Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  She complained angrily about the stories to the FBI. She began pushing the pages with the pictures of her naked into the faces of an FBI agent, telling them to look at how outrageous it was. I’ve actually seen them, one of the FBI officers said. Everybody’s seen them, he added. “She was the most selfish, self-centered person I have ever heard about or seen or met,” one agent recalls.

  Once the flight landed in Vienna in the morning, the illegals prepared to depart. Some of the parents thanked the FBI for how they treated them and their children and then they began to get off. The FBI team stayed on board. The swap had been synchronized carefully. The two planes landed within minutes of each other and taxied to a part of the tarmac as far away as possible from everything else at the airport, almost nose to tail with each other.

  The illegals never touched the ground. “We went down the ramp and saw people go down the ramp opposite,” Elena Vavilova later recalled. A bus then transferred each group to the other plane but they never met their opposite numbers. Sutyagin was given instructions as he disembarked from the Russian plane: do not say a word, do not look around, do not look at the other prisoners, do not make any gestures. “It took 40 seconds. We stepped on the ladder and we were aboard the American plane,” Sutyagin later said. Vasilenko walked past Zhomov, his former tormentor. “Nice try, motherfucker,” he said. Freedom was starting to feel real. But there was still an air of menace. “Watch out,” Zhomov said to Zaporozhsky, according to one person. In that brief exchange lay a warning that perhaps the swap was not quite the end of the story in the eyes of the Russians. The American spies would only later realize that Zhomov had been a few feet away from them. But they never saw him, their nemesis remaining as elusive as ever.

  The four Russians boarded the US plane. Doctors gave them a quick examination. They were not in great shape. They smelled like they looked. “He was half the man he was when he had left,” one person who saw the once athletic and now emaciated Zaporozhsky would say of his state. The contrast with the illegals going the other way could not have been greater.

  THE RUSSIAN PLANE took off for Moscow at 12:38. The American one left seven minutes later.

  THE FOUR COMING out of Moscow were still decompressing and coming to terms with their sudden change in fortune. They were hungry and exhausted and trying to take it all in. The bags Hoffman had given them were opened. Inside were clothes and a small bottle of whisky. It was time for a toast. Sutyagin seemed unhappy and reflective, still bruised by having to sign his confession. He kept to himself, making it clear he did not want to talk. The problem for Sutyagin was that he was in strange company for a man who had always maintained he was not a spy.

  THE PLANE WAS going to make a stop before returning to the United States. It landed at Brize Norton, an RAF base in Oxfordshire. There was no band or big welcoming party, just one official and two soldiers who struggled to get a staircase to the huge plane because it was far larger than those that normally landed at the base. For Skripal, this was his first time setting foot in the country he had been convicted of spying for. Waiting was a small helicopter to whisk Skripal and Sutyagin away. They were taken to the Fort, MI6’s training facility on the south coast. When they arrived, Skripal and Sutyagin were taken to a room. Laid out were shirts, trousers, even socks of all sizes so they could pick ones that fit. Sutyagin picked light colors after the gloom of the prison uniform. A doctor and psychiatrist checked him over. What did he want to eat? He really wanted pelmeni—dumplings—but he was sure they would not be able to get the real thing, so he said he was fine. Sutyagin would say he dreamed of returning to Russia—but he was not sure it would be the Russia he remembered eleven years earlier, when he had been arrested. And in the coming days there were also warnings from multiple people that it might not be safe.

  The first thing Sergei Skripal wanted to do was eat fresh fruit for the first time in years. There were no thoughts of going back for him—instead he would disappear into a quiet life in a suburban cul-de-sac in the cathedral city of Salisbury. What could be more peaceful?

  THE VISION AIRCRAFT continued on from the United Kingdom over the Atlantic. Vasilenko was the most talkative and cheeriest, describing what he had been through. After a while he was so tired he signaled he wanted to sleep and headed to the back of the plane. Two agents helped lift up the armrests so he could stretch out. They grabbed a pillow for him. It was the best they could do, but for most people sleeping across a row of economy seats is akin to low-level torture. But Vasilenko then said something that made them realize what he had gone through. This was the first time he had slept on something that was not concrete for five years. And then he promptly fell asleep for a few hours. He was awake by the time they flew down the Atlantic Seaboard past Manhattan. There was the Statue of Liberty. Vasilenko stared out the window as if he could not believe he was back.

