Last week the Justice Department disclosed that a former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee had been indicted, accused of lying to the FBI. Federal agents had been asking James Wolfe about leaks to reporters. One reporter in particular seems to have been the lucky recipient of Wolfe’s indiscretions: Ali Watkins, now of the New York Times, before that of Politico and BuzzFeed.
Wolfe and Watkins are said to have had an affair, during which the older Senate staffer shared with his young reporter girlfriend tightly held government information. This enabled her to publish career-making scoops. The most prominent of those was her blockbuster BuzzFeed article, April 3, 2017, “A Former Trump Adviser Met With A Russian Spy.” Watkins reported that campaign aide Carter Page admitted to BuzzFeed that “he had been in contact with at least one Russian spy working undercover out of Moscow’s UN office in 2013.”
If that weren’t shocking enough, Watkins had gotten her hands on quotes from the spies in question, whose opinion of Page’s intelligence fit nicely with the media’s general impression of all people Trump. Russian agent Victor Podobnyy was on record saying of Page, “I think he is an idiot.”
April 4, 2017, saw a deluge of copycat news copy as publications raced to rereport Watkins’ big story. But in their eagerness to declare Page either 1) a willing Russian collaborator, 2) a moron, or 3) both, the media mostly breezed past one of the most remarkable stories of spy-craft in decades. It’s a story—one sorely lacking these days—of the FBI at its clever best. And even without the appearance of Carter Page, it is a story with major implications for the question of whether Trump or anyone in his orbit colluded with the Russians—implications that seem to have been missed.
In late January 2015, Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara announced charges against three Russians living in New York and believed to be spies: Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobnyy. Each had a thin cover job: Buryakov was ostensibly an employee at the Manhattan branch of a Russian bank, Vnesheconombank; Sporyshev was a trade representative for the Russian Federation; Podobnyy was an attaché to the Russian mission at the United Nations. In reality the men were all agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
How did American authorities know the men were spies—well, other than the fact that Sporyshev and Podobnyy, with their phony-baloney diplomatic jobs, all but had the word “spy” tattooed on their foreheads? There was incontrovertible evidence: They were on tape talking extensively about their spy business. According to a complaint filed and sworn to by FBI Special Agent Gregory Monaghan on January 23, 2015, the conversations were recorded “within a secure office in Manhattan used by SVR agents to send and receive intelligence reports and assignments from Moscow.” Monaghan had described the location of the recording accurately, but in the understated, officious style we might call Bureau Deadpan. The conversations recorded weren’t just in “a secure office,” they were in the SVR’s local sanctum sanctorum, the secure room in the Residentura.
But how? Had the Residentura been infiltrated in some sort of Tom Cruise scenario, with an acrobatic secret agent dangling in an air vent to place a bug? No, it was much simpler and more elegant than that. The details emerged when Buryakov pleaded guilty in March 2016 (the other two having already escaped the country). Then-U.S. Attorney Bharara, put out a press release explaining all. It went like this: Looking for info on oil and gas markets in the West, Sporyshev set out to recruit “an analyst from a New York-based energy company.” He thought he had succeeded, especially when the new recruit started delivering energy-industry white papers. Not only was the recruit being helpful with the industry analysis documents, he was fastidious in organizing the materials—so much so that he put the papers in binders.
The savvy reader will by now know where this is going. The analyst with the energy company was actually an undercover FBI employee. Together with the “purported industry analysis” documents, the binders contained hidden recording devices. Sporyshev “took the binders to, among other places, the Residentura.” The G-men listened in from March 2012 through September 2014. What a beautiful piece of tradecraft, getting Russian agents to bug their own cone of silence!
Excellent tradecraft, yes, but its success depended on lazy, slipshod spy work by the opposition. And by the sound of their conversations, lazy, slipshod work was standard practice for the Russian agents—a sort of modern Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski.
Take a conversation between Sporyshev and Podobnyy in which the former makes excuses for why he’s had so little luck insinuating himself with young female recruitment targets: “I have lots of ideas about such girls but these ideas are not actionable because they don’t allow to get close enough,” Sporyshev groused. “And in order to be close you either need to f— them or use other levers to influence them to execute my requests. So when you tell me about girls, in my experience, it’s very rare that something workable will come of it.” The spy is so demoralized he can’t even rouse himself for a lothario assignment.
