| ® || The Unheeded Warning | 191 of the illegals might lead the FBI to a possible recruit in the NSA or elsewhere. The preemptive arrests also had an unforeseen consequence. They resulted in accidently compromising Poteyev. When Chap- man returned to Moscow after a spy exchange, she was taken to a well-publicized dinner with Putin. Afterward, she informed her debriefer at the SVR that only Poteyev had been in a position to know the password that an FBI agent had used to try to deceive her into believing she was speaking to an SVR officer. This brought Poteyev under immediate suspicion. Tipped off by the CIA to the FBI's error, Poteyev managed to escape by taking a train from Mos- cow to Belarus, where the CIA exfiltrated him to the United States. Poteyev had been saved from prison—or worse—but he was no lon- ger useful to the CIA as a mole. Without the services of Poteyev in the SVR in Moscow, U.S. intelligence was unable to find out further details about the mission to which Poteyev’s sleeper agents were to be assigned. All it had discovered was the history of the prepara- tions for a major espionage revival. It now knew that the SVR had © installed plumbing in America and that one or more agents in this ® network had been activated to handle a possible recruit in the NSA. But without anyone left in the sleeper network to follow and with- out an inside source in the SVR, it had no further avenues to fruit- fully pursue. The revelation of the sleeper agents had little if any other intelligence value. The NSA’s own security investigation turned up no evidence of a leak at Fort Meade in 2010. That of course doesn’t mean there hadn’t been one. The Russian intelligence service had demonstrated in the past that it was well schooled in covering its tracks in operations against U.S. communications intelligence. For example, CIA coun- terintelligence had learned from a KGB defector in the early 1960s that Russian intelligence had penetrated the cipher room at the U.S. e