by Edward Lucas
Another Russian source might take his holidays in Vienna, and have a long-standing interest in the Central Cemetery. Its 250 hectaresaa feature interesting graves from Freud to Mozart. It has another advantage from an espionage point of view: the long paths and clear sightlines give plenty of opportunity to see if anyone is watching. Assuming all is clear, he can be picked up by a scruffy van parked in some remote corner of the grounds. Inside are comfortable chairs, a bottle of vodka, and a case officer eager to debrief him. Half an hour later, he is wandering round the cemetery again. Spycatchers’ resources are finite: if scrutiny reveals nothing, then they turn to something more promising.
Such elaborate precautions are costly and make sense only for the most highly placed source. Yet if anything goes wrong, he ends up rotting in a labour camp. Every stage needs to be hammered out in advance. Can that hotel penthouse in Kiev be dependably booked in advance? Can the source plausibly stay there on his official salary? Where exactly are the CCTV blind spots? Who will make the reservation? How will the bill be paid? Will the credit card be traceable? What passport will be used? Who will sweep the room for bugs? Each new precaution creates a new difficulty and something else to go wrong. The ideal operation has as few moving parts as possible. It is better to rely on split-second timing, which practice and professionalism can perfect, than on elaborate schemes that are vulnerable to the unexpected.
Take the Vienna trip: what happens if it is pouring with rain? A dedicated grave-spotter may take a short damp walk to see a famous tomb, but not a long one. So what is the back-up plan? A nearby church? Is it always open? What if a service is happening? And how to communicate if the plans go awry? Sussing that out requires lots of legwork. The officers working on this team will know Vienna’s tourist attractions backwards by the time they have finished. Organising brush contacts, dead-letter boxes and signals in Moscow is even more difficult, and involves a stream of innocent-seeming bag men (and bag ladies), scarf-wearers and scouts who will turn up and run errands, dependably, punctually, and inconspicuously, right under the noses of the Russian FSB. Compounding the cost of all this is the need to avoid any recognisable pattern of behaviour. Too many visits to Vienna, or to Kiev, arouse attention. A dead-letter box is most secure when it is used sparingly, ideally only once. So the attrition rate is high. No sooner has an impressively guileful idea been worked out than it starts wearing out.
Such difficulties and precautions beset every stage of agent-running: identifying a potential source, softening him up (‘cultivation’ in spy-speak), presenting bluntly the offer of cooperation (‘pitching’); keeping him safe, motivated and productive (‘agent-running’), debriefing him (‘elicitation’) and when he is no more use standing him down (‘terminating him’). A promising source may be a ‘dangle’ – someone presented by the other side in the hope of flushing out some clues about the way you work. If a source is willing to betray his own country, his loyalty to the person who brokers the betrayal must also be questionable. Even if he starts off genuine, suppose he comes under pressure from the other side, and betrays you and your methods? Maybe he will prove a time-waster, just in search of easy money for old news? The adversary’s ‘wish-list’ is one of the most sought-after pieces of intelligence in the whole spy world. If you know what the other side does not know, you are in a good position to mislead them and to conceal your real secrets.
At a more trivial level, methods and tradecraft are vulnerable too. If a double agent reveals dead-letter boxes, his side can put them under observation in case another, unknown, agent is using them too. Who empties them? Maybe an embassy-based archivist or visa clerk not previously under suspicion as an intelligence officer. Then you have a new target. Giving a clever communications gadget to a newly recruited source can backfire. If he is caught or switches sides, anyone else using a similar device is at greater risk. A ‘walk-in’ who turns up at an embassy in a sensitive country demanding to speak to an intelligence officer can hardly be ignored. But even the initial vetting of such an approach is risky. Whoever meets the visitor may be being set up for embarrassment or expulsion. For someone based at an embassy in Moscow, this will mean a career-blighting departure to London, perhaps after first being humiliated in surreptitiously filmed clips broadcast on the evening television news.6
The spotlight also endangers all a case officer’s previous contacts and operations. Marc Doe, a British official based at the embassy in Moscow who was exposed in the Russian media after a bungled operation, turned out to have a diplomatic cover job that involved channelling embassy funds to human-rights organisations long denounced as fronts for Western interests by the Russian authorities.7 That was an excruciating blunder. For these hard-pressed and vulnerable outfits, the furore weakened their defence.
