A Tormenting in Moscow

All across the former Soviet empire, assets of the Communist Party and its front organizations speedily melted away, often ending up in hands of the wily and well connected. So too did the operational funds of the KGB and its allied agencies. Estimates of the money squirreled away abroad during the collapse of the Soviet Union are in the tens of billions of dollars; a crop of still-unexplained suicides in the old system's dying days disposed of those in a position to blab. These caches of illicitly acquired cash were a financial springboard for the fleet-footed members of the old elite in their new business careers. In effect, they turned their power into wealth, and then back into power.

In Russia itself, Soviet-era spies, chief among them Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, now run the country. They are known as the Siloviki or "men of power." The old KGB was decapitated in 1991 amid the Soviet collapse, but not uprooted. Instead it renamed itself, just as so often in the past. 

Their most potent weapon in their deception is ordinariness. Just as Russian politicians and officials seem at first sight to hail from the same besuited and unremarkable caste as their counterparts in other industrialized countries, Russian spies appear neither glamorous nor sinister. They lead normal lives and work in normal jobs, moving effortlessly and inconspicuously among us. They are the kind of people you might meet at the school-gates, work alongside in an office, bump into on a business trip, or see mowing the lawn next door. Yet their real job is to penetrate our society, to influence it for their own ends, and to steal our secrets.

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The spy scandal that made Chapman famous was part of a larger picture. She was one of 10 people arrested in the United States in June 2010, all of whom lived unremarkable middle-class lives, seemingly far away from traditional espionage targets such as the Pentagon or State Department. She and another Russian lived there under their own names. Seven others had fraudulently obtained identities -- American, British, Canadian, Irish, and Uruguayan (the 10th was the latter's Peruvian spouse). One more suspect, a Russian called Pavel Kapustin, working under the alias of Christopher Metsos, was arrested in Cyprus but allowed to escape by the authorities there -- an episode, never satisfactorily explained, which still arouses fury in U.S. officialdom. 

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New York magazine's headline was "Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute." In London, the Guardian said confidently that "none of the 10 Russians had culled any secrets from their hideouts in US suburbia." A grand old man of Anglo-American journalism opined that the Russian illegals' operation was marked by "complete futility." As the detainees were swapped in Vienna for four people jailed in Russia for spying, David Cornwell, who under the pseudonym John le Carré so ably captured the dark intrigues of Cold War espionage,even suggested that out-of-control "rightists" in America's intelligence agencies were trying to jinx the improvement in Russian-American relations. He asked: "As we watch live in glorious Technicolor the greatest spy-swap of the twenty-first century, and hear in our memories the zither twanging out the Harry Lime theme, do the spies expect us to go scurrying back to our cold war shelters? Is that the cunning plan?"

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Charles Crawford, a long-serving British diplomat in the region, explains it well on his blog. Espionage means finding out where highly sensitive and useful information is stored or circulated, then using the human or physical weaknesses in its protection to copy the information in an undetectable way. All this must be done without anyone noticing or suspecting, and repeated many times over. In such work invisibility is a prime advantage. Spycatchers can watch the every waking and sleeping hour of a diplomat suspected of spying. They can comb through visa applications to spot foreign visitors who may be more or less than they seem. They can put suspects on their own side under surveillance to see if they are having odd meetings with strange people. Such techniques may be effective in catching a spook disguised as a diplomat, or a careless traitor. But they have almost no chance of catching a properly trained and targeted "illegal" -- someone working under an acquired or stolen identity.

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The Soviet legacy, however, has left a distinctive aura around espionage in Russia. For officers of the KGB (such as Chapman's father, Vasily, or Putin and hundreds of thousands like them) life was markedly nicer than for fellow-inmates of the workers' paradise. Housed in the KGB's special accommodation, its officers had access to shops stocked with otherwise unavailable products. They holidayed at KGB resorts and were spared some of the system's petty restrictions on daily life. 

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Privileges aside, the KGB also enjoyed a mystique that still lingers over its successor organizations. People saw it (rather inaccurately) as efficient, knowledgeable and incorruptible. Its officers had a job that mattered, in an organization that worked, and were well rewarded for it. Few in the claustrophobic, ill-run, and bribe-plagued Soviet Union could boast as much. Like the space program and sporting heroes, the KGB also touched another emotional chord: patriotism. Though its ultimate loyalty was to the Communist Party, not the Soviet state (it described itself as the Party's "sword and shield") it basked in the reflected glory of the defeat of Nazi Germany. 

