Tera Read the Reports to Identify Where the Spies Are
T im Foley turned xx on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger blood brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant non far from their habitation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both brothers were born in Canada, but for the past decade the family had lived in the US. The boys' father, Donald Heathfield, had studied in Paris and at Harvard, and now had a senior function at a consultancy firm based in Boston. Their mother, Tracey Foley, had spent many years focused on raising her children, before taking a chore as a real manor agent. To those who knew them, they seemed a very ordinary American family, albeit with Canadian roots and a penchant for foreign travel. Both brothers were fascinated by Asia, a favoured holiday destination, and the parents encouraged their sons to be inquisitive about the world: Alex was simply 16, but had simply returned from a six-month pupil commutation in Singapore.
After a cafe lunch, the four returned home and opened a bottle of champagne to toast Tim reaching his third decade. The brothers were tired; they had thrown a small business firm party the night before to mark Alex's return from Singapore, and Tim planned to go out later. After the champagne, he went upstairs to bulletin his friends about the evening's plans. There came a knock at the door, and Tim'southward mother called upward that his friends must have come up early, every bit a surprise.
At the door, she was met past a different kind of surprise altogether: a team of armed, black-clad men property a battering ram. They streamed into the house, screaming, "FBI!" Some other team entered from the dorsum; men dashed up the stairs, shouting at everyone to put their easily in the air. Upstairs, Tim had heard the knock and the shouting, and his first thought was that the law could exist afterwards him for underage drinking: nobody at the party the night before had been 21, and Boston police took booze regulations seriously.
When he emerged on to the landing, information technology became clear the FBI was hither for something far more serious. The two brothers watched, stunned, equally their parents were put in handcuffs and driven away in carve up black cars. Tim and Alex were left backside with a number of agents, who said they needed to brainstorm a 24-hour forensic search of the home; they had prepared a hotel room for the brothers. 1 of the men told them their parents had been arrested on suspicion of being "unlawful agents of a foreign government".
Alex presumed there had been some mistake – the incorrect house, or a mix-up over his male parent'due south consultancy work. Donald travelled ofttimes for his job; perhaps this had been confused with espionage. At worst, mayhap he had been tricked past an international customer. Even when the brothers heard on the radio a few days later that x Russian spies had been rounded upwards beyond the The states, in an FBI operation dubbed Ghost Stories, they remained sure there had been a terrible mistake.
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was and then outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The man and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, but their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys' parents.
Their existent names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Matrimony, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched abroad as part of a Soviet program of deep-encompass secret agents, known in Russian federation as the "illegals". After a slow-burning career building upward an ordinary North American groundwork, the pair were at present agile agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of mod Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, along with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.
The FBI indictment detailing their misdeeds was a catalogue of espionage cliches: dead drops, castor-pasts, coded letters and plastic bags stuffed with crisp dollar bills. The footage of a aeroplane carrying the ten touching down at Vienna airport, to exist swapped for four Russians who had been held in Russian prisons on charges of spying for the west, brought back memories of the cold state of war. The media had a field solar day with the Bond-girl looks of 28-year-old Anna Chapman, i of two Russians arrested not to take pretended to be of western origin; she worked as an international estate agent in Manhattan. Russian federation didn't know whether to be embarrassed or emboldened: its agents had been disrepair, only what other country would think of mounting such a complex, slow-drip espionage functioning in the beginning place?
For Alex and Tim, the geopolitics behind the spy swap was the least of their worries. The pair had grown up as ordinary Canadians, and now discovered they were the children of Russian spies. Alee of them was a long flying to Moscow, and an even longer emotional and psychological journeying.
N early six years since the FBI raid, I run across Alex in a cafe near the Kiev railway station in Moscow. He is now officially Alexander Vavilov; his brother is Timofei Vavilov, though many of their friends still apply their old surname, Foley. Alex is 21, his yet-boyish looks offset by a serious way and businesslike wearing apparel: black V-neck over a well-baked white shirt. A gentle North American lilt and the careful aspiration of final consonants give him the unplaceable accent of those who have been schooled internationally – in Paris, Singapore and the U.s.a.. These days, he speaks enough Russian to order lunch, but is by no ways fluent. He is studying in a European city and is hither to visit his parents; Tim works in finance in Asia. (In the interests of privacy, both brothers accept asked me not to reveal details almost their working lives.)
