Edward Lucas - Deception

These trends are indeed cause for concern. But whole-scale pessimism is unfounded. Following the lost war, Georgia has picked itself up and resumed reforms and economic growth. For all its faults it remains the only post-Soviet success story outside the Baltic states. Outsiders flock to observe its tax system and administrative reforms. The Georgian leadership has also, belatedly, begun taking security more seriously, and paying heed to the long-standing suggestions and complaints of their Estonian and other advisers. Tighter scrutiny and better counter-intelligence tradecraft have begun to pay off, most recently in July 2011 with the arrest of a presidential photographer, who confessed that he had been recruited by Russia to spy on Mr Saakashvili. The round-up started in November 2010 when nine Georgians and four Russian citizens were arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia. The Georgian Interior Ministry described the group as consisting of military pilots and a sailor and a number of businessmen who had passed on data about flight schedules and military equipment and procurement, as well as the personal details of top Georgian officials.

A documentary broadcast on 5 November, the GRU’s ‘birthday’, on the Georgian Rustavi-2 television channel featured a double agent, code-named ‘Enveri’, shown only with his face hidden, who said he had worked for the GRU at the Georgian port of Poti in the late 1980s. On the instructions of Georgian intelligence, he made contact with his old employers and met three GRU officers who gave him instruction in how to embed secret material in innocent-seeming email attachments. Enveri allowed the Georgians to spot dozens of other locals and a GRU liaison officer, Yuri Skrilnikov. When this officer attempted to meet his source in May 2010 Georgian counter-intelligence officials arrested him, along with another Russian citizen and a Georgian. Both had previously worked at a Russian military base in Georgia until its closure in November 2007.

Enveri reported that his Russian case officers were interested in NATO warships’ visits to Georgian ports and Western training of Georgian military forces. But the true aims of the GRU are wider and more alarming. An analysis by Georgian officials lists them as: discrediting the country’s foreign and domestic political course; preventing accession to NATO and European integration; denting foreign investors’ confidence; creating ‘spots of instability’ to highlight the state’s weakness; creating a pro-Russian ‘fifth column’; consolidating Russian control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia; supporting secessionist tendencies in other parts of Georgia; and creating an intelligence network inside the government.

In other countries, such tasks would be mainly the job of the SVR – the foreign intelligence service. But in Russian eyes, Georgia is not ‘foreign’ enough for that. Instead, the military intelligence agency, the GRU, has the main role. The FSB, once a big presence, now plays a second fiddle, chiefly in targeting the Georgian diaspora inside Russia; in previous years it was involved in scams such as protecting a counterfeiting operation in South Ossetia that produced large amounts of forged American currency. 12The GRU’s prime targets are Georgia’s defence capabilities, links with NATO, energy security, the transport infrastructure (especially ports), the structure and composition of the border police and all electronic communications. But it also mounts special operations, including bombings and other stunts. These, Georgian officials say, are run from the southern regional headquarters in Krasnodar, with a sub-station in the coastal resort of Sochi. At least according to the Georgian authorities, the GRU is also actively involved in stoking violent political protest by marginal parts of the country’s opposition. On 26 May 2011 the Interior Ministry in Tbilisi released an audio recording of a bugged meeting in which an opposition leader, Nino Burjanadze, and her son appeared to be expecting the intervention of GRU special forces if a planned violent demonstration turned into an insurrection.

Georgia also believes that Russian intelligence officers, mostly from the FSB but also from the GRU, are recruiting ethnic Georgians in the occupied district of Gali in Abkhazia, either with bribes or blackmail, in order to carry out acts of terrorism and sabotage. 13This has involved at least twelve incidents since 2009. The targets have included railway installations, bridges, public buildings, public squares, offices of political parties, ministries, the American embassy and the NATO liaison office in Tbilisi. Two people have been killed so far, but many more would have been at risk had the bombings succeeded as planned. In one house search, for example, Georgian police found nine canisters of hexogen explosive, five of which had been modified with homemade shrapnel. The ringleader of one of the groups arrested, Gogita Arkania, said in a witness statement that he had been recruited, trained and directed by Major Evgeny Borisov, who is part of the Russian military contingent in Abkhazia and used to be based there as a ‘peace-keeper’ before the war. Though he is formally part of the FSB border guards, Georgian counter-intelligence officers believe Borisov is an active operative of the GRU; however, this cannot be independently verified and Mr Borisov has made no public statement. Telephone intercepts obtained by Georgian intelligence show intensive traffic between mobile phones registered in Arkania’s and Borisov’s names with a mobile number belonging to the Russian Defence Ministry, at exactly the times that bomb attacks took place in Georgia, for example against the American embassy on the morning of 22 September 2010.

In at least one case, a GRU operation against Georgia was let down by an elementary blunder. On 2 October a bomb placed near an important railway bridge at Chaladidi in the western Khobi district failed to go off. But the next morning the European Union’s Monitoring Mission received a phone call from a Russian military officer, asking for more information about the bomb blast that he claimed passengers had reported on the railway. Georgian officials were baffled – until local residents found the device a few days later. The only possible source for this mistaken enquiry by the Russian officer could have been the GRU unit that instigated the botched attack.

Russia can afford to make mistakes. Georgia cannot afford Russia’s successes. The international media and Western countries have shamefully neglected this bullying campaign by a hostile big state against a friendly small one. The effect is to create a climate of impunity in which the Kremlin and its spymasters feel that the risk of these attacks is minor and the rewards are substantial. Georgian complaints to Russia are either ignored or met with dismissals that range from the airy to the vituperative. Sometimes Georgia is accused of spinning fairy tales; sometimes the charge is Russophobia. Western officials accept privately that Georgia has reason to complain. But they see no political or professional benefit in taking up the issue. It is hard to grab foreign official and public attention about allegations of foreign involvement in a largely non-lethal bombing campaign in a country that is seen as marginal and difficult. Raising the complaints risks making Georgians look paranoid. And if they do gain attention, the result may be to underline the country’s reputation as a trouble spot, not a reliable partner and prospective EU and NATO member.

The operations described in the preceding pages are unpleasant but for the most part clumsy: assassinations, bombings, military sabre-rattling, the blackmail of émigrés, the bedding of politicians. It is now time to turn to the more subtle methods used by Russia’s spymasters, chiefly in Europe and North America: the use of fake (and increasingly of real) identities to place career intelligence officers undercover on long-term foreign assignments. This is a world of closely guarded secrets in training and doctrine, of meticulous planning, deep paradoxes and tangled psychology. It could hardly differ more from its portrayal in spy fiction and in Hollywood films, as I show in the following chapter, which introduces the reader to the real world of spies and spycraft.