Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 6 – Despite its
much ballyhooed success in preventing any attack on the Sochi Olympics, the FSB
has not had a good year in Ukraine, where its military competitor the GRU
played the dominant role in the annexation of Crime and where its inability to
predict developments in Ukraine constituted an intelligence failure of the first
magnitude.
In today’s “Yezhednevny zhurnal,”
Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two of the most prominent independent
commentators on the Russian intelligence services, say that given the FSB’s
responsibilities to monitor Ukraine, many in the Russian capital last spring
were asking how it could have performed so poorly (ej.ru/?a=note&id=26788).
People asked “how such a special
service which so self-confidently conducted itself in Ukraine – and only by
such an attitude can one explain the arrival in Kyiv at the time of the Maidan
events of a group of highly placed officers under their own names – in fact did
not understand anything about what was going on and could not predict anything,
including the disappearance from [Kyiv] of the president under their control.”
Moreover, the two say, “judging from
the fact that so many people came out of nowhere to become leaders of the
pro-Russian party in Crimea, the FSB did not have any serious intelligence
positions even on the peninsula, otherwise the selection of politicians [there]
would have been more sensible.”
“The war which began in the east of
Ukraine,” they write, “from the very beginning” featured PR specialists and
propagandists “in key positions,” and thus “for the Russian special services,
it began a PR war,” perhaps even more than an intelligence one. This reality
was highlighted by the fact that the Russian media “for months” discussed
whether the leader of the pro-Moscow militants was working for the GRU or the
FSB.
According to Soldatov and Borogan, “this
discussion lasted so long that it degenerated into a farce at the end of
December when on the eve of the Day of the Chekist an interview appeared in ‘Nezavisimoye
voennoye obozreniye’” in which an anonymous FSB general said he had recruited
Girkin (Strelkov) in 1995.
But it was not only in Ukraine that the FSB’s involvement
with PR seemed to get the best of it, the two say. They say that the spy scandal which occurred
when Russian border guards seized an Estonian “was unique because it was played
out according to the rules of propaganda which in that case contradicted the
traditions of the special services.”
Initially,
it all looked normal enough. The Russians said he was a spy but as more facts
came out, “many journalists began to suspect that the entire history was a put
up job and the spy not a real one.” That
led to a response: NTV put out a film entitled “Our Man in Tallinn” whose hero
said he had worked 20 years for the Russians.
But
what was “curious” about all this is that he said he worked all that time “not
for the SVR or the GRU,” the two agencies it would have been most appropriate
for such a spy to be employed by but rather “for the FSB.” Moreover, Soldatov
and Borogan say, “in violation of all unwritten rules,” the film showed “even
the officer who ran him, “a completely unbelievable thing for the Russian
special services.”
Even
more intriguing, they write, “in fact for the first time, the FSB acknowledged
[by so doing] that it was involved in foreign intelligence activities.” That is
because, despite the FSB handler’s assertions that the man provided information
on foreign intelligence operations against Russia, it is clear, “the field of
[his] activity was broader” than that.
Such
public relations efforts reflect “the far reaching ambitions of the FSB” to
play a bigger role abroad, something that Soldatov and Borogan say was also
confirmed by the new treaty between South Osetia and the Russian Federation
according to which the State Security Committee of the former becomes part of
the FSB.
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