Blowout

by Rachel Maddow

  The same could be said by any of the Murphys’ friends and neighbors on Marquette Road. It never crossed my mind they were spies. But the neighbors watched the whirlwind postarrest legal proceedings and began to understand something quite extraordinary had transpired right there on their sleepy little road. “Sometimes,” one of the elders on the block told a New York reporter, “things make sense to you after the fact.”

  The ten defendants were arraigned in federal district court, charged with money laundering and conspiring to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government. All but one was held without bail. The final disposition didn’t take long. The Murphys and their co-defendants were back in court less than two weeks later to plead guilty to the charges. The federal judge in Manhattan, at the urging of the U.S. Department of Justice, sentenced the defendants to time served—eleven days so far—and ordered them deported. “The agreement we reached today,” Attorney General Eric Holder announced, “provides a successful resolution for the United States and its interests.”

  The media tracked the Boeing 767 carrying the Murphys and the others to a remote runway at the main airport in Vienna, Austria, where it rendezvoused with a second plane. The two aircraft idled nose to tail on the tarmac for a little more than an hour, while a secure bus shuttled in between, swapping out the ten “foreign agents” arrested in America for four soon-to-be imports to the West—a spies-for-spies trade between Moscow and Washington, a full-blooded Cold War throwback.

  Less than three hours after taking off from Vienna, the Russian Yakovlev Yak-42 jet touched down in Moscow. The Murphys and their co-conspirators were home again, back in Russia after almost twenty years in the United States for some of them. They were received in general triumph, which included a ceremony a few months later at the Kremlin, where the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, presented the “talented adventurers” with special award citations. Prime Minister (and soon-to-be president again) Vladimir Putin promised “a bright and happy future” back home in the motherland for them all. The bosses in the Russian intelligence service took the celebrated secret agents on a victory tour, which reportedly culminated at Putin’s villa on the Black Sea. Anna Chapman later told acquaintances that the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin gave her a ride into the deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal, in his personal submarine.

  According to press reports out of Russia anyway, most of the “Illegals” settled into the “bright and happy future” they were promised. (Only the Murphys disappeared into oblivion.) Mikhail Semenko went to work in the Moscow office of the same travel agency he had worked for in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He didn’t even have to update his LinkedIn page. Natalya Pereverzeva, armed with her business degree from the University of Washington, became an adviser on international projects to the CEO of Russia’s powerful oil pipeline company, Transneft. The most impressive of the new professional assignments went to Donald Heathfield, a.k.a. Andrey Bezrukov, who had compiled the finest record of almost accomplishment among the spy team. Not long after he and the other Illegals completed their weird Putin-led Victory Tour, Bezrukov was awarded a job at the jewel in the crown of Russia’s state-controlled corporations, Rosneft, which would shortly surpass ExxonMobil in pure size and breadth. The appointment was made, it was reported in the Russian press, “as per orders from above.”

  But nobody made out like Anna Chapman, that auburn-haired, latter-day Mata Hari. She landed a job as “adviser” to a Russian investment bank specializing in high tech and aerospace, with no fixed office hours and, consequently, free rein to exploit her Kremlin-powered celebrity to its fullest. Anna appeared on the cover of the Russian edition of Maxim wearing lingerie and holding a Beretta pistol. She launched a fashion line, a perfume, a poker app, and a weekly television show called Secrets of the World with Anna Chapman. She drove a sleek black Porsche Cayenne, frequented high-profile nightclubs in Moscow, and drew hordes of paparazzi at movie premieres.

  Ms. Chapman even tweeted a marriage proposal to Moscow ensconced American defector Edward Snowden a few years back, and she maintains a Western-friendly social media profile. Her Twitter feed quotes Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Oscar Wilde, and John Stuart Mill: “There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.” And she remains, above all, a loyal and patriotic Russian who briefly led the Young Guard of Putin’s United Russia political party. “Anna is Putin’s girl,” one Kremlin watcher told Politico reporter Brett Forrest.

  The way the Illegals’ story was told inside Russia, this ten-person cell of deep-cover spies had done extraordinary work in the United States, uncovering a trove of useful intelligence while successfully pulling the wool over the eyes of the CIA and the FBI. “Nobody [in Russia] thinks [they] were a failure,” Andrei Soldatov, a Moscow-born journalist who specializes in Russian security services, explained to Forrest a little more than a year after the return of the spies. “It’s a victory. Because it shows we can still compete with America. We are a great power. We can do everything we want to do.”

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  Russia’s great “victory” was not conceded here in the United States. The spies were caught, right, and without much trouble. And yet their story made for a fantastic tale. The saga of these deep-cover agents, spooling out in official legal filings and news accounts, offered tantalizing hints of intrigue, and peril, and old-school spycraft at work. The senior of the key suspects had been trained by the old Soviet KGB; the younger by the KGB’s Russian successor in foreign intelligence, the SVR. But these were not your garden-variety agents; the ten Russians captured in the United States in 2010 were modern inheritors of a long and storied history of Russian Illegals. Among spies, Illegals are a special breed of cat—long known for their “sophistication and flair,” as one Russian counterintelligence expert put it—assiduously prepared for long years on foreign assignment, pretending not to be Russians at all.

