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A 20-story high-rise atop a hillock in the Bronx is home to some of the world’s most powerful diplomats — and some of its most dangerous spies.
The Cold War-era structure at West 225th Street in Riverdale — dubbed the “plex” by some law enforcement officers — houses scores of Russian officials, some of whom work in the United States as intelligence operatives, vacuuming up information and making key connections in the service of the Kremlin, according to a report by Fox News Tuesday.
According to retired FBI special agent Robin Dreeke, some of the neighborhood’s residents are agents of either Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) or military intelligence agency, the GRU.
“Open secret is a good way to put it,” Dreeke, the former head of the bureau’s Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, told Fox News. “I think they think it’s more of a secret than we do.”
He added that the Russian snoops keep tabs on “everything.”
“A lot of people think that spies are just going for the high-level classified military infrastructure kind of stuff,” Dreeke said.
However, “the real purpose of spying/intelligence collection is filling information gaps that another country has, and mostly to provide their policymakers and decision-makers the knowledge they need that’s not common knowledge that they can get through legitimate means,” he continued.
Rebekah Koffler, a Russian-born former intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said having agents stationed around the world under diplomatic cover is “a standard procedure” for most nations, including the US.
According to Koffler, the author of the recent book “Putin’s Playbook,” the spies are focused on amassing as much information as they can with the idea that it may someday provide actionable insights.
“They collect regardless – the Russians and the Chinese do – because that’s just how they do business,” she said.
“They view us as threat number one,” Koffler added. “And sooner or later, they believe that information will be useful, whether it’s for wartime or peacetime, when they want to undermine and somehow cause some kind of disruption.”
Dreeke told Fox that he spent hours inside the Riverdale compound between 1997 and 2005, when he was part of the FBI’s Russian Military Intelligence Squad. He’s also tried to recruit Russian spies in an effort to neutralize them.
He said there are two types of intelligence officers. The first category covers those who work for the mission to the United Nations under “diplomatic cover.”
“It’s what we called a ‘symmetrical threat.’ We know they’re here. They’re diplomats under diplomatic cover, so they actually have all the privileges of diplomats. So, when they’re caught conducting espionage against our country, you can’t throw them in jail, because they’re diplomats,” Dreeke explained, adding, “No one likes it. But it’s a fact of life.”
Then there are those in the US under a deeper level of cover, working under “false pretenses, with fake names” and posing an “asymmetrical threat.”
According to Dreeke, some diplomats at the “plex” are not intelligence officers, but there are others who “do the diplomatic job probably one or two hours a day. And the rest of the day is spent collecting intelligence” that they send back to Moscow.
Koffler said the Russian spooks’ M.O. is to try to establish relationships with people the Kremlin believes may be potentially useful sources of information, like government officials.
“It’s not like they try to steal your wallet or your purse and get your information that way,” Koffler said. “It’s called targeteering – they identify, ‘OK, we need a list, we need somebody in your State Department,’ or, ‘We need somebody at the United Nations’ … and they do their homework and they study” their mark.
“Where does this or that person hang out? Do they play golf, for example? Once they identify who exactly they need, what kind of access, they figure out that person’s patterns of behavior … they would show up, like, on a tennis court if you are playing tennis. And they would strike up a conversation with you and try to be your friend. And you have no idea that you’ve been targeted because it all looks so innocuous and accidental,” she said.
Dreeke estimates that as much as 98 percent of the information the agents collect is “benign,” while the remainder is classified, saying ”it is proprietary [information] that does that greater damage.”
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