Why had the response to Litvinenko’s murder been so weak? It’s partly because every political leader—as in America—believed they could be the one to win over the Kremlin and put relations on a sounder footing. Then there were always the institutional voices saying it was time to move on from the past and put this spy stuff behind us and get back to business. But there were darker reasons as well. Russia had greater freedom of maneuver in London than in the past. It was not just that the city had become a playground for their spies. It was also the way that Russia now could wield a subtle influence in British life. The end of the Cold War brought an end to an ideological struggle. Now money—and greed—was the common denominator for many on both sides. In the West, the way in which Russia had opened up in the 1990s to businesses had drawn in a flood of Westerners on the make—all eager to cash in on what they saw as a gold rush. They were juicy intelligence targets for the FSB and SVR (and some of those individuals would rise to positions of political influence on their return). And once a form of oligarchical capitalism had taken hold in Russia, wealthy Russians then began to move their money to London, offering Moscow another way to exploit Western openness and greed. Money could be used to buy friends and protection. The year before the Litvinenko killing, a British intelligence official confided to me that one of the things that depressed him most was the way in which Russian money had “corrupted the professions” in London. By professions he meant those like law, accountancy, and banking. He did not mean the kind of thing we normally associate with corruption—direct bribes to break the law. It was a subtler type of corruption, he explained. The amount of money that Russian oligarchs and businesses could offer to lawyers, accountants, bankers, asset managers, and members of Britain’s professional class meant they were willing to turn a blind eye to the origins of that wealth and not ask too many questions. It was an insidious form of corruption that was eating away at the core of public life. A whole class of people had emerged who provided professional services to wealthy foreigners and who in turn became wealthy themselves. They were influential people with influential friends, and they were now invested in making sure that the situation continued. In many ways this was just as dangerous and corrosive as the kind of bribery and intimidation that happened in “corrupt” countries.
Rich Russians had also learned how to launder their reputations through British society. Buying a football club, sponsoring an art gallery launch, organizing charity balls—all proved useful ways of winning friends and favors. Young, glamorous Russians like Anna Chapman were making their mark. The Kremlin was beginning to understand that influence offered a sort of power. It was not the “hard power” of the military, nor so-called soft power, when people are attracted by your values. It was a kind of dark power that worked unseen and played on greed and ambition. They could support friends covertly and make sure there was money and relationships at stake if anyone wanted to rock the boat with Moscow. In this way, the West would become complicit in the spread of Russian influence, opening new avenues for its spies to operate.
From around the time of Litvinenko’s killing, British intelligence officers began to see signs that Russia was using money for influence further afield as well. There were reports that Moscow was using its energy industry to create dependencies in European countries. Lucrative contacts could be used to enrich people and put politicians in Moscow’s pocket. No one was interested in the initial intelligence about Russia exploiting its new power at this time, they recall. This was all profoundly different from the Cold War days, when the two sides were largely cut off from each other. The Kremlin and its allies increasingly understood how the United Kingdom—and especially London—worked all too well and used greed and social status to embed itself in life in a way that in turn would make challenging Russia harder. This was the city that Alexander Litvinenko had looked out over from his hospital window and the reason why he had pleaded with the police officers not to give in to the pressure he knew they would face.
Why was Litvinenko killed? He was a former Russian intelligence officer working with the enemy. There was a lesson for Britain about what the Kremlin was willing to do and how far it would go to target those it considered traitors. The Russians were more ruthless and willing to go further than London imagined. But this was a lesson Britain and its spies failed to learn. The lesson Moscow learned meanwhile was that Britain was not willing to risk its own wealth to stop them. If you want a visual representation of what the influx of foreign wealth—much of it ill-gotten—has done to London, then take a drive in the evening around its most exclusive streets in places like Knightsbridge and Belgravia. The huge mansions—costing millions and bought in the name of shell companies registered by British lawyers in British Overseas Territories—lie dark and dormant. No one is living there. In these places, but also in its heart, London has become a ghost town.
