Deception

by Edward Lucas

  Once you’re in an organisation doing that kind of work they give you absolutely everything . . . they put you in touch with other people in the area, take you to meetings. They share all their thinking.

  Another business associate says Heathfield’s sales pitch, always to people at the top, was, in effect, ‘I have created a black box that helps you mitigate risk and plan for the future.’ They merely had to tell him their secrets and fears. Heathfield’s software product was professionally designed by a reputable company at substantial cost. But was it any good? Like much other expensive material bought by business executives, the data produced by Heathfield’s software may have been less a real tool for decision-making than ammunition for boardroom battles. Among the experts he showed it to was Yaneer Bar-Yam, a physicist and the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, who politely describes it as a ‘working prototype’ rather than a breakthrough:

  The specifics of the model he showed me were more of a conceptual sketch than an implementation of fundamental mathematics . . . a mock-up – on the lines of ‘this is what it would look like if it works’. It’s another thing to have something that really works.15

  Stripped of its jargon, the software pictured priorities and approaches inside an organisation, with the aim of getting people with different viewpoints to work together. Heathfield’s intern, who used the software for a university project, remembers it less than fondly:

  It had very few capabilities – it was essentially a long-range calendar with a few bells and whistles. We were students and wanted to appease our professor, so we used it in a study on the hydrogen economy16 . . . it didn’t have much utility. The interface was impossible: buggy, jerky, hard to zoom in and out.17

  Despite its flaws, the software may have been designed to provide its promoter, not its users, with insights. Jerome Glenn of the Millennium Project, a UN-linked outfit that ponders the future with help from forty ‘nodes’ around the world, recalls meeting Heathfield exhibiting his software at a conference in 2007. Keen to see his product used at the prestigious project, Heathfield offered it free of charge. Mr Glenn also found it unsatisfactory and did not want to spend time learning to use it. Heathfield was indefatigable, returning every two or three weeks to press his case and ultimately offering to provide an intern, whom he paid $500 a month in order to promote the software inside the project. Even that was not enough to clinch the deal.

  But his consulting work provided a good vantage point. ‘It’s a smart strategy to monitor the think tanks that monitor global change,’ says Mr Glenn. Had he known that Heathfield was a Russian he would have taken immediate steps to have the software checked, he says.18 The advantages for a spy of having a proprietory programme installed on important people’s computers in places ranging from Iran (where the Millennium Project has a ‘node’) to Beijing barely need stating. Even if the software is initially innocuous, an ‘update’ can deliver a piece of malware (malign code) that could copy emails, search a computer or a network for key-words, upload files to a remote server, or steal passwords. Leaving electronic espionage aside, Heathfield’s work also provided a laissez-passer to business, academia and government. A case study cited in his published chapter involved:

  a group of graduate students at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University working under the guidance of Leon Fuerth, a research professor and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Gore. The concept of ‘Forward Engagement’ put forth by Professor Fuerth focuses on identifying major future contingencies that are likely to affect the long-term future of the United States. Those contingencies, from the aging of the US population to catastrophic terrorist acts, have important implications across multiple domains, from environment and energy to international relations. Dealing with those contingencies will require a proactive forward engagement by the US government. In order to make legislators aware of the implications of these major societal developments and to build the momentum for appropriate decisions among the public, a ‘big picture’ of future challenges must be constructed first.19

  It is easy to see how useful such access would be. Students involved in such a project would be prime recruitment targets: the sort of people likely to move onwards and upwards in America’s defence, security and foreign policy establishment. Faculty members at Georgetown would also be well worth getting to know, in order to tap their past government experience – or their future roles. Mr Fuerth is a well-connected figure in Washington, DC. His version of events is as follows:

  Heathfield introduced himself to me at the conclusion of a speech that I gave at a public meeting in Washington. He expressed his interest in the subject of Forward Engagement, presented himself as an entrepreneur vending his own software for long-range assessment in corporations, and requested an opportunity to see me to continue the discussion. We met from time to time, whenever – as he claimed – he was in Washington on business. He volunteered to let my students work with his software to see if it helped their assignment for my class. His description of the work that my students were doing looks accurate. However, as I recall, their judgment was that, while the concept of Heathfield’s software was interesting, the software itself had very limited capabilities insofar as their end-of-semester project was concerned.

