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September 20, 2006

Russia: Secrets Well-Ignored and Poorly-Kept

 

 

 

Is Putin’s Russia becoming the first major intelligence regime? And if so, what does this portend to future Russian political and military ambitions across the globe if the regime is now run by a not-so-nascent espionage political class?

 

Recently the person we’ve come to know as the last Soviet dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev expressed a few regrets about his time at the head of the USSR, most notably, that he was not as strong or strict as Putin. But Putin too has his regrets: he has openly expressed regret at the demise of the Soviet Union (calling it a "national tragedy of enormous scale"), so much so that he's brought back many of the former institutions. Russians today would feel completely at home with their parents’ generation in many respects. On the glasnost (or appearance – not openness) side of things, Russians once again sing the Soviet national anthem as their own. They look out in the “near-abroad” and call it the Commonwealth of Independent States (similar to one name given internally for the Soviet Union in its time). But more substantially, while internally freedoms and descent are being quashed under what I’ve recently dubbed as Putin’s “velvet terror” (exacerbated no doubt by his “Khodorkovsky complex” – similar to Andropov’s “Hungarian complex”), externally Moscow is using whatever means available to throw its weight around, extending its influence far beyond the CIS and Eastern Europe.

 

Today Russia is still a big player in providing arms, advisors, and influence in regimes set diametrically against Western interests. Russia is also a big player in keeping Europe in tow through the domination of its fossil fuel giant Gazprom, which is essentially a state-run enterprise from top to bottom, and filled from top to bottom with Putin’s political yes-men and SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki), Russia’s successor to the KGB.

 

Many experts agree and for good reason that the Soviet Union was the world’s greatest counterintelligence state. Indeed, even despite the failures caused by the elimination of ¾ of Soviet intelligence agents during Stalin’s purges, the Kremlin’s failure to properly assess information gathered by agents in the field because the information did not conform to existing Party biases and assumptions (Stalin’s costly denials about imminent Nazi German intentions and the demand for devotion of ever greater resources to his paranoia about the British come to mind), the Soviet Union had without argument the most extensive and highly successful human intelligence network anywhere in the world.  

 

From early on Soviet NKVD and OGPU agents succeeded in penetrating the “commanding heights” of any power they wished. Britain and its security and intelligence services were not immune, nor in Washington the White House, State Department, War Department, and OSS (World War II predecessor to the CIA), nor either were the governments of Italy, France, Spain, and anyone else, including Nazi Germany, from the placement of agents at the most sensitive positions within the inner circles of power. In the UK among the many the Soviets had cultivated, were the so-called “Magnificent 5”, five British university students who later entered various important positions in British government, including at Whitehall. Among the likes of Kim Philby were those responsible for handing over so much political and technical secret information that Stalin knew more about the meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Roosevelt than did Churchill or Roosevelt; as well he knew more about the British TUBE ALLOYS project to develop a nuclear bomb than did many among the most privy in British government. Kim Philby was later placed in charge of MI6 Section IX, which was the British anti-Soviet counterintelligence directorate, with obviously unpleasant consequences for the West.

 

The KGB also pioneered the art of agent provocateur to a degree of success never before seen on the world stage, as well as that of organizing terrorist proxies working on its behalf, such as Palestinian groups who received direct funding and material support from Lubyanka. Work done by Nazi Germany to destabilize the Sudetenland, Austria, and Poland prior to the Wehrmacht invasion pales by comparison.

 

And Soviet agents ran their networks effectively unopposed until the start of the Cold War, but still enjoyed an SIS and CIA severally throttled by political elements within both Western countries until the Reagan/Thatcher era, enabling the Soviets to run arms and personnel even into the US homeland across Mexican and Canadian borders and sea ports (though the Soviets found it harder to place illegals (illegally present operatives operating under false papers) in the US later on than in the Soviet Union’s ideological heyday). At the same time however, Soviet successes in stealing Western technology were legend in the vastness of their success. By some estimates, stolen Western technology made up for over 70% of Soviet technological advances and saved the cash-starved regime billions of dollars – no doubt helping to keep it on life support for many more years than might otherwise have been sustainable. Though most of its agents became more interested in working for cash than politics, this shortcoming was easy to overlook since because of the lax realities of Western counterintelligence, risks were relatively slim and the payout was not.

 

The main obstacle for the most successful intelligence state in world history however was not nearly so much the man in the field as the political bosses at the top who refused and at times severely punished the messenger when he brought information which did not connect with prior political assumptions.

 

This main obstacle is no longer in the way. In an even much greater way than former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov (an ex-KGB chief) could have imagined, the government under Vladimir Putin (also a former KGB man) has unfettered latitude to follow the policies dictated by thorough and correct intelligence analysis. No longer forced to comport information with ideology, spies and analysts are the true beneficiaries of Gorbachev’s “glasnost” and “perestroika” movements.

