5/10/2023 0 Comments Endless legend espionageSo why not just create entirely fake personas for the spies? A proper check into someone’s background would raise too many questions and if fake documents are spotted then it is game over. A laboratory works on how to replicate the different types of paper and ink and how to artificially age a document in a special oven so a passport can be filled with the backstory of visas and trips and made to look old when it is in fact new. What does a French passport issued five years ago look like? What does a Finnish driver’s license look like? They study which inks, papers, glues, and even staples are used in target countries so they can be faked or-if blanks can be stolen-doctored with a new identity inserted. The Operational Technical section of Department 2 includes a team of highly skilled forgers. Each illegal had a “kurator”-literally a curator of the false identity who would supervise their training and act as a handler once they were in the field. Roughly one in ten attempts would create something considered sustainable against checks by Western security services. If there was any doubt, an entire identity would be discarded. If there was a claim that did not have documentation, then there would be a plausible story why. On the other side would be the made-up evidence supporting that claim-starting with a birth certificate. On one side would be the supposed detail of a person’s life-Donald Heathfield was Canadian and born in Montreal. Officers of the department would draw up paragraphs in two columns. Their job was to create a fictional life and to make it plausible enough to stand up to scrutiny from a discerning critic by building “legends” and providing backstories. A birth certificate meant a child could be born again as an illegal.ĭirectorate S was broken up into departments. “It was considered a big success for us when Department 2 managed to obtain children’s birth certificates after a whole family died in a traffic or other kind of accident,” explains one former member of Directorate S. Then came the key-requesting a new birth certificate (a technique that relied on there being no central registry of births and deaths). This could be as simple as bribing someone for access to a church registry book and then ripping out the pages. Once a candidate was found, the next step might be to destroy any documentary evidence of the death. KGB officers had the macabre job of strolling around cemeteries looking at graves for likely candidates, a process known as “tombstoning.” The ideal situation was a child who died away from the country in which they were born, with few close relatives, reducing the documentary and witness trail to the death. He would steal something from these two families who had already lost something irreplaceable-their children’s identities. A KGB officer serving in Canada had observed them. The twin tragedies had not gone unnoticed. But then a quarter of a century later, Heathfield and Foley were suddenly there again, brought back to life by Directorate S. As with the Heathfields, the pain of the loss of a child so young never left the family. Seven weeks old and just a few days after she had smiled at her mother for the first time, she developed a fever. 14, 1962, in Montreal, the first child of Edward and Pauline Foley. Six weeks later, on March 23, Shirley found little Donald lying still, a tiny arm sticking out of the side of his crib. 4, 1962, in Canada, the third of four children of Howard and Shirley. Donald Heathfield, like his wife, had been born in a cemetery, a ghost rising from the dead.
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