/ 30 June 2010

How Russian spies infiltrated suburban America

Carefully-crafted American normality shattered with the arrest of 11 people on charges of being part of deep cover espionage ring.

The hip and friendly young man with the brunette girlfriend in the front seat as he whipped around Washington in a top-end Mercedes-Benz attracted more envy than suspicion.

A few hundred kilometres away, in a tree-lined, middle-class New Jersey suburb that is home to one of America’s most famous comedians, residents equally saw little to worry about in the unremarkable couple with two young daughters, although they did register the cars cruising by taking pictures.

And the fiery Latin American newspaper columnist drew more amusement than scrutiny for her repeated praise of Fidel Castro.

So it was from Virginia to Boston, and from New York to Seattle: married couples with families, young get-ahead professionals, even noisy anti-government agitators — all seemingly unremarkable in the American mix. Even the accents did not raise eyebrows in a country of immigrants.

But the carefully-crafted American normality, sometimes built over a decade or more, has been shattered with the arrest of 11 people — including eight who claimed to be married couples — on charges of being part of a long-term, deep cover espionage ring run by the Russian intelligence service.

Some of the accused assumed false names and backgrounds — in one case stealing the identity of a dead Canadian. Others lived openly under their real names, but allegedly maintained a double life controlled by Moscow.

Deep cover
The FBI has so far failed to reveal just what kind of intelligence these alleged deep cover agents were passing on, and while the indictments carry a hint that they may not have been very successful spies, their neighbours were invariably astonished to hear the accusations.

“It’s not the Cold War anymore, so I’m surprised to hear we’re arresting Russians,” said Celest Allred of Arlington, on being told that her neighbour Mikhail Semenko had been detained by the FBI. “Not what you expect to find out about your neighbour.”

But that, of course, was the key.

“I guess if I were a spy I would want to live in a place like this too,” said Will Lewis, another neighbour.

Perhaps nowhere gave better cover than the town of Montclair, set in New Jersey’s urban sprawl. Richard and Cynthia Murphy lived in a quiet street, called Marquette Road in a small but tasteful two-storey home. Cynthia was a well-dressed mother working in a New York bank. Her husband was a stay-at-home dad raising their children. The surrounding streets were home to the television comic Stephen Colbert and middle-aged journalists and academics.

The Murphys were friendly and their young daughters went to local schools.

“They had nice kids. A lot like every one else,” said Stanley Skolnik, a 67-year-old clergyman who has a grandchild at school with the Murphy girls. “They were quiet people. He stayed home perhaps a bit more than some of the other dads, but that was about it.”

If there was anything unusual, it was the cars with New York licence plates carrying people taking pictures for no apparent reason, and strangers taking dogs for a walk through their street.

“I guess now I think they were probably a surveillance gang,” Skolnik said.

But their neighbours utterly failed to spot anything strange. If asked, they got the cover story that he was born in Philadelphia and she in New York.

The FBI says a forged birth certificate in the name of Richard Murphy was found in a bank safe deposit box. The marriage may be fake too, as the FBI claims the couples were paired in Moscow for the assignment, although it is assumed the children are really theirs and entirely ignorant of their parents’ alleged work.

‘I’m so happy I’m not your handler’
All the while, the Murphys were said to be meeting Russian contacts to exchange information in train stations and using invisible ink to write messages. They were given fake bank accounts and took secret delivery of large cash payments. In meetings with another Russian agent, Christopher Metsos, in Moscow and Rome, Richard Murphy complained about his job. “Well, I’m so happy I’m not your handler,” Metsos replied. Metsos was arrested and then released in Cyprus on Tuesday.

The Murphys had been spies for years by the time they moved to Montclair. Federal agents had recorded Cynthia Murphy in their Hoboken apartment telling her husband he needed to improve his information collecting.

In spring 2009, Moscow asked them about President Barack Obama’s views before an international summit in July.

The Murphys’ spying career ended dramatically, with police cars blocking the road and agents raiding their house, filming the proceedings. They were taken away to be charged with spying for Moscow. Their two daughters arrived home to find agents already inside. They left with pillows and backpacks, their suburban childhood in Montclair over.

