Deception (2 page)

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'.
^c
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. (Under Vladimir Lenin it was the Cheka; later it became the OGPU, then the NKVD and finally the KGB.) It is now split into two: the FSB, which has inherited the repressive domestic apparatus of the old system, and the SVR, which is the heir to the Soviet foreign intelligence service; alongside both works the separate GRU military intelligence agency.
⁴

Part of this book, therefore, deals with this deception: the story of how the ex-spooks and their friends, in effect in a criminal conspiracy, took over one of the world's largest countries, hugely enriching themselves and duping the West. Their modus operandi fuses organised crime, big business, conventional diplomacy – and intelligence. I show that Russia's spymasters are now using not only old tools against us, but also new ones of which their Soviet-era predecessors could only have dreamed.

Their most potent weapon 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 industrialised countries, the spies I describe in this book 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.

The best known of this new generation of Russian spies was Anna Chapman, the young redhead who was made a global superstar by her arrest and deportation in June
2010
. She has become an intimate friend of Mr Putin's, a prized asset of his political machine, a prominent figure in Russian finance, and a television celebrity. But as I show in chapter
7
, her main talents in working abroad were not the highly honed skills of spy-school legend. She started her life here in the humdrum London suburb of Stoke Newington, to the outside eye just another hard-partying, quick-witted young Russian woman with an English husband and an eye for the main chance, enjoying the safety and comfort of life in Britain. But her ordinariness was deceptive. She was well placed to carry out her espionage assignments precisely because she seemed so inconspicuous. Her later transformation into a trophy superspy adds another dimension. It is proof of the skills of her
imidzhmekeri
(image-makers) and casts a revealing light on Russia itself.

The spy scandal that made Ms Chapman famous was part of a larger picture. She was one of ten 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 tenth 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 American officialdom.
⁵
(In a related case, a Russian who once worked at Microsoft was deported on immigration grounds in mid-July of that year).

Some people reacted with derision to the idea that Russia would send spies to suburbia, others with surprise. Both reactions were mistaken. This was not a new or foolish initiative by the Kremlin's spymasters, but the latest twist in an old and sinister one. Only two years previously, in
2008
, the case of Herman Simm had highlighted Russia's penetration of NATO. A portly Estonian ex-policeman who had become that country's top national-security official, he was exposed as a Russian agent after some able work by Western spycatchers. His case officer – the career spy in charge of his activities – was unmasked too. This was ‘Antonio': a Russian masquerading as a Portuguese businessman, under an elaborately constructed illegal identity. But the media furore over that case soon died down, leaving most people unaware of the effort that Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, still puts into deception, infiltration and subversion. After much lobbying and argument, I was able to persuade the Estonian authorities to allow me to interview Simm; the results of that investigation are in chapter
11
.

The international media frenzy surrounding Ms Chapman trivialised espionage as a branch of show business. The mistake was easily made: pouting and haughty, the Russian firecracker could easily be a fictional character, not a real one. She would fit in neatly as the sultry sidekick to the arch-villain in a Bond movie –
007
's relationship with ‘
90
-
60
-
90
' (Ms Chapman's Russian nickname, which comes from her shapely figure)
^d
would provide appropriately cheesy sexual tension. The lurid and seemingly pointless affair invited ridicule.
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'.
⁶
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?'
⁷

With respect to Britain's greatest spy writer, and with rather less to other commentators, that is an oddly complacent approach. Spies need to seem as boring and inconspicuous as possible, to develop the capabilities that their real jobs require. If they are to be humble errand-runners, ferrying money, false documents and other wherewithal to more glamorous operatives, then they need jobs that allow them to travel. George Smiley, le Carré's best-known character, spent the war years working undercover as an official (supposedly Swiss) of a Swedish shipping company – the perfect background for someone needing a regular excuse to visit Hamburg or other German ports.
⁸
For some the task is to gain jobs, hobbies or lifestyles that give access to secret information. If the mission is identifying potential sources and the weaknesses that will enable their recruitment, they should be good networkers. If they are case officers, who recruit, direct, motivate and check the agents, they need a lifestyle in which meeting a wide range of people arouses no suspicion. If they are moles, aiming to penetrate the other side's security or intelligence services, they need educational and career paths that will make them credible candidates for recruitment there.

Charles Crawford, a British diplomat in the region for many years, explains it well on his blog.
⁹
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.

As I show in chapter
6
, such a person is an asset that can be used whenever, however and wherever it is needed. That Russia is running such agents in America, Britain and Europe (and elsewhere) should be cause for alarm. Imagine that someone who loathes you has a key to your front door. It will be little comfort if he has not yet got round to burning your house down, stealing your valuables, or planting drugs. The worry is that he could.

Russians do not trivialise or ridicule espionage. They take it rather seriously, both as a threat from abroad and as something that their country excels in. Admittedly, people everywhere find fictional spies glamorous. America has the amnesiac but indestructible Jason Bourne:
¹⁰
Commander Bond's high jinks sprinkle stardust over the reputation of SIS. But real-life spies in Western countries have only modest privileges compared to their counterparts elsewhere. In Britain, for example, they retire at
55
, earlier than the diplomatic colleagues whose cover they use. They have rather larger and more loosely scrutinised expense accounts than other officials, but on the whole enjoy the same lifestyle as any other middle-class professional.

The Soviet legacy, however, has left a distinctive aura around espionage in Russia. For officers of the KGB (such as Ms Chapman's father Vasily, or Mr 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. Those in the elite foreign-espionage division, the First Chief Directorate, and some colleagues in cryptography and counter-intelligence, could even be sent to work abroad – perhaps even a posting to the fabled Western cornucopia that the class warriors both despised and envied.

Privileges aside, the KGB also enjoyed a mystique that still lingers over its successor organisations. People saw it (rather inaccurately) as efficient, knowledgeable and incorruptible. Its officers had a job that mattered, in an organisation 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 programme and sporting heroes, the KGB also touched another emotional chord: patriotism. Though its ultimate loyalty was to the Communist Party, not to 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. Rather as the Battle of Britain provides Britain's ‘finest hour', as the Resistance epitomises France's national myth, and as the Normandy beaches exemplify America's commitment to the freedom of Europe, the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War is known in Russia) was the central plank in the Soviet Union's self-image – and plays the same role in Russian identity today.

For all the heroism displayed by Soviet soldiers in defeating the Nazi invaders, the real role of the secret police in those years was a despicable mix of war crimes against the foe, ruthless pacification of ‘liberated' territories and persecution of real or imagined waverers on its own side.
¹¹
Yet Soviet wartime history mostly comes across in a quite different light: on the television screens later adorned by Ms Chapman's lightweight programme on unsolved mysteries,
¹²
viewers used to watch the exploits of the best-known Soviet fictional spy, Max Otto von Stirlitz (to give him his German cover name). His wartime mission was to penetrate the Nazi high command. Unlike Bond, Stirlitz shuns gadgets, guns and girls. His weapon is his mind, fuelled not by communist ideology but a plangent patriotism. Though implausible, books and films featuring his exploits were compelling and sympathetic by the hackneyed standards of Soviet propaganda.
¹³
They so captivated a tough teenager in the backstreets of
1970
s Leningrad that he took the unusual step of walking into the city's KGB headquarters and volunteering his services. But the young Vladimir Putin was told that the organisation did not accept walk-ins; he should get an education first and wait to be approached.
^e

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. Ms Chapman's Soviet-era predecessors wore ill-fitting grey suits and sought the shadows. She likes leather catsuits 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 only 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. As I show in chapter
1
, he can ruin the lives – literally – of those who displease him.