Deception

⁵ Spycraft: Fact and Fiction

Spies break rules for governments that try to enforce them. In this contradiction lies the fascination of the espionage world and also its greatest weakness.[24] Espionage involves breaking laws, perhaps of your own country, more often of its allies and certainly in the country being spied upon. The reason is simple. Secret information may come through deduction and inference, or from exploiting the other side’s carelessness by bluff and subterfuge. But the blunt fact is that for the most part secrets must be stolen. This means instigating treachery, using bribery, burglary, blackmail or outright violence as necessary. That is a long way from the normal tasks expected of a public servant. It attracts a certain kind of person, often flawed or troubled, and shapes them to its needs, to the point that deceit arouses not repugnance, but professional curiosity and admiration. Before looking at the battlefield of the East–West spy wars, it is necessary to understand the mentality, training and selection of the soldiers.

The first quality of a good spy is to shun and shed the social mores that hamper deceiving, cheating and manipulating people. An early exercise during IONEC (the six-month ‘Intelligence Officers New Entry Course’) at Britain’s Fort Monckton spy school on England’s south coast is to gain as much personal information as possible from people in a pub: a prize goes to anyone who obtains passport details. A second is to borrow money from strangers. Some well brought-up trainees find this so demeaning that they quit. Other agencies use similar training games. Israel’s Mossad sets recruits the task of inveigling entry into a stranger’s apartment and appearing on the balcony drinking a glass of water; watchers in a car park below will see who succeeds. Spying is a job for the nosy and devious, not the shy and the scrupulous.

If moral ambiguity is part of the lure, another element is the glamour of secrecy. Nobody cares how and where the government trains its tax inspectors; but the location and topography of Fort Monckton, the names of the courses and their content are secrets.[25] Outsiders catch only fleeting glimpses of life in the shadows, usually in carefully sanitised form. Secrecy and flawed fictional depictions fuel misperceptions. These would not matter were spying a branch of government service with limited relevance to the outside world, such as drafting fire regulations. But espionage is connected directly into nations’ most vital interests and their most ruthless pursuit. Those wanting insights into complicated geopolitical competition in finance, law or diplomacy are more likely to read the Economist than a novel. But concerning the no less intricate world of espionage, every cinemagoer and novel-reader has a (usually mistaken) impression of life in the shadows. This is one reason that the arrest of the ten Russian spies in America in June 2010 attracted such ill-informed commentary.

Drama and suspense require that fictional spies swing into action at a second’s notice, rather than wasting time writing operational plans and worrying about overspending their budgets. They are untroubled by the nagging concerns of counter-intelligence: the weaknesses – human, financial, bureaucratic, operational and technical – that an enemy could exploit. Routine and discipline are the tiresome exception, not the mundane rule. Equipment appears as if by magic and always works. These exciting exploits bear as little relation to real espionage as Star Wars does to astrophysics. Though spies such as le Carré’s cerebral George Smiley do exist, in real-life espionage brain-boxes are as rare as sex-gods. Real intelligence officers – as the professional employees of state spy agencies are called – generally do not know how to pick locks, steal cars, create explosive devices from household chemicals or disable an assailant with a single punch.¹ They hate standing out in a crowd, don’t wear flashy clothes and certainly don’t flirt. Their job is to get unnoticed from A to B, to perform task C and return. Scriptwriters would find that rather dry.

Moreover few intelligence officers steal secrets directly: it is too hard to get the right access, and too risky to exploit it when gained. Their main role is recruiting others to do the dirty work. Here the real talent kicks in: successful spies tend to be good at dealing with people – unobtrusively, imaginatively and persuasively. They could easily be executive coaches, psychotherapists, salesmen, confidence tricksters or (scraping the barrel) journalists. Their job is to extract information and consent by concocting and administering the right cocktail of pressure, ideology, flattery and money.

Each ingredient has its drawbacks. Blackmail can be a jolt that offers an opening for other, more durable means of persuasion; but the resentment it creates limits its usefulness. The victim twists and turns in his mind, desperately seeking a way out – which may be suicide, flight or confession, not treason. Blackmail works best when it comes from a third party, with the intelligence officer appearing as a friend, brokering a deal that involves betraying (initially minor) secrets. Ideology plays a diminished role but can also be useful. A Russian intelligence officer may play on anti-Americanism (most often in allied countries, but sometimes even in the United States). Western recruiters have used Russians’ dislike of the regime’s authoritarian crony capitalism. Flattery is the most potent technique. A friendly voice passing favourable judgement on work overlooked by an unappreciative boss is one of the most formidable weapons in the intelligence officer’s arsenal, particularly when dealing with a ‘developmental’ agent: one who is on the road to treachery, but not yet arrived. When and if the real nature of the clandestine relationship becomes clear, flattery can be crystallised in the form of a rank or a medal.

