by Edward Lucas
6 Chiefly in chapter 3.
7 Londongrad – From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley (Fourth Estate, 2009).
8 The official Air Accidents Investigation Branch report can be found here http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/Agusta_A109E,_G-PWER.pdf with a small but interesting correction here http://www.aaib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/Agusta%20A109E,%20G-PWER%20Correction%209–5.pdf
9 A comprehensive summary can be found here ‘Russia’s intelligence attack: The Anna Chapman danger’, by Peter Hennessy and Richard Knight, 17 August 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10986334 A link on the site plays the programme.
10 In mid 2008 I became aware of this story and made persistent enquiries about it. Britain’s Ministry of Defence press office repeatedly denied that any such incident had taken place. The story was then leaked. ‘Russian Nuke Jet Buzzes Hull’ by Tom Newton-Dunn, Sun, 30 August 2008 http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1749464.ece
11 ‘Fighter jets intercept Russian bombers after flying into Dutch airspace’ 8 June 2011 http://channel6newsonline.com/2011/6/fighter-jets-intercept-russian-bombers-after-flying-into-dutch-airspace/
12 This WikiLeaks cable gives a flavour of the subsequent discussion at NATO http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=9USNATO581
13 Rosja ćwiczyła atak atomowy na Polskę (‘Russia practises a nuclear attack on Poland’) by Michał Krzymowski, Wprost (Warsaw), 31 October 2009 http://www.wprost.pl/ar/176722/Rosja-cwiczyla-atak-atomowy-na-Polske/ See also Sõnad ja Teras (‘Words and Steel’) by Kaarel Kaas, Postimees (Tallinn), 19 September 2009 http://www.postimees.ee/165608/kaarel-kaas-sonad-ja-teras/ and ‘Russian Military Thinking and Threat Perception: A Finnish View’, by Stefan Forss http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/ressources/n5_13112009.pdf
14 See for example ‘Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of US’ by Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, New York Times, 4 August 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/8/5/world/5patrol.html and ‘Russian subs stalk Trident in echo of Cold War’ by Thomas Harding, Daily Telegraph, 27 August 2010 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/7969017/Russian-subs-stalk-Trident-in-echo-of-Cold-War.html
15 No documentary evidence exists for the promise. If it was made (or understood) orally, it was to a state that no longer exists, under duress and without consultation with the other countries concerned. Moreover, Russia can hardly argue both that it is no threat to its neighbours, and that it has a right to veto their security choices. See Opening NATO’s Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era by the late Ronald Asmus (Columbia University Press, 2002).
16 A Washington Post investigation in 2010 ‘Top Secret America’ highlighted the unmanageable size and complexity of the nation’s intelligence agencies. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
17 ‘Polish FM in WikiLeaks: Germany is Russia’s Trojan Horse’, by Andrew Reitman, EU Observer, 16 September 2011 http://euobserver.com/24/113652
18 Welt am Sonntag, ibid.
19 ‘Time to Shove Off’, The Economist, 10 September 2011 http://www.economist.com/node/21528596
20 This is actually the wrong acronym, as FAPSI has been incorporated into the FSB. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/fapsi/index.html
21 http://www.panoramio.com/photo/38125772 by P. King.
22 As reported here: ‘Seen from on high’, Europe.view column, The Economist 3 April, 2008 http://www.economist.com/node/10950261. The Inmarsat satellite was repositioned in 2009. Russia could in theory have built the station in the Kaliningrad exclave – but any data sent back to the rest of Russia would have been vulnerable. Modern interception technology is able to obtain not only microwave and radio transmissions, but also data carried on seabed fibre-optic cables, by means of a ‘collar’ placed at a point where the cable curves.
23 Russia is now a participant in the Wassenaar Arrangement, which restricts the export of sensitive equipment to so-called rogue states. http://www.wassenaar.org/guidelines/
24 This is an archaic bit of legislation dating from 1974 intended to put pressure on the Soviet Union to allow Jewish would-be émigrés to leave the country freely. It is routinely waived by the Senate, but remains an irritant. See http://www.cfr.org/trade/jackson-vanik-amendment/p18844
25 Discussion of this case is difficult for legal reasons. For some years Mr Deripaska, an aluminium tycoon, has had difficulty gaining an American visa because of what officials described as ‘concerns about his business practices and associates’. The FBI is believed to have an audio recording in which he discusses some business difficulties and a planned solution in robust terms. He recently received a visa in exchange for a lengthy interview with officials from the criminal-justice system who sought his help in areas of interest to the US government. Nothing concrete resulted. See ‘FBI Lets Barred Tycoon Visit US’ by Evan Perez and Gregory White, Wall St Journal 30 October 2009 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125685578903317087.html and also Mr Deripaska’s response http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125687000832717809.html
26 http://valdaiclub.com/ gives a flavour of the lavish nature of this event.
