From Russia with Blood

xvi

South Ossetia, Georgia—August 2008

The tanks came barreling through the Roki Tunnel, snaking beneath the snowcapped peaks of the Greater Caucasus mountains that form a forbidding natural barrier between Russia and Georgia. They were heading for the separatist stronghold of South Ossetia, where rebels had been fighting to break away from Georgia and rejoin their ethnic kin on the Russian side of the ridge ever since the territories were split by the fall of the Soviet Union. Now the Kremlin was sending in the cavalry.

Russia had been stoking separatism in South Ossetia for years, and it had been steadily turning up the heat since President Saakashvili’s reelection in Georgia that January. At the start of August, Kremlin-backed fighters in South Ossetia started shelling nearby Georgian villages, and Saakashvili sent in the army to restore order. No one foresaw the ferocity of Russia’s response.

The Kremlin ordered a full-scale invasion of Georgia on all fronts: land, air, sea, and cyber. Troops poured across the border to occupy South Ossetia and the separate rebel region of Abkhazia while fighter jets dropped bombs across the country, warships covered the coast, and hackers unleashed waves of attacks on Georgian government websites. It was the first time Russia had invaded a sovereign state since the fall of the USSR, sparking the first European conflict of the twenty-first century. And by attacking a US ally on its way to NATO membership, the Kremlin was drawing its sword on the entire Western military alliance.

America had been steadily upgrading the Georgian military since Saakashvili put the country on course to join NATO four years earlier, and it had sent a thousand US troops to stage a training exercise outside Tbilisi only weeks before the invasion. The US secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, had visited Georgia the previous month, standing up next to Saakashvili to pledge full support for the country’s future membership of the alliance.

“We always fight for our friends,” she declared.

But the invasion was a crisis for Washington. In the final year of the Bush administration, tensions with Moscow had already escalated over US plans to build an antiballistic-missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, designed to shield the West from Iranian nuclear attacks. Putin had reacted furiously, warning that the new system would turn Europe into a “powder keg,” and then he made a point of visiting Iran—glad-handing the country’s president and championing its right to pursue its civilian nuclear program.

The US could not afford a full-scale conflagration with Moscow: the Kremlin’s cooperation was considered vital to stopping Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the US army needed access to Russian supply lines to get equipment into Afghanistan. So when Russian troops took hold of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, occupying a fifth of Georgia’s internationally recognized territory, America did not fight for its friend.

The Kremlin announced at the end of August that it had liberated South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and now recognized them as independent republics. Russia shut out UN and EU monitors and went on to sign treaties with the de facto governments of the two separatist regions, agreeing to integrate them into Russia. Putin had gambled on the West’s unwillingness to fight—and won.

Geneva, Switzerland—March 2009

Hillary Clinton arrived in Geneva armed with a big red button. President Barack Obama had taken over the White House determined to thaw relations with the Kremlin, and he had dispatched his new secretary of state to meet her Russian counterpart on neutral Swiss territory. She was there to pull off a stunt designed to defuse tensions with Moscow.

There had been a changing of the guard in Russia, too, at least on the face of it. Putin had been constitutionally barred from running for a third consecutive term in the presidential elections the previous year, so he had stepped aside in order to allow his loyal lieutenant Dmitry Medvedev to take the reins. The West was yet to wake up fully to the fact that Putin was still running the country from his temporary perch as prime minister, and hopes abounded in Washington that the new man in the Kremlin might be someone with whom the White House could do business. So the previous month, the vice president, Joe Biden, had used the administration’s first foreign policy speech to express America’s intention to “press the Reset button” on its relationship with Russia, and now the secretary of state had been sent to Switzerland armed with a physical manifestation of that metaphor.

Repairing fraught relations with a rival nuclear superpower by performing a skit in front of the world’s media wouldn’t have been a comfortable commission, even with the most elegant of props. But Clinton gamely grabbed her chance at a press conference with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, producing a pale green box tied up in ribbon and pulling off the lid with a flourish.

“I wanted to present you with a little gift which represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying,” Clinton said with a rictus grin, speaking very slowly and tweezing the button out of the box as if handling a grenade. “We want to reset our relationship.”

Lavrov peered at the strange gift. The red button was mounted on a bright yellow plinth emblazoned with the English word reset and the Russian word перегрузка, or peregruzka. He turned it over in his hands, and a smile spread across his lips.

“You got it wrong,” he said.

