Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 14 – Western media have been fixated on a report that Moscow now has
200 case officers working in London alone and handling 500 agents and as many
as 75,000 informants and the suggestion by some Russian emigres that half of
all their own number serve as Moscow informers.
US-based
Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova spoke with Sergey Zhirnov, a former Soviet
KGB illegal who defected and now lives in France, about those contrasting
claims and about the current state of Russian intelligence and
counter-intelligence operations (zimamagazine.com/2018/11/sergei-jirnov/).
Zhirnov says that he agrees with the
original report and that the numbers the emigres are suggesting are too high –
or at least do not reflect what is actually going on. Russians who live abroad but who have family
and friends in Russia won’t refuse to answer questions by the KGB but that
hardly makes them recruited agents in any meaningful sense.
But the former KGB officer’s most
interesting comments concern the ways in which Russian intelligence operations
are the same or different than they were in the latter years of the Soviet
Union. In some ways, the Russian
services have become bolder in their use of force, but in the area of political
intelligence, not much has changed.
“What has changed is something else,”
Zhirnov says. “After the collapse of the
USSR, present-day Russia did not develop any clear national ideology beside the
single ‘national idea’ according to which all around us are enemies but we are ‘a
great power.’ The Soviet Union for all its shortcomings had a universal idea”
which attracted some and which the KGB used.
Russia in contrast “has become a
fascist country, and therefore it makes friends with all fascists throughout
the world. But I do not think that its
activity abroad has been that successful. Of course, if people are dissatisfied
with what is happening in their country, they may look for some support abroad;
and Russia in this sense may represent for them an interest.”
Just like its Soviet predecessor,
the Russian intelligence services engage in lobbying and recruitment of those
who will push Moscow’s line and in espionage strictly speaking. And again, like
its Soviet predecessor, Russia seeks to destabilize its key opponents. What has
changed is that now it uses money more often because it lacks an attractive
ideological message.
What is especially striking now is
that so many intelligence operations abroad are undertaken for “internal use”
inside Russia and are taken in such a bold way. The Skripal case is an example
of this, Zhirnov says; it was “specially prepared just before” Putin’s re-election;
and it was carried out with a dangerous boldness that has led to problems.
Using the size of buildings that the
Russian intelligence agencies operate from, he says, is a surrogate for data on
their size. Using them, one can say that Moscow has increased its intelligence
work approximately two times from what it was in Soviet times. Given that the Russia’s
population is half that of the USSR, its spy effort thus has grown “about four
times.”
Classic espionage has not only continued
but risen in importance. That is because “Putin is a quite specific person; one
can even say, a maniac. He doesn’t believe anyone at their word or believe any
spoken or printed word. He is capable of believing only secret information.”
That means he relies even more heavily on spying that his predecessors.
In addition to discussing how much
dissidence there was in Soviet times among intelligence officers, Zhirnov makes
another key point about today: “The staff of counter-intelligence in Russia has
grown more than has that of the intelligence branch.” It tracks those living abroad – and far more
Russians now do -- and that is especially for Putin.
“If for the KGB foreign intelligence was the priority,
Putin’s priority is internal security which includes work with the diaspora
abroad and even more keeping track of Russian dissidents in that diaspora.”
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