Since 2010, they take made a conscious decision to avoid the media. They have agreed to talk to me now, Alex explains, because they are fighting a legal battle to win dorsum their Canadian citizenship, stripped from them six years ago. They believe it is unfair and illegal that they are expected to respond for the sins of their parents, and have decided to tell their story for the kickoff time.
As we eat khachapuri, a Georgian bread stuffed with gooey cheese, Alex recalls the days after the raid. He and Tim stayed upwardly until the early on hours in the hotel room the FBI had provided, trying to sympathize what was going on. When they went abode the next day, they establish every piece of electronic equipment, every photograph and certificate had been taken. The FBI'due south search and seizure warrant lists 191 items removed from the Foley/Heathfield residence, including computers, mobile phones, photographs and medicines. They even took Tim and Alex'southward PlayStation.
News crews held a vigil outside; the brothers saturday within with the blinds drawn, their phones and computers confiscated. Early on next forenoon Tim snuck out to get online at the public library and try to find a lawyer for his parents. All the family bank accounts had been frozen, leaving the boys with but the coin they had in their pockets and any they could infringe from friends.
FBI agents drove them to an initial courtroom hearing in Boston, where their parents were informed of the charges. There was a brief meeting with their mother inside jail. Alex tells me he did not ask her what she and his father were accused of. This seems surprising, I say: surely he must have been dying to inquire?
"Here'due south the matter: I knew that if I was going to show in court, the less I knew, the better. I didn't desire to cloud my opinion with anything. I didn't want to enquire questions, because it was obvious people were listening," he says. A boisterous grouping of women are jubilant a birthday at the adjacent table, and he raises his vocalisation. "I refused to let myself be convinced they were actually guilty of anything, because I realised the case would probably describe on for a long time. They were facing life in prison, and if I was to testify, I would have to completely believe they were innocent."
The family had been planning a month-long summer break in Paris, Moscow and Turkey; their female parent told them to escape the media circus and fly to Russia. Later a stopover in Paris, Alex and Tim boarded a plane to Moscow, unsure of what to look on arrival. They had never been to Russian federation before. "It was a really terrifying moment," Alex recalls. "You're sitting on the airplane, yous have a few hours to kill and you don't know what's coming. Yous simply sit there and think and retrieve."
As the brothers disembarked, they were met at the plane door by a group of people who introduced themselves in English language as colleagues of their parents. They told the brothers to trust them, and led them outside the terminal to a van.
"They showed us photos of our parents in their 20s in compatible, photos of them with medals. That was the moment when I thought, 'OK, this is real.' Until that moment, I'd refused to believe any of information technology was true," Alex says. He and Tim were taken to an apartment and told to make themselves at home; one of their minders spent the next few days showing them around Moscow; they took them to museums, fifty-fifty the ballet. An uncle and a cousin the brothers had no thought existed paid a visit; a grandmother besides dropped past, just she spoke no English language and the boys non a word of Russian.
It would be a few days earlier their parents would arrive, having admitted at a court hearing in New York on 8 July that they were Russian nationals. An exchange was already in the offing, and they arrived in Moscow, via Vienna, on 9 July, still wearing the orange prison jumpsuits they had been given in America. My face must give abroad some of my amazement: how does a xvi-year-old process such an extraordinary turn of events?
Alex smirks at me wryly. "Typical high school identity crisis, right?"
Alex and Tim'due south father was born Andrei Olegovich Bezrukov, in Krasnoyarsk region, in the heart of Siberia. Since his return to Moscow in 2010, he has given just a handful of interviews to Russian media outlets, mainly concerning the more than recent work he has washed as a geopolitical analyst. Details of his past, or that of his wife, Elena Vavilova, are scarce.
Alex tells me what he knows about his parents' recruitment, based on the little they have told him: "They got recruited into it together, as a couple. They were promising, young, smart people, they were asked if they wanted to help their land and they said yes. They went through years of grooming and preparing."
None of the 10 deportees has spoken publicly almost their mission in the Us, or their training by the SVR or KGB. Department S, which runs the illegals programme they were on, was the most secretive office of the KGB. One erstwhile "illegal" tells me his training in the late 1970s included two years in Moscow with daily English lessons, taught by an American woman who had defected. He was besides trained in other basics such as communicating in code and surveillance. All the preparation was done on a ane-to-one footing: he never met other agents.