A final complementing ingredient is money. This can be paid as ‘expenses’ or ‘salary’, whichever seems less demeaning. (Many of the biggest traitors, from Britain’s Kim Philby to Estonia’s Herman Simm, have insisted that they were not mere turncoats but the other side’s employees.) Money on its own has its limits though: it buys information, but not loyalty. The sneaking suspicion in any intelligence relationship based chiefly on cash is that if a higher bidder comes along, the first customer can easily come last. A taste for treachery is often accompanied by a fast-growing appetite.[26] Praise a source for what he does and he demands more. Criticise him and he will say that he needs to take still greater risks – and demands more. Recruiting an agent from an impenetrable country such as North Korea is even harder; he may demand a huge sum of money for making any contact at all, and then disappear. Has he been caught? Has he simply disappeared to Brazil to enjoy life at your expense? Was the whole thing a dangle designed to boost the other side’s operational funds? You will never know.

The rules that hamper terrorists and money-launderers have also hit espionage. Opening an anonymous bank account in Vienna, accessed perhaps with a password, or by presenting half a torn postcard (the bank had the other half and would simply check that they fitted), was easy thirty years ago. Now banks are supposed to ‘know their customers’. In clandestine work, even a passport or home electricity bill requires forgery; creating a credit history that will stand up to checking is a serious nuisance. These hassles are potentially lethal. Imagine that you are a North Korean official in Vienna, who is considering selling some secrets. Your home is subject to regular searches by your fearsome State Security Department. If they get suspicious, you go home to eat grass in one labour camp while your wife gnaws tree bark in another. If you are paid in wads of €500 notes and keep them in a bank safety deposit box, you not only miss out on the interest: if you survive long enough to get the money out, you will find that large quantities of cash, gained from an undisclosable source, are more of a problem than a delight.

Some spy agencies therefore run a notional bank account for a source, letting interest build up on the ‘salary’. Assuming the agent reaches retirement, the money is a nest egg for his new life. This also avoids the danger of conspicuous consumption, which can easily attract unwelcome interest. Another trick is to pay agents in rare stamps. These are easily portable, highly concealable, readily exchanged into cash – and leave no trace. Other means include gambling chips from casinos, especially from chains that allow them to be exchanged for cash in any one of several countries. Keeping intelligence officers themselves supplied with money is tricky too. Those working under alias need credit cards that will withstand a credit check. But they may also need to make or receive payments that leave no electronic trace. Here the kind of dodgy money-transfer company that Ms Chapman seems to have been associated with during her time in London (which I describe in the next chapter) can come in useful. Also handy are prepaid debit cards that can be topped up with cash. These featured in the contents of the Boston home of two other spies, ‘Donald Heathfield’ and his wife, listed in the search warrant obtained by the FBI.²

Good spies are not only manipulative and ingenious; they also need good memory skills: when writing things down is dangerous, the easy and accurate recall of number plates, phone numbers, map references and passwords is vital. Spies are naturally inquisitive, and pedantic when it comes to facts, figures, times and dates. They have good Thespian skills, being able to think themselves deeply and convincingly, like a Stanislavski-trained actor, into someone else’s character. All these qualities, however, do not eliminate the paradoxes of spying: first, that using secretly obtained information necessarily endangers its source; second, that systematic attempts to be inconspicuous risk being noticed; and third, that the sort of people who deal in broken promises are unlikely to be good at keeping them.

For those running spy agencies the last of these is the worst. The people most drawn to the shadows are often those people most unsuited to working there. Though some spy for noble or intellectual reasons, for others their motivation is part of the problem, not its solution. The lucrative opportunities that the private sector offers ex-spies can erode loyalties, especially in later years as the job market looms. Those with a philosophical or mystical bent sometimes feel themselves to be part of a lay priesthood, armed with the powers of the curse and the confessional. This can shade into weirdness. Espionage also attracts those obsessed by secrecy for its own sake, and, most lethally, those for whom betrayal is a tantalising extra thrill. Breaking the other side’s rules brings a buzz; sidestepping your own team’s a bigger one. The more adept you are in the dark arts, the more tempting it is to use them widely. At a harmless level, that can involve simply fiddling expense accounts, charging meals and taxis to operational funds. It can mean bending the rules to do a pal a favour. It also invites sexual shenanigans. Spies only rarely use bedroom arts in pursuit of official business: their bosses usually veto such plans, wisely fearing that emotions may impinge on the operation. Outside work, intelligence officers are often formidable adulterers and fornicators – they know all too well how to cover tracks and avoid suspicion. In a life constrained by rules and routines, the temptation to throw over the traces can be huge. Betraying spouses can be a step to betraying secrets.

