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The Unheeded Warning | 191

of the illegals might lead the FBI to a possible recruit in the NSA or
elsewhere.

The preemptive arrests also had an unforeseen consequence.
They resulted in accidently compromising Poteyev. When Chap-
man returned to Moscow after a spy exchange, she was taken to
a well-publicized dinner with Putin. Afterward, she informed her
debriefer at the SVR that only Poteyev had been in a position to
know the password that an FBI agent had used to try to deceive
her into believing she was speaking to an SVR officer. This brought
Poteyev under immediate suspicion. Tipped off by the CIA to the
FBI’s error, Poteyev managed to escape by taking a train from Mos-
cow to Belarus, where the CIA exfiltrated him to the United States.
Poteyev had been saved from prison—or worse—but he was no lon-
ger useful to the CIA as a mole. Without the services of Poteyev in
the SVR in Moscow, U.S. intelligence was unable to find out further
details about the mission to which Poteyev’s sleeper agents were to
be assigned. All it had discovered was the history of the prepara-
tions for a major espionage revival. It now knew that the SVR had
installed plumbing in America and that one or more agents in this
network had been activated to handle a possible recruit in the NSA.
But without anyone left in the sleeper network to follow and with-
out an inside source in the SVR, it had no further avenues to fruit-
fully pursue. The revelation of the sleeper agents had little if any
other intelligence value.

The NSA’s own security investigation turned up no evidence of a
leak at Fort Meade in 2010. That of course doesn’t mean there hadn’t
been one. The Russian intelligence service had demonstrated in the
past that it was well schooled in covering its tracks in operations
against U.S. communications intelligence. For example, CIA coun-
terintelligence had learned from a KGB defector in the early 1960s
that Russian intelligence had penetrated the cipher room at the U.S.
embassy in Moscow and, because of this operation, the KGB was able
to decipher crucial communications. Even so, it failed to find either
the perpetrator or any evidence of his existence for more than half
a century. The operation was only definitively revealed by the Rus-
sian spymaster Sergey Kondrashev in 2007. Tennent Bagley, who
headed the CIA’s Soviet bloc counterintelligence at the time, lately

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 191 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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