Among the agents arrested by the American intelligence services is the 28-year-old businesswoman Anna Chapman, who moved in the circle of London and New York billionaire playboys.
The spy story, which at first looked like a parody, is in fact perhaps just the tip of a grand iceberg. Or even a cover for a real and effectively operating Russian intelligence network in the United States
The simultaneous arrest of 10 Russian intelligence agents in the United States at once created a furor on both sides of the ocean. Both in America and in Russia they shouted about a return to the methods of the Cold War. Everyone was especially outraged by the fact that the exposure of the spy network took place immediately after Dmitry Medvedev's visit. It turns out that the Russians cannot be trusted! - they said in the USA. And in Moscow, they used to say about certain reactionary "circles" and "forces" that are digging under the "reset" policy. Having calmed down, in both countries they began to say that this was not espionage, but some kind of farce. Why, any espionage is largely a farce, an operetta and a soap opera. The spies themselves turned him into a heroic saga.
The apartment building that looks like an open book, where Patricia Mills and Michael Zotolli lived, they are Natalya Pereverzeva and Mikhail Kutsik, can be clearly seen from my balcony. We went to the same supermarket for groceries, played tennis on the same courts, and three years later their eldest son would go to the same elementary school my daughter went to.
There is nothing surprising here: in Washington and its immediate suburbs, the concentration of spies, former and current, is such that it is difficult not to encounter them, just not everyone knows them by sight. There is the International Espionage Museum, which houses retired cloak and dagger knights, bus tours of places of espionage glory, and a second-hand bookstore specializing in intelligence history books where veterans of the invisible front gather to chat. In the fall of 1994, my wife and I arrived in Washington, left the hotel in the morning - and the very first passer-by who walked towards us was Oleg Kalugin. He recognized me, but did not show it, only glared angrily from under his brows. And once in my house a former CIA officer and a retired GRU colonel met - once they worked against each other, but they had never met before.
The neighbors of the arrested agents, who, in the absence of other objects, were attacked by television, gasp, amazed - they say, they did not look like spies at all, and that's it! - but they perceive their neighborhood as a curiosity rather than a source of danger. This is, of course, a normal, healthy reaction, nothing like the morose spy mania of the late 1940s and 50s. And the fact that the spies did not look like spies speaks in their favor - they were well disguised. However, espionage is a craft in which a mask grows to the face. Let's say there are three married couples among those arrested. Prosecutors persistently call these marriages fictitious, but the children born of these marriages are real.
The denouement of this story and various colorful details of the personal life of the accused have been published, but how it began is unknown and is unlikely to become known to the general public. And this is the most interesting thing. Why on earth would these people incur FBI suspicion?
Since communications with the agents were mainly maintained by officers of the SVR New York station, working under the roof of the Russian permanent mission to the UN, there is every reason to assume that the network was discovered by the defector Sergei Tretyakov, who was a deputy resident with the rank of colonel.
Matilda's cat owner
In October 2000, Tretyakov, along with his wife Elena, daughter Ksenia and cat Matilda, disappeared from his office apartment in the Bronx. Only on January 31, 2001, the American authorities announced that Sergei Tretyakov was in the United States, alive and well, and was not going to return to Russia. Ten days later, the New York Times published an article in which, citing a source in the US government, it was argued that the fugitive was not a diplomat, but an intelligence officer. The Russian side immediately demanded a consular meeting with the defector in order to make sure that he was not being held back by force. Apparently, such a meeting was organized - in any case, the demand was no longer repeated, the story quickly died out. This fully met the interests of both sides.
The Tretyakov family began to live in the United States under different names - only the cat did not change its name. In February 2008, Pete Earley's book "Comrade J" was published, which tells about the defector from his own words. For the sake of the advertising campaign, Tretyakov came out of the underground for a short time and gave several interviews. And then he lay down on the bottom again and did not transmit the callsigns. Experts were skeptical about Earley's opus. One of the most respected experts, David Wise, wrote in his review: "All defectors tend to exaggerate their importance - they are worried about the idea that when they run out of secrets, they will be useless."
