A Russian intelligence officer, who posed as a banker in the United States, has been handed a prison sentence by a court in New York. Evgeny Buryakov, 41, posed as an employee of the New York branch of Vnesheconombank, a Russian state-owned bank headquartered in Moscow. However, in January 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Buryakov along with Igor Sporyshev, 40, and Victor Podobnyy, 27, who were employees of the trade office of the Russian permanent mission to the United Nations in New York. According to their indictment, Sporyshev and Podobnyy were in fact employees of the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, one of the direct institutional descendants of the Soviet-era KGB. The FBI said the two were employed by the SVR’s ‘ER’ Directorate, which focuses on economics and finance. Operating under diplomatic guise, they regularly met with Buryakov, who the FBI said was the third member of the alleged spy ring.
However, unlike Sporyshev and Podobnyy,
Buryakov was operating under non-official cover, posing as a bank
employee. Non-official-cover operatives, or NOCs, as they are typically
referred to in the US Intelligence Community, are usually high-level
principal agents or officers of an intelligence agency, who operate
without official connection to the diplomatic authorities of the country
that employs them. They typically pose as business executives,
students, academics, journalists, or non-profit agency workers, among
other covers. Unlike official-cover officers, who are protected by
diplomatic immunity, NOCs have no such protection. If arrested by
authorities of their host country, they can be tried and convicted for
conducting espionage.
The court documents also reveal
that Sporyshev and Podobnyy broke basic rules of intelligence
tradecraft by contacting Buryakov using an unencrypted telephone line
and addressing him by his real name, rather than his cover name. These
conversations, which occurred in April 2013, turned out to be monitored
by the FBI’s counterintelligence division, which promptly recorded them.
The three SVR officers were arrested following a successful FBI sting
operation, which involved an undercover FBI agent posing as an American
investor offering to provide Buryakov with classified documents from the
US Treasury. In March of this year, Buryakov pleaded guilty to working
in the US as unregistered agent of Russia’s SVR. He has been sentenced
to 2 ½ years in prison and ordered to pay a $10,000. Sporyshev and
Podobnyy, who held diplomatic immunity, were expelled from the US
following their arrest.
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