When someone decides to spy on their own country for the U.S., they know they’re taking a risk. But when news broke recently that the U.S. had extracted a high-level Russian official in 2017 with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, it highlighted not only the value of human intelligence, but also the ongoing risks that a spy faces if they choose to defect.
The New York Times described the Russian asset’s role as important in helping U.S. officials trace the source of election tampering by Russia in the 2016 election, all the way back to Putin himself.
But Putin has a long memory according to former case officers, and a hatred for those he deems traitors. So, when a spy, like the one in this recent case, decides to defect, there are efforts made to protect their identity, but the defectors don’t always follow the advice of the CIA. That is one of the issues often addressed as defectors come through the CIA’s National Resettlement Operations Center (NROC).
This is part two of a two-part briefing on the NROC (which former Agency officers refer to as the Defector Operations Center) with its former chief, Cipher Brief expert Joseph Augustyn. Augustyn is a 28-year Agency veteran who was responsible for the resettlement of high-level defectors, affording him the unique opportunity to meet and know many of the CIA’s top spies.
The Cipher Brief: What did you think when you heard through the media that the recent Russian defector had been publicly outed, with some news organizations choosing to publish his real name? (Editorial note: The Cipher Brief decided not to publish his real name because we did not believe it was necessary in order to provide context to the story, and we felt that it could put him and his family in further danger) Given past poisonings of Russian defectors like Sergei Skripal, do you think this person is in danger?
Augustyn: Yes. I don't suspect that the Russians are sending anybody to the United States right now to do anything. But I worry about the family, a year from now, two years from now, or three years from now. That's when security can become a little lax. We won't provide 24/7 protection for these people for the rest of their lives, so there will be opportunities for Putin to send people here to make amends for what he considers traitorous activity. Defector families have to live with this for the rest of their lives. The CIA is committed to trying to maintain their security and their sense of wellbeing. It's not always easy. And by the way, CIA headquarters and management certainly doesn't want anything to happen to defectors, because there's no good publicity that comes out of it.
The Cipher Brief: We understand the danger that these former spies face. They’ve given up their whole lives as they knew them and traded them in for a life in the U.S. What happens if their life in the U.S. doesn’t go as well as they had hoped? There must be issues with acclimating to a completely new environment, language, etc. No?
Augustyn: Yes. Defectors sometimes get disgruntled with what the agency is paying them, or they don’t like their job. There's a famous case, which is very interesting, which you hear very little about. It’s probably inside baseball for The Cipher Brief but it’s something called the Totten Doctrine.
The Totten Doctrine goes back to 1876 when Abraham Lincoln hired a man to spy on the Confederacy for $200 a month during the Civil War. His name was William Lloyd. When William Lloyd died, his estate manager tried to sue the government for something like $10,000 back pay for Lloyd. In 1876, the Totten Doctrine - that still holds - said that the U.S. government cannot be sued by a party who entered into a secret agreement with the government. So still today, you cannot sue the U.S. government if you've entered into a secret agreement.
The Totten agreement was challenged in 2002 in a court case by John and Jane Doe vs. George Tenet, who was Director of the CIA at the time. The Does – obviously not their real names - were a defector couple who were unhappy with the way they were being after they defected and they wanted more money, so they sued the government. In 2002, that case went to the Supreme Court and the court upheld the Totten Doctrine of 1876.
The Cipher Brief: So, what avenues do defectors have to handle their grievances?
Augustyn: That's a very good question. First of all, they will complain to the chief of the Defector Operations Center. I can't tell you how many times I sat with people and listened to their stories of woe. If that doesn’t yield the result they want, they sometimes go to their Congressional representatives. I spent a fair amount of time on the Hill briefing committees and individual representatives about our position vis a vis certain defectors. So, they have the opportunity to do that and they've done it routinely. It doesn't always happen. But by doing that, they're exposing their status to the public.
The Cipher Brief: You said that the program has never reached its legal limit of resettling 100 people in the U.S. each year, but how steady is the client stream?
Augustyn: There is no lack of cases that come our way every year. And it's not just people from Russia we resettle, it's also people from China and North Korea. We've also settled Iranians, Iraqis, and Cubans, at one point. It's a pretty broad program that a lot of people don't appreciate and don't understand.
The Cipher Brief: And the Agency can’t force people to come to the U.S., even if they believe they may be in danger?
Augustyn: We can’t force them to come and we can’t force them to stay. There's a famous case of Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko came through the Defector Operations Center. In 1985, he decided to walk out of a restaurant in Georgetown to redefect and we let him go. We can try to talk them out of it and tell them why it's not a good idea, but they can go.
Then there was the famous case of Alexander Zaporozhsky. Zaporozhsky was a KGB officer who helped us find Aldrich Ames. He came to this country, we resettled him very nicely because of the contributions he made. I used to meet with him routinely for lunch. One day, he said to me, "I'm going back to Moscow for a visit." I said, "You can't do that" and he said, "I need to go back, Joe. My friends, back in KGB tell me it's okay. I'm just going to visit and come back." I tried to dissuade him from it and I said, "If you do that, I'll never see you again." He said, "No, no. I want to do it." Steve Kappes was head of the CIC Counterintelligence Center at the time and I talked to him about it and he said what I did, that he shouldn’t do it. So, Steve and I went to lunch with him and told him that one more time. This is the problem; they all have minds of their own. He went back and long story short, he was arrested at the airport and sent to a hard labor camp in Siberia for ten years.
