Russians Among Us Read online

  Anna Chapman’s story has been the stuff of dreams for tabloid newspapers in London and New York, the two cities where she lived, with the pictures to go with it. But that has done something to obscure her significance. For decades the illegal program had been on autopilot—doing what it had always done in sending out deep-cover illegals to pretend to be someone else from another country and slowly embed themselves among their targets. But Chapman would be part of a new generation of undercover Russian intelligence officers—what the FBI called True Name Illegals. And whereas the other “family illegals” would increasingly represent the past when it came to Russian illegal activity in the West, Anna Chapman was the future. One of the reasons was the way the world changed in September 2001.

  A few weeks after Anna Chapman had come to Britain and met Alex, Al Qaeda struck. The day after the 9/11 attacks, CIA counterterrorism officials briefed President George W. Bush. They said the Russians could now be allies against Al Qaeda. When CIA director George Tenet went to talk to the leadership of Russia House the next day about how that might work, officials there were “dumbfounded,” two of those involved, John Sipher and Steve Hall, later wrote. “To those of us who had worked on Russian issues for years, we knew that there was no way the Russians would be real allies.” Russia House’s deep skepticism of the possibilities of liaison remained. Putin thought 9/11 meant that he would now have support for what he saw as his battle against terrorism in Chechnya. He would be disappointed. One of the recurrent themes of their relations was how little the two sides understood each other. Putin never appreciated how 9/11 changed America and how it would react to that shock. He thought it would make the countries natural allies. Instead, under President Bush, it led to an America determined to assert its power.

  The attacks meant the CIA and FBI (as well as MI5 and MI6) would pivot hard toward terrorism as their overriding priority. Everything now was about stopping the next attack. The officers who dealt with terrorism were now calling the shots. Those dealing with Russia—already seen as dinosaurs in the 1990s—were even farther down the pecking order. Old-school espionage seemed a thing of the past. But while the focus of the West and its intelligence agencies shifted over the years, darting around to meet the latest threat and now fixated on terrorism, their Russian counterparts, in contrast, kept their gaze firmly fixed on their old adversaries throughout.

  The shift of focus toward counterterrorism by the FBI, CIA, and others might sound like good news for the Russian illegal program, drawing away attention. But it was not quite so simple. The attacks had one important consequence for Directorate S. The 9/11 hijackers had gotten into the United States all too easily and their presence had revealed the laxness of America’s border security, visa, and identification systems. To stop further attacks, controls were going to be tightened up. There would be new systems and databases that could be cross-checked. In the past documentation was often a local affair. “It was literally paper copies with little old ladies flipping index cards, pulling them out and making photocopies,” explains one counterintelligence officer. Now it was all going to be modernized to make sure the “dots” could be connected between who someone was and what the authorities knew about them.

  This new world posed a significant challenge for Directorate S. It may have been aimed at terrorists, but the new checks had consequences for illegals. Donald Heathfield, Cynthia Murphy, and the other illegals all had their legends built before September 11, 2001. Many of the loopholes they had taken advantage of—both in the United States and Canada—to steal people’s identities were being closed. Electronic databases were linking up different aspects of people’s identities. If someone died a flag would now be put on his or her birth certificate. That meant stealing the identities of deceased babies to create dead doubles was going to be much more challenging. Traveling was also going to become more laborious as identity checks were increased and passenger data shared in advance so it could be cross-checked against databases of suspects.

  IN THE EARLY to mid-2000s, another threat emerged not just to Russian illegals but to all spies—biometrics. This offered the chance to verify someone’s identity using their unique characteristics. Databases of fingerprints and iris scans at borders make it almost impossible to enter as one person and leave as another or visit using multiple identities. The days of using “thin” cover by picking up one of the passports in your safe and then using it to go into a country and quickly meet an agent and then leave was passing. Even as far back as the early 1990s, Directorate S told agents to look for people who might have access to Western DNA databases. If people who had this access could be recruited as agents, it might offer the SVR the chance to tamper with the entries, insert false ones, or use the profiles of others. Now the checks were being implemented internationally.

  On top of biometrics, the digital world emerging in the mid-2000s added another level of complexity. In the past, spies could create a legend pretty easily with some false documents. But now they also needed a digital backstory—Facebook accounts and a trail of online activity. If someone has no social media or digital footprint, that in itself looks suspicious and might look to a security service like a potential flag for being a spy. MI6 began to understand this in the mid-2000s. They ran tests to see how long a spy working on traditional cover could stand up against a suspicious border officer who was armed with nothing more than Google. The answer was about a minute.

  Different intelligence services would be caught out by this new world. The CIA had a group of its officers involved in kidnapping a cleric in Milan exposed after they were tracked by Italian authorities who simply cross-referenced recently purchased phones with airline and hotel bookings to identify a rendition team. Meanwhile, a Mossad hit team in Dubai operating undercover was identified using closed-circuit TV and passports a few years later. The spying business was changing fast as—like other fields—the internet disrupted the old model. This new world of databases, biometrics, enhanced checks, and digital trails meant it was going to be much harder to create a sustainable backstory for illegals.

