Under the assumed name of Donald Howard Heathfield, together with his wife Elena Vavilova, he lived in several nations outside of the Soviet Union for more than 20 years, engaged in illegal intelligence activities.

According to his undercover identity, Heathfield was the son of a Canadian diplomat, who actually died in 1962 at the age of seven weeks, and graduated from high school in the Czech Republic.

From May 2006 to December 2010, he headed another consulting company, Future Map, specializing in government and corporate strategic forecasting and planning systems, which had branches in Paris and Singapore.

Bezrukov was a member of the World Future Society, an organization once described by the Boston Herald as "a factory of thought for new technologies, at a conference of which leading experts in the field of public administration come together".

In particular, he was familiar with Leon Fuerth, a former National Security Advisor to Vice President Al Gore, and professor of management at George Washington University, William Halal, who participated in the 2008 World Future Society conference.

Around that time, Elena Vavilova had graduated from McGill University and, before settling in the United States, had lived in France.

He was also appointed adviser to the president of Rosneft, as well as an assistant professor at the Department of Applied Analysis of International Problems at MGIMO.

Elena Stanislavovna Vavilova (Russian: Елена Вавилова); born November 16, 1962), often referred to by her cover name Tracey Foley, is a former KGB sleeper agent.

She was born in Tomsk, then part of the Soviet Union, to parents Stanislav Platonovich Vavilov[6] and Svetlana Konstantinovna Vavilova.

Since the late 1980s, for almost 25 years she worked as a deep-cover intelligence officer in several countries under the name of Tracy Lee Ann Foley.

[11] In 2019 Vavilova published in Russian her first spy fiction novel A Woman Who Can Keep Secrets written together with Andrey Bronnikov, a special forces veteran.

[12] It offers a rare glimpse into the training of the Soviet illegals, including evading surveillance, coding messages, studying maps and cryptography, learning foreign languages, establishing a cover story and performing missions abroad to collect intelligence.

Following the book release, Vavilova gave many interviews and appeared on a number of top Russian television and radio programs.