Espionage and Intelligence Services

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares129 Views

    Oppenheimer’s Communist Past Draws New Attention

    by

    J. Robert Oppenheimer teemed with contradictions. He was shy and bold, naïve and brilliant, a loyal husband who cheated, a gentle man whose bomb could kill millions.That he loved quantum physics may be no accident. The field holds that some basic phenomena of the material world have opposing features that cannot be observed simultaneously, such as wave and particle behavior. Oppenheimer had a deep affection for these irreconcilable pairs. He called them “the nature of the surprise, of the miracle, of something that you could not figure out.”In a universe of contradictions, the physicist himself grew famous as an American hero and infamous as a red sympathizer. The question of his true loyalties rang alarms 80 years ago as the Federal Bureau of Investigation probed Oppenheimer’s Communist past — and is now — surprisingly — gaining new attention.This fall, months after Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” won seven Oscars, the Journal of Cold War Studies, a quarterly publication of Harvard University, is revisiting the Oppenheimer case.Four historians argue that the physicist was not just a Communist ally but a full-blown member of a secret Berkeley unit who ultimately perjured himself in a federal hearing that had dug into his past. As evidence, they cite a substantial body of letters, memoirs and espionage files, some postdating the movie’s source material.“Historians have to go where the evidence takes them,” said Gregg Herken, who leads the reassessment and is emeritus professor of history at the University of California.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Edward Johnson, C.I.A. Hero in Iran Hostage Crisis, Dies at 81

      by

      He was a secret partner who helped rescue six American diplomats in 1980 by passing them off as a film crew. The caper inspired the movie “Argo.”Edward B. Johnson, who as an anonymous C.I.A. officer in 1980 helped rescue six American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis by casting them as a Hollywood crew scouting a Mideast location — an audacious escape that itself became grist for an Oscar-winning movie — died on Aug. 27 at his home in Fairfax, Va. He was 81.The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Harold said.Documents detailing the Iran rescue were declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997, and another C.I.A. officer, Antonio J. Mendez, who had masterminded the scheme and recruited Mr. Johnson, wrote a book about the episode, “The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.” (1999).The caper became the basis of “Argo,” a film directed by and starring Ben Affleck (as Mr. Mendez), which won the 2013 Academy Award for best picture.Mr. Mendez died in 2019 without ever revealing his colleague’s name. Mr. Johnson was identified in the book only by his cover name, Julio, and wasn’t referenced in the film at all. And even at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., in a painting depicting the two C.I.A. officers forging visas for the diplomats, Mr. Johnson remained faceless, seen from behind.“Argo: Rescue of the Canadian Six,” a 2012 oil painting on canvas by a C.I.A. artist, Deborah Dismuke. It depicts the C.I.A. officers Antonio Mendez, top, and Mr. Johnson forging fake visas for six American diplomats who were trapped in Tehran during the hostage crisis in Iran. Mr. Johnson’s role in the escapade was not disclosed publicly until last year.Deborah Dismuke/C.I.A, via Associated PressNot until a year ago, in the season finale of “The Langley Files,” an official agency podcast, was Mr. Johnson’s pivotal role revealed publicly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Peter Morgan Turns His Pen From ‘The Crown’ to the Kremlin

      by

      His new play “Patriots,” now on Broadway, follows Putin’s rise to power and the Russian oligarchs who mistakenly thought he’d be their puppet.Going from Princess Diana, a lovely icon who generated waves of sympathy, to Vladimir Putin, an icy villain who generates waves of disdain, might be difficult for some writers.Not Peter Morgan.After pulling back the curtain on the British royal family for six seasons of “The Crown,” Morgan was keen to move on. He had an idea for a play about the oligarchs who, in the 1990s, helped propel an obscure Putin to power and then had to watch as their Frankenstein changed the course of Russian history in a disastrous way.The resulting drama, “Patriots,” which opens on Broadway on April 22, offered Morgan a different way to approach recent history, and a new challenge: switching from the royals, who are household names but not ultimately very powerful, to oligarchs, who are super powerful but not generally household names.Morgan enjoys writing about the vilified, giving them a fighting chance. In “Patriots,” he creates a jigsaw of four Russian men, their fates intertwining in the post-Soviet era, who represent a Byzantine spectrum of moral values.“It’s just a delicious combination of characters,” Morgan, 60, told me, in an interview at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Times Square. “There’s a sort of violence, whereas in ‘The Crown,’ there’s this politeness and there’s repression, and it’s very female. There’s something very male, very violent about this play. It felt like a natural thing to do, having spent so much time in the one world to go into another world just to relax a little.”Will Keen, left, as Vladimir Putin and Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots,” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      C.I.A. Discloses Identity of Second Spy Involved in ‘Argo’ Operation

