Deception

by Edward Lucas

  As I show in chapter 6, such a person is an asset that can be used whenever, however and wherever it is needed. That Russia is running such agents in America, Britain and Europe (and elsewhere) should be cause for alarm. Imagine that someone who loathes you has a key to your front door. It will be little comfort if he has not yet got round to burning your house down, stealing your valuables, or planting drugs. The worry is that he could.

  Russians do not trivialise or ridicule espionage. They take it rather seriously, both as a threat from abroad and as something that their country excels in. Admittedly, people everywhere find fictional spies glamorous. America has the amnesiac but indestructible Jason Bourne:10 Commander Bond’s high jinks sprinkle stardust over the reputation of SIS. But real-life spies in Western countries have only modest privileges compared to their counterparts elsewhere. In Britain, for example, they retire at 55, earlier than the diplomatic colleagues whose cover they use. They have rather larger and more loosely scrutinised expense accounts than other officials, but on the whole enjoy the same lifestyle as any other middle-class professional.

  The Soviet legacy, however, has left a distinctive aura around espionage in Russia. For officers of the KGB (such as Ms Chapman’s father Vasily, or Mr Putin and hundreds of thousands like them) life was markedly nicer than for fellow inmates of the workers’ paradise. Housed in the KGB’s special accommodation, its officers had access to shops stocked with otherwise unavailable products. They holidayed at KGB resorts and were spared some of the system’s petty restrictions on daily life. Those in the elite foreign-espionage division, the First Chief Directorate, and some colleagues in cryptography and counter-intelligence, could even be sent to work abroad – perhaps even a posting to the fabled Western cornucopia that the class warriors both despised and envied.

  Privileges aside, the KGB also enjoyed a mystique that still lingers over its successor organisations. People saw it (rather inaccurately) as efficient, knowledgeable and incorruptible. Its officers had a job that mattered, in an organisation that worked, and were well rewarded for it. Few in the claustrophobic, ill-run and bribe-plagued Soviet Union could boast as much. Like the space programme and sporting heroes, the KGB also touched another emotional chord: patriotism. Though its ultimate loyalty was to the Communist Party, not to the Soviet state (it described itself as the Party’s ‘sword and shield’), it basked in the reflected glory of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Rather as the Battle of Britain provides Britain’s ‘finest hour’, as the Resistance epitomises France’s national myth, and as the Normandy beaches exemplify America’s commitment to the freedom of Europe, the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) was the central plank in the Soviet Union’s self-image – and plays the same role in Russian identity today.

  For all the heroism displayed by Soviet soldiers in defeating the Nazi invaders, the real role of the secret police in those years was a despicable mix of war crimes against the foe, ruthless pacification of ‘liberated’ territories and persecution of real or imagined waverers on its own side.11 Yet Soviet wartime history mostly comes across in a quite different light: on the television screens later adorned by Ms Chapman’s lightweight programme on unsolved mysteries,12 viewers used to watch the exploits of the best-known Soviet fictional spy, Max Otto von Stirlitz (to give him his German cover name). His wartime mission was to penetrate the Nazi high command. Unlike Bond, Stirlitz shuns gadgets, guns and girls. His weapon is his mind, fuelled not by communist ideology but a plangent patriotism. Though implausible, books and films featuring his exploits were compelling and sympathetic by the hackneyed standards of Soviet propaganda.13 They so captivated a tough teenager in the backstreets of 1970s Leningrad that he took the unusual step of walking into the city’s KGB headquarters and volunteering his services. But the young Vladimir Putin was told that the organisation did not accept walk-ins; he should get an education first and wait to be approached.e

  The Soviet Union is gone, but the links between Russia’s spies today and their dark and bloody past are real enough. Of course the old and new are not identical. Ms Chapman’s Soviet-era predecessors wore ill-fitting grey suits and sought the shadows. She likes leather catsuits and the spotlight. They served a totalitarian superpower. She serves post-Soviet Russia, a country that is undeniably capitalist and claims to be democratic. But a lasting connection is privilege. The dispensations enjoyed by Russia’s spooks now mean that they lead a life apart, just as KGB officers did in the Soviet era. The difference is not only in salary and access to consumer goods, but in the privilege of living above and outside the law. The results range from the trivial to the monstrous. An officer of the FSB can drive while drunk (and mow down pedestrians) with impunity. A flash of his ID badge will intimidate any lesser official; he can triumph in any private legal or commercial dispute; he can ignore planning regulations when he builds his house in the country. As I show in chapter 1, he can ruin the lives – literally – of those who displease him.