27 Other papers which have swallowed this include European Voice (published by the Economist), where I write a weekly column; Le Figaro (France); the Economic Times and the Times of India (India); Duma (Bulgaria); Folha de São Paulo (Brazil); la Repubblica (Italy); Clarín (Argentina); El País (Spain); Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Geopolitika (Serbia). http://russianow.washingtonpost.com/about/ and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russianow/
28 On 8 September 2007 it printed a commentary claiming that the Katyń massacre of Polish officers in 1940 was not the work of the Soviet secret police, but of the Nazis. The original article is available here http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t147/apamyatnykh/GAZETA1s.jpg?t=1191101536 See also http://katynfiles.com/content/pamyatnykh-sabov-strygin-shved.html
29 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipGjIs3ovIc
30 Such as complaining about the language and citizenship laws in Estonia and Latvia: see for example ‘Latvia and Estonia discriminate against non-citizens’ by Yevgeny Kryshkin, The Voice of Russia, 26 February 2010 http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/2/26/4852056.html Both countries have substantial, though declining, populations of Soviet-era migrants who have so far declined to learn the national languages or take the test that would entitle them to citizenship. Estonia’s non-citizen population dropped below the symbolically important 100,00 mark in April 2011; in Latvia the Russian-speaking population is better integrated socially but more active politically (partly as a result of Latvian state weakness, and partly because of Russian state interference).
31 See http://www.siac.tribunals.gov.uk/Documents/zatuliveter_substantive_29Nov11.pdf
4 REAL SPIES, REAL VICTIMS
1 ‘Russian Spy Has Defected to Canada’ by Jim Bronskill and Mike Trickey, National Post, 9 March 2001. Not available online directly but copied at http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/intelforum/2001-March/04354.html
2 Snapshots of the site are available at http://www.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history/ for subscribers, or via the Wayback internet archive.
3 AIA listed its contributors as follows: Michel Elbaz – general coordinator; Allister Maunk – administrator and editor; Can Karpat – Turkish and Balkan section; Simon Araloff – European section; Anders Asmus – regional and international politics of Baltic states; Pavel Simonov – Russian section; Ulugbek Djuraev – Central-Asian section; Asim Oku – Turkish section; Sami Rosen – Israeli section; Alexander Petrov – webmaster.
4 One oddity was that on 13 May 2009 the privacy-protection had slipped. The registrant’s email was now listed, with an Israeli postal address: [email protected] Ha-Ela 16, Bene Ayish 79845. Whoever had been so keen to protect the site’s identity was now either careless or carefree.
5 ‘WikiLeaks cable: Russian leadership viewed Lieberman as “one of its own”: Message from US embassy to State Department shows FM was
treated as an “old friend” during a 2009 visit to Moscow’ by Barak Ravid, Haaretz, 29 November 2010 http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/wikileaks-cable-russian-leadership-viewed-lieberman-as-one-of-its-own-1.327694
6 ‘Intelligence war breaks out in Israel’s Foreign Ministry’ by Joseph Fitsanakis, 20 July 2009. http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2009/7/20/1-188/
7 According to the German security service http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/download/SHOW/vsbericht_2009.pdf p. 331 (in German).
8 A prominent semi-retired officer, Anton Surikov, died mysteriously in late 2009. In his last interview with a Western journalist a few weeks earlier, he said that Russia was run by ‘bandits from St Petersburg’. They, he said, were trying to push the country towards an authoritarian, Chinese-style model of political and economic development. The GRU director Valentin Korabelnikov retired in 2009 to avoid sacking, amid semi-public disagreement with his bosses over Russia’s military reforms. ‘Last Cake with a Russian Agent’ by Ben Judah, Standpoint, January/February 2010 http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2580/full
9 Viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFnsqivNW6A
10 ‘ Polska broń w slużbie gruziń skiej armii’ (‘Polish weapons in the service of the Georgian Army’) by Michael Majewski and Pawel Reszka; Dziennik, Warsaw, 10 August 2008. http://wiadomosci.dziennik.pl/polityka/artykuly/156916,polska-bron-w-sluzbie-gruzinskiej-armii.html
11 An excellent account of the conflict is A Little War That Shook The World by the late Ron Asmus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Another is The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia by Svante Cornell and Frederick Starr (eds.) (M. E. Sharpe, 2009).
