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Version 7 Version 8
Russia to Expel American, Saying He Is a C.I.A. Officer Russia to Expel American, Saying He Is a C.I.A. Officer
(about 3 hours later)
MOSCOW — Russian officials said on Tuesday that they had caught a C.I.A. officer trying to recruit a Russian counterterrorism officer to spy for the United States. They said he was detained on Monday night and then released to the American Embassy in Moscow and ordered to leave the country. MOSCOW — He arrived at the meeting with two wigs — the blond one on his head held in place by a baseball cap, a brown one in his knapsack, which also held a compass, a Moscow street atlas and $130,000 in cash. He was an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, Russian officials say, and his goal was to recruit a Russian security officer as a spy.
The Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., identified the man as Ryan Christopher Fogle and said he had been “working under the guise of” a diplomat, a third secretary in the political department of the embassy. It said that when Mr. Fogle was detained, he was carrying a large amount of cash, technical devices, items to disguise his appearance and written instructions for a Russian recruit. He even carried a letter offering “up to $1 million a year for long-term cooperation” and signed affectionately, “Your friends.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling Mr. Fogle “persona non grata” and demanding that he leave the country. It said the United States ambassador, Michael A. McFaul, had been summoned to appear on Wednesday to explain the incident. On Tuesday, the American, identified as Ryan C. Fogle, who had been officially posted in Russia as the third secretary of the political department of the United States Embassy, was ordered to leave the country by the Russian government, which officially declared him “persona non grata.”
The ministry made clear that it viewed the apparent American clandestine effort as a serious slap in the face, after the high level of cooperation between Russia and the United States in the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing. Since the attack, President Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have spoken twice on the telephone. And American law enforcement officials said Russia took the extraordinary step of sharing secret wiretap transcripts of a call in which it was learned that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombing suspects, held extremist beliefs. In a move that appeared as much stagecraft as spycraft, the Russian Federal Security Service, the F.S.B.., took the unusual step of releasing a video showing the arrest of Mr. Fogle, including him face down on a street as a Russian agent pinned his hands behind his back.
“While our two presidents reaffirmed their readiness to expand bilateral cooperation, including through intelligence agencies in the fight against international terrorism, such provocative actions in the spirit of the cold war does not contribute to building mutual trust,” the Foreign Ministry said in its statement. President Vladimir V. Putin has long expressed suspicions that Washington is working covertly to undermine him, and it was unclear if Tuesday’s incident would further damage an already fragile bilateral relationship. The Russian Foreign Ministry publicly summoned the American ambassador, Michael A. McFaul, to a meeting Wednesday to address the allegations.
Photographs released by the Russian Federal Security Service showed a man in a blond wig, a blue checked shirt and a baseball cap being pinned to the ground, evidently by a Russian officer, and the same man sitting grim-faced at a desk in an F.S.B. office. Further images showed a number of items that apparently were confiscated from him: brown and blond wigs, several pairs of dark glasses, several stacks of 500-euro notes, a compass, a map of Moscow and an embassy card identifying him as Ryan C. Fogle. Reveling in the chance to embarrass the United States in a seemingly amateurish act of espionage, the F.S.B. also released photos of the wigs and other odd gear that Mr. Fogle had been carrying, as well as a second video showing three American officials, including the embassy’s chief political officer, Michael Klecheski, listening silently to a harangue by a Russian official.
Russian news outlets also published the text of a letter that they said Mr. Fogle was carrying, written in Russian and addressed to a recruit, that instructed the recipient to create a Gmail account to be used for covert contacts. It offered 100,000 euros, or about $130,000, “to discuss your experience, expertise and cooperation,” with more promised for answering “specific questions.” It goes on to say that “we can offer up to $1 million a year for long-term cooperation, with extra bonuses if we receive some helpful information.” Communications were to be addressed to an enigmatic e-mail address, unbacggdA@gmail.com. The official said Mr. Fogle had tried to recruit a counterterrorism agent with expertise in the Caucasus, an area that has recently become of intense interest to the United States because the men accused of the bombings at the Boston Marathon had lived there.
“This is a down payment from someone who is very impressed with your professionalism and who would greatly appreciate your cooperation in the future,” the letter says. “Your security means a lot to us. This is why we chose this way of contacting you.” The letter is signed “Your friends.” The circumstances of Mr. Fogle’s unmasking seemed bizarre, even given the long, colorful history of spying by the Soviet Union, Russia and their rivals.
