Georgia also believes that Russian intelligence officers, mostly from the FSB but also from the GRU, are recruiting ethnic Georgians in the occupied district of Gali in Abkhazia, either with bribes or blackmail, in order to carry out acts of terrorism and sabotage.13 This has involved at least twelve incidents since 2009. The targets have included railway installations, bridges, public buildings, public squares, offices of political parties, ministries, the American embassy and the NATO liaison office in Tbilisi. Two people have been killed so far, but many more would have been at risk had the bombings succeeded as planned. In one house search, for example, Georgian police found nine canisters of hexogen explosive, five of which had been modified with homemade shrapnel. The ringleader of one of the groups arrested, Gogita Arkania, said in a witness statement that he had been recruited, trained and directed by Major Evgeny Borisov, who is part of the Russian military contingent in Abkhazia and used to be based there as a ‘peace-keeper’ before the war. Though he is formally part of the FSB border guards, Georgian counter-intelligence officers believe Borisov is an active operative of the GRU; however, this cannot be independently verified and Mr Borisov has made no public statement. Telephone intercepts obtained by Georgian intelligence show intensive traffic between mobile phones registered in Arkania’s and Borisov’s names with a mobile number belonging to the Russian Defence Ministry, at exactly the times that bomb attacks took place in Georgia, for example against the American embassy on the morning of 22 September 2010.
In at least one case, a GRU operation against Georgia was let down by an elementary blunder. On 2 October a bomb placed near an important railway bridge at Chaladidi in the western Khobi district failed to go off. But the next morning the European Union’s Monitoring Mission received a phone call from a Russian military officer, asking for more information about the bomb blast that he claimed passengers had reported on the railway. Georgian officials were baffled – until local residents found the device a few days later. The only possible source for this mistaken enquiry by the Russian officer could have been the GRU unit that instigated the botched attack.
Russia can afford to make mistakes. Georgia cannot afford Russia’s successes. The international media and Western countries have shamefully neglected this bullying campaign by a hostile big state against a friendly small one. The effect is to create a climate of impunity in which the Kremlin and its spymasters feel that the risk of these attacks is minor and the rewards are substantial. Georgian complaints to Russia are either ignored or met with dismissals that range from the airy to the vituperative. Sometimes Georgia is accused of spinning fairy tales; sometimes the charge is Russophobia. Western officials accept privately that Georgia has reason to complain. But they see no political or professional benefit in taking up the issue. It is hard to grab foreign official and public attention about allegations of foreign involvement in a largely non-lethal bombing campaign in a country that is seen as marginal and difficult. Raising the complaints risks making Georgians look paranoid. And if they do gain attention, the result may be to underline the country’s reputation as a trouble spot, not a reliable partner and prospective EU and NATO member.
The operations described in the preceding pages are unpleasant but for the most part clumsy: assassinations, bombings, military sabre-rattling, the blackmail of émigrés, the bedding of politicians. It is now time to turn to the more subtle methods used by Russia’s spymasters, chiefly in Europe and North America: the use of fake (and increasingly of real) identities to place career intelligence officers undercover on long-term foreign assignments. This is a world of closely guarded secrets in training and doctrine, of meticulous planning, deep paradoxes and tangled psychology. It could hardly differ more from its portrayal in spy fiction and in Hollywood films, as I show in the following chapter, which introduces the reader to the real world of spies and spycraft.
5
Spycraft: Fact and Fiction
Spies break rules for governments that try to enforce them. In this contradiction lies the fascination of the espionage world and also its greatest weakness.[24] Espionage involves breaking laws, perhaps of your own country, more often of its allies and certainly in the country being spied upon. The reason is simple. Secret information may come through deduction and inference, or from exploiting the other side’s carelessness by bluff and subterfuge. But the blunt fact is that for the most part secrets must be stolen. This means instigating treachery, using bribery, burglary, blackmail or outright violence as necessary. That is a long way from the normal tasks expected of a public servant. It attracts a certain kind of person, often flawed or troubled, and shapes them to its needs, to the point that deceit arouses not repugnance, but professional curiosity and admiration. Before looking at the battlefield of the East–West spy wars, it is necessary to understand the mentality, training and selection of the soldiers.
The first quality of a good spy is to shun and shed the social mores that hamper deceiving, cheating and manipulating people. An early exercise during IONEC (the six-month ‘Intelligence Officers New Entry Course’) at Britain’s Fort Monckton spy school on England’s south coast is to gain as much personal information as possible from people in a pub: a prize goes to anyone who obtains passport details. A second is to borrow money from strangers. Some well brought-up trainees find this so demeaning that they quit. Other agencies use similar training games. Israel’s Mossad sets recruits the task of inveigling entry into a stranger’s apartment and appearing on the balcony drinking a glass of water; watchers in a car park below will see who succeeds. Spying is a job for the nosy and devious, not the shy and the scrupulous.
If moral ambiguity is part of the lure, another element is the glamour of secrecy. Nobody cares how and where the government trains its tax inspectors; but the location and topography of Fort Monckton, the names of the courses and their content are secrets.[25] Outsiders catch only fleeting glimpses of life in the shadows, usually in carefully sanitised form. Secrecy and flawed fictional depictions fuel misperceptions. These would not matter were spying a branch of government service with limited relevance to the outside world, such as drafting fire regulations. But espionage is connected directly into nations’ most vital interests and their most ruthless pursuit. Those wanting insights into complicated geopolitical competition in finance, law or diplomacy are more likely to read the Economist than a novel. But concerning the no less intricate world of espionage, every cinemagoer and novel-reader has a (usually mistaken) impression of life in the shadows. This is one reason that the arrest of the ten Russian spies in America in June 2010 attracted such ill-informed commentary.
24
x I focus in this chapter on solely HUMINT (the recruitment and running of human sources) not SIGINT (electronic intercepts) or geospatial reconnaissance (via satellite). I am also leaving out, among other intelligence professionals, the analysts and reporting officers who make sense of the spies’ work.
25
y This former Napoleonic fort, once used by Britain’s wartime Special Operations Executive, is not as secret as perhaps it should be. Its postcode is PO12 2AT; other details including a telephone number are available on the internet.