The plan was the only one of its kind in international espionage. (Many assumed it had been stopped, until the 2010 FBI dive.) Many intelligence agencies use agents operating without diplomatic cover; some have recruited second-generation immigrants already living abroad, but the Russians have been the only ones to railroad train agents to pretend to be foreigners. Canada was a mutual place for the illegals to go, to build up their "legend" of beingness an ordinary western citizen before beingness deployed to target countries, often the US or Britain. During Soviet times, the illegals had two master functions: to aid in communications between embassy KGB officers and their US sources (an illegal would be less likely to be put under surveillance than a diplomat); and to exist sleeper cells for a potential "special flow" – a war betwixt the U.s.a. and the Soviet Wedlock. The illegals could and so bound into activity.
The KGB sent the couple to Canada in the 80s. In June 1990, Vavilova, under the assumed identity of Tracey Foley, gave birth to Tim at the Women'south Higher hospital in Toronto. His outset memories are of attending a French-linguistic communication school in the city and visiting the warehouse of his dad'southward company, Diapers Straight, a nappy delivery service. It was inappreciably James Bond, simply the piece of work of an amanuensis has always been more than tortoise than hare – years spent painstakingly building upwards the legend.
Andrei Bezrukov already had a degree from a Soviet academy, just "Donald Heathfield" had no educational records. Betwixt 1992 and 1995, he studied for a bachelor'due south caste in international economics at York Academy in Toronto. In 1994, Alex was born; a year later the family moved to Paris. We don't know whether this was on the orders of the SVR, just it seems a safe assumption. Donald studied for an MBA at the École des Ponts and the family unit lived frugally in a small flat non far from the Eiffel Tower; both brothers shared the only bedroom while the parents slept on the sofa.
As Bezrukov and Vavilova built up their story, the state that had recruited and trained them ceased to exist. The ideology of communism had failed; the fearsome spy agency that had dispatched agents across the globe was discredited and renamed. Under Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russian federation seemed on the verge of becoming a failed state. Simply in 1999, every bit the family unit planned a motility from France to the US, a new man entered the Kremlin who himself had a KGB groundwork. In the subsequent years, he would piece of work to make the KGB's successors important and respected again.
With the legend of a hardworking, well-educated Canadian perfected over the years, Heathfield got into Harvard University'due south Kennedy School of Authorities towards the end of that year, and was ready to deploy as an amanuensis of the SVR. He would be spying not for the Soviet system that had trained him, but for the new Russia of Vladimir Putin.
Heathfield and Foley sent their sons to a bilingual French-English language school in Boston, so they could maintain their French and stay in touch with European culture. They could not teach their children about Russian federation; perhaps the accent on French was a style of ensuring their children were not "ordinary" Americans without ringing alarm bells. At home, the family unit spoke a mixture of English and French. (An online video of Bezrukov, appearing in his post-deportation role as a political annotator, shows him speaking smoothen North American with the faintest of twangs.) When he completed his postgraduate degree at Harvard, Heathfield got a job working for Global Partners, a business organization development consultancy.
I speak to Tim on a Sun afternoon, talking to me on Skype from his kitchen. He has the aforementioned facial features and conscientious departing as his younger blood brother, but his hair is blond rather than dark. Looking back on his youth, he tells me his father worked hard, making frequent business trips. He encouraged his sons to read and educate themselves about the earth, and "was like a best friend to us". Foley, Tim says, was a "soccer mom", picking her sons upwardly from schoolhouse and taking them to sports practice. When the boys were in their teens, she started work equally a real manor amanuensis.
In 2008, Tim got a place at George Washington University, in DC, to study international relations. He focused on Asia, taking Standard mandarin lessons and spending a semester in Beijing. The same year, the family became naturalised Americans, with US passports in addition to their Canadian nationality.
The brothers would never live in Canada again; Alex had been one when they left Toronto and Tim only v – merely both felt Canadian. The family returned often to ski, and when the boys went on school trips from Boston to Montreal, they took pride in showing the other students around their "home" land. Alex made a big fuss well-nigh his Canadian background, because "at high school you lot ever desire to become counterculture".
Tim describes their childhood every bit "admittedly normal": the family was shut and spent time together at weekends; his parents had many friends. He has no recollection of them discussing Russia or the Soviet Union; they never ate Russian food, and the closest Tim says he came to a Russian was a polite boy from Republic of kazakhstan at school.
Their parents did non discuss their babyhood much, but this was how they had ever been and the boys had little reason to question information technology. "I never had anything shut to a suspicion regarding my parents," Alex says. In fact, he oft felt disappointed by how irksome and mundane they were: "Information technology seemed all my friends' parents led much more than exciting and successful lives."
