They were the dark partners in the new order. Far from being swept into the dustbin of history with the rubble of the old system, the communist-era spooks have evolved to match the new conditions. Some figures from the old days stayed undercover, gaining trusted roles in the new state structures. One of them was the Estonian Herman Simm, whose activities are the subject of chapter 11. Others turned to business, where their foreign languages and knowledge of the outside world gave them a flying start in the new game. All across the former Soviet empire, assets of the Communist Party and its front organisations speedily melted away, often ending up in the hands of the wily and well connected. So too did the operational funds of the KGB and its allied agencies. Estimates of the money squirrelled away abroad during the collapse of the Soviet Union are in the tens of billions of dollars; a crop of still-unexplained suicides in the old system’s dying days disposed of those in a position to blab.3 These caches of illicitly acquired cash were a financial springboard for the fleet-footed members of the old elite in their new business careers. In effect they turned their power into wealth, and then back into power.
In Russia itself Soviet-era spies, chief among them Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, now run the country. They are known as the Siloviki or ‘men of power’.[3] The old KGB was decapitated in 1991 amid the Soviet collapse, but not uprooted. Instead it renamed itself, just as so often in the past. (Under Vladimir Lenin it was the Cheka; later it became the OGPU, then the NKVD and finally the KGB.) It is now split into two: the FSB, which has inherited the repressive domestic apparatus of the old system, and the SVR, which is the heir to the Soviet foreign intelligence service; alongside both works the separate GRU military intelligence agency.4
Part of this book, therefore, deals with this deception: the story of how the ex-spooks and their friends, in effect in a criminal conspiracy, took over one of the world’s largest countries, hugely enriching themselves and duping the West. Their modus operandi fuses organised crime, big business, conventional diplomacy – and intelligence. I show that Russia’s spymasters are now using not only old tools against us, but also new ones of which their Soviet-era predecessors could only have dreamed.
Their most potent weapon is ordinariness. Just as Russian politicians and officials seem at first sight to hail from the same besuited and unremarkable caste as their counterparts in other industrialised countries, the spies I describe in this book appear neither glamorous nor sinister. They lead normal lives and work in normal jobs, moving effortlessly and inconspicuously among us. They are the kind of people you might meet at the school gates, work alongside in an office, bump into on a business trip, or see mowing the lawn next door. Yet their real job is to penetrate our society, to influence it for their own ends, and to steal our secrets.
The best known of this new generation of Russian spies was Anna Chapman, the young redhead who was made a global superstar by her arrest and deportation in June 2010. She has become an intimate friend of Mr Putin’s, a prized asset of his political machine, a prominent figure in Russian finance, and a television celebrity. But as I show in chapter 7, her main talents in working abroad were not the highly honed skills of spy-school legend. She started her life here in the humdrum London suburb of Stoke Newington, to the outside eye just another hard-partying, quick-witted young Russian woman with an English husband and an eye for the main chance, enjoying the safety and comfort of life in Britain. But her ordinariness was deceptive. She was well placed to carry out her espionage assignments precisely because she seemed so inconspicuous. Her later transformation into a trophy superspy adds another dimension. It is proof of the skills of her imidzhmekeri (image-makers) and casts a revealing light on Russia itself.
The spy scandal that made Ms Chapman famous was part of a larger picture. She was one of ten people arrested in the United States in June 2010, all of whom lived unremarkable middle-class lives, seemingly far away from traditional espionage targets such as the Pentagon or State Department. She and another Russian lived there under their own names. Seven others had fraudulently obtained identities – American, British, Canadian, Irish and Uruguayan (the tenth was the latter’s Peruvian spouse). One more suspect, a Russian called Pavel Kapustin, working under the alias of Christopher Metsos, was arrested in Cyprus but allowed to escape by the authorities there – an episode, never satisfactorily explained, which still arouses fury in American officialdom.5 (In a related case, a Russian who once worked at Microsoft was deported on immigration grounds in mid-July of that year).
Some people reacted with derision to the idea that Russia would send spies to suburbia, others with surprise. Both reactions were mistaken. This was not a new or foolish initiative by the Kremlin’s spymasters, but the latest twist in an old and sinister one. Only two years previously, in 2008, the case of Herman Simm had highlighted Russia’s penetration of NATO. A portly Estonian ex-policeman who had become that country’s top national-security official, he was exposed as a Russian agent after some able work by Western spycatchers. His case officer – the career spy in charge of his activities – was unmasked too. This was ‘Antonio’: a Russian masquerading as a Portuguese businessman, under an elaborately constructed illegal identity. But the media furore over that case soon died down, leaving most people unaware of the effort that Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, still puts into deception, infiltration and subversion. After much lobbying and argument, I was able to persuade the Estonian authorities to allow me to interview Simm; the results of that investigation are in chapter 11.
The international media frenzy surrounding Ms Chapman trivialised espionage as a branch of show business. The mistake was easily made: pouting and haughty, the Russian firecracker could easily be a fictional character, not a real one. She would fit in neatly as the sultry sidekick to the arch-villain in a Bond movie – 007’s relationship with ‘90-60-90’ (Ms Chapman’s Russian nickname, which comes from her shapely figure)[4] would provide appropriately cheesy sexual tension. The lurid and seemingly pointless affair invited ridicule. New York magazine’s headline was ‘Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute’. In London, the Guardian said confidently that ‘none of the 10 Russians had culled any secrets from their hideouts in US suburbia’. A grand old man of Anglo-American journalism opined that the Russian illegals’ operation was marked by ‘complete futility’.6 As the detainees were swapped in Vienna for four people jailed in Russia for spying, David Cornwell, who under the pseudonym John le Carré so ably captured the dark intrigues of Cold War espionage, even suggested that out-of-control ‘rightists’ in America’s intelligence agencies were trying to jinx the improvement in Russian–American relations. He asked: ‘As we watch live in glorious Technicolor the greatest spy-swap of the twenty-first century, and hear in our memories the zither twanging out the Harry Lime theme, do the spies expect us to go scurrying back to our cold war shelters? Is that the cunning plan?’7
3
c An untranslatable Russian word derived from