Deception (13 page)

Monitoring all this closely was the spy-infested Russian mission to NATO. This quasi-diplomatic outfit enjoys a remarkably privileged status at alliance headquarters in Brussels, with regular briefings, spacious offices and security badges that allow its members preferential access to meetings, documents and other facilities. This friendly treatment dates from the days when NATO tried to soft-soap Russia about the alliance's expansion to the former Soviet empire. By opening up to Russia, NATO hoped to dispel any fears about its intentions; belief persists among some member countries that differences with Russia are merely the result of misunderstandings, and that confrontation would be a sign of failure. This approach is heartfelt, particularly in Germany, where it is an article of faith among senior officials that Russia must be embraced and reassured, not deterred. The theoretical argument about whether relations would be even worse without this approach is unresolvable. What is clear is that attempts to build trust have proved unsuccessful in practical terms. On issues such as terrorism NATO puts cards on the table, and receives in return Russian offerings dressed up as serious intelligence, though in truth they are little more than could be found out on the internet. The Russian spies posted to the NATO mission are numerous, ubiquitous, unscrupulous and energetic. They bluntly and repeatedly approach officials whom they regard as promising targets. They are adept at keeping their distinctive ID badges concealed and slipping into meetings to which they have not been invited. Their chief targets are the alliance's future military thinking, especially its contingency plans; new capabilities, for example in cyber-warfare or missile defence; and NATO's codes and communications – the alliance's central nervous system. They have a sharp eye on counter-intelligence: trying to find out what NATO members know about Russia, and where it comes from. They like to have a clear idea of who is being trained for what, by whom, where, and how well.

A paradox here, as so often in intelligence work, is that many of these secrets are both closely guarded and yet not very interesting. NATO's abilities and capabilities have shrivelled since the end of the Cold War. Many of its members spend risibly little on defence. Many of the member states' governments have little interest in Russia, and find it hard to share the worries of countries such as the Baltic states and Poland. In a crisis, NATO's effectiveness depends almost wholly on the United States. Russian intelligence penetration of NATO probably peaked at a time when it revealed a lack of secrets, rather than their existence. Russia's lavishly resourced spies do not mind about that. For a start, NATO HQ is a good place to recruit highfliers from the countries that matter – chiefly America, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Norway or Turkey – who will go on to careers in their national defence and security establishments. Secondly, Brussels is a great place for agent-running. Belgian counter-intelligence is weak. Only a handful of officers deal with Russia. They have no powers of arrest and face grave difficulties in obtaining warrants. All this is a serious problem for the hard-pressed NATO Office of Security.

A deeper reason for Russian behaviour is a paranoid mind-set conditioned partly by the Cold War, partly by the alliance's expansion, and partly by the NATO-led bombing of Serbia in
1999
.
^t
With the Soviet Union out of the way, Russians believe, America and its allies turned a neutral front yard into a
cordon sanitaire
, deliberately designed to humiliate and constrain the former superpower, and breaking a promise made to the Soviet Union in exchange for German reunification.
¹⁵
What if NATO decides next to help one of Russia's near neighbours, say Georgia, or Ukraine, or Moldova, in some military flare-up? When dealing with a powerful and unpredictable military alliance on your borders it is better to have too many sources than too few. Nobody is going to complain about having too much information about NATO's inner workings. The more the diligent spies report that NATO is ineffective and distracted, the more the instructions come back to dig deeper and find the real story.

Other international organisations are at even greater risk. The mental barriers to giving away secrets are lower (betraying your country or its military alliances is one thing, betraying an anonymous bureaucracy is another). Whereas NATO at least tries to keep spies at bay, the headquarters of the European Commission and European Council in Brussels are a security nightmare: a warren of badly policed offices and unvetted staff, where outsiders can walk in and out almost at will on the flimsiest of pretexts. The European Parliament, newly important since the Lisbon Treaty carve-up gave it and the EU's big countries the main role in the union's decision-making, is a particularly vulnerable target. Its members (and office staff, on their behalf) can demand almost any document they like from the European Commission. Staffers are lightly vetted (or not at all) and can ask for a briefing or an informal chat with any official.

The EU, it should be noted, is not in the position to treat Russia the same way. For a start, it has no intelligence-gathering service of its own. Weak leadership, squabbles and bureaucracy plague its misnamed ‘External Action Service', which is supposed to spearhead a more decisive and better-informed EU diplomacy. An intelligence agency requires much greater grip and focus than a diplomatic service. If the EU cannot yet run a foreign ministry and embassies properly, it has no chance of developing a spy agency capable of dealing with a tough target such as Russia. The only advantage of this is that a bad intelligence agency is more damaging than none at all. If you don't spy, you can't bungle; you can't be fooled by bad sources or get good ones into trouble. The disadvantage is that politicians may lack full knowledge of the people and thinking that they are dealing with. The EU is also unable to get proper intelligence from its member states. For the handful of member countries (chiefly Britain and France) that do have real intelligence services, the job is mostly outwitting the EU on matters of national interest, not helping the Eurocrats to raise their game. Even when European and national interests do overlap, the EU is seen as too leaky to be trusted with more than the stalest crumbs of intelligence.

As with all intelligence agencies, it is one thing to gain a flow of information, and another to use it correctly. American decision-makers are overwhelmed by a ‘fire-hose' of classified, secret, top-secret and urgent information produced by that country's sprawling intelligence ‘community'.
¹⁶
Much of it is dross, either recycled or poorly sourced. Much less is known about Russia's use of intelligence, although it is clear that Mr Putin takes a close personal interest in the output of his country's agencies – people who know his daily routine say he habitually spends a couple of hours a day reading its reports and cables, while shunning more conventional (and perhaps more useful) sources of information.

