White House officials—including the president—did not want to risk derailing relations with Russia. They did not think it was worth interrupting cooperation with Russia on other issues because of the illegals. The deliberation went on for days and was “heated.” The resistance from political appointees to the CIA and FBI plan was intense.
The most aggressive option—imprisonment and a mass expulsion of Russian diplomats—was blocked by White House officials. Some at the FBI and CIA were “unhappy with what they considered a soft response,” McFaul later conceded. “They wanted the court drama . . . they wanted the convictions. But Obama did not.” There was—even more worryingly for the intelligence community—the real possibility that the whole arrest plan could be pulled.
On the afternoon of June 18, senior national security officials gathered in the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing, taking their normal places around the long wooden conference table, with the president at the top. The politicians and diplomats had walked in angry and there was palpable tension in the air. The Medvedev visit was now just days away. There was still a clear division about what to do with the illegals. The political players from the White House and the diplomats were worried about the impact on the reset. Was it really worth taking the illegals down given the possible diplomatic fallout? Wasn’t it going to look too provocative? Tom Donilon, one of the more skeptical, asked if there was a risk the operation would undermine Medvedev.
On the other side were the intelligence and law enforcement players from the CIA and FBI who wanted to get Poteyev out and bust the illegals. Robert Mueller briefed everyone on plans for the arrests and Panetta spoke about getting the source out. Obama was unhappy. “The president seemed as angry at Mueller for wanting to arrest the illegals and at Panetta for wanting to exfiltrate the source from Moscow as he was at the Russians,” Robert Gates later said. “Just as we’re getting on track with the Russians, this?” he recalls Obama saying. “This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carré. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing?” The references were telling. In the minds of a new generation of leaders, all this spy stuff seemed a throwback and not the kind of thing that should get in the way of diplomacy. The view was that a bunch of dinosaurs on both sides who could not give up on old-school spying were risking an important breakthrough.
The case was made that the whole arrest plan should be shelved. Vice President Biden, sitting as usual to the president’s right, was adamant that US national security interests would be best served by doing nothing at all, according to Defense Secretary Gates, recalling that the vice president argued that “our national security interest balance tips heavily to not creating a flap” that would “blow up the relationship with the Russians.” Panetta, Gates says, disagreed with Biden and said that the real risk was the president being seen not to take Russian spying seriously. Looking weak was actually the danger. Hillary Clinton took a robust position in pressing for arrests. Others were willing to entertain the idea of arrests but only when the summit was done. But the problem was the source and the travel of the illegals. Obama himself was worried. His preference was to wait until after the summit to make the arrests, if they were made.
One option raised by White House staff was whether Poteyev’s exfiltration could be held off until September. Risking a source was unacceptable for the intelligence officials. Panetta’s priority was getting Poteyev out safely and he argued the arrests had to go forward. He had briefed defense secretary Robert Gates in advance. He knew that as a former CIA director, Gates would understand and support him. The two men made the case that they did not need to worry so much about the impact of the arrests. “This was part of a long story,” Panetta recalls saying. “This is the way they do business, this is the way we do business.” Each spied on the other. Sometimes you found their spies, sometimes they found yours. Diplomacy would continue because you can walk and chew gum at the same time. The reset would survive. But there was still resistance from the White House to the arrests.
What about letting the illegals go quietly back to Russia? That was a very real option that some wanted to pursue. But the counter to that was to argue there was a political risk. Panetta and Mueller pointed out that a small group of senior members of Congress had been briefed. “They were aware of what was going on with the spies and it would really be a serious political problem if Congress found out that we knew about these spies and did not take action to go after them and arrest them,” says Panetta. “I think that argument carried a lot of weight.” Panetta pointed out that if the story leaked, Obama would look weak and the Republicans might use it as a reason to not ratify the new START treaty. Obama also gave what some describe as a cynical but realistic answer, which was that if they let the illegals go, people in the CIA and FBI would be so angry they would leak details. “The Republicans would beat me up,” Obama said. “Isn’t there a more elegant solution?”
Gates weighed in on the side of the CIA and FBI in keeping the exfiltration plan on track, but he wondered if Obama could give details of the illegals to Medvedev and tell him to recall them within forty-eight hours or else face a much noisier expulsion. It might have even given him some leverage against Putin and the hard-liners who ran the program, he suggested. Some of those involved in the arrests believed they could use the arrests to embarrass Putin but the White House priority was on not embarrassing Medvedev.
Initially, Obama backed this option of talking to Medvedev quietly and effectively letting the illegals go but discussions continued as the meeting broke up. Donilon was still unhappy with the plans and talked to Panetta. The top officials discussed things further and decided that confronting Medvedev would put the Russian president on the spot too much. The exfiltration followed by arrest was now the preferred plan. But they agreed they would try to do it in a way that did not humiliate Medvedev or rub the Russian’s nose in the dirt. And that meant no prosecutions. “That would be long, exhaustive, and obviously even more embarrassing for the Russians,” says Panetta. That left another option—a swap. There was still concern that this could take up to a year to negotiate, leaving a source of ongoing friction. But the aim was to “minimize the fallout,” Panetta later recalled. “Russia would be spared the embarrassing spectacle of multiple criminal trials for their sleeper agents.” There would be no prosecution. And—crucially—the arrests would have to wait until the Russian president had left North American airspace on June 27, to minimize embarrassment. “That was the decision and obviously it raised concerns about being able to retrieve—to protect—our source,” says Panetta.
