The GRU took treachery seriously. There were claims that recruits were shown a film of one traitor being pushed into a furnace and burned alive. It was the one part of the Soviet Intelligence apparatus that did not change in name or culture as the Soviet Union became Russia. It included special forces and its own illegals whose job was to prepare for sabotage in the event of war. Caches of weapons were left ready (the West did something similar in Western European nations in case they were overrun). The GRU also had officers stationed under diplomatic cover in embassies, collecting information on military intentions and technology, including by recruiting agents. Skripal’s role, after graduating from the Diplomatic Military Academy, was in its First Directorate, which focused on Europe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had ended up in Madrid. And by the end of his time there he had acquired an MI6 code name: Forthwith.
How important was he as an agent? Opinions differ. In the late 1990s, the customers of MI6—the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence—were primarily interested in political developments in Russia and details of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But what Skripal could offer was largely counterintelligence—details of the GRU and its operatives. This was of niche value, although for those interested in it, Skripal was an excellent source. His cooperation was erratic rather than regular. He was not classed as a full-fledged, recruited agent when he left Madrid and no one was sure his cooperation would continue when he returned to Moscow. But it would. And his new, senior role in the personnel department meant he was able to identify hundreds of GRU officers operating under diplomatic cover overseas, whose details MI6 could then pass on to other countries.
By the start of 2000, Skripal and Poteyev were both in Moscow, providing intelligence from inside their own spy agencies. The actual recruiting of a Russian spy on their home territory of Moscow itself is almost impossible. The slow cultivation of a relationship and the careful conversations required to sound someone out would almost certainly be spotted by the vast counterintelligence machinery. But if you have managed it overseas—like with Poteyev in New York or Skripal in Madrid—then it may be possible to run them back in Russia. But only one of this pair would escape capture. With Poteyev in Directorate S, US intelligence had scored a stunning coup. They had opened up a window right into the heart of the most secretive part of their adversary’s operations against them. As long as they had their source in place, they would be able to track illegals operating in the United States.
BUT THE RUSSIA that Poteyev had returned to after his time in New York was about to change. After the chaos of the 1990s, a new power was rising in the form of a former KGB officer who had traitors in his sights. The United States had its window into the illegals program. But how long would it last?
RIFLING THROUGH SOMEONE else’s safety deposit box is the province of two kinds of people—thieves and FBI agents. On January 23, 2001, the latter were at work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the leafy home of Harvard University. They were covertly searching through the personal items of one of the university’s recent graduates. They were there because, thanks to their source in Moscow, they believed the owner was a Russian illegal. Inside they found a birth certificate. It was for a Donald Howard Graham Heathfield. They snapped a photo and quickly returned it. It would take another four years for another piece of the puzzle to fit alongside the birth certificate. “Suddenly but peacefully,” Howard William Heathfield died at his home in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, June 23, aged seventy, a 2005 death notice in the Canadian press read. “Howie” left behind a wife, three children, two grandchildren, and two dogs, called MacGyver and Holly. There had also been a son, Donald. But Donald had predeceased Howard. Although the middle name was different, both the death announcement and the birth certificate listed the mother’s name as Shirley. Donald Heathfield was not who he said he was.
Investigating illegals—like being one—required patience and attention to detail. Inside the safety deposit box, there were also photographs of Heathfield’s wife, Ann Foley, when she was younger. Many people have their memory boxes—the keepsakes, photos, and letters to recollect an earlier life. But for an illegal to do so was dangerous since it was, almost literally, another life. It was a security lapse. Perhaps Foley needed something to cling to in order to remind her who she really was. Not Ann Foley the Canadian, but Elena Vavilova, the Russian from Tomsk. But she had made a mistake. Surviving as an illegal is all about details—tiny details. And Foley and Moscow Center had missed one. Stamped on the negatives was the name of the company that had produced the film. It was called TACMA—a Soviet film company. It was another piece of crucial evidence for the FBI as the investigation got under way.
It is a mistake to describe the illegals arrested in 2010 as a “spy ring” or network. That implies they were one group working together. The reality was that they were sent out in pairs or individually at different times—some deep in the Cold War, others toward its end, and some after it was over. They would have been aware there were other illegals in the country, but for reasons of security they would not know who they all were. The SVR would not want the discovery of one illegal to allow the FBI to find the others by following them. But for the FBI, this was not a case of finding one illegal and then following them to another. Thanks to Poteyev, their source in Moscow, they knew who was in the United States and who was coming.
The first act that the FBI monitored had come a year before the safety deposit box. On January 14, 2000, Vicky Pelaez made a trip from New York to her native Peru. There she met a Russian official in a public park. She was given a bag. Inside was money from the SVR. What she did not know was that two FBI agents were videotaping the whole show. Once that was done, she called her house in Yonkers, New York. The FBI were also listening in on the line. “All went well,” she told Juan Lazaro. Vicky Pelaez was neither Russian nor an illegal but she was married to someone who was both. And she has always maintained she did not know her husband was a KGB illegal whose career had begun deep in the Cold War.
PELAEZ WAS A dark-haired, charismatic Peruvian. She was not a trained spy and her marriage was not arranged by Moscow Center. And rather than keep a low profile, she had lived a life marked by drama, controversy, and an outspokenness that did little to hide her political views. Born in 1956, Pelaez had studied journalism and became one of the first female reporters in Peru, working first for newspapers and then TV. Stylish and brave, she broke down barriers and challenged the stuffy style of traditional news. She quickly built a reputation as a gritty journalist, unafraid to take risks, and knew how to insert herself into a story, slipping behind police cordons and getting herself into places she was not supposed to be. The country was beset by political violence, and in 1984, she had the kind of brush with danger that can make a reporter’s name. Pelaez and her cameraman were kidnapped outside their TV station’s office in Lima by the revolutionary group Tupac Amaru. They were blindfolded and driven away. The group demanded that Pelaez’s TV channel broadcast a propaganda video that was left in a garbage can in return for the pair’s release. A few hours after the channel broadcast the clip, in which armed and hooded rebels accused the government of torture, the two were freed. When she returned to the newsroom, she encountered distrust from some of her colleagues. Soon after, she left Peru and came to the United States in 1985 on a visa as a political refugee because she was worried about possible threats from rebels.
She left for America with a new husband. Her first marriage, when she was just seventeen, was to Waldo Marsical and they had a son named after him. But the marriage did not last.