  The plane landed at five thirty in the afternoon at Dulles. A fleet of SUVs was waiting to take Vasilenko and Zaporozhsky to their new lives. After a long and painful hiatus they were going to slip into American suburbia—as anonymous as the spies who they had just been exchanged for in Vienna. For those who had fought the long battle there was a brief sense of triumph. At the CIA an all-hands meeting of the division behind the operation was called. Hundreds of staff were told of the success in getting agents to whom they owed a debt out of Russia. But there was some tension about how far to publicly rub the Russians’ noses into the dirt. The Department of Justice, and also the FBI, wanted to make the most of the success of the arrests and swap. But White House officials ordered the DOJ to write the shortest possible press release rather than one trumpeting their victory. That annoyed some.

  In public the Obama administration was doing its best to minimize the seriousness of the case in order to avoid damaging the reset. The message was that this was an incompetent group of low-level spies who had never got hold of any classified information. The swap was the easiest way to deal with this and it was time to move on. “We believe that this is a successful resolution to the situation, one that was handled quickly and pragmatically, and we’re now looking to move forward in addressing our agenda that we have with Russia and focus on resetting the relationship,” the State Department said at their briefing on the day. A White House official on the same day told the Wall Street Journal that a major concern for officials over the last few weeks was to “ensure this was not going to have a negative impact on the strategic relationship we have with Russia.” This was the message from the administration. A strange Cold War throwback had been initiated because of some old-fashioned Russian spying. This had been dealt with and it was time for everyone to put the whole thing behind them.

  But seeing the whole illegals episode and the resultant swap as simply a throwback would prove to be incorrect. It was a mistake that would have consequences.

  23

  Anger

  INSIDE THE PRIME minister’s office in Moscow, Vladimir Putin threw papers up in the air. He had just been told of the arrest of the illegals and he was “livid,” according to one person with an understanding of the Russian leader’s reaction. The illegals program was the pride of Russian foreign intelligence. Now he was having to watch its prized operations against its main adversary dismantled. And it was not just their exposure. It was the humiliation. People were supposed to be scared of Russian spies abroad and proud of them at home. Instead everyone was laughing at them. “Four spies for ten clowns,” was how the Russian media described the swap. “A staggering success in the fight against world espionage: Russians exchanged for Russians,” another newspaper wrote sarcastically. Alongside public humiliation came professional embarrassment. The FBI had owned these illegals for a decade. Russian intelligence had invested huge effort in placing them undercover, but the Americans had been watching their every move from the start. This cut to Putin’s own self-identity as the master spy. “How bad does that make Putin feel,” a US spy from the time asks rhetorically. “He definitely was really pissed when
it happened.” Putin had defined himself as the man who had ended the humiliation of Russia after the terrible decade that preceded his rise to power. The arrest of the illegals cut through to the core of that image he projected. He and his spies had been humiliated.

  THE FALLOUT IN Moscow was incendiary. President Medvedev had just been in Washington rolling up his shirtsleeves and eating burgers with his new friend Barack. But the minute he flew out of North America, Russia’s nose had been rubbed in the dirt. He had been made to look stupid. US officials did their best to explain that this had not been a deliberate attempt to play him. But, of course, they could not explain that the real reason for the timing of the arrests was to get their agent out of Moscow and that they had actually delayed the arrests to reduce the humiliation. So it left the Russians thinking the timing had been deliberately provocative. For Vladimir Putin, there was a lesson that he would not forget. Medvedev had been played. Russia had been humiliated. His handpicked successor was not up to it. The Americans could not be trusted. The spy game would go on. But it was much more than a game. And the stakes would be raised.

