Kitabı oku: «Russians Among Us», sayfa 3

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Strangers in a Strange land

THE MONUMENT WAS at a picturesque site in Canada, although neither the man nor the woman who met each other there will say precisely where it was. The pair were playing at being tourists and strangers. The woman walked down the steps. She stopped for a moment looking for something in her handbag. The man happened to be standing in front of her. In these situations, a camera could be your best weapon. “Good morning. May I take your picture? You look so good in the sunlight,” the man said. Yes, she replied, and they began to talk. It seemed like a chance encounter but, in reality, it was the opening scene in a movie whose script had already been written. As their legend would have it, this was where the pair’s romance began. But the truth was they were not strangers. Rather they were already a married couple. The encounter at the monument was the cover story for where and how Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley first met and how their relationship began.

THE PAIR HAD arrived separately in Canada in 1987, the Cold War still under way. There was excitement at the chance to prove themselves but also fear. The initial journey to a target country was a moment of high risk. There had to be no chance you could be traced back to Russia. So a journey might go first to Eastern Europe, and then to Cyprus, to the Middle East, to Asia, and finally to Canada, at each stage a different set of documents used and then discarded. For Ann Foley, the final entry into Canada was the moment of greatest fear. “You also have to keep your emotions in check, keep calm, not show you are flustered or afraid,” she later recalled. There should be no sudden movements or looking around. But she had nothing to worry about. The Canadian authorities still do not know what identity the pair arrived under or even the date they came into the country. Once the disposable identities had been tossed away, the illegals switched to their new settled identities. First they had to meet and then melt into their target society. Canada was a long-established stepping-off point (the “host” country in the center’s terminology) to prepare to reach the “target country.” At least four of the eleven ghosts who would be the target of the 2010 arrests would have some kind of Canadian documentation. Canada was the ideal launching pad for illegals into America. The culture and language allowed an illegal to acclimatize and build up their identity while border and document checks were largely ineffective. “Canada is a lot like the US, only colder and with fewer people,” a KGB officer explained to one illegal in the 1970s.

Heathfield and Foley’s mission was long-term penetration of the “main enemy.” But what is staggering is that they would spend more than a decade building up their cover before they actually went to live in the United States. That was how long Moscow Center was willing to wait. There was occasionally contact with Moscow Center as orders and money were sent, but their main job was to forget Russia and immerse themselves in Canada. Vavilova would observe other young women whom she saw on the street or met and then try to copy their gestures or their style of conversation. A job was vital partly as it started you on a career that would lead to contacts but also because you needed to explain where your money came from. Some illegals started a business (with money from Moscow); Heathfield had little help though. “I had to get an education again, look for work, create a business … without anyone’s help and with minimal resources,” he later said. In Montreal, Foley enrolled in a course at the Computer Institute of Canada and took a job in accounting at a garment factory. Heathfield worked in accounts at a Honda dealership. It just about covered the bills. They were tough years with long hours, the hard graft of being an illegal. They moved to Toronto and on June 27, 1990, they had their first son, Timothy.

“Every undercover agents’ family have to decide, whether to have children at all,” Foley would later say. “This is a difficult decision to take.” You were bringing a child into the world whose family was living a lie. This was a heavy responsibility and some illegals decided against it. “We carefully weighed this, of course, discussed a lot,” she later said, acknowledging that “our leaders also had concerns.” But it was something the couple had always wanted. They also knew that from the outside, they would look more “normal” if they had children. Even the act of childbirth has risks. In the famous drama about illegals, Seventeen Moments of Spring, an illegal gives away her identity by crying out in pain while giving birth. The problem was she had done it in Russian. When it came to her time, Vavilova as Ann Foley took extensive precautions, attending prenatal classes to learn how best to control herself. She refused anesthetics to keep a clear mind and made sure her husband was present in case anything went wrong.

The summer after the birth of their first child, the couple watched the coup in Moscow and then the collapse of the Soviet Union. The regime they had sworn an oath to was gone. Suddenly, they were on their own. But where some illegals may have given up, Heathfield and Foley did not. It was a “painful period,” Heathfield later acknowledged. “We could not receive support from the Center. We had to fend for our ourselves and cover all our expenses,” recalled Foley. A sense of patriotism endured even as the ideology they had sworn an oath to vanished. But there was also a sense of jeopardy, the knowledge that chaos in Russia risked their exposure. The end of the Soviet Union did not mean the end of the illegals or the desire of its intelligence services to spy on the West, though. Far from it. It was soon clear that the game went on.

