Spies

[paral]

The war in Ukraine has battered the reputation of Russian spies

As they take greater risks, they are getting caught. The Economist, Oct 9, 2022

Editor’s note (October 26th 2022): On October 24th Norway’s domestic security agency arrested a suspected Russian spy who—just as in the example we give below—was purporting to be a Brazilian migrant. The suspected Russian agent had been researching Arctic security at the University of Tromso, in Norway’s far north. He is said to have been operating under the alias “José Assis Giammaria” and came to the university with solid references from the University of Calgary, in Canada. His Norwegian colleagues told reporters he was “friendly”, “asked a lot of questions, including questions of personal nature,” and that he had a “funny accent”. His arrest comes days after Norway arrested another Russian on suspicion of flying drones or taking photographs in the country’s Arctic north. All three cases illustrate, as we explain below, the increasing risks that Russian agents are taking. This is why so many are being caught.

VIKTOR MULLER FERREIRA was a young Brazilian with impressive credentials and a big break. Fresh from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, an incubator of talent for America’s national-security elite, he had secured an internship at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But when he landed in Amsterdam in April, he was quickly deported to Brazil. Mr Ferreira was, in fact, Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, an intelligence officer working for the GRU, Russia’s military-intelligence service.

Mr Cherkasov was a so-called illegal, of the sort depicted in the popular television series “The Americans”—an officer dispatched abroad under an elaborate foreign identity, often for life. In a four-page document obtained by Dutch intelligence, an aide-memoire of sorts, his cover story was laid out in painstaking detail, down to childhood crushes and favoured restaurants. Mr Cherkasov is now languishing in a Brazilian prison, sentenced to 15 years.

When the Soviet KGB was dissolved in 1991, it reappeared as the FSB, a domestic-security service, and the SVR, a foreign-intelligence agency. The GRU has endured in one form or another since 1918. These “special services” bask in the fearsome reputation of their tsarist and Soviet forebears. But they emerge from the war in Ukraine with that reputation, and their networks, in tatters. The explosion which damaged the Kerch bridge on October 8th was only the latest security foul-up; Ukrainian operatives are also suspected of having orchestrated a car-bombing in Moscow in August which killed the daughter of a prominent Russian ultra-nationalist ideologue, according to the New York Times.

Intelligence failure lies at the heart of the war. The FSB, the lead agency for protecting Russian secrets and spying in Ukraine, bungled both tasks in spectacular fashion. It failed to stop America from obtaining, and then publicising, Russian war plans for Ukraine—the most dramatic deployment of intelligence since America’s exposure of Soviet missiles on Cuba in 1962. Worse still, it was the FSB’s own conspicuous preparations for war—including plans to kill dissidents and install a puppet government—that helped convince American and British officials that the Russian military build-up was not a bluff.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war in the first place also owed much to the FSB’s bungling. The agency’s Fifth Service, responsible for ex-Soviet countries, expanded its Ukraine team dramatically in July 2021, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London. Yet its officers largely spoke to those Ukrainians who were sympathetic to Russia and exaggerated the scale of their agent networks in the country, giving the Kremlin the false impression that the Ukrainian government would quickly collapse.

Confirmation bias was only part of the problem. Intelligence agencies reflect the societies they come from. At their best, Russian spies can be top-notch. “We’ve consistently been surprised by the cleverness and relentlessness of some of the things that they do,” says John Sipher, who served as the CIA’s station chief in Moscow and later ran its Russia operations. “They have really, really smart people.”

But that talent co-exists with venality and dysfunction. Intelligence is embellished as it rises up the chain, with bad news stripped out before it reaches the Kremlin. A Western official describes how, in one GRU unit, officers are thought to have skimmed off 30% of the salaries of the agents they recruited. That figure rose to 50% as the officers gradually had to spend more time padding out reports with information culled from the internet.

The great strength of Russian intelligence is its sheer scale. Yet only a fraction of its personnel do useful spywork. It was FSB officers who poisoned Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, with Novichok, a nerve agent, in 2020. Nothing encapsulates the dual ethos of repression and larceny better than the fact that the FSB’s most sought-after position is the chief of the Fourth Service, a division responsible for “economic security”. Its officers are placed in key companies, giving them ample opportunity to enrich themselves.

Infighting within the agencies, and with other government departments, is rife. “The FSB is like the Game of Thrones,” says Maxim (not his real name), a former FSB counterintelligence officer. “You have different clans inside with different political and financial interests.”

