Jump to navigation Jump to search This article is about Russian spy network russian spies wife the United States. For the general topic, see Illegal immigration. Ten Russian agents apprehended on June 27, 2010. Russian sleeper agents under non-official cover.
Canada was a common place for Soviet, and later Russian, illegal immigrants to go so they could create a “legend” of being Western citizens before their deployment to target countries, often the United States or the United Kingdom. The spies were planted in the U. The suspect arrested in Cyprus skipped bail the day after his arrest. A twelfth person, a Russian national who worked for Microsoft, was also apprehended about the same time and deported on July 13, 2010. Ten of the agents were flown to Vienna on July 9, 2010, soon after pleading guilty to charges of failing to register as representatives of a foreign government. On October 31, 2011, the FBI publicly released several dozen still images, clips from surveillance video, and documents related to its investigation in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
Using forged documents, some of the spies assumed stolen identities of Americans, enrolled at American universities and joined professional organizations as a means of further infiltrating spies into government circles. The criminal complaints later filed in various federal district courts allege that the Russian agents in the U. The Russian agents were tasked by “Moscow centre” to report about U. According to the media reports, planning by the FBI to have the “illegals” arrested began in mid-June 2010, but the action was hastened reportedly by some members of the group intending to travel outside the US as well as by Anna Chapman’s growing concern about having been exposed.
June 27, 2010, in a series of raids in Boston, Montclair, Yonkers, and Northern Virginia. They charged the individuals with money laundering and failing to register as agents of a foreign government. One of the suspects using the name of Christopher R. Metsos was detained on June 29, 2010, while attempting to depart from Cyprus for Budapest, but was released on bail and then disappeared. Pavel Felgenhauer believed that they consequently did not constitute a “spy ring”. Shortly after the arrests, The Guardian commented: “The FBI operation represents the biggest penetration of SVR communications in recent memory. The FBI read their emails, decrypted their intel, read the embedded coded texts on images posted on the net, bugged their mobile phones, videotaped the passing of bags of cash and messages in invisible ink from one agent to another, and hacked into their bogus expenses claims.
Coinciding with the day of the prisoners’ swap, the death of the prominent Russian defector Sergei Tretyakov, who died in the US on June 13, 2010, was reported on July 9, 2010. The latter, according to the newspaper’s sources, headed the “American” unit of the SVR department in charge of “illegals” and left Russia for the U. Dmitry Medvedev’s June visit to the U. Shcherbakov had indeed held a senior position in the SVR and “defected about two years ago. Anya Kushchenko, and she is a Volgograd native.
According to some reports, she was born in Ukraine. In 2001, at an underground rave party in London’s Docklands, she met Alex Chapman, the son of a British business executive, whom she married shortly thereafter in Moscow. On July 2, 2010, Alex Chapman’s revelations were made public. Among other things, he claimed he was not surprised by her arrest, and that his ex-wife “held secret meetings with Russian ‘friends’. On July 5, 2010, One India reported that Chapman may have been recruited to become an agent when she was in the United Kingdom, citing Oleg Gordievsky and Alex Chapman as sources, and that an urgent probe was underway in the UK to ascertain whether Chapman organized sleeper cells in the United Kingdom.
Russia where she stated “Russia, Moscow. My favorite place on earth, my native capital! After the meeting with “Roman,” Chapman bought a new cell phone and two telephone cards. She called her father in Moscow and another individual in New York, both advising her not to transfer the passport.