13
Moscow Rules
IN MOSCOW, ALEXANDER Poteyev had come back to a Russia that was changing. His return from New York coincided with the emergence of Vladimir Putin in 2000 as a leader determined to lay to rest the chaotic days of Russia’s past turbulent decade. And part of that meant dealing with traitors. Spy fever was gathering pace. For Poteyev, the path that he had embarked on was one of intense pressure. Every day could be your last. It would have been a nerve-shredding existence. And yet he operated as an agent in place for a decade. Working in Department 4, which dealt with the Americas, he had to evade the counterintelligence checks run by the directorate’s Department 9 (much to the annoyance of the FSB, which would have preferred to know what was going on there). They were constantly looking to see if there was any sign that illegals operating abroad were under observation or had been turned. He knew all too well that one false move—or someone in Washington selling him out—would mean the end. There was a jittery atmosphere within Yasenevo’s Directorate S, former officers remember. Everyone knew that a traitor could destroy their work in building up a new cadre of illegals around the world.
Poteyev had been recruited by the FBI. But running an agent in Russia was not its responsibility. The streets of Manhattan were theirs, but Moscow was another story. That required the CIA. When an agent recruited inside the United States goes back to their home country, running that source should shift from the FBI to the CIA. But getting the transition of an agent from bureau to agency handling is not always easy. Often timing is a problem. It is no good telling us the week before someone goes back, CIA officials regularly complained. That was because it took time to build an operational plan on how to contact the agent securely and discuss it with him or her to make sure it was viable. They prefer to have a good six months, even a year, to be able to plan this transition. In the Poteyev case, a close working relationship between the two sides marked the case from beginning to end, leading to a successful handover. Each case is different, and a careful assessment needs to be made as to whether an agent is up to the task. It helps if the agents are spies themselves and understand the game. It takes the highest degree of skill to do so under the watching eyes of the KGB and then FSB. “It is like playing in Yankee Stadium,” a CIA officer says. To succeed you need to do everything right the first time—operating under so-called Moscow Rules. One mistake and it is over. Expulsion for a CIA or MI6 officer. But a long prison sentence or perhaps death if you were the agent they were running.
For a Russian working for the CIA or MI6 in Moscow, the first challenge was trying to keep your identity secret. Living under constant surveillance plays with your mind. Western spies say they were living in a form of “reality TV” before the concept was invented. It was like the movie The Truman Show, in which your daily life was being watched and recorded and analyzed by an audience—how you ate your cereal and how you and your partner had sex were all part of the show. “So good to meet you in the flesh,” one FSB officer said to a CIA officer. “I’ve seen so many videos of you.”
THE DAILY SURVEILLANCE logs and eavesdropping reports for US diplomats wo
uld all be sent back to the American department of the FSB. And, for many years, the man sitting at the center of the web was Sasha Zhomov. The man who had once dangled the CIA as PROLOGUE took over as head of the American department in the late 1990s. At one point in his career he would work on Chechnya, but even then he never let go of watching the Americans. For the CIA, he was a figure who had faded in and out of sight like their own ghost. His job was to identify American spies but, more important, to use that knowledge to find the Russians who were being run as their agents. He and his colleagues studied the Americans in detail—looking to work out who the spies were and perhaps even find their own “hook” to target them. They pored over every file looking for clues as to who might be betraying Russia’s secrets, determined to bring them down.
Within the American embassy, the atmosphere was claustrophobic. The array of tricks used by first the KGB and then the FSB ranged from bombarding embassies with signals to pick up conversations to spreading spy dust—invisible particles that could trace your movements. At one point in the 1980s, the CIA was so worried that its super-secure part of the embassy had been penetrated that it packed up everything, including furniture, and sent it back to the United States. CIA staff have to maintain their cover inside their own compound since some of the locally hired Russian staff were reporting to the FSB. Officers would carry out brush contacts within the compound itself to pass information or documents without being spotted. Getting out of the embassy to meet a contact was one of the biggest challenges. Everyone knew who the senior officers were, but a newer, young member of staff might be able to fool the other side. The FSB might put them under surveillance for a few weeks to check them out but then drop off, allowing them to try. Another trick was identity transfer, in which an intelligence officer put on a disguise that made them look like a “clean” member of embassy staff in order to get out without surveillance. For a while, officers would be smuggled out of the embassy in car trunks. Then the Russians realized this and would use sensors to detect heat. So something new would have to be tried. Techniques would cycle in and out of fashion as part of the cat-and-mouse game.
