Deception (16 page)

So what was AIA really? It was run by a Russian: Mikhail Falkov. He had emigrated to Israel – as it happens from Soviet-occupied Latvia – in the
1970
s. He is the longstanding owner-editor of IzRus, a prominent Russian-language website there. He is also a former PR adviser to the controversial Israeli politician, currently foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a Soviet-born immigrant whose hard-line approach (towards both Arabs and dovish Israeli officials) and fondness for the regime in Russia arouse considerable controversy.
⁵
Mr Lieberman once worked as a nightclub bouncer. In April
2011
he was charged by the State Prosecutor's Office with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and witness tampering; he denies all wrongdoing, and the case was pending as this book went to press. In the eyes of his critics, he has imported thuggish Soviet-style attitudes and habits into Israeli politics. Mr Falkov's IzRus website in
2009
carried an article denouncing Israeli embassies abroad which could be seen to echo Mr Lieberman's dislike of his own diplomats. It said they were ‘fertile ground for orgies, sex with minors, sexual harassment and bribery' which was ‘hidden from the public'.
⁶
There would be those who might see Mr Lieberman, and his sidekick Mr Falkov, as prime examples of how Russia exerts its influence in other countries.

Mr Falkov declines to answer any questions about AIA's finances, genesis and aims. It may well be that from his point of view it was indeed a purely business venture, which simply failed to gain the advertising that he hoped for. I am not accusing him of anything improper. But a few lines of text on the website give a tantalising hint of another explanation for its existence: suggesting a connection with the world of espionage, not of mere news. On the ‘about us' section of the site, visitors were told:

 

AIA is open to cooperation on a commercial basis with those who possess exclusive and current information on policy and security issues in the countries of Asia and Eastern Europe . . . AIA accepts orders for collecting and analysing information on any issue that concerns policy and security . . . [it] can be either supplied confidentially to the client, or appear on our website.

 

That would be an unusual offer for anyone wanting to quash suspicion of involvement in espionage. It is possible that someone at AIA was hoping to act as a private intelligence broker. I have discussed the issue with people who think it likely that the outfit was operating on behalf of a government, wanting to flush out either sources of information, or demand for it. The ‘freelance news agency' willing to pay generously for research material commissioned by anonymous clients was a staple of Cold War espionage: readers may recall George Smiley using it. The sort of people who read the published material on AIA's website would have included those with an appetite – and a budget – for more sensitive information along similar lines. One explanation is that its website was designed, not necessarily with Mr Falkov's consent or knowledge, to note the people visiting it, and perhaps to log details of their computers or even to plant viruses on them. Another is that its backers were interested to see what kind of orders came in: that could cast an interesting light on the behaviour and needs of government agencies. I do not find this completely convincing: no serious intelligence service would go shopping like this without thorough scrutiny of AIA, which would reveal its suspiciously flimsy structure. Another option is that it was an attempt by a government agency to spot potential sources of information. Any new contributors making themselves known to AIA would represent an interesting pool of potential sources. Those with access to real secrets could then be put on first consulting contracts and then developed, either directly or indirectly, as real agents if they proved useful. But the danger of a trap – a ‘dangle' in espionage parlance – would be great.

More likely in my view is that AIA was (not necessarily with Mr Falkov's consent or knowledge) a counter-intelligence operation. Defence, security and intelligence officials in the ex-Soviet region are often demoralised, disgruntled and outright discontented by the corruption and futility of their jobs. It would be most interesting for the FSB, say, to know which of them would be willing to nibble at the carrot of discreet extra income from a foreign information agency. People vulnerable to a phoney temptation could also be open to an approach by a real espionage service. Such potential weakness is best known about in advance. Widely read by just the right people, Axisglobe's site would have been a neat way of flushing out such potential sources. But its putative role as part of an active intelligence operation was probably quite brief. It established its credibility, reaped its harvest, and then drifted into decay. Its significance may have been chiefly the way that it combined, certainly not for the last time, the anonymity of the internet with the human resources that the Russian diaspora represents for the intelligence and security services in Moscow. On
⁷
June
2011
the site was bought by a Japanese blogger for $
940
. That at least was a commercial transaction.

