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OPINION:
This June will mark 15 years since the FBI arrested 10 Russian deep undercover intelligence officers, known as “illegals,” in an exquisite Justice Department counterintelligence operation code-named “Ghost Stories.”
Illegals, who serve in Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR), spend years in training before conducting risky espionage missions under nonofficial channels, eschewing traditional diplomatic cover. Operating under a false name, they use forged or illegal documents to establish themselves as nationals of the country where they are residing or countries other than Russia.
They deliberately work in private business or academia and keep a low profile by avoiding any face-to-face contact with Russia’s diplomatic presence in-country.
The FBI clandestinely tracked the illegals for years and incredibly, knew where they were going to be at all times. The FBI also penetrated the illegals’ sensitive communications and were reading what the illegals thought were covert communications back to the SVR in Moscow.
The FBI knew beforehand when the illegals were performing sensitive espionage acts, some of which were secretly videotaped and displayed on the FBI website after the illegals were arrested. The illegals would often adopt the name of a dead toddler after an illegal support officer stole an American birth certificate as the first step in building an alias persona. Eventually, after many years of language and cross-cultural training, they would travel to the U.S., become American citizens and seek contacts with influential academics, business people and government officials.
Russian illegals who adopted the names of married couple Cynthia and Richard Murphy arrived in New Jersey during the mid-1990s. Cynthia Murphy developed contacts in New York City financial circles and was trying to cultivate a relationship with a venture capitalist assisting Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential bid when she was arrested.
In his recent book, “The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-long Mission to Infiltrate the West,” journalist Shaun Walker recounts the history of illegals going back to Czarist Russia. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deployed illegals to the U.S. to steal our nuclear secrets during the 1930s and 1940s and sent over 15,000 operatives behind enemy lines during World War II to collect intelligence and conduct covert operations, including assassinations, against the Nazis. The KGB sent a slew of illegals into Czechoslovakia to develop contacts with the organizers of the 1968 Prague Spring, which hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops quashed.
Just this past year, the U.S. traded the Dultsev family of illegals, who had been arrested in Slovenia, to secure the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. While serving in the CIA, I closely tracked the 2010 spy swap negotiations, during which the U.S. traded 10 Russian illegals arrested by the FBI for four Russians who would otherwise have likely taken their last breaths in Siberian labor camps.
At the time, the Obama administration was pursuing a reset policy of rapprochement with Russia, and there were many — including then Vice President Biden — who did not favor arresting the illegals, let alone trading them, out of concern for some blowback on our relationship with the Kremlin. Then CIA Director Leon Panetta deftly convinced the White House that there was no other option than to make the arrests and handle the swap covertly in an intelligence channel.
We at the CIA were as confident as we could be that Russia would agree to the deal, which we assessed would not cause any collateral damage to the ill-fated reset policy. (That policy would later collapse under the weight of its own naive expectations about Russian behavior.) That’s because we were trained to see the world through the twisted KGB eyes of Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, who had been an illegal support officer in East Germany before the Warsaw Pact collapsed.
Cognizant that the arrests of his illegals were bad for the SVR’s image and concerned they might reveal secrets while incarcerated, Mr. Putin wanted them all returned to Russia as soon as possible. Our side had what former Secretary of State George Shultz used to call “the shadow of power cast across the bargaining table,” which gave us the leverage to negotiate the spy swap on favorable terms in just over a week.
That’s the enduring lesson worth keeping in mind as the Trump administration seeks to negotiate a diplomatic off-ramp for Russia’s barbaric invasion and illegal occupation of Ukraine.
Together with our allies, we must recognize and wield our considerable leverage lest the power of the president’s persuasion be rendered ineffectual.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. He can be reached at danielhoffman@yahoo.com.
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