Hernando, Mississippi —  

Ilya Beloozerov was on the run.

He drained his bank account, canceled his cell phone and sped away from his quiet life in suburban Virginia.

After a few days on the road, the Russian-born American citizen befriended a couple living in a parking lot next to a McDonald’s. He told them he’d give them $30,000 to buy a pickup truck and take him to California.

Beloozerov had a suitcase full of cash, nearly a dozen laptops, and a seemingly untraceable ride. All that was left was finding a place to ditch his SUV that he’d driven from Virginia.

But on a sunny fall morning, as he finalized plans for his cross-country escape, a team of federal agents swarmed him outside a Super 8 hotel in Hernando, Mississippi, and gunshots rang out. When the smoke cleared on October 4, 2024, Beloozerov’s body lay splayed out on the pavement amid shards of glass from his car window. He’d been hit by at least five bullets.

Nearly two years later, federal authorities have said nothing about who Beloozerov was or why they fatally shot him.

But a CNN investigation, including a review of bank statements, personal documents and interviews with coworkers, friends, and relatives, found that Beloozerov led a secret double life, unknown to his family and confidantes – but highly alarming to federal authorities.

Behind his public persona as a doting father who liked to play chess, the émigré held a United States security clearance, maintained at least one Russian dating profile and, according to expired passports, had traveled to both Russia and Ukraine in recent years. Among his possessions at the time of his death were a Social Security card and multiple IDs belonging to different dead men, a common way to craft fake identities.

For the last two years of his life, Beloozerov worked for a company that produced high-resolution satellite imagery, including sensitive information about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Weeks before he was killed, CNN learned, his employer contacted authorities with concerns about him.

In interviews with federal agents and later with CNN, his family dismissed the notion that Beloozerov may have been a spy. He would never betray the US by sharing secret intelligence, they said.

But at times, they have harbored doubts. After all, Beloozerov had grown up fiercely anti-Russian, the son of a Soviet-era dissident, and as an adult he strongly supported Ukraine – even sending a care package to soldiers on the front lines.

Could he have been convinced to help the Ukrainian war effort another way? One thing was certain, they said: He would never help Russia.

“It’s crystal clear, how much he was pro-Ukraine,” Beloozerov’s son said.

Since Beloozerov’s death, questions about why he was being pursued by the FBI and why agents killed him have tormented his loved ones. The bureau, which faces little public accountability in fatal shootings, declined to comment for this story.

“No one ever should die like this,” said his former wife and the mother of his 18-year-old son, herself a Russian-born immigrant. “I need to understand why.”

Who was Ilya Beloozerov?

Born in the Soviet Union in 1974, Beloozerov was raised by his mother Lena and stepfather Nikolai Beloozerov, a Soviet dissident and a mathematician, among a community of intellectuals in southwestern Moscow. The USSR was in flux: The country’s military had invaded Afghanistan and Lena feared Ilya would one day be forced to fight. Nikolai’s identity as a dissident made remaining in the country dangerous. So the family left, arriving in the United States in 1987 and settling in Virginia.

Family photos show a young Ilya Beloozerov.
Family photos show a young Ilya Beloozerov.
CNN

Nikolai’s anti-Soviet views had a lifelong impact on the younger Beloozerov: “Ilya (identified) himself as a son of the Soviet dissident – that was a defining feature,” said Beloozerov’s former wife, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, Marina, out of concern for her and her family’s safety.

Beloozerov appeared to embrace life in the United States. He made the dean’s list at the military school where his parents taught, and later attended Virginia Tech. He sometimes wrote political letters to newspapers, in one appearing to reject his Russian roots: “I immigrated to America with my family because I got tired of being a guinea pig in socialist-collectivist experiments in ‘the empire of evil,’” he wrote in a 1994 letter to the Roanoke Times.

Beloozerov built a career in IT, working for IBM in Boulder, Colorado, in the late ’90s, according to an online resume, before returning to the Beltway. He met Marina, who was living in Russia, through a Christian dating site in 2005, and in 2007, she moved to the United States. They married and had a son.

Beloozerov was eccentric. One family member recalled that he tried to sell a car on eBay in the late 2000s, hoping to be paid in gold bars and guns. Marina described how he liked to keep a gun next to his bed while he slept.

Lyubov Campion, who had known Beloozerov since the late 2000s and largely communicated with him by email, said most of Beloozerov’s friendships were online. “He told me, ‘I have many friends but I never met them,’” Campion recalled. “He didn’t have real friends, he had virtual friends.”