Deception

⁴ Real Spies, Real Victims

The Russian diaspora’s presence in the West reflects one of the great triumphs – and vulnerabilities – of the post-1991 era. The free movement of people from East to West was a defeat for the merchants of mind-control in Moscow, who feared that capitalist fleshpots would be an ‘ideological distraction’ for the hard-pressed proletariat of the ‘world fortress’. But the new regime in Russia is more resilient. It flourishes on contacts with the rich world, which offers everything from financial services to luxury goods, and it places no obstacles in the way of those wanting to leave. The Soviet leadership created the largest prison camp in history, keeping hundreds of millions of people bottled up behind the Iron Curtain, with travel privileges tightly rationed and dependent on cooperation with the KGB. Now tens of millions of Russians have travelled abroad: they are free (visa regimes permitting) to work, holiday, study, marry and invest there. Whatever counter-intelligence worries the new era creates, nobody should wish for a moment that the clock be put back to the dark days before 1989. But for Russia’s spymasters, targets and means of espionage overlap in this diaspora. These compatriots may know the secrets of the country they are living in. Or they may be able to help steal them. It is a sad truth that however far émigrés may flee oppression and corruption, their personal ties with their country of origin will always leave them vulnerable to bullying and blackmail.

The new problem is a greatly amplified version of an old one. As we will see in a later chapter, in the huge movements of refugees that followed the Second World War émigré communities from Soviet-block countries easily became pawns in spy wars. As the Cold War intensified, and the gulf between East and West deepened, personal ties across the Iron Curtain were increasingly scanty and easily scrutinised on both sides. Even so, they occasionally led to spectacular breaches in security. A successfully hushed-up scandal of the 1980s involved an émigré from one of the Baltic states (then still occupied by the Soviet Union) who worked as a dentist. That might seem an occupation of no interest to the KGB. But this particular dentist had a contract to provide treatment to the staff of a Western foreign ministry.[22] His files provided a perfect means of distinguishing between mainstream diplomats and intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover. When the spies were due for a dental check before or after an overseas posting, their agency’s personnel office made the appointment, not the foreign ministry’s. The intelligence officers’ files had a distinctive coding – doubtless for budgetary reasons. The KGB, in a clever bit of spycraft, tracked him down and threatened his family members inside the Soviet Union with the many miserable fates awaiting those who displeased the authorities there. When news reached him of their troubles, he was distraught – and with no security training, an easy target.

The result was devastating. The intelligence service concerned went to great lengths to post its best and brightest young officers under carefully constructed diplomatic cover. They cheerfully did the worst jobs in the embassies they were assigned to, toiling over visa applications and stationery invoices in the hope of staying unnoticed. Had they worn neon lights flashing the word ‘spy’ they could hardly have been more conspicuous. The KGB knew just whom to watch. Often it waited for years before taking any action, allowing the targets to work diligently in the belief that their efforts were unseen. In fact they left a toxic trail over a web of contacts that the KGB could investigate at its leisure. To this day, the damage done by the dentist is unknown. Unmasked when some KGB records became available after 1991, he admitted everything and escaped prosecution. This KGB operation was a brilliant piece of work, done with the greatest difficulty in a well-protected NATO country at the height of the Cold War. The task now is much easier. Russians who live abroad, working in everything from finance to showbiz, are a force-multiplier for the regime back home. Even if few have access to secrets themselves, their friends, relatives, colleagues and sporting partners may do so.

Monitoring the activities of émigré and diaspora groups that could pose a threat to the regime’s interests has long been an intelligence target for the Kremlin. It pays particular attention to those who previously occupied positions of power or influence inside Russia. Even if they are not formally defectors, it views them with great suspicion and monitors them aggressively. But ordinary émigrés too may be eavesdropped and recruited, either willingly or not. Some may end up serving just the narrow purposes of Russia’s intelligence services. Someone who works in the billing department of a mobile phone company, in a tax office, in a bank as Ms Chapman did in Britain, or in a credit-rating agency can help expose a fake identity being used by a foreigner on a visit to Russia, or assist in concocting one for Russian spies needing to work abroad. During the Cold War, for example, the KGB was able to recruit an agent in the London regional office of the motor-licensing authority. This enabled them to find out which cars were used by the spycatchers of MI5.