But the greatest risk remains recruiting the wrong person. Sign up the wrong source and you will give away far more than you gain. Hire someone with a fragile ego and a short temper and you risk a major security breach. The case of Richard Tomlinson, a renegade British spy who published a book in Russia about his recruitment, training and quarrels with his bosses, has been costly and damaging for Britain’s intelligence agencies and their foreign partner services.8
In past decades the most formidable spies on both sides were ‘illegals’ – sent on long-term clandestine assignments, using stolen or fake identities, and without the benefit of diplomatic cover. One of them was Sir Paul Dukes, described in chapter 8, whose work under the noses of the Bolsheviks in the years following the Russian revolution makes him probably the most brilliant spy in the history of MI6. But after the debacles of the 1940s (of which more later) Western countries stopped trying to send agents to live undercover behind the Iron Curtain: the difficulty of creating sufficiently credible false identities for people to function inside a closed totalitarian society was just too great. The KGB and other services, however, made great efforts to send their agents to the West, sometimes for lifetime assignments. Some of the agents unearthed in June 2010 were just this kind of classic ‘illegal’. Such spies are formidably expensive. By Russian estimates, creating an illegal identity costs around $1m per head. Still, even if they do nothing for decades, they may, in the right place at the right time, justify their mission. An extreme case is for a military-intelligence agency wishing to acquire a special-operations capability in the event of war. Simply establishing the illegals deep behind enemy lines will be well worth it when it comes to the outbreak of war (‘Day X’ in Soviet parlance) when invisible sabotage capability is priceless. In peacetime they can be vitally useful too, even when they do little or no actual spying themselves.
To understand why, imagine that you are a Russian intelligence officer working under diplomatic cover, tasked with gaining information about the British Parliament, or America’s Congress. You have hundreds of potential targets: lawmakers, their staffers, even cleaners and technicians. But you are an obvious subject for surveillance. Your every meeting and every move carry a risk. You simply cannot afford to hang around in the bars of Westminster or Capitol Hill, chatting people up. Eventually even the most over-worked or demoralised counter-intelligence officers will notice you. So you need eyes and ears in the circles you wish to infiltrate, someone to spot people with access to the information you need, to identify their weaknesses (financial, sexual, psychological or political) and to cultivate them. A journalist, lobbyist or think-tank researcher would be ideal. You cannot play that role, but an illegal can.
If a potential source has strong convictions, an illegal can help turn loyalty to treachery with a ‘false flag’ operation. A standard KGB task in the past, for example, was to find out how East European émigrés were supporting dissident movements in the homeland. A good approach was to pose as an ardent anti-communist, representing a bunch of wealthy donors (preferably based in a faraway country) wanting to target their support effectively. Such a person, eager to gain ‘analysis’ of the real situation, could credibly pay expenses and stipends to those who kept him
informed. This still works today. If you are targeting left-wingers, pretend to be from Cuba; if you want to recruit Muslims, a claimed link with the Palestinian cause will do the trick. If the target is Jewish, or a conservative Christian sympathetic to Israel, say that you are working for Mossad. For an embassy-based intelligence officer to assume such an identity is complicated and risky. An illegal can adopt it more convincingly. For the target, checking the authenticity of such an approach is tricky to impossible: how can, say, a Polish expatriate working in an energy company know if the friendly compatriot enquiring about the workings of the gas market is really an undercover officer of his country’s Agencja Wywiadu (foreign intelligence service) as he claims? He may be a Russian illegal, or working for the Saudis or Chinese. How to check?
