Elena Vavilova speaking at SPbGASUOn 15 December, in the SPbGASU assembly hall, a meeting was held with Russian illegal intelligence officer, retired colonel of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Elena Vavilova.
Now she works at PJSC Norilsk Nickel. Elena Stanislavovna spoke about her professional path, and also shared tips on effective interaction with people. Not only students, teachers and staff of our university, but also guests from other educational institutions came to listen to the lecture. The meeting brought together a full hall.
Elena Vavilova, having studied at the Department of History of Tomsk State University, began preparing to work as an illegal intelligence officer together with her husband Andrey Bezrukov. They were selected for this mission while still studying. She noted that candidates for intelligence as illegal immigrants are usually chosen among students. During preparation, they studied English and French, the culture and behavior of the inhabitants of France, Canada and the USA. Having acquired the necessary knowledge and skills for intelligence, they changed their names to Tracy Lee Ann and Donald Howard Heathfield. The parents were told that they had left to work as translators upon invitation to another country. Then their interesting and dangerous path in this unusual profession began.
First they lived in Canada, then in France and for the last ten years in the USA. In 23 years of living under other names and surnames, they never spoke a word of Russian to each other. They always treated all their actions with caution and thought through every step. During this period, children were born and raised, who did not know that their parents were not living their own lives. “We had to become an ordinary family,” noted Elena Vavilova.
Having moved, they started life from scratch: they reenacted their first meeting, got married, looked for work, and got their education again. In addition, they needed to enter circles in which they could obtain the necessary information. “It is important to build trusting relationships so that a person wants to share something,” the speaker noted. In 2010, Tracy Lee Ann and Donald Howard Heathfield were arrested in Boston while celebrating their youngest son's birthday. This was not their professional mistake, but a consequence of betrayal. The story ended happily: they, like other colleagues, returned to Russia as part of a bilateral exchange.
Elena Vavilova noted that Russian intelligence does not work to harm, does not engage in sabotage activities: it is needed only as a protective function. Life as an illegal intelligence officer, according to Elena Stanislavovna, helped to understand: important qualities for establishing useful connections in the process of communication are constant contact with people, flexibility and at the same time strength of character, attention to detail, readiness to work in conditions of uncertainty, creativity, analytical work and adherence to rules. She advised methods for deepening relationships - to provide help or support to a person, to open oneself to another, to create a positive atmosphere, to expand the sphere of interaction, to get the interlocutor talking.
Even students from other universities came to listen to the lecture. Pyotr Manov, a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Economics at St Petersburg State University, said: “I learned from a friend that I could attend such a meeting. I was interested in both the topic of the speech and the speaker herself, a former illegal intelligence officer. I liked the lecture because I was able to hear an interesting life story of a person with a very unusual profession, as well as recommendations on how to interact more effectively with people based on intelligence skills that can be used in everyday life.”.