📸 Photo

Welcome to America

The two Russians made themselves at home in the small office in Seattle. Alexey Ivanov, twenty, typed on a computer keyboard while his associate, nineteen-year-old Vasiliy Gorshkov, stood by and watched. They were straight off a flight from Russia and already knee-deep into the biggest job interview of their lives—negotiating for a lucrative international partnership with the U.S. computer-security start-up Invita.

Office workers milled around them, and tinny pop music spilled from the computer's speaker. After a few minutes, Gorshkov drifted off to another computer across the room, and Michael Patterson, Invita's CEO, struck up a conversation.

It had been Patterson who'd invited the Russians to Seattle. Invita, he'd told them in an e-mail, was a young company, but it was gaining customers through contacts the founders had made while working at Microsoft and Sun. Now the company wanted help expanding into Eastern Europe. Ivanov, who claimed to have as many as twenty talented programmers working with him, seemed perfect for the job; Gorshkov was a tag-along, invited by Ivanov to act as the duo's spokesman. He had a fiancée waiting back home, pregnant with his first child.

Patterson began casually asking Gorshkov about a recent rash of computer intrusions into U.S. companies, some of whom paid money to the