Without him, there might not have been the hit series "The Americans" about the daily life of Russian spies in the United States. And Washington probably could not have dismantled, in 2010, a network of sleeper agents installed for years in peaceful suburbs. Without Alexander Poteev, the Skripal affair would probably never have happened either. The life and defection in the United States of this Russian master spy has had a snowball effect with multiple ramifications over the years.

Including the first documented assassination attempt on US soil by Russian intelligence services since Vladimir Putin came to power in Moscow. Alexander Poteev has, indeed, been the target of an incredible plot to eliminate him in 2020, revealed the New York Times in an article published Monday, June 19.

One of the bosses of Russian spies abroad

The American daily's account of the hunt by Russian spies to find this "traitor" in the United States actually corroborates revelations of "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West", a book to be published in the United States at the end of June by Calder Walton. an intelligence expert at Harvard University.

The assassins of the SVR (the Russian equivalent of the CIA) wanted the scalp of Alexander Poteev for about ten years. This ex-spy was the vice-director of the directorate "S" of foreign intelligence, that is to say the agency that manages spies implanted abroad.

It was therefore a choice for the CIA to which "he provided information for nearly twenty years," notes Jeff Hawn, a specialist in security issues in Russia for the New Line Institute, an American think tank.

His collaboration with American spies led to the highly publicized dismantling in 2010 of a network of eleven Russian sleeper agents in the United States to which the very photogenic Anna Chapman belonged.

Barack Obama, then President of the United States, had decided, for the sake of appeasement with Moscow, to hand over almost all of these spies to the Russians. In exchange, the Kremlin released several spies and double agents, including Sergei Skripal, who eight years later would be the target of an assassination attempt on British soil by spies of the GRU (the military intelligence service). A case that had deeply deteriorated relations between the United Kingdom and Russia.

"We can say that Alexander Poteev was the trigger of a series of events that have marked the recent history of the Russian intelligence services," said Jenny Mathers, a political scientist and Russian intelligence specialist at Aberystwyth University in Wales. "This is, moreover, only the tip of what we know about the information provided by Alexander Poteev to the Americans," said Keir Giles, an expert on Russian security issues and author of "Russia's war on everybody" where he refers to targeted assassinations abroad as a weapon of Moscow's foreign policy.

"It is likely that an agent who held such a position within the intelligence services was able to explain in detail the dynamics of relations between the different Russian agencies," said Danilo delle Fave, an intelligence specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS) Verona. "His defection clearly had an impact on the operational capability of Russian spies in the United States, but it's hard to know how much," Giles said.

Mexican scientist to the rescue

Enough in any case to become an intimate enemy of Russian power. He was tried for treason in absentia in 2011, the Russian media went after him and Vladimir Putin personally called him a traitor. "The Russian president is known to take his defection cases very personally. He's even supposed to have said he thinks better of his enemies than traitors," Mathers said.

So he clearly had a target on his back. But from there to try to eliminate it on American soil, the world's leading power and Russia's main rival? "This is indeed an extraordinary escalation of tensions when you are trying to eliminate an agent abroad and even more on American soil," notes Jeff Hawn. But between the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London, the Skripal case in 2018 or the murder of a Chechen opponent in Berlin in 2019, "this is not the first time that Russia has been suspected of escalating tensions," says Jeff Hawn.

"This is yet another example of how Putin's Russia does not care about its reputation and risks when it comes to revenge," Giles said. "Moscow is trying to warn potential 'traitors' that they are not safe anywhere, not even in the United States," Dave said.

The operation set up to reach Alexander Poteev mixed meticulous organization and hazardous execution. Russian spies took years trying to locate the former spymaster, who had found refuge in Florida. In 2016, a disinformation operation was even launched in the Russian media to make it appear that he was dead. The aim was to push Alexander Poteev out of his den to reassure his family members back in Russia.

When the SVR finally got a clearer idea of the hiding place of their private enemy number 1, the Russian spies screwed everything up. They went looking for a Mexican scientist without any training as a spy and blackmailed him – he had two wives, one of them in Russia – to go and confirm the exact location of their target. Once there, the latter multiplied the blunders, was arrested by the FBI and told the whole story, reports the New York Times. "The Russians were perhaps hoping that with Covid-19, and the political problems related to Donald Trump's last year in office, the US counterintelligence services would have other cats to whip," notes Danilo delle Fave. They were wrong.

Russian spies, Russian army, same problem?

This case "says a lot about the state of the Russian intelligence services," says Jenny Mathers. First, it illustrates the great gap that exists, according to her, between "the enormous ambitions of the Kremlin to be able to project itself anywhere to carry out its actions and the means that seem much more modest". It is difficult to explain otherwise the choice of an untrained Mexican scientist to carry out an important step in a very sensitive assassination project.

This dubious recruitment "also shows that we are very far from the golden age of the KGB which succeeded in recruiting foreign agents who were committed by conviction and ideology," says Jenny Mathers. These days "it is rather the lure of profit or blackmail that are used," notes this expert.

For her, it may be the same for the Russian secret services as for the army. "Before the invasion of Ukraine, everyone praised the quality of the Russian army, and today we realize that it was probably overestimated. Maybe it's the same with the intelligence services," she said.

Certainly, we must not forget that for failures like this, there are surely as many successes that we never hear about. "It's the very nature of this kind of operation to remain secret when they succeed," Giles said. In the meantime, Alexander Poteev continues to take it easy in Florida. He even took a fishing license under his real name. You have to occupy your weekends when you have Russian assassins on your heels...

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