Deception (12 page)

In January
2010
Mr González gave a frank briefing to a US–Spanish working group. He not only described Russia and Belarus as ‘mafia states' where ‘one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and OC [organised crime] groups.'
^s
He also endorsed the sensational claims made by Aleksandr Litvinenko, a Russian political exile poisoned by a polonium isotope in London in
2009
. (Mr Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, claimed in two books, both banned in Russia, that the former KGB was involved in assassinations and drug smuggling, and staged terrorist outrages for political purposes.)

Among other insights, Mr González said the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia was created by the intelligence services and was closely tied to the mafia (run by the clownish Vladimir Zhirinovsky, it adopts extreme political positions but its deputies in the Duma dependably vote the Kremlin line). The FSB, he said, had the upper hand in the state's symbiotic relationship with criminality. Crime bosses who do not toe the line risk being killed or jailed. Perhaps most worryingly of all, he appeared pessimistic about the Spanish state's ability to deal with the Russian mafia. Attempts to ‘decapitate it' had failed, he said. And its senior bosses were fighting back, with a ‘systematic campaign' to manipulate the Spanish legal system.

Mr González's views are striking, but they are not extreme. Other officials say much the same thing in unattributable briefings. What is unusual is that, thanks to WikiLeaks, the wider public is able to read the unvarnished and attributable views of a senior, expert official, speaking frankly. Occasional on-the-record assessments from senior security officials say much the same thing in more guarded language.
⁵
The really puzzling thing is why this does not resonate into the public debate. Faced with a gangster-run state on our doorstep, why do not our politicians take the necessary steps to quarantine it and counter its malign effects? One reason is clearly the ‘war on terror', which has diverted attention and effort to deal with the threat from radical Islam. Even in the narrow world of counter-intelligence, Chinese spies seem to attract more attention than Russian ones. Admittedly, Beijing's agencies have formidable hackers and are good at stealing military and technological secrets. But they do not murder people, rig our decision-making, or disrupt our alliances. Russia's spies are part of a much wider picture: an effort to play divide and rule, to exploit the greed of Western politicians and officials by paying them to make Kremlin-friendly decisions, and to deal ruthlessly with dissent abroad. This last element leads to flagrant law-breaking by Russian spies, which brings surprisingly little comeback.

One example is the Litvinenko case, mentioned above. His killing, in the view of British officials, involved the FSB. I dealt with this at length in
The
New Cold War
.
⁶
A second instance is portrayed in a book by two British investigative journalists, Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, dealing with what looks like the assassination of Stephen Curtis, a
45
-year-old lawyer for Mr Khodorkovsky.
⁷
Mr Curtis had helped mastermind the shift of Yukos from a shambolic collection of assets marked by rows with investors into a
$
15
bn oil and gas company. Some called that evolution merely cosmetic; others believed it signalled the end of robber-baron tactics and the adoption of good management and transparent corporate governance. Mr Curtis was also a legal adviser to Mr Berezovsky and to other senior Russian figures.

Mr Curtis dealt with frightening people. But he was not easily frightened. When a friend warned him, ‘You are dealing with the Devil,' he replied: ‘I will jump on their backs and ride all the way down to hell.' That proved unpleasantly prescient. After Mr Khodorkovsky was arrested in
2003
, Mr Curtis was – all but literally – in the firing line, as the man who knew the intimate details of his finances. He feared prosecution in Russia on the same trumped-up charges – tax avoidance, money-laundering and embezzlement – and a contract killing at the behest of Mr Khodorkovsky's emboldened business rivals. In the weeks before his death he was under surveillance from investigators hired by minority shareholders in Yukos and by people apparently working for the Russian state. His security consultants found evidence of bugging at his castle in Dorset. He hired a bodyguard and in mid February
2004
, worried by escalating death threats, offered (friends say) the British authorities information in return for government protection. A week before his death he told a friend: ‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks, it will not be an accident.' On
3
March
2004
his helicopter was approaching an airfield in Dorset in poor but not dangerous weather when it suddenly lost power and crashed into a field. An official investigation said that the pilot, Max Radford, had become disorientated during the final stages of his approach to the airfield and found no evidence of an explosion (though tampering with the controls would have also brought the aircraft down).
⁸
Mr Curtis's former bodyguard Nigel Brown, a former Scotland Yard detective, believes his client was killed and is puzzled that the police did not launch a murder inquiry.

It is not just lawyers for fugitive oligarchs who have reason to be worried. A remarkable BBC radio programme in the summer of
2010
entitled ‘Why Russia Spies'
⁹
gave a tantalising glimpse into the closely guarded world of British security and defence worries. It was perhaps a sign of private concern in Whitehall about Russian activities that the radio producers were allowed the access that made the programme possible. Its opening sequence sounded like a flashback to the Battle of Britain: listeners heard fighter pilots scrambling to intercept potentially hostile aircraft. These Russian antics mostly involve the lumbering ‘Bear' (Tupolev Tu-
95
) bomber, a propeller-driven hulk that first went into service in
1952
. It is a useful platform for launching nuclear missiles, but it is easily spotted and no match for any NATO air force. Sometimes, however, the Russian sorties involve the ‘Blackjack' (Tupolev Tu-
160
), a sleek supersonic machine with advanced radar-dodging technology that still creates headaches for NATO. In
2008
news leaked of an incident the previous year when a Blackjack approached northern England at a speed and height that mimicked a real nuclear attack. The target was somewhere between Leeds and Hull. Though the Russian plane turned back just before actually entering British airspace, for a few nerve-wracking seconds defence commanders wondered if World War Three might just possibly be imminent.
¹⁰

