The FBI’s
recent arrest of
several alleged deep-cover Russian intelligence officers, also known as
“illegals”, has provoked astonishment in the media. As
if U.S. intelligence agencies would never dream of carrying out covert
work in Russia! Since the memory span of reporters and pundits rarely
extends beyond a few weeks, perhaps this is understandable. But it
should come as no surprise that spying remains an important tool of
statecraft. As exemplified by the illegals, the Russians are top players
in the game of human intelligence.
Since the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia has been an espionage
superpower. The reasons for Russian excellence at spying lie deep in the
nation’s culture and history, factors which suited the eventual
development of a world-class intelligence service. Centuries of dynastic
rule, the Byzantine nature of the Russian state and attendant intrigue
sharpened the skills of deception necessary in the struggle for power.
The mobilization political culture that led to the creation of the
Russian secret services stretches back a thousand years. The feuding
medieval principalities of
Rus’ formed alliances and betrayed
each other with regularity. To centralize his power Ivan IV, “The
Dread”, formed a precursor to the secret police, the black-clad
Oprichniki,
to wipe out opposition and sow terror among enemies real and imagined.
The Romanov Tsars, meanwhile, maintained all manner of secret
chancelleries that culminated in the Third Section of Nicolas I
[i].
Through the Third Section, Nicolas established a security service his
successors presided over until the autocracy’s overthrow in the Russian
Revolution.
Over the course of the 19
th century, political opposition
was made to match wits with the Tsar’s gendarmes, and this circumstance
laid the foundations for the more ruthless and sophisticated Soviet
secret police. Marxist and anarchist radicals lived a twilight existence
punctuated by flashes of revolutionary violence. The assumption of
false identities, organization into cells, and covert means of
communication became the means to survive and advance the cause against
the Tsarist state. These tactics formed the tradecraft of secret
operations, known as
konspiratsia in Russian.
Police surveillance, informers and penetration agents heightened the
need for ever greater vigilance and secrecy in the paranoid netherworld
of
konspiratsia. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin
were known in their pre-revolutionary lives respectively as Ulyanov,
Bronstein and Dzhugashvili. The men who organized and wielded Soviet
power had long years of underground experience, which shaped the
formation of their secret service.
The founder of the Soviet secret police, the
Cheka (All-Russian
Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage)
was far from a novice at underground revolutionary work. Feliks
Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was the son of a Polish noble family. As a youth
he aspired to become a Catholic priest, but had from his student days
converted to the Communist faith. Dzerzhinsky was thoroughly familiar
with the police practices of the Tsar’s
Okhrana, the successor to the Third Section. After several arrests, he became well-practiced at escaping government captivity.
As head of the
Cheka, “Iron Feliks” was tasked with protecting
the revolution from subversion, both internal and external, by any
means. And so at Lenin’s behest, Dzerzhinsky, that “ascetic, monk-like,
cold-blooded and incorruptible figure” created a merciless secret police
force
[ii]. The
Cheka’s methods
within Russia were far more brutal and murderous than any measures
experienced under the Tsars, and they secured the Bolsheviks’ initially
tenuous grip on power. Dzerzhinsky’s new headquarters, a cream-colored
building on Lubyanka square, became a symbol of the repression and
terror inaugurated by Lenin. The Soviet secret service was also deployed
abroad, where its work was by necessity somewhat more discrete.
Bearing the standard of global revolution, Marxist Russia wasted no
time in making enemies, ranging from the anti-Bolshevik White Russian
movement to the states that “intervened” in Russia after its
catastrophic plunge into Civil War in 1918. The fledgling Soviet
government needed a way to monitor developments abroad and prevent any
plots by White émigrés and their foreign supporters from reaching
fruition. With this objective in mind, in December of 1920 Dzerzhinsky
formed a fully-fledged intelligence service known as the Foreign
Department (INO). The
Cheka’s INO had by the end of the 1920s
built up a formidable overseas espionage apparatus, with around 60 staff
officers deployed in the capitals of Europe, Asia and North America
[iii].
