Deception (43 page)

Making sense of all this is tricky. The all-embracing conspiracy in which one side masterminds every twist and turn of a story is rarely a satisfactory explanation. History suggests that real answers to intelligence puzzles invariably include large doses of incompetence and misjudgement. Assuming that Antonio did indeed defect to America, Simm's career in the Defence Ministry still remains mystifying. Why did he rise so quickly? Why did nobody note his KGB past? The truth is, I fear, that Simm had developed an unofficial relationship with Kapo, which was concerned about the growing Russian interest in Estonian defence, the scope for provocations and penetrations, and the weakness of the ministry in dealing with the threat. Soon after Simm's arrival, Kapo picked up his sloppy behaviour. But instead of having him fired, it made him the agency's unofficial eyes and ears, providing a stream of gossip, innuendo and other information. Kapo felt it had the weaknesses of the ministry under excellent scrutiny. And so they did – except the one that mattered. This theory is denied by all concerned, but I believe it to be true. As I shall argue in the conclusion, our complacency towards the mediocre is Russia's deadliest weapon.

Conclusion

Simm's treachery exemplifies the central point of this book: the need to defend an open society at its weakest points, against people who appear to be no threat to it. Annoying though it may be to NATO's security officials charged with protecting the thousands of documents that Simm passed on to his handlers, the transfer of these papers did little lasting damage to the alliance. Nor did he manage to crack the innermost secrets of Estonian intelligence cooperation with countries such as Britain and America. Though he did give Russia a damagingly accurate inside view of the Estonian elite, even that country's greatest fans could not call that a geopolitical earthquake. The real cause for alarm about Simm and Antonio is the same reason as for Donald Heathfield and Anna Chapman. Rather than the secrets they may have stolen, it is the vulnerabilities they exposed that matter. Catching spies is hard enough. But when they use weaknesses that are intrinsic to our society, the real question is how many more are playing the same tricks now, and may do so in future. Nothing has changed to stop other Russian agents such as Ms Chapman – perhaps much better trained and more determined – following the same path into the heart of Western business, social and financial life. Nor have we any idea how many more Herman Simms may lurk in the fifty-plus generation that holds top jobs in the new member states of the EU and NATO, but conceals dark secrets from earlier careers in communist-run countries.

Russia would never countenance such tactics in reverse. At a think-tank meeting in London, one of Britain's most seasoned Russia-watchers bumped into Ms Zatuliveter and asked who she was: she readily explained that she was a Russian, working for Mike Hancock MP. My friend was thunderstruck. He knew Mr Hancock was on the defence committee; a post in his office would be the perfect vantage point for a talent-spotter, recruiter or agent-runner. (He would have been even more concerned had he known that Ms Zatuliveter was also planning to move on to one of Britain's leading defence companies, or that she was dating a NATO official dealing with Russia.) He asked drily if it would be possible for a British citizen to have a similar job working for a member of the Russian parliament, the Duma. ‘Of course not,' tittered Ms Zatuliveter. She is not the only one laughing. For the
Siloviki
in Moscow, Western society is a spies' paradise. Despite the tedious metal-detectors and identity checks that burden daily life, we are astonishingly, almost suicidally, trusting when it comes to real security – protecting our secrets and our decision-making. To worry about Russian spies still counts as almost comically paranoid. The popular assumption is that we have no secrets worth stealing; and that even if we did, Russia has no interest in or means of obtaining them.

As I have tried to show in this book, that is untrue. We do have secrets. Our countries and alliances make decisions vital to our welfare. Russia is interested in these for reasons of its own. So are other countries – as I have noted earlier, spying is always a grubby business. But Russia is not like other countries, as the case of Sergei Magnitsky demonstrates. It uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making. We do little to protect ourselves.

These Russian agencies are indeed incompetent, nepotistic, corrupt, blinkered and wasteful, like the state they serve. On occasion we have penetrated them and gained important victories – such as the arrests of the illegals described in this book. But they have crucial assets that we lack. One is determination: they really mind about besting us, whereas we do not take them seriously. Another is long-term thinking. For Western intelligence, spying is a demand-driven business. If the political customers want to know something, you invest. If they don't, you move resources elsewhere. Russian spymasters think differently. They are willing to spend large amounts of time and money building up long-term assets, with little concern for the immediate payoff. The fact that the illegals arrested in America may not have done much spying does not mean that they were failures: it just means that their missions were incomplete. Russia's third advantage is the ability to mount deception operations. As I have shown in the book, Western intelligence is fooled time and again by such ruses. Whether it was the Lockhart plot, the Trust, Operation Jungle or trusting Herman Simm's security clearances, the story is the same: complacency and delusion on our side, ruthless ingenuity on theirs.

Despite our spycatchers' recent successes, the rules of the game have not changed, and are in Russia's favour, not ours. The Russian illegals were spies who looked like us, swimming effortlessly and invisibly through suburbia, nightlife, think tanks and consultancy, exploiting the natural trust and collegiality of an open society. Without a lucky break, they would still be there now. Nothing on our side has changed to make such missions harder, or on theirs to make them less likely. Everyone in such worlds needs to be more careful in who they deal with. The lesson of the ‘Spies in suburbia' headlines should be that, however unlikely it may seem, and whatever their passport, background or career, a friendly new colleague, customer, supplier or business partner could, just possibly, be a Russian illegal, perhaps along the deep-cover model of Antonio or Heathfield, more likely resembling Ms Chapman. We will never return to the security-consciousness of the Cold War. But in any society that thinks its values are worth defending, those in professional or public life need to be wary about the questions people ask, and particularly of any offer of money for information.