Aides to Secretary of State John Kerry, who was in Stockholm on Tuesday to attend a conference of Arctic nations, including Russia, declined to comment on the matter. The Central Intelligence Agency also declined to comment, as did the American Embassy in Moscow. Over the years, American diplomats have found bugs and other devices in a wide variety of locations — including the undersides of typewriter keys and the beak of a wooden eagle presented to the ambassador as a gift. The United States once tore down and rebuilt an entire new embassy building in Moscow after discovering the walls were filled with listening devices.
The Russian security agency said its counterintelligence service had documented a series of recent attempts by the United States to recruit officers from Russian law enforcement and “special departments.” Last year, British officials quietly confirmed a Russian allegation from 2006, that its spy service had used a fake rock to hide communication equipment used to download and transmit classified information.
The recruitment target was apparently a counterterrorism officer specializing in the Caucasus region, in which the United States has developed intense interest in recent weeks because the Boston bombing suspects, Mr. Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, had once lived there. Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned to Dagestan in the North Caucasus last year and was in contact with Muslim rebels there. Much discussion on Tuesday centered on the paradox of why the United States, a country that can kill terrorists with remote-controlled drones, would feel the need to send a man with a map and a compass to navigate the traffic-choked Russian capital.
A video posted on the state-financed Russia Today news site shows Mr. Fogle seated, with other American officials standing beside him, as an unidentified Russian security official is heard expressing perplexity at the incident. “It seems to me quite odd,” said Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who has written several books about the Russian intelligence services, and founded a Web site called Agentura.ru, which monitors the activities of intelligence agencies worldwide.
“At first, we could not even believe that this could be happening, because you well know that in recent time the F.S.B. has actively helped the investigation of the bombings in Boston,” the official says in Russian to the Americans. One of the men standing next to Mr. Fogle is Michael Klecheski of the embassy’s political section. Mr. Soldatov said he suspected that the entire episode was a sting operation run by the Russians.
Toward the end of the video, the Russian official appears on screen but his face is blocked out. He says the Americans have committed “a serious crime in Moscow” and then turns to the Americans, who have said nothing, at least in the part of the video released to Russia Today. Yevgenia M. Albats, the author of a 1994 book on the K.G.B., the Soviet-era spy agency, had a similar reaction.
“Do you have any questions about what you have been shown?” the Russian official asks. The Americans, standing with their arms crossed, glance at one another, shrug and shake their heads no. “I’m just surprised that the guy was such an idiot,” she said. “Why did he have to do it in such an old-fashioned way? It sounds like the ’70s.”
Russian officials have been expressing anxiety lately about what they see as Western attempts to undermine political stability in Russia. Mr. Putin has supported new laws to block Russian officials from depositing wealth overseas, saying that doing so leaves them dangerously exposed to pressure from foreign governments. Nongovernmental organizations working in Russia are accused of meddling and are forced to register as “foreign agents” if they receive financing from abroad. Had the Russians viewed Mr. Fogle as a serious threat, Mr. Soldatov and other intelligence experts said, they most likely would have stepped back and let his apparent recruitment effort continue, and perhaps even led him to believe that he had successfully enlisted a double agent, pocketing the money while trying to learn more about the Americans’ interests.
Mr. Fogle’s arrest, given lavish attention on Russian television, fit neatly into that pattern, though some of the details, like the pile of wigs, left many in Moscow incredulous. Instead, the Russians released the videos and photos of Mr. Fogle’s assortment of props, which also included two pairs of sunglasses, a pocketknife, and a protective sleeve made to shield information held on the electronic chips now routinely imprinted on passports, transit passes and identification cards.
“There is nothing new about it — I’m just surprised that the guy was such an idiot,” said Yevgenia M. Albats, the author of a 1994 book on the K.G.B. “I am not interested so much in this Christopher Fogle as much as the person he was trying to recruit. And why did he have to do it in such an old-fashioned way? It sounds like the ‘70s.” He also carried a decidedly un-smart phone that from a distance looked like an old-model Nokia. Unlike its counterpart in the “Get Smart” television series, it was not built into the bottom of a shoe.
Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who is now at the Brookings Institution, said it was difficult to determine from a single case whether the agency was increasing espionage activity inside Russia. But the Russian government’s decision to make the episode so public was telling, he said: “If they wanted to, they could have just quietly told the embassy that he was persona not grata and expelled him, and not put anything in the media.” The most recent comparable spy folly came at the Russians’ expense. In 2010, the American authorities arrested 10 “sleeper” agents who had been living in the United States for a decade, posing as Americans. Some were couples with children; some had well-developed careers in real estate and finance.
In 2010, American authorities arrested 10 people who were part of a Russian “sleeper” spy ring and had been living in the United States for a decade posing as Americans. They had not sent home any classified information and were not charged with espionage; instead, they were returned to Russia in exchange for the release of four people imprisoned there for spying. What they had not done was send any classified secrets back to Russia, and when they were caught they were not charged with espionage but with conspiring to work as unregistered foreign agents. They were eventually expelled to Russia in a swap that included the Kremlin’s release of four men convicted of spying for the West.
At the time, the White House quickly made clear that it did not expect the episode to strain relations with Russia. If Americans then wondered exactly what sort of high-level intelligence the Russian government had expected its operatives to find while living humdrum lives in places like suburban Montclair, N.J., the case of Mr. Fogle seemed to pose its own curious questions:
Similarly, it seemed unlikely that the arrest of Mr. Fogle would significantly affect bilateral relations, including plans for Mr. Putin and Mr. Obama to meet in Northern Ireland this month and in Russia later this year. What exactly did he expect to accomplish with a shaggy, ill-fitting wig that seemed to fall off his head at the slightest bump? And why would a counterterrorism officer, trained by the Russian special services, need a letter describing how to set up a new Gmail account without revealing personal information?
Espionage arrests, though not frequent, have long been an element of diplomatic life in Moscow. In May 2011, Russia arrested Israel’s military attaché in Moscow — an air force colonel who was born in the Soviet Union — as he sat in a cafe with a Russian; it expelled him on suspicion of using several local residents as informers. The Israeli Defense Ministry said it conducted its own investigation and found the Russian accusations to be baseless. Perhaps the overarching question was just: Really?
There have also been notable defections. In October 2000, Sergei Tretyakov, a colonel in the Russian spy service, defected to the United States with his wife and daughter. At the time, he held the title of first secretary of the Russian mission in New York and senior aide to the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergey V. Lavrov. Mr. Lavrov is now Russia’s foreign minister. In Moscow and in Washington, American officials refused to answer that, or any other question.

David M. Herszenhorn, Andrew E. Kramer and Andrew Roth contributed reporting.

Aides to Secretary of State John Kerry, who was in Stockholm on Tuesday to attend a conference of Arctic nations including Russia, declined to comment on the matter.
The State Department’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, confirmed that an officer from the embassy was “briefly detained and was released” but declined to comment further. The C.I.A. also declined to comment, as did the American Embassy in Moscow.
Russia had provided the United States with unusually robust cooperation after the Boston Marathon bombings last month. It helped American officials understand the activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder suspect, who returned to Dagestan in the North Caucasus for six months last year and was in contact with Muslim rebels there, according to Russian officials.
“While our two presidents reaffirmed their readiness to expand bilateral cooperation, including through intelligence agencies in the fight against international terrorism, such provocative actions in the spirit of the ‘cold war’ does not contribute to building mutual trust,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Mr. Fogle was detained on Monday night and released to the American Embassy on Tuesday.
The video released to Russian news agencies shows at least three American officials standing next to a seated Mr. Fogle as a Russian official, who is not shown on camera, expresses perplexity at the incident.
“At first, we could not even believe that this could be happening, because you well know that in recent time the F.S.B. has actively helped the investigation of the bombings in Boston,” the Russian official, speaking in Russian, tells the Americans.
Toward the end of the video, the Russian official comes into view, but his face is blocked out. He says the Americans have committed “a serious crime in Moscow,” and then turns to the Americans, who have said almost nothing, at least in the portion of the video released to Russia Today.
“Do you have any questions about what you have been shown?” the Russian asks. The Americans, standing with their arms crossed, glance at one another, shrug and shake their heads.

Reporting was contributed by Andrew E. Kramer and Andrew Roth from Moscow, Mark Mazzetti from Washington, and Steven Lee Myers from Stockholm.