The laboratory was known variously as “Laboratory No. 12,” “Laboratory X,” or just “Camera” and was headed by Professor Grigory Mairanovsky, a gaunt man with the sunken cheeks of an ascetic. In 1937 the lab was transferred from the civil Biochemical Institute to the secret service, and a year later it came under the personal control of the head of the secret service. Mairanovsky spent years testing poisons on inmates, and over two hundred people were killed.3 After the war, when Nahum Eitingon was put in charge of the assassinations department, Mairanovsky was brought under his control. They ran several operations together, including the poisoning of Isaiah Oggins, until 1951, when Mairanovsky and Eitingon were both arrested, caught in the crossfire of internal turf wars.
Although the Soviet secret services dispensed with Mairanovsky, they did not give up on poison. The secret research never stopped. When in 1978 a Bulgarian dissident was famously killed by an umbrella shot in London, he was injected with ricin—a poison found naturally in castor beans—which the KGB had passed to their Bulgarian colleagues.
Putin’s secret service also used poison.
This had become well known since the liquidation of the infamous terrorist Emir Khattab. Khattab, an Arab warlord who fought in Chechnya, made himself enemy number one for the secret service in the early 2000s. He was responsible for many terror attacks in Russia. In March 2002, he was in hiding in the mountains of the North Caucasus, surrounded by his bodyguards. He was expecting a letter from Saudi Arabia. To prevent being tracked by the Russian secret service, Khattab was communicating with the outside world using couriers—but the FSB had recruited one of them. The agency poisoned an intercepted letter with a nerve agent with the useful quality of delayed activation. The letter was delivered. Khattab opened it, read it, and threw it into a campfire. Three days later, he suddenly started foaming at the mouth.4 In a few hours, he was dead. The FSB took credit for the operation.
Prokhorov had no doubt that the Russian secret services were somehow behind Kara-Murza’s illness. And he believed he had deduced the reason why they wanted to poison his friend: the Magnitsky Act.5
Three people were responsible for the passing of the act: Bill Browder, who hadn’t set foot in Russia for years; Boris Nemtsov, killed in early 2015; and Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr.
And Kara-Murza hadn’t stopped. He traveled incessantly, lobbying other countries to adopt the Magnitsky Act or their own equivalent. Browder and Kara-Murza scored some successes. The British adopted the Magnitsky provisions that targeted gross human rights violators worldwide; Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia barred entry to those on the Magnitsky list; and Denmark started debating similar legislation.
Since Kintz failed to identify the poison, Kara-Murza’s friends and relatives kept trying to identify the substance that had nearly killed him. Kara-Murza Jr. had lived and worked in the United States for more than ten years, so he and Zhenya believed they had another option: the FBI.
When Kara-Murza had recovered well enough to travel, he and Zhenya flew back to Washington. At the airport, they were met by two FBI agents, one of them the man they had met in 2015. They had been in constant communication since Zhenya had learned of a second poisoning. Now Zhenya handed them Kara-Murza’s samples to take to their laboratory.
They expected the agency to start the investigation, but months passed, and they heard nothing. Then, at the end of December 2017, Kara-Murza and the FBI agent had their meeting in the Washington coffee shop.
“We think we found an active substance you were poisoned with,” the agent said. “Barium. It acts like this—it paralyzes the heart and the respiratory system.” He also told Kara-Murza that the agency was preparing a detailed report that would provide details on the poison itself and include some theories about how the poisoning could have been done. He hinted that food was not the only option for delivering the poison.
He also said that given the impending meeting of the heads of the Russian secret services with the new Trump administration, they were going to hand the report over to them with the note “that there was an attempt of poisoning of a Russian citizen on Russian territory for political reasons.”
Then came the January call in which the agent said, essentially, “You know, we have guidelines, that we need to run a second test, and only if the second test results match the first is the report given an official go. Unfortunately, our second test didn’t match the first, so please forget everything I told you,” and hung up.
