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U.S. Spies Rush to Protect Defectors After Skripal Poisoning

WASHINGTON — When a suspected hit man for Russian intelligence arrived in Florida about four years ago, FBI surveillance teams were alarmed.

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U.S. Spies Rush to Protect Defectors After Skripal Poisoning
By
Adam Goldman, Julian E. Barnes, Michael S. Schmidt
and
Matt Apuzzo, New York Times

WASHINGTON — When a suspected hit man for Russian intelligence arrived in Florida about four years ago, FBI surveillance teams were alarmed.

The man approached the home of one of the CIA’s most important informants, a fellow Russian, who had been secretly resettled along the sunny coast. The suspected hit man also traveled to another city where one of the informant’s relatives lived, raising even more concerns that the Kremlin had authorized revenge on American soil.

At FBI headquarters, some agents voiced concern that President Vladimir Putin of Russia, himself a former intelligence officer known to reserve scorn for defectors from their ranks, had sent an assassin to kill one he viewed as a turncoat. Others said he would not be so brazen as to kill a former Russian spy on U.S. soil.

Ultimately, the Russian defector and his family remained safe. But after the poisoning in March of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer living in Britain, and his daughter, U.S. intelligence officials have begun to reassess the danger facing former spies living in the United States, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations.

Moscow’s intelligence agencies have in recent years tracked down several Russians who secretly served as CIA informants and were resettled in the United States through a highly secret agency program to protect former spies, according to the current and former officials.

Counterintelligence officials have done a wide-reaching review of every former Russian informant now in the United States, according to a U.S. official. They have examined security measures to protect the former spies and searched for potential liabilities. Intelligence agents have tried to assess how easy it would be to find the informants through social media accounts, information shared with relatives and other clues. The British government has accused two Russian military intelligence officers of carrying out the Skripal poisoning, which they denied on Thursday in a bizarre television interview. It is not clear whether Putin directed the assault, but U.S. officials have expressed concern that he may shift from rattling cages in the United States to mounting other attacks, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

“The possibility of them doing the same thing here cannot be discounted — especially in light of them interfering in the 2016 election and Skripal,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a former top FBI counterintelligence official. He said he was not familiar with the episode in Florida.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

The New York Times is withholding details about the former CIA informant in Florida because intelligence officials believe his life is in danger. Both he and at least one other former CIA asset were resettled through the agency’s protection division, the National Resettlement Operations Center, after Russian intelligence found their homes, according to current and former officials.

Russia’s pursuit of informants intensified around the time relations with the West soured over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. As Putin has sought to reassert Russia’s power, its largest military intelligence unit, the Main Directorate — also known as the GRU — has been linked to a number of brazen plots abroad, including the shooting down of a passenger jet over Ukraine and the theft of Democratic emails that were a major part of Russia’s interference campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

U.S. officials have long believed that Putin, who was sent home from his post as a KGB officer in East Germany during the fall of the Soviet Union, has a deep antipathy toward former intelligence agents who aid Western countries, but that he would be unwilling to order a strike in the United States. After Skripal’s poisoning, U.S. intelligence agencies can no longer discount it. Killing or even attempting to kill a former Russian spy in the United States would not only further damage relations between Moscow and Washington but would also be likely to prompt an American response. After Britain publicly accused Russia of poisoning Skripal and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent, the United States, Britain and other Western countries expelled scores of Russian diplomats, plunging relations between the two sides into an even deeper freeze.

The Russian government already uses threats against former spies to try to intimidate current informants into going quiet and to dissuade others from aiding Western intelligence, current and former officials say.

In the mid-1990s, a former senior agency official said, the CIA located an explosive device under a car that belonged to a Russian intelligence officer who had spied for the CIA. At the time, it was not clear to the CIA whether the Russians intended for the device to explode or merely to serve as a chilling warning.

“The threat from Putin in this area is real and pervasive,” said Mike Rochford, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who helped expose Russian spies. “It is a dark legacy of a dead Soviet regime.”

The Russians, according to former officials, have used a variety of means to track the former informants.

Many, including the one in Florida, were relocated to the United States along with their family members, and Russians have tracked relatives’ social media accounts to find the families, according to former officials.

The Russians have also used more time-tested techniques, waiting for informants to grow homesick or using honey traps — fake romantic overtures to lure a target. Alexander Zaporozhsky, a Russian colonel, defected to the United States and lived quietly in Maryland until he decided to return to Russia in the early 2000s; a romantic interest lured him back, former agency officials said. He was taken into custody but freed as part of a spy swap with the United States in 2010.

Defectors often reach out to friends and family in their native lands, communications that are typically vulnerable to eavesdropping by Russian intelligence officers, former CIA officials said. In late 2013 or early 2014, the Russian operative who traveled to Florida entered the United States on a valid visa, and U.S. intelligence agencies, which knew enough about his identity to be concerned that he had traveled to the country, began tracking him and discussed whether to stop and question him.

But detaining a Russian who arrived in the country legally is difficult, FBI officials said, and would be likely to prompt the officer to abort his operation, denying U.S. counterintelligence agents a chance to gain valuable intelligence about his activities. Instead, officials decided to monitor the man and watched as he visited the Florida home of the former informant.

The decision to spy on the Russian was also a gamble and showed the level of concern by intelligence agencies. Surveillance is risky because trained spies can detect it. If spies determine how U.S. intelligence officers spotted them, CIA officials worry, that can compromise the method of spying.

Officials said at the time that they were seeing a swarm of suspected Russian operatives entering the United States on legal visas before the U.S. government began tightening requirements after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Moscow was trying to put more operatives in the field who were not working out of the Russian Embassy to make it more difficult for the FBI to track them, according to current and former officials.

FBI officials suspected these Russians were collecting secret messages at dead-drop locations or gathering details about potential vulnerabilities of American internet infrastructure networks.

Similar to the witness protection program, the CIA’s resettlement center is responsible for more than 100 agency assets at any time. They are given U.S. citizenship and asked where they want to live. Many, a former senior CIA officer said, prefer Florida.

On a case-by-case basis, the CIA decides whether to give defectors new identities. In the case of Russians, the decision depends on how much Moscow knows about an informant and the level of interest from Russian intelligence.

But giving people new identities and hiding them in the United States is becoming more difficult, according to former officials, in part because of the online presence of family members. Many Russians and their families have been resettled over the years, including the intelligence officer who provided critical information about Robert Hanssen, the former FBI agent who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to life in prison in 2002.

The CIA moved him and his son to a beach house in California nearly two decades ago, bought them BMWs and provided him an annuity worth millions of dollars.

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