12 Georgia’s South Ossetia Conflict: Make Haste Slowly, Crisis Group Europe Report No. 183, 7 June 2007, p. 16 http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/europe/183_georgia_s_south_ossetia_conflict_make_haste_slowly.ashx
13 My source for this is a Georgian government non-paper and interviews with senior Georgian and Western officials. See also ‘Tbilisi Says Evidence Links Russian Officer to Blasts’, Civil Georgia, 8 December 2010. http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=22940 and ‘Georgia accuses Russia of bombings, warns on talks’ by Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters, 7 June 2011 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/6/7/georgia-russia-talks-idUSLDE75622520110607
5 SPYCRAFT: FACT AND FICTION
1 They may have some self-defence training and will often be excellent drivers. Those who have joined after a previous career in the military, particularly in special forces, are different; so are the dodgy characters often recruited as auxiliaries. For gossipy details of CIA training, see Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy by Lindsay Moran (Putnam, 2005).
2 Search warrant for 35b Trowbridge St, Cambridge MA. http://www.thebostonchannel.com/download/2010/715/24272005.pdf
3 See (in Swedish) http://www.forsvarsmakten.se/hkv/Must/ and Sveriges hemligaste rum (Sweden’s most secret room) by Emelie Asplund and Ewa Stenberg, Dagens Nyheter, 3 October 2005 http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sveriges-hemligaste-rum Next-door Finland is even lower-profile. It has a domestic security agency (SuPo), which is part of the police, and a military intelligence agency. Any capability for foreign human intelligence is admirably hidden.
4 See ‘Factbox: Who are the spies Russia plans to swap?’, Reuters, 9 July 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/7/9/us-russia-usa-spies-factbox-idUSTRE6681DG20100709 The others were Igor Sutyagin, who had worked at a think tank; Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, a KGB colonel who spied for America and helped unmask Ames and Hanssen, but unwisely returned to Russia; and Gennady Vasilenko, about whom little is known. See Stranny srok ‘shpiona’ Vasilenko’ (The strange life of the ‘spy’ Vasilenko), Rosbalt, 13 July 2010 http://www.rosbalt.ru/moscow/2010/7/13/753359.html
5 Sources differ on whether the man concerned was Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s highest-ranking agent-in-place in the Soviet Union, or Piotr Popov, the first GRU officer to be recruited by the West, who was betrayed by the SIS officer George Blake. The account comes from Aquarium – The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy (Hamish Hamilton, 1985) by Viktor Suvorov (the pen name of Vladimir Rezun).
6 The same ‘spotlighting’ was experienced in 1996 by Norman MacSween, the then SIS station chief in Moscow, who was the case officer for Platon Obukhov, a 28-year-old foreign ministry employee. He was shown waiting vainly on a park bench in Moscow. See ‘British Diplomat Linked to Spy Case’ by Owen Matthews, The Moscow Times, 31 July 1996. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/british-diplomat-linked-to-spy-case/320742.html
7 ‘The cold war is over, but rock in a park suggests the spying game still thrives’ by Nick Paton Walsh, Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill, Guardian, 24 January 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/24/russia.politics; and ‘Spy-rock Russian faces 20 years’ jail’ by Mark Franchetti, Sunday Times, 29 January 2006 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article722212.ece
8 The Big Breach: from Top Secret to Maximum Security was originally published in Moscow in 2001, with the help of Russian intelligence. It is now available in the UK from Cutting Edge Press.