  Heathfield’s personality was low-key and friendly, and he appeared to be seriously interested in the subject of foresight and how to develop and use it. Eventually, however, I learned that he was presenting himself as someone who had played an important role in developing Forward Engagement. At that point, I made it clear that this should stop, and he dropped out of touch. Heathfield is not and never was a ‘partner.’ He was one of many persons with parallel interests, whom I have gotten to know as the result of my work in this field . . . Heathfield played no part in the development of these ideas.20

  Mr Fuerth may well have had little time for Heathfield. But the Russian spy’s bosses were clearly interested in Mr Fuerth. He appears to be the person named as ‘Cat’ in encrypted communications to Heathfield from the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. They encouraged him to continue cultivating the source.21 However in this case the main role played by Mr Fuerth and the George Washington University may have been in bolstering Heathfield’s credentials, rather than in active intelligence gathering. His long-term mission may have been to move closer to the national-security world – always the prime target in Russian eyes. Professor William Halal of Techcast, a forecasting outfit, used to see Heathfield regularly during his frequent trips to Washington, DC. ‘He tried to meet anyone who was doing anything of consequence,’ he recalls.22 Heathfield also discussed with him a planned move to the American capital, with every sign of seriousness. That would have given him better access to companies that sell defence- and intelligence-related products and services. But the most tempting target could have been the think-tank world: the soft under-belly of the American security and intelligence community, where retired officials, those hoping for jobs, and those taking a break from government mix and mingle with outsiders.

  Heathfield’s efforts were not just in America. His intern recalls, ‘He was always travelling – I had no idea how he was funded – back and forth between Singapore, Boston and Canada.’ His website also suggests partners in China, including with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, an influential government think tank, with the Beijing Academy of Soft Technologies23 and an outfit called Chinagreenfuture.24 Emails to these organisations asking for details of Heathfield’s involvement in their activities went unanswered but the connection was strong: his elder son interned in China in 2008.

  Clearly part of Mr Heathfield’s image was simple invention. He cites in the ‘resources’ section of his myfuturemap.com website a reputable firm of business coaches called Coachinc.com. Asked to confirm Mr Heathfield’s claimed connection, the CEO, Sandy Vilas, replied immediately: ‘Never heard of him.’25 But chasing down other leads presents a
more complex picture. In a lengthy presentation about Futuremap’s virtues at an event in Singapore sponsored by the local French Chamber of Commerce, Heathfield’s local partner Fabrizio Battaglia used a slide giving the logo of nine well-known international companies, including ABB, Alstom, AT&T and T-Mobile.26 Heathfield’s own website says that he has worked with big companies such as ‘General Electric, AREVA, Boston Scientific, Ericsson, Motorola, Microsoft, Michelin, Philips, STMicroelectronics, SAP, T-Mobile, and United Technologies.’27

  Most of these companies replied that they could not trace any connection with Mr Heathfield. (Mr Battaglia did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Among the exceptions was ST Microelectronics, which confirmed that its ‘internal educational organisation’, ST University, ‘occasionally collaborated’ with Global Partners (a reputable Boston-based firm where Heathfield used to work) for sales and marketing courses involving him as an ‘external consultant’. It insists that it never bought his software or hired him directly, ‘nor was the relationship . . . of any significance in duration or value’.28 The France-based international utilities firm Veolia was the only firm to acknowledge a serious connection. It hired Heathfield to design strategy and speak at management training events. Benoit Bardon, who worked with him closely for six years, recalls a ‘smart guy’ with ‘brilliant methodology’ who showed no interest in intelligence-related matters. Gerard Bridi, an American-based consultant who worked closely with Heathfield (and endorsed him on his LinkedIn profile) says that he typically charged his clients $3,000 a day.

  A bit of puffery is not unusual in the self-promoting world of consultancy. It is also understandable that huge companies, with operations in dozens of countries, find it hard to say whether a particular consultant has or has not been hired at any point over the past fifteen years. But two points stand out. One is how easy it is for a plausible and well-educated person to disguise phoney origins and appear to be a genuine expert. The other is how much damage can be done by allowing such a person access to the inner workings of companies that are involved in defence contracting, energy security, communications and the like. The most likely modus operandi for someone like Heathfield is to recruit sources as unwitting collaborators with Russian intelligence. His consultancy job allowed him to ask well-placed sources to write occasional background reports for anonymous consulting ‘clients’, in exchange for a lucrative fee or well-padded per diem payments. He needed to make no mention that the result was going to a foreign government, let alone to Russia.

  It may help the reader to picture three possible examples of such an approach. Imagine yourself to be an influential American – perhaps a senior partner in a professional-services firm with a client list that includes government agencies and big companies. How suspicious would you be of an intelligent and attractive woman assigned to help with your taxes, who shows a flattering interest in your political connections? Or of a brainy, jargon-spouting consultant wanting to future-proof your business? Or of a plausible-seeming fellow-alumnus who networks assiduously at events that you attend? Most likely, they are all just what they seem. But any of those three could be an illegal, working for Russia, China or some other country, trying to make you a witting or unwitting ally in their attempt to steal secrets and exert influence.