  Ms Chapman does not just hit the old Soviet buttons in the Russian psyche. She tickles its modern neuroses too. Her brand is based not on the steely puritanism of the wartime Soviet military but on the sleazy glitz of modern Russia. Her role was to spy not on the hated Nazis of long ago, but on a new bugbear: Western countries such as Britain and America, which the Russian regime sees as duplicitous, arrogant and greedy. Though the elite likes to shop, bank, frolic and school their children in and around London, many of its members despise Britain, just as they resent what they see as American hegemony and the bossiness of the European Union.

  This hostility stems in part from an inferiority complex: for all the West’s ills, its inhabitants enjoy a quality of life that is missing in Russia. This is despite what many Russians see as its baffling weakness and indolence (I have heard Russians complain in the same breath, quite unselfconsciously, about the feeble levels of maths education in the West and the flabby unfemininity of British and American women). Another reason is that Russians object to what they see as the West’s political interference – for example by sponsoring media-freedom and pro-democracy causes, and sheltering fugitives from Russia, who claim to be persecuted for their political beliefs, but are seen (at least by the authorities in Moscow) as mere swindlers and terrorists.

  Many people dismiss even the existence of this enmity, let alone its seriousness. For them, the era of East–West confrontation ended with Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (reform) and glasnost (openness). The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later buried it. The eastwards expansion of NATO laid its ghost and it became completely irrelevant after the ‘reset’ of American relations with Russia in 2009 under the presidency of Barack Obama. Launched on 6 March 2009, this involved the handing over by the American secretary of state Hillary Clinton to her Russian opposite number, the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, of a large symbolic button marked Peregruzka – Reset.f The aim was to separate issues on which the United States and the Russian authorities were bound to disagree (such as human rights, and the security of the countries of the former Soviet empire) with those where agreement was possible and even pressingly needed, such as Afghanistan, arms control, a legal regime in space, etc. Supporters say it helped speed transit of military matériel to Afghanistan, in curbing (a little) Iran’s nuclear programme, and in a new treaty on strategic nuclear arms. The administration’s other foreign-policy initiatives, in the Middle East, China, Eastern Europe, Iran and North Korea have been marked by a notable lack of success and infirmity of purpose, but at least to its fans the ‘reset’ has been a success, simply by improving the rhetoric (if not the reality) of the relationship. The European Union is if anything even more eager to avoid confrontation, partly in order not to jeopardise the continent’s gas supplies (a quarter of which still come from Russia). Moreover, many Eurocrats see bad relations as the product of insufficiently skilful diplomacy, not the necessary result of clashing values and objectives. That makes it hard to tak
e a tough line with Russia.

  From this viewpoint, worries about the silencing of critics in Russia, or the remaining wrangles over the future of faraway countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, are trivial. Nothing need disturb the safety and comfort of Western public opinion. Such complacency happily coincides with financial interests. For many bankers, oilmen, lawyers and others, their fortunes depend on good relations with Russia. The sweet smell of money triumphs over the stench from below. Economic woes in the West only heighten the temptation.

  I disagree with this approach and in 2007 wrote The New Cold War to explain why.14 That book highlighted Russia’s use of cash, energy and divide-and-rule diplomacy to undermine the Atlantic Alliance, to weaken the European Union and NATO, and to sow distrust between their ‘old’ and ex-communist members. I highlighted Russia’s bullying of neighbours such as Estonia and Georgia; and the penetration of Europe through corruption of politicians, businessmen and others. Since 2007 the once-controversial notion that Russia is run by xenophobic kleptocrats (a portmanteau word from ‘kleptocracy’ or ‘rule by thieves’) has become commonplace. This new book unveils the hidden side of Russia’s dealings with the West: the use of espionage for knowledge, for influence and ultimately for power. The outcome of these manoeuvres will determine whether the West brings Russia towards its standards of liberty, legality and cooperation, or whether it will be the other way round, as we accommodate (or even adopt) the authoritarian crony-capitalism that is the Moscow regime’s hallmark.g