      by

      The movie about the daring mission to rescue American diplomats from Tehran portrayed a single C.I.A. officer sneaking into the Iranian capital. In reality, the agency sent two officers.In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.Ed Johnson, right, receiving the C.I.A.’s Intelligence Star from John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director for operations at the time, in a photo provided by Mr. Johnson’s family. Mr. Johnson was the long-unidentified second C.I.A. officer in the rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran.The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret.“He was someone who spent his whole life doing things quietly and in the shadows, without any expectation of praise or public recognition,” said Walter Trosin, a C.I.A. spokesman and co-host of the agency’s podcast. “And he was very much happy to keep it that way. But it was his family that encouraged him, later in life, to tell his side of the story because they felt there would be value to the world in hearing it.”After Mr. Trosin heard Mr. Johnson and his family were visiting C.I.A. headquarters early this summer, he arranged to meet them. At the meeting, Mr. Trosin and his podcast co-host saw how much the C.I.A.’s recognition of Mr. Johnson’s work meant to his family and started looking for a way to tell the story on the podcast.Mr. Johnson, 80, was unavailable to discuss his career on the podcast or with The New York Times because of health issues. Undeterred, Mr. Trosin dived into the agency’s classified archives.Soon after dangerous operations, the C.I.A. often records secret interviews with the participants, to capture so-called lessons learned for its own, classified histories. In addition, for many storied officers, the C.I.A. records classified oral histories at the end of their careers. C.I.A. historians had done one such oral history with Mr. Johnson.“We found out there was this prior interview,” Mr. Trosin said. “And at least portions of which could be made public.”Thanks to the “Argo” movie, the C.I.A.’s role in the rescue of the diplomats, who were being sheltered by the Canadians, has become one of the agency’s best-known operations.The C.I.A. museum, which has a tendency to dwell on the agency’s failures, features a display on the operation. Among the artifacts is a copy of the script — or at least treatment — of the fake movie complete with the Hollywood-esque tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration.” Also displayed are the business cards of the fake production company used as part of the cover story and the concept art for the movie, which featured drawings from Jack Kirby, the celebrated comic book artist who helped create the Marvel universe.Like the painting, the museum display did not identify Mr. Johnson.A painting depicting a scene from the operation hanging in the C.I.A.’s headquarters shows a second officer sitting across from Tony Mendez as they forge stamps in Canadian passports while in Tehran but does not show his face.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesBut C.I.A. officials said Mr. Johnson, an expert in languages and extracting people from tricky places, was invaluable to the operation.At the time of the hostage crisis, Mr. Johnson was based in Europe, focusing his Cold War work on learning how to get in and out of countries that were not always hospitable to Americans.When Iranian revolutionaries overran the American Embassy and took 52 diplomats hostage, six Americans working in the consular office escaped. They eventually ended up under the protection of Kenneth D. Taylor, Canada’s ambassador to Iran, and the C.I.A. began working on a plan to sneak them out of the country.Mr. Mendez, who had worked with Hollywood experts to hone his tradecraft, came up with the plan to use a fake movie, which he named “Argo” after the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the ancient Greek heroes who had undertaken the arduous mission to retrieve the Golden Fleece.While some C.I.A. extraction operations at the time used single officers, the agency decided that for the rescue of the six diplomats, two officers would be needed, said Brent Geary, a C.I.A. historian who has studied the agency’s history in Iran.Mr. Johnson was fluent in French, German, Spanish and Arabic. He did not, however, speak Persian, the predominant language in Iran.Dr. Geary said the agency had Persian speakers, but could not risk sending in someone who might be known to current or former Iranian officials. The belief was also that someone fluent in the local language could draw questions, and what was critical to the mission was having people with Mr. Mendez’s and Mr. Johnson’s skill sets.“They had trained to get in and out of tight spots,” Dr. Geary said.Even without Persian, Mr. Johnson’s languages came into use. Soon after arriving, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson mistakenly ended up at the Swedish Embassy, across the street from the U.S. Embassy, which was occupied by the Iranian revolutionaries.Tony Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, was played by Ben Affleck in “Argo.”Mark Makela/Corbis, via Getty ImagesOutside the embassy, Mr. Johnson discovered that both he and the Iranian guard spoke German, and the two began talking. The guard then hailed a taxi and wrote the address of the Canadian Embassy on a piece of paper and sent the two fake movie producers off.“I have to thank the Iranians for being the beacon who got us to the right place,” Mr. Johnson said in his oral history.In the “Argo” movie, Mr. Affleck, portraying Mr. Mendez, is shown swiping Iranian forms that were needed to enter and exit the country. But in reality, it was Mr. Johnson who performed the sleight of hand to steal the documents. (Mr. Affleck did not respond to a request to comment.)In his oral history, Mr. Johnson said the “biggest thing” was to persuade the diplomats that they could pull off the movie team cover story.“These are rookies,” Mr. Johnson recalled in the recorded session. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”But Mr. Johnson recounted that the six diplomats pulled it off, putting aside their nervousness and adopting the persona of a happy-go-lucky film crew.The climax of the real movie — spoiler alert for a film that has been out for more than a decade — involves Iranian government officials reacting skeptically to the cover story, then realizing the “film crew” were American diplomats and chasing the plane down the runway. None of which happened.In reality, there was simply one last security check as the group left the departure lounge.“A couple of young Iranians, they’re patting people down as they went through,” Mr. Johnson recalled, noting that the diplomats were leaning into their parts, cracking jokes as they approached the checkpoint.With that, the diplomats, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson were through the last checks. In the oral history, Mr. Johnson recalled boarding and seeing the plane’s name painted on the side. It was named Aargau, and Mr. Johnson thought to himself, “What the hell?”“After a bit, I forget when, I picked up The Herald Tribune and did the crossword puzzle,” Mr. Johnson said. “And one of the one of the clues was Jason’s companions … Jason and the Argonauts.”In the C.I.A. podcast, Mr. Trosin said the name of the plane and the crossword were simply coincidences.“To be clear,” Mr. Trosin said, “this is not C.I.A. officers with excess free time just planting clues.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘A Compassionate Spy’ Review: Back to the U.S.S.R.

