Ten people have appeared in a US court charged with spying for the Russians. So far, only one has admitted that they are undercover agents and one has disappeared from Cyprus in mysterious circumstances. Among the many questions that the case raises are these: What on earth were those people doing? Don’t they know the Cold War is over? Well — yes. The Russians do know the Cold War is over. But no one should be surprised that espionage is still going on, for the truth is that espionage never dies, Cold War or no Cold War. Countries want to know the secrets of their rivals and competitors, and Russia and the United States are certainly still rivals and competitors, even if the Russians no longer describe the Americans as ‘the Main Enemy’.
Russia still has a very large and well-resourced intelligence community. The successor organisations to the KGB is every bit as active as its predecessor. The names may have changed, but the practices haven’t. Today’s Russian agencies appear not even to draw the line at ‘wet jobs’, as assassinations are known in spy fiction: the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London more than three years ago appears to demonstrate that they are still willing to take extreme measures against individuals believed to be damaging to them.
Journalists have found it amusing that Russian spies are still using some of the old covert communication techniques — invisible ink, brush contacts and dead letter drops. If they are cleverly used, they are actually very hard to detect unless the person is already being watched.
The trouble with electronic methods of communication is that, once you transmit anything on any radio frequency, you run the risk that some listening station somewhere will tune in. This group appears to have been using a mixture of old and very new techniques, such as transmitting coded material from laptop to laptop, and steganography. Who knows which of these techniques, the old or the new, it was that first gave them away to the FBI.
Are the Russians up to the same sort of thing in Britain? You bet they are, if they think they can get away with it. MI5’s website notes that the number of Russian intelligence officers working in Britain is back to Cold War levels. And the Russians are not the only foreign power actively spying in Britain. MI5 also mentions the level of the Chinese espionage attack. They are particularly keen to hoover up designs and plans for new technological developments, partly to copy them and manufacture similar products of their own, which they could then sell back to us, and the rest of the world, more cheaply. The Chinese are also particularly good at hacking into computer systems, with the potential of attacking government computers by planting bugs — bugs that could be activated on command.
Countering the threat posed by espionage puts a considerable strain on our security services at a time when they also have to counter the much more immediate and potentially lethal danger of Islamic extremist terrorism. Espionage can pose serious dangers to the long-term interests of Britain — not just its economic interests, but its security interests as well.
What about political espionage? Is that still relevant in today’s post-Cold War world? There is the fact that if you go into a negotiation with a foreign state whose interests are opposed to yours, and the other side knows exactly what your bottom line is, what you are willing to compromise on, then you are, to put it mildly, at a considerable disadvantage.
Agreements between nations are always the result of negotiations. Each party would like to know the other’s strategy, and where their weaknesses lie. It means there is always a role for political espionage — and it also means that successful espionage by hostile foreign powers has the potential seriously to damage another nation’s interests.
In my experience, the Russians attach considerable importance to material obtained covertly, even if it doesn’t add much to what is freely available. I worked on counter-espionage during the Cold War. We used to watch Russian intelligence officers from the GRU (Russia’s military spying network) going to libraries and museums, where they would solemnly copy out material from books on the open shelves, which we speculated they then sent back to Moscow labelled ‘Top Secret’. Their masters in Moscow probably weren’t aware of just how much information was not (and is not) classified at all in Britain. The Russians may still think that if something is worth knowing, it must be secret, perhaps because that is how their society operates.
One of the problems of colossal intelligence bureaucracies, such as the Russians still have, is information overload: if you receive a vast amount of material, you can’t analyse it properly, because you never get around to sorting out the junk from the serious stuff. The Stasi, the East German domestic spy network, is the classic example of this syndrome: the Stasi had files on just about every member of the country’s population. But they were never able to do anything useful with information. They could destroy people’s careers and ruin their lives, but they couldn’t predict what was going to happen, nor stop the communist regime from collapsing.
It is possible, however, that this alleged spy ring in the US was doing something more useful and potentially serious than it seems, even if they were not gathering secrets.
Illegals, which is what these people are thought to be, are a tried and trusted espionage tool. They are highly trained intelligence personnel, equipped with false identities and nationalities. Put into a target country with the long-term objective of merging into the background, they behave like perfectly ordinary members of the communities they are infiltrating. An apparently friendly and unthreatening ‘illegal’ in the right field can make and cultivate contacts easily. Even if there’s no secret information to be acquired, useful snippets can be picked up in conversation over a meal or at a conference.
The holy grail for espionage is to recruit someone in the opposing nation’s intelligence organisation who reaches a high level and who can therefore pass on its most precious secrets. The Russians achieved that with Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and the other Cambridge spies, and it did enormous damage to British intelligence. The Cambridge spies were all recruited on the basis of their ideological commitment by Arnold Deutsch, a KGB ‘illegal’ who worked in Britain. Some of the people arrested in the US may have had the aim of cultivating individuals who might one day work for the CIA or the FBI or some other branch of the US government with access to secrets, and the potential of handing over top secret data.
Large intelligence services, such as Russia, still can afford to devote resources to what they might still see as a worthwhile policy. All of which is why our own smaller security services still have to put their scarce resources into countering espionage.
(The writer was the Director-General of MI5 from 1992 to 1996)
© The Daily Telegraph