  At the beginning of their careers, they had received training in the language and culture of the country they would inhabit. They were taught the basics of identifying and communicating with their fellow travelers: how to execute a brush pass; how to nonverbally signal danger to a comrade; how to send radiograms; how to cipher and decipher coded messages; and more recently, in the age of the internet, how to join a temporary wireless network or operate software to pull encrypted data off innocuous-looking public websites. Once trained, Illegals were shipped off on assignments around the world, including to the United States, often as married couples, armed with legends—stolen identities and invented backstories—to work the long game. They did not gather foreign intelligence while safely under the guise of factotums at Russian embassies and consulates and trade missions, working in broad daylight, with the promise of diplomatic immunity if they were caught in acts of espionage. They instead lived like locals. As locals. They moved into American communities and made friends, went to graduate school and made new friends, got jobs and made new friends, had children and made new friends.

  The newest generation still operated as their predecessors had in the early days of Soviet spydom: switching on and off multiple taxis, buses, and subways to shake real or perceived surveillance; exercising discretion in all ways (their cars, by official edict, should not be pricier or nicer than those of “embassy workers who are of equal or higher rank than the station chief”); and being constantly on guard against slipups that might get them reassigned to some godforsaken outpost in Siberia or demoted to a job in “internal security,” where they would end up spying on Moscow dentist offices or St. Petersburg tennis clubs. Most of all, they waited for and followed the coded instructions from SVR’s Directorate S, whose chief ran the 2010 version of Russia’s nontraditional espionage program. “Try to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources close to State department, Government, major think tanks,” was the routine order from on hig
h, as detailed in the U.S. Justice Department’s federal criminal complaint.

  Their assignments in the United States were actually pretty cushy during the first decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union. While their countrymen back in Russia fought for their economic survival, the Murphys and the Heathfields and the Zottolis lived in the land of plenty, with money to pay exorbitant graduate school tuitions and without a lot of heat from their bosses back at Moscow Center. Instructions from Directorate S were spotty, and general, and not particularly urgent right up to the early years of the twenty-first century, just after Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency.

  Putin was happy to allow the United States to pony up for oil pipelines and tanker-friendly deepwater ports in Russia. He was more than thrilled to have the bankers at Morgan Stanley shake the Western money tree on behalf of Russian companies and quick to boast of the world-beating economic growth that foreign investment engendered in Russia. But the old KGB man would never let go of his suspicion of the United States of America and its insatiable hunger for more. And it wasn’t just paranoia; it was worry borne out of legitimate weakness. Would Wall Street bankers horn in on the claptrap Russian industry that produced the nation’s one economic advantage? Would the United States somehow threaten Russia’s increasing dominance in Europe’s oil and gas markets? Even after the Cold War thaw, by Putin’s reckoning, the American government still seemed committed to eating away at Russia’s already-depleted global standing. America still had an appetite that grew as it was fed. So President Vlad was going to be keeping tabs. And the Illegals rather suddenly found themselves on an uncomfortably tight, and short, leash.

  As Putin consolidated his hold on power in Russia, Directorate S prodded its agents in America to widen their circles of unwitting informants and acquaintances who might prove susceptible to blackmail. “Your relationship with ‘Parrot’ looks very promising as a valid source of info from US power circles,” read a radiogram in 2007. “To start working with him professionally we need all available details on his background, current position, habits, contacts, opportunities….Agree with your proposal to keep relations with ‘Cat’ but watch him.”

  By 2009, as Russia and the United States were just beginning to negotiate a breakthrough treaty to reduce their respective stockpiles of nuclear weapons, Directorate S was increasingly intrigued by Cynthia Murphy’s ongoing contact with a New York venture capitalist named Alan Patricof. Patricof, who had fallen into Cynthia Murphy’s lap as a client of the financial services company she worked for, was not just a major donor to the Democratic Party but the finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s first Senate campaign and a key fund-raiser for her presidential campaign in 2008. He and Clinton were friends! Perhaps even close confidants. Which meant, as far as the SVR bosses in Moscow were concerned, Mr. Patricof should be able to provide inside dope on the new secretary of state and the inner workings of the Obama administration. “Try to build up little by little relations with him moving beyond just [work] framework,” instructed Directorate S. “Maybe he can provide [Cynthia Murphy] with remarks re US foreign policy, ‘rumors’ about White House internal ‘kitchen,’ invite her to venues, etc….In short, consider carefully all options in regard to [financier].”