Far away, in the Washington suburbs, Mikhail Semenko’s neighbours knew him as a friendly Russian with an attractive girlfriend. They describe him as being in his 20s and “stylish”. He drove an expensive Mercedes Benz, had pictures of himself in front of the White House, and sometimes woke up the neighbours with his parties.

Semenko, believed to be his real name, moved to Arlington last summer from New York where he worked for the Conference Board, a group that describes itself as offering “trusted insights for businesses worldwide”.

In Arlington he took a job at the Travel All Russia travel agency, putting his fluency in English, Russian, Spanish and Chinese to good use.

The owner of the travel agency, Slava Shirokov, was stunned at the arrest. “I could never imagine Mikhail doing this. It’s like a movie,” he said before adding that he did notice that Semenko lost interest in his job in recent weeks.

But Shirokov does more than run a travel agency. He is also a geopolitical analyst in a financial company — just the kind of person Moscow Centre said it wanted its agents to cosy up to. And Arlington is home to the Pentagon. The headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency are close by.

Michael Bayless, who lives below Semenko and heard the FBI raid early on Sunday morning, said: “It’s north Arlington. It’s very quiet, a nice, fun place to live and you don’t expect to find Russian spies living above.”

‘Ideal tenants’
Across Arlington, Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills lived in an unassuming block of flats with their toddler and a baby, who were taken into care after their parents’ arrest. Neighbours said they were very friendly and didn’t stand out other than for their accents. Zottoli claimed to be an Italian investment banker. Mills told people she was a Canadian student.

Before moving to Arlington they lived in Seattle, where they were remembered as “outgoing and courteous” and “ideal tenants”.

“They were the nicest people here,” John Evans, who managed the block, told King 5 television in Seattle. “In fact I wished they had stayed on.”

“They came across as being foreigners. Both of them had an accent. Michael said he was Italian, and he seemed Italian”.

The FBI secretly searched the Seattle flat while the couple were living there and found a shortwave radio and what it said was a code book.

One of the neighbours, San Osuna, laughed and said: “It’s very creepy.”

Two more of the alleged agents passed themselves off as Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, a married couple with children who had emigrated from Canada. They lived in Boston and one of their children attended George Washington university.

Heathfield got a job at a consulting firm, Global Partners, as a high powered salesman. The company website describes him as a “manager, entrepreneur, and scholar”.

But the FBI inquiry discovered the man posing as Heathfield had assumed the identity of a dead Canadian. Intercepts found that Tracey Lee Ann Foley was travelling on a forged British passport provided by Moscow. The FBI found old pictures of her in a bank safe deposit box. It said tests showed the film had been manufactured in the Soviet Union.

According to the FBI, Heathfield reported to his Russian controllers in 2004 that he had made contact with a scientist working at a US government research facility “on issues of strategic planning related to nuclear weapon development”.

The following year he said he had established contact with a former high-ranking US national security official.

“I’m absolutely floored,” Paul Hesselschwerdt, the president of Global Partners, told the Boston Globe. “He’s a good person. He’s lived in the US for a long time. We’re just completely shocked.”

The FBI has not revealed whether the man calling himself Heathfield discovered any intelligence of value, but there are signs he knew how to milk the system.

Court documents show the couple claimed tens of thousands of pounds for expenses, including “meals and gifts”, “business cover” and education.

Some of the other accused apparently chose to hide in plain sight.

Vicky Peláez has spent more than 20 years working as a columnist for one of the New York’s best known Spanish-language newspapers, El Diario. Her speciality was strident criticism of US policy in Latin America, with a strong defence of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.

“Fidel Castro is already immortal!” Peláez wrote four years ago, when the Cuban leader was critically ill.

Peláez, who was born in Peru, was arrested with her husband, Juan Lazaro, in Yonkers, a New York suburb. Lazaro claims to have been born in Uruguay. But the FBI says it bugged the couple’s house and heard Lazaro describing how, as a child, he moved with his family to Siberia when the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.

According to the FBI, 10 years ago Peláez was covertly filmed meeting a Russian official in Peru.

The justice department accuses Peláez of taking money from the Russian government and notes that shortly after allegedly receiving the cash she paid $8 000 in back taxes.

Peláez’s son, Waldo Mariscal, said his parents are innocent, that they could not even use a Yahoo! email account and that the arrests are a “farce”. – guardian.co.uk