We also need to rethink the comforting conventional account of European history after
1989
. For many people the years that followed the Soviet collapse represented the longed-for ‘rollback': the reversal of the gains made by Stalin in the years
1944
–
49
. From this viewpoint,
1989
marked the belated culmination of John Foster Dulles's ringing promise forty years earlier:

 

We should make it clear to the tens of millions of restive subject people in Eastern Europe and Asia that we do not accept the status quo of servitude aggressive Soviet Communism has imposed on them, and eventual liberation is an essential and enduring part of our foreign policy.
¹

 

Too many in the West projected their own sense of triumphalism onto the countries of the former Soviet empire. The gains there were indeed huge: political pluralism, prosperity, the rule of law and the chance to make sovereign decisions about security. Visible Russian influence diminished sharply. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel left the region as its occupation finally ended. The days when every government ministry had a senior Soviet official as a minder were gone. But in retrospect, the West (and many locals) over-estimated the scale of the Kremlin's retreat. What looked like roll-back from one point of view was a stay-behind operation from another.
^bu
It is not just that a whiff of Putinism is now noticeable in many countries between the Baltic and the Black Sea, where politicians taste the pleasures of a close overlap between business and politics, and the use and abuse of officialdom against opponents. Amid the ruins of old structures, the KGB established new networks and assets that were to serve it well in the years ahead. Coupled with the inability of the new member states to carry out thorough counter-intelligence screening where it is most needed, the Soviet legacy created, in effect, a cohort of Trojan horses welcomed by Western alliances, states, services and agencies with open arms.

It is hard to know how far this was a deliberate operation, and how far the accidental dividend of precautions taken during the Soviet withdrawal. But the upshot is the same. From the Russian point of view, the outcome of
1989
–
91
has proved far less damaging and humiliating than it seemed at the time. An expensive, brittle and unruly empire has gone. Today these countries are the West's problem. It is not Russia that pays for their modernisation, but the EU and international lenders.
^bv
That barely costs the Kremlin coffers a kopek (indeed Russia benefits from some of this largesse too). Growing prosperity in the ex-captive countries makes them better neighbours and trading partners for Russia. But more importantly, the continuing penetration of their societies, state structures and business by Russian intelligence gives the Kremlin an influence in Europe far more useful than it enjoyed in Soviet days. Recruiting and running Simm was child's play compared to conducting a similar operation during the Cold War. Not only does NATO provide comfortable, well-lit office space and official passes for the Russian intelligence officers who spy on it, but the bureaucracies of a dozen new member states are full of potential targets for recruitment.

These human time bombs will not tick for ever. People who were in their early thirties in the late
1980
s (and thus already tainted by collaboration) are in their fifties now, and at the peak of their careers in officialdom. Within another decade, they will retire. Already for many officials in the ex-communist world, the days of totalitarianism are a childhood memory, not a reality of adulthood. Yet the tainted generation can leave plenty of damage behind it – for example in discreetly advancing the careers of other younger officials willing to cooperate with Russia, or blocking those who seem obstinately honest.

I want to stress that these concerns do not mean writing off the new member states as allies or lessening ties with them. A deplorable result of the Simm case has been to weaken trust between the old West and new East in NATO. If even the Estonians, star pupils in the new order, can blunder in this way, what basis is there for trusting other countries with bigger and more shambolic arrangements? Although more realism and better counter-intelligence procedures are long overdue, to take this standoffish approach is in my view patronising, self-satisfied and hypocritical. It risks handing Russia just the victory that it seeks, in further weakening and demoralising European and transatlantic solidarity. The lesson of the Simm affair is that we need deeper, closer and more effective security cooperation among countries threatened by Russia, not less. A key point is that for all its earlier shortcomings, Estonia did at least catch, prosecute and jail the worst traitor in its history, and did so unflinchingly and conscientiously. It did not allow him to escape to Russia, or to retire into convenient obscurity. That is more than can be said for some other countries in similar circumstances, which have chosen easier and more convenient options. As I have shown, the old West's record on espionage and security in the course of the last hundred years is far more badly blotted than any of the new member states, which have had far harder challenges to overcome, with far fewer resources. Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt came from the heart of the British establishment, not from Estonia. Lockhart, Reilly and Carr had only themselves to blame for their blunders. Ames and Hanssen passed every security clearance. Antonio stole a Portuguese identity and lived in Spain; Heathfield studied in Canada, worked in France and lived in America; Ms Chapman gained a British passport. The painful lessons from that are at home, not abroad.

Gullibility towards Russia and snootiness towards allies are two of the problems I have highlighted. A third is that the Western mindset tends to try to fit Russia's activities abroad into mistakenly neat pigeonholes. More than ten years ago James Woolsey, a former CIA director, characterised the problem thus:

 

If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian . . . wearing a $
3
,
000
suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he tells you that he is an executive of a Russian trading company . . . then there are four possibilities. He may be what he says he is. He may be a Russian intelligence officer working under commercial cover. He may be part of a Russian organised crime group. But the really interesting possibility is that he may be all three and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement.
²

 

Since
1999
, the Russian intelligence threat has morphed further, posing a daunting task for Western spycatchers. The adversary is a shape-shifter: in one manifestation it is a legitimate energy company, then a curious student apparently from a NATO country, then a pushy official from the Russian embassy, then a supposedly independent charitable outfit offering a large donation to anyone who conducts the right research, then a hard-working secretary, then a Portuguese business consultant. For Russia the ‘natural capacity' of which the CIA can only dream is already in place. It exists not only in Russian business abroad, but via foreign businesses with investments or offices in Russia. The people they take on as local employees and then send on foreign postings may be loyal workers for the company, or they may have been assigned to it by the authorities, perhaps for nepotistic reasons, perhaps with clandestine work in mind, perhaps for both. If that fails, the Russian diaspora provides a rich fishing ground for whatever catch is needed.