AP source says catalyst for arrests was NJ spy’s planned departure, possibly for good

AP source: Catalyst for arrests was New Jersey spy

WASHINGTON — The FBI arrested 10 Russian secret agents on June 27 after learning weeks before that one of them, Richard Murphy of Montclair, N.J., would soon be leaving the United States to put his son in college abroad and might not return, a U.S. law enforcement official said Monday.

Murphy’s planned departure was in the official’s words the big catalyst in deciding to take down a spy network that had been under surveillance by the FBI for more than a decade.

Murphy, whose real name is Vladimir Guryev, had traveled outside the United States last spring without any move by the FBI to arrest him. The official said that the difference between the earlier trip and the one which would have started late last month — on what turned out to be the day of the arrests — was that the FBI had reason to believe Murphy might not be coming back.

The official spoke about the matter on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized by the U.S. government to discuss it.

Two White House officials said Friday it became clear in early June that at least two of the Russians were making plans to leave the U.S. The officials did not identify the two, but the law enforcement official says one of them was Murphy. According to one of the two criminal complaints in the case, another of the Russian agents, Anna Chapman, was planning to leave in mid-July for Moscow.

Preparations took time, once the decision was made to dismantle the Russian network.

FBI spent weeks preparing a 37-page complaint that a federal magistrate signed June 25, two days before the arrests.

It charged Murphy, his wife and seven other people with two conspiracies — acting as unregistered foreign agents for Russia and engaging in money laundering.

A second complaint, dated June 27, the day of the arrests, charged two people, including Chapman, the daughter of a Russian diplomat. In separate incidents in New York and Washington on June 26, Chapman and the other defendant named in the second complaint were both approached by FBI undercover agents posting as Russians.

Adding to the sense of urgency surrounding the arrests was Chapman’s behavior on June 26. She became suspicious when meeting that Saturday with the undercover FBI agent who posed as a Russian consulate employee. The undercover agent asked Chapman to deliver a phony passport to another deep cover Russian agent, but Chapman did not do that.

The court documents show that right after meeting the undercover agent Chapman bought a one-time-use cell phone under an assumed name.

Then, authorities say, Chapman made a “flurry of calls” to Russia. In one of the intercepted calls, a man advised her she may have been uncovered, should turn in the passport to police and get out of the country. She was arrested the next day at the police station where she tried to turn in the fake passport.