One of the ten Russian spies under cover arrested in the United States in the 2010 and exchanged with American and British spies detained by Moscow, spoke for the first time with the Western media.
Elena Vavilova was arrested by the American Federal Office in June 2010 along with her husband Andrei Bezrukov. During its two decades of undercover activity in the United States, the married couple used the stolen identities of two deceased Canadian citizens, Tracy Foley and Donald Heathfield.
Vavilova claimed to be of French-Canadian descent and worked as a real estate agent. The couple never spoke Russian at home and their two children, Alex and Tim Foley, were unaware of their parents' secret identities.
Last week, Vavilova, who now works as a private consultant in Moscow, spoke with Shaun Walker, correspondent in Russia for the British newspaper The Guardian.
It was the first face-to-face meeting with a Western media. The reason for the interview was given by the recent book by Vavilova, A Woman Who Can Keep Secrets (in Russian language), which tells about her career and her marriage to Bezrukov. It offers rare insights into the Russian "undercover spy" program dating back to the Soviet period.
The two protagonists of the book meet as students in Siberia, where they are recruited by the KGB and spend several years of training learning foreign languages and crafts. Part of their training was living in a KGB house, similar to an American suburban home, to familiarize themselves with Western life. This story is believed to include real elements of the lives and careers of Vavilova and Bezrukov. The two married in Russia but moved to Canada separately, using false Canadian identities. They pretended to meet for the first time in Canada, where they "dated" and eventually "married" before moving to the United States to start their espionage work.
Vavilova told reporter Walker that the view given to the press about the poor quality of intelligence information provided to Russia is wrong. "Of course I can't talk about it"He said,"but I know what we were doing and it doesn't matter what others say".
He also claimed that training for spies involved the use of weapons and skills in martial arts. Vavilova also added that these skills have never been used in the field but have proved very useful in night missions where street crime in the US was much more widespread than in Russia during the Cold War.