Wise considers Tretyakov's escape an attempt to compensate for the reputational damage caused by the Russian moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, but Tretyakov is clearly inferior in value to these two agents. On the other hand, it is known that Tretyakov received a record reward - more than two million dollars. “I have never asked for a cent from the American government,” Tretyakov asserted in the foreword to the book. - When I decided to help the United States, I never even once stuttered about money. Everything I received was given to me by the US government on its own initiative."
It was after his escape that the FBI began to spy on members of the now-disclosed spy network. Considering Tretyakov's awareness, it is difficult to call it a coincidence.
New Generation Spy
The surveillance was performed in a highly professional manner. The suspects turned out to be bad conspirators and, apparently, amateurs. They did not assume that they were not only under surveillance, not only recorded their conversations, both on the phone and in the house, among themselves, but that the FBI, equipped with a court order, secretly penetrate their homes, copy the hard drives of their computers and encryption notebooks, intercept and read their radio messages and electronic reports to the Center.
The American counterintelligence service has not reaped such a bountiful harvest for a long time. It was a network of illegal agents - not recruited, but trained and sent with a long-term purpose of "deep immersion", with legends and strangers, not fake, but genuine documents. In the 1930s, illegal immigrants were the main instrument of Soviet intelligence, its main resource. In this case, the SVR returned to its previous practice, but at a completely different, higher and more complex level. Who was the head of the New York illegal residency in the 1950s, Willie Fischer, aka Rudolph Abel? A modest photographer, owner of a small photo studio. He hid his microfilms in hollow bolts, coins and pencils and handed them over to the Center, putting them in hiding places.
Nowadays, spies do not hide in dark corners, do not give themselves an ordinary appearance, and do not cut dimes in a closet.28-year-old red-haired businesswoman Anna Chapman, whom the tabloids turned into the new Mata Hari, on the contrary, in every possible way sought to attract attention to herself, revolved in the circle of London and New York playboys-billionaires, had her own small but strong business worth two million dollars and At the same time, she did not hide her biography: a native of Volgograd, a graduate of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, which has long been a source of personnel for the KGB. In order to establish connections, she actively used social networks and in one of them, Facebook, posted, among other pictures, her portrait in a pioneer tie. Stirlitz would be horrified at the thought of this! True, by her age, Anya seemed unable to be a pioneer, but all the more interesting - it means that she tied a tie for a fan. Yes, this is a new generation spy.
I must admit that the FBI itself contributed a lot to the excitement around Anna. In spy stories, the most interesting thing is not the subject of espionage, but the surroundings. Well, what does it really matter what kind of secrets Mata Hari was getting? The important thing is that she is a courtesan, an artist, a seducer - this is what the public loves. And, of course, it's also interesting to read about all sorts of spy tricks. The authorities understand this. And they present the goods from the most advantageous side.
The most up-to-date was the way of her communication with the Center. No hiding places - all reports were transmitted from the agent's laptop to the resident's laptop using a closed wireless network. The connection was established for a short time of the session. But, apparently, it was not for nothing that the Russian "mole" in the FBI counterintelligence, Robert Hanssen, a specialist in computers and modern means of communication, firmly rejected the offer of the Washington KGB station to use more advanced methods of communication and insisted on old-fashioned hiding places. FBI agents detected Pansy's messages using a device available to anyone. Communication sessions were always held on Wednesdays. Anya opened her laptop, sitting in a cafe or bookstore, and was driving past or just walking nearby with a briefcase in hand, a diplomat from the Russian Permanent Mission to the UN, whose identity was not difficult to establish.
These sessions were the biggest mistake and violation of the conspiracy rule, which states: intelligence officers under official diplomatic cover must have nothing to do with illegal immigrants. In every country, Lubyanka has always had two residencies: one legal, the other illegal.
In total, ten such sessions were recorded from January to June this year. In one case, the messenger, having left the mission gate and finding the tail behind him, turned back. And then came the denouement. Anna forgot Bulgakov's commandment "Never talk to strangers."
