Illegals Program
The Illegals Program was a network of Russian sleeper agents under unofficial cover. An investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation culminated in the arrest of ten agents on June 27, 2010, and a prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States on July 9, 2010.
The arrested spies were Russian nationals who had been planted in the US by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, most of them using false identities. Posing as ordinary American citizens, they tried to build contacts with academics, industrialists, and policymakers to gain access to intelligence. They were the target of a multi-year investigation by the FBI. The investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, culminated at the end of June 2010 with the arrest of ten people in the US and an eleventh in Cyprus. The 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 worked for Microsoft, was also apprehended about the same time and deported on July 13, 2010. Moscow court documents made public on June 27, 2011, revealed that another two Russian agents, who Russia alleges were known to the FBI, managed to flee the US without being arrested.
Ten of the agents were flown to Vienna on July 9, 2010, soon after pleading guilty to charges of failing to register as representatives 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 for espionage on behalf of the US and UK.
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 assumed stolen identities of Americans, enrolled at American universities, and joined professional organizations as a means of further infiltrating government circles. Two of the individuals used the names of Richard and Cynthia Murphy and resided in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1990s, before purchasing a nearby home in suburban Montclair. Another couple named in court documents were journalist Vicky Peláez and Mikhail Vasenkov in Yonkers, New York. The court filings allege that couples were 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 US 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 centre" to report about US policy in Central America, US interpretation of Russian foreign policy, problems with US 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 began in mid-June 2010, but the action was hastened reportedly by some members of the group intending to travel outside the US 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 US with his son, and Chapman, in a telephone call to her father the day before the arrest, said she suspected that she may have been discovered and planned to leave for Moscow in mid-July 2010.
US authorities arrested ten of the agents involved on June 27, 2010, in a series of raids in Boston, Montclair, Yonkers, and Northern Virginia. They charged the individuals with money laundering and failing to register as agents of a foreign government. No charges were made that the individuals involved gained access to classified material, though contacts were 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 was no evidence that the convicted agents knew each other beyond their respective spouses; military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer believed that they consequently did not constitute a "spy ring".
Shortly after the arrests, The Guardian commented: "The FBI operation represents the biggest penetration of 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 died in the US on June 13, 2010, was reported on July 9, 2010. A 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, citing anonymous "well-informed" sources, said in July 2010 that Tretyakov had not been privy to the case of Russian "illegals".
The November 11, 2010, issue of span broadsheet Kommersant carried an article that, with reference to unnamed Russian government sources, contained allegations that the "illegals" were fingered by a senior SVR officer named "Colonel Shcherbakov". The latter, 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 U.S." According to other media outlets' sources, the name "Shcherbakov" was fictitious, and a number of experts and commentators judged many allegations in the article to be dubious or improbable. Nevertheless, some comments made the following day by Russian president Medvedev were interpreted as an indirect confirmation of a high-level defection in the Russian intelligence apparatus. On November 15, 2010, Interfax cited unnamed sources within Russian intelligence as alleging that the real name of the defector who was primarily responsible for uncovering the ten convicted agents was Aleksandr Poteyev, who was a colonel in the SVR and was deputy head of the American department within Directorate "S" of SVR. According to Interfaxs unnamed source, a person called Shcherbakov had indeed held a senior position in the SVR and "defected about two years ago".
Agents apprehended by FBI on June 27, 2010
Anna Chapman
Anna Chapman—maiden name Anna Vasil'evna Kushchenko —was arrested with nine others in 2010. According to US authorities, her former name is Anya Kushchenko, and she is a Volgograd native. Her father was employed in the Russian embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. She received her master's in economics degree from the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow. She later worked in London at NetJets, Barclays Bank, and other companies.On July 5, 2010, One India reported that Chapman may have been recruited to become an agent when she was in the United Kingdom, citing Oleg Gordievsky and Alex Chapman as sources, and that an urgent probe was underway in the UK to ascertain whether Chapman organized sleeper cells in the United Kingdom.
Her LinkedIn social networking site profile said she was CEO of PropertyFinder Ltd, a website selling real estate internationally. Chapman posted photos of herself on the Odnoklassniki social networking website in Russia where she stated "Russia, Moscow. My favorite place on earth, my native capital!" She also posted photos and profiles on the Facebook and LinkedIn social networking websites.
Chapman's prior meetings with her Russian handlers were on Wednesdays; not face to face; solely to pass information via encrypted private computer networks at Barnes & Noble or at Starbucks. Thus her suspicion was aroused when an FBI informant, posing as a Russian consular officer named "Roman", on Saturday, June 26 asked her to come to New York from Connecticut, where she was spending the weekend. Her suspicions increased when "Roman" turned out to be a man she did not know who asked her to deliver a fake United States passport to another sleeper agent in a face-to-face meeting. The task of transferring a fake US passport to another Russian agent in a face-to-face meeting was beyond anything that the Moscow Center had previously assigned to her.
After the meeting with "Roman", Chapman bought a new cell phone and two telephone cards. She called her father in Moscow and another individual in New York, both advising her not to transfer the passport. The FBI monitored the calls.
Chapman turned in the passport to the 1st Precinct police station in New York but was questioned by the FBI and arrested.
According to her American lawyer, Robert Baum, while in the US jail, she feared she would be deported. When her deportation became imminent, she said she would go to live in London on her UK passport, but it was subsequently revoked. After her deportation to Russia, in July 2010, Robert Baum reiterated that his client wished to stay in the US. He also said that she was "particularly upset" by the revocation of her UK citizenship and exclusion from the country.
On August 8, 2010, the United Kingdom's tabloid Sunday Express cited an unidentified "source close to MI6" as saying, "There was a deal on the table just before she caught her connecting flight to Moscow. The secret service intercepted her on her flight back from America to Vienna, where her plane landed to refuel. MI6 were keen to know about other 'illegals'—Russian spy cells—hiding in the United Kingdom, so they made her an offer. In return they offered to give her back British citizenship and allow her to settle in London. Anna was having none of it though and told them in no uncertain terms that she wished to return to Russia."
In September 2010, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Chapman said the SVR had forbidden her from saying anything about her activities in the US.