Regular counter-intelligence screening can uncover suspicious patterns of behaviour, or anomalies in the subject’s private life. But the more senior and experienced the subject of scrutiny, the harder it is to trip him up – and the more damage he can do. Aleksandr Poteyev, the American agent at the heart of Russian intelligence who betrayed Ms Chapman and her colleagues, had apparently escaped routine lie-detector tests by virtue of seniority and good connections. Spies are necessarily practised and skilful in fending off unwelcome questions and concealing their real intentions and feelings. The endemic duplicity of the profession makes it hard to deliver sincere praise or to appreciate it.

The mutual dislike that often exists between spies and spy-catchers poses a further problem. Counter-intelligence officers tend to be suspicious, methodical types who like every fact to be nailed down and distrust flair, initiative or anything irregular. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that they see their field-officer colleagues as a self-indulgent menace to security. For their part, the active spies are at heart intuitive rule-breakers with a strong sense of the rightness of their own judgement. They think the spycatchers’ silly rules hamper the chance of doing any real work. (This is one reason why his former colleagues from the elite foreign-espionage division of the KGB detest Mr Putin, who was a lowly counter-intelligence officer during his time in Germany.) The rivalry can be debilitating. When agencies such as the FBI or Britain’s Security Service scent a spy on their turf, their priority is to arrest him to protect the nation’s secrets. When the CIA or SIS (the official title of MI6) finds one, their instinct is to watch, not pounce. The longer the game, the more they learn about the other side’s methods and sources, and the greater the chance of a successful ruse – recruiting the traitor as a double agent, feeding disinformation to the other side, or trying to flush out his case officer or controller.

The constant aim of intelligence work is to provide otherwise unobtainable information to policymakers. But spy agencies vary in size, techniques, susceptibility to political interference and most of all effectiveness. A good index of excellence is discretion: crudely, the lower the profile, the greater the success. Sweden’s Kontoret för särskild inhämtning (Office of Special Collection) is a clear winner. It has no published street address, let alone a website.³ Another variable is necessity. Countries facing an existential threat tend to take their security seriously. Those that don’t (Belgium springs to mind) see it as a low priority. Poor countries find it hard to keep their spy services honest, as the rewards for misbehaviour are proportionately greater for those on low salaries. Spookish meddling in public life is a big problem in many ex-communist countries, where compromising information is political currency. An agency’s ability to bug politicians’ telephones can easily divert its attention from threats to the national interest.

The essential elements of espionage everywhere – boredom, deceit, secrecy and ambition – are an inherently toxic compound. The success or failure of a spy service depends on its ability to mitigate the negative effects of this compound, through selection, training, morale, discipline, scrutiny, and procedure. For all the high stakes and sharp wits, the biggest part of espionage is therefore meticulous, careful work; it can even be rather dull. The focus on routine also reflects the paradox that the most successful breaches of a rule are unmarked. A truly successful operation goes unnoticed by everyone but those who ran it. Every trace left restricts future options and increases the risk of the other side limiting the damage, taking countermeasures and tracking down sources. The hallmarks of successful spying are pedantic planning, plentiful patience, prudent precautions, and most of all invisibility.

The risks sharpen the focus. Officialdom often wastes public money. Errors in espionage mean not just unwanted buildings or ill-conceived regulations but deep damage and ruined lives. Treason bears heavy criminal penalties. In most operations, therefore, the human costs of failure outweigh the benefits of success. The resulting caution is in constant tension with the central means of espionage – rule breaking – yet it is vital that it does not overwhelm it. An intelligence officer who flinches at this might as well be a diplomat.

Imagine, for example, that you are a spymaster considering a potential source – someone, perhaps, like Sergei Skripal, a Russian intelligence officer who for many years passed his country’s secrets to Britain. If your service successfully recruits and runs him, your country gains invaluable information about Russia’s military capabilities and intentions, about its decision-making processes, about the weaknesses and strengths of its security procedures, about its intelligence-gathering efforts abroad, and much more besides. Your country is better informed and safer. Your taxpayers have got value for money. Your political masters will be pleased. Your career will flourish. But your source, if caught, is likely to end his days in a hard labour regime camp somewhere near the Arctic Circle (Mr Skripal was sentenced to thirteen years in 2006; he was one of the four prisoners that Russia swapped for Ms Chapman and her colleagues).⁴

