In 2013, CIA officer Ryan Christopher Fogle, a third secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was accused of being a spy and ordered to leave the Russia.
Incidentally, Fogle entered the U.S State Dept’s “Foreign Service” along with Benjamin Dillon another low-level U.S. Embassy employee, but who was only quietly booted .
The accused American spy , Ryan C. Fogle with St. Louis ties, was not the first U.S. diplomat to be kicked out of Russia for working for the CIA.
It happens in the cat-and-mouse game of espionage.
But Fogle, wore the wig.
It has led to the then 26 year old, being dubbed ‘James Blonde.’
This “persona non grata” was caught in Moscow attempting to pass money and instructions to a Russian FSB agent.
Videos showed by Russian security forces shows Fogle with a blond hairpiece plopped oddly on his head.
It looked very Austin Powers.
It did not reflect well on modern American spy tradecraft.
Russian Federal Security Service, the F.S.B., seemed to be having fun with the display of apparent incompetence,
no matter how stage-managed it might have been and 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.
President Vladimir V. Putin, has long expressed suspicions, Washington is working covertly to undermine him, and it was unclear if this incident would further damage , an already fragile bilateral relationship.
The Russian Foreign Ministry publicly summoned the American ambassador, Michael A. Mc Faul, to discuss the embarrassing arrest and Fogle’s high jinks.
Specifically, why Fogle arrived at a meeting with two wigs — the blond one on his head held in place by a baseball cap, a brown one in his backpack, which also held a compass, a Moscow street atlas and $130,000 in cash.
Supposedly he was an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, with a goal of recruiting a Russian security officer as a spy.
He even carried a letter offering “up to $1 million a year for long-term cooperation” and signed affectionately,
“Your friends.”
below : what Fogle was carrying
They did not include the decidedly un-smart phone he carried, from a distance looked like an ancient Nokia, which seemed a counterpart to the “Get Smart” television series, built into the bottom of a shoe.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, handed Mc Faul a formal protest over Moscow’s claim, it caught Fogle trying to recruit a counterintelligence officer for the CIA during their meeting, though they also discussed other international issues.
Mc Faul left half an hour later without saying a word to journalists waiting outside the compound.
The official said, Mr. Fogle tried to recruit a counter terrorism agent with expertise in the Caucasus, an area that had recently become of intense interest to the US because the Boston Marathon bombers had lived there.
Mr. Fogle’s unmasking seemed bizarre, even in the long, colorful history between the Soviet Union, Russia and their US rivals.
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.
The youngest and most glamorous of Russia’s 10 self-confessed spies, Anna Chapman, triggered the FBI swoop when she made an anxious phone call to her father in Moscow saying she was worried that her cover had been blown.
Chapman’s call, together with a planned trip to Moscow by another spy, Richard Murphy, prompted US law enforcement officials to end months of covert surveillance by arresting the 10 spies, prompting the biggest international espionage furor, since the end of the Cold War.
below: FBI handcuffs used to arrest Anna Chapman
As a red-headed former Barclays Bank employee with British citizenship, Chapman became suspicious when an FBI officer, posing as a Russian consular officer , summoned her to a meeting in New York, and gave her a fake passport and asked her to pass it on, to another purported spy.
Apparently unconvinced , Chapman went directly from the meeting to a Verizon telecoms store, where she bought a pay-as-you-go Motorola phone.
Her lawyer, Robert Baum, revealed that during the phone call with her father, an intelligence officer in Moscow, told her to hand the passport to the police – which she did, prompting the FBI arrest, which later bagged her a photo shoot in Maxim Magazine and a modeling career in Russia.
What was not done was, the sending of any classified secrets back to Russia.
When they were caught they were not charged with espionage , but as conspiring to work as unregistered foreign agents.
In 2013, Joe Weisberg made a TV show about them: The Americans.
Weisberg, a former CIA operative, based his show on the 2010 spy ring, but decided to set the show in a Cold War era to add a tenser drama – back in 2013, people no longer considered America’s relations with Russia as fraught.
Joe Weisberg, Joel Fields and Keri RussellFX ‘The Americans’ TV show panel,
However, the case of Mr. Fogle seemed to pose its own curious questions:
What exactly did he expect to accomplish with a shaggy, ill-fitting wig that seemed to fall off his head at the slightest bump?
Why would a counter terrorism officer, trained by the Russian special services, need a letter describing how to set up a new Gmail account ?
Perhaps the overarching question was just: Really?
