BOOK REVIEW: Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Spies
by Gordon Corera
Reviewed by Joseph Augustyn
Joseph Augustyn is a 28-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service and once headed the CIA’s Defector Resettlement Program
For five years, from 2013-2018, the American television viewing audience was captivated by the fast-paced, award-winning spy series called The Americans. The series told the fictional story of two undercover KGB spies in an arranged marriage, sent by Moscow Center to live in suburban Washington, DC during the Reagan Administration. The couple had two children while in the United States, spoke fluent English, assimilated into the community and appeared as American as their neighbors. The fictitious spies, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, did most of their espionage work at night, often in disguise, sometimes betraying friends and neighbors for Mother Russia and, occasionally, resorting to violence and assassination to further the Soviet cause.
Viewers were fascinated, in part, because the Jennings in many ways, seemed like them, indistinguishable from average Americans. But even more fascinating was the fact that the Jennings had a dark secret…they were spies, they were committing espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and, amazingly, they fooled everyone around them.
Enter Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera. Corera is a long-time and well-respected BBC security correspondent who has written extensively on intelligence matters to include works on MI6, cybersecurity and CIA-related topics. In Russians Among Us, he proves the dictum that often truth is stranger than fiction. Corera masterfully tells the real story of Russian illegals for the first time in detail and sets their role against the broader story of espionage between Russia and the West from the Cold War until present.
Russian illegals, like the fictional Jennings family, have been part of the Soviet and now Russian spy landscape, since 1917. For Russian leaders, including current President Vladimir Putin, illegals have always been the pride of Soviet and Russian intelligence, true heroes, and protectors of the Russian Motherland.
In Russians Among Us, Corera focuses on the group of ten illegals in the United States who were arrested by the FBI in June 2010, and who were the inspiration for The Americans. The real-life illegals were traded for four Russians who were languishing in prison as a result of their past spying for the West. Corera introduces us to the families of these illegals and describes their personal lives, day-to-day activities and family dynamics. He discusses their missions, beginning with their recruitment in Russian universities, their SVR training, their preparation for a decades-long assignment to the United States and their eventual downfall in 2010 at the hands of a persistent and dogged FBI operation known as “Ghost Stories.” This was one of the largest, and most sensitive counterintelligence investigations in FBI history.
What devotees of The Americans saw on their television screens comes to life in Corera’s book. While the ten illegals he focuses on did not commit (nor were they allowed to commit) the gory assassinations and killings routinely portrayed in the TV series, they did spot, assess, and provide recruitment fodder to the SVR, and worked tirelessly to collect and analyze the intelligence needed by Moscow Center to support Russia’s espionage campaign against the West.
Corera brilliantly juxtaposes the activities of the illegals in the US with the evolution of Moscow’s changing intelligence priorities, and specifically the thinking of Vladimir Putin, who once boasted that his first job in the KGB was working with illegals. For the SVR and Putin, illegals were venerated spies, and were part of the “long game” when it comes to espionage. This, Corera says, was why the 2010 arrests were such a devastating blow to Putin. Adding to his “humiliation” was the fact that one of his own, Alexander Poteyev, led to the takedown. Poteyev, who worked in Directorate S within the SVR (responsible for the illegals), was recruited by the FBI in New York City in 1999 and provided intelligence on the illegals for over a decade.
Throughout the book, Corera focuses on Putin’s obsession with spying, particularly against the United States, arguing that Putin had not only built a personality cult around himself, but also around his spies. This, says Corera, is what contributes to Putin’s total disdain for “traitors” and his daunting and unrelenting desire for revenge. To illustrate, Corera chronicles the plights of several well-known “traitors,” to include the details surrounding the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, the multiple assassination attempts against Boris Berezovsky and, of course, the poison attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March 2018.
Cleverly interwoven throughout Corera’s narrative of the illegals are the personal stories too of the four Russian spies who would be part of the spy exchange in 2010. Alexander Zaporozhsky, Sergei Skripal, Gennady Vasilenko and Igor Sutyagin. Corera discusses their roles as spies for the West, detailing what they did, how and why they were captured, and why the US Intelligence Community insisted they be returned as part of the spy swap.
Corera is at his best when describing the final days and hours leading up to the illegals’ arrests. There is, of course, a lengthy discussion of Anna Chapman, the illegal who gained celebrity status for her good looks, provocative personality and her ability, according to Corera, to “get men to talk.” It was Chapman’s poor tradecraft, however, and the FBI’s clever operational maneuvering that led eventually to her arrest and to the arrest of the others on June 27, 2010.
Corera describes the timing of the illegals’ takedown in dramatic Hollywood-style fashion. The FBI and CIA, aware that inside-mole Poteyev was under growing suspicion by the SVR, and the fact that at least two of the targeted illegals were scheduled to leave the United States on a routine visit to Moscow, prompted urgent calls to make the arrests immediately.
Unfortunately, this plan coincided with the visit to the US of then-Russian President Dimitri Medvedev. Not wanting to jeopardize his Administration’s new “reset” policy with Russia, President Obama was reluctant to let the FBI carry out its plan, fearing embarrassment to the visiting Russian President. Corera puts us in the White House Situation Room where the contentious decision to make the arrests is agreed to only after compromise, and only when it could be confirmed that Medvedev had left North American airspace on his way back to Moscow.
Corera uses the final chapters of his book to describe Putin’s own “reset” of Moscow’s intelligence operations. He describes the shift to the use of more true name operatives like Maria Butina, the focus on cyber spies like those who interfered in the 2016 US presidential election, and to Russia’s current emphasis on more tactical and opportunity-driven influence operations. In spite of this, Corera concludes with the subtle warning that there are still illegals out there and will be…at least as long as Putin is in power.
With Russians Among Us, Gordon Corera has contributed significantly to the understanding of the Russian illegals program. But beyond that, he has done it in a way that is entertaining, well-researched, highly readable, and profoundly meaningful to the public understanding of current Russian aims and intentions toward the United States.
Russians Among Us earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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