STRANGE INTELLIGENCE AGENTS

*Huge money, ten years of illegal work and probably long prison terms. Is it really all for the sake of an exemplary garden with hydrangeas? *

NATASHA MOZGOVA, POLINA EREMENKO, NATALIA PORTIAKOVA

At Ray's Hell Burger, the same cafe in Arlington where the presidents of Russia and the United States dined on June 25, they have not yet hung a historical photo on the wall, but they are rejoicing at the influx of customers that followed the “cheeseburger summit”. But an innocent question about eleven "Russian spies", one of whom was arrested in the same Arlington the next day after a significant dinner, causes panic in the manager. He refuses to answer and at the same time demands that in no case be called his name.

But the general American public is delighted with the whole story. "Fantastic! Hollywood oozes from every episode,” enthuses Harvey Clare, author of books about Soviet spies. General opinion: it would be nice if all spies were so civilized, a little glamorous and absolutely harmless.

“It looks like a parody of espionage,” says Ariel Cohen, a Russia specialist at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. “Agents were planted in dubious places without proper training. Judging by the published reports, the “Center” did not even know what to find out from their contacts.”

Questions, according to the expert, arise by themselves. How did it happen that Russian agents did not notice surveillance for years? And the most interesting thing: why did the Russian leadership throw such money at such an unproductive and unprofessional network?

“This is a very complex and expensive operation,” says Harvey Clare. “It is impossible to name the exact amount of costs, but believe me, this is a big figure. The Kennedy School at Harvard (where an agent who went by the name Donald Heathfield studied— Newsweek ) is not cheap. And the houses they lived in, too.”

And judging by the FBI report, it turns out that all this money and ten years of the lives of 11 people who still face 20-year prison terms were spent on a couple of contacts that a good journalist would establish in half a day using modern information gathering tools. “It is not clear what they were counting on in our day,” commented Richard Stoltz, the former head of the CIA station in Moscow. “The result clearly did not justify the efforts made.”

He did not justify it so much that experts began to argue that, perhaps, the disclosed network was a “duck”, designed to divert attention from a real serious agent network. Or that at hour X, the contacts made by the agents would have been attacked much more aggressively by other, much more well-covered intelligence officers. “There is no doubt that the planned long-term operation,” says Harvey Clare. “Apparently, they expected that in the end they would get access to some incredible information or people.”

GUYS, BE GOOD

Most of the agents settled in the US under assumed names and with fake documents in the early 2000s, shortly after Vladimir Putin was elected president. However, since 2002, their activities have been in the field of view of the FBI. Under the vigilant eye of the American intelligence services, "illegals", as in a real Hollywood thriller, passed identical orange bags to each other, "colliding" at the station. They buried money in the park, marking the place with an abandoned bottle. Sitting in coffee shops, they sent messages to the Center, connecting via a Wi-Fi network with a car of the Russian embassy passing by. Encrypted information on the Internet in innocent pictures. For eight years they were not touched, but were arrested the day after the meeting between Obama and Medvedev. The FBI explains this by the fact that one of the agents realized that the mission had failed and decided to leave the United States.

The use of "illegals" is a typical Soviet-Russian technique that is not used by other intelligence agencies of the world, with the exception of Israel. “This is really our forte,” admits a former high-ranking Russian intelligence officer. According to him, the failure of 11 agents at once is a unique case. The reason he believes is betrayal. But the intelligence officer highly appreciates the very fact of the existence of such a network: “On the one hand, a failure, and on the other, the highest achievement: to take out 11 people and naturalize them.”

Since those arrested are officially charged not with espionage, but with money laundering, both sides tried to downplay the pathos of the story. There was talk in both Moscow and Washington that this was a special hawk action to undermine the reset, but officials radiated positivity.

“We are negotiating with Russia on this topic, but focusing on the reset of relations and on our common interests,” said Philip Gordon, Hillary Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for European and Asian affairs. “We would like to bring mutual trust to a level where no one it would be wise to resort to espionage for what can be learned through other channels.

Russia reacted in an unprecedented way, explains a former senior intelligence official: “Never before has the Russian Foreign Ministry recognized in such situations that people with foreign passports in their hands are Russian citizens.” A couple of years ago, when George W. Bush was President of the United States, Moscow would have reacted noisily. “And now everyone is silent, although there are a huge number of people who want to play on anti-Americanism,” says the former intelligence officer.