The officials in the State Department needed to brush up on their Cyrillic. The Russian word on the plinth did not say reset, as intended, but overload. Laughter erupted in the room. Lavrov pressed the button anyway.

America’s big gesture may have misfired, but the two countries still released a shared statement promising a “fresh start” in Russo-American relations. Russia went on to announce that the US military could use its airspace to reach Afghanistan, and America shelved its planned missile shield. In May 2010, Russia finally agreed to international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, and in return the United States canceled sanctions in place against Russia for exporting arms to the Islamic republic. Spring had arrived, and all the frost seemed to have melted. But the next big freeze was on its way.

New York—June and July 2010

Anna Chapman was rattled. The glamorous young spy was living under deep cover in New York as part of a cell of ten Russian agents operating illegally in America, and she was starting to suspect that someone had sold them out.

Most of her coconspirators were posing as married couples—living in leafy suburbs, working vanilla jobs, and even starting families—but Chapman had taken a different tack. Before coming to America, she had married an unwitting young Englishman named Alex Chapman, acquiring a British surname and passport that provided the perfect new identity when she left him for her new assignment. At twenty-eight, she was the youngest in the spy ring, with flame-red hair, piercing green eyes, and an IQ of 162—all of which proved useful when getting close to power—and she was posing as a single businesswoman running a successful international property company in the heart of Manhattan.

The agents’ goal was to build contact with influential figures and relay the intelligence they gleaned using classic spycraft tactics such as dead drops, brush passes, and ciphers. They had developed good relations with a former intelligence official and a scientist involved in developing bunker-buster bombs, and now they were on the cusp of cultivating a US cabinet official.

On a Saturday morning in June of 2010, Chapman received a summons from the handler she knew only as Roman. He contacted her using their special code and ordered her to meet him at a coffee shop in downtown Manhattan, which was odd because Roman was usually a stickler for two golden rules: they only communicated on Wednesdays and never face-to-face. The regular drill was for Chapman to bring her laptop to a public place such as Macy’s or Barnes & Noble while Roman pulled up nearby in a white minivan so they could send each other messages over an encrypted wireless network. But this time, he arrived in person and gave her an assignment to hand off a fake passport to another agent the next morning.

Chapman smelled a rat. Not only did the rendezvous violate Roman’s usual rules, the new assignment was also unlike any other he had previously given her. She called her father, a KGB veteran working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow, to tell him she feared her cover had been blown and she needed to get out of the country. But it was too late. FBI agents were listening in on her call, and they swooped in the very next day, arresting Chapman and nine other agents around Washington, New York, and Boston.

The FBI had been tracking the illegal spy network in an operation code-named Ghost Stories, after the agents’ practice of assuming the identities of the dead. Chapman was right: someone had sold them out. Investigators had been reading their emails, decrypting their ciphers, intercepting their calls, and filming their brush passes, and the man she had met was not really Roman but an undercover US agent. Two weeks later, the spies pleaded guilty in a federal court in Manhattan, and preparations began to send them back to Russia in the biggest East-West spy swap since the Cold War.

The story of the illegal Russian spy cell went global—later spawning the hit TV show The Americans—and the media went to town on Chapman’s looks. Tabloids plastered pictures of the young agent across front pages headlined THE SPY WHO LOVED US and RED HEAD.

“Do we have any spies that hot?” Jay Leno asked Joe Biden on late-night television.

“It was not my idea to send her back,” the vice president quipped.

Back in Britain, Chapman’s ex-husband cashed in on his cameo in the international drama, selling details of the couple’s sex life and an album full of intimate photographs to a London newspaper. Five years later, the thirty-six-year-old Alex Chapman would be found dead in an empty house in the British port city of Southampton, apparently from a multiple-drug overdose.

The spy swap was carried out speedily to preserve the Obama administration’s delicate efforts to reset relations with Russia. The ten illegal agents were flown to Vienna on July 9 and traded on the airstrip for four Russians caught spying for the West. The agents were given a heroes’ welcome back in Moscow, receiving state honors from President Medvedev for their services to the motherland in a ceremony at the Kremlin. Chapman was greeted personally by Putin and won a job heading the government’s youth council to add to a budding career as a model and television presenter.

Among the Western agents released in return was Sergei Skripal. The onetime military intelligence officer had been convicted of selling secrets to Britain and incarcerated in a high-security military detention facility in 2006, but now he was a free man. He was flown to the UK, where he made a new home in the sleepy cathedral city of Salisbury. The spy swap seemed to have gone smoothly for both sides.

