A Postmodernist Era Spy Scandal

The scandalous resolution of the story about illegals in America gave answers to not one of the key questions in this affair. The fact that all of the participants, both from the American and the Russian side, confessed their guilt cannot be considered an answer.

At the present time the main consequence of the exchange can be considered the fact that new information about the spies, which should inevitably have come to light in court, will not become accessible to the society. It therefore would be worthwhile trying to understand what this scandal in fact means for all of the participants.

Significance for the Americans

First of all, the analogy with the catching of Soviet agents during the Cold War is incorrect, despite the immoderate use of the very same cliches by the American media (your neighbor might turn out to be a Russian spy, and so forth).

The exposure of illegals in America in the 1950s had a completely different political significance than now. Besides the secrets that "Reds under the bed" might have stolen, they represented still another danger. During the Cold War, as a war of ideology, the adversary's moral degeneration was considered a key assignment. Illegals therefore were considered a threat to the West's moral stability. It was no accident, for example, that the American special services responded to the British scandal with the Cambridge Five with restrictions on homosexuals -- it was considered that this was a sign of degradation under the onslaught of Communism.

Today it is obvious that "Russians under the bed" numbering 11 people or even 50 people do not represent a threat to the morals and morality of the United States. The damage from their activity is limited only to what they did as intelligence agents, that is, what secrets they obtained. But the FBI made a very indistinct statement exactly about this and after the exchange the opportunity to get a public answer to this question was practically lost.

For Russia

For the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) the exposure of such a number of agents is on the one hand not as serious as it appears (the value of the whole group is hardly comparable to that of one Ames), but on the other hand is evidence of a systemic crisis having Soviet roots. Soviet, and now Russian, intelligence is renowned for two unique things: it has its own full-spectrum higher learning institution and it uses illegals -- that is, its own citizens disguised as inhabitants of another country. They do not have their own institution in the CIA, as they also do not have in MI-6. These intelligence services get along with training courses. Along with this, they did not try to send out either Americans or Britons into the USSR as Soviet citizens (the famous NOC agents -- non-official cover -- are employees without diplomatic cover, and that is all).

There is one reason why Soviet and Russian intelligence teaches their employees in a specialized academy and uses illegals: our spies' best days were during the era of the Comintern's (Communist International) intelligence during the 1930-40s.

Then Soviet Russia could count upon the support of American, British, English and French Communists with excellent educations and connections in the entire world. After Stalin destroyed them during the purges, intelligence had to create a special learning institution in order at least somehow to prepare yesterday's peasants for life in completely different, even everyday, conditions. This did not turn out very well: anecdotes circulated among the British of Soviet military attaches who were former tank crew members with characteristic ways (this is very visible even in photographs from that time).

The sending out of illegals responded to the very same goal -- these were desperate and not very successful attempts to replace Cominternists with home-grown cadres. The return was not proportionate. They used them only for contacts with recruited agents (they were not useful for anything else inasmuch as in the best case they were successful in being disguised only as a small businessman). Besides this, as early as after the collapse of the Soviet Union it became clear that the KGB was indebted for Soviet intelligence's greatest successes during the Cold War's last period (the recruitment of Ames and Hanssen) not to illegals but to the classic intelligence officer Viktor Cherkashin, working, as also befits a spy, in the embassy under cover.

It is apparent, however, that in the SVR they are unable to reject the past, extolled in the form of the never-having-existed Shtirlitz. To tell the truth, nobody also prevented the SVR from reveling in myths: Russian intelligence during the 1990s was not under the same pressure as other special services and luckily avoided reorganizations (not taking into account Primakov's cosmetic reforms) and for not the first decade consider precisely tradition to be their main accomplishment -- a thing that frequently is inadvisable for intelligence.

Today these SVR traditions have clearly let them down: the agents introduced into the US appeared to be incapable of replacing one Cherkashin, and the opinion of several experts that they should only have been "put into operation and waited" does not hold up to any sort of criticism: sleeper agents were used to organize sabotage on an adversary's territory during a special period, during a time of war, but it is unlikely the SVR planned such actions in America. In such a case the question is legitimate: what should be the return for those considerable resources that were expended to put agents of this type into operation?

The Exchange

Of those Russians handed over to the US the American side's most contradictory choice is, of course, Igor Sutyagin, the only one of the four who is not a regular intelligence officer but a civilian scholar. US State Department representative Mark Toner refused to say why it was exactly these four they chose for the exchange, having said only "this was in the interests of the United States." The fact that Sutyagin was not set apart from the general ranks of freed spies, of course, put all of those who for all these years defended him in a difficult position. And Sutyagin's confessing guilt only made the situation worse.