According to a source close to the Kremlin to Newsweek, Medvedev will not react to what happened until there is a direct reaction from Obama. In the meantime, the TV channels were given the command to talk about the so-called spy scandal. In the sense that what kind of spies are they, if they are not even accused of espionage. For every firefighter, variants of a tough reaction are also being worked out - through the Duma, television. But no one is going to cancel the reboot. “So far, we do not see a rejection of the policy of détente, and we ourselves do not intend to abandon such a policy,” the source says. “They believe that Russian-American cooperation is not under threat, at least at the moment.”

RESIDUAL ACCENT

At the first meeting of the New York court, the defendants refused to admit their guilt. True, a split appeared in their orderly ranks a day later. Detained on June 27 in Yonkers, Juan Lazaro admitted that this was his fictitious name and that he was not born in Uruguay, but spent part of his childhood in Siberia. He also said that his wife, Peruvian journalist Vicki Pelaez, acted as a liaison between the United States and South America, where she met with representatives of the Center. Their adult son, having stopped at his parents' house, was forced to fight off journalists who demanded that he say something in Spanish to prove his Hispanic origin. "Inocente!" he threw back at them.

And on Friday it became known that two more arrested people admitted their Russian origin and gave their real names. Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills turned out to be Mikhail Kutsik and Natalia Pereverzeva.

But the most serious FBI catch is the married couple Richard and Cynthia Murphy from Montclair in New Jersey. Murphy's neighbors recognized the remnants of a Russian accent in her speech, but she convinced them that the pronunciation was imported from Belgium. Dedicated care of the hydrangeas and talk about the best school to send their daughters to dispelled any remaining suspicions.

Murphy landed a job at Morea Financial Services, a financial services company. One of her clients was Alan Patricof, a key financier of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. In a report to The Center, Murphy presented him as "a figure very close to the government" and was tasked with eliciting details about foreign policy and rumors from the White House from him. However, Patrikof insists that in conversations with him, Murphy never once hinted at any of these reasons - they only talked about his tax returns.

Last Thursday, Judge Ronald Ellis refused to bail those arrested, with the exception of Vicki Pelaez, "there is strong evidence against them" and there are many open questions about them. “I just don't know who these people are,” he said. During a search of Murphy's home, eight envelopes containing $10,000 were found.

Donald Heathfield, who borrowed the name from a Canadian boy who died six days old in 1968, graduated from Harvard and, according to the FBI file, “processed” future politicians and diplomats together with Tracy Foley, his wife, settling near the Harvard Center for International Affairs.

Both sons of Heathfield and Foley, aged 20 and 16, appeared at the court session in Boston. They exchanged smiles with their parents. The discussion of their case was rescheduled for 16 July. According to the lawyer, the investigation believes that the couple's task was to make important acquaintances by "infiltrating" cocktail parties and parent-teacher meetings.

Standing apart in the group is the “youth”—Mikhail Semenko and Anna Chapman. They are in the case under their own names and do not hide their Russian origin. Red-haired Anna Chapman, apparently, did not play any serious role, but eclipsed everyone else on the pages of newspapers and TV screens. TV channels played slideshows of glamorous photos of the "sexy spy" downloaded from Odnoklassniki and Facebook, accompanied by comments like "she is more suitable for the role of a James Bond girl than James Bond himself."

Anna, according to the FBI, was tasked with establishing connections with influential Americans. To do this, she hung out at receptions and conferences, at charity events and in nightclubs. One of her Facebook friends, the well-known economist Nouriel Roubini, who once predicted the beginning of the economic crisis, immediately fell under the scope of the press. Roubini said that he may have met Anna at some events, but he never talked to her face to face.

Anna's acquaintances reacted to the story in different ways. Someone expressed support on her page on the Internet, someone called her "mediocrity", whose "legend" changed every other time and who gave the impression of "either the daughter of an oligarch, or an employee of an expensive escort agency." Her Facebook friends list began to thin out on the first day of the scandal.

The English surname went to Chapman from her British ex-husband. Alex Chapman claims that the girl was the daughter of a high-ranking Russian and Soviet intelligence officer. According to him, her father "controlled her whole life, and she would have done anything for him." Their marriage fell apart after a few years—Anna became withdrawn and spent all her time with Russian friends, refusing to take her husband with her on the pretext that "everything would be Russian."