The danger can be even greater. If your operation in China, Iran or Syria is blown, your source faces not just prison, but death, perhaps by torture. For their induction into the Soviet GRU military intelligence service, recruits were shown a film of the fate awaiting those who betrayed its secrets (the account comes from a defector who was undeterred). It showed a man, gagged and wired to a steel stretcher, being trundled to the door of a furnace prior to being burned alive:

To save a source from such a fate means a lot of dull errands. Go to the Hotel Sheraton in Kiev and leave this envelope at reception to be collected by Mr Brown. Go to the DHL office in Riga and pay cash for the delivery of this envelope to a Mr Smith in Dublin. Go to a bank in Helsinki, leave one package in a safe-deposit box and collect another. Buy a coffee and read a newspaper in the glass-walled metro station at Moscow’s Sparrow Hills between eleven and twelve every Saturday, wearing a red scarf. That is a signal to Mr Skripal (en route to his regular sports club) that everything is all right. If he is wearing a hat, he’s OK too.

The precautions are necessary because of the time-consuming yet vital assumption that the other side may be watching. Most messages can be exchanged via brush contacts or dead-letter boxes. A memory card the size of a fingernail can carry gigabytes of data, though any non-specialist examining it will find only some anodyne tourist snaps. Mr Skripal can wrap it in chewing gum and stick it to a park bench, or to the side of his seat during his regular Sunday night cinema trip – having first made sure he is sitting next to a woman with a white shirt and red scarf. Meetings are rare and preferably in third countries. Spycatchers suspicious of Mr Skripal see only normal life in Moscow, and harmless recreation elsewhere: an overnight trip to a football match in, say, Kiev. Even detailed scrutiny of the CCTV recordings in his hotel there will not reveal the meeting that took place in its penthouse suite, with a case officer who rented it in the guise of a foreign businessman.

Another Russian source might take his holidays in Vienna, and have a long-standing interest in the Central Cemetery. Its 250 hectares[27] feature interesting graves from Freud to Mozart. It has another advantage from an espionage point of view: the long paths and clear sightlines give plenty of opportunity to see if anyone is watching. Assuming all is clear, he can be picked up by a scruffy van parked in some remote corner of the grounds. Inside are comfortable chairs, a bottle of vodka, and a case officer eager to debrief him. Half an hour later, he is wandering round the cemetery again. Spycatchers’ resources are finite: if scrutiny reveals nothing, then they turn to something more promising.

Such elaborate precautions are costly and make sense only for the most highly placed source. Yet if anything goes wrong, he ends up rotting in a labour camp. Every stage needs to be hammered out in advance. Can that hotel penthouse in Kiev be dependably booked in advance? Can the source plausibly stay there on his official salary? Where exactly are the CCTV blind spots? Who will make the reservation? How will the bill be paid? Will the credit card be traceable? What passport will be used? Who will sweep the room for bugs? Each new precaution creates a new difficulty and something else to go wrong. The ideal operation has as few moving parts as possible. It is better to rely on split-second timing, which practice and professionalism can perfect, than on elaborate schemes that are vulnerable to the unexpected.

Take the Vienna trip: what happens if it is pouring with rain? A dedicated grave-spotter may take a short damp walk to see a famous tomb, but not a long one. So what is the back-up plan? A nearby church? Is it always open? What if a service is happening? And how to communicate if the plans go awry? Sussing that out requires lots of legwork. The officers working on this team will know Vienna’s tourist attractions backwards by the time they have finished. Organising brush contacts, dead-letter boxes and signals in Moscow is even more difficult, and involves a stream of innocent-seeming bag men (and bag ladies), scarf-wearers and scouts who will turn up and run errands, dependably, punctually, and inconspicuously, right under the noses of the Russian FSB. Compounding the cost of all this is the need to avoid any recognisable pattern of behaviour. Too many visits to Vienna, or to Kiev, arouse attention. A dead-letter box is most secure when it is used sparingly, ideally only once. So the attrition rate is high. No sooner has an impressively guileful idea been worked out than it starts wearing out.

Such difficulties and precautions beset every stage of agent-running: identifying a potential source, softening him up (‘cultivation’ in spy-speak), presenting bluntly the offer of cooperation (‘pitching’); keeping him safe, motivated and productive (‘agent-running’), debriefing him (‘elicitation’) and when he is no more use standing him down (‘terminating him’). A promising source may be a ‘dangle’ – someone presented by the other side in the hope of flushing out some clues about the way you work. If a source is willing to betray his own country, his loyalty to the person who brokers the betrayal must also be questionable. Even if he starts off genuine, suppose he comes under pressure from the other side, and betrays you and your methods? Maybe he will prove a time-waster, just in search of easy money for old news? The adversary’s ‘wish-list’ is one of the most sought-after pieces of intelligence in the whole spy world. If you know what the other side does not know, you are in a good position to mislead them and to conceal your real secrets.