Russian man for a rendezvous
On June 26, at 11 am, an unknown man who spoke Russian called her, identified himself as an employee of the Russian consulate and said that they urgently needed to meet. Anna called him back an hour and a half later and said that she could meet only the next day. The stranger agreed, but an hour later Anna changed her mind - the meeting was scheduled for half past four in the afternoon in a cafe in Manhattan. In order not to draw attention to ourselves, we switched to English.
“How are you doing? How does it work? " The stranger asked. For an urgent meeting, the question sounded a little strange. “Everything is fine,” Anyuta answered. - But the connection is junk. And she added, "Before I can speak, I need some additional information." “I work in the same department as you,” the man reassured her. - And here I work at the consulate. My name is Roman. " Anna calmed down, and Roman continued: “I know that in two weeks you will be in Moscow, there they will discuss your work in detail with you. I just wanted to find out how you are doing in general, and entrust you with the task. You are ready?" “OK,” Anya nodded. "So are you ready?" - asked Roman.“Damn, I'm ready,” she confirmed (this is how her remark “Shit, of course” sounds in Russian in my free translation).
Anna gave Roman her laptop to repair, and he handed her a fake passport, which she was to give to the woman agent the next morning, said how she looked, gave a magazine that Anna should hold in her hand, and a password to exchange. (The password and the tip were copied from the real ones, in which only the geographical names changed: “Excuse me, we didn’t meet there last summer?” that the transfer of the passport was successful, Anna had to return to the cafe and stick the postage stamp that Roman gave her to the map of the city installed there.
Anna diligently repeated the task. Then she asked: "Are you sure we are not being followed?" “Do you know how long it took me to get here? - Roman answered calmly. - Three hours. But when you start leaving, be careful. " The last parting words of the stranger were the words: “Your colleagues in Moscow know that you are doing well and will tell you this when they meet. Continue in the same spirit".
After leaving the cafe, Anna began to zigzag: went to the pharmacy, from there to the store of the telephone company Verizon, then to another pharmacy, then back to Verizon. Leaving the store for the second time, she threw the company's branded package into the trash can. They examined him immediately. The package contained a contract for the purchase and maintenance of a cell phone, written out in a fictitious name and address - Fake Street, which means "fake street", a package of two phone cards that can be used to call abroad, and an unpacked charger for a mobile phone, from which it became clear that Anna had bought a device for one-time use.
The next morning she did not come to the meeting with the lady agent, she did not stick the stamp where she should. What happened next, the FBI does not tell, but on the same day, Sunday, June 27, at the same time in several states were arrested at the same time
10 people. One managed to escape to Cyprus, from where he subsequently disappeared.
Anna's lawyer, Robert Baum, claims that his client, having received a fake passport, called her father (she told her English husband that her father is in the KGB, but the lawyer denies this), and he advised her to turn in her passport to the police. It was as if she was arrested at the police station. At a court hearing pending bail, the prosecution said that Anna called a man who recommended that she compose a story, say that she was intimidated, and leave the country immediately after the visit to the police. Anna Chapman was denied bail.
Most likely, the FBI agents realized that they had scared her off, and decided to end the operation. She, in fact, was already nearing the end - a booby-trap operation designed to arrest a suspect in the act. Unlike Anna, another member of the spy network took the bait and carried out the task of the imaginary employees of the residency.
Not in Beijing, so in Harbin
This other was Mikhail Semenko. He was born and raised in Blagoveshchensk. He graduated from high school in 2000 (therefore, now he is 27-28 years old). Graduated from Amur State University with a degree in international relations. Trained at the Harbin Institute of Technology. In 2008, he received a bachelor's degree from Seton Hall Catholic University in New Jersey, after which he found work at the powerful non-profit global organization Conference Board headquartered in New York. This organization is known for its annual business conferences, which bring together more than 12 thousand top managers from all over the world. A year later, Mikhail changed his place of work - he became an employee of the Russian travel agency All Travel Russia and settled in Arlington. In addition to English, he speaks fluent Chinese and Spanish, slightly worse - German and Portuguese. His lifestyle was similar to that of Anna Chapman: he energetically “spun in circles” and drove a Mercedes S-500.