A consensus had finally been reached. The president himself was, according to a person involved, very unhappy but eventually came around to understand that it had to happen. Gates believed that the first instincts of the president and vice president had been “to sweep the whole thing under the rug” but he thought they had yielded to a wiser path. Some in the intelligence community still believed it was not enough. But a decision had been painfully made. Now it was time to execute it, and the timing was going to be tight.
19
Escape
ON JUNE 24, 2010, the patrons of an Arlington, Virginia, burger joint became eyewitnesses to the lengths the Obama administration was willing to go to in order to improve relations with Moscow. The president of the United States and the president of the Russian Federation both strolled in, jackets off, and began shaking hands with diners before ordering some food (which Obama insisted on paying for). True, they were not alone. There was a motorcade outside and Secret Service agents and a few journalists inside with them, but it was still not the place you would normally expect to see two world leaders who had just finished talking global affairs in the Oval Office. The pair sat at a small, cramped table almost knee to knee, and with their interpreters on each side. Strangely, Medvedev seemed to squirt a huge amount of mustard onto his bun but then eat the burger without it. The burger visit—with
its studied informality—had been carefully choreographed by the White House.
The Russian leader’s entire visit to the United States had been designed to present a new dynamic image of Medvedev. “Hello everyone, I’m at Twitter and sending my first message,” the Russian leader had written while visiting the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters a few days earlier in an open-necked shirt. Steve Jobs had given him an as-yet-unreleased iPhone 4, while then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reminisced that he had enjoyed a great time in Moscow back in 1987 to film Red Heat. “I’ll be back,” Medvedev joked with Arnie as he shook his hand, using the actor’s catchphrase from the movie The Terminator. This, officials on both sides agreed, was what the relationship between Russia and the United States should be like—looking to the future and mutual cooperation, not stuck in the past with stories about spies and the Cold War. The two presidents were effusive at their closing press conference about the “new partnership” between their countries. This partnership, President Obama explained, was not just about government-to-government contacts but people-to-people ties. It was meant sincerely but what Obama knew and Medvedev did not was that the FBI was about to bust wide open one set of Russian “people-to-people” contacts that involved deep-cover spies.
As the two leaders munched on their burgers, Russian illegal Mikhail Semenko was living undercover about five hundred yards away, not realizing he was enjoying his final hours of American freedom. Meanwhile in Moscow, Alexander Poteyev was enjoying his last supper in his home country and making his final preparations to flee. On Friday the twenty-fifth he walked out of Yasenevo. One account says he rushed from a meeting, another that he booked some leave and threw a party for some of his SVR colleagues with good whisky, telling them he would see them soon. Another person says Poteyev actually left personal notes for some of his colleagues. He knew that either he would escape or get caught. Either way his time was up.
This was a moment of high tension. Once the plan had been set in motion, there was no way back. The arrests were scheduled in the United States on Sunday night, which meant that on Monday morning it would feel like a bomb had gone off inside Directorate S and Yasenevo. And the first question in the aftermath would be who had planted it.
THE ADVANTAGE OF Poteyev fleeing on Friday was the weekend ahead of him, leaving him two full days to get out. He headed to Tverskaya Zastava Square, home of the Moscow-Belorussky station, one of the major train terminals in the east of Russia’s capital. There he boarded a train to Minsk, the capital of Belarus. His travel would not in itself be suspicious since he was originally from the former Soviet state. He told his wife, who accompanied him to the station, that he was going on a business trip (some say his marriage was not in the best state). As the train pulled out of Moscow on Friday evening, Poteyev would have known he could be seeing the city he had called home for the last time. That was unless he was caught in the coming hours. In that case, the next time he saw the skyline it would likely be glimpsed through the window of a prison van. The 434-mile journey would take the best part of nine hours. The wheels were now in motion and the escape had begun.
On the Saturday, as he woke in Minsk, Poteyev’s wife received a text message. She would later show it to the SVR to prove she had no idea what her husband had planned.
It read: “Try to take this calmly: I am leaving not for a short time but forever. I did not want this but I had to. I am starting a new life. I shall try to help the children. Please do not turn them against me.” The cat was now potentially out of the bag. Would the SVR realize something was amiss? The problem was that if they did, the FBI could not necessarily do much about it if the illegals were given an escape signal.
The Saturday morning began the craziest two days of the whole ten-year operation, the FBI team recalls. Poteyev had fled Moscow and would be missed on Monday morning. The Russian president was only flying out of North America on Sunday evening and the White House had insisted that no arrests be made before he was gone. There was the narrowest of windows to coordinate ten arrests across the country. Anna Chapman’s was the one that came closest to going wrong.
