Deception
Page 9
The real damage was to British credibility, not nerves: the overstretched RAF was short of planes to meet the potential intruder. (That was in 2007: its ability to defend British airspace was weaker at the time of writing and is set to be eroded still further by defence cuts.) The frequency of such probes is surprising – as often as one a week in some periods, and more than fifty since 2005. It is not just Britain that suffers these unwelcome attentions. In 2011, Russian bombers intruded on Dutch airspace on at least three occasions.11 Though irked and sometimes alarmed, defence chiefs dislike discussing the subject. They say that in a real war few Russian planes would get airborne and all would be shot down long before they were near NATO air space. In peacetime, they do not want to give Russia the satisfaction of knowing that its sabre-rattling has an effect.
As well as showing off and tying up scarce defence resources with military stunts, Russian efforts also involve spying on Britain’s nuclear deterrent. It is fashionable to deride this as a Cold War legacy. Those who want Britain to give it up should perhaps ask themselves why Russia spends so much energy trying to unpick its secrets. It is still quite possible to imagine a scenario in which America is unwilling to risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia over a security conflict in Europe. In the autumn of 2009, for example, Russia and Belarus conducted the Ladoga and Zapad-09 manoeuvres.12 This was in fact one exercise, but divided into two in order to avoid having, to invite observers from NATO, as stipulated by arms-control treaties for drills involving more than 13,000 soldiers. The real exercise was not defensive, but aggressive. The combined forces, some 20,000 strong, were rehearsing how to isolate the Baltic states from the rest of Europe, invade and occupy them. In case of reinforcement by other NATO countries, the rehearsal showed that Russia would respond by using tactical nuclear weapons. This drill was followed by another exercise by Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces (the custodians of its main nuclear arsenal) in which the target was Warsaw,13 showing how closely Russia’s conventional defence planning is linked to the use of nuclear weapons – and how important the British nuclear deterrent remains. Imagine for example that America, facing a defence budget shrivelled by economic weakness, were preoccupied elsewhere, say in a confrontation with Iran that blocked oil supplies through the straits of Hormuz (which could easily be manufactured by Russia) or with China over Taiwan. A reminder from Britain that it has an independent nuclear deterrent and is prepared to use it in response to a Russian nuclear attack on any British forces in the Baltic could tip the balance between peace (meaning victory) and a conflict (which NATO, without America, would lose). Such a scenario is in current conditions extremely unlikely. But if that British response becomes impossible (for example because our deterrent is no longer credible) then the whole basis of Western defence weakens. If a future Russian leadership could assume it did not risk the ultimate penalty for military adventurism (and especially if NATO knew it too), then bullying neighbours, with the threat of armed force at least in the background, becomes more likely.
It is therefore interesting that Akula-class submarines, the pride of Russia’s dwindling navy, have resumed a Cold War-era tactic, lurking off the Forth of Clyde in the hope of picking up the acoustic signature of Britain’s Trident submarines as they enter and leave their base. This distinctive pattern of noise allows sophisticated detection equipment to track and potentially destroy the other side’s submarines. Once you know what you are looking for, it is much easier to find it. The Royal Navy’s Vanguard-class submarines now devote considerable time to fending off these attempts. Given the secrecy that traditionally surrounds anything to do with submarines, any public mention of such concerns is a sign of how seriously naval chiefs take the Russian activities. Whispers in the shadows of Whitehall suggest a still greater incidence of such activities, including the targeting of undersea anti-surveillance installations. Akula-class submarines are also patrolling far afield – even to the coasts of the United States, where one such vessel surfaced as if openly inviting attention.14 Russia’s aim is to intimidate and divide NATO, forcing the alliance to focus on hard questions that its members would rather avoid, and for which the various national publics have no appetite. If, after stirring up a divisive discussion in NATO, Russia concluded that Poland and the Baltic states were diplomatically and militarily isolated, it then would find it easier to bully them over other matters of concern such as energy supplies, trade or domestic politics. In assessing that scope for manoeuvre, intelligence plays a vital role.
Russia was most interested in the Western reaction to its exercises. What conclusions did military attachés draw? Could NATO tap Russian battlefield communications in real time? Most importantly, how did other countries respond to the quiet but sharply expressed concern from Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Warsaw? Was the West’s reaction to tell these frontline countries to calm down and be quiet? Or was it to offer them reassurance? In fact, the reaction was not what Russia expected. Though some officials tried hard to play down the significance of the exercises (one called them ‘a twitch of the dinosaur’s tail’), America ordered a response that included in 2010 a major special-forces exercise, a marine amphibious landing in Estonia and a reinforcement drill in Latvia, with more to follow. NATO warplanes held a large air exercise involving mid-air refuelling. America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the Defense Mapping Agency) has compiled a detailed 3D electronic map of the Baltics. NATO contingency plans now for the first time include the Baltic states, involving the use of Swedish airspace and Polish troops. This was presumably not what the Russians wanted. So why did they do it? The chief reason for this self-defeating gambit was a flawed assumption: that the West does not really care about the Baltic states and brought them into NATO only for political reasons. In fact, America at least has shown that it does care about its new allies and is willing to make efforts to prove it.