At a more trivial level, methods and tradecraft are vulnerable too. If a double agent reveals dead-letter boxes, his side can put them under observation in case another, unknown, agent is using them too. Who empties them? Maybe an embassy-based archivist or visa clerk not previously under suspicion as an intelligence officer. Then you have a new target. Giving a clever communications gadget to a newly recruited source can backfire. If he is caught or switches sides, anyone else using a similar device is at greater risk. A ‘walk-in’ who turns up at an embassy in a sensitive country demanding to speak to an intelligence officer can hardly be ignored. But even the initial vetting of such an approach is risky. Whoever meets the visitor may be being set up for embarrassment or expulsion. For someone based at an embassy in Moscow, this will mean a career-blighting departure to London, perhaps after first being humiliated in surreptitiously filmed clips broadcast on the evening television news.⁶

The spotlight also endangers all a case officer’s previous contacts and operations. Marc Doe, a British official based at the embassy in Moscow who was exposed in the Russian media after a bungled operation, turned out to have a diplomatic cover job that involved channelling embassy funds to human-rights organisations long denounced as fronts for Western interests by the Russian authorities.⁷ That was an excruciating blunder. For these hard-pressed and vulnerable outfits, the furore weakened their defence.

But the greatest risk remains recruiting the wrong person. Sign up the wrong source and you will give away far more than you gain. Hire someone with a fragile ego and a short temper and you risk a major security breach. The case of Richard Tomlinson, a renegade British spy who published a book in Russia about his recruitment, training and quarrels with his bosses, has been costly and damaging for Britain’s intelligence agencies and their foreign partner services.⁸

In past decades the most formidable spies on both sides were ‘illegals’ – sent on long-term clandestine assignments, using stolen or fake identities, and without the benefit of diplomatic cover. One of them was Sir Paul Dukes, described in chapter 8, whose work under the noses of the Bolsheviks in the years following the Russian revolution makes him probably the most brilliant spy in the history of MI6. But after the debacles of the 1940s (of which more later) Western countries stopped trying to send agents to live undercover behind the Iron Curtain: the difficulty of creating sufficiently credible false identities for people to function inside a closed totalitarian society was just too great. The KGB and other services, however, made great efforts to send their agents to the West, sometimes for lifetime assignments. Some of the agents unearthed in June 2010 were just this kind of classic ‘illegal’. Such spies are formidably expensive. By Russian estimates, creating an illegal identity costs around $1m per head. Still, even if they do nothing for decades, they may, in the right place at the right time, justify their mission. An extreme case is for a military-intelligence agency wishing to acquire a special-operations capability in the event of war. Simply establishing the illegals deep behind enemy lines will be well worth it when it comes to the outbreak of war (‘Day X’ in Soviet parlance) when invisible sabotage capability is priceless. In peacetime they can be vitally useful too, even when they do little or no actual spying themselves.

To understand why, imagine that you are a Russian intelligence officer working under diplomatic cover, tasked with gaining information about the British Parliament, or America’s Congress. You have hundreds of potential targets: lawmakers, their staffers, even cleaners and technicians. But you are an obvious subject for surveillance. Your every meeting and every move carry a risk. You simply cannot afford to hang around in the bars of Westminster or Capitol Hill, chatting people up. Eventually even the most over-worked or demoralised counter-intelligence officers will notice you. So you need eyes and ears in the circles you wish to infiltrate, someone to spot people with access to the information you need, to identify their weaknesses (financial, sexual, psychological or political) and to cultivate them. A journalist, lobbyist or think-tank researcher would be ideal. You cannot play that role, but an illegal can.

If a potential source has strong convictions, an illegal can help turn loyalty to treachery with a ‘false flag’ operation. A standard KGB task in the past, for example, was to find out how East European émigrés were supporting dissident movements in the homeland. A good approach was to pose as an ardent anti-communist, representing a bunch of wealthy donors (preferably based in a faraway country) wanting to target their support effectively. Such a person, eager to gain ‘analysis’ of the real situation, could credibly pay expenses and stipends to those who kept him informed. This still works today. If you are targeting left-wingers, pretend to be from Cuba; if you want to recruit Muslims, a claimed link with the Palestinian cause will do the trick. If the target is Jewish, or a conservative Christian sympathetic to Israel, say that you are working for Mossad. For an embassy-based intelligence officer to assume such an identity is complicated and risky. An illegal can adopt it more convincingly. For the target, checking the authenticity of such an approach is tricky to impossible: how can, say, a Polish expatriate working in an energy company know if the friendly compatriot enquiring about the workings of the gas market is really an undercover officer of his country’s Agencja Wywiadu (foreign intelligence service) as he claims? He may be a Russian illegal, or working for the Saudis or Chinese. How to check?

