Deception
Page 31
Russia would never countenance such tactics in reverse. At a think-tank meeting in London, one of Britain’s most seasoned Russia-watchers bumped into Ms Zatuliveter and asked who she was: she readily explained that she was a Russian, working for Mike Hancock MP. My friend was thunderstruck. He knew Mr Hancock was on the defence committee; a post in his office would be the perfect vantage point for a talent-spotter, recruiter or agent-runner. (He would have been even more concerned had he known that Ms Zatuliveter was also planning to move on to one of Britain’s leading defence companies, or that she was dating a NATO official dealing with Russia.) He asked drily if it would be possible for a British citizen to have a similar job working for a member of the Russian parliament, the Duma. ‘Of course not,’ tittered Ms Zatuliveter. She is not the only one laughing. For the Siloviki in Moscow, Western society is a spies’ paradise. Despite the tedious metal-detectors and identity checks that burden daily life, we are astonishingly, almost suicidally, trusting when it comes to real security – protecting our secrets and our decision-making. To worry about Russian spies still counts as almost comically paranoid. The popular assumption is that we have no secrets worth stealing; and that even if we did, Russia has no interest in or means of obtaining them.
As I have tried to show in this book, that is untrue. We do have secrets. Our countries and alliances make decisions vital to our welfare. Russia is interested in these for reasons of its own. So are other countries – as I have noted earlier, spying is always a grubby business. But Russia is not like other countries, as the case of Sergei Magnitsky demonstrates. It uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making. We do little to protect ourselves.
These Russian agencies are indeed incompetent, nepotistic, corrupt, blinkered and wasteful, like the state they serve. On occasion we have penetrated them and gained important victories – such as the arrests of the illegals described in this book. But they have crucial assets that we lack. One is determination: they really mind about besting us, whereas we do not take them seriously. Another is long-term thinking. For Western intelligence, spying is a demand-driven business. If the political customers want to know something, you invest. If they don’t, you move resources elsewhere. Russian spymasters think differently. They are willing to spend large amounts of time and money building up long-term assets, with little concern for the immediate payoff. The fact that the illegals arrested in America may not have done much spying does not mean that they were failures: it just means that their missions were incomplete. Russia’s third advantage is the ability to mount deception operations. As I have shown in the book, Western intelligence is fooled time and again by such ruses. Whether it was the Lockhart plot, the Trust, Operation Jungle or trusting Herman Simm’s security clearances, the story is the same: complacency and delusion on our side, ruthless ingenuity on theirs.
Despite our spycatchers’ recent successes, the rules of the game have not changed, and are in Russia’s favour, not ours. The Russian illegals were spies who looked like us, swimming effortlessly and invisibly through suburbia, nightlife, think tanks and consultancy, exploiting the natural trust and collegiality of an open society. Without a lucky break, they would still be there now. Nothing on our side has changed to make such missions harder, or on theirs to make them less likely. Everyone in such worlds needs to be more careful in who they deal with. The lesson of the ‘Spies in suburbia’ headlines should be that, however unlikely it may seem, and whatever their passport, background or career, a friendly new colleague, customer, supplier or business partner could, just possibly, be a Russian illegal, perhaps along the deep-cover model of Antonio or Heathfield, more likely resembling Ms Chapman. We will never return to the security-consciousness of the Cold War. But in any society that thinks its values are worth defending, those in professional or public life need to be wary about the questions people ask, and particularly of any offer of money for information.
We also need to rethink the comforting conventional account of European history after 1989. For many people the years that followed the Soviet collapse represented the longed-for ‘rollback’: the reversal of the gains made by Stalin in the years 1944–49. From this viewpoint, 1989 marked the belated culmination of John Foster Dulles’s ringing promise forty years earlier:
We should make it clear to the tens of millions of restive subject people in Eastern Europe and Asia that we do not accept the status quo of servitude aggressive Soviet Communism has imposed on them, and eventual liberation is an essential and enduring part of our foreign policy.1
Too many in the West projected their own sense of triumphalism onto the countries of the former Soviet empire. The gains there were indeed huge: political pluralism, prosperity, the rule of law and the chance to make sovereign decisions about security. Visible Russian influence diminished sharply. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel left the region as its occupation finally ended. The days when every government ministry had a senior Soviet official as a minder were gone. But in retrospect, the West (and many locals) over-estimated the scale of the Kremlin’s retreat. What looked like roll-back from one point of view was a stay-behind operation from another.bu It is not just that a whiff of Putinism is now noticeable in many countries between the Baltic and the Black Sea, where politicians taste the pleasures of a close overlap between business and politics, and the use and abuse of officialdom against opponents. Amid the ruins of old structures, the KGB established new networks and assets that were to serve it well in the years ahead. Coupled with the inability of the new member states to carry out thorough counter-intelligence screening where it is most needed, the Soviet legacy created, in effect, a cohort of Trojan horses welcomed by Western alliances, states, services and agencies with open arms.
