Deception (19 page)

The risks sharpen the focus. Officialdom often wastes public money. Errors in espionage mean not just unwanted buildings or ill-conceived regulations but deep damage and ruined lives. Treason bears heavy criminal penalties. In most operations, therefore, the human costs of failure outweigh the benefits of success. The resulting caution is in constant tension with the central means of espionage – rule breaking – yet it is vital that it does not overwhelm it. An intelligence officer who flinches at this might as well be a diplomat.

Imagine, for example, that you are a spymaster considering a potential source – someone, perhaps, like Sergei Skripal, a Russian intelligence officer who for many years passed his country's secrets to Britain. If your service successfully recruits and runs him, your country gains invaluable information about Russia's military capabilities and intentions, about its decision-making processes, about the weaknesses and strengths of its security procedures, about its intelligence-gathering efforts abroad, and much more besides. Your country is better informed and safer. Your taxpayers have got value for money. Your political masters will be pleased. Your career will flourish. But your source, if caught, is likely to end his days in a hard labour regime camp somewhere near the Arctic Circle (Mr Skripal was sentenced to thirteen years in
2006
; he was one of the four prisoners that Russia swapped for Ms Chapman and her colleagues).
⁴

The danger can be even greater. If your operation in China, Iran or Syria is blown, your source faces not just prison, but death, perhaps by torture. For their induction into the Soviet GRU military intelligence service, recruits were shown a film of the fate awaiting those who betrayed its secrets (the account comes from a defector who was undeterred). It showed a man, gagged and wired to a steel stretcher, being trundled to the door of a furnace prior to being burned alive:

 

He strains to the point of breaking his own bones, and tearing his own tendons and muscles. It is a superhuman effort. But the wire does not give. And the stretcher slides smoothly along the rails. The furnace doors move aside again and the fire casts a white light on the soles of the man's dirty patent leather shoes. He tries to bend his knees in an effort to increase the distance between his feet and the roaring fire. But he can't.
⁵

 

To save a source from such a fate means a lot of dull errands. Go to the Hotel Sheraton in Kiev and leave this envelope at reception to be collected by Mr Brown. Go to the DHL office in Riga and pay cash for the delivery of this envelope to a Mr Smith in Dublin. Go to a bank in Helsinki, leave one package in a safe-deposit box and collect another. Buy a coffee and read a newspaper in the glass-walled metro station at Moscow's Sparrow Hills between eleven and twelve every Saturday, wearing a red scarf. That is a signal to Mr Skripal (en route to his regular sports club) that everything is all right. If he is wearing a hat, he's OK too.

The precautions are necessary because of the time-consuming yet vital assumption that the other side may be watching. Most messages can be exchanged via brush contacts or dead-letter boxes. A memory card the size of a fingernail can carry gigabytes of data, though any non-specialist examining it will find only some anodyne tourist snaps. Mr Skripal can wrap it in chewing gum and stick it to a park bench, or to the side of his seat during his regular Sunday night cinema trip – having first made sure he is sitting next to a woman with a white shirt and red scarf. Meetings are rare and preferably in third countries. Spycatchers suspicious of Mr Skripal see only normal life in Moscow, and harmless recreation elsewhere: an overnight trip to a football match in, say, Kiev. Even detailed scrutiny of the CCTV recordings in his hotel there will not reveal the meeting that took place in its penthouse suite, with a case officer who rented it in the guise of a foreign businessman.

Another Russian source might take his holidays in Vienna, and have a long-standing interest in the Central Cemetery. Its
250
hectares
^aa
feature interesting graves from Freud to Mozart. It has another advantage from an espionage point of view: the long paths and clear sightlines give plenty of opportunity to see if anyone is watching. Assuming all is clear, he can be picked up by a scruffy van parked in some remote corner of the grounds. Inside are comfortable chairs, a bottle of vodka, and a case officer eager to debrief him. Half an hour later, he is wandering round the cemetery again. Spycatchers' resources are finite: if scrutiny reveals nothing, then they turn to something more promising.

