June 30, 2010
FBI: Yonkers woman got paid $80G in '03 for spying
Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, Shawn Cohen and Jonathan Bandler
www.lohud.com
jfitzgib@lohud.com ________________________
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YONKERS — Vicky Pelaez was not one to pull punches.
The fiery activist and columnist for the Spanish-language El Diario newspaper railed against Arizona's controversial immigration law and U.S. human rights abuses, and once likened the nation's jail system to slavery.
The Yonkers resident was a featured speaker at a May Day rally at Union Square Park in New York City, and was as politically passionate with friends as she was in print.Nothing, however, prepared friends and colleagues for the federal complaint filed this week against Pelaez and her husband, Juan Lazaro, who taught political science at Baruch College, in New York City.
The Yonkers couple were among 10 people charged as part of an alleged spy ring that investigators said had been selling information to Russia.
"I can't believe it," said freelance journalist Lilliana Bringa, a close friend of Pelaez's. "When I heard, I went right to El Diario to hear from the editor if it was true.
"This seems to me incredible, surprising," Bringa said. "I can't believe it. I never suspected it or saw anything suspicious with her."
Pelaez's son, Waldomar Mariscal, 38, said Tuesday that the only thing Russian about his mother and stepfather is their love for composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
"This is overwhelming," Mariscal said outside the family's red-brick home on Clifton Avenue, just north of Riverdale. "You could feel the power of the state. It doesn't look like an allegation. It looks like a sentence."
But federal investigators said Pelaez and Lazaro were part of a network of secret agents that sought information on U.S. policymaking for the SVR, a Russian intelligence agency, according to the federal complaint unsealed in Manhattan on Monday.
The allegations read like a cloak-and-dagger spy novel, including a "brush-pass" exchange with a Russian agent at the North White Plains train station; an upstate trip to dig up buried cash; bags of money handed off at a public park in South America.
The FBI even intercepted a message from Moscow Center, the SVR headquarters, describing the alleged spies' task as a mission "to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US."
Other intercepted messages asked the alleged spies to learn about a broad swath of topics — nuclear weapons, U.S. arms control positions, Iran, White House rumors, CIA leadership turnover, the last presidential election, Congress and other topics.
There was no clue in initial court papers how successful the agents had been, but they were alleged to have been long-term, deep-cover spies, some living as couples.
The arrests were the result of a multiyear FBI investigation of "illegals" — covert SVR agents who assume false identities and live in the U.S. on lengthy assignments.
"'Illegal agents of the SVR generally receive extensive training before coming to the United States," FBI agent Maria Ricci wrote in the 37-page complaint.
"This training has typically focused on, among other things, foreign languages; agent-to-agent communications, including the use of brush-passes," Ricci wrote.
She said the training also includes "short-wave radio operation and invisible writing; the use of codes and ciphers, including the use of encrypted Morse code messages ; the creation and use of a cover profession; countersurveillance measures; concealment and destruction of equipment and materials used in connection with their work as agents; and the avoidance of detection during their work as agents."
'Brush-pass'
Eight of the suspects were arrested Sunday, including Pelaez and Lazaro, who were taken into custody as they arrived home about 9 p.m. with their 17-year-old son.
An 11th suspect, Christopher Metsos, who is identified by the FBI as a secret Russian agent who traveled to the U.S. frequently to make payments to the alleged spy network, was arrested Tuesday in Cyprus.
Metsos was a key figure in the investigation. In one instance, the complaint said he buried a bag of money in Sullivan County that was later dug up by Michael Zottoli, who claimed to be born in Yonkers.
Metsos also had at least four meetings at a Queens restaurant with Richard Murphy, an alleged "illegal" from Montclair, N.J.
According to the complaint, Murphy traveled to the North White Plains train station June 6, 2009, to collect $300,000 for himself and another "illegal" from a Russian government official.An intercepted message from Moscow Center suggested the suburban train depot was chosen because it is "quiet and deserted on weekends. No surveillance cameras."
The complaint, written by Ricci, described the "brush-pass" exchange:
"As Russian Government Official #3 descended from the train platform, Richard Murphy, the defendant, walked up the same stairs.
"As Russian Government Official #3 and Murphy passed one another on the stairs, Murphy held out his backpack and (he and) Russian Government Official #3 did not seem to speak to one another; they paused on the stairs just long enough to make the transfer. Murphy then continued up the stairs to the train platform, and Russian Government Official #3 continued down the stairs and walked away."
Deep cover
There is no indication in the complaint that Pelaez and Lazaro had contact with other members of the ring.
Pelaez was born in Cusco, southeast of Lima, Peru, and worked as a journalist for the now-defunct daily La Prensa de Lima and later for a television station, where she gained notoriety among local journalists.
On Dec 8, 1984, Pelaez, who worked for Frecuencia Latina, was abducted for a day and interviewed a leader of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement. The interview wasn't broadcast on television, but the following year it appeared in Marka, a newspaper with leftist leanings.
Westchester land records show Pelaez was living on Bailey Avenue in the Bronx in the mid-1990s before moving to Yonkers. She bought the Clifton Avenue house in March 1995 after securing a $181,500 mortgage.
Lazaro's name never appeared in the records. Pelaez finished paying off the 30-year mortgage five years ago.
When and why the couple caught the attention of federal agents is not revealed in the criminal complaint.
But by Jan. 14, 2000, their phone was being tapped and Pelaez was under surveillance when she met someone in a public park in an unidentified South American country.
She accepted a bag that the FBI contends was a payment by the SVR. Within hours, she was on the phone telling Lazaro that "all went well," the complaint said.
Surveillance
The couple made several other separate trips to that country, including one in February 2003 by Pelaez during which she was paid $80,000, according to the complaint.
In August 2007, Lazaro visited the same park his wife had visited seven years earlier. Investigators said video surveillance showed him on a bench next to a Russian government official who placed a shopping bag in Lazaro's bag.
Before the trip, Lazaro spoke about his financial troubles in taped phone conversations.
Within days of returning from South America he paid off nearly $8,000 in Yonkers and Westchester County taxes.
Lazaro had also complained that Moscow Center felt "my information is of no value because I didn't provide any source." In a Sept. 10, 2002, conversation, Pelaez suggested he "put down any politician from here" as a source.
The defendants were charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison on conviction. The cases were filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
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I live in Y.O.
Who would have guessed?
Deport every communist pofs from this nation. Let Obama lead them to Kenya and have their utopia over there.
