by Edward Lucas
She appears less useful to her real-life business employers. Yulia Shamal, head producer at the ‘Mysteries’ show, says the new presenter doesn’t have time to do research but does come to editorial meetings. ‘Anya remembered she knew this clever successful person, an artist actually, who not only saw a UFO but managed to take a picture of it,’ says Ms Shamal, struggling to find an example of her star presenter’s editorial talents.
Ms Chapman’s biography does not suggest that she was a class act. But she was an effective one. Her glib but accented English, imperfectly tinted hair, garish clothes and unremarkable professional career were not a clever bluff, but the real thing. Neither ferociously clever nor blessed with steel nerves or hypnotic people skills, she never sought to match, like Heathfield, the talents of the global elite; her forte was to dance with them, to date them and to work alongside them. As a spy, her tradecraft was startlingly sloppy. In London, her company Southern Union was unable even to spell its phoney address properly on official documentation. Her written English was embarrassingly bad. Under pressure from the FBI she failed even to buy a mobile phone without mistakes that would shame a trainee in the first week of a course at Fort Monckton. In a panic, she called her father on an easily intercepted telephone line.
If that signalled the decline in professionalism of what was once the most efficient bit of Soviet bureaucracy, the way Ms Chapman got her job highlighted something else: nepotism. It is easy to infer that she had gained her plum job, complete with generous taxpayer backing for her business, thanks to birth not brains. Andrei Soldatov, the spy-watcher and author of The New Nobility, says: ‘All she did was to try and exploit her father’s connections in the SVR for money.’ Yulia Latynina, a leading opposition journalist, refers to Ms Chapman as ‘a very high-class prostitute in the West, with the state paying for all of her beautiful underwear and all her expenses’.
If it is hard to see what service Ms Chapman has rendered to Russia abroad, it is easy to see what she has done on her return. The failed spy has been a blank canvas on which the regime’s propagandists have painted their own image of Russia: unstoppable abroad, electrically exciting at home, youthful, daring and sexy. But the first priority was damage control. Aleksei Navalny, an opposition activist who has made his name with an online campaign against corruption in big business, notes that a bad image for Russia’s spies also damages Mr Putin, who has played heavily on his own background in the KGB. Mr Putin’s former senior speech-writer Simon Kordonsky, now a professor at the liberal Higher School of Economics, sees the regime’s eagerness to get its spies out of American custody as a manifestation of ‘corporate solidarity’ among Chekists, who felt compelled to show that ‘one of their own cannot be taken’. But as her celebrity status grew, Ms Chapman’s allure, not failure, quickly became a dominant theme. Some seasoned KGB veterans seem genuinely awestruck by her nerveless approach. Viktor Cherkashin, a former counter-intelligence officer in Washington and West Germany who retired in 1991, says she has the right mix of qualities for the modern age.
A person who can behave so naturally, be such a well-known figure in Russia, be part of high society, present a TV show – anyone who can behave like that is an ideal member of an illegals programme.
The growing hype was laced with another potent ingredient: anger over the spies’ betrayal. A Russian official told the Kommersant newspaper that an assassin had already been dispatched to deal with the defector who betrayed the illegals, though this seems to have been bravado.30 Mr Putin, after an evening singing patriotic ditties with the returned spies, said grimly that traitors end up ‘in the gutter’ and blamed ‘treason’ for the spies’ exposure. This approach fits broader propaganda themes favoured by the regime: cynical Western penetration and manipulation of Russian society, the ruthless use of foreign money, and the Soviet-style heroism of the state’s servants in difficult conditions.
In Russia’s glitzy, sex-obsessed media culture, Ms Chapman’s mysterious past and curvy figure were an easy sell. Joanna Seddon, an expert on branding, sees the ex-spy as a classic example of a celebrity who has ‘leveraged her misfortunes into not only media popularity but also tangible wealth’. She likens Ms Chapman to Martha Stewart, the billionaire American businesswoman who launched a triumphant commercial comeback after her five months in jail for insider trading. Each woman, she notes, ‘maintained the rightness of her actions throughout her troubles, providing a reason for her public to believe in her’. Having averted disaster and created a commercial triumph, the culmination of the propaganda response was to turn Ms Chapman into a political asset for a tired-looking regime that presides over a drab and increasingly backward country. Ms Chapman’s symbolic role in Young Guard provided the perfect platform. Yana Lantarova, the organisation’s Federal Charity Director, gushes about her new colleague:
She’s a very profound person – she loves her homeland sincerely. In the short time that she’s joined us she’s learnt how to speak sincerely and convincingly about it.
Ms Lantarova adds helpfully that Ms Chapman ‘fires up’ the movement’s male members. The enthusiasm is not universal. Kirill Schito, a member of the movement’s governing council and of the Moscow municipal assembly, is slightly less flattering, insisting that the benefit is ‘mutual’ and that Ms Chapman is ‘quite smart’. But however artificially staged Ms Chapman’s initial foray into politics may have been, it has struck a genuine chord among at least some ordinary Russians. Support is most enthusiastic in her native Volgograd. Referring to the legendary Second World War Soviet spy, local journalist Stanislav Anishchenko explains:
Our national hero is Stirlitz, a spy that fought against fascism. Anna Chapman is Stirlitz as a girl. So our media made her a hero and we organised the song contest. People always need heroes – that’s why Anna Chapman was born.
