Story of Two Families Who Were Missionaries to the Congo in 1921 by David Wilkerson
T im Foley turned 20 on 27 June 2010. To celebrate, his parents took him and his younger blood brother Alex out for lunch at an Indian restaurant non far from their domicile in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both brothers were born in Canada, just for the by decade the family had lived in the US. The boys' begetter, Donald Heathfield, had studied in Paris and at Harvard, and now had a senior role at a consultancy firm based in Boston. Their mother, Tracey Foley, had spent many years focused on raising her children, before taking a task as a real manor agent. To those who knew them, they seemed a very ordinary American family, albeit with Canadian roots and a penchant for foreign travel. Both brothers were fascinated by Asia, a favoured holiday destination, and the parents encouraged their sons to be inquisitive most the world: Alex was only sixteen, but had just returned from a six-month student substitution in Singapore.
Later a buffet lunch, the iv returned dwelling house and opened a canteen of champagne to toast Tim reaching his tertiary decade. The brothers were tired; they had thrown a modest business firm party the night earlier to mark Alex's return from Singapore, and Tim planned to go out afterwards. After the champagne, he went upstairs to message his friends nigh the evening's plans. There came a knock at the door, and Tim'due south mother chosen upwardly that his friends must accept come early, as a surprise.
At the door, she was met by a different kind of surprise birthday: a team of armed, black-clad men holding a battering ram. They streamed into the business firm, screaming, "FBI!" Another team entered from the back; men dashed up the stairs, shouting at anybody to put their hands in the air. Upstairs, Tim had heard the knock and the shouting, and his first thought was that the police could exist after him for underage drinking: nobody at the political party the night before had been 21, and Boston police took booze regulations seriously.
When he emerged on to the landing, information technology became clear the FBI was here for something far more serious. The two brothers watched, stunned, equally their parents were put in handcuffs and driven away in split up blackness cars. Tim and Alex were left behind with a number of agents, who said they needed to brainstorm a 24-hour forensic search of the dwelling; they had prepared a hotel room for the brothers. I of the men told them their parents had been arrested on suspicion of being "unlawful agents of a foreign government".
Alex presumed there had been some mistake – the wrong firm, or a botch over his begetter's consultancy piece of work. Donald travelled often for his job; perhaps this had been confused with espionage. At worst, peradventure he had been tricked past an international client. Even when the brothers heard on the radio a few days afterwards that x Russian spies had been rounded upward across the The states, in an FBI operation dubbed Ghost Stories, they remained sure there had been a terrible mistake.
But the FBI had not made a mistake, and the truth was so outlandish, it defied comprehension. Not only were their parents indeed Russian spies, they were Russians. The homo and woman the boys knew as Mom and Dad really were their parents, just their names were not Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Those were Canadians who had died long ago, as children; their identities had been stolen and adopted by the boys' parents.
Their real names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova. They were both born in the Soviet Marriage, had undergone training in the KGB and been dispatched away as office of a Soviet programme of deep-encompass secret agents, known in Russia as the "illegals". After a ho-hum-called-for career edifice upwards an ordinary North American groundwork, the pair were now active agents for the SVR, the foreign spy agency of modern Russia and a successor to the KGB. They, forth with eight other agents, had been betrayed by a Russian spy who had defected to the Americans.
The FBI indictment detailing their misdeeds was a catalogue of espionage cliches: expressionless drops, brush-pasts, coded letters and plastic bags stuffed with crisp dollar bills. The footage of a airplane carrying the 10 touching down at Vienna airdrome, to be swapped for four Russians who had been held in Russian prisons on charges of spying for the west, brought dorsum memories of the cold war. The media had a field twenty-four hours with the Bond-girl looks of 28-year-old Anna Chapman, ane of ii Russians arrested non to have pretended to be of western origin; she worked as an international estate amanuensis in Manhattan. Russia didn't know whether to be embarrassed or emboldened: its agents had been busted, simply what other state would think of mounting such a complex, slow-drip espionage operation in the first place?
For Alex and Tim, the geopolitics backside the spy swap was the least of their worries. The pair had grown up every bit ordinary Canadians, and now discovered they were the children of Russian spies. Ahead of them was a long flying to Moscow, and an even longer emotional and psychological journey.
