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188 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS the CIA officer Harold Nicholson, in 1996. Before it could expand its espionage capabilities, it needed to build a network of Russian agents in the United States. For this network, it needed to groom so-called illegals, or agents who were not connected to the Russian embassy. This so-called illegals network was necessary because presumably all Russian diplomats, including the so-called legal members of Rus- sian intelligence, were under constant surveillance by the FBI. Advances in surveillance technology in the twenty-first century made it increasingly difficult to communicate with recruits through its diplomatic missions. To evade it, the “American” division of the SVR was given the task of placing individuals in the United States disguised as ordinary Americans. Their “legend,” or operational cover, could be thin because they would not be applying for jobs in the government. Their job was simply to blend in with their com- munity until they were called upon by the “American” department in Moscow to service a mole who had been planted in U.S. intelli- gence or other parts of the U.S. government. Until they were acti- vated by such a call, they were classified as sleeper agents. Unlike the ) SVR’s “legal” officers, who were attached to Russian embassies as ® diplomats and were protected from arrest by the Treaty of Vienna, the SVR’s illegal agents lack diplomatic immunity. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, who defected from the KGB in the Cold War, the sole job of such sleeper agents was to “live under cover in the West awaiting assignments for the Center.” One assignment that justifies the expense of maintaining such agents is to service a penetration, after one is made, in the U.S. intelligence establishment. While wait- ing to be activated for such a job, sleeper agents were instructed to build every detail of their cover identity so as to perfectly blend in with Americans. To build this American network of sleeper agents took the better part of a decade. In 2005, the SVR’s “American” section in Mos- cow had begun methodically installing them in the United States. Almost all were Russian citizens who had assumed new identities to better blend into their communities. The CIA learned of this sleeper program through Poteyev soon after it began. The issue was how to exploit this knowledge. When I was writing my book on international deception, James Jesus Angle- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 188 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019676