  The FBI did not see any new deep-cover “family illegals” arrive in the United States after 2003. They believe the reason was that the new environment was making it harder to build a sustainable false identity. But now there were other alternatives and new methods for Directorate S as it began a renewed drive to spy on the West under Vladimir Putin. It could take advantage of the new openness of the West to Russians since the end of the Cold War. It had become far easier for students and businesspeople to come over. So one answer was to use people who no longer posed as someone else. Instead they would use their true names and real documents. These were called True Name or Special Agent Illegals by the FBI. Enter Anna. “She wasn’t hiding what her name was—she wasn’t hiding that she was Russian. What she was hiding was that she was working for the Russian Intelligence Service,” says Maria Ricci. How did she get spotted by the SVR? That is not hard to work out. Alex Chapman would realize that the girl he had met had an interesting family.

  The couple’s honeymoon in the summer of 2002 was a long and unusual one. First two weeks in Egypt and then six in Zimbabwe. The latter was because Anna’s father was based there. Anna’s mother had decided she liked Alex, but when her father met him for the first time in Zimbabwe he was suspicious. Alex found him intimidating with his piercing eyes. The father relaxed a little when they went camping. He wanted to know what Alex would do to provide for his daughter. Her father was officially a high-ranking Russian diplomat, but he drove around in a blacked-out four-by-four with one car in front and another behind, more security than other diplomats. Only later would Anna eventually reveal the truth—Alex’s father-in-law was a high-ranking KGB and now SVR officer. She clearly idolized him. “Her father controlled everything in her life,” Alex Chapman later said. “I felt like she would have done anything for her dad.” The honeymoon was action packed—skydiving, boats, a plane ride over Victoria Falls, and a safari. They returned to London
and rented an apartment. Strangely, Alex then became a director of a company that transferred money from the United Kingdom to Zimbabwe.

  For the next two years, Anna went back and forth to Moscow to finish her master’s degree, graduating with first-class honors in 2004. She was clearly smart. But the marriage lasted only two and a half years. Anna was the one to break it up. Something changed. Already by late 2003, she was attending dinner dances at the Ritz—dancing, one person would remember, with a wealthy Texas businessman in his sixties. “There were lots of women there, but she stood out. She was wearing an incredible red dress,” a lawyer later told a newspaper. The lawyer managed to get her phone number and took her out to dinner at upscale restaurants. “Anna had seductive charm,” he said. “She was quite simply gorgeous. I didn’t fall in love with her, but my God she had the magic.”

  Alex watched helplessly as his marriage fell apart. “There was such a dramatic change in the way she thought and the way she went about things. I felt I hardly knew her anymore,” Chapman said later. “It was like someone having a midlife crisis, but in their 20s. She would arrange to go out but when I said I would join her she told me not to bother because they would all be speaking Russian. She was adamant I wasn’t to meet them. She had never been materialistic during the years we were together, but in 2005 and 2006 after she started having these meetings with people she referred to as ‘Russian friends,’ she was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting.”

  These were the years when the British capital came to be known as Londongrad. From the 1990s, a wealthy Russian community had embedded itself in London life. Some oligarchs and businessmen had left Russia for good, but many just used London for a brief escape. It was a short plane ride; the visa regime was permissive and there were plenty of places for a wife to shop while a business deal was done. And there was the fact that the city of London was the number one destination of choice for dirty money around the world. There was plenty of it flowing out of Russia. Hundreds of billions of pounds of criminal money is laundered through British banks each year, aided by a regime of “light touch regulation.” Some estimates put the amount of Russian money coming to the United Kingdom as 100 billion pounds over the last twenty years. Money bought influence and the existence of a large Russian community provided new opportunities for Russian intelligence to operate. They also had little to worry about from the authorities in those years. One MI6 officer was astonished when he discovered that the phone line of the SVR residence in London was no longer monitored 24/7. And after 9/11, Russia dipped even lower down the priority list. The resources directed against counterespionage in MI5 plummeted to just 11 percent of its budget in 2003–2004, its head acknowledging “significant risks” were being taken as a result. One man who could see what was happening was Alexander Litvinenko. After he had arrived in the United Kingdom, he was interviewed by MI5 and MI6. One thing he warned them was that he could see the Russian organized crime world he had tracked as an FSB officer in the 1990s was now exporting its work into London.