      by

      The scientist and spy Theodore Hall is profiled in this warm, low-key documentary.The subject of the absorbing documentary “A Compassionate Spy” might be the brilliant atomic physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, but its star is his nonagenarian widow, Joan. Funny, candid and eager to share, this delightful woman — and her unwavering support for her husband’s espionage during World War II — sets the tone for a film that leaves no doubt as to the location of its sympathies.These will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of the film’s writer and director, Steve James, whose empathy for his subjects has always been evident. And by placing Hall’s leaking of nuclear secrets to the Soviets within the context of the couple’s romantic and robust marriage, James gently wraps the viewer in the warmth of Joan’s memories. The effect is sneakily disarming.“I felt so proud of him,” she confesses to James during one of several interviews. “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust.” Recruited by the Manhattan Project in 1944 at the age of 18, Hall was the youngest scientist working on the development of an atomic bomb and eager to win a race against the Nazis. Later, fearing the consequences of a single country’s monopoly on such a terrible weapon, he decided (with the help and encouragement of his best friend, the poet Saville Sax) to pass classified nuclear details to the Soviet Union. Despite being subjected to F.B.I. interrogations and decades of surveillance, Hall was never prosecuted, his spying concealed from the public until a few years before his death in 1999.Ensconced in her cozy home outside Cambridge, England, Joan (who died last month) is an entertaining booster of her husband’s legacy. Recalling her close postwar friendship with Hall and Sax at the University of Chicago (in nostalgic re-enactments, we see the threesome gamboling on the grass like well-fed puppies), she cheekily hints at a youthful love triangle and reveals that Hall confessed his spying before their marriage. She was unfazed.Hall’s own feelings about the espionage — expressed in clips from various interviews, including the 1998 docuseries “Cold War” and excerpts from a VHS tape belonging to Joan — would grow more nuanced. (The film’s title comes from his citing of compassion as a “major factor” in his decision to leak.) Strangely, he admits no fear for his own safety, and even had to be dissuaded from trying to prevent the 1953 executions of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.Noting America’s political about-face from pro-Russian propaganda (like Michael Curtiz’s 1943 movie “Mission to Moscow”) to Red-scare paranoia, James keeps his camera calm and the talking heads to a minimum. The dramatizations are nicely filmed, if a little hokey, and the overall velvety tone is peppered with piquant details, like Hall communicating with the Russians in a code derived from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”Wry, shy and fragile-looking, Hall gets off lightly here, with little interrogation of his patriotism, personal ethics or fears of a nuclear world’s potential for catastrophic error. (He candidly describes working on the bomb as “exhilarating.”) The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.A Compassionate SpyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      In ‘A Spy Among Friends,’ B.F.F. Betrayal at an International Level