Kara-Murza asked several congressmen to send a request to the FBI. They did but got a very short response: we can’t give you any information on this case because it is confidential.
In February 2018, the heads of the three Russian intelligence agencies—the FSB, the SVR, and Military Intelligence—flew to Washington, DC, to have talks with their American counterparts. We spent plenty of time in the corridors of power in Washington, talking to high-level officials at the State Department and people at Congress, trying to learn anything we could about the mysterious visit. Officially, even the date of the Russian spies’ arrival in DC was not disclosed, and the fact of the visit was reported by the Russian news agency, not the American press. But all our contacts just told us it was a US national security issue, so they were not in a position to disclose any details about the visit.
The talks were reportedly very productive. The secret services of the United States and Russia still needed one another. Whether or not they addressed the matter of Kara-Murza’s poisoning remains a mystery.
Kara-Murza Jr. himself tried desperately to extract any information he could from the FBI regarding his poisonings. He also filed a Freedom of Information Act request. In October 2018 he went to the press, in hopes that publicizing the FBI’s recalcitrance would up the pressure on them.6
He got silence in response.
CHAPTER 33
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
In May 2018 Columbia University brought us to New York to speak at the Political Exiles conference. The timing could not have been better; the topic of the conference perfectly matched the topic we were busy researching. We had a long list of places we needed to visit in the city, most of them in Manhattan.
One stood out from the list: Tatiana restaurant, right on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. In this Brooklyn neighborhood, famous for its huge Russian Jewish diaspora, the restaurant was one of the brightest spots.
Tatiana, a Jew who left Odessa in 1979, had opened the big, kitschy one-hundred-table restaurant named after her in 1990. Right from the beginning, Tatiana was popular. The cuisine was Soviet-Ukrainian, and the entertainment featured dancing girls wearing bright makeup and half-dressed in transparent Russian folk costumes, along with ballerinas. The restaurant drew patrons from far beyond the immediate neighborhood. Visitors frequently included guests from Russia—artists, TV celebrities, and pop stars. Russian spies loved Tatiana, too. For years, the intelligence station in New York took every general who visited from Moscow to Tatiana for dinner.1
Brighton Beach was sunny and windy, just as promised. From the boardwalk we at once spotted the huge restaurant sign. Tatiana’s waiters—Russian men in ill-fitting suits—ushered us inside to a small, two-person table. Large glasses of red wine, filled to the brim, promptly arrived. We looked around.
Inside, Tatiana resembled a Soviet luxury restaurant, the kind of place Irina’s father, who had spent his youth in Soviet Odessa, would have recognized, shining with gold, gleaming lacquered wooden walls, and mirrors on pillars. A big family—the women in tight, glossy black-and-gold dresses and the men in open shirts with gold chains, all of them speaking Russian—was celebrating grandma’s birthday at the long table next to ours.
In the hall downstairs, dozens of portraits were on the walls. The restaurant was proud to have hosted singers and actors well known in post–Soviet Union countries. But there were no photographs of another category of the visitors—the ones we were interested in—or of a particular visit eighteen years back, in the summer of 2000, that
hadn’t ended well.
On that sunny day in August 2000, three men walked into the Tatiana. One of them—with short hair, wearing black pants and a Hawaiian shirt—cut a particularly striking figure. Beer arrived at their table immediately. The three men were speaking Russian, and the word “Putin” was heard time and again. It was clear that the second man, in a beige suit, was playing host, entertaining the other two.
This was no casual political chitchat, however. Sergei Tretyakov, deputy head of the Russian intelligence station in New York, was having lunch with two colleagues from the secret services. Victor Zolotov, the man in the Hawaiian shirt, was the chief of Putin’s bodyguards. His muscle-bound colleague was Evgeny Murov, head of the Federal Protection Service, the Russian version of the US Secret Service. These highly placed officials were meeting at Tatiana to prepare for Putin’s impending visit to the United States.