  Anna Chapman was part of a new type of espionage that took advantage of the West’s and especially the United Kingdom’s openness to those coming over in a way that would not have been possible in the Cold War. Russia was once again building up its espionage capability—both new and old. Soon after Putin took power, spy fever at home was twinned with more aggressive spying abroad, particularly in Europe and the United States. The SVR was given a direct order from Putin to step up its work. One report said the number of SVR officers operating out of London rose from a lonely single individual in 1991 to thirty-three by 2002. By 2005, MI5 was warning that there were at least thirty Russian spies under diplomatic cover. Soon the number would exceed that seen at the end of the Cold War. Some of those spies (who make up more than a third of embassy staff) were carrying out traditional intelligence work, spotting and slowly cultivating agents with access to secrets (always avoiding phone calls, and perhaps with a traveling illegal meeting them abroad in Cyprus or Austria if they are recruited). But there were changes as well—like spying on exiles who had set up home in London. Watching these individuals became the new priority for Russian spies abroad. The Kremlin was convinced that émigrés—like Berezovsky—were plotting campaigns of subversion within Russia and they needed to be monitored—and perhaps dealt with. In London, arch-critics of Putin mixed with those who supported the regime or who had more ambiguous relationships—creating both the desire and opportunities for spies to watch what was happening. And Moscow’s spies found it easy to operate. Sometimes one would be under surveillance from A4—MI5’s watchers—but it would later become clear the Russians had known it and were actually watching the watchers, observing their tactics and procedures so that when the need arose they could go dark and avoid surveillance. “It was our C team against their A team,” is how one senior British counterespionage official remembers it. And now London was full of Russian businessmen and young Russian women. The days of being able to follow a few Russian diplomats around and feel like you had a handle on potential espionage activities were long gone. How did you know who the spies were when there were so many Russians among you?

  AFTER SPLITTING WITH Alex, money was initially tight for Anna. She worked at a branch of Barclays Bank and moved into a small apartment with a young woman from Belarus. “My dream was to go to London and find a rich husband,” that friend later told a journalist. “Anna taught me how to be hard-nosed about these things. She would go and talk to a man if she thought he was useful.” The friend remembers a succession of men surrounding Anna. “Whenever she met a man who interested her, she would always get his phone number, always, it was amazing. I took her to church once, and at the end she even got the number of the priest!” Anna started a series of jobs that placed her in the fast set of London business and life, like one for a company selling private planes to companies and individuals in Russia. She threw herself into the new world of the international jet set who had made London their home and began attending film premieres and society parties.

  In 2005, Nicholas Camilleri, who ran a hedge fun called Navigator, was introduced to Anna Chapman by a London socialite at the restaurant Cipriani. Anna was looking for a new job and she became his assistant. “She was very beautiful,” he recalls. “She got along well with people and people liked her.” She would accompany him as part of his entourage as they hit the party scene for the next year. He took her to places like Annabel’s—long the hangout for minor royalty, Euro-trash, and assorted hangers-on. She got herself close to a number of well-connected international socialites and a friend would later claim she had been specifically attending Boujis nightclub to meet Princes William and Harry, who partied there, although Camilleri is skeptical of such a possibility. Next came a relationship with a Frenchman and the chance to move into his flat just off the King’s Road in Chelsea—the other side of the city, literally and metaphorically, from the small flat she used to share with Alex in Stoke Newington. By 2006, she was on the committee organizing the 235-pounds-a-ticket, white-tie, Russian-themed War and Peace Ball at the Dorchester. The patrons included a long list of European aristocrats. Attendees included the Russian ambassador as well as minor European royalty.

  Camilleri remembers that one of his contacts in particular took an interest in the young Russian woman. Camilleri introduced Boris Berezovsky to Chapman one night. “She latched on to him,” he recalls. “He took quite a fancy to her.” Berezovsky would send his car across Mayfair to pick her up for lunch regularly. She would then come back to the Navigator office and repeat all the not very complimentary things the exiled oligarch had said about Putin. Berezovsky’s political asylum in the United Kingdom rankled the Kremlin. Putin saw his presence as part of a conspiracy. Berezovsky would later boast that he was seeking regime change and had supported opposition groups in places like Ukraine (partly through his nongovernmental organizations) as a way of leveraging change into Ru
ssia. The Kremlin—perhaps unsurprisingly, since Berezovsky was allowed to operate in London—saw this all as something encouraged or supported by Western intelligence agencies.

  So what led Chapman to be close to Putin’s arch-critic? Wealth and power? Or orders from the center? The crucial question is when Anna Chapman became Special Agent Chapman. Camilleri doubts she was working as a spy during the time he knew her. But her ex-husband, Alex, would later claim that he suspected his wife had been “conditioned” by Russians in the United Kingdom at the time their marriage was disintegrating. He said she started to have “secretive meetings” with Russian friends and began to change. It is possible that this was the familiar story of a carefree girl becoming someone more interested in money and social climbing, who was then recruited by the Russian intelligence service. When FBI officials looked back over her trajectory, some think that she had already been recruited when she came to the United Kingdom and that her time there had been to legitimize herself and build her cover. In this way at least, it would be similar to the way Donald Heathfield had built his identity and cover in Canada and France before entering the United States. Others in the United Kingdom, though, believe she was recruited by the SVR in the years she was living in London, perhaps during her regular trips back to Moscow.