A Brief History of the Spy (33 page)

The discussions later in the year were anything but comical, and soured relations between the two countries, particularly as it seemed as if Cold War tactics were back in use. Former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko apparently died of poisoning after drinking a cup of tea that had been laced with radioactive
Polonium-210 on 1 November 2006. He had been an outspoken critic both of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the Russian leader personally, claiming that the FSB under Putin had ordered him to assassinate Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky; that it had been responsible for a series of explosions blamed on Chechen separatists, which had been instrumental in bringing Putin to power; and even that Putin was a paedophile. He was granted asylum in the UK in 2000, where he advised both MI5 and MI6 and wrote increasingly vitriolic attacks on the FSB and Putin, accusing them of supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda, and being responsible for the London bombings of 7/7. Two weeks before his fatal drink, he said that Putin had ordered the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Litvinenko met with former KGB agents Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi on 1 November and fell ill shortly afterwards. He died in hospital on 23 November. The police investigation led to the preparation of an extradition request for Lugovoi from Russia, which was not processed. Lugovoi claimed the request was politically motivated, and was even willing to undergo a polygraph test. The test was carried out by a French media company who supply tests for daytime television programmes such as
The Jeremy Kyle Show
. Lugovoi said he had not been involved directly or indirectly with the murder, or had anything to do with polonium. ‘After careful analysis of all the diagrams obtained from the test, we have determined that the answers to these questions were not false. Thus, in our professional opinion, Andrey Lugovoi was telling the truth when answering the above questions,’ came the result. This seemed to fly in the face of evidence of polonium traces in his hotel rooms, and on the planes that he had used between London and Moscow. Lugovoi now has parliamentary immunity from extradition as a sitting Russian member of parliament; an inquest ordered in October 2011 had still not convened in July 2012, when Litvinenko’s widow
lobbied the British parliament to assist with helping her find final answers.

The relationship between Russia and Britain has not fully recovered from the incident. Diplomats were expelled by both countries. Long-range bomber aircraft sorties were recommenced by the Russians in 2007, requiring RAF planes to scramble from time to time when they came too near to British airspace. The following January, the Russians claimed that the British Council in Moscow was riddled with spies. That July, a ‘senior security source’ told the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘Russia is a country which is under suspicion of committing murder on British streets and it must be assumed that having done it once they will do it again.’ Six months later it was revealed that the number of Russian intelligence agents in the UK was at the same level as during the height of the Cold War, a piece of information that MI5 considered serious enough that it placed it on its website. ‘If a country, such as Russia or Iran, can steal a piece of software which will save it seven years in research and development then it will do so without any hesitation,’ a ‘Whitehall source’ said. ‘Russian agents will target anybody that they believe could be useful to them. Spying is hard-wired into the country’s DNA. They have been at it for centuries and they are simply not going to stop because the Cold War has ended.’ And it was clear that Britain wasn’t the only target.

The spy ring that was broken in America in 2010 was a gift to journalists, thanks to the involvement of future model and cover star Anna Chapman. It had all the ingredients of a classic spy thriller: sleeper agents planted a decade earlier in the heart of suburbia, a beautiful honey trap who got so close to a key member of President Obama’s cabinet that the FBI were forced to act, and a dramatic swap of agents at Vienna International Airport.

Ten Russian agents, including Chapman, were arrested on
27 June, 2010; an eleventh was detained two days later in Cyprus on his way to Budapest; two further members of the ring escaped back to Russia. In the indictment laid against the agents, the FBI included the instructions that the SVR had given the sleepers: ‘You were sent to [the] USA for [a] long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. – all these serve one goal: fulfill [
sic
] your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in [the] US and send intels [intelligence reports] to C[enter].’ They weren’t particularly competent though – evidence against Chapman was provided in part by the laptop that she herself gave to an FBI agent posing as her SVR contact, and she bought a cellphone giving the address ‘99 Fake Street’.

The FBI had been running the operation to catch them – Operation Ghost Stories – for many years. Documents that have been released on the FBI’s website, although heavily redacted, indicate that the ring was under surveillance as far back as 2002 and provided copious amounts of video evidence against them showing them using dead drops, ‘brush past’ exchanges of information with Russian officials and other elements of tradecraft. The Russians had in some cases taken the identities of American citizens and built a complete cover for themselves, including enrolling and graduating from universities and joining professional organizations. They started families as part of their cover and even, according to one of the children, intended to recruit them to work for the FSB when the time was right.

Chapman was a recent addition to the spy ring, and was targeted by the FBI. However, she felt uncomfortable when, on 26 June, the fake SVR agent asked her to pass a counterfeit passport to another spy. She contacted her father, a former KGB officer, for advice; he told her not to carry out the instructions and hand the passport in at a police station. This she did the next day, and was arrested. This attempted entrapment by the FBI may have been a ploy to get stronger
evidence against her. According to Bureau counter-intelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi: ‘We were becoming very concerned,’ he told a British Channel 4 documentary in 2012. ‘They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue.’ This was the first confirmation that Chapman was more competent than the original reports had indicated.

Even before the spy ring was arrested, preparations were in hand for a spy swap with the Russians. When the approach was made by the CIA, and the requisite faux protestations and denials had been made by the FSB, the details were quickly arranged. Chapman and the other Russians were exchanged for: Igor Sutyagin, convicted of passing details on submarines systems to the CIA; Sergei Skripal, a GRU colonel who had been working for MI6; SVR Colonel Alexander Zaporozhsky, sentenced to eighteen years for spying for the Americans in 2003; and Gennady Vasilenko, a former KGB officer who was, incorrectly, believed to be a double agent for the Americans, thanks to information supplied by Robert Hanssen. No evidence had been found against him, but he had been imprisoned on other charges. He was the only one who hadn’t committed treason against the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. According to some reports, he was included in the swap after a personal request from his former counterpart, CIA officer Jack Platt.

