Operation Ghost Stories

The illegals

In the criminal complaint of 27 June 2010 an FBI agent describes the targets of the investigation: covert SVR agents who assume false identities and are called illegals, as opposed to officers who operate abroad under their true names. They were to become sufficiently “Americanized” to gather information about the United States for Russia. The complaint refers to SVR headquarters as Moscow Center.⁴

According to the complaint, one of their tasks was to search for and develop ties in policymaking circles in the United States.⁴

The FBI describes them as deep-cover agents leading seemingly ordinary lives: they married, bought homes and raised children; some used stolen identities (see legend).¹

The investigation

The Department of Justice speaks of a multi-year investigation by the FBI, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Department's National Security Division. According to the complaint, the conspiracy ran from about the 1990s.^2,4

The complaint describes several methods of secret communication, including temporary wireless networks set up between two computers and software similar to that used to decrypt messages hidden by steganography.⁴

The material the FBI later released includes a 2004 photograph of Christopher Metsos carrying out a brush pass with an official of the Russian Mission in New York.¹

The arrests of 27 June 2010

Ten people were detained: “Richard” and “Cynthia Murphy” in Montclair (New Jersey), Vicky Peláez and “Juan Lazaro” in Yonkers, Anna Chapman in Manhattan, “Michael Zottoli”, “Patricia Mills” and Mikhail Semenko in Arlington (Virginia), and “Donald Howard Heathfield” and “Tracey Lee Ann Foley” in Boston. Two criminal complaints covered eleven people; the eleventh, “Christopher R. Metsos”, remained at large.²

All were charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the US Attorney General (up to five years in prison), and nine of them, all except Chapman and Semenko, also with conspiracy to commit money laundering (up to 20 years).²

Guilty pleas and transfer to Russia

On 8 July 2010, before Judge Kimba M. Wood in New York, all ten pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and were to be expelled immediately. The Department of Justice gave their true names: the “Murphys” were Vladimir and Lydia Guryev, “Zottoli” was Mikhail Kutsik, “Mills” Natalia Pereverzeva, “Heathfield” Andrey Bezrukov, “Foley” Elena Vavilova and “Lazaro” Mikhail Vasenkov; Peláez, Chapman and Semenko operated under their own names.³

The United States agreed to transfer them to Russia, and Russia to release four people imprisoned there. Attorney General Eric Holder called it an extraordinary case.³

According to media and secondary accounts · not confirmed by official sourcesAccording to NPR, the exchange took place on Friday 9 July 2010 at Vienna airport. Russia released Igor Sutyagin, Alexander Zaporozhsky, Sergei Skripal and Gennady Vasilenko, who had been pardoned by a decree of President Dmitry Medvedev. The Justice Department's letter to Judge Wood, as described by AP, did not name them; it said three of them had been convicted of treason in the form of espionage on behalf of a foreign power.^5,6

What the FBI revealed a year later

A year after the arrests the FBI released photographs, surveillance footage and documents from the case, dubbed Operation Ghost Stories. According to the FBI, the illegals did not obtain classified documents, but they were not idle: they gathered information, sent it to Russia and spotted and assessed potential sources (see recruitment).¹

As a historical example of Soviet recruitment of students, the FBI cites the Cambridge Five.¹