Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  This was typical of the kind of pitches to Russians in this period. It would involve approaching someone and offering them a contract for consultancy or discussions about business. No secrets would pass. But after a while, it would be explained that this work was sadly at an end but there was another possibility—perhaps further business dealings of a more sensitive nature. This would require the individual being put in touch with someone more closely associated with the British government. If you pitch right away saying, “Do you want to pass secrets for money?” the answer will be no. But one step at a time, reeling someone in can be a lot easier.

  By the middle of the decade, MI6 had reduced by two-thirds the amount of effort it put into spying against Russia and the former Soviet Union. But a sharp young officer, Charles Farr, had taken over Russian operations in London and made the case that MI6 needed to take advantage of the moment and recruit sources for the long term. The officer who met with Skripal was a prodigious pitcher of Russians; “a magic recruiter” is how one of his colleagues remembers him. Skripal proved receptive. The reason was simple—he liked money and did not have much.

  Skripal grew up in Kaliningrad, a strategic enclave on the Baltic coast sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. It was a closed military zone but near enough to the West for the young Sergei to pick up the tinny sounds of BBC World Service radio, which carried news of a more colorful world. His father had been an artillery officer and Skripal joined the elite Soviet airborne troop. He, like Poteyev, had been sent to Afghanistan at the opening of the conflict to carry out undercover missions. These included targeting locals suspected of working with the CIA. Where Poteyev worked for the KGB, Skripal was selected to join Russian military intelligence—the GRU. The eyes and ears of the General Staff, it had always been a tough and uncompromising service, motivated more by patriotism and a military ethos than the ideological focus of the KGB, with which it competed.

  The GRU took treachery seriously. There were claims that recruits were shown a film of one traitor being pushed into a furnace and burned alive. It was the one part of the Soviet Intelligence apparatus that did not change in name or culture as the Soviet Union became Russia. It included special forces and its own illegals whose job was to prepare for sabotage in the event of war. Caches of weapons were left ready (the West did something similar in Western European nations in case they were overrun). The GRU also had officers stationed under diplomatic cover in embassies, collecting information on military intentions and technology, including by recruiting agents. Skripal’s role, after graduating from the Diplomatic Military Academy, was in its First Directorate, which focused on Europe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had ended up in Madrid. And by the end of his time there he had acquired an MI6 code name: Forthwith.

  How important was he as an agent? Opinions differ. In the late 1990s, the customers of MI6—the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence—were primarily interested in political developments in Russia and details of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But what Skripal could offer was largely counterintelligence—details of the GRU and its operatives. This was of niche value, although for those interested in it, Skripal was an excellent source. His cooperation was erratic rather than regular. He was not classed as a full-fledged, recruited agent when he left Madrid and no one was sure his cooperation would continue when he returned to Moscow. But it would. And his new, senior role in the personnel department meant he was able to identify hundreds of GRU officers operating under diplomatic cover overseas, whose details MI6 could then pass on to other countries.

  By the start of 2000, Skripal and Poteyev were both in Moscow, providing intelligence from inside their own spy agencies. The actual recruiting of a Russian spy on their home territory of Moscow itself is almost impossible. The slow cultivation of a relationship and the careful conversations required to sound someone out would almost certainly be spotted by the vast counterintelligence machinery. But if you have managed it overseas—like with Poteyev in New York or Skripal in Madrid—then it may be possible to run them back in Russia. But only one of this pair would escape capture. With Poteyev in Directorate S, US intelligence had scored a stunning coup. They had opened up a window right into the heart of the most secretive part of their adversary’s operations against them. As long as they had their source in place, they would be able to track illegals operating in the United States.

  BUT THE RUSSIA that Poteyev had returned to after his time in New York was about to change. After the chaos of the 1990s, a new power was rising in the form of a former KGB officer who had traitors in his sights. The United States had its window into the illegals program. But how long would it last?

  7

  The Investigation

  RIFLING THROUGH SOMEONE else’s safety deposit box is the province of two kinds of people—thieves and FBI agents. On January 23, 2001, the latter were at work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the leafy home of Harvard University. They were covertly searching through the personal items of one of the university’s recent graduates. They were there because, thanks to their source in Moscow, they believed the owner was a Russian illegal. Inside they found a birth certificate. It was for a Donald Howard Graham Heathfield. They snapped a photo and quickly returned it. It would take another four years for another piece of the puzzle to fit alongside the birth certificate. “Suddenly but peacefully,” Howard William Heathfield died at his home in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, June 23, aged seventy, a 2005 death notice in the Canadian press read. “Howie” left behind a wife, three children, two grandchildren, and two dogs, called MacGyver and Holly. There had also been a son, Donald. But Donald had predeceased Howard. Although the middle name was different, both the death announcement and the birth certificate listed the mother’s name as Shirley. Donald Heathfield was not who he said he was.

