Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  Heathfield and Foley said almost nothing. What the FBI team remembers about their reactions was that they were almost blank. It was almost as if they were physically there but mentally somewhere else. At the moment they came for him, Andrey Bezrukov had instantly understood his life as Donald Heathfield was over and two separate identities were collapsing into one: “It was as if all my previous life and plans had vanished in some kind of fog.” Decades of patient work and sacrifice building a legend had evaporated in an instant. After nearly a quarter of a century, it was over.

  Ann, now nearly Elena again, was taken out in handcuffs. She remembers the neighbors watching in astonishment. Who would look after her youngest son, she was asked. His brother, she answered. She and her husband were placed in separate cars and driven away. Timothy had been upstairs and one of the FBI officers walked him down. He was asked if he wanted to stay in the house while it was searched or go to a hotel room that had been booked. He and his brother opted for the hotel. When they came back to the house the next morning they found everything had been searched. Electronic devices and personal effects had been taken away—right down to Alex’s PlayStation console. The family bank accounts were frozen. The children were left with about three hundred dollars each. Their teenage world had come tumbling down.

  Their parents were taken to an office in Boston. It was Sunday and the place felt empty. “They kept us separate. We could not communicate in any way,” Heathfield says. “When I came into the interrogation room, there was a huge box on the table. It had ‘evidence’ written on it and my name. Then I started getting nervous and frightened.” This was the FBI’s aim—to make clear how much evidence there was and that this was no speculative arrest. “I will not be able to talk my way out of this,” he thought to himself. The question on his mind, like any arrested spy, was a simple but crucial one: why. “This question tormented us at first,” recalled his wife, Elena.

  “FBI agents treated me and my wife with studied respect, the way professionals treat other professionals.” Heathfield always saw himself very much as the serious intelligence officer. He and his wife were confronted separately. It was explained what the charges were—espionage. She expressed surprise and denied it. “I am not talking to you about anything. I want a lawyer.” They were facing twenty-five years in jail, maybe forty. But there was a deal on offer, he recalls: cooperate and it might be just five. It was a terrible dilemma on one level, as they knew their two children were out there in Boston. What were they thinking right now? If they faced the full force of the law, then their time as parents was over and the boys would be alone and bewildered. But there was no choice. They would not talk. They were taken to a solitary cell. There was a bench they could lie down on and a blanket. The husband and wife mentally prepared themselves for a new stage—one of arrest, detention, and endless questioning. This was one, they knew, that could last for years.

  IN NEW JERSEY, FBI agents Maria Ricci and Derek Pieper were there in person for the closing scenes of the drama they had observed for so long. It was a steaming hot day—the worst kind for waiting for hours in your car for the signal that you can make an arrest. You wanted to put your head in a fridge just to try to keep cool. But after years of observing the lives of the Murphys in close focus—listening to their conversations and walking around their home when they were away—they were not going to miss the chance to finally meet face-to-face.

  The Murphys had just settled down for dinner when two FBI teams arrived at the house. Richard Murphy opened the door and saw a sea of blue “arrest” jackets with the distinctive FBI logo on them. He instantly understood. There was no shock. Today was the day it all ended.

  “A lot of times when we arrest people, it is like ‘I didn’t do it.’ When they came to the door they were very calm. They saw all of us. And it was this look, kind of like ‘well I guess today is the day. This is happening,’” says Ricci.

  Murphy even tried to crack a joke. He had a drink in his hand. “I just opened my beer,” he said, joking to see if that might give him a few more minutes.

  As the time for the arrests approached, Ricci and Pieper had been debating over who would interview each of the Murphys. Who would be most likely to build up the best rapport and get them to talk? They settled on Ricci with Cynthia, but at the last moment they switched to Pieper. What they were unsure of was whether she was going to play the KGB colonel or the mom who was concerned about her kids.

  When they were drawing up the arrest plans, the FBI had realized that there was one job description they needed but did not have among their agents—babysitter. How to deal with the kids had been a major concern for the FBI. In the case of the Murphys, the view was that it would not be acceptable for them to be taken away to a child welfare center. The agents, like Ricci, had watched the Murphy girls grow up. They did not want the kids to be sent to some child protection agency. The girls were innocents and the whole experience would be bewildering and bad enough for them anyway without that. Taking proper care of them was about showing a touch of humanity even for your adversary.

  Eleven-year-old Katie Murphy was away at a pool party for a friend’s birthday and the first few minutes of the conversation inside the house were about the children. Pieper tried to reassure Cynthia that the children would be okay. She was asked if there was a friend who could look after them rather than being sent to children’s services. In another sign of how well the FBI team understood them, they already had a pretty good idea of whom she might suggest and were proved right. The hope was this would relax her. But she remained cold. With the initial conversation over, they headed outside of the house to the cars. Cynthia said little. As they went past the garage door it was open. It needed an electronic code to close it. Cynthia asked Derek Pieper if he needed the code to put it down. “We have that,” he said. Her face was a picture. The Russian spy now realized the FBI owned her life—down to the code for her garage door.