N early six years since the FBI raid, I run into Alex in a cafe near the Kiev railway station in Moscow. He is at present officially Alexander Vavilov; his brother is Timofei Vavilov, though many of their friends still use their old surname, Foley. Alex is 21, his still-boyish looks offset past a serious way and pragmatic clothes: black V-neck over a crisp white shirt. A gentle Northward American lilt and the careful aspiration of final consonants requite him the unplaceable emphasis of those who have been schooled internationally – in Paris, Singapore and the US. These days, he speaks enough Russian to order lunch, only is by no means fluent. He is studying in a European city and is hither to visit his parents; Tim works in finance in Asia. (In the interests of privacy, both brothers take asked me not to reveal details about their working lives.)
Since 2010, they have made a conscious conclusion to avoid the media. They take agreed to talk to me at present, Alex explains, considering they are fighting a legal battle to win back their Canadian citizenship, stripped from them 6 years ago. They believe information technology is unfair and illegal that they are expected to answer for the sins of their parents, and take decided to tell their story for the first time.
As we swallow khachapuri, a Georgian breadstuff stuffed with gooey cheese, Alex recalls the days afterwards the raid. He and Tim stayed upwards until the early on hours in the hotel room the FBI had provided, trying to understand what was going on. When they went home the next day, they institute every piece of electronic equipment, every photograph and document had been taken. The FBI'south search and seizure warrant lists 191 items removed from the Foley/Heathfield residence, including computers, mobile phones, photographs and medicines. They even took Tim and Alex's PlayStation.
News crews held a vigil exterior; the brothers saturday within with the blinds drawn, their phones and computers confiscated. Early on adjacent morning Tim snuck out to go online at the public library and try to find a lawyer for his parents. All the family unit depository financial institution accounts had been frozen, leaving the boys with only the money they had in their pockets and whatever they could infringe from friends.
FBI agents collection them to an initial court hearing in Boston, where their parents were informed of the charges. In that location was a brief meeting with their female parent within jail. Alex tells me he did not enquire her what she and his father were defendant of. This seems surprising, I say: surely he must have been dying to ask?
"Here's the thing: I knew that if I was going to prove in courtroom, the less I knew, the better. I didn't want to cloud my opinion with annihilation. I didn't want to enquire questions, because it was obvious people were listening," he says. A bouncy group of women are celebrating a birthday at the next table, and he raises his voice. "I refused to allow myself exist convinced they were actually guilty of annihilation, because I realised the case would probably depict on for a long time. They were facing life in prison house, and if I was to testify, I would have to completely believe they were innocent."
The family had been planning a month-long summertime interruption in Paris, Moscow and Turkey; their mother told them to escape the media circus and wing to Russia. After a stopover in Paris, Alex and Tim boarded a plane to Moscow, unsure of what to await on arrival. They had never been to Russian federation before. "Information technology was a really terrifying moment," Alex recalls. "You're sitting on the plane, you take a few hours to impale and y'all don't know what's coming. You lot just sit down there and call up and recall."
As the brothers disembarked, they were met at the plane door by a grouping of people who introduced themselves in English as colleagues of their parents. They told the brothers to trust them, and led them outside the terminal to a van.
"They showed us photos of our parents in their 20s in uniform, photos of them with medals. That was the moment when I thought, 'OK, this is existent.' Until that moment, I'd refused to believe any of it was true," Alex says. He and Tim were taken to an flat and told to make themselves at dwelling house; i of their minders spent the side by side few days showing them around Moscow; they took them to museums, even the ballet. An uncle and a cousin the brothers had no idea existed paid a visit; a grandmother too dropped past, but she spoke no English and the boys not a word of Russian.
Information technology would be a few days before their parents would make it, having admitted at a court hearing in New York on 8 July that they were Russian nationals. An exchange was already in the offing, and they arrived in Moscow, via Vienna, on 9 July, still wearing the orange prison house jumpsuits they had been given in America. My face must give away some of my amazement: how does a 16-year-old process such an extraordinary plough of events?
Alex smirks at me wryly. "Typical high schoolhouse identity crisis, right?"
Alex and Tim's male parent was born Andrei Olegovich Bezrukov, in Krasnoyarsk region, in the heart of Siberia. Since his return to Moscow in 2010, he has given just a handful of interviews to Russian media outlets, mainly apropos the more recent piece of work he has done as a geopolitical annotator. Details of his past, or that of his married woman, Elena Vavilova, are scarce.
Alex tells me what he knows about his parents' recruitment, based on the little they take told him: "They got recruited into it together, every bit a couple. They were promising, young, smart people, they were asked if they wanted to assist their country and they said yes. They went through years of training and preparing."