THE FBI HAD a plan to entrap Chapman based around her “Wednesday” meetings using a “false flag” operation—having an intelligence officer pose as a spy from another country. In this case, an undercover American FBI officer was going to pose as a member of the SVR based at the Russian consulate, named Roman.
The use of the undercover was going to be important since Chapman could not be charged with fraud in the same way as other illegals because she had always used her true name. The plan was to charge her with failing to register as an agent of a foreign government. What was needed was evidence of her acting as one by following instructions given to her by someone posing as a foreign official.
At 11 a.m. on Saturday, June 26, Roman called Anna Chapman. He spoke Russian and said he needed to meet her urgently that day to hand something over. He used a code name that identified him as working on behalf of Directorate S and which would trigger a meeting with Chapman. A different name would have been an emergency signal to run. Knowing these coded phrases (known as “paroles”) was vital to the operation. Illegals were told to obey orders from anyone who used the right one and only a few people knew the names, among them Poteyev. An hour and a half later, Chapman called back using the number he had given her. She thought she was calling the consulate, but she was not. The two spoke Russian again. It would be difficult to meet that day. She was in Connecticut. Could they meet tomorrow instead? Roman explained it was urgent but said they could meet the next morning if they had to. The delay was bad news. The FBI could see the clock ticking down. But luckily Chapman clearly thought better of brushing off someone from Moscow Center and changed her plans. She called back half an hour later to say she would indeed come back to New York for the meeting. They agreed to meet at 4 p.m. at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan.
The meeting started late. The undercover was wearing a blue shirt and chinos and carrying a plastic bag. He had a hidden recording device on him and there was video surveillance inside the cafe. Chapman was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and sunglasses.
He identified himself as the person who had spoken with Chapman on the phone earlier. “Do you want something?” he asked, meaning a drink. “I guess we should,” replied Chapman. There was a brief discussion about who was paying and then they went to sit down. The undercover suggested she take a seat. It was in good view of the video surveillance team.
The pair spoke Russian initially, until the undercover suggested it might be better to talk English so they would draw less attention to themselves.
“How are you doing?” the undercover asked.
“Everything is cool,” Chapman replied. “Apart from my connection”—apparently a reference to the technical difficulties she was having in the laptop-to-laptop communications.
“I just need to get some more information about you before I can talk,” she said. She had not met this Russian before and she was suspicious.
“Sure,” he said. “I work in the same department as you, but I work here in consulate. . . . There is a situation that I need your help with tomorrow, which is why it’s not like regular email contact or website contact and this could not wait until your Wednesdays.”
He thought it best to show attention to the laptop problems. Chapman was going back to Moscow in two weeks. He could take the problematic laptop back to the consulate to look at or she could take it back to Moscow. Chapman replied it would be more convenient to give it to the consulate. She rummaged around in her bag for a few moments. The undercover had a sip of his drink and she placed the silver Toshiba laptop on the table. Was it the encryption or the sending of the message that was the problem, the undercover asked? She could not receive messages, she explained.
It was time to lay the trap.
“I have a task for you to do tomorrow,” the undercover said.
Chapman did not sound keen. “A short task?” she asked.
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“Tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning. Can you do it?” he said.
Chapman audibly sighed. Being a secret agent could clearly be trying—especially for a busy young woman in Manhattan.
The man went on. “I will explain what it is but I need you to do it tomorrow morning.”
“Okay, how long will it take because I need to like explain . . .” It sounded like she might have a date.
“Half an hour maybe.” After that, he promised she could go back to her regular Wednesday schedule.
“This is not like the Wednesdays with the notebooks, this is different. It is, it is the next step. You are ready for the next step. Okay?” He wanted her to understand this was her chance to prove herself.
“Okay,” said Chapman.
“There is a person here who is just like you, okay. But unlike you, this person is not here under her real name. . . . I have the documents for you to give to her tomorrow morning.”
Was Chapman convinced? All she said was “Okay.”
Chapman was curious. “Is she in New York?”
The undercover did not answer but tried to keep the pressure on.
“Are you ready for this step?” he said. Careful thinking had gone into how to handle Chapman. The strategy was to play on what they believed was her desire to be moved deeper into espionage work. It seemed to be succeeding.
“Shit, of course,” she replied.
She needed to be at a bench at 11 a.m. the next day near the World Financial Center. Chapman would hand over a passport with a fake name to the woman. Now, the undercover handed over the document. He showed her a picture. “She will come to you; give her the passport and you are done.”
There would be a recognition signal for the meeting. Chapman was given a magazine and told she had to hold it in her hand in a specific way. The woman would say: “Excuse me, but haven’t we met in California last summer?” Chapman had to respond, “No, I think it was the Hamptons.” There was a city map outside the cafe where she sat now. She had to place a postal stamp upside down on the side of the map while looking at it. He would then come and check it afterward. The stamp’s presence would mean everything had gone okay.
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