A YOUNG COUPLE approached the immigration officer in Helsinki airport on April 23, 1992, and showed their British passports. The man’s name was James Tristan Peatfield, from Surrey. She was Anna Marie Nemeth, from Wembley. But the immigration officer was suspicious. They seemed nervous. They had just got off a flight from Moscow but only had hand luggage and did not speak very good English. Who had won the British general election a few days earlier? They did not know. When their bag was searched, around $30,000 in cash was found inside an old shirt as well as a shortwave radio. Nemeth had some story about having been in Canada and working in an advertising agency. That was news to the real Anna Nemeth, who worked at a suburban Sainsbury’s supermarket and was left bewildered when police arrived at her door. She had visited Hungary four years earlier, when her passport details must have been copied. She had never met the real Mr. Peatfield, who was from Coulsdon in Surrey. The couple at the airport next offered a cover story that they were trying to emigrate illegally and had purchased passports on the black market with money from selling women’s underwear. Having such a cover story at the ready—usually involving some murky criminality—is standard practice for an emergency situation. The British intelligence officers who interrogated them in Helsinki had some hope that the woman might admit the truth, but she never did. The pair were deported to Moscow. They were illegals who had used the British identities of “live doubles” on a training mission and their failure was subject to a detailed review back in Directorate S. What it told the West was that the flow of illegals had not halted despite the end of the KGB.

The end of the Cold War had not been a moment to relax for Directorate S. Rather it was a time to double down. The world was fluid and uncertain and that meant intelligence was more important than ever. In the first few months after the coup, even while the future of the whole KGB was uncertain, a decision was taken to increase the focus on illegals. “The world is not as safe as some people present it to be,” Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Chief Directorate, explained soon after he retired. “So I think it would be a very safe measure and a good precaution to strengthen the illegal branch.”

The emphasis on illegals was part of a traumatic shift by the new SVR. In the early 1990s it was forced to cut its overseas network of officers operating under diplomatic cover by a third. The fact that relations with the West were improving offered new opportunities, though. In the Cold War, it was hard for Russians to get visas to the West. Now that commercial ties were growing, spies could be placed under cover in business ventures. And the openness also offered the chance to dispatch more illegals. “While favourable circumstances exist it is essential to utilize the repose to deploy to the West as many illegals as possible and to cultivate and recruit more special agents,” one member of the directorate, Alexander Kouzminov, later explained. It was almost as if, as everything else crumbled, the illegals became even more important. But they were about to be dealt a serious blow.

DRESSED IN SHABBY clothes, a Russian knocked on the door of the American embassy in one of the Baltic states in March 1992. He was turned away disappointed, not once but twice. The Americans seem to have been nervous that the elderly man claiming he used to work for the KGB may have been a test of their new, more friendly relationship with Moscow. So the next stop for the Russian was the British embassy in Riga, Latvia, where he explained to a female diplomat that he had worked in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and had access to top secret material. The Russian pulled open his bag. Inside were spicy sausages, bread, and dirty clothes. But he also pulled out some handwritten notes. These, he explained, were the names of illegals operating in the West—both their real identities and their cover names. The British diplomat immediately called MI6. At the time, the British Secret Service was based at Century House in Lambeth, a grubby, twenty-story tower block. It was a gloomy place that reeked of the past. “Are you still here?” officials from the rest of government would sometimes joke with its chief, Colin McColl, when they saw him. The Cold War was over and people were asking what exactly spies were for. But the team that dealt with Russia, and which sat on the thirteenth floor with a panoramic view of the nearby Oval cricket ground, had no intention of stopping even though their old adversary was on the back foot. The Russian defector in Riga, they soon learned, was a prize of the highest order. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who now wanted to inflict as much damage as he could on his former employers. He had secretly copied out and then buried large chunks of the KGB’s operational history in the garden of his dacha.

MI6 organized Mitrokhin’s exfiltration via boat on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while a young officer dug up his files so they could be removed in six large trunks. Three thousand five hundred counterintelligence reports would be sent to thirty-six countries. The US file alone consisted of eight hundred pages. The CIA counterintelligence chief rued the fact he had to travel to London cap in hand for material that could have been his. The FBI, meanwhile, said it was “the most detailed and extensive pool” of intelligence about enemy spies they had ever received. It led directly to a number of illegals, one of them a KGB man living on the American East Coast under the name Jack Barsky. He was put under surveillance by the FBI, who overheard him confessing who he really was to his wife. Disillusioned, he had actually told the KGB back in 1988 that he had been dying of AIDS so that he could give up spying and bring up his child.

Fortunately for Heathfield and Foley in Canada, they had been deployed after Mitrokhin had retired in 1984. But the defection meant that Moscow could not be sure that the legend of any illegals trained before that date had not been blown. When the scale of the disaster became clear, the SVR knew it would have to rebuild its deep cover networks by sending out even more new illegals.

In Britain, there were only limited resources to follow up the two hundred leads Mitrokhin produced about possible agents. The domestic security service MI5 had cut back its counterespionage teams by more than half between 1990 and 1994. A joint MI5-MI6 team targeting Russians in the United Kingdom had been disbanded. In one case a team was passed an intercept suggesting a message was about to be picked up from a drop site, offering the chance to catch a Russian intelligence officer in the act. But at the last moment, the surveillance team was pulled off to deal with something considered a higher priority. The sense was that all of this spy-versus-spy stuff was a bit old-fashioned. There was an important contrast in the 1990s. Western leaders and policy makers thought the Cold War had been won and Russia barely mattered anymore. Russia would “naturally” end up a liberal democratic state. That meant spying on Russia and catching Russian spies was no longer a priority. There were other threats to worry about now. But meanwhile, Russia, on the back foot, felt it needed intelligence on its old adversaries more than ever, precisely because it was vulnerable.

