National Post (National Edition)
Story of a spy named Gideon remains relevant today
TORONTO • Vladimir Putin’s attempt to influence the U.S. election through hacks and leaks was unsavoury and brazen — which is to say, entirely consistent with Russian intelligence operations.
After all, this was the same foreign intelligence apparatus that has repeatedly crept through Canadian cemeteries, looking for the graves of babies so it could steal their identities for its deep-cover spies, known as “illegals.”
The Russian illegals program is a particularly sinister invention: Highly-trained agents are sent to live as “pretend” Canadians — to get jobs, raise families, all the while secretly reporting to their handlers in Moscow.
One of the early illegals was Yevgeni Brik, whose story is told in a new book, Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada. Written by former counter-intelligence officer Donald Mahar, it details a plot of deception and betrayal worthy of a spy novel, one that remains relevant in the age of Putin.
In an interview, Mahar said espionage continues to be a priority for Russia under Putin, a former KGB officer.
“The collection of communications intelligence and state-sponsored hacking such as the world is witnessing right now is indicative of what we must diligently protect ourselves against,” he said.
Initially run by the KGB, and then by its successor the SVR, the illegals program aims to infiltrate countries for sensitive tasks too risky for the spies working out of Russian embassies.
Illegals can spend decades living false lives, cultivating their personal histories, or “legends,” ready to be called upon for operations. Illegals have typically been sent to Canada to build backgrounds for eventual deployment to the U.S. .
“They are Russian espionage elites, among their nation’s costliest and longestterm undercover agents, who will go to great lengths to spy on their target countries,” reads a government document filed in Federal Court in the case of an illegal caught in Canada.
In 1996, a Toronto married couple, Ian and Laurie Lambert, were unmasked as Yelena Olshevskaya and Dmitriy Olshevsky, illegals working for the SVR. They had taken over the identities of Canadians who had died as infants. Both were deported.
A decade later, an SVR illegal who had been living in Montreal as “Paul William Hampel” was outted by Canadian investigators.
He had used a fraudulent Ontario birth certificate to obtain a Canadian passport for missions to the Balkans.
Illegals Elena Vavilova and Andrey Bezrukov were arrested in 2010 after decades in Toronto and Boston as Tracey Foley and Donald Heathfield, Canadians who had died as infants.
Planting illegals has been a long-standing Russian tactic, going back to the postwar era, when Brik arrived in Halifax by ship and opened a Montreal photo studio as David Soboloff, a Torontoborn man whose identity the KGB had taken over.
Trained in the art of dead drops, radio transmissions and encoded microfilm, Brik was supposed to emigrate to the U.S. at a time chosen by his handlers, who wanted him to work with Rudolf Abel, the New York-based illegal featured in the Tom Hanks film Bridge of Spies.
But until then his assignment was to become Soboloff so convincingly that nobody would ever suspect he was a Soviet spy.
Eventually, he was given responsibility for managing five recruited agents, including a Communist Party of Canada member from Toronto who worked on the Avro Arrow and provided its schematics to the KGB.
To familiarize himself with Canada, Brik roamed the country taking odd jobs, but he messed up in Winnipeg in 1953 when he had an affair with Larissa Cunningham, the wife of a Canadian Army corporal. When she left her husband for him, Brik felt compelled to reveal his secret to her.
“Rather than lash out at him, Larissa began to talk to Yevgeni about turning himself in to the RCMP,” Mahar writes. “She told him that the RCMP would protect him and keep him safe from the long reach of the KGB.”
They took the train to Ottawa and Brik came clean to the RCMP security service, which gave him the codename Gideon and turned him into a double agent against the KGB in what was called Operation Keystone.
But when Brik travelled to Moscow in 1955 to keep up appearances with the KGB, he was jailed, betrayed by a member of the security service, Cpl. James Morrison, who sold him out to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa for money to pay off his debts.
For four decades, everyone assumed Brik had been executed but in 1992 Mahar, then with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was assigned the case of an elderly man who had walked into the British embassy in Lithuania and handed over a coded message.
CSIS confirmed it was Brik and then-prime minister Brian Mulroney was briefed. “Every consideration will be given to this man who was betrayed by the cowardice of an RCMP officer,” Mulroney wrote.
An exfiltration operation was thrown together to get Brik out of reach of the KGB and Mahar accompanied Brik back to Canada and debriefed him, allowing him to fill in the gaps in his story, and to correct the historical record about the case, which he calls “seriously flawed” and “largely incorrect.”
Brik lived out his remaining years in Ottawa and died in 2011 at the age of 89.
Morrison was fired from the RCMP not for treason but for misappropriating government funds in what Mahar calls a cover-up to protect the image of the police force.
“One would be mistaken in thinking that Operation Keystone is a relic of the past, a phenomenon of the KGB and the Cold War,” writes Mahar.
“Dispatching deep-cover illegals to the West, and elsewhere, has continued under the current-day SVR.”
Following the 2010 roundup of illegals, called Operation Ghost Stories, Russia initially denied that those arrested by the FBI were spies, calling the allegations “baseless” and “unseemly.”
It was not unlike the reaction to recent reports that Russia was behind the cybercampaign that favoured president-elect Donald Trump.
But when the 10 spies arrived back in Moscow in July, 2010, they were greeted by Putin himself with what Time called a “pep talk and a patriotic sing-along.”