Operation Ghost Stories

Illegals Program

Illegals Program
Ten Russian agents apprehended on June 27, 2010 (Photos taken by the U.S. Marshals Service).

The Illegals Program, as it was called by the United States Department of Justice, was a network of Russian sleeper agents under non-official cover whose investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) culminated in the arrest of ten agents and a prisoner swap between Russia and the United States on July 9, 2010.

The spies were planted in the United States by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (known by its Russian abbreviation, SVR), and were the target of a multi-year investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, culminated at the end of June 2010 with the arrest of 10 individuals in the U.S. and an eleventh suspect in Cyprus. Ten sleeper agents were charged with "carrying out long-term, 'deep-cover' assignments in the United States on behalf of the Russian Federation."

The suspect arrested in Cyprus skipped bail the day after his arrest. A twelfth person, a Russian national who had worked for Microsoft, was also apprehended about the same time and deported on July 13, 2010. The Moscow legal court documents made public on June 27, 2011, revealed that another two Russian agents had managed to flee the U.S. without being arrested.

Ten of the agents were flown on July 9, 2010, to Vienna soon after pleading guilty to charges of failing to register as a representative of a foreign government. The same day, the agents were exchanged for four Russian nationals, three of whom had been convicted and imprisoned by Russia on espionage (high treason) charges.

On October 31, 2011, the FBI publicly released several dozen still images, clips from surveillance video, and documents related to its investigation in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

FBI arrests and criminal charges

Using forged documents, some of the spies had assumed stolen identities of Americans, enrolled at American universities and joined professional organizations as a means of further infiltrating spies into government circles. Two of the individuals used the names of Richard and Cynthia Murphy and resided in Hoboken, New Jersey, since the mid-1990s, before purchasing a nearby home in suburban Montclair. Another couple named in court documents were journalist Vicky Peláez and a man using the name of Juan Lazaro in Yonkers, New York. The court filings allege that couples had been arranged in Russia to "co-habit in the country to which they are assigned", going as far as having children together to help maintain their deep covert status.

The criminal complaints later filed in various federal district courts allege that the Russian agents in the U.S. passed information back to the SVR by messages hidden inside digital photographs, written in disappearing ink, ad hoc wireless networks and shortwave radio transmissions, as well as by agents swapping identical bags while passing each other in the stairwell of a train station. Messages and materials were passed in such places as Grand Central Terminal and Central Park.

The Russian agents were tasked by 'Moscow center' to report about U.S. policy in Central America, U.S. interpretation of Russian foreign policy, problems with U.S. military policy and "United States policy with regard to the use of the Internet by terrorists".

According to the media reports, planning by the FBI to have the 'illegals' arrested had begun in mid-June 2010, but the action was hastened reportedly by some members of the group intending to travel outside the U.S. as well as by Anna Chapman's growing concern about having been exposed. Vladimir Guriyev was planning to travel to France and possibly Russia, Bezrukov was planning to travel outside the U.S. with his son, and Anna Chapman, in a telephone call to her father the day before the arrest, was suspicious that she may have been discovered to be an agent and was planning to leave for Moscow in mid-July 2010.

Ten of the agents involved were arrested by U.S. authorities on June 27, 2010, in a series of raids in Boston, Montclair, Yonkers and Northern Virginia. The individuals were charged with money laundering (which can carry a penalty of up to 20 years' imprisonment) and failing to register as agents of a foreign government. No charges were offered that the individuals involved had gained access to classified material, though contacts had been made with a former intelligence official and with a scientist involved in developing bunker buster bombs.

One of the suspects using the name of Christopher R. Metsos was detained on June 29, 2010 while attempting to depart from Cyprus for Budapest, but was released on bail and then disappeared.

There is no evidence that the convicted agents knew each other beyond their respective spouses; they did not constitute any 'spy ring'.

Shortly after the arrests, the British Guardian commented: "The FBI operation represents the biggest penetration of the SVR communications in recent memory. The FBI read their emails, decrypted their intel, read the embedded coded texts on images posted on the net, bugged their mobile phones, videotaped the passing of bags of cash and messages in invisible ink from one agent to another, and hacked into their bogus expenses claims. <...> The tradecraft used by the alleged SVR ring was amateurish, and will send shivers down the spine of the rival intelligence organisations in Russia. This was bungling on a truly epic scale. No secrets about bunker-busting bombs were actually obtained, but the network was betrayed. <...> To have a spy ring uncovered before they could actually do any serious spying is doubly embarrassing."