  Investigating illegals—like being one—required patience and attention to detail. Inside the safety deposit box, there were also photographs of Heathfield’s wife, Ann Foley, when she was younger. Many people have their memory boxes—the keepsakes, photos, and letters to recollect an earlier life. But for an illegal to do so was dangerous since it was, almost literally, another life. It was a security lapse. Perhaps Foley needed something to cling to in order to remind her who she really was. Not Ann Foley the Canadian, but Elena Vavilova, the Russian from Tomsk. But she had made a mistake. Surviving as an illegal is all about details—tiny details. And Foley and Moscow Center had missed one. Stamped on the negatives was the name of the company that had produced the film. It was called TACMA—a Soviet film company. It was another piece of crucial evidence for the FBI as the investigation got under way.

  It is a mistake to describe the illegals arrested in 2010 as a “spy ring” or network. That implies they were one group working together. The reality was that they were sent out in pairs or individually at different times—some deep in the Cold War, others toward its end, and some after it was over. They would have been aware there were other illegals in the country, but for reasons of security they would not know who they all were. The SVR would not want the discovery of one illegal to allow the FBI to find the others by following them. But for the FBI, this was not a case of finding one illegal and then following them to another. Thanks to Poteyev, their source in Moscow, they knew who was in the United States and who was coming.

  The first act that the FBI monitored had come a year before the safety deposit box. On January 14, 2000, Vicky Pelaez made a trip from New York to her native Peru. There she met a Russian official in a public park. She was given a bag. Inside was money from the SVR. What she did not know was that two FBI agents were videotaping the whole show. Once that was done, she called her house in Yonkers, New York. The FBI were also listening in on the line. “All went well,” she told Juan Lazaro. Vicky Pelaez was neither Russian nor an illegal but she was married to someone who was both. And she has always maintained she did not know her husband was a KGB illegal whose career had begun deep in the Cold War.
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  PELAEZ WAS A dark-haired, charismatic Peruvian. She was not a trained spy and her marriage was not arranged by Moscow Center. And rather than keep a low profile, she had lived a life marked by drama, controversy, and an outspokenness that did little to hide her political views. Born in 1956, Pelaez had studied journalism and became one of the first female reporters in Peru, working first for newspapers and then TV. Stylish and brave, she broke down barriers and challenged the stuffy style of traditional news. She quickly built a reputation as a gritty journalist, unafraid to take risks, and knew how to insert herself into a story, slipping behind police cordons and getting herself into places she was not supposed to be. The country was beset by political violence, and in 1984, she had the kind of brush with danger that can make a reporter’s name. Pelaez and her cameraman were kidnapped outside their TV station’s office in Lima by the revolutionary group Tupac Amaru. They were blindfolded and driven away. The group demanded that Pelaez’s TV channel broadcast a propaganda video that was left in a garbage can in return for the pair’s release. A few hours after the channel broadcast the clip, in which armed and hooded rebels accused the government of torture, the two were freed. When she returned to the newsroom, she encountered distrust from some of her colleagues. Soon after, she left Peru and came to the United States in 1985 on a visa as a political refugee because she was worried about possible threats from rebels.

  She left for America with a new husband. Her first marriage, when she was just seventeen, was to Waldo Marsical and they had a son named after him. But the marriage did not last. It was while on assignment as a newspaper journalist in the early 1980s that she met the man who went by the name of Juan Lazaro. He was a photographer, ten years older but he looked good for it. The two soon became close, as work mingled with her private life. “She was a very passionate woman,” a colleague in Peru later said. “To her, he was a hunk.” She was a fair bit shorter than him and he taught martial arts. At one point, he pulled her up on his shoulders while out in a story so she could get a look at what was happening at the presidential palace. “I first admired him for his knowledge and ideas of social justice, then I was attracted by his physical strength,” she later wrote. On December 3, 1983, they were married. But she had married a lie.

  The real Juan Lazaro was a toddler who had died aged three of respiratory failure in 1947, his mother crying whenever she talked about him in the years after. The fake one was another Russian dead double. His real name was Mikhail A. Vasenkov. Little is known of his early life but he is thought to have been born in Moscow in 1942. He left home young, leaving a brother behind whom he would not see again. Nor would he be there when his parents died. He had been selected for the KGB’s Directorate S, deep in the Cold War. Once his training was complete, he was sent out on assignment. He had come to Peru, sporting a decent-size mustache, on March 13, 1976, on a Uruguayan passport in the name of Juan Lazaro Fuentes. Spain had been his stop-off point to build the legend. After three months there he had flown from Madrid to Lima, with a forged letter on the stationery of a Spanish tobacco company saying he was coming to the country to carry out a market survey. Two years later he used his passport and a fake birth certificate saying he had been born in Montevideo in Uruguay on September 6, 1943, to request Peruvian citizenship, which he received in 1979. He said he was Uruguayan, but a lot of people found the accent a little odd, more European than Latin American. He rarely spoke of his family.

