Why Russian Spies Really Like American Universities
Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.
Why Russian Spies Really Like American Universities
Under the alias Cynthia Murphy, Russian spy Lydia Guryeva attended Columbia Business School, and ingratiated herself with a key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Guryeva’s instructions from Moscow, according to a 2010 FBI complaint, were to “strengthen…ties w. classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info” and to report “on their detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential (vulnerability) to be recruited by Service.”
Now another graduate student at an urban East Coast university, who similarly cultivated powerbrokers and political operatives, is accused of being a Russian spy and taking orders from high-ranking officials in her homeland. Maria Butina, who received a master’s degree in international relations this past spring from American University in Washington, D.C., courted the National Rifle Association’s top guns and sought access to Republican presidential candidates Scott Walker and Donald Trump. She pleaded innocent last week to charges of conspiring to act as a foreign agent.
If the charges against Butina are accurate, she’s only the latest in a long line of Russian agents to infiltrate U.S. universities. Dating back to the Soviet era, Russian spies have sought to take advantage of academia’s lax security, collaborative, global culture, and revolving door with government. Russian intelligence understands that today’s professor of international relations may be tomorrow’s assistant secretary of state, and vice versa. Although cyber-spying and hacking offer opportunities to glean secrets at less personal risk, the traditional strategies of human espionage persist, and sending a spy to school is prominent among them.
In that respect, little has changed since 1938, when Semyon Markovich Semyonov became the first Soviet agent to enroll at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and made contacts vital to stealing scientific secrets. Or since 1958, when KGB officer Oleg Kalugin entered Columbia’s journalism school. After graduation, posing as a Radio Moscow correspondent at the United Nations, Kalugin attended events at Columbia and reported back on them to Moscow. His report on a speech about U.S.-Soviet relations by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a Columbia professor and later national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, earned kudos from the Communist Party’s Central Committee.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/why-russian-spies-really-like-american-universities/
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U.S. universities, ever-sensitive to their finances and global relationships, have largely ignored the threat of foreign espionage: They’re ramping up enrollment of full-paying international students as well as opening campuses abroad, which are often subsidized by the host countries. Columbia didn’t revoke Murphy’s diploma after she turned out to be a spy named Guryeva — though Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government did rescind the degree of another “illegal,” Andrey Bezrukov, who had posed as a Canadian named Donald Heathfield. Story declined to say whether, if Butina is convicted, the university will take away her degree.
