6 ‘Intelligence war breaks out in Israel’s Foreign Ministry’ by Joseph Fitsanakis, 20 July 2009. http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2009/7/20/1-188/
7 According to the German security service http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/download/SHOW/vsbericht_2009.pdf p. 331 (in German).
8 A prominent semi-retired officer, Anton Surikov, died mysteriously in late 2009. In his last interview with a Western journalist a few weeks earlier, he said that Russia was run by ‘bandits from St Petersburg’. They, he said, were trying to push the country towards an authoritarian, Chinese-style model of political and economic development. The GRU director Valentin Korabelnikov retired in 2009 to avoid sacking, amid semi-public disagreement with his bosses over Russia’s military reforms. ‘Last Cake with a Russian Agent’ by Ben Judah, Standpoint, January/February 2010 http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2580/full
9 Viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFnsqivNW6A
10 ‘ Polska broń w slużbie gruziń skiej armii’ (‘Polish weapons in the service of the Georgian Army’) by Michael Majewski and Pawel Reszka; Dziennik, Warsaw, 10 August 2008. http://wiadomosci.dziennik.pl/polityka/artykuly/156916,polska-bron-w-sluzbie-gruzinskiej-armii.html
11 An excellent account of the conflict is A Little War That Shook The World by the late Ron Asmus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Another is The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia by Svante Cornell and Frederick Starr (eds.) (M. E. Sharpe, 2009).
12 Georgia’s South Ossetia Conflict: Make Haste Slowly, Crisis Group Europe Report No. 183, 7 June 2007, p. 16 http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/europe/183_georgia_s_south_ossetia_conflict_make_haste_slowly.ashx
13 My source for this is a Georgian government non-paper and interviews with senior Georgian and Western officials. See also ‘Tbilisi Says Evidence Links Russian Officer to Blasts’, Civil Georgia, 8 December 2010. http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=22940 and ‘Georgia accuses Russia of bombings, warns on talks’ by Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters, 7 June 2011 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/6/7/georgia-russia-talks-idUSLDE75622520110607
5 Spycraft: Fact and Fiction
1 They may have some self-defence training and will often be excellent drivers. Those who have joined after a previous career in the military, particularly in special forces, are different; so are the dodgy characters often recruited as auxiliaries. For gossipy details of CIA training, see Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy by Lindsay Moran (Putnam, 2005).
2 Search warrant for 35b Trowbridge St, Cambridge MA. http://www.thebostonchannel.com/download/2010/715/24272005.pdf
3 See (in Swedish) http://www.forsvarsmakten.se/hkv/Must/ and Sveriges hemligaste rum (Sweden’s most secret room) by Emelie Asplund and Ewa Stenberg, Dagens Nyheter, 3 October 2005 http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sveriges-hemligaste-rum. Next-door Finland is even lower-profile. It has a domestic security agency (SuPo), which is part of the police, and a military intelligence agency. Any capability for foreign human intelligence is admirably hidden.
4 See ‘Factbox: Who are the spies Russia plans to swap?’, Reuters, 9 July 2010 http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/7/9/us-russia-usa-spies-factbox-idUSTRE6681DG20100709. The others were Igor Sutyagin, who had worked at a think tank; Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, a KGB colonel who spied for America and helped unmask Ames and Hanssen, but unwisely returned to Russia; and Gennady Vasilenko, about whom little is known. See Stranny srok ‘shpiona’ Vasilenko’ (The strange life of the ‘spy’ Vasilenko), Rosbalt, 13 July 2010 http://www.rosbalt.ru/moscow/2010/7/13/753359.html
5 Sources differ on whether the man concerned was Oleg Penkovsky, the West’s highest-ranking agent-in-place in the Soviet Union, or Piotr Popov, the first GRU officer to be recruited by the West, who was betrayed by the SIS officer George Blake. The account comes from Aquarium – The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy (Hamish Hamilton, 1985) by Viktor Suvorov (the pen name of Vladimir Rezun).
6 The same ‘spotlighting’ was experienced in 1996 by Norman MacSween, the then SIS station chief in Moscow, who was the case officer for Platon Obukhov, a 28-year-old foreign ministry employee. He was shown waiting vainly on a park bench in Moscow. See ‘British Diplomat Linked to Spy Case’ by Owen Matthews, The Moscow Times, 31 July 1996. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/british-diplomat-linked-to-spy-case/320742.html
7 ‘The cold war is over, but rock in a park suggests the spying game still thrives’ by Nick Paton Walsh, Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill, Guardian, 24 January 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jan/24/russia.politics; and ‘Spy-rock Russian faces 20 years’ jail’ by Mark Franchetti, Sunday Times, 29 January 2006 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article722212.ece
8 The Big Breach: from Top Secret to Maximum Security was originally published in Moscow in 2001, with the help of Russian intelligence. It is now available in the UK from Cutting Edge Press.
9 ‘Spies Among Us: Why Spies, Why Now?’ 10 July 2010 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201007/spies-among-us. Mr Navarro can be reached through www.jnforensics.com
10 His real name is still classified, according to a CIA spokesman. The document can be read at http://www.scribd.com/doc/515327/ciadeepcover
11 ‘What’s wrong with America’s spies’, April 2003, Middle East Intelligence Bulletin http://www.meforum.org/meib/articles/304_me1.htm. Mr Carroll’s website is http://www.tpcarroll.com. Another useful primer on espionage is this course syllabus http://www.csus.edu/indiv/c/carrollt/site/welcome_files/gov’t%20139g%20class%20notes%20fall%202006%20-%2024%20oct.pdf
6 Spies Like Us