Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today

277 Pages·2012·2.35 MB·English

by  Edward Lucas

Contents
Map
Introduction

1 Looting and Murder
2 The Pirate State
3 Deadly Games and Useful Idiots
4 Real Spies, Real Victims
5 Spycraft: Fact and Fiction
6 Spies Like Us
7 The New Illegals
8 The Cockpit of Europe
9 Between the Hammer and the Anvil
10 The Upside Down World
11 The Traitor’s Tale

Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Footnotes
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
To My Parents

Introduction
The cold breath of the communist secret police state blighted countless lives
behind the Iron Curtain. But it also touched my own childhood in 1970s Oxford.
Olgica, our Yugoslav lodger, had an exciting secret: Uncle Dušan. The poet
Matthew Arnold described Oxford as ‘home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs,
and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties’. In Dušan’s case, this was partly
right: his surname (like those of most East European émigrés) if not exactly
unpopular, was certainly baffling to British eyes and ears. I recall him as a glum,
shadowy figure, with plenty to be glum about. His cause seemed irretrievably
lost. He was a hero in his own twilight world, but in post-war Yugoslavia the
authorities denounced anti-communists like him as criminals and traitors.a Many
perished in mass graves or in the torture cells of the secret police. Dušan was one
of the lucky ones. He had escaped to Britain, to a humble job as a mechanic and
life in Crotch Crescent, a drab street in Oxford’s outskirts – a sad comedown for
someone who in pre-war Yugoslavia had been a high-flying young civil servant.
But in one respect, Dušan did not fit Arnold’s dictum. Despite his
disappointments, he had not forsaken his beliefs: communism was evil and the
people who ruled his homeland were usurpers. In fact, Yugoslavia’s
independent-minded communists had become mild by comparison with the
much tougher regimes of the Soviet bloc. But they were still ruthless in their
treatment of dissenters, particularly those in contact with anti-communists
abroad. Olgica’s family maintained, at great risk, secret links with émigré
relatives, flatly denying all knowledge of them under interrogation from the
secret police. In Oxford, she visited her uncle each weekend. Had the authorities
at home known that she was hobnobbing with a dangerous anti-communist
émigré, her father’s glittering medical career (which had even brought him,
briefly, to Oxford) would end; her own future (she had stayed on to finish her
schooling) would be jeopardised too. It could even be dangerous for her to return
home, leaving her stranded in Britain as a teenage refugee.
My own childish preoccupations blundered into this grown-up world. Even
before Olgica’s arrival, my boyhood obsession had been Eastern Europe. I would
spend hours looking at dusty atlases and reading about the vanished kingdoms
and republics of the pre-communist era, with their long-forgotten politicians,
quaint postage stamps and exotic languages. Now behind the Iron Curtain, they
seemed as distant and unreal as Atlantis. In my early teens I needed an example
of communist propaganda for a school history project and decided to write to the
Yugoslav embassy in London, asking for an official statement of how their
government saw their defeated royalist rivals. That would, I thought, sit nicely
alongside the other exhibits I had already assembled, including a passage from
Winston Churchill’s history of the war, a poignant account of life in Cambridge
by the exiled Yugoslav boy-king Peter, and a sizzling history of a British military
mission to his doomed soldiers, the Chetniks.1
I proudly announced my plan. To my consternation, Olgica turned white. My
mother took me aside: didn’t I understand that the Yugoslav embassy in London
would at once hand over this letter to the secret police? (With its sinister-
sounding acronym UDBA, the Uprava državne bezbednosti or Department of
State Security was the bane of the regime’s critics at home and abroad). It would
be obvious that my childish enquiry came from the very Oxford address at which
the daughter of a top Yugoslav paediatrician was living while completing her A-
levels. It was bad enough that the UDBA would instantly suspect her of
propagandising about the royalist past – a crime in Yugoslavia. Worse, it would
start checking up on her family history and might then discover her carefully
concealed ties to the notorious inhabitant of Crotch Crescent. Her life could
unravel in an instant.
This trivial episode taught me important lessons – albeit in politics not history.
First, that the power of the communist state was based on the relentless,
intrusive, bureaucratic reach of the security and intelligence services, and their