  For specific targets of direct national-security importance, someone claiming to be an American citizen (or British, or from another NATO member) may find it marginally easier to gain trust speedily. But in other respects Heathfield’s elaborately acquired illegal identity – a Canadian citizen with a stellar professional career – was unnecessary, and even a hindrance. One of the appealing aspects of Western society is that employers and business associates tend to take the people they deal with on trust. If someone is charming, brainy and effective, those characteristics will matter far more than whether they hail from Tomsk or Toronto. Had Heathfield started his mission twenty years later, his bosses could have sent him to Canada quite legally on a student visa. From there he would have gone to the Kennedy School, and finally moved into consulting, without breaking any law or needing any clandestine connection, other than perhaps a wealthy ‘relative’ in Russia to pay the bills. He could even have changed his name, as many immigrants to North America do, from the hard-to-pronounce Bezrukov to something easier: Heathfield, perhaps. Much if not all of his assiduous networking and self-promotion would have followed an all but identical path. He might still be living in Cambridge, Massachusetts today, rather than working in Russia as a consultant to an oil company. Indeed in some respects his cover story may even have been positively harmful. Some of his former associates say that they would have been more forthcoming had they known he worked for the Russian government: they found his relentless commercialism rather off-putting. Professor Bar-Yam, for example, who had previously found Heathfield’s software commendable if flawed, says his reaction to the spy scandal was ‘very neutral’:

  So Russia was sending people to learn about local culture? You might see it as a cultural exchange. I am not sure that’s a bad thing. If there’s conflict between countries it is very important that there is an exchange of information to bring broader understanding.29

  An illegal identity also has the great weakness of all complex plots: just one loose end can unravel the whole deception. A former student of Tomsk University, now living in America, remembers the couple clearly from the early 1980s: ‘Lena’ (who later became Heathfield’s wife ‘Ann Foley’) was a ballet-loving young woman, who had studied at the city’s prestigious German-language high school and toured Japan with a Soviet tourist group. That was a striking privilege at a time when travel to capitalist countries was restricted to the best-connected, and was especially rare for those living in strategically important ‘closed cities’ such as Tomsk – these were places quarantined by the KGB, where visits by foreigners where banned, and whose inhabitants were generally prohibited from visiting countries in the ‘capitalist camp’.

  Bezrukov transferred to a university in Moscow – an unusual move up the Soviet academic ladder that indicated powerful sponsorship. When the communist world was almost hermetically sealed from the capitalist one, it was highly unlikely that any tendril of an illegal’s old life would appear to trip up the new one. The chance of Tomsk alumni meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts was about as likely as an encounter on the moon. Yet the erstwhile fellow-student30 could easily have bumped into Heathfield and his wife on the street. Denial would be risky, explanations even more so. It might force the controllers in Moscow to abort the whole mission, ending a decade or more of meticulous and costly work.

  Technology and the internet create problems for old-style illegals too. Spycatchers in Britain used to wonder why Soviet block embassy staff showed such interest in cemeteries and country churchyards. Eventually the penny dropped: they were looking for the gravestones of dead children, in order to obtain their birth certificates and then apply for passports, driving licences etc. But the scope for this is shrinking. Biometric data are unique to each individual. Birth and death registries are increasingly computerised. Google makes tracing connections easier. In Heathfield’s case, a news announcement in the Canadian press in 2005 of the death of his ‘father’, Howard William Heathfield, also mentioned that the real infant Donald had predeceased him. Had the phoney ‘Donald’ already been under suspicion, the death notice could have given a dangerous clue to an alert spycatcher.

  Fashioning a fake identity that fools a layman is one thing. Creating one that generates a real passport and other documents is harder. But providing an alias that will withstand determined scrutiny – for example of the kind carried out on an applicant for a security clearance – is now formidably difficult. The slightest anomaly or flaw becomes fatal. For this reason, the best penetration agents are not illegals but traitors: people like Kim Philby, a blue-blooded trueborn Englishman who decided at university to devote his life to the communist cause, and simply waited until SIS hired him.31 Herman Simm was at least in hi
s own eyes in the same category. But traitors cannot be ordered up at will. Instead, Russia’s spymasters are turning to a new and more potent category of illegal. Unlike Heathfield and his colleagues, they do not rely on stolen identities. They use their own.

  7

  The New Illegals

  The clearest traces of this new echelon of Russian spies (one might call them the ‘legal illegals’) were left by Ms Chapman and the rather less glamorous (but more impressive) Mikhail Semenko, a fluent Mandarin speaker who worked at a travel agency but hung around Washington think tanks. Like Heathfield, Semenko maintained a profile on the business networking site LinkedIn.1 This gives his genuine Russian academic credentials, from Amur State University and the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, as well as his American alma mater, Seton Hall. It describes him, in convincing resumé-speak, as a:

  highly creative and analytical professional with recent education and diverse experience involving development assistance, meeting and event planning, partnership building, and high-level client relations. Natural leader and communicator with in-depth knowledge of government policy research, program management, international negotiations, and delivery of formal public speaking presentations.

  Solid history of success creating new public policy events, expanding program participation and membership, and establishing connections between diverse cultures. Multilingual with native expertise in Russian, fluency in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, and intermediate skills in German and Portuguese.