months later it was revealed that the number of Russian intelligence agents in the UK was at the same level as during the height of the Cold War, a piece of information that MI5 considered serious enough that it placed it on its website. ‘If a country, such as Russia or Iran, can steal a piece of software which will save it seven years in research and development then it will do so without any hesitation,’ a ‘Whitehall source’ said. ‘Russian agents will target anybody that they believe could be useful to them. Spying is hard-wired into the country’s DNA. They have been at it for centuries and they are simply not going to stop because the Cold War has ended.’ And it was clear that Britain wasn’t the only target.
The spy ring that was broken in America in 2010 was a gift to journalists, thanks to the involvement of future model and cover star Anna Chapman. It had all the ingredients of a classic spy thriller: sleeper agents planted a decade earlier in the heart of suburbia, a beautiful honey trap who got so close to a key member of President Obama’s cabinet that the FBI were forced to act, and a dramatic swap of agents at Vienna International Airport.
Ten Russian agents, including Chapman, were arrested on 27 June, 2010; an eleventh was detained two days later in Cyprus on his way to Budapest; two further members of the ring escaped back to Russia. In the indictment laid against the agents, the FBI included the instructions that the SVR had given the sleepers: ‘You were sent to [the] USA for [a] long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill [
The FBI had been running the operation to catch them — Operation Ghost Stories — for many years. Documents that have been released on the FBI’s website, although heavily redacted, indicate that the ring was under surveillance as far back as 2002 and provided copious amounts of video evidence against them showing them using dead drops, ‘brush past’ exchanges of information with Russian officials and other elements of tradecraft. The Russians had in some cases taken the identities of American citizens and built a complete cover for themselves, including enrolling and graduating from universities and joining professional organizations. They started families as part of their cover and even, according to one of the children, intended to recruit them to work for the FSB when the time was right.
Chapman was a recent addition to the spy ring, and was targeted by the FBI. However, she felt uncomfortable when, on 26 June, the fake SVR agent asked her to pass a counterfeit passport to another spy. She contacted her father, a former KGB officer, for advice; he told her not to carry out the instructions and hand the passport in at a police station. This she did the next day, and was arrested. This attempted entrapment by the FBI may have been a ploy to get stronger evidence against her. According to Bureau counter-intelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi: ‘We were becoming very concerned,’ he told a British Channel 4 documentary in 2012. ‘They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue.’ This was the first confirmation that Chapman was more competent than the original reports had indicated.
Even before the spy ring was arrested, preparations were in hand for a spy swap with the Russians. When the approach was made by the CIA, and the requisite faux protestations and denials had been made by the FSB, the details were quickly arranged. Chapman and the other Russians were exchanged for: Igor Sutyagin, convicted of passing details on submarines systems to the CIA; Sergei Skripal, a GRU colonel who had been working for MI6; SVR Colonel Alexander Zaporozhsky, sentenced to eighteen years for spying for the Americans in 2003; and Gennady Vasilenko, a former KGB officer who was, incorrectly, believed to be a double agent for the Americans, thanks to information supplied by Robert Hanssen. No evidence had been found against him, but he had been imprisoned on other charges. He was the only one who hadn’t committed treason against the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. According to some reports, he was included in the swap after a personal request from his former counterpart, CIA officer Jack Platt.
The returning spies were eventually hailed as heroes (once they’d been debriefed, and the SVR could be sure that they hadn’t been turned as double agents). Chapman now hosts a TV show and has made appearances in the Russian version of
The Chapman affair had a knock-on effect in Britain when MI5 believed that they had found another honey trap agent shortly after Chapman and her colleagues had been repatriated. Twenty-six-year-old Russian student Ekaterina Zatuliveter was arrested and told she would be deported as a risk to national security. This followed an investigation into her relationship with Portsmouth MP Mike Hancock, during which she had potential access to secret documents.
The evidence against her seemed strong. Either Zatuliveter had a penchant for men in positions of power, or there was something sinister in her choice of partners. Before her affair with Hancock, she had been involved with a Dutch diplomat. Then when she and Hancock went their separate ways, she dated both a NATO official (asking him about a meeting he’d attended with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), and a senior UN official.
Zatuliveter met Hancock when he visited St Petersburg University in 2006 and she eventually travelled to Britain to become his unpaid researcher at the House of Commons. MI5 suspected that she had been instructed by the SVR to seduce Hancock — who had a reputation for extra-marital affairs — to gain a pass to the building and knowledge of his work on various defence committees.
During a series of interviews with both MI5 and MI6, standard for any foreign national working in such a restricted area, Zatuliveter vehemently denied that she was in any way involved with the Russian secret service. When she was served with the deportation order, she determined to fight it, and appealed to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.
The case was heard in October 2011. It didn’t help that she had actually met with a known Russian agent during her affair with Hancock, although she claimed that she had no idea he really was a spy. She had also joked in an email that her affair with the NATO official had meant that half of NATO was disabled, and that the Kremlin were calling her with congratulations. However, although the Commission agreed that the Security Service had ‘ample grounds for suspicion’, they did not believe that they had proved their case, and in November 2011 Zatuliveter was allowed to stay in the UK. Nonetheless, she returned to Russia the following month.
It may not officially be called the Cold War any more, but it’s clear that the ‘Great Game’ between East and West is still very much alive. Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle was arrested in Canada for passing documents to the Russians from the Canadian navy intelligence centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 2012. A sixty-year-old German was arrested in Holland in May 2012, accused of passing 450 secret files to one of Anna Chapman’s former contacts. Former FSB colonel Valery Mikhailov was sentenced to eighteen years in prison on 6 June 2012 after passing papers to CIA officers in Moscow.
According to MI5’s website: ‘The threat of espionage (spying) did not end with the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. Espionage against UK interests continues and is widespread, insidious and potentially very damaging… The ultimate aim of our work is to make it as difficult as possible for foreign spies to operate against the UK.’
In February 2012, outgoing Russian President Dimitri Medvedev told the FSB that Russian counterintelligence exposed 199 foreign spies in 2011, proving that ‘activity of [foreign] intelligence services is not decreasing’.
The FBI agree:
Spies haven’t gone the way of the Cold War. Far from it. They’re more prolific than ever — and targeting our nation’s most valuable secrets. As the lead agency for exposing, preventing, and investigating intelligence activities on US soil, the FBI works to keep weapons of mass destruction and other embargoed technologies from falling into wrong hands, to protect critical national secrets and assets, and to strengthen the global threat picture
