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The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Son of Russian spies will not return to GW this fall

Tim Foley, the GW student whose parents pleaded guilty to being part of a Russian spy ring earlier this summer, will not be returning to the University this fall, a University spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday afternoon.

“At his request, Mr. Foley is no longer enrolled in classes for the fall 2010 semester and has been placed on a leave of absence for the semester,” University spokeswoman Candace Smith said.

The Hatchet reported that Foley was enrolled for fall classes, but Smith said Foley has since dropped his classes.

Foley, an international affairs major, would have been a junior at GW this fall.

The Russian spy story began in June, when 10 people living in the U.S. were arrested for allegedly assuming false identities with “conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government” and “conspiracy to commit money laundering.”

Andrey Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova were two of those arrested, and had been living as a married couple in Cambridge, Mass., under the names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley. The couple had two children – Tim, 20, an international affairs major at GW, and Alex, 16, a high school student at the private International School of Boston.

One week after the arrests, the couple pleaded guilty in a federal court in New York and were immediately deported. Four western spies who had been imprisoned in Russia in the 1990s were exchanged for 10 American spies in Vienna July 9, the largest U.S.-Russia spy swap since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Foley and his brother left for Russia shortly after their parents were deported.

A spokesman for the National Security Division of the Department of Justice declined to comment Tuesday afternoon on whether the U.S. government would allow Foley to return to the U.S.

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