Edward Lucas - Deception

This book is the result of my twin interests, espionage and Eastern Europe. I would occasionally take the number 12 bus down Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth, past the headquarters of Britain’s MI6. The location was in those days, supposedly, a closely guarded official secret, though the bus conductor was prone to announce jovially ‘Century House – all spies alight here’. I never went inside. But I would gaze up at the grubby concrete structure, with a petrol station incongruously sited in its forecourt. Was this really our answer to the fearsome Soviet Lubyanka in Moscow? The imposing classical façade of the KGB citadel (originally an insurance company headquarters) would have suited the grandest streets in central London. But the MI6 building looked liked a scruffy Soviet tower block.

Spies, whether paid agents, idealistic volunteers, or professional intelligence officers, were foot soldiers in the struggle between East and West that shaped the lives of all post-war generations, including mine. They intrigued me as a student, activist and journalist, first in London and later behind the Iron Curtain. In the 1980s I rubbed shoulders and clinked glasses with spooks on both sides, dodging their blandishments while swapping jokes, jibes, arguments and ideas. For a brief while, the collapse of communism looked set to doom the whole business. Now that the Soviet Union was gone, and with it the danger of the Cold War turning hot, what was left to spy on? But the champagne corks that spooks popped in Britain and America in August 1991 were as premature as the gloom in the Lubyanka as the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s secret-police chief, was hauled away by a crane to the cheers of exuberant Muscovites. MI6, the CIA and their partner services rejigged their budgets and turned to new targets: rogue arms dealers, terrorists, gangsters and cyber-criminals. But new crime and old espionage soon proved to be easy bedfellows; the spivs and crooks in the foreground were sometimes new, but in the background lurked, more often than not, the wily and ruthless figures of the old Soviet-block intelligence world.

They were the dark partners in the new order. Far from being swept into the dustbin of history with the rubble of the old system, the communist-era spooks have evolved to match the new conditions. Some figures from the old days stayed undercover, gaining trusted roles in the new state structures. One of them was the Estonian Herman Simm, whose activities are the subject of chapter 11. Others turned to business, where their foreign languages and knowledge of the outside world gave them a flying start in the new game. All across the former Soviet empire, assets of the Communist Party and its front organisations speedily melted away, often ending up in the hands of the wily and well connected. So too did the operational funds of the KGB and its allied agencies. Estimates of the money squirrelled 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. 3These 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’. [3] c An untranslatable Russian word derived from sila (force). It could be rendered as ‘men of power’ or more colloquially as ‘the hard men’. It chiefly refers to the veterans of the Soviet-era KGB and members of its successor organisations. But it also includes those with a background in the armed forces and in the quasimilitary Interior Ministry (MVD) as well as prosecutors and other agencies with the powers to snoop, bug and punish. 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.