He conducted communications in the same way as Chapman. In one of these episodes, he was sitting in a restaurant, while the second secretary of the Russian mission to the UN parked nearby, but did not get out of the car. The same diplomat was once seen covertly transferring a “one-touch” container with information to another agent at a railway station in New York.
On the morning of June 26, a man called Mikhail who said the password: "Couldn't we meet in Beijing in 2004?" Semenko responded with a response “Perhaps, but, in my opinion, it was Harbin. " In 2004, he really was in Harbin. We agreed to meet on the street in Washington at half past seven in the evening. The caller reminded Semenko that he must have an identification mark with him. We met, exchanged the same password and headed to a nearby park, where we sat on a bench. We discussed technical problems during the last communication session. The sham diplomat asked Semenko who taught him how to use the communications program. He replied: "Guys at the Center." How long did the training last at the Center? A week, but there were still two weeks before that.
Finally, the "diplomat" handed Semenko a rolled-up newspaper containing an envelope with five thousand dollars in cash, told him to put the envelope in a hiding place in Arlington Park the next morning, and showed him a plan of the park showing the exact location under the bridge over the stream. Semenko did everything exactly. The money was bookmarked with a hidden video camera. The trap slammed shut.
Sweet couples
Anna and Mikhail recently joined the spy network, lived under their own names and did not hide their real biographies. They remained amateurs, despite short-term training at the Center. All others were illegal. The emphasis was attributed to mixed origins. In America, this cannot alert anyone. In all other respects, they lived the life of typical Americans. Their children, apparently, did not even know that they had relatives in Russia.
From Montclair, New Jersey, Richard and Cynthia Murphy settled in the United States in the mid-90s. Their house was famous in the area for its beautiful garden - their hydrangeas, the neighbors say, were just masterpieces of botany. Cynthia was also excellent at cooking and baking cookies. Their daughters, Kate, 11, and Lisa, 9, rode their bicycles around the neighborhood, loved Sunday family breakfasts in a nearby cafe with pancakes and maple syrup, and delighted their parents with a variety of academic and creative successes. The fact that there was a double bottom in the life of their parents, and their names are actually Vladimir and Lydia Guryev, was a shock for them.
Another pair of defendants, from Boston, are Donald Heathfield and Tracy Foley (in court they called themselves Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova). They posed as naturalized Canadians and have lived in the United States since 1999. He is an employee of an international business consulting firm, she is a real estate agent. Both prospered, lived in a circle of university professors and business people, and lived in a beautiful home. The eldest son Tim studied for 20 years at the prestigious metropolitan University named after George Washington, the youngest, 16-year-old Alex, graduated from high school. It has now emerged that the real Heathfield, a Canadian citizen, had died several years ago. Tracy made an unacceptable puncture: negatives of her girlish photographs on the Soviet Tasma film of the Kuibyshev Kazan Production Association were kept in her safe deposit box.
Spouses Mills and Zotolly (she said that he was Canadian, he was American; they appeared in the United States in 2003 and 2001, respectively) were the first to give their real names and citizenship in court. As far as can be judged, they did this for the sake of their young daughters (the eldest is 3 years old, the youngest is a year old), whose custody, according to American law, for the duration of the parents' imprisonment should be transferred to other close relatives, and their relatives are in Russia.
Finally, couple Vicky Pelaez and Juan Lazaro from the New York City suburb of Yonkers have lived in the United States for over 20 years. She is a Peruvian columnist for one of America's largest Spanish-language newspapers, El Diario La Prensa, and a tireless critic of American imperialism. He is a retired professor of political science. He posed as a Uruguayan and, as is clear from the spouses' dialogue recorded by the FBI, was born in the Soviet Union - he mentions the evacuation to Siberia during the war years. During the investigation, it turned out that Lazaro was not a Uruguayan at all, but Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov. If, of course, this is a real name. Lazaro-Mikhail admitted that he was an agent of Russian intelligence. Perhaps for this reason, the prosecutors did not insist on the detention of his wife. Vicki Pelaez, the only one of the group, was released pending trial on bail of $ 250,000, which was not accepted by the prosecutors of the Ministry of Justice, who sought her re-arrest.