      by

      A twisty MGM+ series tells the story of Kim Philby, a British agent secretly working for the Soviet Union, and Nicholas Elliott, his closest friend.“Why wasn’t he in custody?” asks the MI5 officer Lily Thomas. It is January 1963, and Thomas is talking about Kim Philby, a British intelligence agent who, after being exposed as a Soviet spy, has escaped to Moscow. Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s closest friend and a fellow member of the foreign intelligence agency MI6, looks slightly nonplused. “Well, that’s not how we —” he begins, before coming to an abrupt halt.That “we” is at the heart of “A Spy Among Friends,” a six-part series based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, and starring Guy Pearce as Philby, Damian Lewis as Elliott and Anna Maxwell Martin as Thomas. The series, produced by Sony Pictures Television, premieres March 12 on MGM+.It’s the “we” of the old boys’ club, of men bonded by private schools, an Oxbridge education, members-only clubs and the confident assumption of their right to power. The show explores the psychological shock of the realization that a figure considered “one of us” was something quite different all along.“MI6 tended to attract those public schoolboys, people who had no hesitation about bending the rules because they thought they were above the rules,” Macintyre said in a recent interview. “They believed they were born to lead, and they couldn’t imagine that one of their own could be a traitor.”The TV adaptation was written by Alex Cary (“Homeland”) and directed by Nick Murphy (“Blood”). Like the book, it is both a tale of espionage and the story of a friendship and a betrayal that is as personally devastating for Elliott as the political betrayal is for the Western powers.Philby’s story is true: He was one of the Cambridge Five, a group of upper-class Englishmen recruited by the Soviets while in college, and who were eventually, and gradually, unmasked following World War II, after they had been working for the Communist cause from inside British intelligence services for decades.Pearce said that even after playing the character, Philby’s motivations remained an enigma to him.Sam Taylor/Sony Pictures Television“It’s such a well-known story in the U.K., Philby as the most successful traitor of the 20th century,” Lewis said in a video interview from New York. “This is a sneak peek at a more psychological, emotional way of looking at it.”Philby was both Elliott’s best friend and his idol, Lewis said, and Elliott “fatally continued to facilitate his treachery.” Lewis added: “The great tragedy is that he realizes in retrospect that the man he loved and enabled and defended had gotten thousands of people killed.”Macintyre said that he learned about the Philby-Elliott friendship from the novelist John le Carré, who described it to him as “the best unwritten story of the Cold War.” When he began his research, he discovered “comrades in arms who loved each other as much as heterosexual men in Britain could.”“It’s a very intimate treachery,” Macintyre said.The book, full of biographical detail and historical context, wasn’t easy to adapt, Cary said in an interview, adding that Lewis, whom he had worked with on “Homeland,” helped him develop the script and the show’s approach.“We had long, long conversations about the balance between spy-narrative red meat and a story about friendship,” Cary said.He came up with the fictional Thomas, he said, as “a device through which we could engage with Elliott emotionally,” and as an acknowledgment of the various women in Macintyre’s book who are “involved in an unsung way.” He added that he knew introducing a central female character to the story could “be called woke, which is fine with me!”Thomas, with her northern accent and blunt manners, embodies the class differences between MI5 (which investigates matters of national security, like the F.B.I.) and MI6 (the foreign intelligence service, like the C.I.A.). But her character also suggests a redemptive path for Elliott, who gradually becomes aware of her qualities and potential.Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin) is a fictional character, created for the show to help Lewis’s Elliott along a redemptive path. Sony Pictures Television“She represents what has to change in British society, but also has to play as a real person,” Maxwell Martin said in an interview. Thomas is there, she said, “to serve a narrative — someone who will cleave open Elliott’s mind and his subtleties, his emotional brain and his heartbreak, and someone who would challenge what happened in Beirut.”Beirut, where both men had been stationed, is where the final confrontation between Elliott and Philby takes place. Cary uses their long, elliptical conversation as a central structuring device for the show, which moves swiftly and without any identification between countries, eras and story lines. “That allowed me to tip my hat to the le Carré ‘Tinker, Tailor’ genre,” Cary said.Anchoring the rapidly shifting scenes are conversations: between Philby and Elliott, between Thomas and Elliot, and between Philby and his Russian debriefer. And between these, there are subplots: a fictional one involving a C.I.A. plot in Moscow after Philby’s defection, a true one about the identification of Anthony Blunt, the curator of Queen Elizabeth II’s art collection, as another member of the Cambridge group.“A key decision a director must make is the relationship between your camera and the story,” said Murphy, the show’s director, discussing the story’s shifts in time and location. In the show, “the camera reacts to everything, it doesn’t anticipate, which allows the audience to discover everything as the characters do.”Murphy’s London is a gray, monochrome place, full of brown-suited men and women who are constantly lighting cigarettes in dim rooms. “The era is often delivered cinematically as a tribute to the swinging ’60s,” Murphy said. “But the ’60s hadn’t swung yet; it was an England and a Europe trying to get off its knees after the war.”The Moscow that Philby escapes to is an even more drab city of slushy snow, long lines and drunks on the street. And although he is nominally welcomed as a hero, the K.G.B. is deeply suspicious that he has come to Moscow to spy for Britain.Pearce said that Philby mostly remained an enigma to him, too: “Did he really want to go to Moscow, or take the offer that Elliott makes of a peaceful life in the country in return for a full confession? Would his ego have allowed him to become an ordinary person in England?”While Philby’s flight to Moscow, and whether Elliott was complicit in it, remain an important ambiguity, the central question of the show, Cary said, is “whether there was sincerity in the depths of that friendship, even as there was duplicity in the great arc of the friendship.”That is also the essential question for Elliott, played by Lewis with a fine-tuned opacity that occasionally cracks to reveal the pain beneath.Lewis and the show’s writer Alex Cary also worked together on “Homeland,” and Lewis helped develop the script and approach for “A Spy Among Friends.”Sony Pictures Television“It is like a love story,” Lewis said. “He feels like the cuckold who gave everything blindly to the relationship without knowing he has been cheated on.”Midway through the first episode of the series, Murphy recreates the televised news conference that Philby gave after he was accused of being the “third man” in a Communist spy ring that included his fellow Cambridge student Guy Burgess. Asked whether he still regarded Burgess as a friend, Philby hesitates, then gives an answer that is perhaps the one sincere sentiment he expresses in the show:“On the subject of friendship,” he says slowly, “I’d prefer to say as little as possible, because it’s very complicated.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Mikhail Vasenkov Dies at 79; His Spy Ring Inspired ‘The Americans’

