The methods of the Russian 'suburban spies' in the US seem old-fashioned, but they employed sound, proven tactics that governments have found useful for centuries. If only they hadn't been such a bunch of amateurs, writes PETER JACKSON
NEWS THAT THE FBI in the US has rounded up what is alleged to be a network of at least 11 agents run by Russian foreign intelligence, the SVR, has been met with surprise in the western media. Russian espionage operations have been characterised as a relic of a bygone era of Cold War competition and mistrust.
It would be far more surprising, however, if the Russians were not seeking to gather intelligence on the world’s dominant military, economic and cultural power. Information collected by networks of agents, commonly referred to as human intelligence, or Humint, by intelligence professionals, is the oldest form of intelligence gathering. Its traditions stretch back to the earliest recorded episodes of political history and can even claim divine authority, from the Lord’s instruction to Moses to send spies into Canaan to “spy the land”.
The collection of human intelligence has ever since been a staple of political practice by kings, emperors, dictators and prime ministers. The reason for this is that Humint can provide the kind of insight into the intentions of other actors that more technical means of intelligence gathering – satellite surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and monitoring the internet – rarely achieve.
A success rate of one in 100 is enviable when it comes to placing agents close to the upper reaches of the government of a powerful state. Examples of highly placed agents with access to the inner thoughts of important policy-makers are extremely rare. Success, however, can pay rich dividends in terms of insight into the beliefs and thought processes of key individuals.
One of the most stunning successes in recent times was that achieved by Soviet intelligence in penetrating Whitehall from the 1930s through to the mid-1950s. The celebrated “Cambridge Five” had access to the highest reaches of the foreign and cabinet offices, as well as to Britain’s intelligence agencies. The intelligence they provided was crucial not only for insights into British politics and policy but also, given the intimacy of the Anglo-American alliance at the time, for an understanding of US foreign and security policy.
A well-placed network of “nuclear spies” operating at the same time in Britain and the US succeeded in passing on crucial intelligence on atomic research in the West. This information accelerated the development of the Soviet nuclear programme, enabling Stalin’s Russia to produce its own atomic bomb five to 10 years earlier than it would otherwise have done.
Security measures put in place by western governments after these networks were broken made it much more difficult to achieve high-level penetration on this scale. But these difficulties are offset by the proliferation of potential targets in an era of globalised financial markets and increasingly influential non-governmental organisations.
Information about the investment strategies of leading hedge funds, or about the research breakthroughs of private and state-funded laboratories in areas ranging from missile technology to new forms of energy, or about the lobbying activities of powerful civil society groups, can be just as useful in informing policy as more traditional forms of diplomatic or military intelligence.
The SVR ring in the US appears to have been targeting precisely this type of information. The instructions given to individual agents, to develop contacts in “financial and elite circles”, were vague. But the fact that five of the 11 alleged spies lived and worked in or near New York, as opposed to Washington DC, suggests that the intended targets were Wall Street and the vast array of think tanks and lobby groups that are located in the Big Apple.
This tactic is by no means a new phenomenon. During the 1930s, for example, French political and civil-society circles were comprehensively penetrated by Soviet operatives. A host of non-governmental groups operating in Paris were controlled by Russian operatives, who had also managed to establish a network of information inside the air ministry. The French foreign ministry and high command, meanwhile, were impervious to this kind of penetration.
Recruitment of individuals with links to high-level political circles was another tactic deployed by the KGB in France before and during the second World War. Pierre Cot, minister in several different French governments during the 1930s, provided the KGB with regular intelligence while living in the US after the fall of France in 1940.
The alleged SVR network in the US has been nowhere near as successful. But it does seem to have adopted the same strategy of targeting social circles with access to policy elites.
The “tradecraft” deployed by these operatives, ranging from invisible ink to the use of hidden images on internet webpages – or steganography – is an interesting mixture of old and new.
Spies have been communicating using hidden writing for many hundreds of years, so the use of wireless computer technology and the internet are only variations on this theme. The use of the internet to send messages across the globe instantly is a technique that has been used extensively by transnational terrorist or extremist organisations since the mid-1990s.
The techniques used by the FBI to detect messages between the SVR network and “Moscow Centre” were almost certainly developed in the first instance to keep track of potential terrorist threats to US security. The success achieved by American counterintelligence also demonstrates the pay-off of effective co-operation between the surveillance units of the FBI and the eavesdropping activities of the American communications intelligence leviathan, the National Security Agency.
The efforts of the FBI were no doubt helped by the puzzling carelessness exhibited in a number of rudimentary mistakes by members of the SVR network. The youngest of the accused spies, Anna Chapman (whose real name is apparently Anna Kushchenko), posted pictures of herself in Moscow on her Facebook site, accompanied by a caption describing the city as her “national capital”. She also gave her address as “99 Fake Street” when attempting to purchase a mobile phone.
This kind of amateurishness is certainly not in keeping with the long and storied tradition of highly effective Russian human intelligence operations. From the fabled successes of the tsarist Okhrana in penetrating cells of emigré revolutionaries in Europe before 1914 to the legendary exploits of KGB “illegals” in recruiting vast networks of agents in the West after 1917, the activities of “deep-cover” operatives have occupied a central place in the history of Russian and Soviet intelligence.
The term “illegal” refers to operatives planted abroad without any ties to the official Russian consulates or embassies in their host countries. Illegals received lengthy and rigorous training, were always fluent in several foreign languages and were given carefully prepared false identities before being sent abroad on missions. They were typically expected to spend years, perhaps even decades, establishing lives for themselves in their target country before the network of contacts they developed would begin to bear fruit.
Another long tradition is to send illegals out in pairs as married couples. Eight of the accused Russian spies were deployed using this tactic. This provides for an effective division of labour and also provides central authorities with a means of keeping a close watch on their agents, as couples are effectively charged with spying on one another as well as their target state.
Virtually all of the accused SVR agents therefore fit into long-standing traditions within the Russian intelligence community. But there are also puzzling anomalies. According to court documents provided by the prosecution, many of the communications between the agents and their controllers were in broken English. One cannot help wondering why in the world experienced SVR operatives would choose this mode of communication to convey instructions to highly valued deep-cover agents. Why, furthermore, would another of the accused, Juan Lazaro, draw attention to himself by peppering his lectures at Baruch College with intemperate rants about US foreign policy?
All of this amateurishness suggests either that professional standards within the Russian foreign intelligence machine have deteriorated badly since the end of the cold war or that this was not the highly prized network of SVR illegals that the FBI is suggesting.
All of this is not to suggest that Russian intelligence, along with the secret services of most of the world’s other major states, has not targeted the US in espionage campaigns aimed at collecting information of all kinds. Both formal and informal networks will be a part of intelligence work as long as there is rivalry between states in the international system.
Knowing one’s enemies, and indeed knowing one’s friends, is just as important to political leaders in the 21st century as it was to Sun Tzu more than 2,500 years ago.
Peter Jackson is editor of Intelligence and National Securityand co-author of Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century
