recalls Mr Bearden bleakly.12 Clearly the Kremlin had no desire and little ability to attack the West. It had wound down its involvement in regional conflicts in Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan and the Far East, and was making great efforts to bury past enmities. Particularly in France, Germany and the United States, some political leaders saw their spy services as a troublesome legacy of the bad old days. Friendly countries should not spy on each other, particularly if they wanted to stay friends. The cloaks and daggers belonged in the cupboard. The KGB’s aggressive behaviour was simply mirroring the similarly cowboyish behaviour of the Western agencies.
This was a Panglossian approach. Soviet spying continued up to the moment that the USSR collapsed and carried on almost unbroken under the Russian flag. Even in the depths of the collapse, the SVR (as the First Chief Directorate of the KGB was renamed in December 1991) was preparing a new echelon of agents. In May 1992, two Russian illegals were arrested in Finland carrying British passports in the names of James Peatfield and Anna Marie Nemeth (two real people who were bewildered to find their identities being used in this way). The couple’s true names were Igor and Natalya Lyuskova, and they were apparently on a training assignment. Under political pressure, SIS and its Finnish counterparts downplayed the affair. Later that year, ‘Heathfield’ arrived in Canada to start his bogus studies. The most longstanding of the illegals caught in 2010, the ‘Uruguayan’ Juan Lazaro, had moved to New York in 1985, for a mission that began almost simultaneously with Mr Gorbachev’s reforms. Even more worrying for the West would have been the knowledge of the human time-bombs left behind by the KGB in the territory that it appeared to be vacating. As the empire retreated, it safeguarded copies of its most valuable asset: the secret police files showing past collaboration.
Few worried about that in the hectic late 1980s and early 1990s. What kept the spies in business was instability. No sooner had Western leaders grasped that the new rulers in Moscow were friendly than they worried about their fragile grip on power. From its start in 1986 to its end in 1999, the era of openness in Moscow always looked temporary. Western politicians feared a coup, clampdown or electoral reverse that could put an authoritarian regime back in power (though when this turn of events actually came about, with the rise of Mr Putin and the Siloviki, politicians stubbornly ignored their intelligence services’ warnings).
Some canny Western intelligence analysts had long noticed the growing resentment of Russian chauvinism and raised the unfashionable possibility that ‘nationalities’ might be the regime’s Achilles heel.13 That notion turned from academic theory to red-hot reality as the Baltic independence movements (and their counterparts in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Moldova and Ukraine) stirred from the shadows in the mid 1980s. But having once tried to subvert communism and free the captive nations, the West’s political leadership were unhappy when the supposedly longed-for day loomed close. It seemed much wiser to prop up the Soviet empire for the sake of stability. Analysts who trumpeted the joyful news of the impending collapse found themselves cold-shouldered. For a generation reared on the idea that the Soviet Union was a geopolitical fixture, it was also hard to grasp that its component parts were becoming countries in their own right. Though the Baltics had been countries at least in living memory, others, such as Georgia, had been off the map for most of the century and some Soviet republics – such as giant, oil-rich Kazakhstan – had never been states at all. Similar worries applied to the new Russian Federation after 1991. Would it stay together, or disintegrate under the continuing strains of economic hardship and ethno-nationalist ambition?
The great fear for the West was of a Yugoslav-style conflagration. That country – another seemingly permanent entity – began its descent into war in 1991 in a botched but largely bloodless attempt to prevent Slovenian independence. Later, around 140,000 people were to die, with more than 4m displaced (I am glad that Dušan, Olgica’s uncle in Oxford, did not live to see it).14 A similar conflict in the former Soviet space would not only be bigger, but could involve nuclear weapons. According to the conventional wisdom of the time, radical nationalist politicians were pushing too hard and too fast for independence. An outbreak of chaos or bloodshed might give hardliners in Moscow an excuse to declare martial law and end the reform experiment. For countries neighbouring the Soviet Union, another nightmare was of a lawless, poverty-stricken conflict zone, bringing refugees, terrorism and extremism into the tranquil world that they had preserved throughout the Cold War. ‘There are no good outcomes to this,’ a Finnish official told me glumly in Helsinki in 1991 as I arrived to spread the joyful news of the impending end of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.
But from an operational point of view, the disintegration of central power was an enormous bonus. The Baltics in particular were a spies’ sweetshop: accessible, target-rich and friendly. After decades when every trip across the Soviet frontier involved elaborate preparation, now all one needed to do was to hop onto a ferry from Helsinki or Stockholm. Within a few hours the foreign visitor could be in a bar near a military base, buying drinks for disgruntled officers and sounding out their availability for some lucrative ‘freelance research work’ for a ‘consultancy’. The spooks were so thick on the ground that their presence in the early 1990s was all too conspicuous. I remember a bunch of crew-cut Americans claiming to be ‘television researchers’ working on a film about the natural history of the Baltic coast. As a nature-loving former BBC correspondent, I was delighted at the chance of some informed discussion, only to find out that their ignorance of broadcasting was matched only by their indifference to singing swans and other fauna (though they certainly knew the topography of the coastline). Much of this happened under the noses of the nominal authorities, which although pro-Western, had neither the capability nor the interest to deal with foreign intelligence services. A delegation of top Estonian officials driving back from Leningrad in 1990 stopped at a roadhouse for refreshments and was surprised to see a group of taciturn and muscular German-speaking men, in military haircuts and jump suits, accompanying a truck headed in the same direction. Nobody in the Estonian government had any idea about these visitors’ presence or mission, and no explanation was forthcoming.
That was soon to change. In early 1992 Estonia set up a spy agency specifically designed to work closely with SIS. Its origins were humble: three young men – a lawyer, a final-year history student and a computer programmer – none of them with any experience of intelligence work, sitting in a small office with a pile of spy books from the library. Their mandate was to build the agency from scratch, without the slightest involvement from anyone connected even tangentially with the KGB. They soon realised that Estonia had a big asset: a ready supply of well-educated and patriotic young men and women who knew the Soviet system from the inside. Once trained as intelligence officers, these people could conduct operations in Russia and other ex-Soviet countries far more easily than any Westerner. They would understand whom to target and how to approach them; they understood everything from body language to security procedures. Their Russian language skills were at a level that few Westerners could ever hope to reach.
It was one thing to recruit such people, another to train them. How were they to learn the advanced spycraft needed to operate effectively? Generating that kind of expertise internally needed scale and time. Estonia was small and in a desperate hurry. The result, in September 1992, was an intelligence classic: a typed ten-page document in a buff-brown folder, with flow diagrams hand-drawn neatly between the paragraphs.15 Its key points included checks and balances, parliamentary oversight, compartmentalisation of operations, a ban on the use of intelligence for domestic political purposes, and the avoidance of an ‘information monopoly’. Spying and spycatching would be separated. And having analysed the other options, it said that cooperation with British intelligence was vital. Past blunders were put aside: the distant shadow of Operation Jungle seemed trivial against the task in hand. ‘I was not particularly interested in these historical questions,’ says one of the authors. ‘What was the alternative?’ asks another official of that era. ‘The Finns? Too untrustworthy. The Swedes? Too soft. The Americans? Too bossy. The French? Too alien. The Germans? Screwed up here already. It had to be the British’.16