San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Soviet sleeper agent helped inspire ‘Americans’ series
Mikhail Vasenkov, the most senior of 10 Soviet sleeper agents who posed as ordinary citizens in the United States as they scouted potential recruits, and whose mass arrest and deportation in 2010 inspired the TV series “The Americans,” died April 6. He was 79. His death was announced by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency did not specify how or where he died, but he was interviewed as recently as December 2020 in Moscow.
When they were arrested, Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, a journalist, had been living undercover in a Sovietowned two-story brick and stucco house in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., since emigrating from her native Peru in 1985.
They and eight others, part of a network of so-called illegals, were rounded up in a multiyear FBI investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, and pleaded guilty to failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were then deported, flown to Europe on July 9, 2010, and swapped for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States and Britain.
The arrests of the sleeper agents, including several couples with children and a selfstyled New York socialite, Anna Chapman, generated the concept for “The Americans,” which was broadcast on FX beginning in 2013.
“That was absolutely the inspiration for the series,” Joe Weisberg, who developed the series with Joel Fields, told Time magazine in 2010.
Over six seasons, the drama, set in the 1980s, followed two Soviet undercover agents masquerading as a suburban Washington couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), in a Cold War cat-andmouse contest with federal agents.
Vasenkov, operating as Juan Lazaro Sr., conducted what sounded more like a cat-andslouch competition with federal counterintelligence agents. He and Pelaez did not shade their anti-American views, and they apparently neither collected nor delivered any secrets to Moscow.
When the spies were rounded up, the FBI said that while “their intent from the start was serious, well-funded by the SVR” — the Soviet intelligence service — “and far-ranging,” they “never got their hands on any classified documents.”
Whether for the benefit of eavesdroppers or because he was getting paid regardless, Vasenkov was recorded by federal agents telling his wife matter-of-factly that his Soviet handlers “say my information is of no value,” adding, “If they don’t like what I tell them, too bad.”
He was apparently the first of the Soviet agents to have been compromised, captured on tape as early as 2003 blithely instructing his wife on how to communicate with Moscow. “When you go to Peru, I am going to write in invisible,” he said, according to a transcript, “and you’re going to pass them all of that in a book.” To which Pelaez replied, “Oh, OK.”
When he was arrested, he told investigators that he “would not violate his loyalty” to the SVR — “even for his son,” a teenager whom he would leave behind when he and his wife were deported.
When the 10 agents arrived in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent who was prime minister at the time, greeted them by lustily leading them in patriotic anthems and offering them a “bright life” in Mother Russia with a pension and monthly stipends.
But Vasenkov, the senior spy among them, said no, thank you. He had not been looking forward to his return. He had not lived in his native Russia for decades (by then, he spoke Russian with a Spanish accent), and his wife had never visited the country.
And so within weeks of landing in Moscow, he decided instead to resume his false identity and return with his wife to Peru.
They did, in 2013. In “Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West” (2012), Edward Lucas wrote that while the infiltration by sleeper agents posed a serious threat to U.S. national security, “it is easy to mock the pointlessness of these people, apparently the least serious of the illegals, sent at vast trouble and expense of a foreign country in order to carry out tasks that most people manage with a mouse click.”
Nonetheless, in announcing Vasenkov’s death, the Russian security agency praised him in an obituary.
“At work in special conditions since 1975,” the obituary said, “he created and headed an illegal residency, which obtained valuable political information, which was highly appreciated.”
The couple’s son, Juan Lazaro Jr., who was 17 at the time of their arrest and already an accomplished pianist, declined to accompany them back to Russia. He was finishing his studies at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan at the time. According to a resume, he later graduated from the Juilliard School and studied at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, part of the New School, and still lives in New York.
Pelaez’s stepson from a previous relationship, Waldo Mariscal, an architect who was 38 at the time, also remained in the United States.
He now lives in Peru with his mother, according to her lawyer, Carlos Moreno. She and her sons are among Vasenkov’s survivors, Moreno said.
Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born Oct. 9, 1942, into what his obituary described as a family of workers in Kuntsevo, a town outside Moscow. ( Josef Stalin had a dacha there.) The family moved to Siberia some time after the German invasion during World War II.
Vasenkov graduated from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School. Trained in English and Spanish, he flew from Madrid to Lima, Peru, in 1976 on a Uruguayan passport under the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes, an identity he had stolen from a Uruguayan who had died of respiratory failure in 1947 at the age of 3.
Described as a freelance news photographer with a black belt in karate, he was granted Peruvian citizenship in 1979. In 1983, “with the sanction” of the spy service, according to the Russian security service, he married Pelaez, a television reporter.
Two years later, they immigrated to the United States, where she went to work as a journalist for the Spanishlanguage daily newspaper El Diario/La Prensa.
Vasenkov earned a doctorate in political science at the New School, wrote approvingly of the leftist Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru and, in 2008, taught Latin American and Caribbean politics for a semester as an adjunct professor at Baruch College in Manhattan, part of the City University of New York.