The Illegals Program was a network of Russian sleeper agents under non-official cover. An investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) culminated in the arrest of ten agents on June 27, 2010, and a prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States on July 9, 2010.
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.S. by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service
(known by it's Russian abbreviation, SVR).
Posing as ordinary American citizens, they tried to build contacts with academics, industrialists, and policymakers to gain access to intelligence. They were the target of a multi-year investigation by the FBI. The investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, culminated at the end of June 2010 with the arrest of ten people in the U.S. and an eleventh in Cyprus. The ten sleeper agents were charged with "carrying out long-term, 'deep-cover' assignments in the United States on behalf of the Russian Federation."
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. Moscow court documents made public on June 27, 2011, revealed that another two Russian agents managed to flee the U.S. without being arrested.
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. The same day, the agents were exchanged for four Russian nationals, three of whom had been convicted and imprisoned by Russia on espionage (high treason) charges.
These spies assumed stolen identities of Americans, enrolled at American universities and joined professional organizations as a means of further infiltrating spies into government circles. Two of the individuals used the names of Richard and Cynthia Murphy and resided in Hoboken, New Jersey in the mid-1990s, before purchasing a nearby home in suburban Montclair. Another couple named in court documents were journalist Vicky Peláez and Mikhail Vasenkov (AKA alias Juan Lazaro) in Yonkers, New York. The court filings allege that couples were arranged in Russia to "co-habit in the country to which they are assigned," going as far as having children together to help maintain their deep covert status.
The criminal complaints later filed in various federal district courts allege that the Russian agents in the U.S. passed information back to the SVR by messages hidden inside digital photographs, written in disappearing ink, ad hoc wireless networks, and shortwave radio transmissions, as well as by agents swapping identical bags while passing each other in the stairwell of a train station. Messages and materials were passed in such places as Grand Central Terminal and Central Park.
The Russian agents were tasked by "Moscow centre" to report about U.S. policy in Central America, U.S. interpretation of Russian foreign policy, problems with US military policy, and "United States policy with regard to the use of the Internet by terrorists."
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. [...] The tradecraft used by the alleged SVR ring was amateurish, and will send shivers down the spine of the rival intelligence organisations in Russia. This was bungling on a truly epic scale. No secrets about bunker-busting bombs were actually obtained, but the network was betrayed. [...] To have a spy ring uncovered before they could actually do any serious spying is doubly embarrassing."
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. A Florida medical examiner's report, released on September 20, 2010, cited an accident and a tumour as the cause of death. In response to allegations in the media that he might have tipped off the US authorities about some of the "illegals", Tretyakov's co-author Pete Earley, citing anonymous "well-informed" sources, said in July 2010 that Tretyakov had not been privy to the case of Russian "illegals".
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