(Graphic by Lee Ferran / Code and Dagger. Original photo courtesy DVIDS.)
His first assignment from his new Russian handler was… nuns. To find out the names of four nuns.
Perhaps not the most glamorous assignment, but for the young American Peter Debbins, it was a prelude to what became a 15-year betrayal of the U.S., including the eventual infiltration of the Army’s famed Special Forces.
What started as a conversation with a Russian intelligence officer in a west-central Russian city in the mid-1990s ended Wednesday in a Virginia courtroom, after Debbins pleaded guilty to being a long-term source for Russian spies – including providing information on his brothers in arms.
“President Kennedy called the Green Berets ‘a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction.’ Mr. Debbins actions were a symbol of betrayal, a badge of cowardice, and a mark of treachery,” Alan Kohler, a top FBI counterintelligence official, said, referring to the famous headgear worn by Special Forces soldiers. “He pledged his allegiance to Russia, and in doing so, sold out his country and fellow Green Berets.”
Debbins faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, but a plea agreement notes that he aided prosecutors after pleading guilty and suggested he could see a reduced sentence.
But 14 years earlier, Debbins was a college student in ROTC with plans of joining the military – plans that must have been music to the ears of “RIS 1,” among the more than a half-dozen Russian spies that would court and encourage Debbins over the years.
‘Son of Russia’ Comes Home
According to court documents that lay out the case against Debbins, including a Statement of Facts Debbins signed when he made his plea, his recruitment by Russian intelligence appeared exceedingly simple – Debbins is described as an eager traitor who once said the U.S. needed to be “cut down to size.”
His affinity for Russia started as an interest in the heritage of his mother, who had been born in the Soviet Union. He traveled multiple times to Russia beginning when he was just 19 years old and met his wife-to-be in Chelyabinsk, a Russian city more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow and just north of Kazakhstan. Her father, prosecutors noted, was an officer in the Russian military.
Neither the original indictment or the statement of facts explains exactly how Debbins appeared on the Russian spies’ radar, but when Debbins returned to Chelyabinsk two years after his first trip, a Russian intelligence officer reached out, asking to meet. Debbins agreed. That meeting was followed by others, with other intelligence officers.
Court papers are not clear on whether Debbins knew from the beginning that the Russians were intelligence officers, but it suggests he at least knew the meetings were to be kept secret.
“As a cover for their meetings, the Russian intelligence service directed the defendant to tell his girlfriend that he was meeting with a professor on campus,” the statement of facts said.
Debbins later said he assumed the men were from the FSB, Russia’s civilian spy service and successor to the KGB. He only learned years later they were actually from the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency that has garnered so many headlines in recent years.
During his first meetings Debbins told the handler identified as RIS 1 about his aspirations for U.S. military service, but said he was a “son of Russia” and wanted to learn more about the country.
The odd bit about the nuns comes in here, where apparently RIS 1 wanted to test Debbins by asking him to learn the names of “four nuns at a Catholic church that the defendant had visited,” the statement of facts says. “The defendant subsequently visited the nuns, obtained their names, and provided the names to RIS 1.”
The next year, in 1997, the Russians bestowed a code name on Debbins: Ikar Lesnikov. He would use it in communications for years to come.
Betraying the Beret
Paydirt for the Russians, however, didn’t come until 2003 when Debbins joined the 10th Special Forces Group, stationed in Germany. He soon received Top Secret security clearance. (Debbins already held a lower-level clearance in the course of his prior military service.)
His Special Forces career would prove short-lived, however, after court papers say that during a deployment to Azerbaijan, which borders the Caspian Sea to the west, he brought his wife along and let her use a government cell phone. This was apparently enough of a security breach that his clearance was suspended, and he was booted from the Army – albeit with an honorable discharge.
Despite going on “inactive reserve” for the military from that point until 2010, Debbins kept up his contact with Russian intelligence officers.
In 2008, during a conflict between Russia and Georgia, Debbins provided information to them about U.S. Special Forces operations in Georgia. He also gave up information about specific Special Forces soldiers with whom he had served.
“The defendant identified for RIS 5 and RIS 7 at least one specific Special Forces team member whom he thought they could approach” to recruit as yet another source, the statement of facts says. The court papers don’t say anything more about the Russians’ broader recruitment efforts.
Out of Special Forces, Into US Intelligence
The end of Debbins’ military career was not the end of his work in the world of intelligence. A purported resume of Debbins that was featured as an exhibit in the case shows stints working as a Russian analyst for military counter-intelligence and as a contractor for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
From his Special Forces background, Debbins appears to have pivoted to an expertise in cybersecurity, with a Russian specialty.
To do these jobs, Debbins regained his Top Secret clearance in 2010, according to The Washington Post. In court documents, security specialists in the U.S. government described how through these jobs Debbins was privy to U.S. government secrets of the highest restrictions.
But at least the public record suggests his relationship with Russian spies ended in 2011. The Post reported that Debbins’ years-old misdeeds only came to light last year after he flubbed a polygraph for a renewal of his security clearance.
So, in the end, why did Debbins betray men he had trained with and served alongside, and the government he’d worked for his whole adult life?
“The defendant provided information to the Russian intelligence agents in 2008 at least in part because he was angry and bitter about his time in the U.S. Army,” the statement of fact says. “The defendant also thought that Russia needed to be built up and that America needed to be ‘cut down to size.’”
In an interview with FBI agents in 2019, Debbins saw at least his original recruitment in the 1990s by the Russians differently.
“I had a messianic vision for myself in Russia, that I was going [to] free them from their oppressive government,” he wrote during the interview. “So I was flattered when they reached out to me…”