  Lazaro used his cover as a photographer to travel and carry out missions for the KGB. It gave him the ability to meet politicians and businessmen. These were people who might be recruited to become “agents of influence” for the Soviet Union—such an agent did not necessarily provide secrets but instead offered the ability to alter the course of events, small or large, to suit Moscow’s needs—perhaps a journalist spreading information or a businessman laundering money or a politician making decisions. Russian reports, whose accuracy is hard to judge, suggest his marriage to Pelaez was genuine (although possibly with KGB approval), and her move to the United States provided an opportunity for him to move his work there, a decision sanctioned by the KGB leadership. FBI officials, though, wonder if Lazaro’s target may always have been to go to the United States.

  After they moved to the United States, the couple settled in New York and in a house on Clifton Avenue in Yonkers. Pelaez became a US citizen, Lazaro a legal resident. Pelaez resumed her career as a journalist, working first as a reporter and then a columnist for a New York–based Spanish-language newspaper. Her political views were left-wing. She saw herself as standing up to the powerful and speaking for the oppressed and was a critic of American foreign policy, especially in Latin America. In 1993, Juan Jr. was born. He would go on to be a talented pianist who earned a scholarship to a Manhattan arts school. He would play Chopin and Beethoven to audiences, his eyes closed as he seemed absorbed by the music. At a concert in Peru, his proud father was interviewed by an education consultant about how he raised a musical prodigy.

  Lazaro was a teaching assistant at the New School in Manhattan from 1993 (eventually earning a doctorate). Later he would be hired as an adjunct professor at Baruch College to teach a class on Latin America and the Caribbean. Like his wife, he seems to have done surprisingly little to hide his politics. Students remember his strident denunciations of US foreign policy. He praised Hugo Chávez, the populist left-wing leader of Venezuela, and attacked the invasion of Iraq as driven by corporate profit seeking.

  What did Pelaez know of her husband’s identity and spy work? She always maintained she was not a spy and did not know her husband was a Russian illegal. The evidence produced by the FBI, though, suggests she was involved in clandestine behavior. From at least 2000, the FBI was on to the pair. A bugged conversation in the house on February 20, 2002, suggested Pelaez had just returned from Latin America and the couple talked about money she had brought back. A year later, they discussed whether they would have $72,500 or $76,000 after accounting for their expenses following another trip. The bug picked up a conversation on April 17, 2002, in which Lazaro described his childhood to Pelaez. At one point he said, “We moved to Siberia . . . as soon as the war started.” If he had been born in Uruguay, why was he brought up in Siberia? It is possible she thought his Latin American communist parents had lived in Russia. Or perhaps, as some FBI officials think, she knew more than she was letting on.

  The trips to South America had another purpose as well as collecting money. They were a way of passing covert messages to Russian officials. And they were using one of the most old-fashioned pieces of spy tradecraft. In January 2003, shortly before a trip Pelaez was taking, the bugs in their house captured a conversation between her and Lazaro. He explained he was going to write in “invisible” and she was going to “pass them all of that in a book.”

  Invisible ink goes back hundreds of years but was still being used by Lazaro to send some of his intelligence reports. The FBI would find pads of papers embedded with specially treated chemicals in their house. An illegal would write a normal-sounding letter to a fictitious friend. Then they would take a sheet of contact paper—almost like carbon paper—and place it over the letter and use a pencil to add a message onto the letter that could not be seen. They would have to carefully destroy the extra papers and mail the letter off to a foreign address—perhaps in Colombia or Austria—or deliver it by hand (as Pelaez seems to have been doing). A Line N officer would receive it and send it to Moscow, where the paper was developed and message decrypted. The whole process was time consuming and slow. But in the digital age, it can be particularly useful since it leaves no electronic trail for investigators to follow.

  Communications back to home base are the most difficult and risky part of any spy’s work. The whole point of anyone operating undercover is that there should be as little as possible to tie them to their real controllers. If any evidence of contact is discovered, it is highly incriminating. But at the same time, instructions need to flow one way and intelli
gence back the other. Throughout history there have been many ways spies have sought to manage this process and minimize the risk, from face-to-face meetings to carrier pigeons. In order to preserve their secrecy, illegals were supposed to communicate directly with Moscow Center rather than through officers operating out of the SVR residency in their embassy.

  Lazaro was the oldest of the illegals active in the United States. He had been trained in an era long before the internet or digital communications and so used the most old-fashioned techniques—like invisible ink and mailing letters. One counterintelligence official likens illegals to satellites launched out into space. They are sent out with what is state-of-the-art technology at the time, but they then have to keep using that for decades while they operate. Bringing them back home for training on an entirely new system is not something that can easily be done since it would take so long as to potentially jeopardize their cover. In this way, Juan Lazaro’s communications techniques were the most dated of the group, since he had been launched back in the Cold War, pre-digital, pre-internet era. “He was old school,” says one FBI officer.

  The bug in Pelaez and Lazaro’s house also picked up an odd irregular clicking sound on a number of occasions. This, the FBI realized, was linked to the receipt of coded radio messages coming in from Moscow Center. On November 23, 2002, a bug captured Lazaro reading out loud as he composed a lengthy radiogram to Moscow Center about the conflict in Chechnya. Radiograms are coded bursts of data that can be picked up by a commercial radio receiver. This is a classic decades-old communications technique for illegals—still used to this day and which leaves no digital trail.