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Russian Illegals
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 On June 28, 2010, ten people were arrested in Massachusetts and Virginia accused of being part of a Russian espionage ring. The individuals were considered “illegal agents” because they were in the United States under non-official cover – being unregistered foreign agents – a violation of Title 18 USC Section 951. Some of the illegal agents moved to the United States in the 1990s, while others (such as Anna Chapman) did not arrive until 2009. Most of the illegal agents were provided with fake identities and even fake childhood photos and cover stories (part of what would be called a “legend”) in order to establish themselves in the United State under “deep cover.” The Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR) allegedly provided them with bank accounts, homes, cars and regular payments in order to facilitate “long-term service” where, according to the FBI criminal complaint, the individuals were supposed to “search [for] and develop ties in policymaking circles” in the United States. The criminal complaint provides evidence indicating that most of the operatives were being run out of the SVR residence at the U.N. mission.
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Counterintelligence
According to the FBI, the Russian illegal agents were under heavy surveillance by U.S. counterintelligence agents for ten years. Working out of Boston, New York, and Washington, the FBI employed its Special Surveillance Group to track suspects in person; place video and audio recorders in their homes and at meeting places to record communications; search their homes and safe-deposit boxes; intercept e-mail and electronic communications; and deploy undercover agents to entrap the suspects.
Counterintelligence operations don’t just materialize out of thin air. There has to be a tip or a clue that puts investigators on the trail of a suspected spy. Somebody must have seen or experienced something suspicious and alerted the FBI. All we know for sure is that someone said something.
See something?
Say something!
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We may never know how successful the illegal agents were in finding and developing ties in U.S. policymaking circles. The criminal complaint relates that they sent everything from information on the gold market from a financier in New York to seeking out potential college graduates headed for jobs at the CIA. The illegal agents were allegedly instructed by their handlers in the United States and Russia to not pursue high-level government jobs, since their legends were not strong enough to withstand a significant background investigation. But they were encouraged to make contact with high-level government officials, in order to have a finger on the pulse of policymaking in Washington.
Tradecraft
The criminal complaint alleges that the illegal agents used traditional spy tradecraft to communicate with each other and send reports to their handlers. The illegal agents allegedly transmitted messages to Moscow containing their reports encrypted in “radiograms” (short-burst radio transmissions that appear as Morse code) or written in invisible ink, and met in neutral countries for payments and briefings. They are also said to have used “brush passes” (the quick and discreet exchange of materials between one person and another) to transfer information, equipment and money. The criminal complaint also gives examples of the operatives using coded phrases with each other and with their operators to confirm each others’ identities.
An eleventh person was arrested in Cyprus but skipped bail after his arrest. A twelfth person, a Russian National, who had worked for Microsoft was also apprehended and deported on July 13, 2010.
In addition to the traditional tradecraft described in the criminal complaint, there are also new operational twists. Some of the illegal agents allegedly used e-mail to set up electronic dead drops to transmit encrypted intelligence reports to Moscow, and several operatives were said to have used steganography (embedding information in seemingly innocuous images) to hide messages. Chapman and Semenko allegedly employed private wireless networks (Wi-Fi) hosted by a laptop programmed to communicate only with another specific laptop. The FBI claims to have identified their ad-hoc wireless network that had been temporarily set up when the suspect was in proximity to a known Russian diplomat. These electronic meetings occurred frequently, according to the FBI, and allowed operatives and their operators to communicate covertly without actually being seen together.
It is important to note that the accused individuals were not charged with espionage; the charge of acting as an undeclared agent of a foreign state is less serious. The criminal complaint never alleges that classifie information was received or transmitted. This doesn’t mean that the suspects weren’t committing espionage. According to the criminal complaint, their original guidance from Moscow was to establish deep cover. This meanthat they would have been tasked with positioning themselves over time in order gain access to valuable information (it is important to point out that “valuable” is not synonymous with “classified”) through their established occupations or social lives. This allows agents to gain access to what they want without running unnecessary security risks.
In July 2010, an agreement was reached with the Russian Federation under which the ten Russian illegal agents would be deported to Russia in exchange for four individuals who had been convicted of espionage in Russia. The agreement led the Russian agents to all quickly plead guilty of being unregistered foreign agents, allowing the United States government to avoid a series of protracted trials in which sensitive information about intelligence and surveillance techniques could be exposed. All four persons the United States received in the swap had served a considerable time in Russian prisons; at least 3 of the jailed individuals in Russia had beenconvicted of spying for either the United Kingdom or the United States.
SOURCES:
2. What is steganography?
4. Which two Russian agents used their true names?
5. What were the Russian agents tasked to do for the SVR?
Yes! Many of the Russian agents had been living in the U.S. since the 1990s doing menial work for the Russian intelligence service until they were needed for something bigger.
Sorry, wrong answer. There is no generic codeword for Russian spy rings. Please try again.
Not exactly. However, Col. Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer who defected to Great Britain in 1985, made reference to Cold War-era KGB documents that detailed the locations of hidden weapons and equipment caches which had been placed in Western Europe and the United States to supply KGB sabotage teams that would take action against Western countries in the event of war.
Incorrect. However, Russian GRU defector Stanislav Lunev said in his autobiography published in 1998 that “the GRU and the KGB helped to fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad, and that during the Vietnam War the USSR gave $1 billion to American anti-war movements, more than it gave to the VietCong.”
Ye! Steganography (literally meaning covered writing) dates back to ancient Greece, where common practices consisted of etching secret messages in wooden tablets and covering them with wax. Another known method was tattooing a shaved messenger's head, letting his hair grow back, then shaving it again when he arrived at his contact point. In modern times, steganography uses special software to hide information inside audio, video, and image files.
