Nostalgia for Soviet Spies

By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan

The Russian spy scandal has focused attention on whether the use of “illegals,” undercover agents with no diplomatic immunity, makes any sense in the 21st century. Comparisons to Soviet-era illegals who were quite successful during the Cold War are not valid. The Cold War was a war of ideologies, and the moral corruption of the enemy was the chief objective.

But today, the value of illegals is negligible. It is obvious that 11 — or even 1,011 — Russian illegals in search of “hidden information” from open sources could never harm U.S. interests or undermine its “moral fiber.”

The spy flap is evidence of a serious crisis within Russia’s intelligence. The Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, is unique for two reasons: It has its own academy, and it uses illegal agents. Both the CIA and MI6 only have training courses, and neither has attempted to send U.S. or British citizens to Russia disguised as local citizens.

The explanations for both things is the one: the golden days of Russian espionage were during the era of Comintern, the international Communist organization active from 1919 to 1943. In those times, the Soviet Union used Western Communists and their loyalists as spies, but they were eliminated in the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, forcing the Soviet intelligence service to create a special school to train former peasants to work in an unfamiliar environment. The results were always controversial: such agents failed to penetrate government or military bodies and were able to be stationed only as low-level businessmen. Not surprisingly, the KGB owed its greatest successes of the late Cold War era, the recruitments of Aldrich Ames, who directed the CIA’s analysis section covering Soviet intelligence operations, and of Robert Hanssen, in the counterintelligence unit of the FBI, to Viktor Cherkashin, a KGB agent with diplomatic cover at the Soviet Embassy — not to illegals.

But it looks like the Foreign Intelligence Service cannot give up on old ways. One reason is that it was never required to do so: unlike other Russian secret services, it was not reformed in the 1990s. The other reason is that it prides itself on maintaining its old traditions. But these outdated traditions have crippled the agency. Some old-time advocates of illegal agents claim that they are valuable resources during wartime. Located within enemy territory, the argument goes, these undercover agents can deliver weapons and lead a partisan campaign against the enemy. But it is difficult to imagine that this would be relevant in post-Cold War U.S.-Russian relations.

Igor Sutyagin was the only civilian among the four people whom the United States received in the spy exchange. Sutyagin’s arrest in October 1999 coincided with the Federal Security Service’s campaign against several dozen scientists and academics. Amnesty International and other human rights activists both in Russia and in the West declared Sutyagin a political prisoner.

Sutyagin faced absurd accusations that the open information he collected included state secrets. The fact that a former intelligence service agent served as a jury member for the trial confirmed the weakness of the FSB’s position. To be fair, however, the liberal media in Russia and in the West largely ignored or downplayed the shady consulting firm Alternative Futures that hired Sutyagin as a consultant and vanished without a trace after his arrest.

Sutyagin’s confession, which was a mandatory condition to secure a presidential pardon and extradition, changed the situation, hinting that the FSB could not or did not want to tell the court what sort of secrets Alternative Futures really obtained from Sutyagin.

In times of war — including the Cold War — intelligence organizations were the ones that decided what the public was allowed to know about their activities. But in the post-Cold War era, this has changed. Americans have the right to know why a trial for spies alleged to pose a serious treat to their country’s security was canceled, and Russian society must ask whether the mistakes of the intelligence service will be investigated. Another good question that the public needs to ask: How long does the Foreign Intelligence Service intend to cling to its old ways and keep building false myths about its activities?

Published in the Moscow Times, July 13, 2010