Illegals can also help funnel funds from the buyer to the seller of secrets. But they cannot help with, and indeed are part of, a bigger problem: getting value for the money paid. A hint of this comes from the published fragments of intercepted communications between ‘Moscow centre’ – the headquarters of Russian espionage – and two of its illegals in America. The bosses are tut-tutting about the house lived in by ‘Cynthia and Richard Murphy’: does it belong to them (which would fit their cover story)? Or is it really the property of the Russian state? It is easy for each end to feel cheated by the other: the illegals regard everything they spend as a claimable expense. They are in effect doing two jobs: their cover profession and real spying. It is quite fair that the motherland should subsidise their property, cars or children’s education. For their part, spymasters worry that operational funds are dribbling away into peripheral expenses, padding further a lifestyle that for most Russians would already seem unimaginably pampered and pleasant.

Illegals are also useful in the humblest parts of spying. Joe Navarro, a twenty-five-year veteran of FBI counter-intelligence, points out that one of their functions is simply to acquire legal documents such as a passport, driver’s licence, university ID card or utility bills that can then be used as the basis for future forgeries. He describes illegals as like cancer: they have usually done their worst by the time they are detected. No electronic intercept or embassy-based spy can gain access to things that an illegal living as an average American can manage:

For a service with the money and patience to run them, illegals clearly have many uses. They present one of the trickiest problems in the counter-intelligence universe. Whatever they do or don’t do, they are certainly no laughing matter. The real question is whether they justify their costs. From a Western perspective now, the answer is ‘usually not’. It makes more sense to use lots of disposable junior intelligence officers working under light cover than to concentrate resources on a small number of costly assets with elaborate cover stories. The classic work on this is a declassified CIA study called Principles of Deep Cover by a long-dead intelligence officer who used the pseudonym C.D. Edbrook.¹⁰ He writes:

The danger of distraction is clear: Edbrook’s paper cites a CIA agent who spent four years building a cover story by attending a university in order to gain a job as a salesman in a particular target area. He then lost interest and resigned. This certainly seems to have been the case with some of the Soviet-era illegals sent to America on long-term deep-cover missions during the Cold War. Eventually unearthed thanks to the Mitrokhin archive, they proved to have done very little or no spying, and in some cases had lost contact largely or wholly with their controllers. Edbrook continues:

Thinking in the spy world has moved on a bit since this, exploiting the increasingly blurred boundaries between government service and life outside. Thomas Patrick Carroll, a former American intelligence officer turned academic and security consultant, has coined the term ‘natural capacity’ for a kind of spying which is self-financing, ubiquitous and effective. He posits the following scenario: America wishes to know about the people, materials, finances and political associations of an international airport in the Middle East. The traditional approach would be to post intelligence officers, probably under official cover as diplomats, to recruit the necessary sources. Under ‘natural capacity’ the CIA would have at the airport an authentic, profitable private firm, backed by real investors. It could survive any amount of scrutiny, and would provide anything that policymakers needed to know about the airport. ‘Natural capacity’ could also include a mining company searching for mineral deposits in Afghanistan, or an NGO[29] providing mobile hospital services with access to remote parts of the Philippines where extremists lurk.¹¹

Mr Carroll’s speculative account of a desirable future for American intelligence sounds uncannily like the way that Russia behaves already. Its energy companies, banks and other commercial, journalistic and academic outfits give it ‘natural capacity’ of a kind that British or American spymasters for now can only dream of. Ms Chapman’s hybrid identity in the West – genuine in every respect but her intentions – fits into that well. But Russia’s spymasters have also shown they can use human and financial resources the old-fashioned way, by running deep-cover illegals. It is hard to see how Western services can match that, even if they wanted to. For a couple plucked from Tomsk in the 1980s Soviet Union, a move to the West under an illegal identity probably seemed like a good career move – and so it must have appeared to the illegal ‘Donald Heathfield’ and his wife Ann Foley, who were originally from Tomsk but who spent twenty years living undercover in the West. The other way round looks less attractive. It is hard to imagine the CIA recruiting two able graduate students in Wisconsin or Kansas for a twenty-year mission living undercover in Siberia. Yet the fact that something is illogical or undesirable from a Western point of view does not mean that a Russian decision-maker would see the issue in the same way. Blessed by natural abundance, and with Soviet-style thinking still lurking in the background, Russia tends towards extravagant use of resources of all kinds.