The same insights are useful today. Does the Western businessman visiting Russia have a convincing credit history? Does his mobile phone number check out? What calls has he made? Does he have any frequent-flier cards? If so, what pattern of activity do they show? Does he pay taxes? If so, from which home address and on which sources of income? Someone with access to an immigration computer can check if records show any sign of previous globetrotting for the passport that this supposed international businessman presented at his hotel.

Still more tempting targets are those in a position to obtain secrets or sensitive information. Even if they do not have the necessary access, they may know someone who has. In a lawless country such as Russia, it is easy to find ways of influencing them, either directly or through those that they care about. As a Canadian official put it after a spy scandal there: ‘They’re pretty good at applying pressure, by appealing to their patriotism… or by reminding them that Mother is still back home.’¹ Such robust persuasion is easiest when émigrés actually visit Russia. The FSB can plant drugs or pornography, fake an allegation of rape, or concoct some other unpleasant difficulty, either against the victim directly, or against a relative or friend. The accused protests his innocence to grim-faced police who tell him to expect a lengthy stay in custody while the case is fully investigated. Without proper legal representation, facing scandal at home and possibly losing his job, the detainee is easy prey when an anonymous visitor in civilian clothes appears, explaining that the ‘misunderstandings’ will clear up in return for a little help. This cooperation can range from straightforwardly betraying secrets to more subtle tasks such as reporting on colleagues’ personal weaknesses, or simply providing anodyne information in order to test the source for later use.

In some cases, the victim hurries home and reports the entire affair to his own country’s counter-intelligence service (one such agency is the source of the above outline of the FSB’s modus operandi). If that happens, the Western side may try to use the person to feed disinformation to the FSB, or to obtain more information about Russia’s wish list. Such instances are rare. Western spycatchers worry about how often such FSB approaches have been successful and unreported, and what may have happened as a result. The advantage of this kind of operation for the FSB is that its methods and officers are largely preserved: if the ‘pitch’ is unsuccessful and the source is never seen again, little is lost. If it works, the agent running can happen mainly or wholly inside Russia: after all, the target has completely convincing family reasons for visiting. Each time he visits, the screw can tighten a little. That is a lot easier than trying to recruit people in Berlin, London, New York or Paris under the noses of NATO counter-intelligence services.

A good example of what appears to be the use of the diaspora for intelligence purposes is the story of Axis Information and Analysis (AIA). This outfit described itself as an ‘information agency that unites professionals having years of experience in collecting and analysing information about Asia and Eastern Europe’. It claimed to be focused upon ‘states that constitute a threat to regional and international security, as well as upon areas of ethnic and religious conflict’. Its main mission was to produce rather good information about defence, security and intelligence issues. A typical day’s headlines, on 25 February 2009, included items such as ‘Former Czech chief-of-staff works in company with person suspected of ties with Soviet intelligence’; ‘Estonian investigators pass opinion why did Herman Simm betray his native country’; ‘Attempt of bombing of synagogue in Ukraine not considered act of terrorism’ and ‘Russia has at least 500 secret service agents in Vienna 20 years after Cold War’.

From 2005 I was a regular visitor to AIA’s website, www.axisglobe.com.² The information was a clever mix of local media reports, seasoned with intelligent observations and occasional bits of first-hand reporting. It was topical, accurate, well presented and concise, if in slightly stilted English. So who was writing it? I had never met any of the people listed on the site as contributors, though after more than twenty-five years dealing with the region I would have expected to have heard of such evidently expert and well-informed colleagues. Nor had I met anyone else who had. Nor did Google show them as having any existence elsewhere. AIA said that some of its authors were still in government service and that they, and some other contributors, used pen names. It self-consciously added an air of mystery by claiming to use ‘journalists, ex-diplomats, and former officers of the special services of a number of Asian and East European countries’ [my italics].³

The site did not require payment and had no advertising. My initial assumption was therefore that it was part of an information-warfare effort, aimed at planting skewed stories or disinformation in a seemingly credible wider stream of news. But intense scrutiny of the AIA output, even on the subjects I knew best, revealed no consistent pattern that supported this theory. The tone was pleasantly astringent towards the Russian services and their rivals alike. I took discreet soundings from intelligence professionals in the region. They turned out to be fans of AIA, with the same curiosity about its origins and purpose. The site was registered via an American hosting company, with all further details privacy-protected. I tried writing to the supposed editor, Michel Elbaz, and got an evasive reply in return. Eventually I gave up worrying and simply used the site as a handy compendium of news and analysis, assuming that it must have some kind of business model that I was too stupid to grasp. Had I looked a bit harder, I might have found some clues suggesting the opposite.