So far I have outlined much of the profile of Russian espionage: in cahoots with gangsters at one moment, bullying émigrés to cooperate at another, stealing industrial secrets the next, and turning to lobbyists and lawyers when that becomes necessary. This is bad enough for countries inside the EU and NATO. It is far worse for those on its fringes. I conclude this section with a detailed look at the frontline of Russia's military-intelligence effort – the subversion, special operations and dirty tricks being practised in Georgia, a country that has challenged Russia's claim to a
droit de regard
in the former Soviet Union. This idea is a central part of Russia's foreign-policy thinking about its neighbours; nothing should happen that Russia does not know about, and nothing should happen that Russia does not consent to.

Under the Tsarist empire from
1813
to
1917
, briefly independent until
1921
and then part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in
1991
, Georgia has a special place in the hearts and minds of Russian officials. They see it rather as Americans do Florida, a prized spot for recreation and the source of countless sentimental holiday memories. It is also a bastion of Russian influence on the Black Sea, and a bulwark against historic rivals for influence in the region such as Iran and Turkey. The idea that Georgia – an Orthodox Christian country – might want to head westwards, joining the European Union and even NATO, strikes most such Russians as preposterous effrontery, even if it is exactly what the overwhelming majority of Georgians want. Russia kept a military presence in Georgia, against the will of the republic's authorities, until
2006
, occasionally displaying military muscle in a show of force. But the real threat was not the demoralised and largely barracks-bound regular soldiers.

So far I have mainly dealt with the direct heirs to the KGB, the FSB domestic security agency and the SVR foreign-intelligence service. But in Georgia's case, another organisation is at work: the GRU military-intelligence service.
^w
Georgian officials term it the ‘most aggressive and destructive' of Russia's three spy services. With around
12
,
000
employees,
7
the GRU has maintained unbroken institutional continuity since Leon Trotsky created it in
1918
(and it draws on a long tradition of Russian military espionage going back to Peter the Great). Even in Soviet times, the GRU's motivation was more patriotism than communist ideology. Its officers tend to come from the provinces rather than Russia's metropolises, from humbler backgrounds than the elite spies of the SVR, and nowadays from more honest ones than the cronies and thugs of the FSB. Partly as a result, the GRU tends to stay clear of the dodgy money-laundering schemes and commercial shenanigans beloved of its sister agencies: it will take part when operationally necessary, but not out of simple greed. It is hard, for example, to imagine a GRU officer being involved in the swindles that led to the death of Sergei Magnitsky. The agency is also less subject to political interference than the SVR: it is directly responsible only to the defence ministry, which shields it somewhat from the feuds and machinations at the top of Russian officialdom. But its senior officers and people close to it run into trouble if they stray into national politics.
⁸

The GRU's chief mission is to collect military information affecting Russian national security, especially plans, hardware and personnel moves. Those who watch it sometimes feel the agency is stuck in something of a time warp, with targets and tasking almost unchanged since Soviet times. GRU officers seem to assume that foreign countries have secret plans to attack Russia that must be uncovered. If they cannot be found, then the search must be intensified. GRU doctrine and methods have in the past been different too. It tends to go for the ‘quick hit': overcoming a source's reluctance, squeezing out his secrets and then dumping him, shutting him up with money, threats or worse. GRU officers are trained in the use of force and are quite capable of using it. In this sense, the GRU is quite different from counterpart organisations such as America's Defense Intelligence Agency (part of the Pentagon) or Britain's Defence Intelligence (which works out of the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall). These are chiefly focused on analysing information; when their staff members venture into the field, it is mainly as embassy-based attachés.

