What was the most difficult emotional experience in departing for a new life? The farewells to parents were hard (there was a cover story of going to Australia). But the real fear was never returning. “There was a possibility we would never come back. We even contemplated the possibility of dying there,” Vavilova later said. “Strangers in a strange land, under alias.” Bezrukov was haunted by the thought of the Canadian cemetery his false identity had been born in and the fear he might be buried far away from Mother Russia. The tombstone would simply read “Donald Heathfield.” If you were an illegal, even your death would be a lie. That was the life the young couple had committed to as they set out.
THE MONUMENT WAS at a picturesque site in Canada, although neither the man nor the woman who met each other there will say precisely where it was. The pair were playing at being tourists and strangers. The woman walked down the steps. She stopped for a moment looking for something in her handbag. The man happened to be standing in front of her. In these situations, a camera could be your best weapon. “Good morning. May I take your picture? You look so good in the sunlight,” the man said. Yes, she replied, and they began to talk. It seemed like a chance encounter but, in reality, it was the opening scene in a movie whose script had already been written. As their legend would have it, this was where the pair’s romance began. But the truth was they were not strangers. Rather they were already a married couple. The encounter at the monument was the cover story for where and how Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley first met and how their relationship began.
THE PAIR HAD arrived separately in Canada in 1987, the Cold War still under way. There was excitement at the chance to prove themselves but also fear. The initial journey to a target country was a moment of high risk. There had to be no chance you could be traced back to Russia. So a journey might go first to Eastern Europe, and then to Cyprus, to the Middle East, to Asia, and finally to Canada, at each stage a different set of documents used and then discarded. For Ann Foley, the final entry into Canada was the moment of greatest fear. “You also have to keep your emotions in check, keep calm, not show you are flustered or afraid,” she later recalled. There should be no sudden movements or looking around. But she had nothing to worry about. The Canadian authorities still do not know what identity the pair arrived under or even the date they came into the country. Once the disposable identities had been tossed away, the illegals switched to their new settled identities. First they had to meet and then melt into their target society. Canada was a long-established stepping-off point (the “host” country in the center’s terminology) to prepare to reach the “target country.” At least four of the eleven ghosts who would be the target of the 2010 arrests would have some kind of Canadian documentation. Canada was the ideal launching pad for illegals into America. The culture and language allowed an illegal to acclimatize and build up their identity while border and document checks were largely ineffective. “Canada is a lot like the US, only colder and with fewer people,” a KGB officer explained to one illegal in the 1970s.
Heathfield and Foley’s mission was long-term penetration of the “main enemy.” But what is staggering is that they would spend more than a decade building up their cover before they actually went to live in the United States. That was how long Moscow Center was willing to wait. There was occasionally contact with Moscow Center as orders and money were sent, but their main job was to forget Russia and immerse themselves in Canada. Vavilova would observe other young women whom she saw on the street or met and then try to copy their gestures or their style of conversation. A job was vital partly as it started you on a career that would lead to contacts but also because you needed to explain where your money came from. Some illegals started a business (with money from Moscow); Heathfield had little help though. “I had to get an education again, look for work, create a business … without anyone’s help and with minimal resources,” he later said. In Montreal, Foley enrolled in a course at the Computer Institute of Canada and took a job in accounting at a garment factory. Heathfield worked in accounts at a Honda dealership. It just about covered the bills. They were tough years with long hours, the hard graft of being an illegal. They moved to Toronto and on June 27, 1990, they had their first son, Timothy.
“Every undercover agents’ family have to decide, whether to have children at all,” Foley would later say. “This is a difficult decision to take.” You were bringing a child into the world whose family was living a lie. This was a heavy responsibility and some illegals decided against it. “We carefully weighed this, of course, discussed a lot,” she later said, acknowledging that “our leaders also had concerns.” But it was something the couple had always wanted. They also knew that from the outside, they would look more “normal” if they had children. Even the act of childbirth has risks. In the famous drama about illegals, Seventeen Moments of Spring, an illegal gives away her identity by crying out in pain while giving birth. The problem was she had done it in Russian. When it came to her time, Vavilova as Ann Foley took extensive precautions, attending prenatal classes to learn how best to control herself. She refused anesthetics to keep a clear mind and made sure her husband was present in case anything went wrong.
The summer after the birth of their first child, the couple watched the coup in Moscow and then the collapse of the Soviet Union. The regime they had sworn an oath to was gone. Suddenly, they were on their own. But where some illegals may have given up, Heathfield and Foley did not. It was a “painful period,” Heathfield later acknowledged. “We could not receive support from the Center. We had to fend for our ourselves and cover all our expenses,” recalled Foley. A sense of patriotism endured even as the ideology they had sworn an oath to vanished. But there was also a sense of jeopardy, the knowledge that chaos in Russia risked their exposure. The end of the Soviet Union did not mean the end of the illegals or the desire of its intelligence services to spy on the West, though. Far from it. It was soon clear that the game went on.
A YOUNG COUPLE approached the immigration officer in Helsinki airport on April 23, 1992, and showed their British passports. The man’s name was James Tristan Peatfield, from Surrey. She was Anna Marie Nemeth, from Wembley. But the immigration officer was suspicious. They seemed nervous. They had just got off a flight from Moscow but only had hand luggage and did not speak very good English. Who had won the British general election a few days earlier? They did not know. When their bag was searched, around $30,000 in cash was found inside an old shirt as well as a shortwave radio. Nemeth had some story about having been in Canada and working in an advertising agency. That was news to the real Anna Nemeth, who worked at a suburban Sainsbury’s supermarket and was left bewildered when police arrived at her door. She had visited Hungary four years earlier, when her passport details must have been copied. She had never met the real Mr. Peatfield, who was from Coulsdon in Surrey. The couple at the airport next offered a cover story that they were trying to emigrate illegally and had purchased passports on the black market with money from selling women’s underwear. Having such a cover story at the ready—usually involving some murky criminality—is standard practice for an emergency situation. The British intelligence officers who interrogated them in Helsinki had some hope that the woman might admit the truth, but she never did. The pair were deported to Moscow. They were illegals who had used the British identities of “live doubles” on a training mission and their failure was subject to a detailed review back in Directorate S. What it told the West was that the flow of illegals had not halted despite the end of the KGB.
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