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The Unheeded Warning | 189 ton had pointed out to me that “the business of intelligence services requires understanding precisely the relationship of their opposi- tion to them.” His view, though his opponents inside the CIA would call it with some justification an obsession, was that an intelligence service had to focus on the moves of its rivals. To accomplish this “business” in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the CIA had to establish why its new opposition, the SVR, was laying the foundation for an espionage operation. What were its priorities in the resumption of the intelligence war? Its inside man in the SVR, Poteyev, provided it with a tremendous advantage in this relation- ship. He knew the links in a sleeper network that the SVR believed was safely hidden from surveillance. If they were followed, when they were activated, they could expose whatever recruits the SVR had in the American government. The CIA duly shared this infor- mation about the sleeper ring with the FBI, which had the respon- sibility for the surveillance of foreign agents in the United States. The FBI, for its part, kept the Russian sleeper agents under tight surveillance—an operation that grew in complexity and expense as © more SVR agents arrived in the United States. ® Meanwhile, in Moscow, Poteyev was following the unfolding operation. Part of his SVR job was to continue preparing these “Americans,” as they were called by the SVR, for their assignments. Some had been sent as couples, others as singles. One of the sin- gles that Poteyev personally handled was Anna Kushchyenko. She was a strikingly beautiful Russian student who changed her name to Anna Chapman by briefly marrying a British citizen she met at a rave party. After taking his name, she left him. After completing her training in Russia, she was sent by the SVR to New York City to establish herself as an international real estate specialist. Other “Americans” under Poteyev’s watch became travel agents, students, and financial advisers. In all, Poteyev identified to the CIA twelve such sleeper agents. The cost of FBI surveillance of them over the years became sizable. According to a former FBI agent, around-the- clock surveillance on the movements and communications of a sin- gle individual can cost over $10,000 a day. When the CIA received Poteyev’s message in 2010 warning that Russian military intelligence had asked the SVR to activate some of | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 189 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019677