 

 

At a time with US human information gathering at one of its weakest partly due to Clinton-era cutbacks in CIA manpower (by some accounts up to 80%), not much is known of Russian activities apart from the occasional spy we’ve managed to catch in the past few years or evidence of SVR background work in Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, and other hotspots. This lack of eyes coupled with a general lack of interest in political circles in the West also aid the SVR phoenix in its daily tasks.

 

It may strike some as remarkably naïve that President Bush would claim to have looked into Putin’s soul and seen only goodness, particularly since the first President (and former head of CIA) Bush was no stranger to the world of deception. But George W. Bush would not be alone in making too brief an assessment of his Muscovite counterpart. One must only look at the administrations of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter to see this apathy in the West – even in the face of a full-scale Cold War – is nothing new. But time may be the only thing that tells. We do know there has yet been very little movement to harden assets against Chinese espionage – a force which promises and in many respects is outdoing the old KGB in the sophistication and success of its work, and one can only imagine that interest in Russian activity may be even further pushed back on the list of priorities among many in Washington. But we do both at our peril. While many may believe that the military coup failed when the KGB led by Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov attempted it against Gorbachev in 1991, what they may not see is that what failed was a coup against a coup (as Khrushchev learned, Soviet coups didn’t always involve tanks). As Alexei Yegorov then-head of counterintelligence said after taking part in the failed military coup in ’91 as he was being led away: “Everything is clear now. I am such an old idiot. I’ve really f****ed up.” As Christopher Andrew Points out in “The Sword and the Shield”, “Instead of repudiating its Soviet past, however, the SVR saw itself as the heir of the old FCD (First Chief Directorate – foreign intelligence)”. Russian secret services today are nothing more than the proud heirs of their KGB legacy, but they no longer work as mere caretakers of the asylum.

 

As such, it could be reasoned that the most productive of KGB tactics still prevail today in Putin’s Russia and with its influence abroad, but perhaps with greater freedom and efficiency than in former times. The Russian mob today is likely little more than the “dirtyworks” operating arm of the SVR, where everything from assassinations and kidnappings to nuclear technology sales can be conducted in such a way that responsibility is sidestepped and focus is not seriously drawn or couched in foreign governments as a national security threat emanating out of Moscow. But this tactic too is nothing new: As one senior Italian diplomat (and honeytrap victim) discovered during the Cold War, Soviet agents were quite adept at this. After he was lured into an illicit affair with a female KGB swallow, it was then discovered that embarrassingly compromising photographs were surreptitiously taken. The diplomat was told that these photographs of him (being seduced by a Soviet agent) had actually been taken by a criminal gang⁽¹⁾ and that Soviet officials acting allegedly as the white-hatted intermediary would be happy to step in and prevent their publication by these criminal elements, provided the Italian diplomat cooperate by working for the KGB. Blackmail of corporate interests of course also went on both as a key source of S&T and as a way to get those corporations to ply political pressure on their Western governments in support of Soviet aims. As Bill Gertz mentions in his new book “Enemies: How America's Foes Steal Our Vital Secrets--and How We Let It Happen”, along with a human spying campaign that equals if not exceeds that undertaken by the Soviets, Russian SIGINT agents today together with other operations additionally continue to aggressively hack into US government computer networks. What's more, Russia still refuses to outlaw spamming by Russian "criminal" elements (a technique infamous for taking advantage of using malicious code embedded into e-mail which can then be used to break into a computer or computer network and steal or alter information). Many of the most aggressive hacking attempts have been noted as coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe (as well as China). With the pilfering of government and private personnel and client records (as I covered extensively here) also comes another asset: blackmail – an invaluable asset for an intelligence organization whose historical use of the tactic is pro forma. The plundering of our national secrets today surely has Ronald Reagan spinning in his grave – but he may be the lucky one.

 

While we would enjoy the idea of better opportunities for relations between Westerners and the average Russian, the Putin government is proving to be nothing more than the old barn with a new paint job; a dictatorship of the intelligence officer.

 

 

RELATED: The entire Matt Drudge radio interview with Bill Gertz recorded three days ago can be found at a blog called "Drudge Report Archives". (DRA appears to be unafilliated with Matt Drudge's show or website The Drudge Report.)

 

 

Posted by Martin at September 20, 2006 04:29 AM

Comments

Posted by: Debbie at September 20, 2006 04:22 PM

Posted by: Angel at September 20, 2006 04:24 PM

Posted by: Martin at September 20, 2006 11:50 PM

Posted by: Debbie at September 24, 2006 09:46 AM

Posted by: Martin at September 24, 2006 10:16 AM