Such elaborate precautions are costly and make sense only for the most highly placed source. Yet if anything goes wrong, he ends up rotting in a labour camp. Every stage needs to be hammered out in advance. Can that hotel penthouse in Kiev be dependably booked in advance? Can the source plausibly stay there on his official salary? Where exactly are the CCTV blind spots? Who will make the reservation? How will the bill be paid? Will the credit card be traceable? What passport will be used? Who will sweep the room for bugs? Each new precaution creates a new difficulty and something else to go wrong. The ideal operation has as few moving parts as possible. It is better to rely on split-second timing, which practice and professionalism can perfect, than on elaborate schemes that are vulnerable to the unexpected.

Take the Vienna trip: what happens if it is pouring with rain? A dedicated grave-spotter may take a short damp walk to see a famous tomb, but not a long one. So what is the back-up plan? A nearby church? Is it always open? What if a service is happening? And how to communicate if the plans go awry? Sussing that out requires lots of legwork. The officers working on this team will know Vienna's tourist attractions backwards by the time they have finished. Organising brush contacts, dead-letter boxes and signals in Moscow is even more difficult, and involves a stream of innocent-seeming bag men (and bag ladies), scarf-wearers and scouts who will turn up and run errands, dependably, punctually, and inconspicuously, right under the noses of the Russian FSB. Compounding the cost of all this is the need to avoid any recognisable pattern of behaviour. Too many visits to Vienna, or to Kiev, arouse attention. A dead-letter box is most secure when it is used sparingly, ideally only once. So the attrition rate is high. No sooner has an impressively guileful idea been worked out than it starts wearing out.

Such difficulties and precautions beset every stage of agent-running: identifying a potential source, softening him up (‘cultivation' in spy-speak), presenting bluntly the offer of cooperation (‘pitching'); keeping him safe, motivated and productive (‘agent-running'), debriefing him (‘elicitation') and when he is no more use standing him down (‘terminating him'). A promising source may be a ‘dangle' – someone presented by the other side in the hope of flushing out some clues about the way you work. If a source is willing to betray his own country, his loyalty to the person who brokers the betrayal must also be questionable. Even if he starts off genuine, suppose he comes under pressure from the other side, and betrays you and your methods? Maybe he will prove a time-waster, just in search of easy money for old news? The adversary's ‘wish-list' is one of the most sought-after pieces of intelligence in the whole spy world. If you know what the other side does not know, you are in a good position to mislead them and to conceal your real secrets.

At a more trivial level, methods and tradecraft are vulnerable too. If a double agent reveals dead-letter boxes, his side can put them under observation in case another, unknown, agent is using them too. Who empties them? Maybe an embassy-based archivist or visa clerk not previously under suspicion as an intelligence officer. Then you have a new target. Giving a clever communications gadget to a newly recruited source can backfire. If he is caught or switches sides, anyone else using a similar device is at greater risk. A ‘walk-in' who turns up at an embassy in a sensitive country demanding to speak to an intelligence officer can hardly be ignored. But even the initial vetting of such an approach is risky. Whoever meets the visitor may be being set up for embarrassment or expulsion. For someone based at an embassy in Moscow, this will mean a career-blighting departure to London, perhaps after first being humiliated in surreptitiously filmed clips broadcast on the evening television news.
⁶

The spotlight also endangers all a case officer's previous contacts and operations. Marc Doe, a British official based at the embassy in Moscow who was exposed in the Russian media after a bungled operation, turned out to have a diplomatic cover job that involved channelling embassy funds to human-rights organisations long denounced as fronts for Western interests by the Russian authorities.
⁷
That was an excruciating blunder. For these hard-pressed and vulnerable outfits, the furore weakened their defence.