The pace of contributions to the site slackened in late 2009 and it became inactive in 2010. It was still a useful repository for historical information – particularly as I was beginning to research this book. In mid-2010, the whole site went behind a pay wall, demanding a log-in and password but giving no indication of how to acquire one. Frustrated, I emailed Mr Elbaz again, simply asking him to invoice me for access to the archived material on the site. Any normal company would have responded to that – at least to ask how much I was prepared to pay. AIA did not respond. This fired my interest again. If AIA was not trying to make a profit, someone had sponsored it. But who? And why? It had no visible do-gooding or academic affiliation. I started investigating more vigorously.⁴

A bit more digging brought a real breakthrough: the identity of one of the AIA contributors. He turned out to be a colleague: Āris Jansons, a well-known Latvian journalist and an acquaintance of mine for nearly twenty years. He had worked at Radio Free Europe in Prague after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When its Latvian service closed in 2004, he returned to Riga to look for a job. In January 2006 he was browsing the web and noticed a mistakenly identified picture in an AIA story. He emailed the site to point out the error, and after receiving an initially dismissive reply from Mr Elbaz then received a rather friendlier letter offering him a job as the Baltics correspondent. Mr Jansons was intrigued. The money was good and, more importantly, the editorial quality was impressive. I have reviewed numerous emails between the two men, provided by Mr Jansons. Mr Elbaz’s brief to his new writer was a model of editorial professionalism. He gave a step-by-step guide to AIA’s needs. One priority was to avoid duplication with any other English-language source. Another was to use a snappy, and preferably intriguing, headline. Concision, relevance and topicality were vital. The only slightly puzzling aspect was an instruction to avoid any direct criticism of the regime in Uzbekistan. But that was hardly going to be a big deal for a correspondent in the Baltics. The first year went well, with generous pay and plenty of demand. Mr Jansons wrote excellent articles, under a pseudonym. After that, AIA began to plead poverty. Payments slowed and stopped. Eventually Mr Elbaz offered Mr Jansons shares in the company in lieu of pay, which he turned down. Mr Jansons found another job and apart from grumbling about his unpaid fees, thought no more of it: freelance life is like that.

So what was AIA really? It was run by a Russian: Mikhail Falkov. He had emigrated to Israel – as it happens from Soviet-occupied Latvia – in the 1970s. He is the longstanding owner-editor of IzRus, a prominent Russian-language website there. He is also a former PR adviser to the controversial Israeli politician, currently foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a Soviet-born immigrant whose hard-line approach (towards both Arabs and dovish Israeli officials) and fondness for the regime in Russia arouse considerable controversy.⁵ Mr Lieberman once worked as a nightclub bouncer. In April 2011 he was charged by the State Prosecutor’s Office with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and witness tampering; he denies all wrongdoing, and the case was pending as this book went to press. In the eyes of his critics, he has imported thuggish Soviet-style attitudes and habits into Israeli politics. Mr Falkov’s IzRus website in 2009 carried an article denouncing Israeli embassies abroad which could be seen to echo Mr Lieberman’s dislike of his own diplomats. It said they were ‘fertile ground for orgies, sex with minors, sexual harassment and bribery’ which was ‘hidden from the public’.⁶ There would be those who might see Mr Lieberman, and his sidekick Mr Falkov, as prime examples of how Russia exerts its influence in other countries.

Mr Falkov declines to answer any questions about AIA’s finances, genesis and aims. It may well be that from his point of view it was indeed a purely business venture, which simply failed to gain the advertising that he hoped for. I am not accusing him of anything improper. But a few lines of text on the website give a tantalising hint of another explanation for its existence: suggesting a connection with the world of espionage, not of mere news. On the ‘about us’ section of the site, visitors were told:

That would be an unusual offer for anyone wanting to quash suspicion of involvement in espionage. It is possible that someone at AIA was hoping to act as a private intelligence broker. I have discussed the issue with people who think it likely that the outfit was operating on behalf of a government, wanting to flush out either sources of information, or demand for it. The ‘freelance news agency’ willing to pay generously for research material commissioned by anonymous clients was a staple of Cold War espionage: readers may recall George Smiley using it. The sort of people who read the published material on AIA’s website would have included those with an appetite – and a budget – for more sensitive information along similar lines. One explanation is that its website was designed, not necessarily with Mr Falkov’s consent or knowledge, to note the people visiting it, and perhaps to log details of their computers or even to plant viruses on them. Another is that its backers were interested to see what kind of orders came in: that could cast an interesting light on the behaviour and needs of government agencies. I do not find this completely convincing: no serious intelligence service would go shopping like this without thorough scrutiny of AIA, which would reveal its suspiciously flimsy structure. Another option is that it was an attempt by a government agency to spot potential sources of information. Any new contributors making themselves known to AIA would represent an interesting pool of potential sources. Those with access to real secrets could then be put on first consulting contracts and then developed, either directly or indirectly, as real agents if they proved useful. But the danger of a trap – a ‘dangle’ in espionage parlance – would be great.

More likely in my view is that AIA was (not necessarily with Mr Falkov’s consent or knowledge) a counter-intelligence operation. Defence, security and intelligence officials in the ex-Soviet region are often demoralised, disgruntled and outright discontented by the corruption and futility of their jobs. It would be most interesting for the FSB, say, to know which of them would be willing to nibble at the carrot of discreet extra income from a foreign information agency. People vulnerable to a phoney temptation could also be open to an approach by a real espionage service. Such potential weakness is best known about in advance. Widely read by just the right people, Axisglobe’s site would have been a neat way of flushing out such potential sources. But its putative role as part of an active intelligence operation was probably quite brief. It established its credibility, reaped its harvest, and then drifted into decay. Its significance may have been chiefly the way that it combined, certainly not for the last time, the anonymity of the internet with the human resources that the Russian diaspora represents for the intelligence and security services in Moscow. On ⁷ June 2011 the site was bought by a Japanese blogger for $940. That at least was a commercial transaction.

So far I have outlined much of the profile of Russian espionage: in cahoots with gangsters at one moment, bullying émigrés to cooperate at another, stealing industrial secrets the next, and turning to lobbyists and lawyers when that becomes necessary. This is bad enough for countries inside the EU and NATO. It is far worse for those on its fringes. I conclude this section with a detailed look at the frontline of Russia’s military-intelligence effort – the subversion, special operations and dirty tricks being practised in Georgia, a country that has challenged Russia’s claim to a droit de regard in the former Soviet Union. This idea is a central part of Russia’s foreign-policy thinking about its neighbours; nothing should happen that Russia does not know about, and nothing should happen that Russia does not consent to.

Under the Tsarist empire from 1813 to 1917, briefly independent until 1921 and then part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, Georgia has a special place in the hearts and minds of Russian officials. They see it rather as Americans do Florida, a prized spot for recreation and the source of countless sentimental holiday memories. It is also a bastion of Russian influence on the Black Sea, and a bulwark against historic rivals for influence in the region such as Iran and Turkey. The idea that Georgia – an Orthodox Christian country – might want to head westwards, joining the European Union and even NATO, strikes most such Russians as preposterous effrontery, even if it is exactly what the overwhelming majority of Georgians want. Russia kept a military presence in Georgia, against the will of the republic’s authorities, until 2006, occasionally displaying military muscle in a show of force. But the real threat was not the demoralised and largely barracks-bound regular soldiers.

So far I have mainly dealt with the direct heirs to the KGB, the FSB domestic security agency and the SVR foreign-intelligence service. But in Georgia’s case, another organisation is at work: the GRU military-intelligence service.[23] Georgian officials term it the ‘most aggressive and destructive’ of Russia’s three spy services. With around 12,000 employees,7 the GRU has maintained unbroken institutional continuity since Leon Trotsky created it in 1918 (and it draws on a long tradition of Russian military espionage going back to Peter the Great). Even in Soviet times, the GRU’s motivation was more patriotism than communist ideology. Its officers tend to come from the provinces rather than Russia’s metropolises, from humbler backgrounds than the elite spies of the SVR, and nowadays from more honest ones than the cronies and thugs of the FSB. Partly as a result, the GRU tends to stay clear of the dodgy money-laundering schemes and commercial shenanigans beloved of its sister agencies: it will take part when operationally necessary, but not out of simple greed. It is hard, for example, to imagine a GRU officer being involved in the swindles that led to the death of Sergei Magnitsky. The agency is also less subject to political interference than the SVR: it is directly responsible only to the defence ministry, which shields it somewhat from the feuds and machinations at the top of Russian officialdom. But its senior officers and people close to it run into trouble if they stray into national politics.⁸