But soon after the agents’ return to Moscow, Putin announced that the traitor who had betrayed them to the FBI had been identified. “It was the result of treason,” he thundered, foretelling an ignominious fate for the mole who had blown the illegal spy network. “It always ends badly for traitors: as a rule, their end comes from drink or drugs, lying in the gutter.”

The culprit was Alexander Poteyev, a decorated colonel who had won the Red Star for his efforts during Russia’s long and bloody war in Afghanistan and climbed the ranks of the Foreign Intelligence Service after the fall of the Soviet Union. Poteyev had been posted to the United States in the 1990s, and when he returned to Moscow, he was named the deputy head of the ultrasecret department known as Directorate S, set up to oversee the sleeper cell in America.

A military court put Poteyev on trial for treason, and Chapman testified that he must have provided the US authorities with the information that led to her arrest; the FBI agent who contacted her posing as Roman had used a code that only he and her handler could have known. The court handed down a sentence of twenty-five years in prison—but there was no one there to lead away in handcuffs. Poteyev had skipped the country.

As the FBI was plotting the arrests of Chapman and the other illegals, the deputy head of Directorate S asked his bosses for an impromptu vacation. He boarded a train to Minsk, and from there he traveled to Ukraine, where he acquired a fake passport. Poteyev had made it to a CIA safe house in Frankfurt before being picked up and whisked away to America.

“Try to take it calmly,” he wrote to his wife in a text message that prosecutors read out at his trial. “I am leaving not for some time but forever. I didn’t want to, but I had to. I am starting a new life and I will try to help the children.”

Putin bemoaned the turncoat’s escape in a television interview. “The man betrayed his friends, comrades in arms, and the people who sacrificed their lives for the motherland,” he raged. “How can he look into the eyes of his children? Pig!”

Now the Obama administration had a new headache as it struggled to smooth over relations with Moscow. The master spy who had just arrived on US soil was a priceless intelligence asset—and he was squarely in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.

Langley, Virginia

In a verdant stretch of Virginia’s Fairfax County, buried in the thickly forested backwater of Langley, lies the CIA’s headquarters. Inside the sprawling complex, America’s intelligence chiefs were reckoning with a brand-new threat. The United States was harboring scores of defectors under its government resettlement program, many of them Russian, and while the runaways were provided with new identities, the working assumption had always been that the Kremlin would never dare come after them in America. But intelligence was now flooding into Langley indicating a slew of threats against Russian defectors living in the United States. Chief among them was Colonel Poteyev.

The Russians suspected that the man accused of blowing the lid off Anna Chapman’s spy ring had been recruited as a double agent during his stint in the United States in the 1990s, and had been supplying an astonishing stream of top-secret intelligence ever since. Poteyev had to be protected. But he was proving a hard man to look after.

Under the US government’s defector resettlement program, it was standard practice for the CIA to provide Poteyev and his relatives with new names and passports to protect their identities. It was also standard for the agency to encrypt the defectors’ communications, help them find jobs and schools for their children, arrange psychiatric treatment to deal with the depression that frequently accompanies exile, and even offer plastic surgery to make their faces unrecognizable. But Poteyev didn’t want to hide. He told his CIA handlers he wanted to live in the open under his own name. They beseeched him to think better of it, but Poteyev was implacable. He wasn’t going to skulk away in the shadows. If his former colleagues came for him, then so be it.

It didn’t take long. That November, the Russian media reported that a contract killer had been dispatched to kill the mole who had sold out the illegals. “We know who he is and where he is,” a high-ranking Kremlin source told one newspaper. “You can have no doubt—a Mercader has already been sent after him.” That was a reference to Ramón Mercader, the Spanish hit man sent to Mexico in 1940 by the KGB to kill Leon Trotsky with an ice pick.

Poteyev had moved to Florida, where he settled into a new life fishing and passing his days quietly on the sunny coast, albeit under twenty-four-hour watch. Sure enough, sometime after his defection, a Russian hit man did make it to his address with orders to kill him—but his surveillance team raised the alarm before he was harmed. For a while, the threat seemed to have fizzled. And then suddenly the Moscow media lit up with the news that the traitor who betrayed Russia’s spies to America was dead.

The Kremlin-controlled television channel Rossiya-1 led with the parable of Poteyev, an intelligence officer of “impeccable lineage” who had met a “sorry end” after selling out to the United States—yet another example of how “life punishes traitors.” Poteyev’s name was added to the growing list of enemies of Putin’s government who had died in recent years, and the New York Times cited him in a front-page article as one of many examples of the dark trend.

