Deception (17 page)

The biggest disaster for the West was the war of August
2008
. The aim of foreign assistance to Georgia had been to make a conflict less likely, by calming and reassuring the Georgian leadership in the face of escalating military provocations from Russia. Instead, it produced the opposite result. Georgian politicians wildly overestimated both their own military strength and Western support. This was a colossal intelligence failure. NATO countries failed to read Russia's intentions, and the way that their Georgian protégés would behave under pressure. Intelligence officers in the region reported the increasingly dangerous situation regularly and accurately to their controllers. But analysts blurred or misinterpreted those reports, controllers failed to pass them on with sufficient urgency, and the services' political masters failed to appreciate the implications of what they were being told. That the whole affair happened when many top decision makers were on holiday did not help. A particularly striking and systemic failure was in America's CIA. The small analysis division dealing with Russia has attracted particular criticism (belatedly) from its ‘customers' elsewhere in the US government for interpreting raw intelligence in a framework that took great account of Russian sensitivities, fears and interests, but discounted other interpretations.

The American, British and Estonian training of Georgian human and electronic intelligence resources created structures that still lacked the clout and insight to interpret or influence events adequately. Decision-making circles were thoroughly penetrated, certainly by electronic means and possibly through the use of witting traitors or unwitting intelligence assets, recruited and run under the noses of the agencies responsible for security. Russia knew what Georgia knew, and how Georgia would react. It was therefore able to provoke the Georgian leadership successfully into attacking the breakaway province of South Ossetia, in the belief that a short victorious war would topple the separatist regime there and forestall a Russian troop build-up that the Tbilisi authorities believed was a prelude to a full-scale and potentially devastating military offensive.

That proved a disastrous miscalculation. Russia counterattacked, and the expensively equipped Georgian forces performed, for the most part, poorly (though to be fair the best part of the armed forces were in Iraq, or on leave having just returned from duty there). Command and control broke down. Expensive battlefield radios didn't work (leaving officers to communicate by insecure personal mobile phones). The reserve forces fared particularly poorly.
¹¹
Russia's victory owed more to weight of numbers than to military prowess. But it was a triumph for the Russian intelligence agencies, which had a startlingly clear picture of events on the Western side. In one revealing cameo, telephones at a major NATO military facility in Europe became unusable: the NATO Office of Security (NOS) was aware that they were penetrated, but was unable to take immediate countermeasures. Officials instead had to use their personal mobile phones (which may have been even less secure than the landlines). Russia knew to a high degree of certainty that America would not go to war to defend a friendly country that was under attack; it also knew that the European Union was in no state to act as a decisive, well-informed mediator. It was able to follow in detail the zigzag diplomacy of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the evolution of the amateurishly imprecise ceasefire document that he finally produced with a triumphant flourish on
13
August.

Since the war, many in the West have come to see Georgia as a faraway country of which they never knew much and would now like to know less. Certainly Mr Saakashvili's erratic behaviour in the run-up to the war in
2008
did little to boost his country's credibility. It will be a long time before any NATO country's spymaster sticks his neck out on behalf of a Georgian leadership that has gained a reputation for chaos and unreliability. Politicians in the EU and America still maintain rhetorical support for Georgia's territorial integrity, but have produced scant support in practical terms. Foreign assistance efforts in Georgia have wound down, as have Georgian efforts to meet Western concerns about the rule of law and political pluralism.

These trends are indeed cause for concern. But whole-scale pessimism is unfounded. Following the lost war, Georgia has picked itself up and resumed reforms and economic growth. For all its faults it remains the only post-Soviet success story outside the Baltic states. Outsiders flock to observe its tax system and administrative reforms. The Georgian leadership has also, belatedly, begun taking security more seriously, and paying heed to the long-standing suggestions and complaints of their Estonian and other advisers. Tighter scrutiny and better counter-intelligence tradecraft have begun to pay off, most recently in July
2011
with the arrest of a presidential photographer, who confessed that he had been recruited by Russia to spy on Mr Saakashvili. The round-up started in November
2010
when nine Georgians and four Russian citizens were arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia. The Georgian Interior Ministry described the group as consisting of military pilots and a sailor and a number of businessmen who had passed on data about flight schedules and military equipment and procurement, as well as the personal details of top Georgian officials.

A documentary broadcast on
5
November, the GRU's ‘birthday', on the Georgian Rustavi-
2
television channel featured a double agent, code-named ‘Enveri', shown only with his face hidden, who said he had worked for the GRU at the Georgian port of Poti in the late
1980
s. On the instructions of Georgian intelligence, he made contact with his old employers and met three GRU officers who gave him instruction in how to embed secret material in innocent-seeming email attachments. Enveri allowed the Georgians to spot dozens of other locals and a GRU liaison officer, Yuri Skrilnikov. When this officer attempted to meet his source in May
2010
Georgian counter-intelligence officials arrested him, along with another Russian citizen and a Georgian. Both had previously worked at a Russian military base in Georgia until its closure in November
2007
.

Enveri reported that his Russian case officers were interested in NATO warships' visits to Georgian ports and Western training of Georgian military forces. But the true aims of the GRU are wider and more alarming. An analysis by Georgian officials lists them as: discrediting the country's foreign and domestic political course; preventing accession to NATO and European integration; denting foreign investors' confidence; creating ‘spots of instability' to highlight the state's weakness; creating a pro-Russian ‘fifth column'; consolidating Russian control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia; supporting secessionist tendencies in other parts of Georgia; and creating an intelligence network inside the government.