None of the 10 deportees has spoken publicly virtually their mission in the US, or their training by the SVR or KGB. Department S, which runs the illegals programme they were on, was the most secretive part of the KGB. I onetime "illegal" tells me his training in the tardily 1970s included two years in Moscow with daily English lessons, taught past an American woman who had defected. He was also trained in other nuts such as communicating in code and surveillance. All the preparation was done on a one-to-one basis: he never met other agents.
The program was the just one of its kind in international espionage. (Many assumed it had been stopped, until the 2010 FBI swoop.) Many intelligence agencies utilize agents operating without diplomatic cover; some accept recruited second-generation immigrants already living abroad, but the Russians have been the just ones to train agents to pretend to be foreigners. Canada was a common identify for the illegals to become, to build up their "fable" of being an ordinary western citizen before being deployed to target countries, oftentimes the The states or U.k.. During Soviet times, the illegals had 2 primary functions: to aid in communications between embassy KGB officers and their The states sources (an illegal would exist less likely to be put nether surveillance than a diplomat); and to exist sleeper cells for a potential "special menses" – a war between the US and the Soviet Wedlock. The illegals could then jump into action.
The KGB sent the couple to Canada in the 80s. In June 1990, Vavilova, under the assumed identity of Tracey Foley, gave birth to Tim at the Women's College hospital in Toronto. His first memories are of attention a French-language school in the city and visiting the warehouse of his dad'southward company, Diapers Directly, a nappy delivery service. It was hardly James Bond, simply the work of an agent has always been more tortoise than hare – years spent painstakingly edifice up the legend.
Andrei Bezrukov already had a degree from a Soviet university, just "Donald Heathfield" had no educational records. Between 1992 and 1995, he studied for a bachelor's degree in international economics at York Academy in Toronto. In 1994, Alex was built-in; a year after the family moved to Paris. We don't know whether this was on the orders of the SVR, but it seems a rubber supposition. Donald studied for an MBA at the École des Ponts and the family unit lived frugally in a modest apartment not far from the Eiffel Tower; both brothers shared the but chamber while the parents slept on the sofa.
Equally Bezrukov and Vavilova congenital upwards their story, the country that had recruited and trained them ceased to exist. The ideology of communism had failed; the fearsome spy agency that had dispatched agents across the globe was discredited and renamed. Under Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia seemed on the verge of becoming a failed state. Merely in 1999, as the family planned a movement from French republic to the US, a new man entered the Kremlin who himself had a KGB background. In the subsequent years, he would work to brand the KGB'south successors important and respected again.
With the legend of a hardworking, well-educated Canadian perfected over the years, Heathfield got into Harvard Academy'due south Kennedy School of Government towards the end of that yr, and was ready to deploy as an agent of the SVR. He would be spying non for the Soviet system that had trained him, but for the new Russian federation of Vladimir Putin.
Heathfield and Foley sent their sons to a bilingual French-English school in Boston, so they could maintain their French and stay in touch with European culture. They could non teach their children about Russia; perhaps the emphasis on French was a mode of ensuring their children were not "ordinary" Americans without ringing alert bells. At home, the family spoke a mixture of English language and French. (An online video of Bezrukov, appearing in his mail-deportation role as a political analyst, shows him speaking polish North American with the faintest of twangs.) When he completed his postgraduate caste at Harvard, Heathfield got a job working for Global Partners, a business development consultancy.
I speak to Tim on a Lord's day afternoon, talking to me on Skype from his kitchen. He has the same facial features and conscientious parting as his younger brother, simply his hair is blond rather than dark. Looking dorsum on his youth, he tells me his male parent worked difficult, making frequent concern trips. He encouraged his sons to read and educate themselves about the world, and "was like a all-time friend to u.s.". Foley, Tim says, was a "soccer mom", picking her sons upwards from school and taking them to sports practice. When the boys were in their teens, she started work as a real estate amanuensis.
In 2008, Tim got a place at George Washington University, in DC, to study international relations. He focused on Asia, taking Mandarin lessons and spending a semester in Beijing. The aforementioned year, the family became naturalised Americans, with US passports in addition to their Canadian nationality.
The brothers would never live in Canada again; Alex had been one when they left Toronto and Tim only v – merely both felt Canadian. The family returned often to ski, and when the boys went on school trips from Boston to Montreal, they took pride in showing the other students around their "home" country. Alex made a big fuss nigh his Canadian background, because "at loftier school yous ever desire to go counterculture".
Tim describes their childhood as "absolutely normal": the family was close and spent time together at weekends; his parents had many friends. He has no recollection of them discussing Russia or the Soviet Union; they never ate Russian food, and the closest Tim says he came to a Russian was a polite boy from Republic of kazakhstan at school.