Sutyagin's arrest at the end of the 1990s coincided in time with the FSB's (Federal Security Service) campaign against scientist-ecologists and the numerous scandals accompanying the investigations and judgments against them. Amnesty International declared Sutyagin a prisoner of conscience and Russian human rights defenders declared him a political prisoner, in spite of the fact that before the arrest nothing was known about Sutyagin's political views and he did not in any way display his social position.

From the official charge made against Sutyagin in the Moscow City Court it follows that he is guilty of transferring information taken from the open press, which he with the help of his analysis somehow turned into state secrets. The absurdity of the accusations was strengthened by the circumstance that, being a USA and Canada Institute colleague, Sutyagin never had access to a state secret. Former SVR employee Yakimishen's revelation provided to the jury, about which we wrote in Moskovskiye Novosti, again confirmed the weakness of he FSB's position.

At the same time, the suspicious consulting firm Alternative Futures for which Sutyagin worked on contract remained outside the bounds of discussion by the liberal media. Let us recall that according to the FSB's version Sutyagin established contact with two of the firm's employees, Sean Kidd and Nadia Locke, whom the FSB considered representatives of the US's military intelligence. The FSB presented the address and telephone for the firm in London but by the time of the scandal the office had already been abandoned and the telephone disconnected.

In 2004 the authors of this article received information about a third person, the Briton Christopher Martin, yet another co-founder of Alternative Futures. Besides this, we learned the address of a house in London in which Sutyagin met with Nadia Locke and Sean Kidd. During a check it was explained that the house belongs to Christopher Martin and he answers the home telephone. In a telephone conversation Martin explained that it was the first time that he heard about Sutyagin, that the house is sometimes rented, and he flatly refused to meet. Thanks to the help of British journalists we found out that Martin is a former employee of Barclay's Bank and that in 2004 he worked for a small publishing house. The publishing house's specialty is the publication of military memoirs and memoirs of former intelligence officers and diplomats. A month after our conversation with Martin the house was put up for sale. We also wrote about this story in Moskovskiye Novosti but no reaction to this publication followed.

Sutyagin's transfer at the US's initiative together with three spies and his confession are changing the situation. What has occurred makes it possible to surmise that the FSB could not or did not wish to transfer to the court materials about what kind of secret information Sutyagin in fact transferred to Alternative Futures and where the source was for the flow of secrets (in the corridors they name the Obninsk center for additional training for nuclear submarine crews, where Sutyagin taught). Unimportant circumstances that are not a crime were presented to the court instead of a transmitter of secrets. Sutyagin received 15 years in a penal colony for this mystification presented to the court. It is exactly this that remains the main complaint against the FSB in the matter: Sutyagin was illegally convicted.

Nevertheless, Sutyagin's confession of guilt put not only human rights defenders into a difficult position but other scientists as well who continue to be behind bars under the accusation of spying, for instance, the Krasnoyarsk physicist Danilov. The Amnesty International organization, having in this way put him in the same ranks as Vladimir Bukovskiy also is now forced to squirm, stating that Sutyagin might have confessed his guilt under pressure.

Questions That Should Not Remain without an Answer

The entire story about the SVR illegals and the subsequent exchange looks like a postmodernist play based on Cold War motifs: illegals with archaic invisible ink (technology from the beginning of the past century), an exchange carried out using a scenario from 1960s spy films. The impression is such that the devotees of stylistics that have passed into history have performed for too long both in the US and in Russia and at the same time both countries' politicians clearly have made it understood that they are not interested in a real escalation of the conflict.

There is only one important circumstance about which they apparently have tried to forget: in the 1960s relations between the society and intelligence agents were fundamentally different than they are now. Then there was a war going on, although it was only cold, and the special services decided that the society must know about these games, and the intimidated voters for the most part accepted these conditions of the game.

However, over the past 20-30 years the political situation has changed, the space for questions to the special services has become larger. As the Americans have the right to ask why a legal process against spies who supposedly seriously had threatened the US's national security was disrupted, so Russian society must raise the question: will an investigation be carried out of the mistakes committed by foreign intelligence. Besides this, it would be worthwhile to raise the question of for how long the FSB will consider the court an object for mystification.

There also is reason to ask the human rights defenders' community: where is the line between victims of the state machine and people who have suffered for their convictions.

Published in Russian in Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal 12.07.2010