  Meanwhile, Ricci was with Richard Murphy in the house. For all his gruffness on the phone and his snippy emails to Moscow Center, he ended up being personable and warm. There was some small talk, but he was clearly deeply worried about the kids and seemed more concerned than Cynthia about what was going to happen to them. He kept telling Ricci to make sure Katie took her medicine, which was in the fridge. “While Cindy was the intelligence officer, he switched quickly to dad,” recalls Ricci. Since dinner had been interrupted, Ricci said they would get some food when they got to New York. “Can I get a beer, too?” he joked. “I don’t know if I can get that. But I’ll do my best,” replied Ricci. The pair were driven away separately.

  Katie was still in her bathing suit and clutching an animal floater when she came home on Sunday evening. She found her sister Lisa still in the house but her parents gone. Sitting with her sister was a female FBI agent, while others were combing through her house. The two daughters were later taken away in a minivan with tinted windows, carrying pillows and rucksacks. It must have been bewildering for girls so young, who would have not even the slightest conception that their parents were anything other than what they had seemed to be. But now suddenly, they were being ripped out of the quiet, suburban lives they had known. The girls looked stunned, neighbors remember.

  The neighbors stood outside the Murphys’ home in shock after the arrest. Journalists would find them debating whether or not to water the garden. Some questioned whether it was wrong to water the hydrangeas if they belonged to Russian spies. “The hydrangeas did nothing wrong,” responded one. The spies were gone and the suburbs closed up after them as if they had never been there.

  CYNTHIA WAS DRIVEN from Montclair through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Manhattan. The drive—even on a Sunday evening—was long. There was a pride parade in New York that weekend, which added to the journey and the slightly surreal element. Pieper still tried to focus on her role as a mother in an attempt to relax her—is there anything else the kids need to bring along with them? All he got in reply were one-word answers.<
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  In many spy cases, gaining a confession is vital since the suspect has often been identified based on secret intelligence—like a CIA source or an NSA intercept—that cannot be revealed in court. But with the illegals, that was not a problem, since the FBI had been building a case for years. But still, out of sheer human curiosity rather than legal necessity, the FBI officers involved in the case were hoping that the illegals might elect to talk.

  When they got to the office, Cynthia Murphy was fingerprinted. Pieper’s attempts to charm her had met with a blank. Now it was time to confront her with the full extent of what the FBI knew. A stack of photos was laid out in front of her. They were a gallery of her life over the last ten years—a clear signal that the FBI had been watching all along. She remained unmoved. “I know what your job is,” she said to Pieper. “And I don’t want to talk to you.” That was that. You know what, I’m not going to beg, thought Pieper. That’s fine. Enjoy the rest of your night.

  There was a human curiosity about what these people were really like and also a professional one—as fellow intelligence officers what had it been like? The FBI team wondered if they could just forget the handcuffs for a moment and say, “It’s over—let’s talk.” But it never happened. They had expected that Sunday evening had just been an initial interview and that there would be the chance for more interviews in the coming weeks. So they had held back, hoping to work them slowly. What the FBI team did not realize was that there would be no second chance to try to persuade the Murphys and others to talk. Events would move faster than anyone expected.

  SEMENKO WAS ARRESTED at his apartment in Arlington. A neighbor saw him being taken away by FBI agents with his T-shirt pulled up over his head. The third true-name illegal, Alexey Karetnikov, was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on the twenty-eighth. He had not been in the United States long enough for the FBI to be able to charge him with a crime. The best option, it was decided, was the quieter way of dealing with spies: the FBI had a simple word with him to let him know he was busted. He was formally deported to Russia after admitting he was in violation of immigration law, and it was made clear he would be arrested if he returned without permission.

  Zottoli and Mills were detained at their Arlington apartment. There was only one person who knew their children. The problem was that she happened to be flying to Washington, DC, for a conference at the time of the arrests. So the FBI put an agent on her plane who could turn to her at the right moment, explain what was going on, and ask if she could look after a couple of children. Mills, some of the FBI agents remember, was the tougher of the couple when it came to the moment of confrontation.

  IN YONKERS, VICKY Pelaez and Juan Lazaro had been out at a barbecue in New Jersey on Sunday and an FBI car intercepted them in front of their house as they were returning. Pelaez would later describe it in the most dramatic of terms. “Dozens and dozens of heavily armed FBI men, dressed in black, many masked, burst into my life in what seemed like a movie,” she wrote. When their two children—Waldo Marsical and Juan Lazaro Jr.—made it to the house they were in for a shock. The FBI was everywhere. The agents wanted to know if there were secret hiding places. The children were astonished at what the agents already knew. “They knew my nickname,” Juan Lazaro Jr. told his mother’s newspaper. “They knew absolutely everything.” Even, he said, that he was considering applying to music school, adding, “They asked me if I’d looked at conservatories in Russia.”

