News today of the conviction of 10 Russian spies and a CIA-KGB spy swap for 4 of our own in the Soviet Union has hit the news. But not so evident is what the spies actually did, and who they were. However, one of them has a shockingly interesting background. He received his Masters Degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University in 2000 under the false name of Donald Howard Heathfield. His real name is Andrey Bezrukov, and he spied right under Harvard’s nose in Cambridge, Mass.
How somebody pulls off a masquerade using a Boston Brahmin name like Heathfield when they really have an Eastern European cabbage patch name like Bezrukov is beyond me. I also can’t figure out the linguistics. I wonder if Andrey really mastered the New England English accent as well? So much for security features at our nation’s leading university. Beyond his academic success at Harvard, all we know about Andrey is that he met with a U.S. government employee in 2004 "to discuss nuclear weapons research." Could you imagine if this guy ended up with a big bureaucrat job in the U.S. Department of Defense? We are fortunate this spy ring was broken up, but I don’t think it says much about the Masters review panel at the Kennedy School at Harvard.
July 9th, 2010 at 12:00 am
Jim:
At least we’ve made this much progress since the time when Whittaker Chambers exposed Alger Hiss back in 1948:
THESE spies did not become under secretary of the US Treasury, or acting Secretary General of the United Nations, or head of the Carnegie Trust.
Kudos are do to the career counter-
intelligence officers in the FBI who stopped this group of spies, and doubtless are on the track of many more. Theirs is usually a Thankless job, but the FBI spy hunters deserve our thanks on this one. Well done !