Standing apart in this group is 54-year-old Christopher Metsos. Judging by a number of signs, this is the most serious of all agents, performing the functions of the financier of the network and flying to various countries around the world to receive cash. You cannot transfer cash on a laptop, money had to be transferred in person, and several Russian diplomats, including in one of the countries of South America, appeared on these programs. In the United States, Metsos, who lived on a Canadian passport, was on short visits. Since June 17, he was in Cyprus in the company of a spectacular brown-haired woman, from whom the hotel staff did not hear a word, and behaved like an ordinary tourist. Meanwhile, the FBI put him on the international wanted list. Metsos, of course, could not help but find out about the arrests on the East Coast of the United States. Early in the morning of June 29, he left the hotel and, together with the brown-haired woman, tried to fly to Budapest, but was detained by the police. There were no complaints about the brown-haired woman, and she flew to Hungary, and Metsos appeared before the court, which set the date for the hearing of the extradition case, took his passport and released him on bail of 33 thousand dollars. After that, Metsos disappeared and, most likely, has already left the island - perhaps, having moved to its northern, Turkish half, and from there to Turkey.
Christopher Metsos, 54, appears to be the most serious of all agents, serving as a financier. He was the only one who managed to avoid arrest
TASS is authorized to joke
It is interesting that on Monday morning, when the United States had not yet woken up, but the spy story had already appeared on the news agency feeds (the first reports of arrests appeared on Monday at about half past four in the morning US East Coast time - it was half past ten in Moscow), Dmitry Medvedev spent in Gorki a meeting on the financing of law enforcement agencies. It was attended by both Prime Minister Putin and SVR Director Mikhail Fradkov. But in the presence of the press, none of them said a word about the overseas arrests.
The first blow was taken by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was on a visit to Jerusalem. His statement, made three hours and minutes after the first reports, was restrained: we do not know the details, we are waiting for explanations from Washington. He did not fail to sneer: "The only thing I can say is that the moment when it was done was chosen with special grace." Presumably, the minister hinted that the scandal had spoiled the presidents' "reset". After another three and a half hours, a stern statement was made by a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “In our opinion,” he said, “such actions are not based on anything and pursue unseemly goals. We do not understand the reasons that prompted the US Department of Justice to make a public statement in the spirit of the "spy passions" of the Cold War.
After this announcement in Moscow, statesmen and American experts vied with each other to denounce the enemies of the reset. They talked about the "relapses of the Cold War", but from this reasoning a mile away carries the mossy logic of this very war, the "trench truth" of the ideological battles of the last century. How tired of these hardened denunciations of "circles" and "forces" that strive to ruin such a wonderful relationship, undermine the friendship between Medvedev and Obama, want to discredit their own president! A masterpiece of a kind should be recognized as the statement of expert Sergei Oznobishchev, who put it this way: “This plays into the hands of anti-American circles in our country and, first of all, anti-Russian in America in order to derail the ongoing improvement in our relations, and can slow down the ratification of the START treaty, the abolition of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, and may also affect our accession to the WTO."
Do these people seriously believe that US counterintelligence should let SVR agents continue to spy on as relations improve?
But by evening, the belligerent tone of the comments had changed to an ironic-condescending one. It was asked by Vladimir Putin, who received Bill Clinton at Novo-Ogarevo. The prime minister joked nicely: "You arrived in Moscow at the right time: the police have gone wild there, people are being put in prisons." “Clinton laughs,” reads the official transcript.
The message appeared on the ITAR-TASS news feed at 17:56. Then everyone realized that it was decided not to attach importance to the incident. At 19:35, the Foreign Ministry issued a new statement in a peaceful tone, and the previous one disappeared from the Foreign Ministry's news feed. What I liked most about this second statement was this: "We presume that they will be provided with normal treatment in their places of detention, and that the American authorities will guarantee access to them for Russian consular officers and lawyers." And indeed: why, since the "reset", not let the very diplomats who gave them money and took information from laptops to them?
