The two sons of a Russian couple, who were among 10 deep-cover spies arrested in the United States, have given an interview about their experience for the first time. Tim and Alex Foley (now Vavilov) are the sons of Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, a married couple arrested in 2010 under Operation GHOST STORIES, a counterintelligence program run by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Following their arrest, their sons, who had grown up thinking their parents were Canadian, were told that they were in fact Russian citizens and that their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. Their English-sounding names and Canadian passports had been forged in the late 1980s by the KGB, the Soviet Union’s primary external intelligence agency.
The two boys were at the family’s home in suburban Cambridge, MA, on Sunday, June 27, 2010, when FBI agents conducted coordinated raids
across New England, arresting their parents and eight more Russian
‘illegals’. That term is used to signify Russian non-official-cover
operatives, namely intelligence officers who operate abroad without
diplomatic cover and typically without connection to the country they
spy for. It is now believed that Bezrukov and Vavilova were recruited as
a couple in the 1980s by the KGB’s Department S, which operated the
agency’s ‘illegals’ program. They were trained for several years before
being sent to Canada, where their mission was to blend into the society
and establish a ‘legend’, a background story of their lives that could
be supported by forged documentation supplied by the KGB. In 1995, the
family moved to Paris, France, where Bezrukov, using the name Donald
Heathfield, earned Master in Business Administration from the École des
Ponts. Both their children had been born by 1999, when the family moved
to Massachusetts so that Bezrukov could study at Harvard University. He
then joined a consultancy firm, which he apparently planned to use as a
vehicle in order to get close to influential American lawmakers.
Their two sons, who are now living in unspecified countries in Europe and Singapore, told British newspaper The Guardian that their childhood was “absolutely normal” and that they never suspected their parents of being spies. They told The Guardian’s
Shaun Walker that their parents never discussed Russia or the Soviet
Union, never ate Russian food, and never met Russian people while in
Massachusetts. The sons, whose Russian names are Alexander and Timofei
Vavilov, said they remember meeting their grandparents “somewhere in
Europe” when they were very young, but that they later disappeared from
their lives. Their parents told them that they lived in rural Alberta,
Canada, and that they found it difficult to travel.
The two brothers said that, shortly after
their parents were arrested by the FBI, they were put on a plane to
Moscow. When they arrived there, a group of people appeared on the plane
door and introduced themselves to them as “colleagues of their
parents”. They were then placed in a van and taken to a Moscow
apartment, where they were given information about their parents’ true
backgrounds, including photographs of them from their teenage lives and
military service in the USSR. It was then, they told The Guardian, that they finally believed that their parents were indeed Russian spies.
The family reunited a few days later in Moscow, after Bezrukov, Vavilova, and the other Russian ‘illegals’ were exchanged
with four men held in Russian jails for spying for the West. The two
brothers now want to regain their Canadian citizenship, which was taken
from them by the government of Canada after their parents were found to
have been using forged Canadian citizenship papers. They argue that they
feel Canadian, not Russian, and that they are not responsible for their
parents’ actions, which were hidden from them until their arrest in
2010.
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