Coinciding with the day of the prisoners' swap, the death of the prominent Russian defector Sergei Tretyakov who had died in the US on June 13, 2010, was reported on July 9, 2010; the Florida medical examiner's report released on September 20, 2010, cited an accident and a tumour as the cause of death. In response to allegations in the media that he might have tipped off the US authorities about some of the 'illegals', Tretyakov's co-author Pete Earley in July 2010, citing anonymous "well-informed" sources, said that Tretyakov had not been privy to the case of Russian 'illegals'.

November 11, 2010, issue of Kommersant, Russia's broadsheet, carried an article that, with reference to unnamed RF government sources, contained allegations that the 'illegals' had been fingered by a senior SVR officer named "Colonel Shcherbakov (Щербаков)" (according to an unnamed ex-CIA source, his full name may be Александр Васильевич Щербаков); the latter had, according to the newspaper's sources, headed the 'American' unit of the SVR department in charge of 'illegals' and left Russia for the US "three days prior to Dmitry Medvedev's June visit to the US". According to other media outlets' sources, the name "Shcherbakov" was fictitious and a number of allegations made in the article were judged by experts and commentators to be either highly dubious or improbable; nevertheless, some comments made the following day by RF President Medvedev were interpreted as an indirect confirmation of the fact of a high-level defection in the RF intelligence apparatus. On November 15, 2010, Interfax citing unnamed sources within Russian intelligence claimed that the real name of the defector who was primarily responsible for uncovering the 10 convicted agents was (reportedly, his full name is Александр Николаевич Потеев), who had a rank of Colonel in the SVR and had been deputy head of American department within Directorate 'S' of SVR ('S' oversees illegals). According to Interfax and other media sources, Shcherbakov did exist and also had held a senior position in the SVR; reportedly, he "had defected about two years ago".

Agents apprehended by FBI on June 27, 2010

Anna Chapman

Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov (Juan Lazaro) and Vicky Peláez

Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova (Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley)

Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev (Richard and Cynthia Murphy)

Mikhail Kutsik and Nataliya Pereverzeva (Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills)

Mikhail Semenko

Other presumed agents of the Illegals Program

"Christopher Metsos" (Pavel Kapustin)

The man known by the name of "Christopher Metsos" was alleged to be the money man and main go-between behind the Illegals Program and the SVR. The real name of Metsos, who assumed the identity of a deceased boy, is unknown. On June 29, 2010, acting on an Interpol notice, police arrested the 55-year-old man at the Larnaca International Airport as he was about to board a jet for Budapest. He was released after posting €27,000 (equivalent to US$33,777) bail and told to report to a police station thereafter, but skipped out and apparently fled the country.

According to the information from US authorities shortly after his flight, "Metsos", who had traveled on a Canadian passport and claimed to be Canadian, had regularly travelled to the US to deliver money to his fellow Russian spies; he would typically drop off money at New York City area locations including a coffee shop, restaurant and subway station. According to his Cyprus lawyer, 'Metsos' had no discernible Russian accent and described himself as a Canadian resident who had divorced 15 years prior and had a son living in Paris.

On July 26, 2010, it was reported by the media that Passport Canada, upon conducting a review, had revoked the travel document issued to Christopher Metsos.

Late in July 2010, Russian political commentator Yulia Latynina voiced a theory that "Christopher Metsos" might have been a double agent and was probably now in the US; she did not cite any sources.

In the court verdict read in Moscow on June 27, 2011, it was claimed that the real name of the man who had posed as "Christopher Metsos" was Pavel Kapustin (Павел Капустин), a Russian espionage professional, who was exfiltrated upon being released on bail in Cyprus.