It is quite obvious that by the time journalists in Washington began to torment the press secretaries of the White House and the State Department with questions, the US and Russian governments had already agreed to refrain from unpleasant reciprocal measures. Both officials said with confidence that this story would not spoil relations and that there would be no expulsion of diplomats from either the United States or Russia. Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said, in addition, that the President was reported on this case several times. Thus, he refuted the popular version in Russia that the FBI's actions are the machinations of the reactionary forces "substituting" Barack Obama. Obama knew about the FBI operation in advance.
We already know - albeit from anonymous sources - additional details of how the political decision to arrest and exchange was made. The president's advisers learned about the existence of Russian illegal immigrants in February. Representatives from the FBI, CIA and the Department of Justice briefed them in general terms about the progress of the operation and briefly described each object of surveillance. Subsequently, senior officials of the White House apparatus met several times for meetings on this matter. President Obama was notified on June 11. Counterintelligence announced its intention to arrest the agents. A detailed discussion of these plans followed, and above all the question of what would happen after the arrests.
No decision was made that time.
Senior officials, now without a president, have revisited the topic several times at their meetings chaired by John Brennan, the president's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser. The Russian reaction seemed difficult to predict. An exchange was spoken as one of the scenarios.
Let's wave, but looking
Spy exchanges became part of the Cold War in February 1962, when the United States traded Colonel Willie Fischer, who was serving a 30-year imprisonment, as Rudolph Abel, for U-2 pilot Gary Powers. In the future, not only spies, but also Soviet dissidents became bargaining chips. Sometimes, in order to hastily rescue its exposed spy, Moscow deliberately arrested an American and declared him a spy. This is exactly what happened in September 1986 with the American journalist Nicholas Danilov. A provocateur was sent to him, and when he handed Danilov a package of papers on the street, the journalist was arrested "red-handed."
Danilov's exchange for Soviet intelligence officer Gennady Zakharov was the latest deal of this kind. Both cases - Powers and Danilov - I described in detail in "Top Secret" from the words of the direct participants in the events. If negotiations on the exchange of Abel - Powers lasted a year and a half, then the exchange of Zakharov - Danilov was agreed in two weeks. The scheme worked, but for the present case it was not quite suitable: the Cold War deals were prisoner of war exchanges. And now the parties are not at war, but kind of cooperating. Is it worth it to publicly grab the hand of a guest stealing silver spoons from the sideboard? Wouldn't it be better to take him aside and solve the issue quietly, without driving him or himself into the paint? But the fact of the matter is that in Washington there was no certainty that Moscow would even blush a little, and not throw a tantrum.
Pending a decision by the political leadership, the CIA and the State Department sketched out a list of candidates for an exchange. It turned out that there was not particularly anyone to change for - Moscow simply does not have a sufficient "exchange fund". The proposal on humanitarian considerations, to include in the list of political prisoners, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Zara Murtazalieva, was rejected from the very beginning. The main selection criterion was the presence of a charge of espionage, real or imaginary. But it would be absurd to seek from Moscow persons convicted of espionage in favor of some third country. For this reason, neither Igor Reshetin nor Valentin Danilov, the scientists serving a sentence on charges of espionage for China, were on the list. There were three left: former SVR colonel Alexander Zaporozhsky (I again examined his case in detail on the pages of the newspaper), former GRU colonel Sergei Skripal, and Gennady Vasilenko, a former major in the Russian foreign intelligence service.
Vasilenko is the most interesting figure of all three. Very little is known about him in Russia, a little more in the USA. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked in Washington and Latin America and tried to recruit CIA officer Jack Platt. In turn, Platt, known as an outstanding recruiter, tried to recruit Vasilenko and even once came to a meeting with him with a case full of cash dollars. Neither one nor the other achieved success (at least, Platt argues it), but made friends, met families, played sports together. Once Vasilenko disappeared. It turned out that he was summoned to Havana for a meeting, and there he was arrested and taken to Moscow, to the Lefortovo prison. Subsequently, it turned out that Hanssen passed him, but Hanssen, according to Platt, was mistaken. Vasilenko spent six months behind bars. It was not possible to prove his guilt, and he was released, but fired from the authorities.
