Is Russia Hunting Defectors in America?
They get lonely. They miss their friends and family left behind in Russia. And so, despite the danger of exposing themselves to Kremlin retribution, Russian defectors hiding abroad make phone calls or send emails back to relatives in the motherland.
And when they do, the Kremlin is listening.
“It’s easy to find us, if they are really determined,” one defector in the U.S. tells Newsweek. Phone calls and emails make it easy for Russian eavesdroppers to locate them. A visit from a relative back home makes it even easier. Agents can just trail them to a defector’s doorstep.
Some U.S. security sources say there has been an uptick in Russian activity here over the past two years. Suspected Russian agents have been spotted cruising the neighborhoods of some defectors protected by CIA security teams, they say. The FBI and CIA have been ”bringing people out of retirement, people who worked against the Russians in the 1990s,” to cope with the the challenge, the defector said, speaking anonymously out of fears for his personal safety.
The CIA declined to comment. The FBI did not respond to questions about Russian activity in America.
The March 4 nerve-agent attack on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy for British intelligence, in a shopping mall in Salisbury, England has U.S. counterintelligence agencies on edge.
“Everyone’s been on high alert since the Skripal poisoning,” Michelle Van Cleave, head of the National Counterintelligence Executive under President George W. Bush, tells Newsweek. On Thursday, another former Russian double agent in the U.K, Boris Karpichkov, reported that he’d been warned last month that Kremlin agents were coming for him, too. “Be careful, look around, something is probably going to happen,” an old comrade told him in mid-February, according to NBC News. "It's very serious, and you are not alone."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/is-russia-hunting-defectors-in-america/ar-AAvjteE?li=BBnb7Kz
