One day in autumn 1993 I was in MI5’s headquarters in Gower Street. I was to get a briefing with *Jim, who at that time ran K Branch. As we sat chatting in a proverbially nondescript conference room, cups of tea in front of us, he laid out his view of the spying threats to the UK. It was levelheaded – certainly he did not seem in any way nostalgic for the Cold War. Jim noted that there was a 50 per cent drop in the number of SVR officers operating in the UK. Facing budget cuts the SVR had come to a deal with the Foreign Ministry, reducing the number of spooks, and with it the potential for embarrassment with the Western countries that befriended Boris Yeltsin’s democratic government.
The fall of the Berlin Wall had led to some obvious possibilities for economies in the spy business. Western agencies no longer had to track the activities of the KGB’s fraternal Eastern Bloc services, from East Germany to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. They had become democracies, most dissolving the spying agencies that had become hated symbols of the old system of power. With the collapse of the ideological confrontation there was a host of people also – from the KGB officers in London who liaised with the Communist Party of Great Britain or trades unionists to the staff of MI5’s F Branch who attempted to disrupt them – who were simply out of a job.
Adding to this sanguine picture was his assessment of the Michael Smith spy case. Smith, convicted in November 1993, was the agent revealed by the Oshchenko defection. Jim felt that his arrest and prosecution marked the tidying up of Cold War business rather than the start of something new.
There were however concerns voiced about the GRU. Jim told me that Russian military intelligence had successfully ‘resisted the nominal attempts at home to bring it under political control’. While the SVR had cut back, ‘the GRU have not reduced abroad’, and consequently, Jim said, ‘we’re more worried about them, they’re the least susceptible to political consideration’.
Moreover, Britain’s agencies considered the GRU a far harder target for penetration: its ethos had held up. The Americans had a couple of successes. Colonel Sergei Bokhan, the GRU deputy rezident in Greece, defected to the CIA in the summer of 1985, but that was because the agency warned him he’d been betrayed. Prior to defecting, Bokhan had been what the Americans called an RIP, a recruitment in place. Getting a GRU officer to spy for you during the Cold War, well, that had been a fearsome challenge. MI6 had found it impossible for decades, an important fact when considering the cultivation of Colonel Skripal.
Collectively, the Russian intelligence people, Jim felt, were, ‘still re-defining their objectives and working out their priorities’. The same of course was true in Langley, the Central Intelligence Agency head office, or at Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s garish new HQ on the south bank of the Thames. The arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994 exposed the huge damage that could be done by a KGB penetration – several agents had been executed as a result of his treachery and others, including Gordievsky, compromised. The SVR would start to reconstitute itself, and the GRU was unbroken. There was still a job for the mole-hunters.
And what about instability and the dangers of Russia’s democratic transition more generally?
In 1989 MI6 had received a defector from inside a secret biological weapons programme, Vladimir Pasechnik. In an interview he recorded with me for the BBC in 1992 he revealed publicly what he had told the spooks three years earlier, that a secret biological weapons programme had been hidden within an ostensibly civilian enterprise, in violation of an international treaty.
The British had also penetrated the chemical weapons establishment, and as both Gorbachev and Yeltsin moved to renounce these deadly technologies, the Western agencies had detected signs of concealment (from leaders in the Kremlin as well as themselves) and evasion from the Russians. The security of nuclear warheads also remained a great concern during these years.
Balanced against a continued desire to spy against Russia was the sense that opportunities were there to be grasped – and the visionary language of politicians who were heartily glad the Cold War was over. Stella Rimington, then Director General of MI5, travelled to Moscow to discuss cooperation. The FBI director did too and suggested the Bureau open a large office in the Russian capital. There were plenty of Western concerns that the Russians seemed to share, from the possible proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to organized crime, and terrorism.
As the Western espionage agencies braced for their own version of the peace dividend, budgetary cuts, those advocating new ‘global issues’ gained the upper hand, while the denizens of Cold War espionage were on the back foot. At MI6, that section at the pinnacle of the old spying game, Controller Soviet Bloc, was renamed Controller Central and Eastern Europe, suffering a modest reduction in staff and budget.
Along with the reshuffling of desks came the early retirement of some of the old Sov Bloc warhorses. Those running Eastern Bloc agents had been known in the corridors of MI6 as ‘the Master Race’; in the mid-1990s they no longer called the shots.
Russia though remained a target for intelligence collection and in the 1990s John Scarlett had a large role in defining the organization’s post-Cold War attitude to it. Having been posted in 1991 to Moscow as Head of Station he was, one year after his arrival, ‘declared’ to the authorities, meaning that his intelligence role was acknowledged and the emphasis of his job shifted from spying on the Russians to liaising over matters of mutual interest.
A brilliant Oxford history graduate and Russian-speaker, Scarlett had been Gordievsky’s case officer during the KGB man’s London years. It was the type of assignment that in the SIS of the early 1980s had given that officer an aura of enormous importance. If there were to be growing cooperation on counter-terrorism or fighting organized crime, the Office would need its man in Moscow, and Scarlett was as good a person to embody this change as they could find. Nobody at Vauxhall Cross ever thought this groundbreaking move would be a routine liaison posting, like Paris or Canberra, but Scarlett’s experience was to serve as a reminder to many in Whitehall of the unreconstructed nature of Russia’s agencies, particularly the FSB, which has the mission of catching foreign agents.
In March 1994, Scarlett was expelled from Moscow, when the Russians publicized the conviction of an official in their defence sales organization, saying he’d been spying for Britain. The word back in P5, SIS’s Russia wing, was that Moscow’s action was really motivated by pique that MI5 had declined to give a visa to the opposite number that the SVR had appointed to London. If London ruled out an ex-KGB heavy, then they would send Scarlett packing. As this episode shows, conflict was baked in to the relations between MI6 and the KGB’s successor organizations from the outset.
Throwing out a declared officer was regarded in SIS as an oddly perverse step since he was hardly hiding his true role, and such a step would make any future cooperation harder. When the Russians tipped off the press so that they could photograph Scarlett getting his flight home, this nettled MI6 still further, its officers having a particular horror of exposure in this way. Once a picture becomes public, intelligence services in the other places you may have been, whether under your own name or deep cover, might then reassess who you’d met and where you’d been, conducting a mole-hunt.
As Bagnall finished his first foreign station job and returned to Vauxhall Cross, he was picked up by the Russian Operations Section. By the mid-1990s, after various reorganizations, all of the key elements in the Russia game, overseas field stations, UK-based operations, targeting, and support sections, were grouped together in an organization called P5. The key purpose of P5, like its equivalents in the production directorate dealing with other parts of the world, was the harvesting of the agency’s raw product, intelligence from human agents, known in Whitehall’s secret jargon as CX.