The star-struck Mr Anishchenko even organised a song contest in honour of his city’s most famous daughter. The winner was ‘Anna Chapman is not Mata Hari’ – a reference to a Dutch dancer and courtesan shot for spying in the First World War. It captures the nationalistic pride that Russians hold in their spies, though the doggerel lyrics are equally dire in the original Russian as in this loose translation.31
America’s symbols of freedom,
The model of democrats’ wisdom,
It’s a home, not prison for nations,
The immigrants’ high expectation,
You get comfortable life as a present,
The White House guys are so pleasant,
They can’t sleep without your well-being,
Without helping earning your living,
It’s not so easy as it sounds,
Sometimes all dreams fall to the ground,
One day that a girl is simple and shy,
Can wake up and find she is a spy,
If only poor Anna could know,
That this road is not safe to go,
Then you’d give up business for sure,
And go to the place where’s secure,
To Mars or better to Venus,
To meet no misters, no peers,
To look at the earth from a distance,
But suffer from lonely existence,
The world is full of secrets, believe me,
You cannot get it, just leave it!
You don’t want surprises? – keep an eye open!
Be Glorious, all spies of Russia!
Be famous from Europe to Asia!
Your work and efforts are priceless,
Your fame and your records are doubtless,
You went through fire and water,
Kept busy the police headquarters,
Said nothing in chambers of torture,
Kept heads up in all misfortunes,
Anna Chapman is not Mata Hari! (repeated four times)
This knee-jerk nationalism is a perfect antidote to public apathy and disgruntlement. Ms Chapman also contrasts sharply with the ranks of United Russia, mostly filled with balding middle-aged men. Sergei Mar
kov, a Duma deputy with close Kremlin ties, says:
People are bored with the talking heads on the TV; they are interested in adventure and in action. Spies like these are really popular in the country. She fits the bill perfectly and she is really attractive.
He also sees Putinesque qualities in Ms Chapman’s curves:
Vladimir Putin is regarded as a sexual champion as he is very cool and very sexy. Both [Ms Chapman and Putin] are spies – both of them young, healthy, energetic, sexually attractive – and they met publicly. This is about making United Russia sexier and cooler . . . a successful political message needs to be combined with a successful non-political message.
This linking of Putin and Chapman has already started to sink into the popular consciousness. In May 2011 a shoot-em-up game called Voinushka (Punch-up) was launched on popular Russian social networking websites. A youthful-looking khaki-clad Mr Putin features as the commander, setting tasks for the person playing the undemanding game. He has a redheaded assistant, showing voluptuous décolleté, wearing a Soviet-style military hat and toting a rifle. The game’s designers say they did not consciously choose Ms Chapman as a model.
It would be easy to dismiss this as harmless fun and games – a kind of circus in which an exotic bout of public service turns into an equally exotic private-sector phenomenon. If Ms Chapman and her colleagues seem to have done no real harm in the West, except perhaps to our image of invulnerability, then maybe it is time for bygones to be bygones. Outsiders may ogle her lightly clad figure, but must be resigned to the fact that her most interesting feature – her career in intelligence – is forever cloaked in shadow. Moreover, that someone who embodies superficiality rather than achievement has become a female role model speaks volumes about Russian femininity. Ms Chapman also embodies the contradiction between the regime’s xenophobic attitude to the West in general, and its senior members’ personal enjoyment of foreign fleshpots. As the journalist Ms Latynina notes caustically: ‘This great heroine of the Putin youth was crying, crying buckets when she was told she was going to be banned from Great Britain.’
Sleazy and sex-crazed, crass yet sinister, xenophobic yet obsessed with the West, an artificial creation of an ailing regime: Ms Chapman is emblematic of the country that recruited, ran and promoted her. She exemplifies too the threats and the failings of Russian intelligence: nepotistic in recruitment, with an increasingly blurred line between the professional and private duties of its officers, but still able to plant undetectable and effective agents in our midst.
I have explained Russia’s motivation for spying, how it spies, and why we should mind. The next section of the book looks at the history of Western espionage efforts against Russia. Despite some occasional successes, these have in many respects been feebly focused and disastrously executed, something of which British and other Western taxpayers are largely unaware. The biggest losers in this saga of fiascos have been not the Western spymasters and their staff, but the locals who trusted them. This section also sets the scene for the final part of the book, looking at one of the most serious and damaging episodes in recent years: the case of the Estonian Hermann Simm. In both the Western bungles and Russian triumphs, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania play a central role. Too small to be able to determine their own destiny,an they are also too important for outsiders to ignore. That has been a fateful combination: both Russia and the West have tussled for influence in the Baltic region and states, and used them as springboards for espionage efforts elsewhere.