Their parents did non discuss their childhood much, but this was how they had e'er been and the boys had fiddling reason to question information technology. "I never had annihilation close to a suspicion regarding my parents," Alex says. In fact, he ofttimes felt disappointed by how irksome and mundane they were: "It seemed all my friends' parents led much more than heady and successful lives."
Lilliputian did he know. Bezrukov and Vavilova had been put under FBI surveillance before long after they moved to the US, probably because of a mole in the Russian bureau. Excerpts from their 2010 indictment propose the couple lived with a level of intrigue well-nigh people would assume exists simply within the pages of a spy novel. One paragraph recounts an intercepted communication from Moscow Centre (SVR headquarters), explaining how Vavilova should plan for a trip back to her motherland. She was to fly to Paris and have the train to Vienna, where she would pick up a fake British passport. "Very of import: i. Sign your passport on page 32. Train yourself to be able to reproduce your signature when necessary… In the passport you'll get a memo with recommendation. Pls, destroy the memo after reading. Be well."
Their father, meanwhile, was using his piece of work as a consultant to penetrate The states political and business circles. It is not articulate whether he managed to access classified material, but FBI intercepts reported a number of contacts with former and current American officials.
In the few public remarks Bezrukov has made virtually his job, he makes it sound more than similar that of a thinktank analyst than a super-spy. "Intelligence work is not about risky escapades," he told Practiced magazine in 2012. "If you bear like Bond, you'll last half a day, maybe a day. Fifty-fifty if in that location was an imaginary safe where all the secrets are kept, by tomorrow half of them will be outdated and useless. The best kind of intelligence is to empathize what your opponent will think tomorrow, non find out what he thought yesterday."
Bezrukov and Vavilova communicated with the SVR using digital steganography: they would post images online that contained messages hidden in the pixels, encoded using an algorithm written for them by the SVR. A message the FBI believes was sent in 2007 to Bezrukov by SVR headquarters was decoded as follows: "Got your note and signal. No info in our files almost E.F., BT, DK, RR. Agree with your proposal to apply 'Farmer' to kickoff building network of students in DC. Your relationship with 'Parrot' looks very promising every bit a valid source of info from U.s. power circles. To beginning working on him professionally we need all available details on his background, current position, habits, contacts, opportunities, etc."
Way back in 2001, well-nigh a decade before her arrest, the FBI had searched a safe-eolith box belonging to Tracey Foley. There they institute photographs of her in her 20s, ane of which bore the Cyrillic imprint of the Soviet company that had printed it. The family home had been bewitched, possibly for many years. The FBI knew the couple's real identities, even if their ain children did not, simply the Americans preferred to keep an eye on the Russian spy band, rather than make a move.
Why the FBI finally acted is unclear. 1 suggestion is that Alexander Poteyev, the SVR officer believed to have betrayed the group, felt his embrace was blown. He reportedly fled Russian federation in the days before the arrests; in 2011, a Russian courtroom sentenced him to 25 years in prison house for treason in absentia. Another possibility is that one of the group was getting close to sensitive information. Whatever the reason, in June 2010 the FBI decided to wrap up Operation Ghost Stories and bust the Russian spy ring.
I speak to Tim and Alex many times, in person, over Skype and email. They are not uncomfortable talking about their experiences, only neither do they savor it much. Initially, they want to speak only almost their court instance in Canada; but gradually they open up, answering all my questions nigh their boggling family life.
I have to admit there are some details that bother me. Did they really never suspect a matter?
In 2012, the Wall Street Periodical reported that unnamed US officials claimed an FBI bug placed at the family's Boston home had picked upwardly the parents revealing their true identities to Tim long before the arrest. Furthermore, the officials said, his parents had told Tim they wanted to groom him as a Russian spy. A second-generation spy would exist a much more impressive nugget than kickoff-generation illegals, who had built up personas that were solid but not impregnable to background checks. Tim, according to the unnamed officials, agreed he would travel to Moscow for SVR preparation and even "saluted Mother Russia".
Tim strenuously denies the story, insisting it was a full fabrication. "Why would a kid who grew upward his whole life believing himself to be Canadian, decide to risk life in prison for a land he had never been to nor had any ties to? Furthermore, why would my parents take a similar risk in telling their teenage son their identities?"
The claim that he saluted Mother Russia is "just equally ridiculous as it sounds", Tim says. He would be happy to answer the allegations in court, but it is incommunicable to argue with anonymous sources. When contacted by the Guardian, the FBI declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal article.