The SVR, a descendant of the First Chief Directorate, the KGB’s foreign-intelligence arm, considers itself a cut above its sister services. But the war has left it battered. Western countries have expelled over 400 suspected Russian intelligence officers since the spring, eliminating nearly half of those operating under diplomatic cover in Europe. Those remaining face heightened scrutiny by local security services.

A recent report by SUPO, Finland’s intelligence service, notes that Russian intelligence officers there have mostly been “severed” from their networks. It warns that Russian spies are resorting to alternative means. One is cyber-espionage. Another is the recruitment of foreigners within Russia. A third, which SUPO does not mention, is to lean more heavily on illegals like Mr Cherkasov. But that comes at a cost. The pressure on illegals is driving them to take greater risks than usual, according to European intelligence officials.

In March, for instance, Poland arrested Pablo González, a Spanish-Russian journalist also known as Pavel Rubtsov, on suspicion of working for the GRU. A Ukrainian source says he was attempting to enter Ukraine to access a cyber unit in one of the country’s intelligence agencies (Mr Rubtsov denies the charges). Mr Cherkasov might have targeted the ICC because it had opened an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine. Their exposure will be keenly felt. Illegals are hugely expensive to train and deploy. The SVR is thought to have 50 to 100 deployed illegals, and the GRU only between ten and 20, according to sources familiar with those programmes.

In many ways, Russian spies face the same professional challenges as their Western counterparts. It is becoming increasingly difficult to cross borders under multiple names, given the ubiquity of biometric controls, or build a digital backstory that stands up to scrutiny. Paying and communicating with agents is another challenge. But whereas Western spies have learnt how to blend into the noise, Russian ones have been slow to adapt. Illegals still use the dated technique of appropriating the identity of a dead baby (familiar to readers of “The Day of the Jackal”, a novel published in 1971.) Sloppiness abounds. Data leaked from a Russian food-delivery service in March exposed the names of FSB and GRU officers having food sent to their respective headquarters.

That would not matter so much if Russian intelligence were not under intense scrutiny. Ever since the GRU’s attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former officer, in Salisbury, an English city, in 2018, Western allies have shared increasing amounts of intelligence on Russian spooks. Though it was Dutch intelligence that exposed Mr Ferreira, the operation was a joint endeavour that relied on America, Ireland and others.

There has been little accountability for all this bungling. Western officials say they cannot confirm rumours that Sergei Beseda, the head of the FSB’s Fifth Service, was arrested in Russia in March. There are no proven job losses at senior level. That reflects the privileged status of the siloviki (securocrats) in the Russian state. Mr Putin does not trust his spies—he is said to be bypassing Alexander Bortnikov, the FSB’s chief, and talking to department heads—but it would be unwise to pick a fight with them just as his regime is experiencing an upswell of popular discontent over the drafting of hundreds of thousands of young Russian men to fight in Ukraine. On October 8th Mr Putin even placed the FSB in charge of security for the Kerch bridge.

The result is likely to be more of the same bungling and sleaze. “You have a deep tradition of intelligence professionalism,” says Sir John Sawers, a former chief of MI6, “and like a gangrene on top of it is this growing corruption.” Maxim, the former FSB officer, agrees. “Back in the 1990s and 2000s there was a KGB touch to it. We stayed under the radar,” he says. The breaking point for him was when new graduates of the FSB academy were spotted driving a luxury Mercedes around Moscow. “They need to substitute this money world with something bigger. I’m not sure how they are going to do it.”

Russian spooks are being kicked out of Europe en masse

The Kremlin’s intelligence services have been set back by years. The Economist, Apr 7, 2022

RUSSIA’S INVASION of Ukraine has bruised its army and battered its economy. Now Russia’s spies are being hammered, too. On April 7th Austria, for many years a hub for Russian espionage, became the latest country to expel suspected Russian intelligence officers, bringing the total number of Russian officials expelled from America and Europe since the war began to more than 400. The mass expulsions, the largest in history, are likely to have lasting effects on Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services and their ability to spy—and to subvert—in Europe.

Though America and Bulgaria each kicked out a dozen Russians in the first week of the war, the most recent round of expulsions began with Slovakia and Bulgaria in mid-March, followed by Poland and the Baltic states on March 23rd, and then a cavalcade of others, including 75 from France and Germany on April 4th. On April 5th nine countries, and the European Union itself, sent home more than 150. Most are alleged spies, though not all—Lithuania is casting out Russia’s ambassador. Other countries are preparing further expulsions.