The illegals’ controllers in Moscow may well have been wasteful in using their assets’ costly and carefully designed cover. One of the illegals in America, ‘Cynthia Murphy’, was asked to collect information about the world gold market. Any competent trader or banker in Moscow could have done that without needing any clandestine cover. Decision-makers in all countries tend to overestimate the value of secret information, Russians more than most. It may well be that these illegals wasted time satisfying their masters’ fetish for material marked ‘secret’, which in fact contained little that was not available from open sources.

Amused complacency, however, is not the media’s usual response to, say, the leak of toxic industrial waste. Even if the discharge does not prove damaging, it focuses attention on the physical or procedural flaws that caused it. The arrest of the illegals showed that American public life was wide open to penetration and that Russia has put substantial resources over many years into trying to exploit that weakness. Why was nobody worried? A big reason was the FBI’s clever news management. It is often said that spies like the shadows. But like any outfit dependent on taxpayers’ money and politicians’ willingness to spend it, intelligence and security services pay careful attention to their image: in their case as mysterious, austere and self-sacrificing guardians of the ultimate national interest. Though they do not hold press conferences or run advertising campaigns, they use nudges and winks, discreet briefings of selected journalists deemed ‘sound’; and the occasional release of carefully honed material to the wider public.

This clashes with an operational need: to mislead the other side. Crowing about successes risks endangering sources and methods. Keeping silent about them risks giving an impression of idleness and incompetence. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (the official label for MI6) was thrilled to have smuggled Mr Gordievsky to Finland. The temptation to show off a brilliant piece of tradecraft was great. But once you explain how a diplomatic car picked up your fugitive from a remote rural bus stop and took him across the border in a heat-insulated baggage compartment, you will be less likely to pull the trick off again. The same principles apply to disasters. If you are penetrated or betrayed, then owning up to the damage risks giving the other side some clues about what they achieved – and failed to achieve. Some spy services never prosecute traitors for just this reason. Those who are caught are quietly retired or shifted to other jobs, leaving the other side guessing whether their asset was blown, or was just the victim of a random bureaucratic shuffle.

It is against this background that all the public information relating to the detained illegals such as Ms Chapman must be judged. The American authorities weighed every line of the criminal complaints they issued against the arrested spies. Clearly, it was necessary to provide enough information to crack the defence of those arrested, leading to an immediate admission of guilt. The American authorities did not want to risk a trial in which FBI agents could have been subject to embarrassing and potentially damaging cross-examination about sources and methods. Another priority was to cause maximum annoyance and confusion to the Russian side, chiefly by making the ‘damage control’ effort as painful, costly and disruptive as possible. That meant overstating what the American side didn’t know, and understating what it did. In the world of mirrors and mind-games, planting doubts is a powerful offensive weapon. Exaggerating the time during which the spies were under surveillance, for example, discredits everything they did in their bosses’ eyes. A cardinal principle of intelligence work is that anything provided by a compromised source must itself be considered as compromised. The farther back in history that the taint goes, the bigger is the area of contamination. Similarly, the Americans may not have succeeded in intercepting and decoding everything sent from Ms Chapman’s laptop.[30] But the Russians cannot be sure. If burst transmissions over ad-hoc networks between nearby laptops are hard to monitor then it would be a neat counter-measure to mention them frequently in the criminal complaint. It will be a bold Russian spy who includes them in his operational planning in future. A correctly concocted mixture of overstatement and ambiguity will cast a corrosive cloud over Russian intelligence operations for years.

It is also necessary to understate some bits of a successful operation. If the key to cracking the spy ring was a flaw in Russian tradecraft, it would be a mistake to highlight it: after all, the other side may make the same mistake again. If the vulnerability came from code cracking, that too must be concealed. If the clues came from a penetration agent in Moscow, his welfare must be weighed against the need to curb or catch the spies he has betrayed. Is he so valuable, and will he be at such great risk, that he must be exfiltrated before the spycatchers pounce on their quarry or limit his activities? Protecting him may set off alarm bells and send the hostile agents scurrying into hiding. The spycatchers’ nightmare is a failure on all fronts: damage done, the horse bolted, and nothing gained.

America’s criminal complaints against the illegals were nicely balanced. They trumpeted the Bureau’s success, humiliated the Russian side, but gave away rather little about sources and methods. It is not clear, for example, how the FBI obtained the ‘was it in Beijing?’ code word that one of its agents used to gain the confidence of Mikhail Semenko, a Russian working under his own name in Washington DC. They put heavy emphasis on traditional surveillance: bugging phones, entering premises with a search warrant, looking at safety-deposit boxes. That the FBI can do that will surprise nobody. They highlight what look like some bad mistakes in the Russians’ tradecraft. Donald Heathfield’s wife had a photographic negative in a safety deposit box that bore a Russian brand name, Tasma (TACMA in Cyrillic). For someone purporting, as she did, to be a Canadian real estate agent, that was a huge breach in a cover story. Another of the illegals is said to have written a vital email password on a bit of paper next to a computer, which was noted by FBI agents during a clandestine visit to the apartment. If these blunders indeed happened, those in the Russian intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo responsible for training illegals will be unpleasantly surprised.[31] But the FBI may have exaggerated or misleadingly portrayed the slip-ups. During their debriefing sessions the agents may deny having made these errors. Ideally, both their competence and their loyalty will be questioned.

