WASHINGTON — The United States has detained a 12th person in the Russian spy ring investigation, but it does not have enough evidence to charge him with a crime, four federal law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
The officials said the man, a Russian citizen, is being detained on immigration violations and was expected to be deported from the United States later Tuesday.
The name of the 23-year-old individual came up during the course of the FBI's probe into the Russian spy ring, and he entered the United States last October, two of the officials said. All four officials spoke on condition of anonymity about the ongoing matter.
The officials said the man had been staying in a different part of the United States from the other Russian agents and had no ties to them other than that his name came up as part of the same criminal inquiry.
The Justice Department investigated thoroughly and would have prosecuted the man if authorities had had enough evidence to do so, the officials said.
To date, investigators have uncovered no evidence that the man possessed, retained or passed on sensitive or classified information, said one of the officials.
In the biggest spy swap since the Cold War, 10 Russian agents who infiltrated suburban America were deported last week in exchange for four people convicted of betraying Moscow to the West. An 11th person has been a fugitive since fleeing authorities in Cyprus following his release on bail.
The FBI arrested the 10 on June 27 after learning weeks before that one of them, Donald Heathfield of Cambridge, Massachusetts, soon would be traveling abroad with a college-age son and might not return, a U.S. law enforcement official said.
Heathfield's planned departure was, in the official's words, the big catalyst in deciding to take down a spy network that had been under surveillance by the FBI for more than a decade.
Heathfield's real name is Andrei Bezrukov.
The official said Heathfield was to have started traveling late last month. The FBI had reason to believe Heathfield might not be coming back, said the official, who spoke about the matter on condition of anonymity because the government had not given authorization to discuss it.
Two White House officials said Friday that it became clear in early June that at least two of the Russians were making plans to leave the United States. The officials did not identify the two, but the law enforcement official said Monday that one of them was Heathfield. According to one of the two criminal complaints in the case, another of the Russian agents, Anna Chapman, was planning to leave mid-July for Moscow.
Preparations took time once the decision was made to dismantle the Russian network.
The FBI spent weeks preparing a 37-page complaint that a federal magistrate signed June 25, two days before the arrests.
It charged Heathfield, his wife and seven other people with two conspiracies — acting as unregistered foreign agents for Russia and engaging in money laundering.
A second complaint, dated June 27, the day of the arrests, charged two people, including Chapman, the daughter of a Russian diplomat. In separate incidents in New York and Washington on June 26, Chapman and the other defendant named in the second complaint were both approached by FBI undercover agents posing as Russians.
Adding to the sense of urgency surrounding the arrests was Chapman's behavior on June 26. She became suspicious when meeting that Saturday with the undercover FBI agent who posed as a Russian consulate employee. The undercover agent asked Chapman to deliver a phony passport to another deep cover Russian agent, but she did not do that.
The court documents show that right after meeting the undercover agent, Chapman bought a one-time-use cell phone under an assumed name.
Then, authorities say, Chapman made a "flurry of calls" to Russia. In one of the intercepted calls, a man advised her that she might have been uncovered and that she should turn in the passport to police and get out of the country. She was arrested the next day at the police station where she tried to turn in the fake passport.