We finally got him back in the famous spy swap in 2010. Those were the illegals that the FBI wrapped up, Anna Chapman and company. We swapped them and one of the people we got back was Zaporozhsky. That's also the same swap where Sergei Skripal came back and then went to London. We also got Gennady Vasilenko back in that swap.
The point is, we can't force people to take our advice. Just like in this recent case we've been reading about all week, the spy decided to keep his true name. I still don't know why he did that. I have no inside knowledge, but we would never recommend that someone keep their true name.
We all know what the result is of that decision. People found out. They found out that he bought a house in his true name, which blows me away because that's not standard operating procedure. He's now out of that house and will probably take a new identity some place and be taken out of this area. It's a tricky and hard business.
Resettlement Case Officers have to also be good case officers. They need to know good tradecraft, but they also have to be a psychologist. They have to be a social worker and they have to be a friend. It takes a different kind of person to work with these people year after year.
The Cipher Brief: What did you think when Edward Snowden ended up in Moscow?
Augustyn: Well, I think Edward Snowden is a traitor par excellence. I'm a believer in whistle blowers but you can't take it upon yourself to do what Snowden did and release the numbers of documents and the treasure trove of intel that he did. When he went to Moscow, well they have a similar program. By the way what we do in the agency with defector resettlement the Brits do as well, the Israeli's do it, even the Russians do it. The problem is I can tell you that the Russian program is not anything like ours. When I realized that Snowden was stuck in Moscow it brought a smile to my face.
The Cipher Brief: What do you know about their program?
Augustyn: Well, we certainly take care of our people financially much, much better than the Russians ever would. And our defectors aren’t stuck in Russia. Just by virtue of that alone our program is superior. On the other hand, the U.S. will not go after Edward Snowden in Russia. If you're a Russian here in the U.S. you're going to think Putin's coming after you here.
I don't want to leave you with the impression that all of these cases end up badly because that's not the case. We've had some incredibly successful cases where we've made some people incredibly happy. Then eventually, by the way, they can apply for US citizenship and they get it.
The Cipher Brief: They don’t automatically get U.S. citizenship when they enter into these agreements?
Augustyn: No. They get what we used to call, ‘expedited citizenship’ and there are several cases where people have lived very good lives and have been successful in what they do in the United States but for every one of those there's at least one that doesn't work out as well as we would like.
One of the most famous defectors that the U.S. has ever had was Colonel Ryszard Kukliński from Poland. He was part of the Warsaw Pact and he provided us something like 35,000 pages of Soviet documents about the Warsaw Pact and what they were doing. We brought him to the United States and he kept his true name because of who he was. We resettled him in Florida, and he came with his family. He had two sons and a wife. I met him several times before he died in 2004.
He was a real hero because he was one of the crown jewels of the agency. There have been books written about him. His two sons were in their early 20s, and one died mysteriously on a boat that he was on with a friend. They were off the coast of Florida in calm seas on a sunny day and neither of them was ever to be seen again. About six months later, Kukliński’s other son was involved in a hit and run crash that killed him instantly. The car that hit him was torched and unidentifiable and the driver was never found. You have to say to yourself, "Really? Is that just a coincidence or is something going on?"
We had a case last summer with a former spy named Aleksandr Poteyev. He was an agent that we ran. He had been working in Russia since 1999 and he helped us identify the Russian illegals that the FBI wrapped up in June of 2010. He was part of Directorate "S" in the SVR, which oversees U.S. activity and he eventually fell under suspicion. He sent his wife to the U.S. and he sent his son to visit his wife while he stayed in Russia. The suspicion around him was getting worse. He gave up the illegals, and two weeks before the FBI wrapped them up, he obtained false documentation, took a train from Moscow to Minsk and then another train from Minsk to Frankfurt, fell into agency hands and came to the United States.
As soon as he arrived in the U.S., the FBI wrapped up the ten illegals and then the spy swap happened. Poteyev went to Florida and lived under his true name. In 2016, there was a Russian identified by the FBI who came into the country legally on a passport and was caught snooping around Poteyev's house. Nothing happened because the FBI intervened, but I see that as another potential assassination plot on our soil.
People will argue that Putin doesn't want to cross the red line in the United States. I believe he hasn’t yet crossed the red line, but he's certainly straddled it. I'm convinced that Poteyev was on a hit list. Shortly thereafter, after the U.S. caught this guy, the Russians put out a news release saying that it was unconfirmed that Poteyev died in the United States. It's a shadow and it's a cloak of danger that these people live with all the time and it's up to the agency to protect them.
Read Part One of The Dangerous Business of Exfiltrating Spies in The Cipher Brief
Read also, Dr. Shakil Afridi: How a Valuable U.S. Intelligence Asset Became a Liability only in The Cipher Brief
