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This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell. Brought to you by Lockheed Martin. Your mission is ours.

These Russian illegals, they were what we would call sleeper agents. They were all born in the Soviet Union.

They all created fictional stories. Again, many of them posing first as Canadian citizens.

They would often adopt the name of a dead toddler and, you know, they have Russian illegal support officers like Vladimir Putin who would steal birth certificates.

And then eventually travel to the United States become American citizens and seek contacts with academics and business people and others.

So during the 10 years that the FBI was watching the illegals, what did they observe? What did the FBI see?

So imagine, I know you're a football fan, but imagine, you know, you're like my hometown in the England Patriots and you kind of stole the other team's playbook.

The FBI knew exactly where these these illegals were going to be at all times. They had penetrated their communications.

And so they were reading their covert, not so covert communications. They knew beforehand when these illegals were going to go out and perform operational acts.

And so they were able to track everything that the illegals were doing and warn American citizens who otherwise wouldn't have known that they might have been in contact with somebody they should avoid.

There was always an ongoing discussion about when these illegals are going to be arrested.

They are after all illegals and operating illegally in the United States. Imagine that your stream of reporting on the illegals at some point needs to be brought to a close.

The concern as well that the FBI had frankly is that they were really immersing themselves into our society.

They were having children who were going to potentially penetrate our government agencies and it was going to become quite a significant outlay of resources to surveil them all.

The Obama administration rightly so did not want their reset policy to suffer any collateral damage.

That was one reason why if you arrest the illegals, the last thing you're going to do is keep them in jail and perpetuate a bad situation.

The way out of that was a swamp. There was no other option but to make these arrests. But the way to avoid collateral damage was to allow us to handle it in intelligence channel and do so without public scrutiny which could potentially have an impact on our bilateral relationship.

Daniel Hoffman is a former career CIA operations officer. He has over 30 years of service at not only the CIA but also with the US military, the Department of State and the Department of Commerce.

Dan's assignments at CIA included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union, Europe as well as the war zones in both the Middle East and South Asia.

He is widely considered to be a Russia expert. I just sat down to talk to Dan about the story of the Russian illegals, another in our series of spy stories.

We'll be right back with that conversation after a quick break. I'm Michael Morelle and this is Intelligence Matters.

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