In other countries, such tasks would be mainly the job of the SVR – the foreign intelligence service. But in Russian eyes, Georgia is not ‘foreign' enough for that. Instead, the military intelligence agency, the GRU, has the main role. The FSB, once a big presence, now plays a second fiddle, chiefly in targeting the Georgian diaspora inside Russia; in previous years it was involved in scams such as protecting a counterfeiting operation in South Ossetia that produced large amounts of forged American currency.
¹²
The GRU's prime targets are Georgia's defence capabilities, links with NATO, energy security, the transport infrastructure (especially ports), the structure and composition of the border police and all electronic communications. But it also mounts special operations, including bombings and other stunts. These, Georgian officials say, are run from the southern regional headquarters in Krasnodar, with a sub-station in the coastal resort of Sochi. At least according to the Georgian authorities, the GRU is also actively involved in stoking violent political protest by marginal parts of the country's opposition. On
26
May
2011
the Interior Ministry in Tbilisi released an audio recording of a bugged meeting in which an opposition leader, Nino Burjanadze, and her son appeared to be expecting the intervention of GRU special forces if a planned violent demonstration turned into an insurrection.

Georgia also believes that Russian intelligence officers, mostly from the FSB but also from the GRU, are recruiting ethnic Georgians in the occupied district of Gali in Abkhazia, either with bribes or blackmail, in order to carry out acts of terrorism and sabotage.
¹³
This has involved at least twelve incidents since
2009
. The targets have included railway installations, bridges, public buildings, public squares, offices of political parties, ministries, the American embassy and the NATO liaison office in Tbilisi. Two people have been killed so far, but many more would have been at risk had the bombings succeeded as planned. In one house search, for example, Georgian police found nine canisters of hexogen explosive, five of which had been modified with homemade shrapnel. The ringleader of one of the groups arrested, Gogita Arkania, said in a witness statement that he had been recruited, trained and directed by Major Evgeny Borisov, who is part of the Russian military contingent in Abkhazia and used to be based there as a ‘peace-keeper' before the war. Though he is formally part of the FSB border guards, Georgian counter-intelligence officers believe Borisov is an active operative of the GRU; however, this cannot be independently verified and Mr Borisov has made no public statement. Telephone intercepts obtained by Georgian intelligence show intensive traffic between mobile phones registered in Arkania's and Borisov's names with a mobile number belonging to the Russian Defence Ministry, at exactly the times that bomb attacks took place in Georgia, for example against the American embassy on the morning of
22
September
2010
.

In at least one case, a GRU operation against Georgia was let down by an elementary blunder. On
2
October a bomb placed near an important railway bridge at Chaladidi in the western Khobi district failed to go off. But the next morning the European Union's Monitoring Mission received a phone call from a Russian military officer, asking for more information about the bomb blast that he claimed passengers had reported on the railway. Georgian officials were baffled – until local residents found the device a few days later. The only possible source for this mistaken enquiry by the Russian officer could have been the GRU unit that instigated the botched attack.

Russia can afford to make mistakes. Georgia cannot afford Russia's successes. The international media and Western countries have shamefully neglected this bullying campaign by a hostile big state against a friendly small one. The effect is to create a climate of impunity in which the Kremlin and its spymasters feel that the risk of these attacks is minor and the rewards are substantial. Georgian complaints to Russia are either ignored or met with dismissals that range from the airy to the vituperative. Sometimes Georgia is accused of spinning fairy tales; sometimes the charge is Russophobia. Western officials accept privately that Georgia has reason to complain. But they see no political or professional benefit in taking up the issue. It is hard to grab foreign official and public attention about allegations of foreign involvement in a largely non-lethal bombing campaign in a country that is seen as marginal and difficult. Raising the complaints risks making Georgians look paranoid. And if they do gain attention, the result may be to underline the country's reputation as a trouble spot, not a reliable partner and prospective EU and NATO member.

The operations described in the preceding pages are unpleasant but for the most part clumsy: assassinations, bombings, military sabre-rattling, the blackmail of émigrés, the bedding of politicians. It is now time to turn to the more subtle methods used by Russia's spymasters, chiefly in Europe and North America: the use of fake (and increasingly of real) identities to place career intelligence officers undercover on long-term foreign assignments. This is a world of closely guarded secrets in training and doctrine, of meticulous planning, deep paradoxes and tangled psychology. It could hardly differ more from its portrayal in spy fiction and in Hollywood films, as I show in the following chapter, which introduces the reader to the real world of spies and spycraft.

5

Spycraft: Fact and Fiction

Spies break rules for governments that try to enforce them. In this contradiction lies the fascination of the espionage world and also its greatest weakness.
^x
Espionage involves breaking laws, perhaps of your own country, more often of its allies and certainly in the country being spied upon. The reason is simple. Secret information may come through deduction and inference, or from exploiting the other side's carelessness by bluff and subterfuge. But the blunt fact is that for the most part secrets must be stolen. This means instigating treachery, using bribery, burglary, blackmail or outright violence as necessary. That is a long way from the normal tasks expected of a public servant. It attracts a certain kind of person, often flawed or troubled, and shapes them to its needs, to the point that deceit arouses not repugnance, but professional curiosity and admiration. Before looking at the battlefield of the East–West spy wars, it is necessary to understand the mentality, training and selection of the soldiers.