Mr Carroll’s speculative account of a desirable future for American intelligence sounds uncannily like the way that Russia behaves already. Its energy companies, banks and other commercial, journalistic and academic outfits give it ‘natural capacity’ of a kind that British or American spymasters for now can only dream of. Ms Chapman’s hybrid identity in the West – genuine in every respect but her intentions – fits into that well. But Russia’s spymasters have also shown they can use human and financial resources the old-fashioned way, by running deep-cover illegals. It is hard to see how Western services can match that, even if they wanted to. For a couple plucked from Tomsk in the 1980s Soviet Union, a move to the West under an illegal identity probably seemed like a good career move – and so it must have appeared to the illegal ‘Donald Heathfield’ and his wife Ann Foley, who were originally from Tomsk but who spent twenty years living undercover in the West. The other way round looks less attractive. It is hard to imagine the CIA recruiting two able graduate students in Wisconsin or Kansas for a twenty-year mission living undercover in Siberia. Yet the fact that something is illogical or undesirable from a Western point of view does not mean that a Russian decision-maker would see the issue in the same way. Blessed by natural abundance, and with Soviet-style thinking still lurking in the background, Russia tends towards extravagant use of resources of all kinds.
The illegals’ controllers in Moscow may well have been wasteful in using their assets’ costly and carefully designed cover. One of the illegals in America, ‘Cynthia Murphy’, was asked to collect information about the world gold market. Any competent trader or banker in Moscow could have done that without needing any clandestine cover. Decision-makers in all countries tend to overestimate the value of secret information, Russians more than most. It may well be that these illegals wasted time satisfying their masters’ fetish for material marked ‘secret’, which in fact contained little that was not available from open sources.
Amused complacency, however, is not the media’s usual response to, say, the leak of toxic industrial waste. Even if the discharge does not prove damaging, it focuses attention on the physical or procedural flaws that caused it. The arrest of the illegals showed that American public life was wide open to penetration and that Russia has put substantial resources over many years into trying to exploit that weakness. Why was nobody worried? A big reason was the FBI’s clever news management. It is often said that spies like the shadows. But like any outfit dependent on taxpayers’ money and politicians’ willingness to spend it, intelligence and security services pay careful attention to their image: in their case as mysterious, austere and self-sacrificing guardians of the ultimate national interest. Though they do not hold press conferences or run advertising campaigns, they use nudges and winks, discreet briefings of selected journalists deemed ‘sound’; and the occasional release of carefully honed material to the wider public.
This clashes with an operational need: to mislead the other side. Crowing about successes risks endangering sources and methods. Keeping silent about them risks giving an impression of idleness and incompetence. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (the official label for MI6) was thrilled to have smuggled Mr Gordievsky to Finland. The temptation to show off a brilliant piece of tradecraft was great. But once you explain how a diplomatic car picked up your fugitive from a remote rural bus stop and took him across the border in a heat-insulated baggage compartment, you will be less likely to pull the trick off again. The same principles apply to disasters. If you are penetrated or betrayed, then owning up to the damage risks giving the other side some clues about what they achieved – and failed to achieve. Some spy services never prosecute traitors for just this reason. Those who are caught are quietly retired or shifted to other jobs, leaving the other side guessing whether their asset was blown, or was just the victim of a random bureaucratic shuffle.
It is against this background that all the public information relating to the detained illegals such as Ms Chapman must be judged. The American authorities weighed every line of the criminal complaints they issued against the arrested spies. Clearly, it was necessary to provide enough information to crack the defence of those arrested, leading to an immediate admission of guilt. The American authorities did not want to risk a trial in which FBI agents could have been subject to embarrassing and potentially damaging cross-examination about sources and methods. Another priority was to cause maximum annoyance and confusion to the Russian side, chiefly by making the ‘damage control’ effort as painful, costly and disruptive as possible. That meant overstating what the American side didn’t know, and understating what it did. In the world of mirrors and mind-games, planting doubts is a powerful offensive weapon. Exaggerating the time during which the spies were under surveillance, for example, discredits everything they did in their bosses’ eyes. A cardinal principle of intelligence work is that anything provided by a compromised source must itself be considered as compromised. The farther back in history that the taint goes, the bigger is the area of contamination. Similarly, the Americans may not have succeeded in intercepting and decoding everything sent from Ms Chapman’s laptop.[30] But the Russians cannot be sure. If burst transmissions over ad-hoc networks between nearby laptops are hard to monitor then it would be a neat counter-measure to mention them frequently in the criminal complaint. It will be a bold Russian spy who includes them in his operational planning in future. A correctly concocted mixture of overstatement and ambiguity will cast a corrosive cloud over Russian intelligence operations for years.
It is also necessary to understate some bits of a successful operation. If the key to cracking the spy ring was a flaw in Russian tradecraft, it would be a mistake to highlight it: after all, the other side may make the same mistake again. If the vulnerability came from code cracking, that too must be concealed. If the clues came from a penetration agent in Moscow, his welfare must be weighed against the need to curb or catch the spies he has betrayed. Is he so valuable, and will he be at such great risk, that he must be exfiltrated before the spycatchers pounce on their quarry or limit his activities? Protecting him may set off alarm bells and send the hostile agents scurrying into hiding. The spycatchers’ nightmare is a failure on all fronts: damage done, the horse bolted, and nothing gained.
America’s criminal complaints against the illegals were nicely balanced. They trumpeted the Bureau’s success, humiliated the Russian side, but gave away rather little about sources and methods. It is not clear, for example, how the FBI obtained the ‘was it in Beijing?’ code word that one of its agents used to gain the confidence of Mikhail Semenko, a Russian working under his own name in Washington DC. They put heavy emphasis on traditional surveillance: bugging phones, entering premises with a search warrant, looking at safety-deposit boxes. That the FBI can do that will surprise nobody. They highlight what look like some bad mistakes in the Russians’ tradecraft. Donald Heathfield’s wife had a photographic negative in a safety deposit box that bore a Russian brand name, Tasma (TACMA in Cyrillic). For someone purporting, as she did, to be a Canadian real estate agent, that was a huge breach in a cover story. Another of the illegals is said to have written a vital email password on a bit of paper next to a computer, which was noted by FBI agents during a clandestine visit to the apartment. If these blunders indeed happened, those in the Russian intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo responsible for training illegals will be unpleasantly surprised.[31] But the FBI may have exaggerated or misleadingly portrayed the slip-ups. During their debriefing sessions the agents may deny having made these errors. Ideally, both their competence and their loyalty will be questioned.
30
ad Ms Chapman and another junior illegal ferried laptop computers between Russia and America, rather more often than planned because of repeated technical glitches. When they worked, the laptops were used to send clandestine radio transmissions to intelligence officers based at Russian diplomatic missions.
31
ae Known as the ‘Forest’ or the ‘Sanatorium’, the SVR headquarters is a Finnish-built skyscraper complex in the district of Yasenevo, just south of the Moscow ring-road.