Deception (44 page)

Russian misbehaviour abroad can seem a problem solely for the criminal justice authorities: they deal with gangsters, forgers, people-traffickers, cyber-crime and assassins. Blink and the problem seems instead one for the authorities that supervise the financial system, and have to deal with Russia's many strange business-like entities. Alert to every loophole, these are moving vast quantities of murkily obtained cash into the respectable world's banks and stock exchanges. Curbing that could prevent the people who swindled the Russian taxpayer and murdered Mr Magnitsky from enjoying their loot. Then again, the Russia files seem destined for the visa authorities: it is their job to cordon off our societies from ill-wishers and malefactors. Sometimes the regime in Moscow seems like a matter for diplomats, who with luck and skill may coax it into cooperative relationships with its neighbours, and defuse the misunderstandings of the past.

The grave weakness of the Western approach is that it regards spy-catching, criminal justice, financial supervision, lobbying disclosure and media-ownership rules as quite separate areas of decision-making. Yet given the multi-faceted threat they face, the agencies involved in these fields need to work in concert, not separately. It is troubling that the British and Irish authorities have not, for example, followed up the case of Steven Sugden. Because no money seems to have been stolen, it is below the radar of the police. From the spy-catchers' point of view, it is a ‘cold case'. They are too busy stopping things that may be going to happen to worry about events that took place a few years back. Moreover, even if techniques of Russian spycraft were used, the aim falls outside their remit. MI
5
catches spies, not criminals. Yet finding out if, how and why an imposter purloined the real Mr Sugden's signature, and what really happened with the addresses in Rossmore Grove, deserves proper investigation. The culprits are still at large; they and their accomplices are unpunished. The loopholes are still open. Someone may try the same trick again. If your own name, your address, your signature and your date of birth were used in such a manner, it would be of little comfort to know that the case fell between the cracks of a bureaucracy designed for another age.

A guiding principle in the West's dealings with Russia should be to listen to those people there who share our values, and to sustain and encourage them rather than demoralising them. In February
2011
the four leaders of the main opposition party, the Party of People's Freedom, wrote a sharply worded newspaper article, berating the Western countries for their role in facilitating the misrule and looting of Russia.

 

We urge Western leaders to discontinue their kisses-and-hugs ‘Realpolitik', which has failed, and to stop flirting with Russian rulers – behaviour that has not brought any benefits to the West and produces in Russia an impression that Putin's system is a decent one, like any other in the democratic world.

It means the West should cease greeting Russian rulers as equals, providing them with legitimacy they clearly do not merit. It means the West should start exposing corrupt practices by the Russian establishment, whose ability to find havens for stolen funds and leave Russia for comfortable lives in Western nations is one of the regime's pillars of stability. It means Western nations should introduce targeted sanctions against the officials directly abusing the rights of their compatriots.
³

 

Sanctions of this kind do not mean isolating Russia as a whole, which would indeed be futile and counterproductive. But it is worth stating bluntly that the current approach, of engagement without willpower, is certain to make matters worse, not better. The West hardly realises that it is dealing with an adversary that understands us better than we know ourselves, whose goals and methods are mysteries to us, and whom we barely recognise when we see him. He is determined; we are divided. He is resentful and paranoid; we are complacent and trusting. We want to like him. We hope he will like us, and eventually be like us. He wants nothing of the kind. As Don Jensen points out: ‘Those who keep calling for an engagement that will eventually transform Russia cannot see that it is the West, not Russia, that is being transformed.'
⁴
I hope this book can help the West to avoid that fate.

Acknowledgements

Meelis Saueauk of Estonia's Institute for Historical Memory kindly helped me find KGB documents about Operation Jungle from Estonian and Latvian archives. Ivo Juurvee also provided important examples of Soviet-era propaganda. Ritvars Jansons at the Occupation Museum in Riga generously shared his insights. M
ā
ra Gr
Ä«
nberga helped me find her article about the remarkable Mr P
Ä«
nups. Prokop Tomek in Prague shared his research on Miloslav Kro
č
a and his daughter. Tom Bower effortlessly unearthed his twenty-year-old notebooks and lent me his unique copy of the film
Red Web
. Tina Tamman helped me track down Alexander Koppel, whose daughter Catherine and son-in-law Michael Breslin provided kind hospitality. Juho and Janno Kiik readily shared their memories of Voldemar. Ben Judah provided excellent research on Anna Chapman's life in Russia. Sam Donaldson in Dublin investigated the mysteries of Rossmore Grove. I am grateful to all of them, and to the people I have quoted. Bill Swainson at Bloomsbury deftly untangled the book's structure and helped me signpost it for a wider audience. Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge and Wright calmed my jitters.

My children Johnny, Hugo and Izzy uncomplainingly put up with my physical and mental absences. My wife Cristina Odone's critique was invaluable, as were her love and patience from beginning to end. In
1970
s Oxford, my father J.R. Lucas's thoughts on espionage and communism inspired this book; it is dedicated to him and my mother Morar, who have been my unfailing support for fifty years. I am grateful to my editors at the
Economist
for giving me a sabbatical, and to my colleagues, particularly Ludwig Siegele, John Peet, Tom Nuttall and Bruce Clark, for uncomplainingly covering for my absences. However, the views, and mistakes, in this book are mine alone.

I owe a great debt to people who must remain nameless. They know who they are.

No government agency has sponsored or censored this book.

