Russia would never countenance such tactics in reverse. At a think-tank meeting in London, one of Britain’s most seasoned Russia-watchers bumped into Ms Zatuliveter and asked who she was: she readily explained that she was a Russian, working for Mike Hancock MP. My friend was thunderstruck. He knew Mr Hancock was on the defence committee; a post in his office would be the perfect vantage point for a talent-spotter, recruiter or agent-runner. (He would have been even more concerned had he known that Ms Zatuliveter was also planning to move on to one of Britain’s leading defence companies, or that she was dating a NATO official dealing with Russia.) He asked drily if it would be possible for a British citizen to have a similar job working for a member of the Russian parliament, the Duma. ‘Of course not,’ tittered Ms Zatuliveter. She is not the only one laughing. For the Siloviki in Moscow, Western society is a spies’ paradise. Despite the tedious metal-detectors and identity checks that burden daily life, we are astonishingly, almost suicidally, trusting when it comes to real security – protecting our secrets and our decision-making. To worry about Russian spies still counts as almost comically paranoid. The popular assumption is that we have no secrets worth stealing; and that even if we did, Russia has no interest in or means of obtaining them.
As I have tried to show in this book, that is untrue. We do have secrets. Our countries and alliances make decisions vital to our welfare. Russia is interested in these for reasons of its own. So are other countries – as I have noted earlier, spying is always a grubby business. But Russia is not like other countries, as the case of Sergei Magnitsky demonstrates. It uses its intelligence agencies as part of a broad and malevolent effort to penetrate our society and skew our decision-making. We do little to protect ourselves.
These Russian agencies are indeed incompetent, nepotistic, corrupt, blinkered and wasteful, like the state they serve. On occasion we have penetrated them and gained important victories – such as the arrests of the illegals described in this book. But they have crucial assets that we lack. One is determination: they really mind about besting us, whereas we do not take them seriously. Another is long-term thinking. For Western intelligence, spying is a demand-driven business. If the political customers want to know something, you invest. If they don’t, you move resources elsewhere. Russian spymasters think differently. They are willing to spend large amounts of time and money building up long-term assets, with little concern for the immediate payoff. The fact that the illegals arrested in America may not have done much spying does not mean that they were failures: it just means that their missions were incomplete. Russia’s third advantage is the ability to mount deception operations. As I have shown in the book, Western intelligence is fooled time and again by such ruses. Whether it was the Lockhart plot, the Trust, Operation Jungle or trusting Herman Simm’s security clearances, the story is the same: complacency and delusion on our side, ruthless ingenuity on theirs.
Despite our spycatchers’ recent successes, the rules of the game have not changed, and are in Russia’s favour, not ours. The Russian illegals were spies who looked like us, swimming effortlessly and invisibly through suburbia, nightlife, think tanks and consultancy, exploiting the natural trust and collegiality of an open society. Without a lucky break, they would still be there now. Nothing on our side has changed to make such missions harder, or on theirs to make them less likely. Everyone in such worlds needs to be more careful in who they deal with. The lesson of the ‘Spies in suburbia’ headlines should be that, however unlikely it may seem, and whatever their passport, background or career, a friendly new colleague, customer, supplier or business partner could, just possibly, be a Russian illegal, perhaps along the deep-cover model of Antonio or Heathfield, more likely resembling Ms Chapman. We will never return to the security-consciousness of the Cold War. But in any society that thinks its values are worth defending, those in professional or public life need to be wary about the questions people ask, and particularly of any offer of money for information.
We also need to rethink the comforting conventional account of European history after 1989. For many people the years that followed the Soviet collapse represented the longed-for ‘rollback’: the reversal of the gains made by Stalin in the years 1944–49. From this viewpoint, 1989 marked the belated culmination of John Foster Dulles’s ringing promise forty years earlier:
We should make it clear to the tens of millions of restive subject people in Eastern Europe and Asia that we do not accept the status quo of servitude aggressive Soviet Communism has imposed on them, and eventual liberation is an essential and enduring part of our foreign policy.1
Too many in the West projected their own sense of triumphalism onto the countries of the former Soviet empire. The gains there were indeed huge: political pluralism, prosperity, the rule of law and the chance to make sovereign decisions about security. Visible Russian influence diminished sharply. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel left the region as its occupation finally ended. The days when every government ministry had a senior Soviet official as a minder were gone. But in retrospect, the West (and many locals) over-estimated the scale of the Kremlin’s retreat. What looked like roll-back from one point of view was a stay-behind operation from another.[74] It is not just that a whiff of Putinism is now noticeable in many countries between the Baltic and the Black Sea, where politicians taste the pleasures of a close overlap between business and politics, and the use and abuse of officialdom against opponents. Amid the ruins of old structures, the KGB established new networks and assets that were to serve it well in the years ahead. Coupled with the inability of the new member states to carry out thorough counter-intelligence screening where it is most needed, the Soviet legacy created, in effect, a cohort of Trojan horses welcomed by Western alliances, states, services and agencies with open arms.
It is hard to know how far this was a deliberate operation, and how far the accidental dividend of precautions taken during the Soviet withdrawal. But the upshot is the same. From the Russian point of view, the outcome of 1989–91 has proved far less damaging and humiliating than it seemed at the time. An expensive, brittle and unruly empire has gone. Today these countries are the West’s problem. It is not Russia that pays for their modernisation, but the EU and international lenders.[75] That barely costs the Kremlin coffers a kopek (indeed Russia benefits from some of this largesse too). Growing prosperity in the ex-captive countries makes them better neighbours and trading partners for Russia. But more importantly, the continuing penetration of their societies, state structures and business by Russian intelligence gives the Kremlin an influence in Europe far more useful than it enjoyed in Soviet days. Recruiting and running Simm was child’s play compared to conducting a similar operation during the Cold War. Not only does NATO provide comfortable, well-lit office space and official passes for the Russian intelligence officers who spy on it, but the bureaucracies of a dozen new member states are full of potential targets for recruitment.
These human time bombs will not tick for ever. People who were in their early thirties in the late 1980s (and thus already tainted by collaboration) are in their fifties now, and at the peak of their careers in officialdom. Within another decade, they will retire. Already for many officials in the ex-communist world, the days of totalitarianism are a childhood memory, not a reality of adulthood. Yet the tainted generation can leave plenty of damage behind it – for example in discreetly advancing the careers of other younger officials willing to cooperate with Russia, or blocking those who seem obstinately honest.
74
bu Stay-behind operations were a staple of NATO planning during the early years of the Cold War, and envisaged well-organised networks of saboteurs and spies working to disrupt Soviet rule after an invasion of Western Europe, with access to secret arms caches. They included the notorious Operation Gladio, which degenerated into political mischief-making in Italy.
75
bv Chiefly the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank. If things go badly wrong, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank provide bailout packages.