In recent years, Russian politicians in exile began to spot Nomma Zarubina, a young Russian woman living in the US, at events organized by anti-Kremlin activists in the US and Canada.
Usually, she would take a selfie with a prominent Russian exile and then send a friend request to his or her social media account on Facebook, LinkedIn, or VK.
Zarubina, 34, provoked some suspicion, but since her activity did not go further than visiting public events and cultivating contacts among anti-Kremlin activists in exile, no one challenged her.
Even though she had in the past cooperated with the Russian Center in New York and with the Kremlin-funded Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots of the US (KSORS), she managed to win the trust of several prominent anti-Kremlin groups in exile.
In April, she participated as an expert in a discussion organized by the Free Nations of Post-Russia, essentially a Russian anti-imperialist project, in Washington, and in November, spoke at that group’s event at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Zarubina was also a regular visitor to Russia, last heading home March 2022.
Understandably, her arrest by the FBI on December 3 prompted a lot of anxiety among Russians in exile.
She was detained and charged with two counts of making false statements to FBI agents regarding her ties to the FSB, Russia’s biggest intelligence service. Zarubina was run by two officers, identified as “FSB officer 1” and “FSB officer 2.”
According to the FBI, Zarubina was recruited as an agent by “FSB officer 1” no later than December 2020 when she was given the codename “Alyssa.” She was assigned to build a network of contacts among American journalists and politicians, as well as cultivating ties with the Russians in exile.
Zarubina’s covert activities in the US were supervised from Tomsk, an industrial city in Siberia that is 5,600 miles from NYC.
That sounds counterintuitive and against the traditional Russian intelligence modus operandi. In our experience, Russian agents are generally tightly controlled by their handlers, mostly stationed at the eighth floor in the Russian mission to the UN on 67th Street, which hosts the Russian rezidentura — the center of the Kremlin’s espionage activities in the US since the early Soviet days. Agents and handlers would communicate via clandestine meetings in New York parks, leaving messages in hiding places during the Cold War, and via private Wi-Fi networks in more recent times.
But for Zarubina, the center of espionage activity was a four-story building designed in Stalinesque imperial style that was home to a regional department of the FSB in Tomsk. Her handlers had probably never traveled to the West. Nevertheless, they are part of the Russian intelligence-gathering effort, and a very active one.
The idea of using regional state security offices for operations abroad was first introduced at the peak of the Cold War — in 1966, the KGB established a network of intelligence units in regional offices in the republics and regions.Their main task was to recruit foreigners who visited their regions.
Targets were habitually Americans and other Westerners. The KGB ordered that regional departments conducting such activities be guided by two centrally crafted documents — “On the state of intelligence work against the USA and measures to strengthen it” and KGB instruction No. 23 “On strengthening the fight against the USA as the main enemy of our state.”
A special spy term was invented razvedka s territorrii (intelligence gathering from a territory.) The offices were indeed established, Putin once served in such a unit in St. Petersburg, but in many places, the regional officers had little to do since foreigners’ travel in the Soviet Union was seriously restrained.
Things changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, something accompanied by a massive exodus of Russians. The regional departments’ intelligence units — the so-called First Sections of the FSB departments in the regions — took on a new function; they were to work with Russians who had left the country, but still had connections in the motherland.
That turned out to be a very effective approach. It is one thing to make a recruiting approach to an American or a Russo-American in the US, where the recruiter is in a vulnerable position and always at risk of being reported to the FBI.
It’s quite another to wait for a Russian immigrant to come visiting his native town. Once in Russia, it is an emigrant who is vulnerable. The intelligence officers in those units don’t need to be trained in foreign languages or be world-savvy, they just need to be good at using the traditional FSB toolkit, which is mostly about how to pressure a target for recruitment.
According to independent estimates, between 2000 and 2020, up to 5 million people left Russia. This number doesn’t include the massive exodus of the early 1990s, or the post-2022 wave of emigration, which totaled another million or so people. Unlike the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia doesn’t close the doors to those who left — a citizen can travel to Russia, provided there is no ongoing investigation against him or her.
Many emigrants, even those who left the country for political reasons, keep visiting the motherland, mostly for family reasons: the full-scale invasion has now been going on for almost three years, and of course, relatives back home get sick or die. It’s fairly easy to come home and say goodbye.
Once there, in Russia’s towns and regions, FSB officers are waiting to greet them.
For some, an encounter with an FSB regional officer ends in prison time, as it did for Ksenia Karelina, a Russian American ballet dancer arrested by the agents of the regional department of the FSB in Ekaterinburg and sentenced to 12 years in prison for donating $51 to a Ukrainian charity.
And for others, it’s a request to become a Russian agent. Although it may feel more like a demand, and be very hard to refuse.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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