Tretyakov was a shrewd Soviet and then Russian intelligence officer. He had built his career—serving abroad in Canada and then in the United States—playing skillfully by written and unwritten KGB rules. His grandmother had been head of the typists department in Stalin’s secret services (quite a sensitive job). He himself had grown up in Iran in the family of a Soviet trade representative. He happily married the daughter of a Soviet diplomat. During the last Soviet years, just before being sent to Ottawa, he held a position as head of the Komsomol (the Communist Party youth organization) in the foreign intelligence department of the KGB—an incomparable position for forging useful connections in Yasenevo. Everything was in place to secure Tretyakov’s successful career—an appropriate family background, a bunch of highly ranked backers at foreign intelligence headquarters. Now he faced the challenge of dealing with two new colleagues, chosen by Putin to be his right-hand men inside Russia’s secret services. Both had landed their jobs just four months prior, when Putin became the Russian president.
Tretyakov knew well that the style of the Kremlin’s new boss could best be detected through the people who chose to serve him. And understanding Putin’s style, he thought, should be easier for people like himself. The new president was also from KGB foreign intelligence, and the gossip was that he would choose his people from the KGB flock.
But with these two men, Tretyakov felt uneasy. He thought he knew the rules, but now he was losing his confidence. These men were nothing like the kind he knew from Foreign Intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo.
At Tatiana, as the men waited for their meals, Tretyakov was struggling to entertain his guests. Putin’s top security services pals had a distinctive style. Zolotov boasted about how well he had trained his men to keep Putin safe. Each was a martial arts expert, capable of killing an attacker with a single blow, he said.
Suddenly, ostensibly demonstrating his skills, Zolotov swung his hand in the air and struck Tretyakov in his temple. The blow knocked the spymaster off his chair, and he landed, unconscious, on the floor. When he regained consciousness, he heard Murov yelling at Zolotov, “You could have killed him!”
If that was the style of Putin’s secret services, it was very distinctive.
Two months later, on October 11, Tretyakov left his apartment along with his wife, his daughter, and a cage containing Matilda, the beloved family cat. He locked the door behind them. They went down to the underground garage of the Russian diplomatic compound in Riverdale, in the north Bronx, where Tretyakov’s car—a Ford Taurus—was parked. It was 1:00 p.m., lunchtime for the Russians working in the building, meaning it was less likely that they would run into someone they didn’t want to run into.
The Riverdale compound is an ugly, twenty-story, high-rise apartment building built by Soviet engineers in the 1970s. Its roof is stuffed with antennas and transformers belonging to SVR and GRU, aimed at intercepting radio communication between FBI surveillance cars. That the Russian apartment building was the highest landmark in the area made such interception easier. The signals from the roof antennas were routed to the nineteenth floor, where technical staff engineers from the SVR and GRU worked day and night.
Tretyakov drove to the gate, pushed the intercom, and said, “Tretyakov.” It was a security routine he was complying with for the last time in his life. When the gate opened, Tretyakov drove his Ford and his family straight to an FBI safe house and defected.
Did the unpleasant lunch with Putin’s two friends contribute to his decision? It is possible that he saw clearly that day that his chances for a successful career among people like Zolotov were slim. Or perhaps he had seen some other sign that things were getting hot. Tretyakov had secretly worked for the Americans for several years and could be compromised. In either case, he had come to think it was the right time to leave.
By this time, Putin already had made some dramatic changes in the SVR. He shifted the agency’s focus from east to west. He did it in the most effective way known in Russian bureaucracy—through personnel changes.
In the 1990s, the SVR was led by generals who had spent their careers in India, Pakistan, and the Middle East. Inside they were called the Middle Eastern mafia.
Putin picked his head of the agency from a completely different group. The new chief of Foreign Intelligence had spent his career in the West, first in Germany. Before his appointment, he was an SVR official representative to the United States. Operatives with experience spying in the United States started to fill important positions in the agency. Even the press office followed the trend. The officer chosen as the new spokesperson for the agency spent years in New York in the 1990s in the guise of a correspondent for the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda.