9 ‘Spies Among Us: Why Spies, Why Now?’ 10 July 2010 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201007/spies-among-us Mr Navarro can be reached through www.jnforensics.com
10 His real name is still classified, according to a CIA spokesman. The document can be read at http://www.scribd.com/doc/515327/ciadeepcover
11 ‘What’s wrong with America’s spies’, April 2003, Middle East Intelligence Bulletin http://www.meforum.org/meib/articles/304_me1.htm Mr Carroll’s website is http://www.tpcarroll.com Another useful primer on espionage is this course syllabus http://www.csus.edu/indiv/c/carrollt/site/welcome_files/gov’t%20139g%20class%20notes%20fall%202006%20-%2024%20oct.pdf
6 SPIES LIKE US
1 Available at http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/62810complaint2.pdf and http://www.justice.gov.opa/documents/62810complaint1.pdf
2 ‘Russian Spy Suspects Were Suburbia Personified’ by Manny Fernandez and Fernanda Santos, New York Times, 30 June 2010 www.nytimes.com/2010/6/30/nyregion/30couples.html
3 Interview with author, December 2010.
4 Mr Patricof, a prominent New York-based financier, was a donor to President Bill Clinton’s campaign and a friend of Mrs Clinton’s. He admitted that he knew Mrs Murphy but insists he never discussed anything of a political or sensitive nature with her. He is believed to be the person referred to in the Department of Justice initial complaint (section 85a, p35). Available at http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/62810complaint2.pdf Complaint 1 is available at http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/62810complaint1.pdf
5 ‘Busted Russian Spy Wants Old Life Back’ by Richard Boudreaux, Wall St Journal, 7 August 2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000 1424052748703309704575413600124475346.html
6 See Complaint 1, section 40.
7 One might start by sparing a thought for the children involved, such as the Murphys’ daughters. For them, their parents’ foray into international espionage meant a painful and bewildering upheaval, ending in a return to Russia, a country they did not know with a language they did not speak. Children trust their parents above all and find even minor deceptions upsetting. The revelation of a double life will leave deep scars. Spouses can suffer quite badly too. A whiff of the hurt and distrust caused by the affair came in February 2011 with an interview given to Caretas, a Peruvian magazine, by Ms Peláez, who insisted that she had no idea that her husband of twenty years was not who he claimed to be. ‘Not even when we fought would I hear a word in Russian . . . not even in intonation. Such was his preparation.’ Ms Peláez, who was handcuffed and put in prison uniform before the initial court hearing, shows some sympathy with her husband’s cause, suffused with the grandiloquent rhetoric of Soviet-era solidarity with the Third World. She describes him as the ‘last Soviet hero’ and an ‘unseen warrior’, who told her: ‘I was brought up as a revolutionary, as an internationalist.’ In a column for Moscow News, where she began as a regular con
tributor in August 2011, she says he is ‘sad’ about how much life has changed in the thirty years since he left the Soviet Union. Her own son from a previous relationship and her younger son Juan (fathered by Vasenkov) have remained in New York. She said her husband ‘suffers for the lack of his son, to whom he dedicated his best hours and whom he now can’t see’. She said she does not want to stay in Russia, where she is receiving a $2,000 monthly pension, but wishes to return to either Peru or Brazil eventually. Some doubt about Ms Peláez’s eloquently expressed disappointment comes from the criminal complaint against her husband, in which FBI eavesdroppers say they overheard him talking to her about his family’s wartime experiences in the Soviet Union: ‘We moved to Siberia . . . as soon as the war started.’ It is conceivable, if unlikely, that she believed that he was a Uruguayan (perhaps of communist parents) who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union. Perhaps she knew he was spying but thought it was for another country, such as Cuba. The Peruvian authorities queried her marriage and birth certificates. See ‘Vicky Peláez to face corruption charges in Peru’ http://www.livinginperu.com/news/13009 and ‘La “Espía” que Volvió del Frío’ (‘The “Spy” who returned from the Cold’) http://nuestragente2010.wordpress.com/-vicky-pelaez-regresa-al-peru as well as ‘Mystery surrounds alleged spies’ children – With parents behind bars, kids’ lives likely in turmoil’ by Elizabeth Chuck and Ryan McCartney, msnbc.com, 30 June, 2010 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38021300/ns/us_news-security/
8 www.bostonredcarpet.com and the seemingly identical www.foleyann.com, accessed 7 September 2010 (now defunct).
9 http://www.futuremap.com/conversion-pages/strategic-leadership/future-challenges The website gives no clue about the number of people working at Futuremap, and blurs the distinctions between the ‘institute’ and the ‘company’. Heathfield’s name appears only once on the entire site. Both futuremap.com and myfuturemap.com are written in Russified English, with a notable absence of definite and indefinite articles.