The ejection of spooks on this scale is unprecedented. It is more than double the number booted out in 2018, when 28 Western countries expelled 153 suspected spies in response to Russia’s attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who had spied for Britain, in Salisbury, England. The latest expulsions are “outstanding” and “long overdue”, says Marc Polymeropoulos, who led the CIA’s operations in Europe and Eurasia until 2019. “Europe was their historic playground and their diplomatic staff is always pretty damn large in a lot of these places.” In his last job, says Mr Polymeropoulos, “we really considered Europe to be a key battleground with the Russians.”

The immediate aim of the expulsions is to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Officials from the FSB, Russia’s security service, and GRU, the military intelligence outfit that targeted Mr Skripal, both played a key role in planning and waging the war. It is also intended to make it harder for Russia to go about the core business of intelligence: stealing secrets.

The Russian intelligence presence in some European countries had grown so large that it was becoming hard for local security services to keep tabs on suspected and proven spies. Last year a German spy chief said that Russian spying stood at the same levels as during the cold war. Before the most recent expulsions, there were estimated to be almost 1,000 undeclared Russian intelligence officers in embassies and consulates in Europe.

But espionage is not the only concern. Rooting out intelligence officers also helps insulate Europe from Russian sabotage and subversion. In one way, the roots of the latest expulsions stretch back to last year. In April 2021 the Czech Republic accused the GRU of bombing an arms depot in the country. It expelled 81 Russian diplomats (one reason why it has kicked out fewer this time round), America another ten and other European countries 14.

That episode, and others like it, prompted a sweeping NATO audit of Russia’s rezidenturas (stations, as Britain or America would call them) in Western embassies and their activities. The audit found that the country’s embassies were packed with huge numbers of undeclared intelligence officers from across its three services: the GRU, FSB and SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, which makes up the bulk of spies in diplomatic missions abroad. In October last year NATO expelled eight alleged spies from its mission in Brussels, prompting Russia to shut down the office and to kick NATO out of Moscow in return.

The purpose of removing Russian officials from Europe is not just to stop them doing undesirable things. It is also to stop them aiding and abetting others. The GRU officers who poisoned Mr Skripal and bombed Bulgaria were not pretending to be diplomats in London or Sofia; they were sent from Moscow under what is known as non-official cover. Mr Skripal’s would-be assassins famously pretended to be tourists visiting Salisbury cathedral. Such covert action often relies on support from local embassies, though, such as the use of diplomatic pouches to move illicit material across borders.

Making this sort of thing harder is sensible, but it comes at a cost because Russia responds in kind. After the Skripal expulsions, Russia kicked out 189 Western officials. One result is that bona fide diplomats—who are invariably part of the exodus—have less opportunity to engage ordinary Russians, at a time when state propaganda is growing more unhinged. This is why foreign ministries are often less keen on expulsions than security officials.

The number of Western spies in Moscow also takes a hit. In practice, this may be less of a problem than it seems. On their home turf, Russian security services have more resources and powers at their disposal to track Western intelligence officers based in embassies in Moscow than vice versa—a GRU officer can move around and meet people more easily in Berlin than a CIA officer in Russia’s capital.

Nor is expulsion a permanent solution. Russia tends to send back new spies to replace the ones who have left, requiring Western counterintelligence agencies to work out, from scratch, which lowly first secretary is the new spook. Some Western officials say their aim is to ensure that bloated Russian embassies in Europe are no larger than their Western equivalents in Moscow—a principle that the Czech Republic insisted on last year. That requires constantly refusing visas for new arrivals, and diligent information sharing among allies so that an officer kicked out from one country cannot be sent to another.

Fewer Russian spies in New York, London or Paris means fewer potential double agents. Nonetheless, there are still plenty left. And Western spies may find good hunting among them in the current circumstances. It was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 which disillusioned Oleg Kalugin, a KGB general, Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB’s rezident in London and Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist; the latter two became spectacularly successful agents for MI6, while Mr Kalugin became a dissident and moved to America. The war in Ukraine, far bloodier than the crushing of the Prague Spring, may have a similar effect on some of their successors in the GRU, SVR and FSB.

“Many of those serving here fully realise that Russia has been humiliated by this disastrous war because of their total access to information,” says Jonathan Haslam, a historian of Russia’s intelligence services, “and you can conclude that on their return to the Motherland they cannot be relied upon by the regime.” In Moscow, the upper echelons of the FSB seem to be in turmoil, blamed by Mr Putin for botching the war and providing unreliable information. Russian spies posted abroad, and their families, will also have become accustomed to life in Western capitals. A return to increasingly totalitarian Moscow may not appeal. “I would hope that all of them are getting a phone call or a bump on the street or a visit from the local security services for a chat,” says Mr Polymeropoulos. “The allies should hit them up before they leave.”