For whatever reason, however, Russia does seem to have the knack of searching through floods of data to find the most usable bits. EU officials who deal with Russia, for example, have told me that they frequently have the impression that the other side already knows every part of their negotiating position. It is easy to scoff at this: why should anyone care if the Russians bamboozle the Eurocrats? The answer is simple. If Russia understands which countries are the die-hard supporters of a particular EU policy that it does or doesn't like, which are the wobblers, and what is the negotiating position, it knows where to apply diplomatic pressure (or when not to waste time and effort fighting a lost cause).

The EU talks to Russia about matters of vital interest to every member-state's citizens, but a prime example is energy. Here the picture has shifted sharply over the past decade. Ten years ago, Russia was seen as a bright prospect for Europe's future oil and gas supplies, and a source of nuclear expertise, fuel and technology. Since then corruption and incompetence at home, and bullying behaviour abroad have eroded Russia's clout, to the point that even Germany is now sceptical about its reliability. In the past, Germany was heavily dependent on Russian gas. Its biggest energy companies were closely tied to Gazprom, and the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, took on the chairmanship of a controversial Russian–German gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed soon after he left office in
2005
. In his time Germany resisted any attempt to talk toughly to Moscow on energy and other issues: many outsiders saw that as sinister. They feared that the gas supplies had anaesthetised the country's prudence and scepticism when it came to policy towards Russia.
¹⁷

That has changed. Russia's squabbles with transit countries such as Ukraine have interrupted gas supplies to Europe and rattled German confidence. Angela Merkel, Mr Schröder's successor, is instinctively more hawkish about Russia. Corruption and incompetence in Gazprom and elsewhere have raised fears about Russia's ability to meet its long-term supply commitments. New gas supplies are available from elsewhere – chiefly Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which can be delivered by sea from distant suppliers. Only five years ago this was scarce and expensive. But technological change has made tankers and terminals cheaper, while new extraction techniques mean that more gas is on the market. The days when Russia's east-west pipeline monopoly created a lock on European energy supplies are over.

But Russia is now playing a hard defensive game. It no longer controls the bottleneck in supplies. Instead it wants long-term contracts, stakes in downstream distribution systems and market information. In Britain, those dealing with Gazprom's local subsidiary say that its behaviour is less that of a new entrant into the market, and more of an intelligence operation. The head of counter-intelligence for Germany's BfV security service, Burkhard Even, highlighted the role of Russian spies in

 

supporting Russian companies . . . to gain a footing in the German energy sector. The interest is above all in alternative and regenerative energy, possibilities to increase energy efficiency, European energy interests and diversification strategies . . .
¹⁸

 

Russia is in most respects a backward country – a source of humiliation to those who remember that the Soviet Union was the country that put the first satellite, living creature and human being into space. Closing that gap through the normal process of industrial development seems all but impossible. Despite remaining pockets of excellence in the education system, ambitious Russians head abroad, rather than building their businesses at home.
¹⁹
Though Mr Putin is personally determined that Russia become a world leader in nano-technology, building such hi-tech industry from scratch is hard: Russia does have plenty of brainpower, but it is starting ten years later than competitors in Germany, America and Britain. The only way Russia can hope to close the gap is by stealing secrets, either to take advantage of them in its own industry, or to trade elsewhere (principally to China). One way of doing that is snooping on other countries' communications.

Use Google Earth to search for
57
º
48
'
8
.
20
”N
28
º
12
'
58
.
59
”E and you will see a snapshot, taken from space, of a large collection of satellite dishes on the westernmost extremity of Russia, on the Estonian border, to the north-east of the main A-
212
road from the provincial capital Pskov. Even viewed from on high, the gleaming metal and bright paintwork make it clear that this is a new installation; the long shadows cast by the guard fence and sentry posts around the antenna array indicate a high degree of security. Google now helpfully labels it ‘Center FAPSI'
²⁰
and an enterprising photographer has provided a fine picture of it.
²¹
Western intelligence officials were initially puzzled about the facility's purpose. Russia already has an archipelago of electronic listening stations: why build a new one exactly there?

The answer was that this particular corner of Russia overlapped, just, with the then footprint of the main Inmarsat
4
-F
2
satellite, which sits high over the Atlantic ocean in a geostationary orbit carrying a huge quantity of data between Europe and the United States.
²²
Such data networks are of great interest to Russia. The ability to listen in to mobile phone calls, bug emails, observe web-browsing habits and obtain passwords are essential ingredients of other espionage operations, both in gathering politically sensitive information and in garnering compromising material that can be used for blackmail – and also in stealing other countries' commercial and industrial secrets.
^u

Industrial espionage was a big feature of Soviet-era intelligence too. But the economic planners who ran industry then were mostly incapable of putting into production the techniques and technology that the KGB's spies so painstakingly and brilliantly acquired during the Cold War. Many of those constraints have now gone. Russian state-backed high technology companies operate more effectively than their Soviet-era predecessors. One reason is that they are not shackled by the constraints of the planned economy. Another is that the paranoid culture of secrecy has faded. Their experts and executives can travel freely; Western controls on the export of sensitive equipment that frustrated Soviet engineers during the Cold War have lifted.
²³
Not only can the stolen material be better used, but the threshold of treachery when obtaining it has sunk. In the days of ideological competition between East and West, even the most hard-up Western scientist might think twice about helping a totalitarian superpower whose very existence was based on lies and mass murder. Helping Russia sounds a lot less bad: after all, many Western businesses and politicians have deep interests in that country too. A German scientist or engineer who succumbs to a Russian approach to pass on secrets from his firm or university laboratory could be forgiven for thinking that if senior public figures can enrich themselves through connections with Russia, humble boffins can do the same.