capacity to ruin the lives of those who displeased them. Second that these
agencies’ reach extended far beyond their own grim dominions – even to the
seemingly safe and secure world of an English university town. The
extraordinary idea that my actions could put me under scrutiny by hostile foreign
officials sparked an interest that has gripped me for decades. In the years that
followed I devoured spy literature, from defectors’ memoirs to John le Carré’s
novels. I tracked down retired spies and quizzed them. I also kept a beady eye on
contemporaries who were offered jobs by MI6, as Britain’s Secret Intelligence
Service, SIS, is colloquially known.b
Even without knowing much about the intelligence world I was struck by the
clumsiness of those approaches: on the same day a crop of identical government-
issue buff envelopes would arrive in student pigeonholes. Some recipients
ignored the strictures to keep silent. A friend even framed the letter and put it in
his lavatory, so his friends could appreciate the unconvincing letterhead and the
strangulated wording of the offer: ‘From time to time opportunities arise in
government service overseas of a specialised and confidential nature.’ For those
who did apply, the clumsy efforts of the vetting officers (also accompanied by
dire warnings about secrecy) were similarly corrosive of confidence in the
spooks’ worldview. Did it really matter in the struggle against the Soviet empire,
I wondered, if Tom had gay flings, if Dick smoked dope or if Harriet had a
boyfriend in the Socialist Workers’ Party?
I reckoned I could do more good on the outside, and searched for any East
European cause that would accept my help. Inspired by my father, who
smuggled books to fellow-philosophers persecuted in Czechoslovakia, I helped
organise a student campaign to support Poland’s Solidarity movement, crushed
by martial law in December 1981. I waved placards outside embassies and wrote
letters of protest on behalf of political prisoners. I studied unfashionable
languages such as Polish, and practised them by befriending bitter old émigrés in
the dusty clubs and offices of west London – the world of le Carré’s Estonian
‘General’ in Smiley’s People.2 Like the spy author’s fictional émigrés, these real-
life ones had been sponsored by Britain’s spooks, then betrayed and dumped. I
did not know then the full extent of the fiasco of Operation Jungle, which I detail
in chapter 9.
This book is the result of my twin interests, espionage and Eastern Europe. I
would occasionally take the number 12 bus down Westminster Bridge Road in
Lambeth, past the headquarters of Britain’s MI6. The location was in those days,
supposedly, a closely guarded official secret, though the bus conductor was
prone to announce jovially ‘Century House – all spies alight here’. I never went
inside. But I would gaze up at the grubby concrete structure, with a petrol station
incongruously sited in its forecourt. Was this really our answer to the fearsome
Soviet Lubyanka in Moscow? The imposing classical façade of the KGB citadel
(originally an insurance company headquarters) would have suited the grandest
streets in central London. But the MI6 building looked liked a scruffy Soviet
tower block.
Spies, whether paid agents, idealistic volunteers, or professional intelligence
officers, were foot soldiers in the struggle between East and West that shaped the
lives of all post-war generations, including mine. They intrigued me as a student,
activist and journalist, first in London and later behind the Iron Curtain. In the
1980s I rubbed shoulders and clinked glasses with spooks on both sides, dodging
their blandishments while swapping jokes, jibes, arguments and ideas. For a
brief while, the collapse of communism looked set to doom the whole business.
Now that the Soviet Union was gone, and with it the danger of the Cold War
turning hot, what was left to spy on? But the champagne corks that spooks
popped in Britain and America in August 1991 were as premature as the gloom
in the Lubyanka as the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lenin’s secret-police chief,
was hauled away by a crane to the cheers of exuberant Muscovites. MI6, the CIA
and their partner services rejigged their budgets and turned to new targets: rogue
arms dealers, terrorists, gangsters and cyber-criminals. But new crime and old
espionage soon proved to be easy bedfellows; the spivs and crooks in the
foreground were sometimes new, but in the background lurked, more often than
not, the wily and ruthless figures of the old Soviet-block intelligence world.
They were the dark partners in the new order. Far from being swept into the
dustbin of history with the rubble of the old system, the communist-era spooks
have evolved to match the new conditions. Some figures from the old days
