It Takes Two

What is amazing is how well Andrei and Elena kept up the pretence of being ordinary parents with ordinary jobs. Sure, Andrei travelled frequently, especially once he got a job at a business development consultancy called Global Partners, but Elena was a classic ‘soccer mom’, apparently devoting herself to her sons until they were old enough not to need her, at which point she went into real estate. Tim has described his and his brother’s childhood as ‘absolutely normal’: ‘I never had anything close to a suspicion regarding my parents,’ he told the Guardian. ‘It seemed all my friends’ parents led much more exciting and successful lives.’[37] In an interview she gave in 2019 under her real identity, to promote a novel she wrote based on her experiences, Elena confirmed that sustaining this atmosphere of dullness was the whole point: ‘If one day you come and do something like James Bond, then that’s it and you’re done, you can’t sustain a longer life and work doing that. People think it’s always on the edge, but actually most of it is very routine and very boring.’[38]

While no one was paying attention, the couple were communicating with the SVR using digital steganography – posting images online that contained messages hidden in the pixels. Their son Tim thinks his parents would never have told him or his brother about their true identities. They were professionals, committed both to the deception and also to each other at the deepest possible level. Only they, as a couple, knew the truth, which was terrifying if you stopped to think about it. None of their friendships was real because they themselves were not real; even more troubling is that they had had children in the certain knowledge that they would never be able to tell them who they really were and what they were doing.

Rather than prison, the couple’s fate was to be exchanged as part of an official spy swap with Russia. (A Russian spy for the British intelligence services, Sergei Skripal – later to become world famous when he was poisoned in Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok in 2018 – was part of the swap.)

Handling spies is often about exploiting the vulnerable – using sophisticated techniques to manipulate the personality flaws of damaged people who are happy to risk everything because they have nothing to lose. The ‘Foleys’ were different, however.

So too were Jason and Suzanne Matthews, their American equivalents, who worked for thirty-three years for the CIA’s Operations Directorate trying to recruit intelligence sources. (Jason used his insider knowledge to write the successful thriller Red Sparrow, filmed with Jennifer Lawrence playing a Russian former ballerina forced to undergo espionage training.) The way they tell it, their coupledom was central to their success at ‘turning’ people because it put those people at ease.

‘A tandem couple comes in really handy,’ Jason admitted to the Sunday Times:

For instance, you’ve been working on Ivan for six months and you’re not making any progress. So you invite Ivan over for dinner. Suzanne talks to Ludmilla – Mrs Ivan – in the kitchen, swapping recipes in English. And because Suzanne knows the game, she talks to Ludmilla about the future of her children, and what they can achieve, what America is like. And Ludmilla, back home with Ivan that night, says, ‘You stay friends with that Jason guy because I like her and they’re going to help us.’ Then, one night, Ivan knocks on the door, tears streaming down his face: his five-year-old has leukaemia and he needs help. We had doctors on call, we could fly people anywhere.[39]

Being a tandem couple is the best sort of ‘agency marriage’ to have because you are both spies, rather than one person being ‘inside’ and the other being a ‘civilian’. In that situation, it would be ‘up to the inside spouse to decide to tell the civilian spouse what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. That often does not happen, for good reasons or bad, which contributes to the high divorce rate. It’s a built-in excuse to fool around. With Suzanne and me, she knew when I had a meeting, when I was going to go out and what the story was. And, of course, it worked the other way, too.’[40]

The secret here is communication. Anyone who has ever been through relationship therapy knows that is not something couples necessarily excel at. For some, though, being able to communicate effectively is the glue that binds them – as I hope to show in the next chapter.

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