There was another thing that bothered me: was it actually but coincidence that the family had planned to travel to Russian federation that summer, and that the brothers therefore had Russian visas? Yes, Alex says. "It was very much my idea to get to Russia. We had this world map at dwelling house and when yous looked at the pins on it, you could come across we'd been almost everywhere simply Russia, and then I was very curious and I was pushing for it. It was simply going to be i role of our summertime trip."
In hindsight, surely, that summer trip to Paris, Turkey and Moscow must have looked rather different. When the family were reunited in Moscow in July 2010, did the boys ask their parents what the programme had been? Had they intended to reveal everything? Or were they really going to spend a calendar week in Moscow pretending non to understand a word spoken effectually them?
"I actually think that was the plan," Alex says. "That nosotros would travel to Russia, and maybe they might get and encounter people without us. Merely I don't call up there was a plan to tell us anything."
Tim agrees. If their parents had revealed the truth, it would have fabricated Tim and Alex a huge liability; "as professionals", he says, it'due south unlikely they would accept taken the hazard. They doubt their parents always planned to tell them nigh their real identities. "Honestly," Tim says, "I really don't think so. It sounds strange, simply yeah."
Both brothers tell me they retrieve, as immature children, seeing their grandparents. Where? On vacation, Alex says, "somewhere in Europe"; he tin't call back where, exactly. Asked if he was certain the people he met were his real grandparents, he says, "I recall so." Were they speaking Russian? "I was really young, I have no idea," he says firmly.
I raise the question with Tim, who would have been older. He remembers seeing his grandparents every few years until he was around 11, when they disappeared from his life. "Apparently, now when I recall back on it, I kind of empathise how information technology worked. If I had seen them when I was older, I would have realised that they don't speak English – they don't seem very Canadian."
At Christmas, the boys would receive gifts marked "from grandparents". Their parents told them they lived in Alberta, far from Toronto, which was why they never saw them. Occasionally, new photographs would make it of the grandparents confronting a snowy backdrop; it helped that the climates of Alberta and Siberia are not then different.
If Tim and Alex's story sounds eerily familiar to fans of The Americans, the tv set drama about a KGB couple living in the United states of america with their ii children, that'southward because it'due south partly based on them. The evidence is gear up in the 1980s, providing a cold war properties, but the 2010 spy circular-up served as an inspiration. The evidence's creator, Joe Weisberg, trained to exist a CIA case officeholder in the early on 1990s and, when I speak to him on the telephone, tells me he e'er wanted to put family unit at the heart of the plot. "I of the interesting things I saw when I worked at the CIA was people lying to their children. If y'all have young children, yous can't tell them y'all work for the CIA. And so, at some point, you accept to pick an age and a time, and they find out that they've been lied to for about of their lives. It's a difficult moment."
When I encounter Alex in Moscow, he has only finished watching the beginning flavor. (He had started on previous occasions, but found it as well difficult; he and Tim joked that they should sue the creators.) His parents like the show, he tells me. "Plain it's glamorised, all this killing people and activity everywhere. But it reminded them of when they were young agents, and how they felt almost being in a strange new place." Watching information technology, Alex says, has made him more curious: what set his parents off on this path, and why?
I n 2010, the spies were welcomed dorsum to Russian federation as heroes. After a debriefing at SVR headquarters, Bezrukov, Vavilova and the other deportees met with then-president Dmitry Medvedev to receive medals for their service. Subsequently, they met with Putin, and the group reportedly sang the patriotic Soviet song From Where The Motherland Begins. The authorities put on a tour: the agents and their families travelled to St Petersburg, Lake Baikal in Siberia and Sochi on the Black Body of water. The thought was to testify off mod Russian federation, and to provide them with an opportunity to bond.
Practise they still see up, I inquire Alex. "From fourth dimension to time," he says. He and Tim were the merely adolescents; of the 4 couples arrested, two had younger children, while some other had adult sons. Even then, the other families were probably the only people in the world who could even begin to empathize their surreal situation.
Bezrukov and Vavilova institute themselves back in a very dissimilar Russia from the ane they had left. The oldest of the agents had been retired from agile espionage work for a decade, Alex says, and barely remembered how to speak Russian. The group were told they would no longer work for the SVR, but jobs were found for them in state banks and oil companies. Anna Chapman was given a television series and now has her ain fashion line. Bezrukov was given a job at MGIMO, a prestigious Moscow university, and has written a book on the geopolitical challenges facing Russia.