Alexey Karetnikov

On July 13, 2010, the US government disclosed that a 12th, previously undisclosed person, was being held in custody and was said by the media to be implicated in the same federal probe. Later that day, the person was identified as Alexey Karetnikov, a 23 year old former entry-level software tester at Microsoft, who had been apprehended on June 28, 2010 in Seattle. He was charged with immigration violations and consented to deportation in lieu of further court proceedings; he was sent to Russia on July 13, 2010. Law enforcement officials said on the day of his deportation that Karetnikov had no direct ties to the other deported persons, although his name came up in the broader investigation.

On July 22, 2010, Newsweek published the comments of Karetnikov's fellow dorm resident, who said that Karetnikov had impressed him as "very oily" and "very Russian" according to the anonymous source, Karetnikov spoke surprisingly poor English, but was "sophisticated" and knew a lot about Microsoft.

Communication techniques

The Russian agents used private Wi-Fi networks, flash memory sticks, and text messages concealed in graphical images to exchange information. Custom steganographic software developed in Moscow was used where concealed messages were inserted into otherwise innocuous files. This program was initiated by using the Control-Alt-E keys and entering a 27-character password, which the FBI found written down. Coded bursts of data sent by a shortwave radio transmitter were also used. Using invisible ink and exchanging identical bags in public places were also used.

Chapman used her laptop at a New York coffee shop on 47th Street in January 2010 and electronically transferred data to a Russian official driving by. Two months later, Chapman used a private Wi-Fi network, possibly at a Barnes and Noble store on Greenwich Street in New York, to communicate with the same Russian official, who was nearby. Chapman used a range extender for her laptop.

Court proceedings

Prisoner exchange

Reuters reported on July 7–8, 2010, that the U.S. and Russia had reached a deal under which the 10 individuals arrested in that country as part of the Illegals Program would be deported to Russia in exchange for individuals who had been convicted of espionage by Russia. Alexander Zaporozhsky, Sergei Skripal and were also included in the exchange. All of the four persons had served a considerable time in Russian prisons; at least three of the jailed individuals in Russia had been convicted of spying for either the United Kingdom, or the US.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was reported on July 8, 2010, as saying that President Barack Obama had approved the swap deal. An administration official was quoted as saying that Obama had not spoken to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev about the spy swap but had been "fully briefed and engaged in the matter." Broad agreement in the US was reported to exist that the agents were being deported swiftly as neither government wanted the case to damage attempts to reset their relationship.

Shortly before the swap deal was reached, nuclear specialist Igor Sutyagin, one of the Russian prisoners included in the deal, had been moved to a Moscow prison from a facility near the Arctic Circle, and was then flown to Vienna as part of the exchange between the two nations.

Under a U.S-Russian agreement, the Russian government has agreed to release the Russian prisoners and their family members for resettlement. The Russian prisoners have all served a number of years in prison and some are in poor health.

On July 9, 2010, the Russian ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed the exchange of four convicted people for ten Russian citizens citing "humanitarian considerations and constructive partnership development".

On July 9, 2010, all ten suspects were deported on a government-chartered jet from Vision Airlines took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport on July 8, carrying the ten Russian agents to Vienna International Airport via Bangor, Maine, for a refuelling and then for the swap around mid-day of July 9, 2010 (local time). Returning from Vienna were four Russian prisoners – Igor Sutyagin, Alexander Zaporozhsky, Sergei Skripal, . The aircraft landed at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, England, to drop two of the exchanged Russian nationals, then proceeded to Washington Dulles International Airport on the afternoon of July 9, 2010. The Russian government Yakovlev Yak-42 jet returned to Moscow's Domodedovo airport where, after landing, the 10 spies were kept away from local and international press.

Prisoners held by Russia involved in the exchange

Igor Sutyagin

Sergei Skripal

Sergei Skripal (Сергей Скрипаль) was a colonel in Russia's Military Intelligence Service, who had been sentenced in 2006 to 13 years for spying for Britain. He had spied for Britain's MI5 intelligence agency in the late 1990s while serving in the Russian Ground Forces, and had been paid to give away the identities of a number of Russian agents.

Aleksandr Zaporozhsky

Alexander Zaporozhsky (Александр Запорожский) was an operative in Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service who had been sentenced in 2003 to 18 years for secret cooperation with the United States. He was released as part of the swap after having served seven years.

