The Russian "illegals" spies in the United States
United States, 2010
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
For more than a decade, in what it called Operation Ghost Stories, the FBI tracked a network of SVR agents, Russia's foreign intelligence service, who lived in the United States as ordinary citizens, with no diplomatic cover. With forged documents and, in some cases, stolen identities, they married, bought houses, raised children and studied at American universities, trying to get close to academics, financiers and people linked to the government. One of the couples lived in Montclair, New Jersey; others in Yonkers, Cambridge and northern Virginia. The man who used the name Juan Lazaro reportedly built his persona on the birth certificate of a Uruguayan boy who died at the age of three.
To send information to Moscow, the agents hid messages inside digital photos posted on the internet, using a Russian-made program that required a 27-character password, which the FBI found written down. They also used invisible ink, shortwave radio and private wireless networks: in 2010, Anna Chapman opened her laptop in a New York café to exchange data with a Russian official driving past. In quick meetings, they swapped identical bags on a station staircase, and a go-between buried money on a plot in upstate New York that another couple dug up two years later. None of them ever obtained secret documents.
Sources
In the game
Blue Hydrangea
A New Jersey suburb, Thursday, June 24, 2010, 10 pm. On Maple Street, with its trimmed lawns and identical mailboxes, the living room of engineer Elmer Rutledge smells of cold coffee and fear.
On June 27, 2010, the FBI arrested ten agents; an eleventh, the go-between known as Christopher Metsos, was detained in Cyprus and fled after posting bail. On July 8, the ten pleaded guilty to acting as agents of a foreign government without registering, and on the 9th they were flown to Vienna and exchanged for four people imprisoned in Russia, among them Sergei Skripal. The neighborhood was stunned: according to the press at the time, a neighbor of the Montclair couple joked that they could not be spies, "look what she did with the hydrangeas".