Vasilenko joined the NTV-Plus television company as deputy head of the security service. In August 2005, he was arrested on a new charge. Initially, he was charged with organizing the assassination attempt on the general director of Mostransgaz, Alexei Golubnichy (Golubnichy was not injured). This accusation was not confirmed, but during searches of Vasilenko's house, illegal weapons and components of explosive devices were found. For this, as well as for resisting police officers, he was convicted in 2006. His term of imprisonment expired in 2008, for which a new one was added to him is unknown. Immediately after the arrest, a veteran of foreign intelligence, a former resident in Washington, Colonel Viktor Cherkashin, spoke in defense of Vasilenko. “I have known Vasilenko for a very long time, and what happened was a complete surprise to me,” he said in an interview with the Vremya novostei newspaper. “I doubt he would be involved in such a dubious undertaking. He is an adult and a very responsible person, passionate about his work."
Igor Sutyagin, a former employee of the Institute of the USA and Canada, was added to Vasilenko, Skripal and Zaporozhye - the inclusion of his name on the list looked justified from a formal point of view and implicitly introduced the same humanitarian and human rights emphasis. Of the four, only Skripal pleaded guilty to working for British intelligence in court.
The issue was last discussed with President Obama at a meeting of the National Security Council on June 18, six days before Medvedev's visit.
The timing of the arrests was left to the discretion of the FBI. The president, according to sources, did not interfere in this decision. According to anonymous authors, the denouement was accelerated by the intention of one of the illegal immigrants to leave the country - this person ordered a ticket to Europe for the evening of the day when the arrests were made. Most likely, we are talking about Anna Chapman, who was alarmed by a meeting with an imaginary courier.
Like clockwork
No matter how hard they tried in Washington to calculate the possible actions of Moscow, the initial statement of the Foreign Ministry that it did not know any Russian spies had an effect on the Americans in charge of the operation like a blow to the head with a butt. CIA Director Leon Panetta realized that something needed to be done and called SVR Director Mikhail Fradkov. As a result, by the end of the day, a metamorphosis took place in Moscow's position. A list of four candidates for exchange was immediately sent to the Russian side. Moscow agreed very quickly.
In parallel, the prosecutors entered into negotiations with the defendants' lawyers regarding a pre-trial deal. It was with the expectation of such a deal that the arrested were not charged with espionage. They were accused of not registering properly as agents of a foreign government (the agent in this case is not necessarily a spy) and of money laundering. It remains unclear whether it is about their espionage fees or about some other, much larger amounts. The first point of the charge is up to five years in prison, for laundering - up to 20. Negotiations were going on to plead guilty to a less serious crime in exchange for the refusal of prosecutors to bring a more serious charge.
It was not easy to persuade the accused. The failed agents, who were also rooted in American soil, wanted to know what would happen to them at home, to have guarantees of a secure future, since all their property in the United States was subject to confiscation. They were also worried about the fate of underage children. It is for this reason that Russia recognized them as its citizens and sent them to meet with each employee of the consulate. The hardest part was with Vicky Pelaez, who does not have Russian citizenship. She was promised a free apartment and $ 2,000 in a monthly "stipend."
The Russian side decided to formalize the release of its prisoners through a pardon. Under the Constitution, the President has the right to pardon convicted criminals at his own discretion. However, in order to save the face from the prisoners, they demanded to sign a petition with a confession of guilt. The most difficult decision was for Igor Sutyagin, who had already served 11 of 15 years in prison.
A key element of the agreement was the agreement that Moscow would not take any retaliatory measures that were supposed to be "under the protocol," that is, it would not require the departure of American diplomats. As for the Russian diplomats, who acted as contacts with the agents, they were most likely asked to leave quietly.
Panetta and Fradkov spoke to each other three times, most recently on July 3. When all the fundamental issues were resolved, they began to plan the exchange operation.
On the afternoon of July 8, all 10 defendants pleaded guilty to not registering with the US Department of Justice as agents of a foreign government. After reviewing the terms of the deal, Judge Kimba Wood (at one time Bill Clinton predicted it for the post of Minister of Justice) approved it and sentenced each accused to imprisonment for the term they had already served as pre-trial detention. On the same day, Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree pardoning Zaporozhye, Skripal, Vasilenko and Sutyagin.