Hmmm, not the best answer. Steganography can use encrypted information but it is typically used when encryption is not available.
No, but several kinds of invisible inks were used by both sides during the Revolutionary War. One type was activated with heat and others by various chemicals. The invisible message was usually written between the lines of another letter, which would appear to be totally innocent. Upon receipt, the reader would either heat the letter over a flame or put it into a chemical bath to reveal the hidden message.
Sorry, but this is not steganography. However, the Russian agents were observed communicating with their Russian handlers using private Wi-Fi networks. Anna Chapman was seen sitting in a Manhattan coffee shop in January 2010 and used a laptop to transfer data to a Russian government official as he passed by in a people-carrier. At another time, Chapman pulled a laptop out of her bag while in a Manhattan book shop. Meanwhile, a Russian government official was spotted
Not the best answer. Dead drops are secret locations known only to the spy and his or her handler. It is used for the clandestine exchange of intelligence information; a dead drop avoids the need for an intelligence officer and a spy to be present at the same time. In his last dead drop, Robert Hanssen, an FBI special agent who spied for Russia, placed a white piece of tape on a park sign--this was a signal to his Russian handler that there was information at the pre-defined dead drop. He then placed a sealed garbage bag full of classified material and taped it to the bottom side of a wooden footbridge over a creek.
Sorry, but this is not the correct answer. However, foreign intelligence services have been known to sponsor malicious software to break into computers and networks to exfiltrate information.
Yes! Among other things, the handler tells the spy what information to collect and how to exfiltrate it out of the host country.
Not exactly, but here is more information. Burst transmissions are a subset of radio transmissions, where the entire message is sped up to the point where listeners can no longer recognize it as human speech. Additionally, at the faster speed, those transmitting the message get off the air so fast that anyone listening to them can’t fix their position. Once the intended target receives the message, they can slow it down and listen to it at normal speed. Mikhail Kutsik and Nataliya Pereverzeva (Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills) received specially coded radio transmissions from their high-rise Seattle apartment, and the FBI secretly entered their home where they found random numbers used to decode the transmissions.
No, Richard and Cynthia Murphy were Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev. They were arrested at their home in Montclair, New Jersey. They have two young daughters, aged 11 and 9 at the time of their parents’ arrest. Vladimir Guriyev used a false birth certificate that claimed he had been born in Philadelphia, while his wife said that she had been born in New York City as “Cynthia A. Hopkins.” The two had earlier lived in an apartment in Hoboken since arriving in the United States in the mid-1990s. They then purchased a suburban Montclair home for $481,000 in 2008. When they purchased it, the couple argued with their handlers as to who would officially own the house, with the ultimate decision being that it would be owned by “Moscow Center.”
No, Juan Lazaro was actually Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov. Vasenkov confessed to being a spy and admitted that “Juan Lazaro” was not his real name. He additionally stated he was not originally born in Uruguay, and that Vicky Peláez (her real name) had delivered letters to Russian authorities on his behalf. Peláez had been a television reporter in Peru and a columnist at El Diario La Prensa in New York City at the time of her arrest. In her writings, Peláez was often critical of U.S. policy in Latin America and had supported liberation movements in those countries. Vasenkov and Peláez have a son together.
Correct! Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko both used their true names. An undercover FBI agent attempted to draw Anna Chapman into a trap at a Manhattan coffee shop to assess her ties to Russian spies. The FBI agent offered Chapman a fake passport with the instructions to forward it to another Russian spy. He asked, “are you ready for this step?” to which Chapman unequivocally replied, “of course.” She accepted the passport. However, after making a series of phone calls to her father, Vasily Kushchenko, a Russian diplomat and possibly a former KGB official, Chapman ended up heeding her father's advice and handed the passport in at a local police station, but was arrested shortly after.
Semenko was first noted by the FBI when he used a computer in a restaurant to send encrypted messages presumably to a car parked in the restaurant lot that had Russian diplomatic plates driven by a Russian official who was known to have transferred money to other Russian sleeper agents in 2004. Shortly before his arrest, Semenko met with an undercover FBI agent purporting to be a Russian agent and accepted $5,000, which he delivered to a drop site. Chapman and Semenko were not a couple.
No, Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills were actually Mikhail Kutsik and Nataliya Pereverzeva. Kutsik claimed to be American but had a thick accent, and Pereverzeva claimed to be Canadian, but neighbors said she sounded Yugoslavian. They lived in the Seattle, Washington, area for about two years, and both attended the University of Washington, Bothell, where they earned bachelor's degrees in business. Kutsik worked for several different jobs over the years including a telecom company accountant, car salesman and teleconference firm employee. Pereverzeva was a stay-at-home mom who cared for their two young sons. After Kutsik lost his job in 2009, they moved with their children to Arlington, Virginia, later that year. After their parents were arrested, arrangements were made to send the children to Russia.
Correct! They were to develop tis within U.S. policy making circles, whil appearing to live normal lives.
No, there was no evidence that the Russian illegals were tasked to disseminate pro- Russian propaganda. It was reported, however, that Vicky Peláez was often critical of U.S. policy in Latin America and had supported liberation movements in those countries.
Sorry, wrong answer. The Russian intelligence service allegedly instructed them to not seek jobs that required a background investigation since their legends were not strong enough to stand up to that kind of scrutiny.
This is not the best answer. Their Russian handlers did not want them to risk being caught seeking U.S. national defense information since they were in the U.S. under deep cover.
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