The intelligence INO officers gathered from agents and transmitted
to Moscow inflicted serious damage on White émigré initiatives against
the Soviet Union. INO operations also informed the Politburo on the
intentions and capabilities of the states it faced in the international
arena. The Soviet state from the beginning of its existence maintained a
siege mentality in relation to the countries beyond its borders. The
collection of secret information on foreign opponents was of the highest
priority for the Soviet leadership and a pressing task for its spies.
To obtain strategic intelligence or deal a crippling blow to anti-Soviet
émigré groups, any and all methods could be applied.
Espionage is by its nature an ethically dubious enterprise. Yet
Marxism-Leninism as a mindset also made the Soviet secret service more
brutal, effective and innovative than its Tsarist predecessor. The
Bolsheviks’ contempt for “bourgeois” moral strictures meant that any and
all means were available for gaining political control of the country.
Lenin’s political adaptation of Marxist philosophy emphasized
expediency, deception and aggression in order to attain unlimited
power.
Konspiratsia was a principal method to subvert the societies of the West and usher in the global triumph of Communism.
The unprecedented power of the Soviet secret service can to some
extent be attributed to the materialist philosophy of the Bolshevik
revolutionaries. The great twentieth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai
Berdyaev remarked that, “the organization of the unity of spirit and
worldview by state power leads in practice mainly to the strengthening
of the state police organs and espionage”
[iv].The
founders of the Soviet state inhabited a moral universe centered on the
proletariat, led, of course, by the Communist Party. Under the
reasoning of Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism, any action that
advanced the revolution could be justified. Thus the Soviet
intelligence service obeyed only one ethic: to serve the Party
in Moscow, the vanguard of world revolution. The covert war with the
enemies of the revolution, within Russiaand without, demanded utter
ruthlessness.
Such a hardened, even callous mindset was deemed necessary to achieve
the radiant future that Communist ideology promised. It was this
promise that so attracted many impassioned Marxists and fellow-travelers
in other countries to flock to the Soviet banner. The beckoning star of
utopia burned bright in the minds of many Western intellectuals during
the reigns of Lenin and Stalin. The Kremlin controlled the Third
Communist International, known as the Comintern, and exercised
significant influence over numerous associated political parties, labor
unions and newspapers. Party members and sympathizers to the cause
formed a support network that wittingly or unwittingly advanced Soviet
foreign policy and propaganda.
A few of these individuals were noticed by INO “talent spotters” both
for their convictions and potential access to government secrets. Among
them was British intelligence officer Harold “Kim” Philby, who would
for three decades betray Crown secrets to the Soviets. Philby had been
committed to Communism since his days at Cambridge, and was recognized
as a bright prospect in Vienna in 1934, where he began underground work
with a Comintern front organization
[v].
Arnold Deutsch, the deep-cover intelligence officer who recruited him,
was an Austrian Jew and disciple of Wilhelm Reich, and equally drawn to
Marxism’s “scientifically based” analysis and revolutionary vision.
Communist solidarity proved to be a tremendous asset in the recruitment
and running of agents in the West.
Ideological fervor was not the only advantage accrued to Soviet
intelligence as it sought to ferret out secrets from the nations beyond
its borders. The Bolsheviks were relentless modernizers and sought, in
the words of Lenin, to fashion a new society through “Soviet power plus
electrification”. To meet the leadership’s practically unlimited demands
for security, the
Cheka expanded and reorganized as the GPU,
OGPU, and NKVD. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the growth of the security
apparatus was accompanied by increased specialization of functions,
such as the formation of the foreign intelligence arm, the INO, and its
components for political, economic and industrial espionage. At the same
time, the secret police underwent a standardization of procedure that
promoted uniformity in training and operations. Along with a military
chain of command, these factors made the Soviet intelligence service
into a formidable and effective espionage
system.