Illegals can also help funnel funds from the buyer to the seller of secrets. But they cannot help with, and indeed are part of, a bigger problem: getting value for the money paid. A hint of this comes from the published fragments of intercepted communications between ‘Moscow centre’ – the headquarters of Russian espionage – and two of its illegals in America. The bosses are tut-tutting about the house lived in by ‘Cynthia and Richard Murphy’: does it belong to them (which would fit their cover story)? Or is it really the property of the Russian state? It is easy for each end to feel cheated by the other: the illegals regard everything they spend as a claimable expense. They are in effect doing two jobs: their cover profession and real spying. It is quite fair that the motherland should subsidise their property, cars or children’s education. For their part, spymasters worry that operational funds are dribbling away into peripheral expenses, padding further a lifestyle that for most Russians would already seem unimaginably pampered and pleasant.
Illegals are also useful in the humblest parts of spying. Joe Navarro, a twenty-five-year veteran of FBI counter-intelligence, points out that one of their functions is simply to acquire legal documents such as a passport, driver’s licence, university ID card or utility bills that can then be used as the basis for future forgeries. He describes illegals as like cancer: they have usually done their worst by the time they are detected. No electronic intercept or embassy-based spy can gain access to things that an illegal living as an average American can manage:
a car, a home, a library, neighbourhood events, air shows on military bases, location of fibre cables, access to gasoline storage facilities, a basement to hide an accomplice, a neighbour’s son serving in the military, and so on. A mere walk . . . can give you access to vehicles parked at a garage sale that have stickers from government installations or high tech companies doing research. These individuals can be tracked or befriended . . . [Illegals] get invited to parties, meet people and gain access to individuals with knowledge, influence or information.9
For a service with the money and patience to run them, illegals clearly have many uses. They present one of the trickiest problems in the counter-intelligence universe. Whatever they do or don’t do, they are certainly no laughing matter. The real question is whether they justify their costs. From a Western perspective now, the answer is ‘usually not’. It makes more sense to use lots of disposable junior intelligence officers working under light cover than to concentrate resources on a small number of costly assets with elaborate cover stories. The classic work on this is a declassified CIA study called Principles of Deep Cover by a long-dead intelligence officer who used the pseudonym C.D. Edbrook.10 He writes:
Because the deep-cover agent must usually devote a large share of his time to carrying on his ostensible legitimate occupation, his intelligence production is quantitatively small. He is therefore an expensive agent, justified only by the uniqueness of information he produces, or can be expected in the long term to produce. The establishment of a deep-cover operation should consequently derive without exception from the object to be achieved, not from the availability of the agent or the opportunity for cover.
The danger of distraction is clear: Edbrook’s paper cites a CIA agent who spent four years building a cover story by attending a university in order to gain a job as a salesman in a particular target area. He then lost interest and resigned. This certainly seems to have been the case with some of the Soviet-era illegals sent to America on long-term deep-cover missions during the Cold War. Eventually unearthed thanks to the Mitrokhin archive, they proved to have done very little or no spying, and in some cases had lost contact largely or wholly with their controllers. Edbrook continues:
The rational preparation and conduct of an operation can therefore have no other guide than its purpose, and this purpose must therefore be defined at the outset . . . A deep-cover mission is not justified if it can do no better than wander along the fringes of an intelligence target, eliciting scraps of information and misinformation, or ‘collect information available in the normal course of cover work and spot potential agent material.’ab It is wasteful to have a deep-cover agent doing the routine jobs that can be done just as well by an official-cover man or his ordinary local agents and informants. The targets that call for deep cover are those to which official government representatives lack access or in which they must conceal their interest or from which only an independent channel will elicit information not meant for official consumption.