Monitoring all this closely was the spy-infested Russian mission to NATO. This quasi-diplomatic outfit enjoys a remarkably privileged status at alliance headquarters in Brussels, with regular briefings, spacious offices and security badges that allow its members preferential access to meetings, documents and other facilities. This friendly treatment dates from the days when NATO tried to soft-soap Russia about the alliance’s expansion to the former Soviet empire. By opening up to Russia, NATO hoped to dispel any fears about its intentions; belief persists among some member countries that differences with Russia are merely the result of misunderstandings, and that confrontation would be a sign of failure. This approach is heartfelt, particularly in Germany, where it is an article of faith among senior officials that Russia must be embraced and reassured, not deterred. The theoretical argument about whether relations would be even worse without this approach is unresolvable. What is clear is that attempts to build trust have proved unsuccessful in practical terms. On issues such as terrorism NATO puts cards on the table, and receives in return Russian offerings dressed up as serious intelligence, though in truth they are little more than could be found out on the internet. The Russian spies posted to the NATO mission are numerous, ubiquitous, unscrupulous and energetic. They bluntly and repeatedly approach officials whom they regard as promising targets. They are adept at keeping their distinctive ID badges concealed and slipping into meetings to which they have not been invited. Their chief targets are the alliance’s future military thinking, especially its contingency plans; new capabilities, for example in cyber-warfare or missile defence; and NATO’s codes and communications – the alliance’s central nervous system. They have a sharp eye on counter-intelligence: trying to find out what NATO members know about Russia, and where it comes from. They like to have a clear idea of who is being trained for what, by whom, where, and how well.
A paradox here, as so often in intelligence work, is that many of these secrets are both closely guarded and yet not very interesting. NATO’s abilities and capabilities have shrivelled since the end of the Cold War. Many of its members spend risibly little on defence. M
any of the member states’ governments have little interest in Russia, and find it hard to share the worries of countries such as the Baltic states and Poland. In a crisis, NATO’s effectiveness depends almost wholly on the United States. Russian intelligence penetration of NATO probably peaked at a time when it revealed a lack of secrets, rather than their existence. Russia’s lavishly resourced spies do not mind about that. For a start, NATO HQ is a good place to recruit highfliers from the countries that matter – chiefly America, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Norway or Turkey – who will go on to careers in their national defence and security establishments. Secondly, Brussels is a great place for agent-running. Belgian counter-intelligence is weak. Only a handful of officers deal with Russia. They have no powers of arrest and face grave difficulties in obtaining warrants. All this is a serious problem for the hard-pressed NATO Office of Security.
A deeper reason for Russian behaviour is a paranoid mind-set conditioned partly by the Cold War, partly by the alliance’s expansion, and partly by the NATO-led bombing of Serbia in 1999.t With the Soviet Union out of the way, Russians believe, America and its allies turned a neutral front yard into a cordon sanitaire, deliberately designed to humiliate and constrain the former superpower, and breaking a promise made to the Soviet Union in exchange for German reunification.15 What if NATO decides next to help one of Russia’s near neighbours, say Georgia, or Ukraine, or Moldova, in some military flare-up? When dealing with a powerful and unpredictable military alliance on your borders it is better to have too many sources than too few. Nobody is going to complain about having too much information about NATO’s inner workings. The more the diligent spies report that NATO is ineffective and distracted, the more the instructions come back to dig deeper and find the real story.
Other international organisations are at even greater risk. The mental barriers to giving away secrets are lower (betraying your country or its military alliances is one thing, betraying an anonymous bureaucracy is another). Whereas NATO at least tries to keep spies at bay, the headquarters of the European Commission and European Council in Brussels are a security nightmare: a warren of badly policed offices and unvetted staff, where outsiders can walk in and out almost at will on the flimsiest of pretexts. The European Parliament, newly important since the Lisbon Treaty carve-up gave it and the EU’s big countries the main role in the union’s decision-making, is a particularly vulnerable target. Its members (and office staff, on their behalf) can demand almost any document they like from the European Commission. Staffers are lightly vetted (or not at all) and can ask for a briefing or an informal chat with any official.
The EU, it should be noted, is not in the position to treat Russia the same way. For a start, it has no intelligence-gathering service of its own. Weak leadership, squabbles and bureaucracy plague its misnamed ‘External Action Service’, which is supposed to spearhead a more decisive and better-informed EU diplomacy. An intelligence agency requires much greater grip and focus than a diplomatic service. If the EU cannot yet run a foreign ministry and embassies properly, it has no chance of developing a spy agency capable of dealing with a tough target such as Russia. The only advantage of this is that a bad intelligence agency is more damaging than none at all. If you don’t spy, you can’t bungle; you can’t be fooled by bad sources or get good ones into trouble. The disadvantage is that politicians may lack full knowledge of the people and thinking that they are dealing with. The EU is also unable to get proper intelligence from its member states. For the handful of member countries (chiefly Britain and France) that do have real intelligence services, the job is mostly outwitting the EU on matters of national interest, not helping the Eurocrats to raise their game. Even when European and national interests do overlap, the EU is seen as too leaky to be trusted with more than the stalest crumbs of intelligence.