The real damage was to British credibility, not nerves: the overstretched RAF was short of planes to meet the potential intruder. (That was in
2007
: its ability to defend British airspace was weaker at the time of writing and is set to be eroded still further by defence cuts.) The frequency of such probes is surprising – as often as one a week in some periods, and more than fifty since
2005
. It is not just Britain that suffers these unwelcome attentions. In
2011
, Russian bombers intruded on Dutch airspace on at least three occasions.
¹¹
Though irked and sometimes alarmed, defence chiefs dislike discussing the subject. They say that in a real war few Russian planes would get airborne and all would be shot down long before they were near NATO air space. In peacetime, they do not want to give Russia the satisfaction of knowing that its sabre-rattling has an effect.

As well as showing off and tying up scarce defence resources with military stunts, Russian efforts also involve spying on Britain's nuclear deterrent. It is fashionable to deride this as a Cold War legacy. Those who want Britain to give it up should perhaps ask themselves why Russia spends so much energy trying to unpick its secrets. It is still quite possible to imagine a scenario in which America is unwilling to risk a nuclear confrontation with Russia over a security conflict in Europe. In the autumn of
2009
, for example, Russia and Belarus conducted the Ladoga and Zapad-
09
manoeuvres.
¹²
This was in fact one exercise, but divided into two in order to avoid having, to invite observers from NATO, as stipulated by arms-control treaties for drills involving more than
13
,
000
soldiers. The real exercise was not defensive, but aggressive. The combined forces, some
20
,
000
strong, were rehearsing how to isolate the Baltic states from the rest of Europe, invade and occupy them. In case of reinforcement by other NATO countries, the rehearsal showed that Russia would respond by using tactical nuclear weapons. This drill was followed by another exercise by Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces (the custodians of its main nuclear arsenal) in which the target was Warsaw,
¹³
showing how closely Russia's conventional defence planning is linked to the use of nuclear weapons – and how important the British nuclear deterrent remains. Imagine for example that America, facing a defence budget shrivelled by economic weakness, were preoccupied elsewhere, say in a confrontation with Iran that blocked oil supplies through the straits of Hormuz (which could easily be manufactured by Russia) or with China over Taiwan. A reminder from Britain that it has an independent nuclear deterrent and is prepared to use it in response to a Russian nuclear attack on any British forces in the Baltic could tip the balance between peace (meaning victory) and a conflict (which NATO, without America, would lose). Such a scenario is in current conditions extremely unlikely. But if that British response becomes impossible (for example because our deterrent is no longer credible) then the whole basis of Western defence weakens. If a future Russian leadership could assume it did not risk the ultimate penalty for military adventurism (and especially if NATO knew it too), then bullying neighbours, with the threat of armed force at least in the background, becomes more likely.

It is therefore interesting that Akula-class submarines, the pride of Russia's dwindling navy, have resumed a Cold War-era tactic, lurking off the Forth of Clyde in the hope of picking up the acoustic signature of Britain's Trident submarines as they enter and leave their base. This distinctive pattern of noise allows sophisticated detection equipment to track and potentially destroy the other side's submarines. Once you know what you are looking for, it is much easier to find it. The Royal Navy's Vanguard-class submarines now devote considerable time to fending off these attempts. Given the secrecy that traditionally surrounds anything to do with submarines, any public mention of such concerns is a sign of how seriously naval chiefs take the Russian activities. Whispers in the shadows of Whitehall suggest a still greater incidence of such activities, including the targeting of undersea anti-surveillance installations. Akula-class submarines are also patrolling far afield – even to the coasts of the United States, where one such vessel surfaced as if openly inviting attention.
¹⁴
Russia's aim is to intimidate and divide NATO, forcing the alliance to focus on hard questions that its members would rather avoid, and for which the various national publics have no appetite. If, after stirring up a divisive discussion in NATO, Russia concluded that Poland and the Baltic states were diplomatically and militarily isolated, it then would find it easier to bully them over other matters of concern such as energy supplies, trade or domestic politics. In assessing that scope for manoeuvre, intelligence plays a vital role.

Russia was most interested in the Western reaction to its exercises. What conclusions did military attachés draw? Could NATO tap Russian battlefield communications in real time? Most importantly, how did other countries respond to the quiet but sharply expressed concern from Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Warsaw? Was the West's reaction to tell these frontline countries to calm down and be quiet? Or was it to offer them reassurance? In fact, the reaction was not what Russia expected. Though some officials tried hard to play down the significance of the exercises (one called them ‘a twitch of the dinosaur's tail'), America ordered a response that included in
2010
a major special-forces exercise, a marine amphibious landing in Estonia and a reinforcement drill in Latvia, with more to follow. NATO warplanes held a large air exercise involving mid-air refuelling. America's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the Defense Mapping Agency) has compiled a detailed
3
D electronic map of the Baltics. NATO contingency plans now for the first time include the Baltic states, involving the use of Swedish airspace and Polish troops. This was presumably not what the Russians wanted. So why did they do it? The chief reason for this self-defeating gambit was a flawed assumption: that the West does not really care about the Baltic states and brought them into NATO only for political reasons. In fact, America at least has shown that it does care about its new allies and is willing to make efforts to prove it.