Notes

 

Links cited here are available at
www.edwardlucas.com

Introduction

1
Miss Fire: The Chronicle of a British Mission to Mihailovich
1943 – 1944 by Jasper Rootham (Chatto & Windus, 1946).
Petar
. A King's Heritage; The Memoirs of King Peter II of Yugoslavia
(Cassell,
1955
). Three Yugoslav-centred books that shaped my childhood are Lawrence Durrell's neglected classic spy novel,
White Eagles over Serbia
(Faber & Faber,
1957
); the masterly ‘Sword of Honour' trilogy by Evelyn Waugh (Chapman and Hall,
1955
,
1951
and
1961
); and Rebecca West's
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(Macmillan,
1941
).

2
Smiley's People
by John le Carré (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980). Colonel Alfons Rebane, the Estonian officer who played a leading role in SIS's Operation Jungle, was the model for le Carré's ‘General Vladimir', an Estonian émigré whose murder brings George Smiley back into the spy world.

3
See for example this report on the suicide of Nikolai Kruchina: ‘Soviet Turmoil; New Suicide: Budget Director', New York Times, 27 August 1991
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/27/world/soviet-turmoil-new-suicide-budget-director.html
and also ‘Desperately Seeking Rubles' by Susan Tifft and Yuri Zarakhovich, Time, 4 November 1991
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974181–1,00.html

4
The Cheka (formally the
Vserossiyskaya Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya
or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) was itself in some senses a successor to the Tsarist-era Okhrana (
Otdelenie po Okhraneniyu Obshchestvennoi Bezopasnosti i Poryadka, or Department for Protecting Public Safety and Order
). Successor organisations were the OGPU (
Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye
, or State Political Directorate, the NKVD (
Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs
) and the KGB (
Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security
). The FSB (
Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service
) is the main successor organisation to the KGB. The SVR is the much smaller
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki
or Foreign Intelligence Service. It used to be the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet-era KGB. By contrast the GRU (
Glavnoye Razveditelskoye Upravleniye
or Main Intelligence Directorate) is the military-intelligence service. Much diminished in recent years, it has changed neither its title nor its structure since Trotsky established it in 1918.

5
See ‘
Delo Poteyeva: predatel nanes ushcherb v 50mln dollarov no ne smog obmanut nachalstvo ukrainskoy lyubovnitsey
' (The Poteyev case: the traitor cost $50m but couldn't fool his bosses about his Ukrainian mistress)
http://www.newsru.com/russia/28jun2011/poteev.html
(this and all other links accessed July 2011).

6
‘Spying Suspects Seemed Short on Secrets' by Scott Shane and Benjamin Weiser,
New York Times
,
29
June
2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/world/europe/30spy.html
‘Russian Spies Too Useless, Sexy to Prosecute' by Dan Amira,
New York
magazine,
7
July
2010
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/07/russian_spies_too_useless_sexy.html
‘Spy swap: Viennese Waltz'
Guardian
,
10
July
2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/10/spy-swap-russia-us-editorial
‘The Russian spy scandal that nobody much cared about' by Alexander Chancellor,
Guardian,
2
July
2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/02/russian-spy-ring-scandal

7
‘Spy Swap' by John le Carré,
Guardian
,
9
July
2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/spy-swap-john-le-carre
The Harry Lime reference is to the
1949
film
The Third Man
(later a novella by Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay) of espionage in post-war Vienna.

8
Call For The Dead
by John le Carré (Penguin,
1965
). The first chapter is online. ‘A Brief History of George Smiley',
Guardian
,
22
May
2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/22/le-carre-call-for-the-dead

9
http://charlescrawford.biz/blog/more-on-russian-illegals-and-sleepers
(accessed
4
July
2010
).

10
The central character in thrillers by Robert Ludlum, later made into films such as
The Bourne Identity
(
2002
).

11
An excellent fictional account of this comes in Vasily Grossman's wartime classic
Life and Fate
(tr. Robert Chandler, Vintage Classics,
2010
). The NKVD's wartime role through the eyes of Soviet soldiers, is well portrayed in
Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army,
1939
–
1945
by Catherine Merridale (Picador,
2007
).

12
The home page for this programme (in Russian) is here
http://www.ren-tv.com/pages/tayny-mira-s-annoy-chapman

13
The author Yulian Lyandres (
1931
–
93
), under the pen name Yuliam Semyonov, published his first book
Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesni (The Seventeen Instants of Spring
) in
1968
. Unusually, it portrayed Nazi German officials as real people, not caricature monsters. Known as Colonel Maxim Isayev to his KGB colleagues, Stirlitz disrupts Nazi efforts to conclude a separate peace with the Western allies. After the war he hunts fugitive Nazis in Latin America, and is imprisoned at the height of the Stalinist post-war purges.

14
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Russia and the West
(Bloomsbury,
2008
). Published in America as
The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West
(Palgrave,
2008
).

15
For details see
http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/

16
Mr Mitrokhin made contact with an SIS officer in the British embassy in Riga on
24
March
1992
. The CIA had previously turned him down. SIS brought him and his family to Britain in November and later retrieved a large amount of material, said to be six aluminium trunkfuls, copied from the KGB archives and hidden in his dacha garden. Some of it appeared in a series of books that he wrote with the historian Christopher Andrew (Allen Lane
1999
–
2005
),
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB; The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World; The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West
. A parliamentary inquiry criticised some aspects of this:
http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm47/4764/4764.htm