      by

      He and his wife were among 10 Soviet sleeper agents who blended into American society before being exposed and deported in 2010. The TV series sprung from the episode.Mikhail Vasenkov, the most senior of 10 Soviet sleeper agents who posed as ordinary citizens in the United States as they scouted potential recruits, and whose mass arrest and deportation in 2010 inspired the TV series “The Americans,” died on April 6. He was 79.His death was announced by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency did not specify how or where he died, but he was interviewed as recently as December 2020 in Moscow.When they were arrested, Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, a journalist, had been living undercover in a Soviet-owned two-story brick and stucco house in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., since immigrating from her native Peru in 1985.The house in Yonkers, N.Y., where Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, lived undercover.Daniel Barry for The New York TimesThey and eight others, part of a network of so-called illegals, were rounded up in a multiyear F.B.I. investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, and pleaded guilty to failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were then deported, flown to Europe on July 9, 2010, and swapped for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States and Britain.The arrests of the sleeper agents, including several couples with children and a self-styled New York socialite, Anna Chapman, generated the concept for “The Americans,” which was broadcast on FX beginning in 2013.“That was absolutely the inspiration for the series,” Joe Weisberg, who developed the series with Joel Fields, told Time magazine in 2010.Over six seasons, the drama, set in the 1980s, followed two Soviet undercover agents masquerading as a suburban Washington couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), in a Cold War cat-and-mouse contest with federal agents.A scene from the sixth season of the FX television show “The Americans,” which was inspired by the arrest of Mr. Vasenkov and nine others as spies. From left, Lev Gorn with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who played married Soviet agents at the center of the show. Patrick Harbron/ FXMr. Vasenkov, operating as Juan Lazaro Sr., conducted what sounded more like a cat-and-slouch competition with federal counterintelligence agents. He and Ms. Pelaez didn’t shade their anti-American views, and they apparently neither collected nor delivered any secrets to Moscow.When the spies were rounded up, the F.B.I. said that while “their intent from the start was serious, well-funded by the S.V.R.” — the Soviet intelligence service — “and far-ranging,” they “never got their hands on any classified documents.”Whether for the benefit of eavesdroppers or because he was getting paid regardless, Mr. Vasenkov was recorded by federal agents telling his wife matter-of-factly that his Soviet handlers “say my information is of no value,” adding, “If they don’t like what I tell them, too bad.”He was apparently the first of the Soviet agents to have been compromised, captured on tape as early as 2003 blithely instructing his wife on how to communicate with Moscow.“When you go to Peru, I am going to write in invisible,” he said, according to a transcript, “and you’re going to pass them all of that in a book.” To which Ms. Pelaez replied, “Oh, O.K.”When he was arrested, he told investigators that he “would not violate his loyalty” to the S.V.R. — “even for his son,” a teenager whom he would leave behind when he and his wife were deported.When the 10 agents arrived in Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who was prime minister at the time, greeted them by lustily leading them in patriotic anthems and offering them a “bright life” in Mother Russia with a pension and a monthly stipend.But Mr. Vasenkov, the senior spy among them, said no, thank you. He had not been looking forward to his return. He had not lived in his native Russia for decades (by then he spoke Russian with a Spanish accent), and his wife had never visited the country. And so within weeks of landing in Moscow he decided instead to resume his false identity and return with his wife to Peru.They did, in 2013.In “Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West” (2012), Edward Lucas wrote that while the infiltration by sleeper agents posed a serious threat to U.S. national security, “it is easy to mock the pointlessness of these people, apparently the least serious of the illegals, sent at vast trouble and expense of a foreign country in order to carry out tasks that most people manage with a mouse click.”Nonetheless, in announcing Mr. Vasenkov’s death, the Russian security agency praised him in an obituary.“At work in special conditions since 1975,” the obituary said, “he created and headed an illegal residency, which obtained valuable political information, which was highly appreciated.”The agency openly identified him as a “former Russian spy and sleeper agent” — a covert infiltrator assigned to scout potential spies, assess vulnerable targets and stand ready to be activated in a crisis even decades later.The S.V.R. said that Mr. Vasenkov had reached mandatory military retirement with the rank of colonel in 2004, without elaborating on why he had remained in New York for six more years before he was betrayed, the agency said, by a Soviet defector.The agency’s announcement listed the medals and other commendations that Mr. Vasenkov had been awarded and characterized him as “a hardworking, honest and modest employee” who had been “prone to work associated with risk” and had shown “will, courage and resourcefulness.”The couple’s son, Juan Lazaro Jr., who was 17 at the time of their arrest and already an accomplished pianist, declined to accompany them back to Russia. He was finishing his studies at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan at the time. According to a résumé, he later graduated from the Juilliard School and studied at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, part of the New School, and still lives in New York.Ms. Pelaez’s stepson from a previous relationship, Waldo Mariscal, an architect who was 38 at the time, also remained in the United States. He now lives in Peru with his mother, according to her lawyer, Carlos Moreno. She and her sons are among Mr. Vasenkov’s survivors, Mr. Moreno said.Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born on Oct. 9, 1942, into what his obituary described as a family of workers in Kuntsevo, a town outside Moscow. (Stalin had a dacha there.) The family moved to Siberia some time after the German invasion during World War II.Mikhail graduated from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School. Trained in English and Spanish, he flew from Madrid to Lima in 1976 on a Uruguayan passport under the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes, an identity he had stolen from a Uruguayan who had died of respiratory failure in 1947 at the age of 3.Described as a freelance news photographer with a black belt in karate, he was granted Peruvian citizenship in 1979. In 1983, “with the sanction” of the spy service, according to the Russian security service, he married Ms. Pelaez, a television reporter.Two years later, they emigrated to the United States, where she went to work as a journalist for the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Diario/La Prensa.Mr. Vasenkov earned a doctorate in political science at the New School, wrote approvingly of the leftist Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru and, in 2008, taught Latin American and Caribbean politics for a semester as an adjunct professor at Baruch College in Manhattan, part of the City University of New York.Despite the recording of Mr. Vasenkov’s instructions about invisible ink, Ms. Pelaez insisted that she had not known that her husband was a Soviet agent until the arrests. And in interviews, her stepson — who remained loyal to the couple, saying, “We believe in the integrity of our parents”— vouched for her.“My mother barely speaks English,” he said. “She’s going to speak Russian? The only Russian thing my mother likes is vodka.” More