It is hard to know how far this was a deliberate operation, and how far the accidental dividend of precautions taken during the Soviet withdrawal. But the upshot is the same. From the Russian point of view, the outcome of 1989–91 has proved far less damaging and humiliating than it seemed at the time. An expensive, brittle and unruly empire has gone. Today these countries are the West’s problem. It is not Russia that pays for their modernisation, but the EU and international lenders.bv That barely costs the Kremlin coffers a kopek (indeed Russia benefits from some of this largesse too). Growing prosperity in the ex-captive countries makes them better neighbours and trading partners for Russia. But more importantly, the continuing penetration of their societies, state structures and business by Russian intelligence gives the Kremlin an influence in Europe far more useful than it enjoyed in Soviet days. Recruiting and running Simm was child’s play compared to conducting a similar operation during the Cold War. Not only does NATO provide comfortable, well-lit office space and official passes for the Russian intelligence officers who spy on it, but the bureaucracies of a dozen new member states are full of potential targets for recruitment.
These human time bombs will not tick for ever. People who were in their early thirties in the late 1980s (and thus already tainted by collaboration) are in their fifties now, and at the peak of their careers in officialdom. Within another decade, they will retire. Already for many officials in the ex-communist world, the days of totalitarianism are a childhood memory, not a reality of adulthood. Yet the tainted generation can leave plenty of damage behind it – for example in discreetly advancing the careers of other younger officials willing to cooperate with Russia, or blocking those who seem obstinately honest.
I want to stress that these concerns do not mean writing off the new member states as allies or lessening ties with them. A deplorable result of the Simm case has been to weaken trust between the old West and new East in NATO. If even the Estonians, star pupils in the new order, can blunder in this way, what basis is there for trusting other countries with bigger and more shambolic arrangements? Although more realism and better counter-intelligence procedures are long overdue, to take this standoffish approach is in my view pat
ronising, self-satisfied and hypocritical. It risks handing Russia just the victory that it seeks, in further weakening and demoralising European and transatlantic solidarity. The lesson of the Simm affair is that we need deeper, closer and more effective security cooperation among countries threatened by Russia, not less. A key point is that for all its earlier shortcomings, Estonia did at least catch, prosecute and jail the worst traitor in its history, and did so unflinchingly and conscientiously. It did not allow him to escape to Russia, or to retire into convenient obscurity. That is more than can be said for some other countries in similar circumstances, which have chosen easier and more convenient options. As I have shown, the old West’s record on espionage and security in the course of the last hundred years is far more badly blotted than any of the new member states, which have had far harder challenges to overcome, with far fewer resources. Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt came from the heart of the British establishment, not from Estonia. Lockhart, Reilly and Carr had only themselves to blame for their blunders. Ames and Hanssen passed every security clearance. Antonio stole a Portuguese identity and lived in Spain; Heathfield studied in Canada, worked in France and lived in America; Ms Chapman gained a British passport. The painful lessons from that are at home, not abroad.
Gullibility towards Russia and snootiness towards allies are two of the problems I have highlighted. A third is that the Western mindset tends to try to fit Russia’s activities abroad into mistakenly neat pigeonholes. More than ten years ago James Woolsey, a former CIA director, characterised the problem thus:
If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian . . . wearing a $3,000 suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he tells you that he is an executive of a Russian trading company . . . then there are four possibilities. He may be what he says he is. He may be a Russian intelligence officer working under commercial cover. He may be part of a Russian organised crime group. But the really interesting possibility is that he may be all three and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement.2
Since 1999, the Russian intelligence threat has morphed further, posing a daunting task for Western spycatchers. The adversary is a shape-shifter: in one manifestation it is a legitimate energy company, then a curious student apparently from a NATO country, then a pushy official from the Russian embassy, then a supposedly independent charitable outfit offering a large donation to anyone who conducts the right research, then a hard-working secretary, then a Portuguese business consultant. For Russia the ‘natural capacity’ of which the CIA can only dream is already in place. It exists not only in Russian business abroad, but via foreign businesses with investments or offices in Russia. The people they take on as local employees and then send on foreign postings may be loyal workers for the company, or they may have been assigned to it by the authorities, perhaps for nepotistic reasons, perhaps with clandestine work in mind, perhaps for both. If that fails, the Russian diaspora provides a rich fishing ground for whatever catch is needed.
Russian misbehaviour abroad can seem a problem solely for the criminal justice authorities: they deal with gangsters, forgers, people-traffickers, cyber-crime and assassins. Blink and the problem seems instead one for the authorities that supervise the financial system, and have to deal with Russia’s many strange business-like entities. Alert to every loophole, these are moving vast quantities of murkily obtained cash into the respectable world’s banks and stock exchanges. Curbing that could prevent the people who swindled the Russian taxpayer and murdered Mr Magnitsky from enjoying their loot. Then again, the Russia files seem destined for the visa authorities: it is their job to cordon off our societies from ill-wishers and malefactors. Sometimes the regime in Moscow seems like a matter for diplomats, who with luck and skill may coax it into cooperative relationships with its neighbours, and defuse the misunderstandings of the past.