Little did he know. Bezrukov and Vavilova had been put under FBI surveillance soon after they moved to the US, probably considering of a mole in the Russian agency. Excerpts from their 2010 indictment advise the couple lived with a level of intrigue almost people would assume exists only within the pages of a spy novel. I paragraph recounts an intercepted advice from Moscow Centre (SVR headquarters), explaining how Vavilova should programme for a trip dorsum to her motherland. She was to fly to Paris and take the train to Vienna, where she would pick upward a imitation British passport. "Very important: one. Sign your passport on page 32. Train yourself to be able to reproduce your signature when necessary… In the passport you'll get a memo with recommendation. Pls, destroy the memo afterwards reading. Be well."
Their male parent, meanwhile, was using his work as a consultant to penetrate US political and business circles. It is not clear whether he managed to access classified cloth, but FBI intercepts reported a number of contacts with one-time and current American officials.
In the few public remarks Bezrukov has fabricated about his job, he makes information technology sound more than like that of a thinktank analyst than a super-spy. "Intelligence work is not about risky escapades," he told Skillful magazine in 2012. "If you bear like Bond, you lot'll last one-half a day, maybe a twenty-four hour period. Even if at that place was an imaginary condom where all the secrets are kept, by tomorrow half of them volition be outdated and useless. The best kind of intelligence is to understand what your opponent will think tomorrow, not discover out what he thought yesterday."
Bezrukov and Vavilova communicated with the SVR using digital steganography: they would post images online that contained letters hidden in the pixels, encoded using an algorithm written for them by the SVR. A bulletin the FBI believes was sent in 2007 to Bezrukov by SVR headquarters was decoded as follows: "Got your note and point. No info in our files almost Due east.F., BT, DK, RR. Agree with your proposal to utilise 'Farmer' to start building network of students in DC. Your relationship with 'Parrot' looks very promising every bit a valid source of info from US power circles. To start working on him professionally we demand all available details on his background, current position, habits, contacts, opportunities, etc."
Way back in 2001, nearly a decade before her abort, the FBI had searched a prophylactic-eolith box belonging to Tracey Foley. At that place they found photographs of her in her 20s, one of which diameter the Cyrillic imprint of the Soviet visitor that had printed it. The family domicile had been bugged, perhaps for many years. The FBI knew the couple's real identities, fifty-fifty if their own children did not, but the Americans preferred to continue an eye on the Russian spy ring, rather than make a motion.
Why the FBI finally acted is unclear. One suggestion is that Alexander Poteyev, the SVR officer believed to take betrayed the group, felt his comprehend was diddled. He reportedly fled Russia in the days earlier the arrests; in 2011, a Russian courtroom sentenced him to 25 years in prison for treason in absentia. Another possibility is that one of the group was getting close to sensitive information. Whatever the reason, in June 2010 the FBI decided to wrap up Operation Ghost Stories and bust the Russian spy ring.
I speak to Tim and Alex many times, in person, over Skype and email. They are not uncomfortable talking almost their experiences, only neither do they savor information technology much. Initially, they desire to speak just near their court instance in Canada; only gradually they open up, answering all my questions well-nigh their extraordinary family life.
I take to admit there are some details that carp me. Did they really never suspect a affair?
In 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that unnamed Us officials claimed an FBI bug placed at the family'southward Boston home had picked upwards the parents revealing their truthful identities to Tim long before the arrest. Furthermore, the officials said, his parents had told Tim they wanted to groom him as a Russian spy. A second-generation spy would be a much more impressive asset than outset-generation illegals, who had built upward personas that were solid just non impregnable to groundwork checks. Tim, co-ordinate to the unnamed officials, agreed he would travel to Moscow for SVR preparation and even "saluted Mother Russian federation".
Tim strenuously denies the story, insisting it was a total fabrication. "Why would a kid who grew upwards his whole life believing himself to exist Canadian, make up one's mind to risk life in prison house for a country he had never been to nor had any ties to? Furthermore, why would my parents take a similar risk in telling their teenage son their identities?"
The merits that he saluted Female parent Russian federation is "just as ridiculous as it sounds", Tim says. He would be happy to answer the allegations in courtroom, but it is incommunicable to argue with anonymous sources. When contacted by the Guardian, the FBI declined to annotate on the Wall Street Periodical commodity.
