Gordon Corera - Russians Among Us

Derek Pieper, originally from Boston, was another long-standing member of the team. Quieter, with a dry sense of humor, he had also been to law school after Harvard but decided he did not want to be a lawyer. He had worked as an investigator on public corruption in New York and then joined the bureau’s New York field office in 2004. Investigating organized crime seemed the most interesting possibility at the time but instead he found his first assignment was to the counterintelligence squad investigating illegals. He too would see the case through to the end. The squad had to keep things tight even from neighboring counterintelligence teams. “The next squad over had no idea what we were doing,” says Pieper. Because the team also hunted for treacherous Americans, it was sometimes assumed by colleagues that their secretiveness might be because they were investigating someone within the building. Working counterintelligence was not the way to make yourself popular.

The FBI agents found themselves plunged into a strange world. Ricci would talk to some of her Boston colleagues who were following Heathfield and Foley about what it took to be an illegal. “This is crazy. I can’t imagine going to Quantico and being told: you know what, Maria, you’re really good at languages, we think you have an ability to be an illegal—I want you to give up your life, your family, your friends, everything, go to Moscow, live a completely different life. You can’t call home anymore. You can’t say ‘Happy birthday, Mom.’ By the way, here’s your new husband.” They had a front-row seat into the SVR’s most secret program and yet the reality was they were watching a family like the Murphys in suburbia. “When you think of a Russian spy you are thinking of someone rappelling off a rooftop or jumping out of a plane,” Maria Ricci said years later. “What I think of is these two eating a hamburger at the family picnic and drinking really bad beer.”

The FBI’s armory of techniques includes monitoring and recording phone calls and emails, searching bank records, placing covert video cameras in public places and hotel rooms, and physical surveillance of suspects. But one of the most important would be the covert searches of their homes. The FBI’s job may include combating crime, but one of its core investigative techniques is to do something that, if a passerby happened to spot it, would look a lot like breaking and entering. A covert search is legally authorized to support the FBI’s mission. But it still involves people in the middle of the night getting into someone else’s property and having a root around. In the case of the illegals this would have seemed even stranger to a passerby. It was not as if these were offices belonging to a company or someone thought to have mob links. These were ordinary suburban houses and apartments belonging to people with families.

Covert searches are risky. If one of the illegals realizes there has been a break-in, either because they notice something in the wrong place or a neighbor tells them there were some strange goings-on when they were out, then they might well suspect the FBI was on to them. In that case, the whole investigation could be over. This meant the searches were carried out only rarely. Typically, they would be done when you knew for sure the inhabitants of a property were out and there was no chance of them coming back. Out for dinner was not good enough—an argument or a bad meal and they could be back early. Out of town for a vacation when you knew the day of their return was better. But even then you still had to worry about neighbors. You do not want them seeing something strange and telling the owners or a police car waking the street with sirens. A property like that of the Murphys would maybe be searched twice a year. No more. “We didn’t go in just to have a look around,” explains Kohler.

An FBI team wants to know as much as possible about the lifestyle and the property before they go in. The FBI used experts who are “pattern of life analysts,” whose job is to learn every detail of people’s lives—when do they normally go to sleep and get up? Do they wake in the middle of the night much? When are the neighbors awake? Are there any dogs? What time does the garbage truck come? The last question is important because the FBI carried out what is called “Trash Cover,” which means switching trash cans before they are picked up. One source says that for a full decade, the FBI collected all the trash from the illegals’ houses to search it for any possible clues. “We owned almost every facet of their life. We knew what they were doing on a daily basis. When they came. When they went,” one FBI agent would later say.

A covert entry like that in Hoboken in 2005, which led to the key breakthrough, would usually take place in the middle of the night. A skeleton key or lock pick got you in. Then windows are carefully blocked out so that the team can use their own light inside without anyone outside becoming suspicious. It would include one or two case officers working directly on the investigation—like Maria Ricci or Derek Pieper—who might be able to spot the significant items. Others would be technical specialists. “You are literally sneaking around somebody’s house … there’s always pressure,” says Ricci; “they lived in an apartment building, so walls are thin. So you would hear the guy next door cough and you realize you really needed to be quiet … We went in when we had a reason to go in.” Every time you went in, you rolled the dice. Too many times and chances are you would eventually make a mistake. The team searching in Hoboken realized that their targets were using small tricks to detect whether anyone had been inside their apartment while they were away. When the Murphys’ closets were opened, they were packed with items. In some cases, strings were weaved around things in a particular pattern. In another there were coins in pockets of certain clothes. Disturbing the string or coins would make it hard to put them back in exactly the same way. They were simple but effective tricks using everyday items. It meant the FBI team decided not to touch certain things, as they could not take the risk.

One role for covert entry teams was the placement of tiny listening devices—microphones or bugs that were able to pick up conversations in the room. This is something the FBI has long experience in developing, so they can be hidden in everyday items. The bureau will not comment on what these might be, where they can be placed, or how they work, for fear of tipping off subjects of investigation. But they gave a deep insight into what targets talked about and how they lived their lives—right down to how they talk to their children and to each other. “I practically lived with the Murphys for so long,” says Ricci. “I feel I know Richard Murphy better than some of my relatives, which may say something quite bad about me.”

The hours were long for the FBI team, just as they were for the illegals. The amount of material produced by the bugs was enormous. Every time a floorboard squeaked, the recording device would be tripped and the recording would need to be reviewed. The squad of agents had to sit listening to the endless chatter of daily life, hoping somewhere in there was a nugget that might be a clue to some spy activity. The FBI team never heard the Murphys talk to each other about the challenges of living as an illegal. Even when they were alone in the house together, they never broke cover and talked to each other either in Russian or in English about their real work. They certainly seemed aware of the possibility of some kind of surveillance. Occasionally there might be a hushed conversation somewhere in the house that was hard to pick up on the listening devices but seemed to correlate with when there was an operational meeting coming up, but it was hard to be sure.