The real Juan Lazaro was a toddler who had died aged three of respiratory failure in 1947, his mother crying whenever she talked about him in the years after. The fake one was another Russian dead double. His real name was Mikhail A. Vasenkov. Little is known of his early life but he is thought to have been born in Moscow in 1942. He left home young, leaving a brother behind whom he would not see again. Nor would he be there when his parents died. He had been selected for the KGB’s Directorate S, deep in the Cold War. Once his training was complete, he was sent out on assignment. He had come to Peru, sporting a decent-size mustache, on March 13, 1976, on a Uruguayan passport in the name of Juan Lazaro Fuentes. Spain had been his stop-off point to build the legend. After three months there he had flown from Madrid to Lima, with a forged letter on the stationery of a Spanish tobacco company saying he was coming to the country to carry out a market survey. Two years later he used his passport and a fake birth certificate saying he had been born in Montevideo in Uruguay on September 6, 1943, to request Peruvian citizenship, which he received in 1979. He said he was Uruguayan, but a lot of people found the accent a little odd, more European than Latin American. He rarely spoke of his family.
Lazaro used his cover as a photographer to travel and carry out missions for the KGB. It gave him the ability to meet politicians and businessmen. These were people who might be recruited to become “agents of influence” for the Soviet Union—such an agent did not necessarily provide secrets but instead offered the ability to alter the course of events, small or large, to suit Moscow’s needs—perhaps a journalist spreading information or a businessman laundering money or a politician making decisions. Russian reports, whose accuracy is hard to judge, suggest his marriage to Pelaez was genuine (although possibly with KGB approval), and her move to the United States provided an opportunity for him to move his work there, a decision sanctioned by the KGB leadership. FBI officials, though, wonder if Lazaro’s target may always have been to go to the United States.
After they moved to the United States, the couple settled in New York and in a house on Clifton Avenue in Yonkers. Pelaez became a US citizen, Lazaro a legal resident. Pelaez resumed her career as a journalist, working first as a reporter and then a columnist for a New York–based Spanish-language newspaper. Her political views were left-wing. She saw herself as standing up to the powerful and speaking for the oppressed and was a critic of American foreign policy, especially in Latin America. In 1993, Juan Jr. was born. He would go on to be a talented pianist who earned a scholarship to a Manhattan arts school. He would play Chopin and Beethoven to audiences, his eyes closed as he seemed absorbed by the music. At a concert in Peru, his proud father was interviewed by an education consultant about how he raised a musical prodigy.
Lazaro was a teaching assistant at the New School in Manhattan from 1993 (eventually earning a doctorate). Later he would be hired as an adjunct professor at Baruch College to teach a class on Latin America and the Caribbean. Like his wife, he seems to have done surprisingly little to hide his politics. Students remember his strident denunciations of US foreign policy. He praised Hugo Chávez, the populist left-wing leader of Venezuela, and attacked the invasion of Iraq as driven by corporate profit seeking.
What did Pelaez know of her husband’s identity and spy work? She always maintained she was not a spy and did not know her husband was a Russian illegal. The evidence produced by the FBI, though, suggests she was involved in clandestine behavior. From at least 2000, the FBI was on to the pair. A bugged conversation in the house on February 20, 2002, suggested Pelaez had just returned from Latin America and the couple talked about money she had brought back. A year later, they discussed whether they would have $72,500 or $76,000 after accounting for their expenses following another trip. The bug picked up a conversation on April 17, 2002, in which Lazaro described his childhood to Pelaez. At one point he said, “We moved to Siberia … as soon as the war started.” If he had been born in Uruguay, why was he brought up in Siberia? It is possible she thought his Latin American communist parents had lived in Russia. Or perhaps, as some FBI officials think, she knew more than she was letting on.
The trips to South America had another purpose as well as collecting money. They were a way of passing covert messages to Russian officials. And they were using one of the most old-fashioned pieces of spy tradecraft. In January 2003, shortly before a trip Pelaez was taking, the bugs in their house captured a conversation between her and Lazaro. He explained he was going to write in “invisible” and she was going to “pass them all of that in a book.”
Invisible ink goes back hundreds of years but was still being used by Lazaro to send some of his intelligence reports. The FBI would find pads of papers embedded with specially treated chemicals in their house. An illegal would write a normal-sounding letter to a fictitious friend. Then they would take a sheet of contact paper—almost like carbon paper—and place it over the letter and use a pencil to add a message onto the letter that could not be seen. They would have to carefully destroy the extra papers and mail the letter off to a foreign address—perhaps in Colombia or Austria—or deliver it by hand (as Pelaez seems to have been doing). A Line N officer would receive it and send it to Moscow, where the paper was developed and message decrypted. The whole process was time consuming and slow. But in the digital age, it can be particularly useful since it leaves no electronic trail for investigators to follow.
Communications back to home base are the most difficult and risky part of any spy’s work. The whole point of anyone operating undercover is that there should be as little as possible to tie them to their real controllers. If any evidence of contact is discovered, it is highly incriminating. But at the same time, instructions need to flow one way and intelligence back the other. Throughout history there have been many ways spies have sought to manage this process and minimize the risk, from face-to-face meetings to carrier pigeons. In order to preserve their secrecy, illegals were supposed to communicate directly with Moscow Center rather than through officers operating out of the SVR residency in their embassy.
Lazaro was the oldest of the illegals active in the United States. He had been trained in an era long before the internet or digital communications and so used the most old-fashioned techniques—like invisible ink and mailing letters. One counterintelligence official likens illegals to satellites launched out into space. They are sent out with what is state-of-the-art technology at the time, but they then have to keep using that for decades while they operate. Bringing them back home for training on an entirely new system is not something that can easily be done since it would take so long as to potentially jeopardize their cover. In this way, Juan Lazaro’s communications techniques were the most dated of the group, since he had been launched back in the Cold War, pre-digital, pre-internet era. “He was old school,” says one FBI officer.
The bug in Pelaez and Lazaro’s house also picked up an odd irregular clicking sound on a number of occasions. This, the FBI realized, was linked to the receipt of coded radio messages coming in from Moscow Center. On November 23, 2002, a bug captured Lazaro reading out loud as he composed a lengthy radiogram to Moscow Center about the conflict in Chechnya. Radiograms are coded bursts of data that can be picked up by a commercial radio receiver. This is a classic decades-old communications technique for illegals—still used to this day and which leaves no digital trail.
Twice a week illegals tuned in and then used a one-time pad of seemingly random numbers that were then added to or subtracted from the digits in a message. The papers then had to be disposed of. One option was to fold them tight (like an accordion) and place them on something metal to burn them; another was to soak the paper in water and then rub it with your fingers until it broke up and flush what was left down the toilet. Illegals would spend hours hunched over their notepad, carefully transposing letters and numbers. But all that work was for a reason. As long as only