The returning spies were eventually hailed as heroes (once they’d been debriefed, and the SVR could be sure that they hadn’t been turned as double agents). Chapman now hosts a TV show and has made appearances in the Russian version of
Maxim
magazine, as well as on the catwalk. This might make it seem as if what she did isn’t to be taken seriously, but, as former MI5 Director General Sir Stephen Lander pointed out, ‘The fact that they’re nondescript or don’t look serious is part of the charm of the business. That’s why the Russians are so successful at some of this stuff. They’re able to put people in
those positions over time to build up their cover to be useful. They are part of a machine . . . And the machine is a very professional and serious one.’

The Chapman affair had a knock-on effect in Britain when MI5 believed that they had found another honey trap agent shortly after Chapman and her colleagues had been repatriated. Twenty-six-year-old Russian student Ekaterina Zatuliveter was arrested and told she would be deported as a risk to national security. This followed an investigation into her relationship with Portsmouth MP Mike Hancock, during which she had potential access to secret documents.

The evidence against her seemed strong. Either Zatuliveter had a penchant for men in positions of power, or there was something sinister in her choice of partners. Before her affair with Hancock, she had been involved with a Dutch diplomat. Then when she and Hancock went their separate ways, she dated both a NATO official (asking him about a meeting he’d attended with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), and a senior UN official.

Zatuliveter met Hancock when he visited St Petersburg University in 2006 and she eventually travelled to Britain to become his unpaid researcher at the House of Commons. MI5 suspected that she had been instructed by the SVR to seduce Hancock – who had a reputation for extra-marital affairs – to gain a pass to the building and knowledge of his work on various defence committees.

During a series of interviews with both MI5 and MI6, standard for any foreign national working in such a restricted area, Zatuliveter vehemently denied that she was in any way involved with the Russian secret service. When she was served with the deportation order, she determined to fight it, and appealed to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.

The case was heard in October 2011. It didn’t help that she had actually met with a known Russian agent during her affair
with Hancock, although she claimed that she had no idea he really was a spy. She had also joked in an email that her affair with the NATO official had meant that half of NATO was disabled, and that the Kremlin were calling her with congratulations. However, although the Commission agreed that the Security Service had ‘ample grounds for suspicion’, they did not believe that they had proved their case, and in November 2011 Zatuliveter was allowed to stay in the UK. Nonetheless, she returned to Russia the following month.

It may not officially be called the Cold War any more, but it’s clear that the ‘Great Game’ between East and West is still very much alive. Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle was arrested in Canada for passing documents to the Russians from the Canadian navy intelligence centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 2012. A sixty-year-old German was arrested in Holland in May 2012, accused of passing 450 secret files to one of Anna Chapman’s former contacts. Former FSB colonel Valery Mikhailov was sentenced to eighteen years in prison on 6 June 2012 after passing papers to CIA officers in Moscow.

According to MI5’s website: ‘The threat of espionage (spying) did not end with the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. Espionage against UK interests continues and is widespread, insidious and potentially very damaging . . . The ultimate aim of our work is to make it as difficult as possible for foreign spies to operate against the UK.’

In February 2012, outgoing Russian President Dimitri Medvedev told the FSB that Russian counterintelligence exposed 199 foreign spies in 2011, proving that ‘activity of [foreign] intelligence services is not decreasing’.

The FBI agree:

Spies haven’t gone the way of the Cold War. Far from it. They’re more prolific than ever – and targeting our nation’s most valuable secrets. As the lead agency for exposing,
preventing, and investigating intelligence activities on US soil, the FBI works to keep weapons of mass destruction and other embargoed technologies from falling into wrong hands, to protect critical national secrets and assets, and to strengthen the global threat picture by proactively gathering information and intelligence.

Will we ever reach a stage where spies aren’t needed? As MI5 Director-General Jonathan Evans said in a speech in the City of London on 25 June 2012:

Those of us who are paid to think about the future from a security perspective tend to conclude that future threats are getting more complex, unpredictable and alarming. After a long career in the Security Service, I have concluded that this is rarely in fact the case. The truth is that the future always looks unpredictable and complex because it hasn’t happened yet. We don’t feel the force of the uncertainties felt by our predecessors. And the process of natural selection has left us, as a species, with a highly developed capacity to identify threats but a less developed one to see opportunity. This helps explain the old saying that when intelligence folk smell roses they look for the funeral.

Spies have been around for as long as there have been opposing groups of mankind. Sun Tzu was counselling, ‘Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business,’ in
The Art of War
2,500 years ago. The threats may change but the need for information about them will never go away. And while that remains the situation, spies will continue to thrive.

My thanks to everyone who has assisted with the preparation of this book, including a couple of sources who need to remain anonymous, and especially to:

Brian J. Robb for many things, especially the introductions and the wise words on the text. It’s my turn to buy the DVDs!

Duncan Proudfoot and Clive Hebard, my editors at Constable & Robinson, for their help in shaping this manuscript and for their patience when real life intervened; and my copy-editor Gabriella Nemeth, for helping me avoid some pitfalls of my own making.

Robert J. Sawyer for the recommendation of the Writers Blocks software which was a great help in plotting out the best way to frame the narrative.

Michael, our Cold War tour guide in Berlin at Easter 2012, for some very interesting insights and tales of the CIA in its early days.

Lee Harris, Amanda Rutter, Lizzie Bennett, Scott Pearson, Jenny Miller, Caitlin Fultz, Patricia Hyde and Adina Mihaela Roman for coming to the rescue when things were looking difficult.