The GRU's officers do work as military attachés too. But its role is much wider. Until the military reforms of
2009
it used to have responsibility for most of Russia's elite
Spetsnaz
special forces – the equivalent of Britain's SAS and SBS, or America's Delta Force. It continues to have a special-operations capability. A small cadre of illegals are posted abroad, mainly to act as saboteurs in time of war. The agency also runs an extensive military counter-intelligence effort inside Russia; it is responsible for satellite reconnaissance (a comparable function to America's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and also for military electronic information collection, such as snooping on NATO communications. The GRU's officers are trained at the ‘Aquarium' spy school and headquarters building in Moscow. In a sign of the agency's prestige, in November
2006
Mr Putin formally opened the agency's glitzy new building, on Narodnogo Opolchenia (People's Militia Street) in the heart of Moscow. A sycophantic news repor
t
⁹
showed the indoor swimming pool (for training frogmen) a firing range, special windows incorporating anti-bugging technology and a hi-tech situation room.

The GRU has played a big role in Chechen counter-insurgency operations. A GRU operation killed the first president of the breakaway republic (a terrorist leader in Russian eyes), Jokar Dudayev. A missile blew him up when he unwisely emerged from hiding to make a call on his satellite telephone. Another high-profile killing was the car-bomb assassination of the exiled Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in the Qatari capital Doha in February
2004
. This killed the Chechen leader and two bodyguards, as well as seriously injuring his
12
-year-old son Daud. Shortly afterwards the infuriated Qatari authorities arrested three Russians (possibly because Russia's foreign-intelligence agency, the SVR, which often has poor relations with the GRU, botched part of the follow-up). One of the arrested men, a first secretary at the Russian embassy named Aleksandr Fetisov, was released shortly afterwards either because of his diplomatic immunity, or possibly in exchange for two Qatari wrestlers arrested on trumped-up charges while in transit at Moscow airport. The other two men were identified as GRU agents, Anatoly Yablochkov and Vasily Pugachev. Both men received emphatic public support from Russian officials; their defence attorney was Nikolai Yegorov, a friend and former university classmate of Vladimir Putin. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, but were extradited to Russia in December to serve their sentence there. On arrival, they received a hero's welcome and disappeared from public view. The Russian authorities said that the Qatari sentence was ‘not relevant'.

Many Russians see the Chechen fighters as mere bandits and welcomed these operations. For Western countries worried about global jihadist violence, the nuances of Chechen insurrectionist politics paled against the need to maintain solidarity between big countries in counter-terrorism. But the GRU's operations in Georgia are quite different. They are directed against a country that has not attacked Russia. Its only crime is to see its history and future differently. The GRU armed and trained Abkhaz and South Ossetian forces that resisted Georgian independence in the early
1990
s. The reluctance was understandable: Georgia's ethnonationalist leadership at the time made little effort to accommodate the views of the country's minorities. But the Abkhaz and Ossetian separatist militias also perpetrated ethnic cleansing against people in their territories, mainly Georgians, who disagreed.

After those civil wars ended in uneasy truces, many in Moscow assumed that Georgia could be maintained as a weak and pliant neighbour. History proved otherwise. Georgia stabilised under the rule of Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet foreign minister, and then accelerated its reforms under the leadership of the American-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. Seen (perhaps rather romantically) as a lone outpost of Atlanticist sentiments in the region, and (hard-headedly) as a vital part of plans to bring oil and gas from the Caspian and Central Asian regions to world markets, Georgia benefited from a huge CIA and Pentagon aid programme. Georgian intelligence and security officers received fast-track training in the United States and in other NATO allied countries. The Georgian military received subsidised or donated equipment, ranging from sophisticated battlefield radios to portable anti-aircraft missiles (provided secretly by Poland in
2007
).
¹⁰
The hope was to make Georgia a bastion of Western influence on Russia's southern flank. But in the rivalry between the GRU and its adversaries, the Russian side has so far been the winner.