Gennady Vasilenko

Gennady Semyonovich Vasilenko is the only person swapped from the Russian side who had not been convicted on espionage (high treason) charges. He had been a KGB officer working for external intelligence and counter-intelligence departments during the 70s and 80s; in 1988, presumably having been fingered by a Russian mole in the FBI, Robert Hanssen, he fell under suspicion of being a double agent. Vasilenko was not convicted but instead sacked from the KGB force. He was arrested in 2005 and charged with an attempted murder. Due to lack of evidence this charge was dropped; instead, he was sentenced to 3 years on possession of illegal firearms and explosive materials. In 2009, Vasilenko was convicted and sentenced again for allegedly having attempted to bribe facility officials.

According to media reports (which cite anonymous sources in Russian intelligence), Vasilenko was included in the list for the swap thanks to a personal request from the former CIA officer Jack Platt who had known him in the line of his CIA official duties (Vasilenko was posted in the U.S. under diplomatic cover from 1976 to 1981).

Others held by Russia

Alexander Sypachev

Alexander Sypachev was a colonel in the Russian intelligence service who was arrested after delivering a report to a secret location in 2002. He was sentenced to eight years for spying for the CIA. He was reported to have been considered for a swap but was not among the 4 Russians released.

Six other individuals were considered for exchange as an even 11:11 swap, but were not exchanged in Vienna.

Political ramifications

While there had been speculations that the arrests of the alleged spies, which occurred barely 72 hours after President Medvedev's White House visit, might cast a shadow over President Barack Obama's effort to improve relations between the US and Russia, on June 30, 2010, the US administration said that it would not expel Russian diplomats and it expressed no indignation that Russia had apparently been caught spying on it.

On June 29, 2010, The Guardian's comment said: "Revelations about spy rings are the last thing a politician like Medvedev, who presents himself as a moderniser, needs" in its July 1, 2010, issue, The Economist wrote: "The revelations have caused embarrassment in Moscow, not so much because Russia was caught spying on America, but because it did it so clumsily. Old KGB spies this week lamented the decline in professional standards. But the scandal has rather more serious domestic implications too. It punctures the mystique that helped allow the security services to gain such clout under Vladimir Putin, Russia's former president and present prime minister and a former KGB spy. The story discredits him and his circle of siloviki, the former and present members of the security services. Being laughed at is worse than being feared."

On February 1, 2011, the Republic of Ireland's cabinet made a decision to expel a Russian diplomat from the country – the first time since 1983, after the Irish government, based on the Garda Síochána's report, concluded that the Russian security agent based at the Russian embassy in Rathgar had gathered details from six genuine Irish passports that were then effectively cloned in Russia for the US-based spies. Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said, "The Government, by today’s action, has once again made clear that it will not tolerate the fabrication and use of forged Irish passports by agents of a foreign State." On February 4, 2011, the Irish press identified the expelled diplomat as Alexander Smirnov, first secretary in the Russian embassy’s consular section. On February 2, 2011, Russia threatened retaliation.

Aftermath of the swap

After the Russian agents were returned to Russia, they were delivered to the SVR headquarters. They were not technically arrested, and relatives could visit them. However they were not allowed to leave the facility until the debriefing process was over, which took several weeks, as the Russian authorities appeared to suspect that betrayal, be it by any of the agents themselves or not, could be a plausible explanation of their exposure.

According to her lawyer, Vicky Peláez was placed in a Moscow apartment provided by Russian authorities. She turned down a 2000 USD per month offer from the Russian government and was planning to return to Peru.

On June 28, 2010, Anna Chapman's UK citizenship was revoked.

On July 13, 2010, Russian intelligence sources were quoted as saying that the deported Russian agents would undergo a rigorous series of tests, including a lie detector, to establish whether any of them had acted as a double agent.

The spy affair attracted media attention, including Chapman being described as "glamorous" and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden joking shortly after the swap on a television chat show to comedian Jay Leno when asked "Do we have any spies that hot?" by saying "Let me be clear. It wasn't my idea to send her back." Joe Biden also said of the Russian agents: "And the ten, they've been here a long time, but they hadn't done much."