In Moscow and in Washington, American officials refused to answer that, or any other question.
Much discussion 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.
GPS units are sold in Russia or smart phone apps with directions easily downloaded and installed.
A diplomat would also have a mobile phone and be more plausible,why not simply do that?
Why turn this matter into a very public spectacle and ensure that any future intelligence turns would be done in a far more clandestine manner?
When issues like this occur, a short statement is announced and made known that a US or a Russian diplomat is required to leave the country.
The publicity is far too high for this to be something serious.
Had the Russians viewed Mr. Fogle as a serious threat, intelligence experts said,
they most likely would have stepped back and let his recruitment effort continue, perhaps even lead him to believe he had successfully enlisted a double agent, pocketing the money while trying to learn more about the Americans’ interests.
If Fogle were going to turn a Russian intelligence agent, why would he have to wear a disguise?
Fogle (or a cutout ) could have simply “encountered” one another somewhere in Moscow and chatted briefly.
A cut–out is a mutually trusted intermediary, method or channel of communication that facilitates the exchange of information between agents.
Moscow is a giant city, and it would likely be exceptionally easy to find myriad places for a clandestine meeting.
Why would Fogle have written evidence on him as to what he was planning to do?
Why would Fogle be carrying around large amounts of cash?
For a cash deal, it’s always to have THEM come to a fixed location so you are not the victim of a robbery, or a set up and there are pre-paid debit cards with exceptional banking secrecy – far more compact and easier.
What could a lone Russian counter-terrorism agent tell an American intelligence agency that would have been so important for them turn him in such a blatant fashion?
Why didn’t the FSB try to turn their agent as a double?
This would be the perfect opportunity to feed the Americans useless information.
It would also allow them to gather information on the Americans.
There are a host of other issues, but the ones outlined make it difficult to believe this was either, a serious recruiting assignment or that Fogle is anything more than a “patsy”.
Lee Harvey Oswald always claimed he was a patsy.
It is not known whether the target was part of the sting operation or if they have been arrested.
Russia’s haste to make the news public could mean either the attempt was so audacious that it shocked leaders, or that hardliners have seized on it to stop a move towards detente (easing of hostility or strained relations) with the US.
Speculation: This appears to be some type of distraction either from the US against Russia or vice-versa.
It does not appear as a legitimate spy arrest, or a serious attempt to recruit Russian intelligence agents.
‘Moscow is the toughest, most saturated counter-intelligence environment in the world, so it would seem this is a message for internal constituency.
Another theory offered by dissenters who say it wasn’t easy to recall, a single instance of the US accusing a Russian diplomat of being a spy if he was not, and vice-versa.
The question is why, and more importantly why at this time?
The Russian the US was trying to recruit was an official counter-terrorism expert on Chechnya.
The Russians maybe warned the FBI, on the radicalization of a Chechen who later plants bombs in Boston.
Instead of admitting the Russians were right, the FBI and CIA wanted to investigate the possibility, the Boston bomber was a Russian double agent, recruited under a false flag or the US wished to re divert Chechen energies, against Putin, to blunt the Chechen Muslim stance against the US.
Sources revealed the accused CIA spy was trying to ‘recruit’ an FSB agent who specialized in Islamic extremism , in Russia and may have traveled to the region where the bombing suspects came from.
It is thought, the FSB agent had knowledge of Russian intelligence on Boston terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and part of a team who went to Dagestan which provided intelligence to the US about an extremist threat in 2011, and had earlier warned the FBI about his potential extremist links.
In material released by the FSB, it is clear the Americans had phone numbers for one or more Russian intelligence agents, involved in anti-terrorism work in the Caucasus, obtained during trip involving FBI agents to Dagestan in search of intelligence on Tamerlan’s trip.
‘After the first call he refused to meet, but this man called again and insisted on a meeting,’ said a recording of a FSB officer addressing three US diplomats who came to collect Fogle from FSB headquarters.
Kommersant newspaper stated, ‘It is likely during the trip the US obtained phone numbers of the FSB agents then decided to use them as personal contacts with anti-terror agents, given the exchange of information, in the form of questions and answers between special services.’
Russia has not named the target of the US co-operation, and it is not known whether the agent faced any problems, or arrest over the US interest in him.
While relations between the two countries have been strained, officials in both Washington and Moscow sought to play down the incident.
Fogle was caught in Vorontsovski Park, an area in south-east Moscow, the FSB said.
Fogle was held overnight before being released .