Illegals Program
Discover the true story of the "Illegals Program," a network of Russian sleeper agents in the US, their FBI investigation, and eventual arrest and exchange.
~11 min readMay 6, 2026 · 07:17 AM
<p>The Illegals Program (so named by the United States Department of Justice) was a network of Russian sleeper agents under unofficial 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.<br/>The arrested spies were Russian nationals who had been planted in the US by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (known by its Russian abbreviation, SVR), most of them using false identities. 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 US 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."<br/>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, who Russia alleges were known to the FBI, managed to flee the US without being arrested.<br/>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 for espionage (high treason) on behalf of the US and UK.<br/>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.</p>
<p>FBI arrests and criminal charges<br/>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 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 (using the 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.<br/>The criminal complaints later filed in various federal district courts allege that the Russian agents in the US passed information back to the SVR by messages 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.<br/>The Russian agents were tasked by "Moscow centre" to report about US policy in Central America, US interpretation of Russian foreign policy, problems with US military policy, and "United States policy with regard to the use of the Internet by terrorists".<br/>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. Vladimir Guriyev was planning to travel to France and possibly Russia, Bezrukov was planning to travel outside the US with his son, and Chapman, in a telephone call to her father the day before the arrest, said she suspected that she may have been discovered and planned to leave for Moscow in mid-July 2010.<br/>US authorities arrested ten of the agents involved on June 27, 2010, in a series of raids in Boston, Montclair (New Jersey), Yonkers, and Northern Virginia. They charged the individuals with money laundering and failing to register as agents of a foreign government. No charges were made that the individuals involved gained access to classified material, though contacts were made with a former intelligence official and with a scientist involved in developing bunker buster bombs.<br/>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.<br/>There was no evidence that the convicted agents knew each other beyond their respective spouses; military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer believed that they consequently did not constitute a "spy ring".<br/>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. ... 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."<br/>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".<br/>The November 11, 2010, issue of span broadsheet Kommersant carried an article that, with reference to unnamed Russian government sources, contained allegations that the "illegals" were fingered by a senior SVR officer named "Colonel Shcherbakov" (according to an unnamed ex-CIA source, his full name may be Александр Васильевич Щербаков, Alexander Vasilievich Shcherbakov). 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 US "three days prior to Dmitry Medvedev's June visit to the U.S." According to other media outlets' sources, the name "Shcherbakov" was fictitious, and a number of experts and commentators judged many allegations in the article to be dubious or improbable. Nevertheless, some comments made the following day by Russian president Medvedev were interpreted as an indirect confirmation of a high-level defection in the Russian intelligence apparatus. On November 15, 2010, Interfax cited unnamed sources within Russian intelligence as alleging that the real name of the defector who was primarily responsible for uncovering the ten convicted agents was Aleksandr Poteyev (reportedly, his full name is Александр Николаевич Потеев, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Poteyev), who was a colonel in the SVR and was deputy head of the American department within Directorate "S" of SVR ("S" oversees illegals). According to Interfax's unnamed source, a person called Shcherbakov had indeed held a senior position in the SVR and "defected about two years ago".</p>
<p>Agents apprehended by FBI on June 27, 2010</p>
<p>Anna Chapman</p>
<p>Anna Chapman—maiden name Anna Vasil'evna Kushchenko (Russian: Анна Васильевна Кущенко)—was arrested with nine others in 2010. According to US authorities, her former name is Anya Kushchenko, and she is a Volgograd native. (According to some reports, she was born in Ukraine.) Her father was employed in the Russian embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. She received her master's in economics degree from the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow. She later worked in London at NetJets, Barclays Bank, and other companies.<br/>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.<br/>Her LinkedIn social networking site profile said she was CEO of PropertyFinder Ltd, a website selling real estate internationally. Chapman posted photos of herself on the Odnoklassniki ("Classmates") social networking website in Russia where she stated "Russia, Moscow. My favorite place on earth, my native capital!" She also posted photos and profiles on the Facebook and LinkedIn social networking websites.<br/>Chapman's prior meetings with her Russian handlers were on Wednesdays; not face to face; solely to pass information via encrypted private computer networks at Barnes & Noble or at Starbucks. Thus her suspicion was aroused when an FBI informant, posing as a Russian consular officer named "Roman", on Saturday, June 26 asked her to come to New York from Connecticut, where she was spending the weekend. Her suspicions increased when "Roman" turned out to be a man she did not know who asked her to deliver a fake United States passport to another sleeper agent in a face-to-face meeting. The task of transferring a fake US passport to another Russian agent in a face-to-face meeting was beyond anything that the Moscow Center had previously assigned to her.<br/>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. The FBI monitored the calls.<br/>Chapman turned in the passport to the 1st Precinct police station in New York but was questioned by the FBI and arrested.<br/>According to her American lawyer, Robert Baum, while in the US jail, she feared she would be deported. When her deportation became imminent, she said she would go to live in London on her UK passport, but it was subsequently revoked. After her deportation to Russia, in July 2010, Robert Baum reiterated that his client wished to stay in the US. He also said that she was "particularly upset" by the revocation of her UK citizenship and exclusion from the country.<br/>On August 8, 2010, the United Kingdom's tabloid Sunday Express cited an unidentified "source close to MI6" as saying, "There was a deal on the table just before she caught her connecting flight to Moscow. The secret service intercepted her on her flight back from America to Vienna, where her plane landed to refuel. MI6 were keen to know about other 'illegals'—Russian spy cells—hiding in the United Kingdom, so they made her an offer. In return they offered to give her back British citizenship and allow her to settle in London. Anna was having none of it though and told them in no uncertain terms that she wished to return to Russia."<br/>In September 2010, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Chapman said the SVR had forbidden her from saying anything about her activities in the US.</p>
