Cyber espionage is a new version of an old game, one that will probably never disappear from the “virtual streets” of any city in the world. Spies are not an anomaly. Anywhere you go in the world there are probably spies. Just as US officials have authorized cyber espionage in other countries (albeit they play with what we believe is a more honorable rule book), there are also US spies who still disguise themselves and participate in clandestine activities abroad.

Of course, in-the-flesh Russian operatives likely still exist here.1 The expulsion of thirty-five diplomats, including those who may have also functioned as intelligence operatives, is a big deal. But that doesn't mean the United States will not continue to find operatives on our soil. Again, let's be careful and not jump on the bandwagon of suspicion. There are millions of Russian immigrants and Russian American citizens who are truly ordinary folks, many of them who are exceptionally accomplished, but they are not spies. They are in no way connected to the Russian government or to the Russian operatives who may spearhead cyber-espionage operations against the United States.

There certainly are spies here. No doubt we would be surprised if there weren't. We seem to find them fascinating, partly because they live the kind of colorful double lives we watch on television shows like The Americans or in movies like Salt. Learning how they operate and how they are caught can also teach us about techniques of modern-day spy tradecraft that often play out in a new form in the cyber arena.

One of the most intriguing modern-day Russian operatives (in my humble opinion) is Evgeny Buryakov (aka Zhenya), who functioned like many of the Ghost Story spies.2 Zhenya spent the years between 2010 and 2017 pretending to work at a Russian bank called Vnesheconombank (VEB) in New York City while covertly serving as an operative for the Russian External Intelligence Service, known as the SVR.³

The SVR is really just the most recent incarnation of the KGB, which handled the Soviet Union's domestic and worldwide intelligence and counterintelligence operations. The KGB was officially abolished with the dissolution of the USSR. SVR took over its foreign operations division, while the Federal Security Service took over its domestic and counterintelligence work. These are all distinct organizations from the Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, or GRU, which takes care of military intelligence and is part of the Russian armed forces.⁴ The SVR is meant to be a more “modern special service employing talented ambitious people devoted to the Motherland and their military duty” than the KGB.⁵

Zhenya was caught and prosecuted on March 11, 2016, by Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York (who was fired by President Trump approximately a year later), and John Carlin, assistant attorney general for national security.⁶ Zhenya was sentenced to thirty months in prison for “conspiring to act as an agent of the Russian Federation without providing prior notice to the Attorney General.” He was also ordered to pay a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a one-hundred-dollar special assessment, given an additional three years of supervised release, and ordered to be deported to Russia after his prison sentence was completed.

Essentially, he was convicted not because he was a spy, but for not telling the US attorney general he was a spy. It's an odd catch-22. Buryakov was working under nonofficial cover. If he'd reported himself as an official with the Russian intelligence agency, he would not have been officially convicted. This is how the law reads, although it is an odd espionage loophole.⁷

Bharara's statement included in a Department of Justice press release suggests that he, too, may also be interested in the idea of tradecraft.

“Evgeny Buryakov, in the guise of being a legitimate banker, gathered intelligence as an agent of the Russian Federation in New York. He traded coded messages with one of his Russian spy codefendants, who sent the clandestinely collected information back to Moscow. So long as this type of Cold War–style spy intrigue continues to go on in present-day New York City, the FBI and the prosecutors in my office will continue to investigate and prosecute it.”8

Buryakov was part of a group whose members were gathering intelligence on subjects including US future alternative energy sources and future US sanctions against Russian banks. The second member of the group was Igor Sporyshev, who was under deep cover as a trade representative for the Russian Federation of New York.⁹ They used classical techniques such as coded messages to share intelligence-related information while disguising their connection to each other.

The group also included Victor Podobnyy, a Russian whose official cover was an attaché to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations. In 2013, Podobnyy met with Carter Page, who later became a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor in 2016. Page shared information about the US energy industry. He maintains that he had no idea Podobnyy was a spy. “I shared basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents with Podobny[y],” Page said in an emailed statement to CBS News. “In doing so, I provided him nothing more than a few samples from the far more detailed lectures I was preparing at the time for the students in my Spring 2013 semester ‘Energy and the World: Politics, Markets and Technology’ course, which I taught on Saturdays at New York University.”¹⁰ Therein lies part of the problem when investigating the possibility of collusion between President Trump's campaign and people highly trained in the art of deception. In the United States this level of deception is an anomaly. The list of players involved in the scandal keeps growing, reading like the cast of flawed characters in a blockbuster movie, one that gives you a headache as you try to piece together the various plot elements. It is difficult to discern who is a willing participant and who has been compromised.

