VANCOUVER, CANADA — For the last 12 years, Mikhail and Irina Lennikov have lived unremarkable lives, not unlike countless other immigrants who came to Canada from Eastern Europe looking for a fresh start in a prosperous and quiet land.
He found a job as a software developer. She got hired in an insurance office. Their son, Dmitri, who barely remembers Russia, graduated last month from Byrne Creek Secondary School in the comfortable suburb of Burnaby.
The difference is that Mikhail Lennikov's employer in the Soviet Union was the KGB.
Citing a law that denies permanent residency to employees of agencies that engage in espionage or subversion against democratic governments, a Canadian judge last month ordered Lennikov deported to Russia.
The legal decision has touched a nerve in British Columbia, where the former KGB agent's friends and neighbors, along with thousands of other Canadian citizens and 36 members of Parliament, have rallied to his defense -- holding marches, parades and petition drives.
So has his church, which has allowed the soft-spoken, graying Asian studies expert to take sanctuary within its walls on an east Vancouver side street, in defiance of the government's attempts to put him on a plane back to his hometown of Vladivostok in Russia's far east.
"From our perspective, he's one of us. He's part of this congregation. And when we said we were going to support him, we didn't just mean with e-mails and phone calls and faxes. We weren't going to let this happen without doing everything we can," said Richard Hergesheimer, pastor at First Lutheran Church, which Lennikov has called home since June 2.
Unlike law enforcement authorities in the United States, Canadian officials have honored churches' exercise of the age-old tradition of sanctuary to those fleeing what religious leaders see as unjust laws.
But the Canadian Border Services Agency has refused to rule out going after Lennikov, prompting everyone at the church -- whether its music leader or its Sunday school teachers -- to adopt an anxious regimen of heightened security. Doors are locked; visitors who ring the bell are quizzed before being admitted.
"We have not entered into a church to arrest someone in the past, but there is no law preventing us from doing so," said Faith St. John, spokeswoman for the border agency.
No one has suggested that Lennikov, 48, engaged in acts of violence or intimidation when he held the rank of captain in the KGB for six years in the 1980s.