As with all intelligence agencies, it is one thing to gain a flow of information, and another to use it correctly. American decision-makers are overwhelmed by a ‘fire-hose’ of classified, secret, top-secret and urgent information produced by that country’s sprawling intelligence ‘community’.16 Much of it is dross, either recycled or poorly sourced. Much less is known about Russia’s use of intelligence, although it is clear that Mr Putin takes a close personal interest in the output of his country’s agencies – people who know his daily routine say he habitually spends a couple of hours a day reading its reports and cables, while shunning more conventional (and perhaps more useful) sources of information.
For whatever reason, however, Russia does seem to have the knack of searching through floods of data to find the most usable bits. EU officials who deal with Russia, for example, have told me that they frequently have the impression that the other side already knows every part of their negotiating position. It is easy to scoff at this: why should anyone care if the Russians bamboozle the Eurocrats? The answer is simple. If Russia understands which countries are the die-hard supporters of a particular EU policy that it does or doesn’t like, which are the wobblers, and what is the negotiating position, it knows where to apply diplomatic pressure (or when not to waste time and effort fighting a lost cause).
The EU talks to Russia about matters of vital interest to every member-state’s citizens, but a prime example is energy. Here the picture has shifted sharply over the past decade. Ten years ago, Russia was seen as a bright prospect for Europe’s future oil and gas supplies, and a source of nuclear expertise, fuel and technology. Since then corruption and incompetence at home, and bullying behaviour abroad have eroded Russia’s clout, to the point that even Germany is now sceptical about its reliability. In the past, Germany was heavily dependent on Russian gas. Its biggest energy companies were closely tied to Gazprom, and the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, took on the chairmanship of a controversial Russian–German gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed soon after he left office in 2005. In his time Germany resisted any attempt to talk toughly to Moscow on energy and other issues: many outsiders saw that as sinister. They feared that the gas supplies had anaesthetised the country’s prudence and scepticism when it came to policy towards Russia.17
That has changed. Russia’s squabbles with transit countries such as Ukraine have interrupted gas supplies to Europe and rattled German confidence. Angela Merkel, Mr Schröder’s successor, is instinctively more hawkish about Russia. Corruption and incompetence in Gazprom and elsewhere have raised fears about Russia’s ability to meet its long-term supply commitments. New gas supplies are available from elsewhere – chiefly Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which can be delivered by sea from distant suppliers. Only five years ago this was scarce and expensive. But technological change has made tankers and terminals cheaper, while new extraction techniques mean that more gas is on the market. The days when Russia’s east-west pipeline monopoly created a lock on European energy supplies are over.
But Russia is now playing a hard defensive game. It no longer controls the bottleneck in supplies. Instead it wants long-term contracts, stakes in downstream distribution systems and market information. In Britain, those dealing with Gazprom’s local subsidiary say that its behaviour is less that of a new entrant into the market, and more of an intelligence operation. The head of counter-intelligence for Germany’s BfV security service, Burkhard Even, highlighted the role of Russian spies in
supporting Russian companies . . . to gain a footing in the German energy sector. The interest is above all in alternative and regenerative energy, possibilities to increase energy efficiency, European energy interests and diversification strategies . . .18
Russia is in most respects a backward country – a source of humiliation to those who remember that the Soviet Union was the country that put the first satellite, living creature and human being into space. Closing that gap through the normal process of industrial development seems all but impossible. Despite remaining pockets of excellence in the education system, ambitious Russians head abroad, rather than building their businesses at home.19 Though Mr Putin is personally d
etermined that Russia become a world leader in nano-technology, building such hi-tech industry from scratch is hard: Russia does have plenty of brainpower, but it is starting ten years later than competitors in Germany, America and Britain. The only way Russia can hope to close the gap is by stealing secrets, either to take advantage of them in its own industry, or to trade elsewhere (principally to China). One way of doing that is snooping on other countries’ communications.
Use Google Earth to search for 57º48’8.20”N 28º12’58.59”E and you will see a snapshot, taken from space, of a large collection of satellite dishes on the westernmost extremity of Russia, on the Estonian border, to the north-east of the main A-212 road from the provincial capital Pskov. Even viewed from on high, the gleaming metal and bright paintwork make it clear that this is a new installation; the long shadows cast by the guard fence and sentry posts around the antenna array indicate a high degree of security. Google now helpfully labels it ‘Center FAPSI’20 and an enterprising photographer has provided a fine picture of it.21 Western intelligence officials were initially puzzled about the facility’s purpose. Russia already has an archipelago of electronic listening stations: why build a new one exactly there?