The parents who came in from the cold
This is a very chilling story on a lot of levels:
Tim Foley turned 20 on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant not far from their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both brothers were born in Canada, but for the past decade the family had lived in the US. The boys’ father, Donald Heathfield, had studied in Paris and at Harvard, and now had a senior role at a consultancy firm based in Boston. Their mother, Tracey Foley, had spent many years focused on raising her children, before taking a job as a real estate agent. To those who knew them, they seemed a very ordinary American family, albeit with Canadian roots and a penchant for foreign travel…
After a buffet lunch, the four returned home… There came a knock at the door, and Tim’s mother called up that his friends must have come early, as a surprise.
At the door, she was met by a different kind of surprise altogether: a team of armed, black-clad men holding a battering ram. They streamed into the house, screaming, “FBI!” Another team entered from the back…
The two brothers watched, stunned, as their parents were put in handcuffs and driven away in separate black cars. Tim and Alex were left behind with a number of agents, who said they needed to begin a 24-hour forensic search of the home; they had prepared a hotel room for the brothers. One of the men told them their parents had been arrested on suspicion of being “unlawful agents of a foreign government”.
Alex presumed there had been some mistake – the wrong house, or a mix-up over his father’s consultancy work…
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys’ parents.
Well worth reading the whole thing.
The story—which appeared in the Guardian—labels the truth as “outlandish” and “defying comprehension.” But I don’t find it the least bit outlandish, although of course (thankfully) most people’s parents don’t lead double lives as ordinary citizens and spies. But that’s what spies do—they deceive. They lie, even (or perhaps especially) to their children (although there’s a tentative indication in the story of at least a possibility that the children did in fact know, and that they themselves are now lying).
A larger question is why this couple had children in the first place. Was it part of their cover as a normal family? Or did they just want children for the usual reasons? They seemed to have loved them, at least according to their sons.
The story makes me wonder whether most spies have children. Of course, some spies decide to go into the spying business after they’ve already had kids (the Rosenbergs might qualify, for example, although I’m not sure at what point they made that decision). But that wasn’t true for this couple; they were already spies when they had their first child.
Well, lo and behold, an article appeared in Psychology Today back in 2010 when this spy story first came out, discussing that very issue:
In this case, there are eight kids whose lives were impacted by dangerously crafted games played by their parents. While the details seem to come directly out of a 1960s Ian Fleming or John le Carre Cold War novel, the reality is it’s 2010 and these kids live in a fast-paced technological world where their faces are spread around the globe in an instant (their names are all over the Internet; I will not use their names). Not like the pre-Web Rosenberg boys, who were eventually lost to obscurity.
All children, at some point, ask the question, “Who am I?” Not only do these kids of Russian spies have to deal with the crimes their parents are charged with, they have to figure out who their parents really are, and in some cases, who they themselves really are. They grew up as all-American kids for the most part with moms making Statue of Liberty cupcakes, picnics with hamburgers and hotdogs, PTA events, “Suburbia 101” as one neighbor described the spy family next door. The painted shutters, the refrigerator magnets and the hydrangeas have now crumbled for these kids like a house of cards.
The article goes on to say that most of the kids are “overachievers” and all the parents seem to have been good parents—except for this one little detail of the magnitude of the deception. Kids can be pretty resilient; I hope these are, but I have little doubt that there will be scars.
[NOTE: This TV series was based at least partly on this incident. I’ve never seen the show.]
I have watched the series you refer to – The Americans (2013 TV series). A good series but very graphic scenes of violence that didn’t need to be there. More sex than necessary as well.
“The Americans” is definitely bingeable. I enjoyed it. The husband and wife actors held up their parts. Margo Martindale, who played Mags Bennett, the criminal matriarch on “Justified,” played their KGB handler in “The Americans.”
It was interesting the show creators moved the show back to the 1980s. Maybe there was more drama with the Cold War still on. Maybe Russian spying seemed less believable during the 2000s into the Obama years.
“The 1980s are calling and they want their foreign policy back.”
Yet Russian skulduggery today is the hot ticket for liberals. Maybe they would like to take another crack at it…
I’m another who watched The Americans. Had mixed feelings about it but found it a good enough story to keep watching. And by the end very much wanted Elizabeth to end up in the Gulag.
Anyway–I thought it was fairly unbelievable and looked around online trying to find out whether any such thing had actually been done for an extended period of time. What I found suggested it had not. Oddly, this story didn’t turn up. I didn’t construct my search very well, obviously. I am truly shocked that these people really did it and got away with it for so long.
Good Cold War drama. It was quite consistent with the sort of thing intelligence circles told people in government and the military about illegals going back decades.
Interesting differences with “The Americans” – spoiler alert if you haven’t watched it yet – are that (1) the older child (daughter) is recruited as teen and participates with her parents for some time, and (2) at the end, both children stayed in the United States (the younger one left at his boarding school; and the daughter got off the train on which she and her parents were escaping to Canada at the last stop in the US).
One has to have a certain amount of empathy for the two teenaged sons of the real world couple: loss of both US and Canadian citizenship. On the other hand, what would their actual loyalties be? Could Canada or the US ever trust them? There is no easy answer for that….