The GRU’s chief mission is to collect military information affecting Russian national security, especially plans, hardware and personnel moves. Those who watch it sometimes feel the agency is stuck in something of a time warp, with targets and tasking almost unchanged since Soviet times. GRU officers seem to assume that foreign countries have secret plans to attack Russia that must be uncovered. If they cannot be found, then the search must be intensified. GRU doctrine and methods have in the past been different too. It tends to go for the ‘quick hit’: overcoming a source’s reluctance, squeezing out his secrets and then dumping him, shutting him up with money, threats or worse. GRU officers are trained in the use of force and are quite capable of using it. In this sense, the GRU is quite different from counterpart organisations such as America’s Defense Intelligence Agency (part of the Pentagon) or Britain’s Defence Intelligence (which works out of the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall). These are chiefly focused on analysing information; when their staff members venture into the field, it is mainly as embassy-based attachés.

The GRU’s officers do work as military attachés too. But its role is much wider. Until the military reforms of 2009 it used to have responsibility for most of Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces – the equivalent of Britain’s SAS and SBS, or America’s Delta Force. It continues to have a special-operations capability. A small cadre of illegals are posted abroad, mainly to act as saboteurs in time of war. The agency also runs an extensive military counter-intelligence effort inside Russia; it is responsible for satellite reconnaissance (a comparable function to America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and also for military electronic information collection, such as snooping on NATO communications. The GRU’s officers are trained at the ‘Aquarium’ spy school and headquarters building in Moscow. In a sign of the agency’s prestige, in November 2006 Mr Putin formally opened the agency’s glitzy new building, on Narodnogo Opolchenia (People’s Militia Street) in the heart of Moscow. A sycophantic news report⁹ showed the indoor swimming pool (for training frogmen) a firing range, special windows incorporating anti-bugging technology and a hi-tech situation room.

The GRU has played a big role in Chechen counter-insurgency operations. A GRU operation killed the first president of the breakaway republic (a terrorist leader in Russian eyes), Jokar Dudayev. A missile blew him up when he unwisely emerged from hiding to make a call on his satellite telephone. Another high-profile killing was the car-bomb assassination of the exiled Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in the Qatari capital Doha in February 2004. This killed the Chechen leader and two bodyguards, as well as seriously injuring his 12-year-old son Daud. Shortly afterwards the infuriated Qatari authorities arrested three Russians (possibly because Russia’s foreign-intelligence agency, the SVR, which often has poor relations with the GRU, botched part of the follow-up). One of the arrested men, a first secretary at the Russian embassy named Aleksandr Fetisov, was released shortly afterwards either because of his diplomatic immunity, or possibly in exchange for two Qatari wrestlers arrested on trumped-up charges while in transit at Moscow airport. The other two men were identified as GRU agents, Anatoly Yablochkov and Vasily Pugachev. Both men received emphatic public support from Russian officials; their defence attorney was Nikolai Yegorov, a friend and former university classmate of Vladimir Putin. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, but were extradited to Russia in December to serve their sentence there. On arrival, they received a hero’s welcome and disappeared from public view. The Russian authorities said that the Qatari sentence was ‘not relevant’.

Many Russians see the Chechen fighters as mere bandits and welcomed these operations. For Western countries worried about global jihadist violence, the nuances of Chechen insurrectionist politics paled against the need to maintain solidarity between big countries in counter-terrorism. But the GRU’s operations in Georgia are quite different. They are directed against a country that has not attacked Russia. Its only crime is to see its history and future differently. The GRU armed and trained Abkhaz and South Ossetian forces that resisted Georgian independence in the early 1990s. The reluctance was understandable: Georgia’s ethnonationalist leadership at the time made little effort to accommodate the views of the country’s minorities. But the Abkhaz and Ossetian separatist militias also perpetrated ethnic cleansing against people in their territories, mainly Georgians, who disagreed.

