By Jeff Stein and Patricia Ravalgi
If Russian intelligence were a baseball team, they would be the Houston Astro – good, powerful, even lethal, but a cheater who broke the rules in a game known for bending them. And they practically got away with it.
“I like that analogy,” says Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA clandestine operations officer. “I would add that Houston’s players were never really sanctioned either, right? They lost the manager and the GM, but the players got away with it. Sound familiar? “
Whatever the analogy, Russia’s spies entered the field as hurting athletes in 2020, scoring big and smart espionage victories in the West, but also stumbling over clumsy murder plots that have further tarnished their names in the competitive field of international relations. You would think that the manager would be fired with such a record, but again, this team is led by Vladimir Putin. He just doesn’t care.
“What surprises me is Putin’s willingness to risk being caught because of these offspring,” says John Sipher, who knows a thing or two about the Russians, as a CIA station manager in Moscow. All of these targets “were not a real threat to Putin”.
Opposition figure Alexei Navalny, he noted, “gets something like 3 percent support” across Russia, but last August the FSB, Moscow’s internal security agency, tried to poison him to death with the nervous agent Novichok.
It’s a pattern: two years ago, the GRU, Russia’s violent military intelligence agency, sent death squads to liquidate Novichok with a long coat, Serge Skripal. (It almost killed him.) In February, Bulgarian authorities accused three Russian agents in absentia of trying to poison a Sofia arms dealer and two associates in 2015. Last year, Moscow used more outdated methods to eliminate a Chechen separatist warrior in Germany – a bullet to the head on a Berlin street.
It’s Murder Inc. with guns and poison – no cloaks, no daggers, thank you very much.
Douglas London, another retired senior CIA official, says the attacks “have a purpose and little cost.”
“He likes the macho image,” he adds. “It’s just old school Russian.”
“It’s outdated, but he didn’t pay a price for any of that,” said Sipher SpyTalk.
Well, let’s say it’s a price that Putin can live with: a slap in the face of governments he has offended, in the form of expulsions and sanctions. AN SpyTalk criticism – inspired by Rob Lee, a doctoral candidate at Kings College in London – found that 14 Russian spies were publicly expelled from seven countries in 2020, most for spying, some for political meddling. In a Hollywood-quality scam, two Russian “diplomats” were expelled from Prague this year after they were discovered for planting a fake story in a local media saying that another Russian – a rival in his embassy, as it turned out – was plotting to poison Czech officials. In a comical climax, Moscow reacted with great resentment to PNGs. In neighboring Slovakia, three Russians were expelled in retaliation for obtaining fake Slovak visas from Moscow to enter Germany for the Berlin murder.
The same goes for other places where Moscow agents were apparently caught in the act of espionage or political intrigue.
“What surprises me is Putin’s willingness to risk being caught because of these offspring.“
– John Sipher, former head of the CIA station in Moscow
Last week in Colombia, for example, two alleged Russian intelligence officers were expelled for allegedly collecting intelligence about the “energy and mineral commodities industry” and for “trying to recruit sources in the city of Cali”.
A week earlier, Bulgaria had given a Russian diplomat 72 hours to leave the country “after prosecutors claimed he had been involved in espionage since 2017,” according to Reuters, citing the Foreign Ministry.
On December 10, the Netherlands expelled “two alleged Russian diplomats” for targeting its “high-tech sector with a substantial network of sources,” according to the BBC. The expelled Russians, he said, were accredited diplomats who worked at the Russian embassy in The Hague.
Similarly, in August, Norway expelled a Russian “diplomat” involved in espionage for an Oslo consultancy in shipbuilding, renewable energy and the oil and gas industry. A week later, Austria expelled a Russian “diplomat” who would have been involved in economic espionage at a technology company for years, aided by an Austrian citizen. Russia responded in kind.
Moscow has meddled more seriously in Guyana, in the north of the continent of South America, according to a March report from its capital. “A Russian, a Russian-American and a Libyan were expelled on charges of trying to” interfere in the electoral process at the behest of “an opposition party, through a” conspiracy to access the Guyana Electoral Commission computer system ” .
Ukraine, on the other hand, was not content to initialize Russian agents. In virtual war with Moscow since its invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine just this week “closed four intelligence networks and detained eleven Russian secret service agents, three of whom were involved in sabotage attempts and terrorist attacks on critical infrastructure facilities, ”announced Kiev. “Another FSB agent was arrested in the Luhansk region. He tried to hand over secret documentation on the Neptun missile system developed by the Ukrainian defense industry, ”he added. Further counterintelligence investigations are ongoing.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian agents in Russia continued to meddle in US policy, in particular the campaign by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to defame Joe Biden’s son Hunter. In September, the Treasury Department said it would sanction Ukrainian Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament, for conspiring with Giuliani to fabricate charges against Hunter Biden. “Derkach … has been an active Russian agent for more than a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services,” concluded the Treasury. Giuliani is reportedly under investigation in Manhattan for “potentially illegal gains from his work with” Soviet businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman “in a natural gas business in Ukraine”.
Washington had few resources, except sanctions, or accusations in absentia, against Russian agents in the Hunter Biden case and other, blatant attacks on the United States in 2020, since all the perpetrators were beyond the reach of American authorities.
In October, for example, the US accused six current and former members of Russia’s military intelligence agency “for allegedly carrying out some of the most destructive hacker attacks in the world from 2015 to 2019, including bringing down Ukraine’s power grid and causing almost $ 1 billion in damages to three American companies. ”All defendants are outside the US
Likewise, American officials are still evaluating legal options to deal with the massive invasion of Russia recently discovered in the computer systems of several federal agencies, including the departments of Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security, Agriculture and Trade. “Although American officials believe that an entity linked to Russia or Russian individuals is responsible for the attacks, they have not yet finalized the designation of which actors are responsible,” a senior government official told CNN.
More outrage came from the Russian embassy: “another unfounded attempt by the US media to blame Russia for hacker attacks on US government agencies.”
Two years ago, in reaction to Skripal poisoning, the United States and 28 other countries punished more than 150 Russian officers on their shores. Washington alone expelled 60 Russians, including 12 intelligence officers from the Moscow mission at the UN headquarters in New York, and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle.
In 2020, Putin seemed a little more careful about foreign murders. Or maybe it was just a coincidence, a lack of timely goals.
The Russian strongman shows no signs of changing course. Quite the contrary: he has been celebrating his intelligence services. Starting 2020 last January, his SVR chief held an unprecedented ceremony to honor several operatives that have served with distinction around the world.
Putin has good reason to puff up his chest, say former senior CIA officials with a long history of battle in Central Moscow: Trump has not made Russia pay a substantial price for its excesses.
“It’s not that the Russians are so good, but over the past four years, the political climate has prevented the U.S. intelligence community from leveraging its capabilities and advantages, with the White House providing the Kremlin with superior coverage against the consequences,” London, who recently retired from a 34-year career in the CIA’s Clandestine Services Division, said SpyTalk.
“There are no rules on espionage, although it is an internationally recognized standard,” says Dan Hoffman, who in addition to running the CIA station in Moscow, has led large-scale espionage campaigns against Russia in Europe and elsewhere. “Putin plays without rules, just as much as he can do.”
“Is he just a KGB thug or is he really more scared than we think.” adds Sipher. “I tend to think that he just continues to see the world as a Soviet Chekist and that is what they do.”
Co-published with SpyTalk, where Jeff Stein leads a team of stars of veteran investigative reporters, writers and subject matter experts who will take you behind the scenes of the state of national security. Sign up for full access to the newsletter and website.