Not as bad as what the Kuklinski kids had to come to terms with….similar, and not
one wonders… even more when one is from a refugee family… with history…
one of my most interesting things i played with as a child, but cant find is this:
The Latvian factory VEF (Valsts elektrotehnisk? fabrika) manufactured the camera from 1937 to 1943…
yes it was fun to play with…
among other things from people of that era…
Decades later when i was getting married, my friend was also getting married… i guess i lucked out… cause his wife turned out to be a chinese spy, and homeland security is still trying to find her…
then there is the training i got from corporations where dad worked and uncle, in corporate espionage… which today, i do security in IT on the side giving talks at the wall street security conferences..
but, why not study those that had everything and switched sides losing it all?
i do miss that minox…
Anyway–I thought it was fairly unbelievable and looked around online trying to find out whether any such thing had actually been done for an extended period of time.
Mac: I had a childhood fascination with Soviet spies. Some of what I read was romanticized, but even then spies didn’t behave as Elizabeth and Phillip did.
Spies run networks. They find sources and receive information, which they pass on to their intelligence service. It’s high-pressure, tedious work but doesn’t involve breaking necks on a regular basis.
Col Rudolph Abel was an important, long-term Soviet spy in the US. He helped run the Rosenbergs during the Manhattan Project. The FBI eventually caught Abel while he was posing as a painter and photographer in Brooklyn. He was later traded back to the Soviets for the U-2 pilot Gary Powers. His life looked nothing like “The Americans” couple.
As I was reading this post I thought it sounded like the premise of The Americans. Had no idea that series was based on a true story. Fascinating.
Spies live amazingly normal lives. They marry and have children like everyone else. Among my contemporaries those of us who weren’t married with children at the outset of our careers all were before retirement.
The only difference was that with young children you have to limit what you tell them because they tend to chat with their playmates and teachers; at some level of maturity though, “Dad works really really long hours and travels all the time” doesn’t cut it, and you have a sit-down talk.
The Russian illegals are a unique category, as described in the posted article. They were (are) completely on their own and subject to the laws of the host country, posing as nationals. The vast majority of case officers are under diplomatic protection and if discovered the worst penalty is likely being declared persona non grata.
You would think no family could survive this level of stress but all my colleagues are still married, decades later.
Don’t forget: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095532/
Little Nikita (1988) film with River’s parents being Soviet Spies.
My wife and I were hooked on the TV show. It collected a large number of award nominations and wins, see here. I thought the production was just right. The whole 6 seasons are available on Amazon Prime and included with the subscription price if anyone is interested.
What an incredibly cruel thing to do to their children.
What does this remind me of?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0511107/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_i73
What sticks in your head…
Great post Neo … or pointer-tip, since I read the linked article, with keen interest. I write this, without reading other Comments first. I was unaware of this story, or the Series.
At the top, it is obtuse to ‘wonder’ about the (at least hoped-for) role of any children of these plants. And the putative recruitment. This was a ‘feature’ from the get-go, not a ‘bug’.
I did a Cold War hitch in military high-tech. Not an officer, not intelligence. But even in such relatively pedestrian environments, the lines do begin to blur. Like with the boys…
I suspect when we look at Assange and Snowden et al, we are looking at the cutting edge of intelligence and spying. Clear & clean lines are not there … not very useful. Major blurring.
The extreme value of a second-generation operative means that serious thought went into their handling. To transition an innocent child (or later adult) to incremental levels of awareness, and hopefully (some degree of) co-optation, needs to be done right.
Of course, the game-board has changed, ‘out from under’ Alex and Tim. But just imagine the mirror-case … kids raised in Russia, now semi-stranded/exiled in the West: we’re talking profoundly unique individuals with matchless perspective.
huxley: “It’s high-pressure, tedious work but doesn’t involve breaking necks on a regular basis.”
One of my continuing complaints about the series was the amount of violence that Phillip and Elizabeth engaged in. Constant string of murders. I guess that’s just show biz– they had to keep the audience engaged–but it got preposterous.
I loved The Americans, which ended its run last year on FX. I highly recommend it.
Very interesting that the spies used steganography to encode info in maps, much like the AI map maker that was cheating did.
In a related way, an old Dean Koontz book had a significant twist being a US “city” actually being a training ground for Soviet kids to learn English and “be American”; I only just finished this 1982 book last week.
The Russians were embarrassed at being caught, but also proud at doing it.
Now, I think the Chinese have also been doing it, like Feinstein’s driver, but have better at avoiding being caught.
Huawei’s IP thefts are tangentially related.
Cheating AI: https://wordpress.com/post/tomgrey.wordpress.com/181
see the illegals program, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_Program
On this topic, has anyone else ever read Nelson DeMille’s novel “The Charm School?”
Artfldgr
The Minox was used by both Axis and Allied intelligence agents during World War II. Later versions were used well into the 1980s.
The parents of childhood friends had a Minox camera. Interestingly enough, both parents had friends and relatives with Cold War connections. Come to think of it, the father himself did, as he made some spending money doing a report for a US government agency on on his visit to relatives in an Iron Curtain country.
The Minox: A Closer Look at Every Spy’s Favorite Camera