Making sense of these swirling allegations and theories is tricky, not least because of the ever-present threats of violence and lawsuits.30 But whether by accident or design, our view of Russia is clouded by misinformation and wishful thinking; in some cases clear evidence exists of intimidation and deception. Skewed perceptions are one reason why the West’s response has been so weak to the subject of the next chapter: the regime’s activities abroad.
3
Deadly Games and Useful Idiots
Many reading this grim account may still feel that greedy, lawless and incompetent spooks are chiefly a problem for Russians. It may all be a great pity, but why should outsiders actually mind what happens inside the Kremlin’s realms? But as I will show in this chapter, the toxic combination of chauvinism and criminality is a problem for the rest of the world too. In no other country have gangsterdom and state power overlapped to such a threatening extent. The most powerful drug cartels may have high-tech communications equipment or the ability to penetrate a law-enforcement agency, or have some politicians on the payroll. But they have nothing that (yet) matches Russia’s ruling criminal syndicate’s capabilities. It has almost limitless money, global geographical scope and the full armoury of state technical and logistical resources, from spy satellites to submarines, giving unprecedented capabilities in snooping and manipulation. Russia’s world-class hackers, for example, work sometimes in government, sometimes under official protection and sometimes entirely in their own criminal interest.1 Russian dirty money and underhand business practices taint and corrode the financial systems, business cultures and politics of the countries they touch. As Don Jensen, a stalwart American critic of the regime, points out, Russia’s main export is not oil and gas. It is corruption.2
Though officials do not speak about this much in public, they worry a lot about it in private. A cable from the American embassy in Madrid in August 2010 (now available on WikiLeaks) termed Russia a ‘virtual mafia state’.3 It stated baldly that Russian intelligence agencies were using mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking. It highlighted the secret support and protection that Russian intelligence in Spain provides for gangsters, who in return work ‘as a complement to state structures’ to carry out tasks that the Russian government could not be publicly linked to. The cable cited gun-running to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and also the mysterious case of the Arctic Sea cargo ship, hijacked in 2009 in a complex tale that probably involved smuggling elements of Russia’s S-300 air defence system to Iran.4
The source of the allegations was José Grinda González, nicknamed ‘Pepe’, a senior Spanish prosecutor who has spent a decade investigating the Russian mafia. His record in fighting Russian organised crime leaves other European countries looking feeble and ineffective. He was responsible for the investigation of Zakhar Kalashov, the most senior ‘Russian mafia’ figure (he has Georgian nationality) to be jailed in Europe. Mr González was involved in two big anti-mafia operations in recent years, ‘Avispa’ (2005–07) and ‘Troika’ (2008–09), which resulted in the arrest of more than sixty suspects.
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.’[19] 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 $15bn 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.