IN MOSCOW, CIA and MI6 officers found themselves in a strange new world. A few months after the coup, John Scarlett became MI6’s first-ever head of station who was “declared” to the other side’s spies. It was a second Moscow posting for the future MI6 chief and as he walked the streets, he could sense how the speed of the Soviet Union’s collapse had been bewildering and traumatic. “People were out in the streets selling their personal belongings,” he later recalled. Russia had gone from being a superpower seeing itself as on a par with the United States to an economic basket case. Some liberals in Moscow had hoped for an infusion of support from the West. Instead all they got were businessmen out to make money and some economists from Harvard promoting “shock therapy” in the form of relaxing price controls and privatizing state industries to create “popular capitalism.” The result was a disaster. The economy went into in free fall, with prices skyrocketing, savings disappearing, manufacturing collapsing, and unemployment rising rapidly. This was a catastrophic first experience of Western capitalism in the early 1990s. For most people shock therapy simply created shock. The West saw outward signs of change in elections and privatization but it did not see the pain inflicted on ordinary people. But then it was not really that interested. The Cold War was over. It had won. And so who needed to worry about Russia?

As Western spies sat down with their old adversaries over vodka, they could sense the Russians struggling to come to terms with their new status. But in the meetings there was more drinking than trust. Each side thought the other had not stopped spying. And each was right. The SVR was certainly going through difficult times, but those who watched Russia closely in the CIA began to see warning signs that the old enemy was returning faster than anyone realized. In one officer’s mind, the KGB had splintered but then reconstituted itself to fight again, a bit like the robot in the Terminator films. But no one at the top was paying attention to the warnings of people dismissed as “Cold War dinosaurs.” “People looked at me like I was insane. It was lonely,” recalls one CIA officer. While most people in the West believed Russia was changing, the old guard in the spy business—who could still feel the watching eyes on the streets of Moscow—never believed it had or would.

In Moscow, the Russians were likewise convinced MI6 and the CIA had never stopped their work against them. Many former KGB officers were convinced that the fall of the Soviet Union had been the result of subversion carried out by Western intelligence rather than internal decay. Now, the territory under Moscow’s control had shrunk and its buffer from the West had gone. The Russians thought the strategy was continuing to try to keep Russia down when the truth was almost more painful—the West at the highest policy level had lost interest in Russia. There was no master plan. But in Moscow, the spies could also see their opposite numbers in the CIA and MI6 as busy as ever. John Scarlett’s time in Moscow would end with his expulsion over the recruitment of one agent (although the real reason was a row over who his Russian counterpart would be in London). The CIA and MI6 were opening up intelligence stations in its neighborhood—including former parts of the Soviet Union like the Baltic states—which were then being used to persuade Russians to walk over the border with secrets. Russians—including former KGB officers—were lining up to sell what they knew. There were so many, the CIA was literally turning them away. The knowledge of this pained old KGB hands deeply. It was a humiliation.

In 1994, Vyacheslav Trubnikov took over as head of the SVR. Russia, he told me years later in Moscow, wanted to be an equal partner, working together against common threats like terrorism and proliferation. But instead it took the message that “Russia as the defeated side should stick to the rules and manners, which will be dictated by the victorious allies.” NATO, rather than disbanding, instead expanded closer to Russia’s borders, breaking what Moscow believed was a promise. Too many Western spies were engaged in what Trubnikov (rather endearingly) describes as “hanky panky.” He points to one Western intelligence agency running a sting operation to smuggle nuclear material out of Russia in order to make the point that Moscow could not be trusted to look after it anymore. The belief the other side had not stopped meant you could not, either.

Inside the CIA, the tension over how to view Russia remained intense. One of his subordinates recalls Milt Bearden referring to Russia as “Ouagadougou with rockets,” another remembers it being “Upper Volta with rockets,” but the meaning was the same—a country that was significant only because it happened to have nuclear missiles. Bearden suggested the CIA’s Moscow station would eventually be no different from Paris, staff remember him saying. The agency would gather intelligence on political developments but work jointly with the Russians on issues like terrorism, drugs, and weapons proliferation. That idea sent shudders down the spine of the small band of old hands. Deep inside Russia House, the CIA’s old guard were not willing to let go. They still hungrily sought the tiniest scraps of intelligence. That was because they harbored a dark secret. The hunt for spies had not ended as the Cold War concluded. For all the talk of its adversary being on the back foot, there were a select few within the CIA who knew the Russians had moles burrowed somewhere among them.