After those civil wars ended in uneasy truces, many in Moscow assumed that Georgia could be maintained as a weak and pliant neighbour. History proved otherwise. Georgia stabilised under the rule of Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister, and then accelerated its reforms under the leadership of the American-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. Seen (perhaps rather romantically) as a lone outpost of Atlanticist sentiments in the region, and (hard-headedly) as a vital part of plans to bring oil and gas from the Caspian and Central Asian regions to world markets, Georgia benefited from a huge CIA and Pentagon aid programme. Georgian intelligence and security officers received fast-track training in the United States and in other NATO allied countries. The Georgian military received subsidised or donated equipment, ranging from sophisticated battlefield radios to portable anti-aircraft missiles (provided secretly by Poland in 2007).¹⁰ The hope was to make Georgia a bastion of Western influence on Russia’s southern flank. But in the rivalry between the GRU and its adversaries, the Russian side has so far been the winner.

The biggest disaster for the West was the war of August 2008. The aim of foreign assistance to Georgia had been to make a conflict less likely, by calming and reassuring the Georgian leadership in the face of escalating military provocations from Russia. Instead, it produced the opposite result. Georgian politicians wildly overestimated both their own military strength and Western support. This was a colossal intelligence failure. NATO countries failed to read Russia’s intentions, and the way that their Georgian protégés would behave under pressure. Intelligence officers in the region reported the increasingly dangerous situation regularly and accurately to their controllers. But analysts blurred or misinterpreted those reports, controllers failed to pass them on with sufficient urgency, and the services’ political masters failed to appreciate the implications of what they were being told. That the whole affair happened when many top decision makers were on holiday did not help. A particularly striking and systemic failure was in America’s CIA. The small analysis division dealing with Russia has attracted particular criticism (belatedly) from its ‘customers’ elsewhere in the US government for interpreting raw intelligence in a framework that took great account of Russian sensitivities, fears and interests, but discounted other interpretations.

The American, British and Estonian training of Georgian human and electronic intelligence resources created structures that still lacked the clout and insight to interpret or influence events adequately. Decision-making circles were thoroughly penetrated, certainly by electronic means and possibly through the use of witting traitors or unwitting intelligence assets, recruited and run under the noses of the agencies responsible for security. Russia knew what Georgia knew, and how Georgia would react. It was therefore able to provoke the Georgian leadership successfully into attacking the breakaway province of South Ossetia, in the belief that a short victorious war would topple the separatist regime there and forestall a Russian troop build-up that the Tbilisi authorities believed was a prelude to a full-scale and potentially devastating military offensive.

That proved a disastrous miscalculation. Russia counterattacked, and the expensively equipped Georgian forces performed, for the most part, poorly (though to be fair the best part of the armed forces were in Iraq, or on leave having just returned from duty there). Command and control broke down. Expensive battlefield radios didn’t work (leaving officers to communicate by insecure personal mobile phones). The reserve forces fared particularly poorly.¹¹ Russia’s victory owed more to weight of numbers than to military prowess. But it was a triumph for the Russian intelligence agencies, which had a startlingly clear picture of events on the Western side. In one revealing cameo, telephones at a major NATO military facility in Europe became unusable: the NATO Office of Security (NOS) was aware that they were penetrated, but was unable to take immediate countermeasures. Officials instead had to use their personal mobile phones (which may have been even less secure than the landlines). Russia knew to a high degree of certainty that America would not go to war to defend a friendly country that was under attack; it also knew that the European Union was in no state to act as a decisive, well-informed mediator. It was able to follow in detail the zigzag diplomacy of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the evolution of the amateurishly imprecise ceasefire document that he finally produced with a triumphant flourish on 13 August.

Since the war, many in the West have come to see Georgia as a faraway country of which they never knew much and would now like to know less. Certainly Mr Saakashvili’s erratic behaviour in the run-up to the war in 2008 did little to boost his country’s credibility. It will be a long time before any NATO country’s spymaster sticks his neck out on behalf of a Georgian leadership that has gained a reputation for chaos and unreliability. Politicians in the EU and America still maintain rhetorical support for Georgia’s territorial integrity, but have produced scant support in practical terms. Foreign assistance efforts in Georgia have wound down, as have Georgian efforts to meet Western concerns about the rule of law and political pluralism.

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.¹² The 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.¹³ This 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.