Internal Crisis in the FSB: Officers Vs Generals

Visiting the FSB’s headquarters, President Medvedev not praised the spies, promising to increase their salaries and upgrade their kit. This essentially reinforced the unassailable position the FSB had acquired in the 2000’s. It seems that this, the country’s most secretive agency, managed to prevent their president from seeing that the service is currently experiencing its deepest morale crisis since the early 1990’s. Unlike then, however, this crisis has been provoked by internal, not external, factors.

Remember that the secret service was guaranteed this position ten years ago under the pretext of being the only structure in the country able to act as the state’s iron fist in the new economic environment. Ten years ago the Lubyanka’s top brass affirmed that the secret services really were the state’s most essential and reliable weapon, comprising people who are united in their patriotic ideals, bound together by their shared team spirit and loyalty to the regime. In short, that they were a team of like-minded people who have dedicated themselves to the service and who are willing even to sacrifice themselves for it should the need arise.

In choosing to retain these apparent qualities, the Kremlin was prepared to close its eyes not only to the fact that those very same generals had cottages on the Rublevka, but also to the corruption scandals. For the sake of preserving that loyalty and unity, certain failings could be overlooked or forgiven: After all, they could be seen as being growing pains, or explained away as due to the difficulties of the transition period.

It was under this pretext that the secret service accumulated resources, swallowed up competing services and sent a host of officers out, under cover of secondment, into state structures and corporations. True, at the same time it so happened that the responsibility for confronting what the Kremlin perceived to be the two main threats to political stability (terrorism in the North Caucasus and the shadow of the Orange Revolution) were gradually offloaded onto others’ shoulders: forces under the ministry of the interior and Chechen President Kadyrov took charge in the Caucasus, while control over social movements came under the Interior Ministry’s Department for Countering Extremism.

It later became clear that there was some doubt over this apparent unity and esprit de corps among the members of the secret services, and that this was due to this material improvement, and how the service’s leadership dealt with it.

Here we are primarily talking about their introduction of a system for calculating officers’ salaries based on certain coefficients. In particular – the 2.2 coefficient – which means that senior staff receive 2.2 times more than other staff at the same grade, but are not appointed to management positions. In addition, a real difference emerged between the salaries of those serving in the central apparatus and those in the regions. In Moscow this divided those working in the Lubyanka itself, and those in the nearby buildings. This led to an abrupt material schism between the bosses and the foot-soldiers, and a decline in the leadership’s authority. Rank and file officers stopped believing that equality could be achieved inside the organization: for several years now military courts have been dealing with claims served by staff against their bosses, primarily over perks of the job, such as accommodation rights.

In 2009 the growing internal morale crisis led to the most sensitive section of the FSB’s operations, seconded personnel formerly known as “active reserve officers”, the eyes and ears of the secret services in business and state structures, being put on the line. Obviously here, the loyalty of those seconded personnel was key to there being any point to the practice.

In June last year, the St Petersburg garrison military court was forced rule on FSB employee Dmitry Kuznetsov’s claim against the local FSB management. Kuznetsov was seconded into the Avrora company (which produces management systems for military vessels and oil sector technology) as deputy director general in November 2007. In May 2009 he was recalled to the FSB, something he wasn’t at all happy about. First he spent some time in hospital, before serving a complaint against the management, in which he claimed that only the director of the FSB himself had the right to recall him from his position in the company Avrora. Kuznetsov failed, but a precedent was created. Several months later the whole command system over FSB operatives was again disputed in court, and again by an FSB officer.

In 2007 colonel T, an officer in the FSB’s information department, got the Mayor of Moscow to agree to him taking a job undercover in the city government. However, in April 2007 the officer learnt that someone else was to be appointed in his place, and was sacked. Colonel T took it badly, and took his secret service bosses to court. In response, the FSB raised a criminal case under article 159, part 1 (Fraud). However, the fact is that under the agency’s rules, an employee is duty bound to hand over the salary paid to him in his seconded position, here Colonel T’s job in the Mayor’s office, to the state. The colonel thought this unfair, since he was sent in there in secret, his colleagues in the Mayor’s office knew nothing of his status, and he was doing two jobs at once: Recruiting agents and carrying out the duties of a Moscow state functionary.

The colonel went to the Moscow garrison military court to challenge the director of the FSB, and the key document regulating the rules covering sending spies on such assignments. This is an order by the director of the FSB himself, Order Number 094 dated April 24, 2001 “On organizing the seconded work of military servicemen under the Federal Security Service”. On June 22, his petition was refused. When in January this year Colonel T realized that he was coming up against a brick wall in Russia, he decided his next step would be to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

The fact that one of the most sensitive subjects for the FSB would be revealed for the consideration of a court situated outside Russia, and that it had not been initiated by a victim of an anti-terror operation in Chechnya, or a scientist convicted of espionage, but by one of their own, a man from the inside, an officer with the secret service, could only be explained by the morale crisis unfolding amid the senior management of the FSB, which was no longer in any position to resolve internal conflicts.

Colonel T is not the first FSB officer to go to Strasbourg. On January 14, something remarkable happened: the European Court of Human Rights gave their first ruling on a claim brought by a member of the FSB against their service. Former counterintelligence officer Innokenty Osipov demanded his pension be recalculated. The court found in his favor and now the Russian Federation has to pay him 11,370 euros.

Published in Ezhednevny Zhurnal 01.02.10