<p>Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov (Juan Lazaro) and Vicky Peláez</p>
<p>Vicky Peláez, a Peruvian national and US citizen, and Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov (Russian: Михаил Анатольевич Васенков, alias Juan Lazaro), a Russian citizen, were arrested at their home in Yonkers, New York. Both admitted being Russian agents. The couple have a son together, and Peláez also has a son from a previous marriage.<br/>According to a report by The Wall Street Journal in early August 2010, the real Juan Lazaro died of respiratory failure in 1947 in Uruguay at age 3, with Vasenkov having presumably used the dead toddler's birth certificate to build a persona. According to a file kept by the Peruvian Interior Ministry that The Wall Street Journal cited, Vasenkov flew on March 13, 1976, from Madrid to Lima on a Uruguayan passport in the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes. He bore a letter on a Spanish tobacco company's stationery that said they had hired him for a market survey in Peru. Two years later, he submitted copies of the passport and a 1943 Uruguayan birth certificate with a letter asking Peru's military dictator Francisco Morales Bermúdez (the country was then run by a US-friendly junta) for Peruvian citizenship, which Peru granted in 1979.<br/>In 1983, "Juan Lazaro" married Vicky Peláez. Peláez was a television reporter in Peru, and a columnist at El Diario La Prensa in New York City. In her writings, Peláez often criticized US policy in Latin America, and supported liberation movements in those countries. In 1985, Peláez and "Lazaro" moved to New York with her son from a previous relationship.<br/>"Juan Lazaro" wrote a 1990 article for a European publication that spoke "glowingly" of the Shining Path guerrilla movement. He was described as a "journalist and anthropologist" in the 1998 book Women and Revolution: Global Expression, for which he was a contributing author. Vasenkov studied at the New School for Social Research and taught a class on Latin American and Caribbean Politics at Baruch College for one semester during the 2008–2009 school year as an adjunct professor. According to The New York Times June 29, 2010, report, Vasenkov was a vocal opponent of American foreign policy in class: "He maintained that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a money-making ploy for corporate America. He praised President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and disparaged President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia as a pawn for paramilitary groups that have broad control over drug trafficking." At least one student complained about Vasenkov's teaching and he was let go at the end of the semester. The department chairman reported that Vasenkov's instruction was not up to standard, resulting in his teaching for only one semester, but that he recalled no controversy over any anti-American views.<br/>US officials reported that on June 27, 2010, Vasenkov confessed to being a spy and that "Juan Lazaro" was not his real name, though he declined to give his true identity. He additionally stated he was not born in Uruguay, and that Peláez delivered letters to Russian authorities on his behalf. It was later reported that Lazaro's real name is Mikhail Vasenkov. In November 2010, Russian broadsheet Kommersant published Russian anonymous sources' allegations that while in US custody, Vasenkov had three ribs and a leg broken by investigators trying to extract more information from him—a claim assessed by experts as highly improbable. The Kommersant article also cited unnamed Russian government sources as saying that Vasenkov was presented with the SVR personal file on him obtained through a senior SVR defector ("Colonel Shcherbakov"), whereafter he was forced to own up to his real name.<br/>On August 7, 2010, The Wall Street Journal cited Vasenkov's American lawyer, Genesis Peduto, as saying that his client indicated to him on the phone that he wanted to leave Moscow for Peru: "He doesn't want to stay in Russia. He says he's Juan Lazaro and he's not from Russia and doesn't speak Russian. He wants to be where his wife is going, to her native country, where it will be easier for Juan Jr. to visit. His family comes first." In December 2013, Vicky Pelaez left Russia and returned home to Peru; Vasenkov moved there in January 2014.<br/>Vasenkov died in April 2022.</p>
<p>Andrey Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova (Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley)</p>
<p>Andrey Bezrukov (Russian: Андрей Безруков, alias Donald Howard Heathfield) and Yelena Vavilova (Russian: Елена Вавилова, alias Tracey Lee Ann Foley) admitted being both Russian citizens and Russian agents. They used Canadian identities stolen for them by the KGB, and lived in Canada for several years.<br/>When arrested, Bezrukov and his cover wife Yelena Vavilova had a home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Heathfield had earned an M.P.A. degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he was described as a "joiner". Heathfield claimed to have been the son of a Canadian diplomat and to have studied at a school in the Czech Republic. A fellow graduate of the Kennedy School noted that Heathfield kept careful track of his nearly 200 classmates, who included President of Mexico Felipe Calderón. The couple was arrested on June 27, 2010.<br/>On July 16, 2010, after his arrest and deportation, Harvard revoked Heathfield's degree on grounds of his misrepresentation of his identity on his application.<br/>Bezrukov was a professional member of the World Future Society, described by the Boston Herald as "a think tank on future technologies that holds conferences featuring top government scientists". Leon Fuerth, a former national security advisor to US Vice President Al Gore, spoke at the World Future Society 2008 conference in Washington, D.C., along with George Washington University professor William Halal. In a July 2, 2010, Wall Street Journal article, Fuerth is quoted acknowledging he met Heathfield after a speech he gave. In the same article, Halal described his relationship to Heathfield as benign; "I would bump into him at meetings of Federal agencies, think tanks, and the World Future Society. I have no information that's of any security value… Everything I gave Don was published widely and readily available on the Internet". Bezrukov was chief executive of Future Map, a consulting company involved in government and corporate preparedness systems.<br/>Bezrukov's cover wife, Yelena Vavilova (as Tracy Foley), worked for Redfin, a r</p>
<hr/><p><em>Based on Wikipedia article: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Illegals Program</a> – licensed under CC BY-SA.</em></p>