Buryakov was tasked with finding out information on how to pressure Canadian airplane unions to let Russia do the manufacturing of some Bombardier passenger jets. Bharara describes some of the crack espionage Buryakov undertook in fulfilling this crucial mission: he “conducted Internet searches relating to Bombardier and labor unions and, earlier, had obtained news articles regarding the planned deal…”
The agents did a lot of griping. Podobnyy’s pedestrian life as a spy wasn’t what he had hoped or expected. “F—!” he said. “Not one point of what I thought then, not even close [nothing like] movies about James Bond. Of course, I wouldn’t fly helicopters, but [expected to] pretend to be someone else at a minimum.”
Why so discouraged?
The trio of Russian spies were still shell-shocked from the U.S. intelligence roll-up of the “Illegals” years before. Ten Russian sleeper agents pretending to be average Americans were arrested in 2010. They had been operated by the SVR’s “Directorate S,” and yet that elite shop had been impotent to protect its agents from discovery and prosecution.
Podobnyy says “Directorate S is the only intelligence that is real intelligence, Directorate S.”
“It was,” Sporyshev laments.
“Look, in the States even the S couldn’t do anything,” agrees Podobnyy. “They caught ten of them. And you remember what they were charged with? Illegal cashing [of the money] the Center sent, that’s all!” And so, they concluded that when it came to undercover activities, there wasn’t much that could be accomplished. “[E]ven the S cannot do anything here.”
Which brings us to the implications that have been missed all along.
The first is that, for all we’ve been hearing about Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election, everything we know about Russia’s hobbled espionage capabilities in the United States—and we know quite a lot, given the FBI’s listening device that operated for years in the heart of the New York Residentura—suggests that Vladimir Putin’s regime would have a hard time influencing a dog-catcher’s election in Poughkeepsie.
The second is a sort of dog-that-didn’t-bark affair. Remember the dossier, written by ex-British-spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Clinton campaign, the document that did so much to launch the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia? The Steele dossier alleged that Trump had conspired with Putin for five to eight years, and that the operation was handled by “Russian diplomatic staff in key cities such as New York, Washington DC and Miami.” But during the time of this supposed conspiracy, the FBI was listening in to the conversations of the very Russian spies posing as diplomatic staff in New York. If there had been a Trump-Kremlin connection being operated out of New York, wouldn’t one expect the topic to have come up in the discussions among Russian intelligence officers in the supposedly secure safe-room at the Residentura? Would the spy trio have been so bored and disheartened if they had been running a secret asset who just happened to be one of the richest celebrities in town?
That said, there are limits to what is publicly known. The complete transcripts collected by the FBI were never released—just enough, and then some, to establish that Buryakov, Sporyshev, and Podobnyy were spies. But we do know that the FBI acted on the names that turned up in the spies’ conversation. When Podobnyy told Sporyshev in 2013 how he planned to feed Carter Page “empty promises,” the FBI promptly went and had a conversation with Page to warn him he was being targeted. Is it credible that Donald Trump’s name would have turned up and been ignored by the FBI? Is it possible that Bharara would have come across references to Trump in the course of a high-profile prosecution and not done anything with the information?
Then again, maybe Buryakov, Sporyshev, and Podobnyy talked at length about working Trump after all. Perhaps the FBI has just forgotten they have some such unreleased recordings buried in the file. Or maybe the bureau has already identified the relevant tapes and turned the transcripts over to the special counsel’s team. But if Mueller did have such tapes, would he have sat on them for so long?
If there is any mention of Trump in the Residentura bootlegs, let’s hope the FBI digs them out and the special counsel brings them forward, sooner rather than later, so that the whole collusion question can be answered.
Absent those possibilities, what are we to take away from the lack of any reference to Trump in the unguarded conversations of top Russian spies in New York? Is it unreasonable to take it as an indication the tale of a Trump/Russia conspiracy is not to be believed?