By coincidence, for most of his time in New York, he’d been supervised by Tretyakov.
Tretyakov worked under Putin only for seven months, but he witnessed the dramatic change. Years later, he told us on the phone from his home in Florida, “Russian intelligence became even more aggressive [compared with the KGB and the early 1990s], at least if judging by the requests we started to get and what kind of appetite the center now showed. There are plenty of our former officers in the government, and we all have brains made in the same factory.”2 He meant that Putin and his friends trusted the SVR assessment much more than they did information provided by conventional diplomats.
That change didn’t go unnoticed. Already in the spring of 2001, three Western countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany—reported increases in the activity of Russian intelligence abroad.3 These allegations were to be repeated time and again as Putin’s tenure in the Kremlin stretched on.
Not only did the focus change; the intelligence programs were expanded, too. According to Tretyakov, around that same time, the SVR dramatically increased spending on the “illegals program,” meaning the placement of covert intelligence operatives with false identities and false names—in many cases, sending people in the guise of émigrés. The SVR believed that these sorts of spies could easily lose themselves in the West amid the huge post-Soviet wave of emigration.4
Ten years later it became clear that not all of them infiltrated the West as successfully as Moscow hoped.
In June 2010 the FBI arrested ten Russian illegals after having had them under surveillance for a long time, prompting the biggest spy scandal between the two countries in a decade. Eight of the ten had pretended to be not Russian; they held American, Canadian, or Peruvian passports and Western names. Two stood out in the crowd: twenty-eight-year-old Mikhail Semenko, arrested in Arlington, Virginia, and redheaded Anna Chapman, the same age, who was arrested in New York. Russian by origin, they hadn’t adopted false names like the rest of the Russian spies. While Semenko had come to Washington, DC, to work for the Travel All Russia travel agency, Chapman pretended to be a new émigré.
Born in Volgograd to the family of a high-ranking KGB official, Anna had studied at university in Moscow. At a party she met a Brit, Alex Chapman, and promptly married him—getting a British passport into the bargain—and moved to London. In 2009 she came to New York and landed a job at a
website selling real estate. There she was put under FBI surveillance as part of a massive counterintelligence operation, code-named Ghost Stories, against SVR spies in the United States. The federal agents discovered her contacts with known Russian spies based in the city. While sitting at a Starbucks in Manhattan using her laptop, she was caught using a private Wi-Fi network shared by a minivan driven by a Russian government official.5
While this marked the end of Anna Chapman’s spy career, it was hardly the end of the Kremlin’s intelligence scheme. In fact, the same year she was exposed, Russian intelligence openly took up the issue of the compatriots, and a high-ranking official representing Russian intelligence became a member of the Kremlin’s interagency coordinating body in charge of the Russians abroad.6
It looked like the old KGB system, created by Andropov and Kryuchkov in the 1970s to coordinate efforts to prevent “subversive activities” by émigrés and, at the same time, to recruit them, had been restored and expanded. The age-old method of eliminating the regime’s enemies was still a tool in their toolbox.
Years and decades passed, and Russian intelligence kept honoring the traditions. When Putin made KGB veteran Sergei Naryshkin chief of the SVR in late 2016, Naryshkin made it known that a portrait of Vasily Zarubin was on display in Yasenevo.7
Would it ever become possible to break with KGB tradition and reform Soviet intelligence to comport with a democratic system of governance and the rule of law? Yeltsin surely missed his chance, but had there ever been a chance?
On a sunny June day in London, we posed this very question to tall, smiling Richard Aldrich, professor of international security at the University of Warwick and a renowned historian and authority on British intelligence. He explained that the two systems, democratic and authoritarian, have “fundamentally different notion[s] of intelligence.”
The Compatriots Page 27