Latest / The Shadow Dossier / The Shadow Dossier — The Illegals Living Next Door

Transcript

The Shadow Dossier — The Illegals Living Next Door · The Shadow Dossier

• 0:00
  the shadow dossier act i the ordinary life in
• 0:09
  the summer of 2010 fbi agents fanned out across
• 0:14
  the suburbs of new york boston seattle and northern
• 0:18
  virginia to arrest 10 people who had spent years
• 0:21
  building unremarkable american lives they coached
• 0:25
  soccer wrote for magazines worked in finance
• 0:29
  Raised children in split -level houses with mowed
• 0:32
  lawns. Neighbors described them, almost without
• 0:36
  exception, as friendly and forgettable. That
• 0:43
  was the point. Each of them was a Russian intelligence
• 0:45
  officer. Part of a program the SVR, Russia's
• 0:50
  Foreign Intelligence Service, calls the Illegals
• 0:52
  Program. Agents sent abroad under fabricated
• 0:56
  identities. with no diplomatic cover and no official
• 1:00
  connection to the Russian government to protect
• 1:02
  them if caught. Some had lived under their assumed
• 1:06
  names for more than a decade, building credit
• 1:09
  histories, mortgages, and marriages years before
• 1:12
  they were ever asked to do anything resembling
• 1:14
  spy work. The FBI had been watching several of
• 1:27
  them for years under an investigation codenamed
• 1:30
  Ghost Stories. Agents tracked the network's tradecraft,
• 1:35
  money buried in fields, messages exchanged through
• 1:39
  brief, scripted encounters with passersby in
• 1:42
  parks, and a purpose -built software program
• 1:44
  that let officers swap data with passing cars
• 1:48
  over a private wireless signal, invisible to
• 1:51
  anyone not looking for it. One member of the
• 1:57
  network, using the name Anna Chapman, drew particular
• 2:01
  attention after her arrest, both for the tradecraft
• 2:04
  the FBI documented and, almost immediately, for
• 2:09
  a wave of tabloid interest in her that had little
• 2:12
  to do with intelligence work. Chapman, born Anna
• 2:16
  Kushchenko in Russia. had moved to New York and
• 2:19
  built a real estate networking business, moving
• 2:22
  in social and professional circles far from anything
• 2:26
  resembling a safe house. Investigators later
• 2:32
  revealed that in at least one instance, they
• 2:35
  had substituted their own agent for the Russian
• 2:37
  intelligence officer the network expected to
• 2:40
  meet, letting the FBI both confirm the network
• 2:44
  contacts and control what information passed
• 2:46
  between them. all without the illegals realizing
• 2:49
  anything was wrong. On June 27, 2010, FBI teams
• 3:03
  moved simultaneously, arresting 10 people in
• 3:07
  coordinated raids. An 11th suspect, arrested
• 3:10
  separately in Cyprus, posted bail and disappeared
• 3:15
  before he could be extradited. The Department
• 3:18
  of Justice charged the group with conspiracy
• 3:20
  to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government,
• 3:25
  a lesser charge than espionage, reflecting how
• 3:28
  little classified material investigators believe
• 3:31
  the network had actually managed to obtain in
• 3:34
  return for the years of preparation invested
• 3:36
  in it. The scale of the operation surprised even
• 3:43
  seasoned intelligence watchers. It wasn't the
• 3:46
  number of agents so much as the patience behind
• 3:49
  it. A program willing to spend a decade or more
• 3:52
  building ordinary lives for people who might
• 3:55
  never be activated for anything more urgent than
• 3:59
  reporting on the mood of Washington policy circles
• 4:01
  from distance. What happened next moved with
• 4:13
  a speed that belonged to an earlier era of espionage.
• 4:17
  On July 8th, all 10 defendants pleaded guilty
• 4:21
  to acting as unregistered foreign agents. And
• 4:25
  within 24 hours, in a charter plane on the tarmac
• 4:28
  in Vienna, Austria, they were exchanged for four
• 4:32
  men who had been imprisoned in Russia on charges
• 4:35
  of spying for the West. It was the largest such
• 4:38
  swap since the height of the Cold War. arranged
• 4:41
  and executed in less than two weeks from arrest
• 4:44
  to handover. Among the four men released to the
• 4:50
  West that day was Sergei Skripal, a former Russian
• 4:54
  military intelligence officer who had passed
• 4:56
  secrets to Britain's MI6. He resettled quietly
• 5:01
  in Salisbury, England. Eight years later, in
• 5:05
  2018, He and his daughter were poisoned there
• 5:09
  with a military -grade nerve agent and attacked
• 5:12
  the British government attributed to Russian
• 5:14
  intelligence operatives. The man freed in a spy
• 5:17
  swap meant to close one Cold War -style episode
• 5:21
  became, in time, the center of another. The illegals
• 5:28
  themselves largely returned to Russia where several
• 5:32
  received state honors. Anna Chapman went on to
• 5:36
  a media career, hosting a television program
• 5:39
  and appearing at pro -Kremlin youth events. The
• 5:42
  suburbs they left behind absorbed the story the
• 5:45
  way suburbs do. Briefly, then not at all. The
• 5:49
  houses were sold. The mortgages were paid off
• 5:52
  by someone else. And the ordinary lives that
• 5:55
  had taken a decade to build were gone within
• 5:58
  a single week in July. This concludes declassified
• 6:05
  file number 0049 of the Shadow Dossier. The illegals
• 6:10
  living next door. What dangerous secrets await
• 6:16
  in our next file? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts,
• 6:22
  Spotify, RSS .com, and YouTube so you never miss
• 6:28
  an official declassification. This is the shadow
• 6:33
  dossier. Thank you for listening.