On July 24, 2010, in the Crimea, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin told reporters, without specifying the date, that he had met with the agents, specifically acknowledging that Chapman was among them; he said that they had had "a tough life" and been turned in as a result of "betrayal" he also sang with the agents to live music some songs, including "From Where the Motherland Begins" (What the Motherland Begins With or What Does the Motherland Start With). Putin declined to evaluate their work saying that it was not up to him to evaluate but up to specialists and the "ultimate consumers of the information of such type, the Supreme Commander – the president of the Russian Federation."

In mid-August 2010, Sir Stephen Lander, Director-General of MI5 (1996–2002) voiced an opinion that the very existence of a ring of Russian "illegals" was no laughing matter: "The fact that they're nondescript or don't look serious is part of the charm of the business. That's why the Russians are so successful at some of this stuff. They're able to put people in those positions over time to build up their cover to be useful. They are part of a machine... And the machine is a very professional and serious one."

In October 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recognized those "Intelligence agents who worked in the United States and returned to Russia in July" together with other members of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service for their services to the motherland in ceremonies held at the Kremlin.

In November 2010, an unidentified Kremlin official told Kommersant that an assassination plan for the alleged defector "Colonel Shcherbakov" was already in the works: "We know who he is and where he is" the source added that "a Mercader" had been sent after Shcherbakov – a reference to assassin Ramón Mercader who murdered Leon Trotsky in Mexico with an ice axe in 1940. The newspaper article's author later said that the statement could have been made in jest ("spy humour"). On November 13, 2010, U.S. intelligence analyst suggested that, assuming Shcherbakov was in the US, he must be under FBI protection.

On November 17, 2010, the Interfax news agency cited an unidentified "Russian intelligence source" as saying that "Colonel , a former deputy head of the U.S. division of Directorate S (illegal intelligence) within the SVR" was the subject of both internal and criminal investigations, with the criminal case likely to have been opened as per Article 275 of the RF Criminal Code (high treason). Poteyev's identity (full name: Александр Николаевич Потеев) was confirmed by other ex-KGB and ex-SVR sources. The revelations in the Russian media about the 'treachery' within the SVR were seen by commentators as a sign of an ongoing struggle within the RF top bureaucracy for control over the administratively autonomous agency that had been part of the USSR KGB.

On December 1, 2010, commentator and researcher Bill Gertz quoted a "former intelligence official close to the National Security Agency" (NSA) as saying that the FBI and the NSA were conducting a counterintelligence probe at the NSA Fort Meade, Md., headquarters in a top-secret hunt for a Russian agent, believing that the spy ring was likely acting as conduits for information coming from "one or more Russian spies that NSA is convinced reside at Fort Meade and possibly other DoD intel offices". Bill Gertz's report prompted the Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov to question the quasi-official version about Poteyev's responsibility. In a Larry King Live interview, aired by CNN about the same time, RF prime minister Putin maintained that the agents "deserved unconditional respect", "their activities had not done harm to U.S. interests" and that they would only become operational "in crisis periods, say, in case of a breakup of the diplomatic relations."

On December 16, 2010, prime minister Putin, when answering the question during a televised call-in show about whether he had ever signed assassination orders, said that hit squads had long been abolished in Russia; speaking specifically of the turncoat allegedly responsible for exposing the 10 sleeper agents, he denounced him as a "brute" and a "pig" saying that "the traitors will croak all by themselves".

On May 3, 2011, in Moscow, Alexander Poteyev was indicted on high treason and desertion charges and later put on trial in absentia. On 27 June 2011, he was found guilty in absentia on both charges and convicted to 25 years of imprisonment; the judge's verdict said that Poteyev had been recruited to the CIA in 1999. His court-appointed advocate said that Poteyev's remuneration from the US government might have reached $55 million.

See also

References

External links

• Official Press Release from the United States Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs (includes copies of both indictments)
• "Criminal Complaints From the Justice Department" at The New York Times
• Photos of the spies from Ukrainian news

News media

• Profile: Russia's 'spies' in the suburbs, BBC News, July 2, 2010, includes related stories and video
• Collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Alleged Russian spies: Guide to the 11 Suspects, The Huffington Post, June 30, 2010
• Anna Chapman, One Last Look at The Smoking Gun, July 28, 2010, includes mugshots of the other spies

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