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  For all the ways it hit the fundamentals of a shiny-cover airport bookstore spy novel, the real story of these new Illegals had to have been unsettling to an old spymaster like Vladimir Putin. To an American audience, sure, the arrests in the summer of 2010 exposed something right at the overlap of exciting and ridiculous—dead drops, fake accents, and code words, oh my. But it could only be funny if you didn’t think much was at stake; for the Russians, this was their best effort. And the excruciating ineptitude of what were supposed to be the Kremlin’s elite spies was now on display for a world audience. The evidence was irrefutable: the Russians were losing their edge even in the arenas where they once enjoyed their most trumpeted victories. While Mrs. Patricof might have had cause to worry about what sorts of “options” were considered and deployed in the attempt to entice her seventy-five-year-old husband into deeper relations, nothing suggested that the White House’s famed “internal kitchen” was ever in danger of a serious breach. The Illegals had gleaned, well, pretty much nothing they couldn’t have gotten reading their local newspapers. Putin’s best spies in America seem to have never really had their heart in the mission. The New Yorker’s Keith Gessen, a Russian-born American journalist and novelist who came to the United States when he was six years old, found the entire episode “sad and touching….Sad because, according to the F.B.I. affidavit, the information requested by the Russian government (‘Moscow Center,’ as it’s called) is so mundane, and some of it merely trade secrets, unbefitting a mighty state and redolent too of the central planning that once turned the U.S.S.R. into an economic basket case. Touching because the other information they are said to have sought—American plans for fighting terrorism; American plans for Iran; Obama’s hopes for last summer’s summit in Moscow—seems to dance around the real issue. Like a kid in the presence of his new crush, asking, ‘Do you like movies?,’ ‘What’s your favorite color?,’ Russia really wanted to ask America: What do you think of me?”

  The Illegals operation was not merely sad and touching; it was also dated. The spies were still using invisible ink, for God’s sake. “If the accusations prove to be true,” noted Time magazine, “the biggest lesson from this entire episode may be that real-life spies today act just like fictional spies from the 1980s.” Yeah, only less like John Le Carré characters and more like the ones in the movie with Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd. Despite the public boasts about their heroic victory in Moscow, the Illegals were demonstrably bumbling, even slipshod. The group was under close and constant surveillance for nearly ten years, with footage and photographs and audio recordings to prove it. Their countersurveillance efforts had bordered on gross negligence. Their homes were searched and their cars tagged with GPS trackers, and the Illegals never knew. The best of the spies, Heathfield/Bezrukov, was for years kept under the watchful and unseen eye of the U.S. lead agent Peter Strzok—the G-man later torched by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans for his role in investigating the Russia scandal surrounding the U.S. 2016 presidential election. The Illegals had repeated contact with FBI agents posing as fellow Russians. “Are you ready for this [next] step?” one undercover agent asked Anna Chapman. “Shit,” she replied, “of course.” Then she unwittingly handed over her laptop to the American undercover agent, and then she bought a burner phone and a Tracfone calling card, and then she dumped the receipt into a public trash can where it was fished out by the FBI. Double-0 Heaven indeed.

  Almost all of the SVR spies exhibited stunning deficiencies in both tradecraft and general attitude. Richard Murphy was an exemplary nincompoop on each count. There was a reason Cynthia Murphy was bringing home the bacon and Richard was a stay-at-home dad. To begin with, and maybe this was just the dark Tolstoyan Russian in him, he was an incessant whiner. “They don’t understand what we go through over here,” Murphy liked to say. At a 2002 meeting at a restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens, he spent an hour complaining to a Russian agent sent to give him money. “Well,” said the other Russian, while handing him a black bag containing $40,000, “I’m so happy I’m not your handler.”

  At one point, near the end of the operation, the directorate seemed worried that Richard Murphy might go walkabout, especially after he suggested putting the house on Marquette Road in his own (fake) name. “From our perspective, purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here,” Comrade Murphy tried to explain to his bosses. “It was a convenient way to solve the housing issue, plus to ‘do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.”

  The answer from Directorate S was an emphatic nyet: “Your education, bank accounts, car, house—all these serve one goal: fulfill your
main mission…to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels to [Moscow Center].”

  Murphy was assigned simple tasks only, like handoffs of backpacks or gym bags with other Russian Illegals. To his credit, Murphy could be counted on to remember the code phrases for identification: “Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?”

  “Yes indeed,” was the correct reply, “I was in La Valletta, but in 2000.”

  He was, however, not great on details—such as knowing there is more than one entrance at the southwest corner of Central Park. “We might have, ah, have different place in mind,” he apologized after one botched attempt at a meeting. And he was apparently not great at identifying his fellow Russians, which made for a few uncomfortable incidents, like when he walked up to one benighted soul beneath the metallic globe sculpture at Columbus Circle in New York City and unleashed his code phrase: “Uncle Paul loves you.”

  The man did not return the agreed-upon retort—“It is wonderful to be Santa Claus in May”—but instead looked at Murphy like he was crazy, until Murphy and his backpack went off in search of his real contact.