Other people who knew Anna from her London period of life did not notice anything special about her. “I would describe her as a girl who didn’t stand out in any way,” promoter Ilya Taranto tells Newsweek. “Everyone drank—she drank. Everyone danced—she danced. Came to a party with friends. I was friends with the Russians." He was very surprised when he heard about the arrest, because, according to him, she never behaved like a person who is trying to infiltrate somewhere. “She was not even in the circles of golden youth,” says Taranto. “Just hanging out, there is no other way to describe it.”

Some of Chapman's acquaintances believe that she was arrested by mistake. However, the FBI agents, who have been shadowing her for six months, are quite confident in their version. According to the investigation, the dummy agent gave her an “assignment” to take a fake passport to a certain place. Anna, suspecting something, bought a mobile phone under a fictitious name, from which she called the Center. There she was advised to hand over her passport to the police and return to Moscow. Anna handed over her passport, but on June 26 she was arrested. Last week, the court extended her arrest, refusing to release her on bail.

While the "Russian agents" are waiting in the cells for their fate, the neighbors of the arrested are worried about what will happen to their children. Even if they were bad spies, they were good parents, people testify. Children born in the United States are American citizens, and now that parents are threatened with imprisonment or deportation, their fate is not clear. Usually the next of kin are considered ideal for children if their parents go to prison. But how can they help children who do not know them or the country that entrusted their parents with such a dangerous mission?

GREAT SIX

American military and counterintelligence officers who worked for Russia

Aldrich Ames

A high-ranking CIA officer, who headed the "Soviet department", in 1985 he himself came to the USSR Embassy with a proposal for cooperation. His activities became one of the biggest failures of the CIA. According to various sources, he uncovered from 12 to 25 American agents, ten of them were executed. For nine years, Ames was paid $ 2.7 million, and he explained his well-being by the inheritance of his wife. Twice he was able to pass a polygraph test, diverting suspicion from himself. He was arrested in 1994. He is currently serving a life sentence.

Harold James Nicholson

The instructor of the closed CIA training center was nicknamed Batman in the Russian special services. He was discovered in 1996 - he failed a routine polygraph test, and $ 120,000 of unknown origin appeared in his accounts. Nicholson admitted that he gave Russia information about the CIA resident in Moscow and about young employees who were being trained. Sentenced to 23 years in prison, he continued to work for the SVR and receive money through his son Nathaniel. Both were charged with new charges in 2009.

Earl Edwin Pitts

An employee of the New York branch of the FBI, who worked in the Soviet direction, was recruited by the KGB in 1987. He passed information to the KGB and the SVR for five years, including the names of undercover FBI agents. His fee for the entire term was $ 224,000. In 1992, the cooperation was interrupted, but Pitts soon fell under suspicion. The FBI began a lengthy operation, under the guise of Russian intelligence officers, inviting him to resume cooperation and hand over secret documents. In 1996, Pitts was arrested, in 1997 he confessed to everything and was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

George Trofimoff

Born in a family of Russian emigrants in Germany, he moved to the United States with his parents and began his career in the army. In 1969, he was assigned to the military intelligence center in the German city of Nuremberg, and it was there that the KGB was recruited, according to some reports, by the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church Iriney. Trofimoff worked for the USSR and then Russia for 25 years, handing over about 50,000 pages of documents, including those on chemical and biological weapons. In 1994, he was suspected of espionage, and he retired with a scandal. But the dossier on him continued to be collected, and in 2000 the 73-year-old spy was arrested and then sentenced to life imprisonment.

Robert Hanssen

The head of the Soviet analytical department of the FBI began working for the KGB under the nickname Ramon in 1985, although, according to the American press, Hanssen had contacts with the GRU in the late 1970s. With the fall of the USSR in 1991, Hanssen cut off contacts with Russian intelligence, but resumed them in 1999. Two years later he was arrested. To avoid the death penalty, Hanssen made a deal and spoke about his activities. For $ 1.4 million and valuable gifts, such as diamonds, he gave Moscow about 6,000 pages of classified documents, not only from the FBI, but also from the CIA and other sources. It is believed that it was he who told about the secret tunnel under the Soviet embassy in Washington. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

Ariel Weinmann

In 2006, 22-year-old submariner Ariel Weinmann was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was threatened with life imprisonment, but he made a deal by confessing to espionage. And although the court and the prosecutor's office did not announce for whose benefit Weinmann was spying, the American media confidently named Russia. Weinmann served on the Albuquerque, armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles. In 2005, he defected, stealing a laptop with classified information, flew to Austria to sell the information he had to a foreign government. Then he returned to the United States through Mexico, where he was arrested. Weinmann himself explained his act with sincere sympathy for the country for which he was spying.