The complaints published by the American authorities are also interesting for what they do not say. They do not give any detailed account of the illegals’ tasking: what were they really trying to do, and how? The overall instruction is to create convincing cover stories: but for what purpose? Heathfield is said to have tried to find out about America’s bunker-busting bombs. The complaint alludes indirectly to his attempts to befriend Leon Fuerth, a former senior administration official, and to contacts between ‘Cynthia Murphy’ and a Democratic Party bigwig (which I cover in more detail in the next chapter). The reader learns a lot – perhaps a surprising amount for those unused to the spy world – about the mechanics of spying: the cover stories, the foreign travel, the code words and the use of laptops. He learns very little about the substance.

The official explanation is that the Russian illegals indeed failed to make any real headway in America. They consumed much of Moscow’s money and time, but succeeded only in infiltrating suburbia. A neat twist in this portrayal is that even this bit of the Russians’ mission looks unsuccessful. They may have deceived their neighbours, but from the very beginning they were under the eagle-eyed scrutiny of the FBI. Nobody in America needs to feel embarrassed, because no secrets were stolen. That is comforting but not wholly plausible. For a start, the idea that the FBI and its overseas partner agencies would manage (or want) to keep ten people, some of them seasoned intelligence officers, under constant surveillance in multiple countries for a period of many years is fanciful. Even for a well-funded US government agency, the cost in time and money would be colossal. More to the point, it would be risky: a small slip-up would set alarm bells ringing in Moscow and quite possibly lead to the quarry vanishing. It is more likely that only some were under long-term surveillance and that even this was not constant. It is probable that all ten came under complete observation only at the end.

Establishing assets able to move easily in a hostile environment is in itself a major achievement for an intelligence service. Whether they were spotting potential recruitment targets, collecting information, or servicing other agents, the illegals’ activities cannot be regarded as harmless or benign. As I show later, even the junior Ms Chapman had previously helped out with a questionable money-transfer operation, involving apparent identity theft and other shenanigans. It is hard to believe that all her counterparts in America were less active. She and Mikhail Semenko were regularly conducting secret communications with Russian intelligence officers. It is unlikely that they were merely exchanging test transmissions or remarks about the weather.

Another factor that may have sanitised the FBI’s account of the illegals’ activities is the political climate. Anybody who had fallen seriously into the clutches of one of these illegals would be unhappy to have the fact broadcast. Humiliating influential people by highlighting their cooperation with Russian espionage would be a mistake on almost any count. It would make unnecessary enemies – something that an agency with acute political antennae knows to avoid. It would raise the question of whether these individuals should be prosecuted, with all the embarrassment and unwelcome publicity involved. Nor would the FBI see any great need to make an example, assuming such people are dupes, not traitors. The Bureau could just identify the people acting as sources for the illegals and deliver a quiet but sorrowful warning, explaining that they were on a slippery slope that could have all too easily ended up in disgrace or jail. Such a conversation would almost certainly end with an admonition to discuss its content with nobody – a course of action strongly in the interests of both sides. In short: absence of evidence that the illegals were effective is not the same as evidence that they were not.

A second political dimension is US–Russian relations. As noted earlier, for all its shortcomings, the ‘reset’ is one of the few bits of Mr Obama’s foreign policy to have shown any sign of success. Although the White House could not ignore the FBI’s evidence of extensive and potentially damaging Russian espionage, it would be quite natural for the country’s political leaders to try to limit the wider diplomatic fallout by presenting the illegals as more comic than sinister. Were the public to believe that the spies had done serious harm to the nation’s interests, it would be a lot harder to explain why senior figures in the administration saw fit to hobnob so cordially with their Russian counterparts.

For all these reasons, the illegals’ arrest was presented to avoid any great sense of alarm or urgency. The message from background briefings was of patronising sorrow rather than anger: it was a pity that Russia still felt the need to play these strange old-fashioned games, both because of what it said about the thinking in Moscow and also because these fossilised spies – sad relics of the old days of superpower rivalry – had achieved so little. Yet as I show in the next chapter, the illegals’ activity in America and elsewhere gives no grounds for such complacency.