Thinking in the spy world has moved on a bit since this, exploiting the increasingly blurred boundaries between government service and life outside. Thomas Patrick Carroll, a former American intelligence officer turned academic and security consultant, has coined the term ‘natural capacity’ for a kind of spying which is self-financing, ubiquitous and effective. He posits the following scenario: America wishes to know about the people, materials, finances and political associations of an international airport in the Middle East. The traditional approach would be to post intelligence officers, probably under official cover as diplomats, to recruit the necessary sources. Under ‘natural capacity’ the CIA would have at the airport an authentic, profitable private firm, backed by real investors. It could survive any amount of scrutiny, and would provide anything that policymakers needed to know about the airport. ‘Natural capacity’ could also include a mining company searching for mineral deposits in Afghanistan, or an NGOac providing mobile hospital services with access to remote parts of the Philippines where extremists lurk.11
Mr Carroll’s speculative account of a desirable future for American intelligence sounds uncannily like the way that Russia behaves already. Its energy companies, banks and other commercial, journalistic and academic outfits give it ‘natural capacity’ of a kind that British or American spymasters for now can only dream of. Ms Chapman’s hybrid identity in the West – genuine in every respect but her intentions – fits into that well. But Russia’s spymasters have also shown they can use human and financial resources the old-fashioned way, by running deep-cover illegals. It is hard to see how Western services can match that, even if they wanted to. For a couple plucked from Tomsk in the 1980s Soviet Union, a move to the West under an illegal identity probably seemed like a good career move – and so it must have appeared to the illegal ‘Donald Heathfield’ and his wife Ann Foley, who were originally from Tomsk but who spent twenty years living undercover in the West. The other way round looks less attractive. It is hard to imagine the CIA recruiting two able graduate students in Wisconsin or Kansas for a twenty-year mission living undercover in Siberia. Yet the fact that something is illogical or undesirable from a Western point of view does not mean that a Russian decision-maker would see the issue in the same way. Blessed by natural abundance, and with Soviet-style thinking still lurking in the background, Russia tends towards extravagant use of resources of all kinds.
The illegals’ controllers in Moscow may well have been wasteful in using their assets’ costly and carefully designed cover. One of the illegals in America, ‘Cynthia Murphy’, was asked to collect information about the world gold market. Any competent trader or banker in Moscow could have done that without needing any clandestine cover. Decision-makers in all countr
ies tend to overestimate the value of secret information, Russians more than most. It may well be that these illegals wasted time satisfying their masters’ fetish for material marked ‘secret’, which in fact contained little that was not available from open sources.
Amused complacency, however, is not the media’s usual response to, say, the leak of toxic industrial waste. Even if the discharge does not prove damaging, it focuses attention on the physical or procedural flaws that caused it. The arrest of the illegals showed that American public life was wide open to penetration and that Russia has put substantial resources over many years into trying to exploit that weakness. Why was nobody worried? A big reason was the FBI’s clever news management. It is often said that spies like the shadows. But like any outfit dependent on taxpayers’ money and politicians’ willingness to spend it, intelligence and security services pay careful attention to their image: in their case as mysterious, austere and self-sacrificing guardians of the ultimate national interest. Though they do not hold press conferences or run advertising campaigns, they use nudges and winks, discreet briefings of selected journalists deemed ‘sound’; and the occasional release of carefully honed material to the wider public.
This clashes with an operational need: to mislead the other side. Crowing about successes risks endangering sources and methods. Keeping silent about them risks giving an impression of idleness and incompetence. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (the official label for MI6) was thrilled to have smuggled Mr Gordievsky to Finland. The temptation to show off a brilliant piece of tradecraft was great. But once you explain how a diplomatic car picked up your fugitive from a remote rural bus stop and took him across the border in a heat-insulated baggage compartment, you will be less likely to pull the trick off again. The same principles apply to disasters. If you are penetrated or betrayed, then owning up to the damage risks giving the other side some clues about what they achieved – and failed to achieve. Some spy services never prosecute traitors for just this reason. Those who are caught are quietly retired or shifted to other jobs, leaving the other side guessing whether their asset was blown, or was just the victim of a random bureaucratic shuffle.