CHAPTER 18 The Unheeded Warning
The NSA—the world’s most capable signals intelligence organi- zation, an agency immensely skilled in stealing digital data—had had its pockets thoroughly picked.
—CIA DEPUTY DIRECTOR MICHAEL MORELL, 2015
Is APRIL 2010, the CIA received a stark reminder of the ongoing nature of Russian espionage. It came in the form of a message from one of its best-placed moles in the Russian intelligence service. This surreptitious source was Alexander Poteyev, a fifty-four-year- old colonel in the SVR, which was the successor agency to the first chief directorate of the KGB. While the FSB took over the KGB’s domestic role in 1991, the SVR became Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Its operation center was in the Yasenevo district of Moscow. The CIA had recruited Poteyev as a mole in the 1990s when he had been stationed at the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. That it could sustain a mole in Moscow for over a decade attested to its capa- bilities in the espionage business. After he returned to Moscow, still secretly on the CIA’s payroll, he became the deputy chief of the SVR’s “American” section. This unit of Russian intelligence had the pri- mary responsibility for establishing spies in the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and other American intelligence agencies.
The SVR’s last known (or caught) mole in US. intelligence was
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