There was some other thing that bothered me: was it actually just coincidence that the family had planned to travel to Russia that summer, and that the brothers therefore had Russian visas? Yes, Alex says. "It was very much my thought to go to Russia. We had this world map at habitation and when you lot looked at the pins on it, you could meet we'd been almost everywhere but Russian federation, so I was very curious and I was pushing for it. It was just going to be one part of our summer trip."
In hindsight, surely, that summer trip to Paris, Turkey and Moscow must have looked rather different. When the family were reunited in Moscow in July 2010, did the boys ask their parents what the programme had been? Had they intended to reveal everything? Or were they really going to spend a week in Moscow pretending not to understand a word spoken around them?
"I really retrieve that was the plan," Alex says. "That nosotros would travel to Russia, and maybe they might go and encounter people without us. Simply I don't think there was a plan to tell us annihilation."
Tim agrees. If their parents had revealed the truth, it would have made Tim and Alex a huge liability; "equally professionals", he says, it's unlikely they would have taken the risk. They doubt their parents ever planned to tell them most their real identities. "Honestly," Tim says, "I really don't think so. It sounds strange, but yeah."
Both brothers tell me they call back, as immature children, seeing their grandparents. Where? On holiday, Alex says, "somewhere in Europe"; he tin can't think where, exactly. Asked if he was sure the people he met were his real grandparents, he says, "I think and so." Were they speaking Russian? "I was really young, I have no idea," he says firmly.
I raise the question with Tim, who would have been older. He remembers seeing his grandparents every few years until he was around eleven, when they disappeared from his life. "Plain, at present when I think back on it, I kind of sympathize how it worked. If I had seen them when I was older, I would have realised that they don't speak English – they don't seem very Canadian."
At Christmas, the boys would receive gifts marked "from grandparents". Their parents told them they lived in Alberta, far from Toronto, which was why they never saw them. Occasionally, new photographs would arrive of the grandparents confronting a snowy backdrop; it helped that the climates of Alberta and Siberia are non so dissimilar.
If Tim and Alex's story sounds eerily familiar to fans of The Americans, the television drama about a KGB couple living in the US with their two children, that's because it's partly based on them. The show is ready in the 1980s, providing a cold state of war backdrop, but the 2010 spy round-up served every bit an inspiration. The show's creator, Joe Weisberg, trained to be a CIA case officer in the early on 1990s and, when I speak to him on the phone, tells me he e'er wanted to put family at the heart of the plot. "One of the interesting things I saw when I worked at the CIA was people lying to their children. If you lot have young children, you can't tell them you work for the CIA. And so, at some point, y'all have to pick an age and a time, and they detect out that they've been lied to for nearly of their lives. It's a difficult moment."
When I encounter Alex in Moscow, he has just finished watching the first flavour. (He had started on previous occasions, but establish it too hard; he and Tim joked that they should sue the creators.) His parents similar the show, he tells me. "Obviously it's glamorised, all this killing people and activity everywhere. But it reminded them of when they were young agents, and how they felt about being in a strange new place." Watching it, Alex says, has fabricated him more curious: what set his parents off on this path, and why?
I n 2010, the spies were welcomed back to Russia equally heroes. Afterward a debriefing at SVR headquarters, Bezrukov, Vavilova and the other deportees met with then-president Dmitry Medvedev to receive medals for their service. Subsequently, they met with Putin, and the grouping reportedly sang the patriotic Soviet song From Where The Motherland Begins. The authorities put on a tour: the agents and their families travelled to St Petersburg, Lake Baikal in Siberia and Sochi on the Black Ocean. The idea was to show off modern Russia, and to provide them with an opportunity to bond.
Do they still run across up, I ask Alex. "From time to time," he says. He and Tim were the but adolescents; of the four couples arrested, two had younger children, while another had adult sons. Still, the other families were probably the only people in the earth who could even brainstorm to sympathize their surreal situation.
Bezrukov and Vavilova plant themselves back in a very dissimilar Russia from the one they had left. The oldest of the agents had been retired from active espionage work for a decade, Alex says, and barely remembered how to speak Russian. The group were told they would no longer piece of work for the SVR, merely jobs were institute for them in state banks and oil companies. Anna Chapman was given a television receiver series and now has her own manner line. Bezrukov was given a task at MGIMO, a prestigious Moscow university, and has written a book on the geopolitical challenges facing Russian federation.