On July 9, at 2 pm Moscow time (at 4 am Washington time), the Yak-42 of the Russian Emergencies Ministry first landed at the Vienna International Airport, and then a Boeing leased by the CIA. The pilots taxied to a remote section of the field, exchanged passengers and lay down on the opposite course. Minor children of illegal immigrants were brought to Russia earlier. On the way back, the Boeing landed at Bryze Norton Royal Air Force Base, where Skripal and Sutyagin left the plane. Vasilenko and Zaporozhsky continued on their way to the United States. Zaporozhsky was returning home - in the United States he has a house, a wife and three children.
The instant readiness with which Russia reacted to the exchange offer bears witness to the value of the arrested agents and Moscow's desire to ensure their silence.
But what is their value, since they have not found any essential secrets? Moreover, they rubbed their glasses and fooled their leaders, passing off information from open sources as military secrets. It turns out that Moscow was spending money on parasites, which became easy prey for the FBI, where, in turn, there are also parasites who are too lazy to catch real spies? Various witty columnists and professional humorists have already made fun of this.
Firstly, the prosecutors released only a small fraction of the available materials - just enough to be enough to bring charges in court. Secondly, in our time, Russian intelligence is unlikely to have to save money, and the costs of maintaining the exposed group were not at all astronomical. Thirdly, the agents did indeed collect rumors, information about the mood in the US administration and in the American expert community on various issues of international politics, but these were the tasks they received from the Center.
There is a psychological nuance here, which Sergei Tretyakov pointed out in one of his interviews: “We traditionally did not believe the information published in the foreign press. Not because it is wrong, but because it is open. We only believed in intelligence - this information is secret and more accurate. And therefore, the demand for intelligence in the current Russian government is probably higher than it was under Soviet rule, since at that time not many KGB immigrants were in power in Russia. " And then Tretyakov spoke about the conversation that took place in August 2000 in New York between the director of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, General Yevgeny Murov, who had come to prepare the visit of President Putin, and the then Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, Sergei Lavrov: “He spoke like this:“Let me remind you that Mr. Putin relies on the information these guys are gathering (and pointed to us). Support them and make life easier for them in every possible way."
This is the psychology of the current Russian government: any information becomes valuable if received through intelligence channels.
Epilogue after the denouement
The agents rescued from American bondage will probably have a tolerable existence in Russia, but nothing more. They were not destined to become national heroes: the press turned them into a caricature. Anna Chapman, who has become a star of the yellow press, intends to settle in the UK (she, in addition to Russian, has British citizenship), but even there she will not be able to convert her story into hard currency: under the terms of the deal with American justice, all proceeds from the commercial use of this plot will go to the US treasury.
The final statement of the Russian Foreign Ministry smacks of Kafkaesque logic. "This agreement," it says, "gives reason to expect that the course agreed by the leadership of the Russian Federation and the United States will be consistently implemented in practice and that attempts to knock it off this course will not be crowned with success." It turns out that the "reset" is a mutual obligation of the parties not to obstruct the spies, and if they are caught, to change quickly.
Personally, this whole story did not seem so lightweight to me from the very beginning. What if the spies had fooled the FBI, I wondered, if their role was to divert attention from really important agents? It turns out that I am not alone in these doubts. Viktor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad Israeli intelligence official and best-selling author, told the Washington Post that it’s unthinkable not to notice the kind of surveillance that the FBI has imposed on suspects. “But if you are being watched, and you stopped spying, you burned out,” he continues. It turns out that the agents imitated activity, deliberately slandered themselves into hidden microphones and hid pictures from their Soviet childhood in deposit safes. A veteran of American intelligence, who did not want the newspaper to call him by name, quite agrees with this. The notorious ten, he says, are just the "tip of the iceberg."
And finally, perhaps most unexpectedly, the epilogue after the denouement. On June 13, Sergei Tretyakov died of a heart attack at his home in Florida - according to the doctors' conclusion. He was only 53 years old. The announcement of his death was published only on July 9th. Just on the day of the exchange.
The most amazing of the amazing coincidences, metamorphoses and details of this story. If, of course, the word "amazing" is appropriate here.