  For some elderly people, news of the arrests would only bring pain. As soon as they could, FBI agents traveled to Canada to see the real parents of Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley to explain to them that their private grief was about to become a detail in a spy story. Old wounds, never fully healed, were reopened. There were other hurried conversations as well. Alan Patricof wanted to give Hillary Clinton at the State Department a heads-up, knowing that her name might emerge when it came to his contact with Cynthia Murphy. Clinton’s office would issue a statement saying there was “no reason” to think the secretary was a target of this spy ring.

  THERE WERE OTHER moving parts in play in an intense few days. Russian sources say that on Sunday, June 27, a female FBI agent called an SVR officer who was based in Chile. The phone number they had used was known to only two people—the officer’s wife and Alexander Poteyev. The FBI will not comment but Russian sources say the officer was offered $100,000 to turn. Instead he fled as quickly as possible through Argentina and back to Moscow. He had been another one of those identified thanks to intelligence from their source.

  And of course, as the news of the phone call and arrests filtered back to Moscow, there would have been anguish at Yasenevo, with the realization that decades of work and investment had been undone in a single day. It is hard to imagine what the scene might have looked like as officers arrived at work in Directorate S on Monday morning to the news. An urgent meeting would have been called. But why could no one get hold of the deputy head of Department 4?

  ON JUNE 29, Christopher Metsos checked out early from his cheap hotel and headed to Larnaca airport. There, according to the FBI plan, he was stopped by Cypriot police on a US extradition warrant as he was about to catch a flight to Budapest, Hungary. His female companion continued to board the flight. But then things began to go wrong. Metsos was taken to court. He seemed strangely calm and showed no anxiety, the lawyer who was assigned to him recalled. “He told me that he had nothing to do with this case. He didn’t understand why he was there.” The pair had coffee and water as they waited. In a twenty-five-minute hearing, the judge agreed to let Metsos out on $34,000 bail until an extradition hearing a month later. The money was quickly handed over. He was supposed to hand in his passport as well as turn up at a police station every day. This was a man who had a dozen identities and passports to go with each, as well as the backing of the SVR and Directorate S’s resources and experience. The idea that handing in a single passport was going to keep him on the island was absurd. He registered at the local police station and calmly went back to a new hotel, the Achilleos, at around two thirty in the afternoon. He paid 630 euros for a two-week stay. He hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob and took a shower.

  The next day he failed to report to the police between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. as instructed. It was only the day after that the police entered his room. They found the bed still made and a pair of his slippers sitting next to it. None of the staff had seen him leave. Perhaps he had slipped away while the night porter was in the bathroom or perhaps he had climbed over a balcony. However he did it, he had done it quickly and with no one seeing a thing. A proper spy’s escape.

  The United States was not happy. “As we had feared, having been given unnecessarily the chance to flee [Metsos] did so,” said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Department of Justice. The Cyprus authorities went through the motions of trying their best to look for him. They said all exit points were monitored. A police photo that showed him looking impassive and sunburnt was distributed. But no one had the slightest expectation that he would be located.

  The best guess is that he headed to the northern part of the divided island and from there by boat to Turkey and perhaps Syria before going to Moscow. Others wonder if Russian organized crime groups involved in human trafficking got him to Greece, where the SVR could have whisked him away. Cypriot government officials insisted that the decision to give bail to Metsos had been one for the courts alone. But many in the United States believed this was a favor from the Cypriot government to the Russians. As the search was under way, the country’s president was hosting a reception celebrating the arrival of a Russian bank on the island. President Demetris Christofias had been educated in the Soviet Union, met his wife there, spoke Russian, and was a self-professed friend of Moscow. He was looking forward to a visit from the Russian president in October of that year. Even though the United States and Britain use Cyprus as a spy base for operations into the Middle East (with a large British listening station), Russian influence ru
ns deep. It was one of the places Russians stashed their money and Limassol was known as “little Moscow.” In 2013, when the Cypriot banking system was close to collapse, rather than take an EU bailout, which would have carried with it demands to clean up the system, the country turned to Moscow.

  The FBI team was not bothered as to whether the illegals they arrested would talk or not. After all, they knew pretty much everything about their lives already. But Metsos was different. If he had talked they may have been able to learn much more about illegals around the world. He would have been the ultimate prize. “It would have been huge to talk to him,” says Alan Kohler. But Metsos, ever the wily operator and veteran spy, slipped from their grasp. There remains deep anger about that among those who worked on the case. And he has never been seen since. Like a ghost, he simply vanished. That only left those languishing in prison cells in America. “In terms of value to the FBI in preventing this happening again, there wasn’t a lot there,” says Kohler. “Their value was in a trade.” And now the question was whether that deal could be done.

  21

  The Squeeze