But three months after his chilling obituary was broadcast, the dead man ambled into a Florida Walmart and purchased a saltwater fishing license. He filled out the form using his own name and gave as his address an apartment in a gleaming nearby high-rise. Soon after that, he registered to vote as a Republican. Poteyev was, in fact, very much alive—and he still wasn’t hiding.

The CIA had seen these sorts of fake stories about the deaths of defectors before. Russia sometimes used them as a way to smoke out its enemies, prompting them to reach out to relatives or friends under watch in Russia to provide reassurance that the reports were false, thereby giving the FSB an email address or phone number to hack. But Poteyev was living in the open under his own name. Had Russia resorted to spreading the fake reports of his death in order to maintain the message that traitors would be crushed, having tried and failed to kill him?

Whatever lay behind it, America’s spy chiefs handed down orders that the story must not be debunked. It was safest for everyone that the world was allowed to think Poteyev was dead. If Russia was embarrassed by the revelation that the traitor lived on, its assassins might come back to get him for real. The CIA was now working with the FBI to plan a coordinated response to future assassination attempts on other Russian exiles in the United States, and the targets were under round-the-clock protection. This was a considerable logistical challenge. America sheltered up to a hundred defectors at a time under its resettlement program, and the States had always been a place where Russian runaways could be assured of safety. Not anymore.

CIA Moscow Station

The CIA’s man in Moscow was a husky white-haired veteran nearing the end of his career, and he’d spent long enough in Russia to get a little jaded about death. “Yes, Putin has been known to commit assassinations—first of all, news flash; second of all, big deal” was his stock response to the idea of spending time gathering string on Russian hits. “I’m trying to get plans and intentions on what the Kremlin is trying to do on a much bigger scale than somebody getting murdered.”

He preferred to use his time gathering intelligence on what he saw as the big strategic questions—Russia’s intentions toward NATO, its activities in Syria, and its nuclear plans. But the Moscow station had a standing requirement to assess the capacity of the Russian state to stage hostile operations in the United States, and now the matter had become more pressing. The CIA’s spies in Moscow had been tasked with figuring out how much harm Russia could do if it came after its enemies in America the same way it had elsewhere in the West.

As they studied the body count of Russia’s antagonists overseas, they were struck by a glaring trend. The rate at which Russian exiles in the United Kingdom met untimely deaths clearly defied natural explanation—particularly those exiles in Boris Berezovsky’s immediate circle. They knew the oligarch was Putin’s most bitter foe, so it came as no surprise that his associates would be targeted, and they weren’t expecting Berezovsky to die peacefully, either. What did raise eyebrows among the spies in Moscow was the ease with which Russia seemed to be cutting down its adversaries in Britain.

If Russian runaways died in the United States with the same regularity they did in the UK, it would surely not go unnoticed. Government oversight committees would be asking questions. The intelligence agencies would take a greater interest than MI6 seemed to be showing, and the FBI would put a stop to it. Then again, they reasoned, London was a notorious hub for Russian money, so perhaps that changed the equation.

When the CIA man in Moscow met his MI6 counterparts over beers, he quizzed them over what was going on in Britain.

“Look,” he said gruffly, “how’s it possible for Russians to kill regularly without having to worry about it too much? Basically get to the UK and kill?”

The British spies readily acknowledged the problem. “We know the Russians have an active program of killing people in the UK,” he was told. “But it’s not our responsibility. That would be Scotland Yard.”

The spies in Moscow weren’t alone in marveling at the death toll in Britain. Back in Langley, the rising body count of the Kremlin’s enemies in the UK was being reviewed with growing concern. America’s intelligence staff had been tracking the deaths since Berezovsky and his entourage first fled Russia and many had long since concluded that the British government was woefully incapable of protecting its own inhabitants from the long arm of the Russian state. But until now, that had not been a cause of undue concern. Picking off the odd exile in Britain was one thing, but it had seemed inconceivable that Putin would dare to pull that kind of stunt on a rival superpower. That calculus had now shifted.

As threats to defectors in the United States spiked following Poteyev’s defection, the spies at Langley were left asking themselves an uncomfortable question. By failing to stand up to Russian aggression in Britain, had America’s closest ally unwittingly emboldened Putin to believe he could kill with impunity wherever in the West he chose?