Tim and Alex were given Russian passports at the end of December 2010; of a sudden, they became Timofei and Alexander Vavilov. The names were "completely new, foreign and unpronounceable for us", Tim says. "A real identity crisis," he adds with a hint of bitterness. Unable to render to university for his terminal year, he managed to transfer to a Russian university and complete his caste at that place, before doing an MBA in London.
Alex was less lucky. He finished high school at the British International Schoolhouse in Moscow, but did not desire to stay in Russian federation. He practical to university in Canada, but was told he would showtime take to utilize for a new nascence document, and so a citizenship certificate; but and then could he renew his Canadian passport. In 2012 he was admitted to the Academy of Toronto, and practical for a four-year educatee visa on his Russian passport. The visa was issued and he planned to depart for Canada on 2 September. Simply four days before he was due to leave, as he was packing his bags and exchanging emails with his time to come roommate, he received a phone phone call from the Canadian embassy in Moscow demanding he come for an urgent interview. The meeting was hostile; in that location were a lot of questions about his life and his parents. The visa was annulled before his optics, and he lost his university place. Alex has since been rejected for French and British visas. Twice, he has been accepted to study at the London School of Economics, but both times did not get a visa. Somewhen, he was able to get a visa to written report elsewhere in Europe; Tim travels mainly in Asia, where many countries tin be visited visa-free on a Russian passport.
The brothers' battle to regain Canadian citizenship is non simply near logistics. Moscow is not a city that embraces newcomers, and neither of them feels particularly Russian. "I feel like I have been stripped of my own identity for something I had nothing to practice with," Alex tells me. Both are bully to work in Asia for the time being, only want to move to Canada when they feel ready to start families. More than anything, their Canadian identity is the last straw they have left to grasp on to, subsequently and so much of the rest of their previous reality fell away.
"I lived for 20 years believing that I was Canadian and I still believe I am Canadian, zip tin can change that," Tim wrote in his affidavit to the Toronto court. "I exercise not have any attachment to Russia, I do not speak the language, I do not know many friends there, I take not lived in that location for any extended periods of time and I do not want to live there."
Everyone who is born in Canada is eligible for Canadian citizenship, with 1 exception: those who are born to employees of strange governments. Only the brothers' Toronto-based lawyer, Hadayt Nazami, argues that it is ridiculous to apply the provision to their case; the whole point of the law, he says, is to forestall those who don't take the responsibilities of citizenship from enjoying its privileges.
Ultimately, the courtroom seems to be operating as much on emotional as on legal grounds, possibly with the Wall Street Periodical story near Tim's apparent recruitment at the dorsum of its mind. But even if the brothers knew about their parents' activities (and at that place is no hard evidence of this), I wondered what the courtroom expected of them. What is a 16-year-old who finds out he is the child of Russian spies supposed to do? Telephone call the FBI?
Tim and Alex have been through many months of questioning themselves and their identities, and of wondering whether they should be angry with their parents. They don't want their childhood to define them as they grow older. Many of their shut friends know, simply virtually of their coincidental acquaintances don't. When asked where they are from, the default response for both is "Canada".
They remain friends with many people from their previous life in Boston, though Tim says some broke off contact, mainly those whose parents were friends with his parents and felt betrayed.
While they accept no wish to live in Russia, both brothers visit Moscow every few months to run into their parents. I ask them how hard it has been to continue that relationship going. Was at that place a confrontation? Tim and Alex choose their words carefully; they desire to appear rational and pragmatic, rather than emotional, it seems. "Of course, there were some very hard times," Tim says. "But if I go aroused with them, it's not going to atomic number 82 to whatever beneficial outcomes." He admits it is distressing that, even though he can now spend time with his grandparents, the language barrier means he will never know them properly. "In terms of family and keeping this whole thing together, it really doesn't work out well when you choose this kind of path," he says, his voice abaft off wistfully.
Alex tells me that he sometimes wonders why his parents decided to have children at all. "They live their lives like everyone else, making choices along the fashion. I am glad they had a cause they believed in so strongly, simply their choices mean I feel no connectedness to the land they risked their lives for. I wish the earth wouldn't punish me for their choices and actions. It has been deeply unjust."
A number of times, Alex tells me that it is not his place to judge his parents, but that six years ago he spent a long catamenia wrestling with "the big question" of whether he hated them or felt betrayed. In the cease, he came to i conclusion: that they were the same people who had raised him lovingly, any secrets they hid.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/discovered-our-parents-were-russian-spies-tim-alex-foley
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