But the greatest risk remains recruiting the wrong person. Sign up the wrong source and you will give away far more than you gain. Hire someone with a fragile ego and a short temper and you risk a major security breach. The case of Richard Tomlinson, a renegade British spy who published a book in Russia about his recruitment, training and quarrels with his bosses, has been costly and damaging for Britain's intelligence agencies and their foreign partner services.
⁸

In past decades the most formidable spies on both sides were ‘illegals' – sent on long-term clandestine assignments, using stolen or fake identities, and without the benefit of diplomatic cover. One of them was Sir Paul Dukes, described in chapter
8
, whose work under the noses of the Bolsheviks in the years following the Russian revolution makes him probably the most brilliant spy in the history of MI
6
. But after the debacles of the
1940
s (of which more later) Western countries stopped trying to send agents to live undercover behind the Iron Curtain: the difficulty of creating sufficiently credible false identities for people to function inside a closed totalitarian society was just too great. The KGB and other services, however, made great efforts to send their agents to the West, sometimes for lifetime assignments. Some of the agents unearthed in June
2010
were just this kind of classic ‘illegal'. Such spies are formidably expensive. By Russian estimates, creating an illegal identity costs around
$
1
m per head. Still, even if they do nothing for decades, they may, in the right place at the right time, justify their mission. An extreme case is for a military-intelligence agency wishing to acquire a special-operations capability in the event of war. Simply establishing the illegals deep behind enemy lines will be well worth it when it comes to the outbreak of war (‘Day X' in Soviet parlance) when invisible sabotage capability is priceless. In peacetime they can be vitally useful too, even when they do little or no actual spying themselves.

To understand why, imagine that you are a Russian intelligence officer working under diplomatic cover, tasked with gaining information about the British Parliament, or America's Congress. You have hundreds of potential targets: lawmakers, their staffers, even cleaners and technicians. But you are an obvious subject for surveillance. Your every meeting and every move carry a risk. You simply cannot afford to hang around in the bars of Westminster or Capitol Hill, chatting people up. Eventually even the most over-worked or demoralised counter-intelligence officers will notice you. So you need eyes and ears in the circles you wish to infiltrate, someone to spot people with access to the information you need, to identify their weaknesses (financial, sexual, psychological or political) and to cultivate them. A journalist, lobbyist or think-tank researcher would be ideal. You cannot play that role, but an illegal can.

If a potential source has strong convictions, an illegal can help turn loyalty to treachery with a ‘false flag' operation. A standard KGB task in the past, for example, was to find out how East European émigrés were supporting dissident movements in the homeland. A good approach was to pose as an ardent anti-communist, representing a bunch of wealthy donors (preferably based in a faraway country) wanting to target their support effectively. Such a person, eager to gain ‘analysis' of the real situation, could credibly pay expenses and stipends to those who kept him informed. This still works today. If you are targeting left-wingers, pretend to be from Cuba; if you want to recruit Muslims, a claimed link with the Palestinian cause will do the trick. If the target is Jewish, or a conservative Christian sympathetic to Israel, say that you are working for Mossad. For an embassy-based intelligence officer to assume such an identity is complicated and risky. An illegal can adopt it more convincingly. For the target, checking the authenticity of such an approach is tricky to impossible: how can, say, a Polish expatriate working in an energy company know if the friendly compatriot enquiring about the workings of the gas market is really an undercover officer of his country's
Agencja Wywiadu
(foreign intelligence service) as he claims? He may be a Russian illegal, or working for the Saudis or Chinese. How to check?

Illegals can also help funnel funds from the buyer to the seller of secrets. But they cannot help with, and indeed are part of, a bigger problem: getting value for the money paid. A hint of this comes from the published fragments of intercepted communications between ‘Moscow centre' – the headquarters of Russian espionage – and two of its illegals in America. The bosses are tut-tutting about the house lived in by ‘Cynthia and Richard Murphy': does it belong to them (which would fit their cover story)? Or is it really the property of the Russian state? It is easy for each end to feel cheated by the other: the illegals regard everything they spend as a claimable expense. They are in effect doing two jobs: their cover profession and real spying. It is quite fair that the motherland should subsidise their property, cars or children's education. For their part, spymasters worry that operational funds are dribbling away into peripheral expenses, padding further a lifestyle that for most Russians would already seem unimaginably pampered and pleasant.