OTTAWA – The U.S. government says four alleged Russian spies posed as Canadians to cover their tracks on deep-cover assignments for Moscow.
The Justice Department in Washington said Monday that three of them were among 10 who have been arrested as purported agents of Russia’s intelligence service.
Court papers filed in the case by the Federal Bureau of Investigation say Donald Howard Heathfield, Tracey Lee Ann Foley, Patricia Mills and Christopher R. Metsos all claimed to be Canadian.
Metsos remains at large.
Investigators allege Heathfield assumed the identity of a dead Ontario man as part of his spy legend — possibly using his actual birth certificate.
The episode could spark the sort of diplomatic furor that erupted in 2006 when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service revealed an alleged Russian spy using the alias Paul William Hampel used a phoney Ontario birth certificate to successfully obtain passports on three occasions.
The agents’ job, according to the papers filed Monday in U.S. District Court, was “to search and develop ties in policy-making circles” in the United States.
Each of the 10 was charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison on conviction.
Nine of them were also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum 20 years in prison on conviction.
The arrests were the culmination of a multi-year investigation of a network of U.S.-based agents of the SVR, the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian Federation, FBI special agent Maria Ricci says in the court filing.
“The targets of the FBI’s investigation include covert SVR agents who assume false identities, and who are living in the United States on long-term, ‘deep-cover’ assignments.”
Heathfield and Foley, a married couple who lived near Boston, claimed to be naturalized U.S. citizens born in Canada, the court documents say.
In searching a Cambridge, Mass., safe-deposit box, investigators found a photocopy of a birth certificate in the name of Donald Howard Graham Heathfield.
While the birth certificate “appears to be real,” an obituary search revealed the man to be the dead son of Howard William Heathfield of Burlington, Ont., who died in June 2005 at age 70.
Corporate websites describe Heathfield as developer of Future Map, a software system, and as a principal with the Massachusetts office of Global Partners Inc. His resume says he has a bachelor of arts in international economics from York University in Toronto.
Foley, though claiming to be Canadian-born, travelled on a fake British passport prepared for her by the SVR, the court papers say.
A real estate website says she is a Montreal native educated in Canada, Switzerland and France. It claims Foley once worked as a human resources officer in Toronto and ran her own travel agency in Cambridge that specialized in organizing trips to French wine regions for small groups of enthusiasts.
“Ann’s cultural awareness and international experience make her sensitive to the needs of other people,” the site says. “She strives for excellence in everything she does.”
Heathfield and Foley appeared briefly in Boston federal court on Monday. A detention hearing was scheduled for Thursday.
The FBI says Moscow instructed the couple to gather information on U.S. foreign policy in such areas as use of the Internet by terrorists, the military and Central Asia. In one instance, Heathfield supposedly told his spymasters he had made contact with a U.S. nuclear weapons researcher.
The FBI alleges Heathfield and Foley communicated with Moscow headquarters through special computer software that embeds secret messages in images — a process known as steganography.
Mills and Metsos also claimed to be Canadian citizens.
Mills and her co-defendant husband Michael Zottoli lived for years in Seattle before moving to Arlington, Va., last October.
The FBI says Metsos, perhaps the most mysterious of the four purporting to be Canadian, does not live in the United States. The agency did not disclose his country of residence, but said he often travelled to the U.S. to meet with agents and pay them on behalf of Moscow.
In 2004, a Russian government official surreptitiously handed Metsos money in New York, the documents allege. Metsos then buried some cash in upstate New York and, two years later, Mills and Zottoli flew there and dug it up, the FBI says.
In Moscow, calls to the Foreign Ministry and the Foreign Intelligence Service were not answered early Tuesday.
— With files from the Associated Press