  Few cases highlight this corruption and brutality better than the one I begin with: the torture and death in 2009 of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer working for a British investor. He exposed a $230m fraud by a criminal group led by the FSB and backed at the highest level in the regime.15 He paid for this discovery with his life; since his death the authorities have tried to cover up his murder, and their fraud, with a mixture of bombast, lies, bullying and evasion. The scandal exemplifies the overlap between gangsterdom and power in Russia, the abuse of the legal system, and the bravery of those Russians willing to defend the rule of law. The tentacles of FSB power stretch to the West too, not least because Russian officials have snooped on and intimidated Mr Magnitsky’s colleagues and defenders in London and elsewhere. As I show in subsequent chapters, the ruling regime represents not just a tragedy for Russia: it is a direct threat to our own well-being and safety.

  In the annals of Western intelligence history, victories feature more than defeats. Many know of the triumphant exfiltration – spy parlance for a secret rescue – in 1985 of the brave and brilliant Oleg Gordievsky, for years Britain’s top spy in the KGB. The defection in 1992 of Vasily Mitrokhin, a senior archivist in Russia’s espionage service, is also rightly celebrated.16 The KGB laboured under big disadvantages: the increasingly apparent failures of the planned economy, the climate of fear that impeded sensible decision-making, and the burden of political interference. Yet the West’s ultimate victory in the Cold War does not mean its intelligence services were winners all the time. The comforting account of a past studded with triumphs is misleading and leads to complacency. In chapters 8 and 9 I highlight some little-known stories of the previous decades in East–West spy wars, and their mostly dismal results for British and American intelligence. Our services were crippled by conflicting objectives: whether to spy on the Soviet block or to try to topple it. They repeatedly fell victim to Soviet deception operations. They were penetrated by traitors such as Kim Philby, and paralysed by the fear that more such moles remained undiscovered.

  The episodes I have chosen to illustrate these problems are linked to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These have been vulnerable and contested territory on the East–West frontline for a hundred years. Even today, they stand most to gain if we win – and most to lose if we are defeated. I make no secret of my sympathy for their cause. I lived there in 1990–94 when they wriggled out of the Kremlin’s clutches. I witnessed their growing prosperity and rejoiced over what seemed like their safe landing in NATO in 2004. I have also seen how Russia systematically tries to undermine their sovereignty and subvert their security. The tales of the spy wars there include torture and treachery, deep deceptions and cynical double-dealing. They feature tragedy and triumph, brilliance and bungling, heroism, sacrifice, betrayal – and deception.

  The first episode comes in the months after the Russian revolution of 1917, when outside governments, chiefly Britain, France and the United States, believed that they could snuff out the communist experiment before it took root and spread to other countries. The British envoy in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, fell for a brilliant deception operation personally masterminded by the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. Lockhart believed Lenin’s bodyguards – a crack force of Latvian riflemen – would switch sides in return for the offer of an independent Latvian state, backed by the Western powers. But having failed to check properly the credentials of his supposed Latvian allies, Lockhart was hooked by Lenin’s ruse. The British agent’s naivety and carelessness not only landed him in jail. It also confirmed Russian suspicions about Western meddling, and fuelled Lenin’s propaganda machine, which was warning Russians of foreign meddling and menaces. Catching a British spy red-handed trying to mount a putsch was the best possible proof of that.

  Despite that humiliating lesson, Western intelligence in the region then fell victim to a far greater deception: the ‘Trust’. British spymasters’ gullibility and recklessness in the early 1920s allowed the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, to pretend that a huge underground organisation in Soviet Russia was eager to receive outside help. Nothing of the kind existed: the Trust was an invention. Scores of anti-communist Russians went to their deaths on botched operations planned by Western spy chiefs who believed triumph was just around the corner. This fiasco also cost the life of Britain’s reckless ‘ace of spies’, Sidney Reilly. His successors proved to be the epitome of the secretive incompetence that plagues the world of espionage. They proved unwilling or unable to learn from their mistakes, making a similar blunder only twenty years later when they backed bogus anti-Soviet resistance groupings in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. British, American and other Western spymasters saw these countries as ideal springboards for both spying and subversion: the Soviet-occupied Baltic states were easily accessible by plane or boat, with ardently anti-communist populations that were already fighting a guerrilla war against their new Soviet rulers. But the result was a catastrophe. The brave men that we sent to help this cause ended up in the clutches of the KGB.

