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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Unheeded Warning

“The NSA—the world’s most capable signals intelligence organization, an agency immensely skilled in stealing digital data—had had its pockets thoroughly picked.”

■ --CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell

In April 2010, the CIA received a stark reminder of the ongoing nature of Russian espionage. It came in the form of a message from one of its best placed moles in the Russian intelligence service. This surreptitious source was Alexander Poteyev, a 54-year old colonel in the SVR, which was the successor agency to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. While the FSB took over the KGB’s domestic role in December 1991, the SVR became Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service. Its operation center was in the Yasenevo district of Moscow. The CIA had recruited Poteyev as its mole in the 1990s when he had been stationed at the Russian Embassy in Washington DC. That it could sustain a mole in Moscow for over a decade attested to its capabilities in the espionage business. After he returned to Moscow, still secretly on the CIA’s payroll, he became the deputy chief of the SVR’s “American” section. This unit of Russian intelligence had the primary responsibility for establishing spies in CIA, FBI, NSA and other American intelligence agencies.

The SVR’s last known (or caught) mole in US Intelligence was CIA officer Harold Nicholson in 1996. Before it could now expand its espionage capabilities. It needed to build a network of Russian sleeper agents in the United States. For this network, it needed to groom so-called “illegals,” or agents who were not connected to the Russian Embassy. This so-called “illegals” network was necessary since presumably all Russian diplomats, including the so-called “legal” members of Russian intelligence, were under constant surveillance by the FBI. Advances in surveillance technology in the 21st century had made it increasingly difficult to communicate with recruit through its diplomatic missions. To evade it, the “American” division of the SVR was given the task of placing individuals in the United States disguised as ordinary Americans. Their “legend,” or operational cover, could be thin since they would not be applying for jobs in the government. Their job was simply blend in with their community until they were called upon by the “American” department in Moscow to service a mole that had been planted in US intelligence or other part of the US government. Until there were activated by such a call, they were classified as sleeper agents. Unlike the SVR’s “legal” officers, who were attached to Russian embassies as diplomats and were protected from arrest by the Treaty of Vienna, the SVR’s illegal agents lack diplomatic immunity. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, who defected from the KGB in the Cold War, the sole job of such sleeper agents was to “live under cover in the West awaiting assignments for the Center.” One assignment that justifies the expense of maintaining such agents is to service a penetration, after one is made, in the US intelligence establishment. While

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