  ON THEIR RETURN the illegals were taken to the forest at Yasenevo. They were subject to a “debriefing” as the SVR sought to understand what exactly had happened and if there could have been any further compromises. It was not a full interrogation, but reports suggested lie detectors were involved, as they were kept on a compound for a few days with no mobile phones. For the Kremlin there was a decision. How should they treat the returnees? One former US official says Putin was personally upset with the illegals. They had grown too comfortable living in America on SVR money, even arguing about who owned their houses. He was particularly upset, a former official says, at the idea that the illegals’ children were American citizens since they had been born there. The illegals had failed. They had been caught, admittedly not due to their own mistakes, but still, their sometimes sloppy tradecraft and their complaints about the SVR were now on public display thanks to the FBI’s indictment. There were no triumphs and no achievements to convince people the investment had been worthwhile. But at the same time, there was another side to the story. These were illegals—so storied in Russian culture. What message would it send to punish them further? To acknowledge failure would be to look weak. And so, in the end, Putin personally signaled that the illegals were to be welcomed back as heroes. He did that by singing a song.

  WITHIN DAYS OF their return, the ten found themselves meeting Russia’s prime minister. It was a “pleasant” meeting, Elena Vavilova said; “he has a very good understanding of our profession and respect for it.” Putin also spoke about the encounter in positive terms. “We talked about life. We sang, not karaoke, but to live music,” Putin told reporters soon after. He made a point of mentioning the song they had sung together. “Where Does the Motherland Come From” was the theme song to Sword and Shield—a 1968 TV series about an illegal who infiltrates Nazi Germany (the answer to where it comes from is “From the oath that you swear to her in your youthful heart”). The series was one of Putin’s favorites and played a part in his desire to join the KGB. Now he was singing it with real illegals. He made a point of praising their virtues and those of all illegals. “Just imagine,” he said. “First you have to master a language as if it were your own, think in that language, talk in it, fulfill the task set in the interests of your motherland over many years, suffering daily dangers.” Putin was playing to a traditional narrative. Russia could still go head-to-head in espionage with the United States. The die had been cast. There would be heroes—the illegals—and there would be villains—the traitors. These brave Russian heroes had been undone only by treachery. “It always ends badly for traitors: as a rule, their end comes from drink or drugs, lying in a ditch,” Putin said.

  Putin made these comments during a trip to neighboring Ukraine. Just before talking to reporters he had spent time with a group of Russian bikers calling themselves “the Night Wolves.” The group were fierce Russian nationalists who were holding a convention in Crimea, home to a major Russian naval base even though it was in Ukraine. Ever the action man, the Russian prime minister got on a Harley-Davidson three-wheeler at one point to ride alongside them. Dressed all in black, he explained that motorbikes were a symbol of freedom. The iconography of a Harley-Davidson may be quintessentially American but what few appreciated at the time was that on this visit, Putin was already revving up for his return to the presidency on a new agenda. Glorifying spies, vilifying traitors, and renewing nationalism would fuel his return. Vladimir Putin was not done in restoring Russia. Less than four years after his visit, the Night Wolves would be patrolling the streets as Russia occupied Crimea.

  Putin added one more intriguing line when he was talking of traitors lying dead in a ditch. “Recently, one of them ended up like this. And it is not clear why.” Whom was he referring to? On June 13 Sergei Tretyakov, the former colonel in the SVR who had been working for the CIA out of the Russian mission to the UN at the same time as Poteyev, was eating at his home in Florida. His wife had baked his favorite chicken pie. They were sitting at the table discussing their plans for July Fourth when he got up from the table and then fell. She dialed 911. Paramedics were there within minutes. They tried to do their best. But it was too late. He had died at age fifty-three. The news had only emerged on July 9—the very day of the spy swap. His wife had wanted to keep it quiet to avoid giving Moscow the pleasure of knowing he had passed away. She explained that he had a heart attack after choking on a piece of meat. He was a smoker and drinker, so this was certainly possible. But could there have been more? He had lived openly under his name, only enjoying protection when traveling outside the United States on various trips to brief foreign intelligence services (including in the United Kingdom). He and his family believed he was untouchable in the United States. “Russians would never dare to do anything to Sergei!” his wife later wrote. “If ANYTHING happened to my husband because of Russians, Russia would be excluded from the international community. Sergei was too well known. This would be much worse than Mr. Litvinenko’s scandal. My husband died of a heart attack.”