  I have tracked down perhaps the last survivor of those days. He is living peacefully in southern England, cherishing medals awarded by a country he thought would not be free in his lifetime, and a statuette given in belated gratitude by SIS. I have also found a previously unpublicised example of a successful mission in the Soviet Union by a star British spy and traces of others. But the balance sheet is still grim. The spy chiefs’ deluded belief in partisan warfare in the Baltic cost hundreds of lives and ruined thousands. It squandered money, prestige and credibility on a cause that brought no gain and great pain.

  The latest blunder came when the Baltic states regained independence in 1991, and Western intelligence piled back in to its old stamping ground. Again, the Russians were waiting and again the West was caught in a deception. Herman Simm, the most trusted official in the most trusted of all the ex-communist countries, Estonia, was a linchpin between its defence ministry and foreign allies. He gained plaudits for his efficiency and helpfulness, and top Estonian and NATO security clearances. The people who administered these systems somehow failed to spot that the avuncular ex-policeman was a long-standing KGB agent. To Estonia’s lasting credit, it did not try to hush up the catastrophe: Simm was caught, prosecuted and jailed. Not only that, the Estonian authorities gave me exclusive and repeated access to him. One reason for Estonian sensitivity is a startling and little-known aspect of the story. Simm was not spying only for the Russians.

  S
imm was an exception because he was caught. So too were Ms Chapman and the spies in America. But their story reveals the long-term efforts Russia makes and the vulnerabilities it exploits. How many other ‘illegals’ are living unnoticed in Britain, Europe or America? And how many agents have they recruited? Raising the alarm over this is a central aim of this book. The West has largely let down its guard. The CIA’s counter-espionage officers and their counter-intelligence colleaguesh at the FBI still devote time and money to catching Russian spies. But this is the exception, not the rule. Since 11 September 2001, priorities have shifted. Britain’s Security Service, usually known by its acronym MI5, claims to devote only 4 per cent of its resources to counter-intelligence – the overwhelming majority goes to counter-terrorism.17 In Belgium a mere handful of local spycatchers, ill-paid and lacking political backing, have to keep track of the hundreds of Russians aiming to penetrate the European Union, the NATO headquarters in Brussels and other tempting targets.

  The passage of time and other priorities have eroded the expertise and institutional memory that in Cold War days helped spycatchers keep track of Soviet penetration attempts. Concerns for privacy have made vetting procedures flimsy. Officials can make money on the side, take lucrative jobs on retirement, take unexplained foreign trips, copy documents onto memory sticks from supposedly secure laptops and carry an array of electronic gadgets that never come under scrutiny. I also highlight the mistaken complacency that has surrounded the expansion of NATO to the ex-communist countries. It was right to enlarge the alliance (chiefly because of Russia’s neo-imperialist sabre-rattling) but intelligence and security services have grossly underestimated the Soviet-era shadow that still lies over the region. The liberation of 1989–91 was intoxicating, but its effects were only skin-deep. Replacing the planned economy with free markets, state censorship with free media, and one-party rule with free elections were hugely important changes. But the transformation of the political and economic systems could not be matched by an instant change in the human beings that inhabit them. Millions of people in the region have grown up under communism and collaborated with it. The toxic legacy of secret police files, with the shabby compromises and sordid secrets they contain, still taints public life. It provides plenty of scope for blackmailing the guilty – and smearing the innocent. Even those seen in the West as heroes, such as Poland’s former president Lech Wałęsa, have come under a cloud of suspicion about past collaboration.18 Although not everything in the secret police files is true, and many true things are not in the files, the dirty secrets of the past, many of them spirited away to Russia in the dying days of the old regimes, create great possibilities for pressurising anyone born before, roughly, 1970. In short, the collapse of communism left a series of human time-bombs all over the former empire – with the Kremlin in charge of the remote controls.