The INO ran most of its agent networks out of Soviet embassies and
consulates. Moscow’s intelligence officers could work under official
cover, whether as diplomats, journalists, or trade representatives. In a
world of mutual hostility between the two ideological “camps”, however,
the Soviet state could not rely upon its embassies as the sole vehicles
for intelligence collection. Instances such as Britain’s severance of
diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1927 made this abundantly clear
[vi]. How was an asset to receive regular instructions and deliver secrets if his controlling officer had been expelled as
persona non grata?
Counterintelligence pressure from the host nation could also freeze
espionage work. In such cases, the Soviet secret service needed to
maintain steady channels of contact in the target country to receive any
potentially vital information.
Due to challenges in Moscow’s relations with many countries, the INO
had throughout the twenties occasionally deployed officers abroad
without diplomatic cover. Because of their lack of any official status
or recognition by the Soviet government, these spies were known as
illegals. By 1930, espionage conducted under a false identity and
without accreditation took on new significance for Soviet intelligence.
In that year, the service was restructured to reflect targeting
priorities. One major innovation was the creation of an Illegals Section
within the INO. Its deep-cover intelligence operatives were now formed
into an elite force, the first of its kind in the world of espionage.
The Illegals Section was designed by the Soviet leadership as a strategic instrument
[vii].
Stalin’s Politburo was at the time seized by the (unfounded) notion
that the capitalist powers sought to initiate a war against the Soviet
Union. The illegals would therefore deploy to target countries under
deep cover (legends) and set up bases of operations, known as
residencies. Illegal residencies could collect intelligence and run
agents at less risk of detection than their embassy colleagues. By
masquerading as citizens of the target (or a third) country, illegal
officers were almost impossible for counterintelligence services to
trace. If relations between the Soviet Union and another state were
disrupted by crisis or war, INO illegal residencies would be expected to
continue functioning and take control of agent networks previously run
from the embassy. The timely transfer of crucial information
to Moscow could assume strategic significance in the arena of war and
diplomacy.
Along with deep-cover intelligence operations, the Politburo assigned
one other major task to illegals: “wet affairs”, the liquidation of
enemies of the Soviet state. Secret services around the world have
carried out targeted killings, though the phenomenon is rarer than its
representation in spy novels. Soviet intelligence, however, lent
credence to such popular conceptions by its fearsome methods. The
repression spawned by Stalin’s malignant paranoia was projected
overseas, as well. Moscow was ruthless in its pursuit of defectors,
anti-Soviet émigré leaders, and individuals deemed dangerous to its
interests. Men such as the exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, White Russian
generals, and others would fall victim to a concerted effort aimed at
their destruction.
Dispatching assassins abroad to hunt down their targets required a
clandestine system of support and logistics to evade hostile security
services. In the first decade of Soviet power, the
Cheka and its
successors enacted “special measures” beyond state borders, but there
was no central department to direct this gruesome activity. Within the
INO a separate, “Special Group” was formed in 1929 to undertake missions
to kill or kidnap those targeted by the Kremlin
[viii].
Its founding heralded a decade of executions abroad as Soviet hit teams
roamed Europe and took part in the bloody Spanish Civil War.
The Special Group was a parallel structure to the Illegals Section,
and illegal officers served in its ranks. The unit was also equipped
with a poisons laboratory and ran its own foreign residencies and agent
networks
[ix]. Like the rest of the Soviet security apparatus, the Special Group was purged, reorganized, and would eventually become the 4
th Directorate
of the NKVD during the Second World War. Lubyanka’s special units would
provide invaluable services to the Soviet Union in its mortal struggle
with Nazi Germany. Soviet operatives waged a campaign of espionage,
sabotage, and assassinations from South America to
Wehrmacht-occupied
territory on the Eastern Front. One of the most storied illegals from
this era was NKVD special agent Nikolai Kuznetsov, who convincingly
posed as Prussian
Wehrmacht Lieutenant Paul Siebert in occupied Ukraine, running an intelligence network and killing several German high officials
[x]. The film
Podvig Razvedchika (Feat
of an Intelligence Officer) was loosely based on his record and
influenced young men like Vladimir Putin to enter the KGB.
