[7] Moscow court documents made public on June 27, 2011, revealed that another two Russian agents, who Russia alleges were known to the FBI, managed to flee the US without being arrested.

[9] On October 31, 2011, the FBI publicly released several dozen still images, clips from surveillance video, and documents related to its investigation in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.

The court filings allege that couples were arranged in Russia to "co-habit in the country to which they are assigned", going as far as having children together to help maintain their deep covert status.

[11] The criminal complaints later filed in various federal district courts allege that the Russian agents in the US passed information back to the SVR by messages hidden inside digital photographs, written in disappearing ink, ad hoc wireless networks, and shortwave radio transmissions, as well as by agents swapping identical bags while passing each other in the stairwell of a train station.

[33][34] On November 15, 2010, Interfax cited unnamed sources within Russian intelligence as alleging that the real name of the defector who was primarily responsible for uncovering the ten convicted agents was Aleksandr Poteyev (reportedly, his full name is Александр Николаевич Потеев, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Poteyev),[35][36] who was a colonel in the SVR and was deputy head of the American department within Directorate "S" of SVR ("S" oversees illegals).

[2][43] Thus her suspicion was aroused when an FBI informant, posing as a Russian consular officer named "Roman", on Saturday, June 26 asked her to come to New York from Connecticut, where she was spending the weekend.

[14] Her suspicions increased when "Roman" turned out to be a man she did not know who asked her to deliver a fake United States passport to another sleeper agent in a face-to-face meeting.

[47] On August 8, 2010, the United Kingdom's tabloid Sunday Express cited an unidentified "source close to MI6" as saying, "There was a deal on the table just before she caught her connecting flight to Moscow.

[53] According to a report by The Wall Street Journal in early August 2010, the real Juan Lazaro died of respiratory failure in 1947 in Uruguay at age 3, with Vasenkov having presumably used the dead toddler's birth certificate to build a persona.

[54] According to a file kept by the Peruvian Interior Ministry that The Wall Street Journal cited, Vasenkov flew on March 13, 1976, from Madrid to Lima on a Uruguayan passport in the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes.

[57] According to The New York Times June 29, 2010, report, Vasenkov was a vocal opponent of American foreign policy in class: "He maintained that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a money-making ploy for corporate America.

A fellow graduate of the Kennedy School noted that Heathfield kept careful track of his nearly 200 classmates, who included President of Mexico Felipe Calderón.

[73] In July 2012, referring to "current and former U.S. officials", The Wall Street Journal reported that the couple had groomed their son, Tim Foley, for a future spy career.

In March 2018, Alexander (going by his mother's surname of Vavilov) received a Canadian passport and moved back to Canada, while awaiting the Supreme Court verdict.

[81] Lidiya was trying to cultivate a relationship with Alan Patricof, a venture capitalist who co-chaired Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential bid, with her handlers telling her to "try to build up relations little by little".

[84] The couple was also tasked with obtaining information about US policy in Afghanistan, the nuclear program of Iran, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks.

They received specially coded radio transmissions at their high-rise Seattle apartment, and the FBI secretly entered their home, where they found random numbers used to decode the "radiograms".

[88] On January 13, 2011, Russia's oil pipeline monopoly, Transneft, confirmed that Natalya Pereverzeva was appointed an adviser for foreign economic relations to the company's president, Nikolai Tokarev.

[96] A court verdict read in Moscow on June 27, 2011, identified "Metsos" as Pavel Kapustin (Павел Капустин), a Russian espionage professional, who was exfiltrated upon being released on bail in Cyprus.

[98] The Russian agents used private Wi-Fi networks, flash memory sticks and text messages concealed in graphical images to exchange information.

[2] Two months later, Chapman used a private Wi-Fi network, possibly at a Barnes & Noble store on Greenwich Street in New York, to communicate with the same Russian official, who was nearby.

[103][104] As of July 6, 2010, The New York Times reported that federal and local prosecutors were seeking a rapid conclusion to the case, to avoid a trial that might disclose sensitive information about information-gathering techniques.

[106] In a hearing held in federal court in Manhattan on July 8, 2010, before Judge Kimba Wood, all ten defendants pleaded guilty to a single charge each of secretly conspiring to act as agents of the Russian government.

[citation needed] An administration official was quoted as saying that Obama had not spoken to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev about the spy swap but was "fully briefed and engaged in the matter".

[114] The aircraft landed at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, England, to drop two of the exchanged Russian nationals and proceeded to Washington Dulles International Airport on the afternoon of July 9.

[118] The Washington Post commented that Sutyagin's case differed from the other released prisoners, and that his original arrest might have been to warn Russians not to cooperate with Western companies and think tanks.

It punctures the mystique that helped allow the security services to gain such clout under Vladimir Putin, Russia's former president and present prime minister and a former KGB spy.

[144] In mid-August 2010, Sir Stephen Lander, former Director-General of MI5 (1996–2002), voiced an opinion that the very existence of a ring of Russian "illegals" was no laughing matter: "The fact that they're nondescript or don't look serious is part of the charm of the business.

[35][153][154] The revelations in the Russian media about the 'treachery' within the SVR were seen by commentators as a sign of an ongoing struggle within the RF top bureaucracy for control over the administratively autonomous agency that had been part of the USSR KGB.

"[160] On December 16, 2010, prime minister Putin, when answering the question during a televised call-in show about whether he ever signed assassination orders,[161][162] said that hit squads had long been abolished in Russia; speaking specifically of the turncoat allegedly responsible for exposing the ten sleeper agents, he denounced him as a "brute" and a "pig" saying that "the traitors will croak all by themselves", adding that a traitor's life is miserable and regrettable.