147 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Unheeded Warning “The NSA—the world’s most capable signals intelligence organization, an agency immensely skilled in stealing digital data—had had its pockets thoroughly picked.” m= --CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell In April 2010, the CIA received a stark reminder of the ongoing nature of Russian espionage. It came in the form of a message from one of its best placed moles in the Russian intelligence service. This surreptitious source was Alexander Poteyev, a 54-year old colonel in the SVR, which was the successor agency to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. While the FSB took over the KGB’s domestic role in December 1991, the SVR became Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service. Its operation center was in the Yasenevo district of Moscow. The CIA had recruited Poteyev as its mole in the 1990s when he had been stationed at the Russian Embassy in Washington DC. That it could sustain a mole in Moscow for over a decade attested to its capabilities in the espionage business. After he returned to Moscow, still secretly on the CIA’s payroll, he became the deputy chief of the SVR’s “American” section. This unit of Russian intelligence had the primary responsibility for establishing spies in CIA, FBI, NSA and other American intelligence agencies. The SVR’s last known (or caught) mole in US Intelligence was CIA officer Harold Nicholson in 1996. Before it could now expand its espionage capabilities. It needed to build a network of Russian sleeper agents in the United States. For this network, it needed to groom so-called “illegals,” or agents who were not connected to the Russian Embassy. This so-called “illegals” network was necessary since presumably all Russian diplomats, including the so-called “legal” members of Russian intelligence, were under constant surveillance by the FBI. Advances in surveillance technology in the 21“ century had made it increasingly difficult to communicate with recruit through its diplomatic missions. To evade it,