By the late 1940s, it should also be noted that the ethnic character
of Soviet intelligence had been transformed. Gone were the days of the
internationalist INO, in which the department’s leadership and many of
its operatives were of Jewish descent or foreign Communists, including
many Latvians, Poles and Hungarians. Men like Mikhail Trilisser, Sergei
Shpigelglaz, Teodor Maly and Abram Slutsky had already met their fate in
the pre-war meat grinder. With Stalin’s last major purge, this time
unleashed in 1948 against “rootless cosmopolitanism”, the intelligence
apparatus was being consolidated into a largely Slavic/Great Russian
entity
[xi].
As the Cold War progressed, illegals who were to be deployed abroad
were much more likely to be Russians (as well as Armenians, Central
Asians, etc.) who had lived their entire lives in theSoviet Union.
Communist ideology was still the religion of the security organs and the
rest of the state, but there was now a prominent accent on “socialist
patriotism” that would remain throughout the Soviet-American competition
for global dominance.
At the onset of the Cold War, the illegals were presented another
complex challenge. Washington was no longer an ally; indeed it had
become the “Main Adversary” in Soviet parlance. Confrontation with
the United States made intelligence targeting into Western
Europe and North America especially critical. The Kremlin needed the
inside track on the US strategic posture and Western policy aims, but
first and foremost the Kremlin leadership wanted early warning
[xii].
Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa had forever seared into the minds of the
Soviet policy elite the necessity of preventive intelligence (Although
the strategic surprise the German general staff achieved was largely due
to Stalin’s shoddy analysis of the situation). With the U.S. building a
network of alliances and bases in Eurasia’s outer rim to contain Soviet
power, Moscow moved its espionage campaign into high gear. With the
creation of the KGB in 1954, illegal operations would be run from
Directorate S, in turn part of Lubyanka’s First Chief Directorate
(foreign intelligence)
[xiii].
Illegal officers were highly prized assets in the struggle with the
West because of their invisibility. “Legal” residencies run out of
Soviet embassies and trade delegations were dutifully monitored by
counterintelligence services like MI5, France’s DST and the FBI.
Meanwhile illegals would assume foreign identities, cultivate their
legends for years, and blend into their host society. Without
intelligence acquired from a defector or a penetration, a Soviet illegal
was just about impossible to track down. Moscow Center therefore ran
some of its most valued agents through illegal networks to insulate them
from detection. Through these operations, the Soviet secret service
also looked to form ties with powerbrokers and policymakers in target
nations. In one extraordinary instance, the illegal officer and Spanish
Civil War veteran Josef Grigulevich was the Costa Rican embassy’s
Chargé d‘Affaires for Italy, the Vatican and Yugoslavia from 1951 to 1953
[xiv].
In addition to raising the bar for classical espionage, the Soviets
never ceased their involvement in direct-action missions. Officially the
KGB’s last killing was carried out in 1959 by the illegal Bogdan
Stashinsky against the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Yet Soviet
intelligence continued to field an assassination capability for the
remainder of its existence. This unit specializing in “wet affairs”
underwent numerous reorganizations due to defections (such as
Stashinsky’s) and scandals, starting off as the fittingly-named 13
th Department under Khrushchev until it finally became the Illegals Directorate’s 8
th Department
[xv].
It made perfect sense for the KGB to house deep-cover intelligence
officers and a special operations component under the same roof because
of shared assignments. Directorate S was engaged in identifying and
building comprehensive intelligence profiles on both foreign leaders and
military commands and strategic infrastructure. In a time of war or
crisis, commandos from its own
Vympel group would infiltrate
hostile nations, and with the assistance of Soviet illegal networks,
neutralize their targets. In one such actual instance, chief of the
Illegals Directorate General Yurii Drozdov directed the storm
of Kabul’s Tazh-Bek Palace and the assassination of the troublesome
Afghan president Hafizullah Amin in 1979
[xvi].
At this crossroads of Russian history, the KGB’s illegals and special
operators set the stage for Moscow’s disastrous occupation
of Afghanistan and the long twilight of Soviet power.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberalization, chaos and
weakness of the 1990s, Russia experienced severe geopolitical and
economic retrenchment. For the past decade, though, Moscow has worked to
restore its regional and international position according to its
national interests rather than Marxist-Leninist ideology. The former
intelligence officer Vladimir Putin has been at the helm of this drive.
