Anna Chapman and her gang that couldn’t spy straight — arrested by the FBI in June 2010 and swapped a few days later for four Russian double agents — were back in the news this week. Just in time for Halloween, the FBI released hundreds of heavily redacted pages of documents (plus videos and photographs) of the brazen spook operation it called “Ghost Stories.”
The affair made for fun headlines: a group of post-Cold War, Boris-and-Natasha spies pretending to be ordinary civilians and skulking around New York and Washington swapping bags of cash. And fun photos, thanks to La Chapman herself (maiden name: Anna Vasilyevna Kushchyenko), a sexy redhead masquerading as a real-estate agent who, once repatriated to Russia, became a TV hostess and lingerie model.
But don’t be fooled. Anna herself may have been a classic “swallow” — an attractive female spy — but her ring was deadly serious, the latest example of a longstanding and ongoing Russian intelligence operation against the “principal enemy” — us.
That operation is known in the intelligence community as “the illegals”: foreign spies (some even native-born Americans) costumed as civilians who worm their way into the highest echelons of government or — via seduction, bribery or blackmail — gain access to high officials.
Under Cold War conventions, both the Americans and the Soviets generally stashed their spooks in the embassies under innocuous diplomatic cover (cultural attaché or second secretary for trade); sometimes they even posed as journalists.
Far more dangerous, however, were the illegals, a Moscow-directed program that sought (and still seeks) to place sleeper agents inside a host country or (better yet) identify, recruit and train secret sympathizers who might pass for American.
The story of one of the most effective of these came to light only after his death in Moscow in 2006 — more than a half-century after the fact. George Koval, an Iowa-born Soviet agent recruited by the GRU (Russian military intelligence) and sent back to America, joined the Army and infiltrated the top-secret labs at Oak Ridge, Tenn., home of the Manhattan Project.
Koval’s theft of atomic secrets was so significant that Russia’s Vladimir Putin posthumously awarded him the Hero of the Russian Federation medal, crediting him with hastening the Soviet development of the bomb in 1949.
So the news that the Chapman ring got one agent, Cynthia Murphy (real name, Lydia Guryev) hired to do personal bookkeeping for Alan Patricof, a political fund-raiser with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, is troubling.
The idea was to collect information about US foreign policy from a confidant of the secretary of state. It’s highly unlikely any state secrets were spilled — but it was still foolish for a State Department spokesman to pooh-pooh the news, huffing: “There is no reason to believe that the secretary of state was a special target of this spy ring.”
That’s bunk. There’s every reason to believe she and other US officials were precisely the targets. Because that’s what the “illegals” program is all about.
A high-level KGB operative of my acquaintance told me years ago that an “illegal” once managed to rise as high as the US ambassador to an unnamed country. The current crop may well be doing even better. The influx of nationals from the former Soviet Union who’ve been raised in the United States since the USSR’s collapse in 1991 offers the KGB’s successor a ripe field for recruitment. And the much-penetrated field of academe remains fertile ground for Russian mischief as well.
Yes, a couple of former KGB agents have publicly criticized the Chapman ring for its outmoded tradecraft and its negative effect on Moscow-Washington relations. But it’d be crazy to assume this was the only bunch of “illegals” that the Russians have been running.
Insiders suspect that the FBI, which had been tracking the Chapman ring for 10 years, has deliberately let the real brains of the operation temporarily escape the dragnet — a common practice in a counterintelligence takedown.
“To think that, just because we took down one network, that there are no more, or to think that we’ve seen everything there is to see would be foolhardy,” said FBI counterspy Frank Figliuzzi.
That’s a reminder that, while the Cold War may be over, the “great game” of international intrigue continues unabated. And that there’s some folks in Washington who ought to be very nervous.
Michael Walsh’s new spy thriller, “Shock Warning,” is in stores now.