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The Soviet Union is gone, but the links between Russia's spies today and their dark and bloody past are real enough. Of course, the old and new are not identical. Chapman's Soviet-era predecessors wore ill-fitting grey suits and sought the shadows. She likes leather cat suits and the spotlight. They served a totalitarian superpower. She serves post-Soviet Russia, a country that is undeniably capitalist and claims to be democratic. But a lasting connection is privilege. The dispensations enjoyed by Russia's spooks now mean that they lead a life apart, just as KGB officers did in the Soviet era. The difference is not in salary and access to consumer goods, but in the privilege of living above and outside the law. The results range from the trivial to the monstrous. An officer of the FSB can drive while drunk (and mow down pedestrians) with impunity. A flash of his ID badge will intimidate any lesser official; he can triumph in any private legal or commercial dispute; he can ignore planning regulations when he builds his house in the country.

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Though the elite likes to shop, bank, frolic, and school their children in and around London, many of its members despise Britain -- just as they resent what they see as American hegemony and the bossiness of the European Union.

This hostility stems in part from an inferiority complex: for all the West's ills, it provides a quality of life that is missing in Russia. This is despite what many Russians see as its baffling weakness and indolence. Another reason is that Russians object to what they see as the West's political interference -- for example, by sponsoring media freedom and pro-democracy causes, and sheltering fugitives, who claim to be persecuted for their political beliefs, but are seen (at least by the authorities in Moscow) as mere swindlers and terrorists.

Despite the Putin Kremlin's lip-service to the free-market, the business community has been a frequent target as well. Few cases highlight the FSB's corruption and brutality better than the torture and death in 2009 of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer working for a British investor. He exposed a $230 million fraud by a criminal group led by the FSB and backed at the highest level in the regime. He paid for this discovery with his life; since his death, the authorities have tried to cover up his murder, and their fraud, with a mixture of bombast, lies, bullying, and evasion. The scandal exemplifies the overlap between gangsterdom and power in Russia, the abuse of the legal system, and the bravery of those Russians willing to defend the rule of law. The tentacles of FSB power stretch to the West too, not least because Russian officials have snooped on and intimidated Magnitsky's colleagues and defenders in London and elsewhere. The Magnitsky case shows that the ruling regime represents not just a tragedy for Russia: it is a direct threat to our own wellbeing and safety.

The passage of time and other priorities have eroded the expertise and institutional memory that in Cold War days helped spycatchers keep track of Soviet penetration attempts. Concerns for privacy have made vetting procedures flimsy. Officials can make money on the side, take lucrative jobs on retirement, take unexplained foreign trips, copy documents onto memory sticks from supposedly secure laptops, and carry an array of electronic gadgets that never come under scrutiny. A mistaken complacency has also surrounded the expansion of NATO to the ex-communist countries. It was right to enlarge the alliance (chiefly because of Russia's neo-imperialist saber-rattling) but intelligence and security services have grossly underestimated the Soviet-era shadow that still lies over the region. The liberation of 1989-1991 was intoxicating, but the effect was only skin-deep. Replacing the planned economy with free markets, state censorship with free media, and one-party rule with free elections were hugely important changes. But the transformation of the political and economic systems could not be matched by an instant change in the human beings that inhabit them. Millions of people in the region have grown up under communism and collaborated with it. The toxic legacy of secret police files, with the shabby compromises and sordid secrets they contain, still taints public life. It provides plenty of scope for blackmail of the guilty -- and the smearing of the innocent. Even those seen in the West as heroes, such as Poland's former president Lech Walesa, have come under a cloud of suspicion about past collaboration. Although not everything in the secret police files is true, and many true things are not in the files, the dirty secrets of the past, many of them spirited away to Russia in the dying days of the old regimes, create great possibilities for pressurizing anyone born before, roughly, 1970. In short, the collapse of communism left a series of human time-bombs all over the former empire -- with the Kremlin in charge of the remote controls.

Neither the Simm case, nor the exposure of Chapman and her colleagues, have properly woken up public opinion and officialdom to the fact that Russian spies' activities are not just a lingering spasm of old Soviet institutions, twitching like the tail of a dying dinosaur, but are part of a wider effort to penetrate and manipulate, which targets the weakest parts of our system: its open and trusting approach to outsiders and newcomers. Because this threat is underestimated or outright ignored, it is especially potent. It is part of a world, espionage, of which outsiders mostly know little and understand less.

The battle lines were more clearly drawn in the days of the Cold War, when the threat was of communist victory. The corrupt autocracy that rules Russia now is playing by capitalist rules -- and the threat is even more corrosive. However, Russia's new spies, like their Soviet predecessors, engage in the subversion, manipulation and penetration of the West. They also defend a regime that is tyrannical, criminal and even murderous. Some things never change.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/13/dark_soldiers_of_the_new_order?page=0,4