Sporyshev, forty-one, and Podobnyy, twenty-eight, were “charged,” which was later tempered down to “accused,” with the same charges Buryakov faced in court. They were also “accused” with second-count charges for aiding and abetting Buryakov.¹¹ Both Sporyshev (a trade representative) and Podobnyy (an attaché to the UN) had diplomatic immunity, and have left the country. They were “charged in absentia.”12

SECRET SPY GEAR

The FBI used creative and old-school methods to find the spies. They sent in an undercover agent (aka Undercover Employee One—UCE-1) who pretended to be a professional analyst working for an energy company based in Manhattan. UCE-1 allowed Sporyshev to try and recruit and compromise him. In the process, he brought to Sporyshev tons of paperwork inside three-hole-punch binders that contained fake documents about the energy industry. Miniature superspy cameras were hidden in the hard binder covers and other secret cubbyholes in the binders. Sporyshev carried the binders everywhere, including to the “Residentura,” the SVR's home base in New York.¹³

It was a simple method that yielded fantastic results. Sporyshev and Podobnyy were recorded discussing the federal agent's official cover, the nuts and bolts of their roles as SVR officers, and the FBI's arrest of the “illegals” (in other words, secret spies found in the United States, much like those depicted on The Americans TV series). The two operatives spoke about Buryakov's other undercover work posing as a representative of VEB for five years in South Africa, and in doing so essentially outed him during a dinner with another member of the SVR.

The spy team revealed methods in which they directed Buryakov to gather intelligence and transmitted his reports back to SVR headquarters in Moscow.¹⁴ The dynamic duo also discussed attempting to recruit Manhattanites to be covert operatives for Russia.¹⁵

During their operations, the three men regularly communicated using “clandestine methods and coded messages,”¹⁶ in order to exchange intelligence without being recognized as associating with each other or disclosing their secret lives as members of the Russian intelligence service. The FBI found this out by using top secret interception methods of calls between the two ringleaders, in which they noted they needed to meet for some seemingly mundane purpose, like giving them a “ticket,” “book,” or “list,” or for some phony social occasion. This was part of the code they used to alert one or more of the others that they needed to meet to exchange what they found.

During these meetings, they often exchanged paperwork or small items. The FBI broke their secret code through ordinary and logical methods. For example, although the team said twelve times that they needed to exchange tickets, they never were seen attending events like a concert or football game that would require tickets. Once, they spoke about going to a film at a cinema.17

The Department of Justice press release about the capture of the operatives revealed a few close calls and near attempts at gaining important intelligence.

ATTEMPT TO GAIN SENSITIVE INFORMATION ABOUT THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE

On May 21, 2013, Sporyshev called Buryakov and tasked him to connect with his sources and find out what questions ITAR-TASS, a Russian news service, could pose to the New York Stock Exchange. When he called Buryakov again, he had the answers. He said the news service could ask questions about (i) exchange-traded funds (ETFs), including the “mechanisms of their use to destabilize the market”; (ii) “curbing of trading robot activities”; and (iii) “technical parameters” and “other regulations directly related to the exchange.” On July 8, a man posing as the ITAR-TASS bureau chief emailed these questions to an employee of the New York Stock Exchange.¹⁸

SANCTIONS

An investigation that may have served the Russian government intelligence well in 2017 occurred on March 28, 2014, when Buryakov was instructed to research “the effects of economic sanctions on our country.”¹⁹

The FBI listened to an intercepted conversation on April 2, 2014—where Sporyshev noted he hadn't heard from Buryakov in a while and asked to meet outside the VEB office. The FBI later conducted a court-authorized search of Buryakov's computer and found at the time of the call that Buryakov had been conducting internet searches for “sanctions Russia consiquences [sic]” and “sanctions Russia impact.” Was Buryakov a slacker who wasn't doing his homework right away?20

Another intercepted conversation, on April 4, 2014, revealed that Buryakov called Sporyshev and said that he “wrote you an order list,” and suggested that they meet. Twenty minutes later, Sporyshev was in the driveway at Buryakov's home. Video surveillance cameras revealed that the two met for less than two minutes and appeared to exchange a small object.

Later, Buryakov was given documents he believed were obtained from a US government agency about US sanctions against Russia, and other classified material, which could be useful to the SVR and its Moscow-based officials.

As some of these stories unfold, one might wonder if there is any uniform way to deal with an operative once he/she has been captured and why some sentences are stiffer than others. For example, Buryakov has to do prison time while the people whom he was working for, and as we have seen “the illegals” and the thirty-five spies President Obama sent home as a form of sanctions intended as punishment for covert actions, were simply notified that they were being expelled and required to leave the country within a specific period of time. In this high-stakes game of tradecraft, the operatives themselves are bargaining chips.²¹ Some, like Buryakov, become sacrificial lambs, while others, like Anna Chapman, become heroines. As a newshound who has spent years interacting with intelligence operatives, I suspect there is more to these stories than what we've been told. I wonder about who is conducting these operations. Are they high-level employees or largely grunts who spend nights sitting in their cars nursing coffee and hoagies, watching for lights in windows or people walking through doors, who spend days monitoring fuzzy surveillance cameras. I wonder who purchases the tiny cameras or discovers the trapdoor space in a binder.

Mostly, it fascinates me to wonder what information is out there, what secrets Russian operatives may have about the United States. How many more spies are out there, and what are the things we have not been told about them? Were any of the people responsible for the hacking of the DNC databases former old-school spies who used classical techniques, yet dropped them into the cybersphere of the modern age? Do they work in tandem with people like Buryakov or Chapman, utilizing the information that the ground operatives have gathered? How does the spy game really work?

To find this out I spoke with Eric O'Neill, whose former career as a “spy catcher” was the subject of a major feature film.