Putin and his colleagues understand well the role of espionage as an
instrument of policy. The Kremlin has put its spies from the GRU
(military intelligence) and the SVR (the First Chief Directorate’s
successor service) to good use. The SVR has been acquiring all manner of
Western technologies, working in tandem with energy giants like Gazprom
and Lukoil to advance Russian strategic objectives in Europe, and
mounting influence operations against NATO expansion and the placement
of U.S. missile defense systems on Russia’s frontiers.
The revelations from the June 29
th arrests in cities
across America’s East Coast make it clear that Moscow Center still
values its illegals for intelligence collection and other covert
activities. The media has sensationalized the episode and lent it a
comic atmosphere, largely drawn from the glamorous lifestyles of more
peripheral players.
But it would be a mistake to cast the captured officers as incompetents
without significant details on their discovery by the FBI, or what the
Russians knew, and when they knew it, from their own counterespionage
work. Illegal intelligence officers are regarded as world-class both by
the service that fields them, the SVR, and its foes.
Human intelligence is a rather murky business, and the public often
only learns about the exploits of spies through their failures. In an
analogous case four years ago in Canada, we were reminded by the
talented Mr. Hampel that Russia continues to deploy deep-cover
operatives to the West
[xvii].
In 2008, it was revealed that an SVR illegal was the handler of Hermann
Simm, the Estonian defense official who provided Moscow an insider’s
view of NATO’s most guarded secrets
[xviii].
While the SVR today plays a more limited role in special operations
(the FSB is another matter entirely), its Directorate S is alive,
kicking and operating throughout the world. The illegals represent the
pinnacle of the Russian secret service tradition, a line of work with
centuries of heritage, and one no less relevant in the contemporary
Great Game.
[i] Makarevich, Eduard.
Sekretnaya Agentura. Algoritm, 2007. Moskva. (p. 19)
[ii] Hingley, Ronald.
The Russian Secret Police. Simon and Schuster, 1970. New York. (p. 119)
[iii] Prokhorov, Aleksandr, & Kolpakidi, Aleksandr.
Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001.St. Petersburg. (pp. 11-14)
[iv] Berdyaev, Nikolai.
Opyt Eskhatologicheskoi Metaphiziki. Paris, 1946. (p. 187)
[v] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry.
Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 485)
[vi] Tsarev, Oleg, & West, Nigel.
The Crown Jewels. Yale University Press, 1999. New Haven. (p. 44)
[vii] This is documented in a Politburo resolution from January 1930. Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry.
Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 19-20)
[viii] Sever, Aleksandr.
Istoria KGB. Algoritm, 2008. Moskva. (p. 48)
[ix] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr, & Prokhorov, Dimitry.
KGB: Spetsoperatsii Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo AST, 2000. Moskva. (p. 489)
[x] Gladkov, Teodor.
Legenda Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo Veche, 2001. Moskva.
[xi] Gladkov, Teodor.
Lift v Razvedku. Olma-Press, 2002. Moskva. (p. 445)
[xii] Ibid. (p. 503)
[xiii] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr & Prokhorov, Dimitry.
Vneshniaia Razvedka Rossii. Neva, 2001. St. Petersburg. (p. 72)
[xiv] Paporov, Yurii.
Akademik Nelegalnykh Nauk. Izdatelskii Dom Neva, 2004. St. Petersburg. (p. 118)
[xv] Kolpakidi, Aleksandr, & Prokhorov, Dimitry.
KGB: Spetsoperatsii Sovetskoi Razvedki. Izdatelstvo AST, 2000. Moskva. (p. 504)
[xvi] Drozdov, Yurii.
Vymysl Iskliuchen. Almanakh Vympel, 1996. Moskva. (p. 187)
[xvii] http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/122209–russian-spy-had-all-tools-of-trade
[xviii] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,691817,00.html
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