8
The Cockpit of Europe
A Hollywood blockbuster would hardly do justice to the stories. A masterspy disguised as a ragged pianist plays in his foes’ canteen – and receives a knighthood for his efforts. A blundering colleague believes his enemies’ tale of a vast underground army just waiting for his visit, and pays for his credulity with his life. Bungling spymasters dismiss espionage scoops that could change history. Souped-up torpedo boats, once the pride of Hitler’s navy, rocket across the sea on moonless nights, their heavily armed passengers bearing ciphers, radios, treasure – and cyanide pills. Hidden in forest bunkers, desperate men risk death by torture in a forgotten and futile war. A star military commander in the Waffen-SS becomes a top man in British intelligence. Among his superiors is an undercover KGB colonel. Neglected and misunderstood, these events from past decades are the background to the spy wars of the present day.
Big countries’ interests collide in the Baltic, often secretly and mostly tragically. In the past hundred years the region has been the front line of two big wars and several small ones, with coups, uprisings, pogroms and guerrilla struggles as footnotes.1 The tides of history have swept the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians along, just as they have drowned their now-forgotten ethnic cousins.ao The region was one of the central killing grounds of the Holocaust: Germans and local collaborators murdered around 228,000 Jews, around 90 per cent of the pre-war population.2 It is also a spies’ playground. Trade, tourism, culture and family ties make foreign visitors plentiful and inconspicuous, whether they have really come to admire the architecture, do a business deal, see relatives – or empty a dead-letter box. Targets are plentiful and loyalties fluid: locals know from bitter experience that fortunes shift and that many irons in the fire are better than one.
The stories include colourful characters such as Arthur Ransome, better known as a best-selling author of children’s stories in which the plentiful clues to his previous espionage career have long remained unnoticed.3 Among others are Sidney Reilly, Britain’s ‘ace of spies’; Paul Dukes, the only MI6 officer to be knighted for his work in the field, and traitors such as Kim Philby. Shadows still cloak the region’s intelligence history.4 Details in an official British account are skimpy and stop in 1947.5 American records are mostly still classified. Swedish records were allegedly destroyed, though they later turned up in the basement of a retired general.6 But the outlines are clear. The Baltic was the hub of Western spymasters’ botched efforts to topple the Bolshevik leadership in Russia in the five years following the revolution. After the Second World War they backed a bogus underground partisan movement there. In the 1990s they barged back into the region, believing it to be an ideal springboard for intelligence operations against Russia.
The story starts with the Bolshevik revolution. In Britain, France and America politicians wanted Russia’s secretive and fanatical new rulers explained. Could they be enticed back into the war with Germany, or at least prevent the Kaiser’s high command switching forces from the East to frustrate the allied advance in the West? Were the Bolsheviks really hell-bent on fomenting revolution elsewhere, or just prone to verbal flourishes about it? As spies sought answers, Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI6 (and in spy jargon the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service) proposed on 18 January 1918 the creation of a new ‘Baltic area’ division dealing with Russia.7 By 1923 the British espionage effort centred on the Estonian capital, Tallinn, with networks of agents run from substations in the Latvian capital Riga, and Kaunas (Lithuania’s ‘provisional capital’ since the loss of the historic capital, Vilnius, to Poland).8 The governments of the three newborn states, foreshadowing a similar reaction in 1991, were glad to see the British presence grow.ap Too weak to manage their own security, they welcomed an outsider with similar geopolitical interests but no direct desire to meddle in their affairs. America, in those days, was an untried newcomer in European security. Sweden was too close and too self-interested, Germany too familiar and too weak. France, though a great power, had no historical ties to the region. The simultaneous weakness of both Russia and Germany gave a unique chance to start, or re-start, a history harshly interrupted by centuries of colonial rule.9 But for Russian leaders both then and now the loss of the Baltic provinces seemed an unfair, costly and temporary sacrifice.10
As initial British, French and American efforts to bribe or browbeat the Bolsheviks into rejoining the war against Germany faltered, attention turned to toppling the regime.
Countries that cherished order were turning to subversion.11 (Prevention would have been easier: a British military official posted to Russia in 1917 to monitor political radicals stopped Karl Radek and Fritz Platten, two well-known revolutionaries, from entering Russia; unfortunately he failed to notice that the third member of the party was Lenin.)12 Officials took an apocalyptic tone. Admiral Sir William Hall, director of British Naval Intelligence, speaking on his retirement in November 1918 at the end of the First World War, said: ‘Hard and bitter as the battle has been, we have now to face a far, far more ruthless foe, a foe that is hydra-headed and whose evil power will spread over the whole world, and that foe is Russia.’13 Cumming took a similar view, telling his Stockholm station in late 1918: ‘The only enemy now to be considered are the Bolsheviks.’14
The communist grip on power in August 1918 was precarious. The Bolshevik-controlled territory – barely bigger than the old sixteenth-century Muscovy – was short of food and chaotically run. Rows blazed about politics, economics and strategy. Anti-Bolshevik forces still presented a lively if fragmented opposition: an uprising the previous month by the ultra-leftist Social Revolutionaries had narrowly failed. A big British expeditionary force under General Frederick Poole had landed at Archangel on Russia’s northern coast, aiming to provide muscle and leadership to the White Russian forces. The Red Army was in disarray. Allied leaders expected a swift victory.