stayed undercover, gaining trusted roles in the new state structures. One of them
was the Estonian Herman Simm, whose activities are the subject of chapter 11.
Others turned to business, where their foreign languages and knowledge of the
outside world gave them a flying start in the new game. All across the former
Soviet empire, assets of the Communist Party and its front organisations speedily
melted away, often ending up in the hands of the wily and well connected. So too
did the operational funds of the KGB and its allied agencies. Estimates of the
money squirrelled away abroad during the collapse of the Soviet Union are in
the tens of billions of dollars; a crop of still-unexplained suicides in the old
system’s dying days disposed of those in a position to blab.3 These caches of
illicitly acquired cash were a financial springboard for the fleet-footed members
of the old elite in their new business careers. In effect they turned their power
into wealth, and then back into power.
In Russia itself Soviet-era spies, chief among them Vladimir Putin, a former
KGB officer, now run the country. They are known as the Siloviki or ‘men of
power’.c The old KGB was decapitated in 1991 amid the Soviet collapse, but not
uprooted. Instead it renamed itself, just as so often in the past. (Under Vladimir
Lenin it was the Cheka; later it became the OGPU, then the NKVD and finally
the KGB.) It is now split into two: the FSB, which has inherited the repressive
domestic apparatus of the old system, and the SVR, which is the heir to the
Soviet foreign intelligence service; alongside both works the separate GRU
military intelligence agency.4
Part of this book, therefore, deals with this deception: the story of how the ex-
spooks and their friends, in effect in a criminal conspiracy, took over one of the
world’s largest countries, hugely enriching themselves and duping the West.
Their modus operandi fuses organised crime, big business, conventional
diplomacy – and intelligence. I show that Russia’s spymasters are now using not
only old tools against us, but also new ones of which their Soviet-era
predecessors could only have dreamed.
Their most potent weapon is ordinariness. Just as Russian politicians and
officials seem at first sight to hail from the same besuited and unremarkable
caste as their counterparts in other industrialised countries, the spies I describe in
this book appear neither glamorous nor sinister. They lead normal lives and work
in normal jobs, moving effortlessly and inconspicuously among us. They are the
kind of people you might meet at the school gates, work alongside in an office,
bump into on a business trip, or see mowing the lawn next door. Yet their real
job is to penetrate our society, to influence it for their own ends, and to steal our
secrets.
The best known of this new generation of Russian spies was Anna Chapman,
the young redhead who was made a global superstar by her arrest and
deportation in June 2010. She has become an intimate friend of Mr Putin’s, a
prized asset of his political machine, a prominent figure in Russian finance, and
a television celebrity. But as I show in chapter 7, her main talents in working
abroad were not the highly honed skills of spy-school legend. She started her life
here in the humdrum London suburb of Stoke Newington, to the outside eye just
another hard-partying, quick-witted young Russian woman with an English
husband and an eye for the main chance, enjoying the safety and comfort of life
in Britain. But her ordinariness was deceptive. She was well placed to carry out
her espionage assignments precisely because she seemed so inconspicuous. Her
later transformation into a trophy superspy adds another dimension. It is proof of
the skills of her imidzhmekeri (image-makers) and casts a revealing light on
Russia itself.
The spy scandal that made Ms Chapman famous was part of a larger picture.
She was one of ten people arrested in the United States in June 2010, all of
whom lived unremarkable middle-class lives, seemingly far away from
traditional espionage targets such as the Pentagon or State Department. She and
another Russian lived there under their own names. Seven others had
fraudulently obtained identities – American, British, Canadian, Irish and
Uruguayan (the tenth was the latter’s Peruvian spouse). One more suspect, a
Russian called Pavel Kapustin, working under the alias of Christopher Metsos,
was arrested in Cyprus but allowed to escape by the authorities there – an
episode, never satisfactorily explained, which still arouses fury in American
officialdom.5 (In a related case, a Russian who once worked at Microsoft was
deported on immigration grounds in mid-July of that year).
Some people reacted with derision to the idea that Russia would send spies to