The grave weakness of the Western approach is that it regards spy-catching, criminal justice, financial supervision, lobbying disclosure and media-ownership rules as quite separate areas of decision-making. Yet given the multi-faceted threat they face, the agencies involved in these fields need to work in concert, not separately. It is troubling that the British and Irish authorities have not, for example, followed up the case of Steven Sugden. Because no money seems to have been stolen, it is below the radar of the police. From the spy-catchers’ point of view, it is a ‘cold case’. They are too busy stopping things that may be going to happen to worry about events that took place a few years back. Moreover, even if techniques of Russian spycraft were used, the aim falls outside their remit. MI5 catches spies, not criminals. Yet finding out if, how and why an imposter purloined the real Mr Sugden’s signature, and what really happened with the addresses in Rossmore Grove, deserves proper investigation. The culprits are still at large; they and their accomplices are unpunished. The loopholes are still open. Someone may try the same trick again. If your own name, your address, your signature and your date of birth were used in such a manner, it would be of little comfort to know that the case fell between the cracks of a bureaucracy designed for another age.
A guiding principle in the West’s dealings with Russia should be to listen to those people there who share our values, and to sustain and encourage them rather than demoralising them. In February 2011 the four leaders of the main opposition party, the Party of People’s Freedom, wrote a sharply worded newspaper article, berating the Western countries for their role in facilitating the misrule and looting of Russia.
We urge Western leaders to discontinue their kisses-and-hugs ‘Realpolitik’, which has failed, and to stop flirting with Russian rulers – behaviour that has not brought any benefits to the West and produces in Russia an impression that Putin’s system is a decent one, like any other in the democratic world.
It means the West should cease greeting Russian rulers as equals, providing them with legitimacy they clearly do not merit. It means the West should start exposing corrupt practices by the Russian establishment, whose ability to find havens for stolen funds and leave Russia for comfortable lives in Western nations is one of the regime’s pillars of stability. It means Western nations should introduce targeted sanctions against the officials directly abusing the rights of their compatriots.3
Sanctions of this kind do not mean isolating Russia as a whole, which would indeed be futile and counterproductive. But it is worth stating bluntly that the current approach, of engagement without willpower, is certain to make matters worse, not better. The West hardly realises that it is dealing with an adversary that understands us better than we know ourselves, whose goals and methods are mysteries to us, and whom we barely recognise when we see him. He is determined; we are divided. He is resentful and paranoid; we are complacent and trusting. We want to like him. We hope he will like us, and eventually be like us. He wants nothing of the kind. As Don Jensen points out: ‘Those who keep calling for an engagement that will eventually transform Russia cannot see that it is the West, not Russia, that is being transformed.’4 I hope this book can help the West to avoid that fate.
Acknowledgements
Meelis Saueauk of Estonia’s Institute for Historical Memory kindly helped me find KGB documents about Operation Jungle from Estonian and Latvian archives. Ivo Juurvee also provided important examples of Soviet-era propaganda. Ritvars Jansons at the Occupation Museum in Riga generously shared his insights. Māra Grīnberga helped me find her article about the remarkable Mr Pīnups. Prokop Tomek in Prague shared his research on Miloslav Kroča and his daughter. Tom Bower effortlessly unearthed his twenty-year-old notebooks and lent me his unique copy of the film Red Web. Tina Tamman helped me track down Alexander Koppel, whose daughter Catherine and son-in-law Michael Breslin provided kind hospitality. Juho and Janno Kiik readily shared their memories of Voldemar. Ben Judah provided excellent research on Anna Chapman’s life in Russia. Sam Donaldson in Dublin investigated the mysteries of Rossmore Grove. I am grateful to a
ll of them, and to the people I have quoted. Bill Swainson at Bloomsbury deftly untangled the book’s structure and helped me signpost it for a wider audience. Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge and Wright calmed my jitters.
My children Johnny, Hugo and Izzy uncomplainingly put up with my physical and mental absences. My wife Cristina Odone’s critique was invaluable, as were her love and patience from beginning to end. In 1970s Oxford, my father J.R. Lucas’s thoughts on espionage and communism inspired this book; it is dedicated to him and my mother Morar, who have been my unfailing support for fifty years. I am grateful to my editors at the Economist for giving me a sabbatical, and to my colleagues, particularly Ludwig Siegele, John Peet, Tom Nuttall and Bruce Clark, for uncomplainingly covering for my absences. However, the views, and mistakes, in this book are mine alone.
I owe a great debt to people who must remain nameless. They know who they are.
No government agency has sponsored or censored this book.
Notes
Links cited here are available at www.edwardlucas.com