Tim and Alex were given Russian passports at the end of December 2010; suddenly, they became Timofei and Alexander Vavilov. The names were "completely new, foreign and unpronounceable for united states", Tim says. "A real identity crisis," he adds with a hint of bitterness. Unable to return to academy for his last year, he managed to transfer to a Russian university and consummate his degree there, before doing an MBA in London.
Alex was less lucky. He finished high school at the British International School in Moscow, merely did not desire to stay in Russia. He applied to academy in Canada, but was told he would first have to apply for a new birth document, and then a citizenship document; only and then could he renew his Canadian passport. In 2012 he was admitted to the Academy of Toronto, and applied for a four-year student visa on his Russian passport. The visa was issued and he planned to depart for Canada on 2 September. But four days before he was due to leave, as he was packing his bags and exchanging emails with his future roommate, he received a phone call from the Canadian embassy in Moscow enervating he come up for an urgent interview. The meeting was hostile; there were a lot of questions about his life and his parents. The visa was annulled before his eyes, and he lost his university place. Alex has since been rejected for French and British visas. Twice, he has been accepted to study at the London School of Economic science, but both times did non get a visa. Eventually, he was able to go a visa to written report elsewhere in Europe; Tim travels mainly in Asia, where many countries tin exist visited visa-free on a Russian passport.
The brothers' battle to regain Canadian citizenship is not simply about logistics. Moscow is not a city that embraces newcomers, and neither of them feels specially Russian. "I experience like I accept been stripped of my own identity for something I had nothing to exercise with," Alex tells me. Both are keen to work in Asia for the time being, but desire to move to Canada when they feel set up to starting time families. More than than anything, their Canadian identity is the terminal harbinger they accept left to grasp on to, after and so much of the residual of their previous reality roughshod away.
"I lived for 20 years believing that I was Canadian and I nonetheless believe I am Canadian, nothing can change that," Tim wrote in his affirmation to the Toronto courtroom. "I do non have any zipper to Russia, I practice not speak the language, I practise not know many friends there, I accept not lived in that location for whatsoever extended periods of fourth dimension and I do not want to alive there."
Everyone who is born in Canada is eligible for Canadian citizenship, with one exception: those who are born to employees of foreign governments. But the brothers' Toronto-based lawyer, Hadayt Nazami, argues that it is ridiculous to apply the provision to their case; the whole betoken of the law, he says, is to forbid those who don't have the responsibilities of citizenship from enjoying its privileges.
Ultimately, the courtroom seems to exist operating as much on emotional as on legal grounds, perhaps with the Wall Street Journal story about Tim'southward apparent recruitment at the back of its mind. Merely fifty-fifty if the brothers knew virtually their parents' activities (and there is no hard prove of this), I wondered what the courtroom expected of them. What is a 16-year-one-time who finds out he is the child of Russian spies supposed to practice? Call the FBI?
Tim and Alex have been through many months of questioning themselves and their identities, and of wondering whether they should exist angry with their parents. They don't want their babyhood to ascertain them as they grow older. Many of their close friends know, but most of their casual acquaintances don't. When asked where they are from, the default response for both is "Canada".
They remain friends with many people from their previous life in Boston, though Tim says some bankrupt off contact, mainly those whose parents were friends with his parents and felt betrayed.
While they accept no wish to live in Russia, both brothers visit Moscow every few months to see their parents. I ask them how hard it has been to keep that human relationship going. Was at that place a confrontation? Tim and Alex cull their words advisedly; they desire to appear rational and pragmatic, rather than emotional, it seems. "Of course, there were some very difficult times," Tim says. "But if I get angry with them, information technology's not going to atomic number 82 to any benign outcomes." He admits it is sad that, even though he can now spend fourth dimension with his grandparents, the language bulwark means he will never know them properly. "In terms of family and keeping this whole affair together, information technology really doesn't work out well when you choose this kind of path," he says, his vocalization trailing off wistfully.
Alex tells me that he sometimes wonders why his parents decided to have children at all. "They alive their lives similar everyone else, making choices forth the way. I am glad they had a crusade they believed in and then strongly, but their choices hateful I feel no connexion to the land they risked their lives for. I wish the earth wouldn't punish me for their choices and actions. It has been deeply unjust."
A number of times, Alex tells me that it is not his place to judge his parents, but that six years ago he spent a long menstruum wrestling with "the big question" of whether he hated them or felt betrayed. In the end, he came to ane conclusion: that they were the same people who had raised him lovingly, whatever secrets they hid.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/discovered-our-parents-were-russian-spies-tim-alex-foley
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