  So what did Putin mean by his reference? There were some who thought he was hinting that this had been murder. His language, though, was ambiguous. An autopsy confirmed the cause of death. Many US officials working at the time believe there was nothing sinister. However, one senior US official does say that in hindsight it would have been better if more checks had been made at the time to be sure what killed Tretyakov. The same official says that recruits at Russian intelligence training academies are told about Tretyakov’s story in a different context. They are told that the FBI will try to recruit you and then when they are done with you, they will kill you. And the story—even though false—is believed by many. The FBI knows that because sometimes when its officers have pitched to a Russian officer serving in the United States—the next generation of Poteyevs or Tretyakovs—the Russians have told this story.

  Even if the Kremlin was not behind his death, then there were benefits to having people think it might have been murder since it would act as a warning to others. Tretyakov had been the number one traitor on the list for the Russians, one American official says. But now that he was gone there would be another person to take over the top slot. And that would be the man who betrayed the illegals—Alexander Poteyev.

  IN THOSE FIRST few weeks and months there was speculation in Russia as to how the illegals had been betrayed. Tretyakov’s defection back in 2000 was thought by some—wrongly—to be the cause. There were reports that the illegals had been interviewed to see if there was a double agent among them. There was even talk that perhaps Metsos had been the CIA mole, since he had mysteriously disappeared. A name of the betrayer appeared in the press but it was wrong (it was actually the name of the person who had provided Hanssen’s file). But of course, inside the SVR they must have known the truth from the start. After all, Alexander Poteyev had not turned up for work on Monday morning at Department
4 of Directorate S—just hours after the illegals he handled had been arrested.

  This was a full-blown crisis for the SVR. The arrests were described as one of the greatest failures ever. There was talk that perhaps the SVR should be merged with (meaning swallowed up by) the increasingly powerful FSB, with senior figures, including Putin, said to believe that the breaking apart of the KGB into separate groups at the end of the Cold War had been a mistake. The FSB had already been given the power to conduct operations overseas in 2003 and some suspected it of leaking details of how poor the SVR’s security had been in order to achieve their ends (which included gaining power to oversee internal security within the SVR, the only domain its reach did not stretch to). The fear among some Russians, though, was that putting all intelligence into the hands of a single organization would bring back the KGB in a new form. The CIA picked up intelligence that the reset might be over and that Fradkov might lose his job. Whatever baby steps there were toward intelligence sharing were stopped in their tracks. “It was all switched off,” says one intelligence official serving at the time. The view from the hawks in the CIA’s Russia House was that cooperation wasn’t worth the effort anyway.

  The failure also raised to public debate an existential question about the whole practice of sending illegals overseas. Was it worth it? All that investment and training seemed to have produced nothing but embarrassment. The fact that the US administration had deliberately played down the importance of or threat from the illegals—emphasizing that they had not stolen any secrets—now played back into Russia. One estimate was that the cost of training and supporting illegals and also replacing the communications system that the FBI had penetrated and compromised was $50 million. “What damn illegals? They haven’t been needed by anyone for 50 years. Someone just had to report to their boss that we have intelligence operations,” an anonymous former SVR officer told the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. The whole enterprise was an anachronism, a hangover from the Cold War whose only purpose was for spy chiefs to be able to impress their KGB-trained leader that they had one over on the “Main Adversary” by having agents secretly in place in their country, argued Andrei Soldatov, the leading independent commentator on Russia’s spies. “Still stuck in the past, Putin views this superpower rivalry much in the same way he wants Russian athletes to get more medals than the Americans at the Olympic Games,” he wrote. Others were also skeptical. “Perhaps, Russia will save some money now after it stops spending money on illegal intelligence,” mused Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB officer who had moved to Britain and become the owner of the London Evening Standard newspaper. This questioning was one of the strategic effects that the Americans hoped to accomplish by public arrests—the humiliation of defeat and the inevitable questions in Russia over expense would, it was hoped, make it harder to sustain the illegals program going forward.