When you went out on the streets to meet an agent you had to be able to “go black” by carrying out a long surveillance detection route to get rid of watchers. The FSB had a scale of resources that dwarfed that of FBI and MI5. Sometimes the surveillance was designed to be obvious. It could even be helpful. In one case a CIA officer was sitting in a cafe near a train station waiting to catch a train back to Moscow. The surveillance officer actually came up to the American and reminded them that the train was departing in a few minutes because he did not want to miss it, either, and be stuck out of town. In another case an FSB surveillance team swooped in to prevent a CIA officer being subject to a mugging after their car tire was deliberately slashed. The relationships were a strange mixture of cooperative and collegial—each side making up nicknames for those they saw regularly but whom they rarely actually met. The episodes could occasionally be comic, like when a couple of CIA officers and their spouses decided to visit a museum out of town. The surveillance team followed them in only to find the museum was tiny and empty. The collected group of spies and their watchers found themselves being given an awkward guided tour together. There were unspoken rules, though. One was that if you messed with them, they would mess with you. And they had plenty of ways of doing that—from the simply unpleasant, like using your toilet and failing to flush, to the much darker, in which families were harassed.
Sometimes they would try to lull you into a false sense of security so that you would go out and meet someone and make a mistake, leading the way to your agent. Offense, though, has the advantage, those who have worked the Moscow streets say, because you have the initiative. All the training was so that when you were on the streets you were almost on autopilot—you were prepared for every possibility and would not have to overthink to react. It was alternately thrilling and terrifying, explains one person: terrifying for the moments leading up to any operational move but thrilling when you were in it as the adrenaline flowed. There was the sense that you were beating the opposition in their own backyard when they were holding all the cards. “There is no feeling like that—to defeat a really professional opposition,” they say. When you were black, you were black. Then you knew you could meet someone. But it would have to be fast.
AN AGENT WOULD rarely be met face-to-face in Moscow. US sources will not comment on Poteyev, but the Russians believe he was able to carry out drops of information in the city. These may have been physical dead drops or they may have been electronic dead drops in which information is left or passed over an encrypted communications device (using these can be risky since they are a telltale sign of spying). These are useful for passing hard information but no substitute for a face-to-face meeting in which a case officer can talk directly to his or her agent, ask them questions, and also gain a feel for what kind of psychological state they are in and what is worrying them. But there was an advantage with Poteyev. He had to travel for his job. Over the next ten years Poteyev traveled to the Americas (mainly Latin America, including Mexico and Chile) twelve times on short business trips and a further nine times to countries neighboring Russia, according to an official Russian investigation. In the Americas, he would be officially visiting the Russian embassy in order to talk to their Line N officers and check on their performance. In some cases, colleagues were said to later have recalled moments when they did not know where he was on these trips. This is thought to have been when he was secretly meeting the CIA face-to-face, under far less pressure than on the streets of Moscow.
CIA officers would head abroad under “non-official cover,” posing as a businessman or some other professional to meet Poteyev. When they met, a CIA officer would often be accompanied by an FBI agent—including in Latin America. This was a carefully thought-through decision. The FBI, rather than the CIA, was the organization that was primarily using this intelligence and so would have the most direct understanding of some of the details and what questions to ask. There was also the fact that the FBI had cooperated so well in New York that it felt this was the right thing to do in order to keep the relationship ongoing. There was another calculation—it was thought important for the FBI to understand the risks Poteyev was facing and to see the challenges in trying to organize meetings. That meant seeing the whites of his eyes. It was hoped this would make it less likely they would make unrealistic demands and also remind people back in the bureau that one screwup—a messy covert entry into an illegal’s house—and Poteyev’s life could be in danger. The cooperation was tight. FBI officials were also embedded in the CIA’s Russia House to receive messages coming back from Poteyev.
The intelligence passed at dead drops and at meetings was invaluable. Poteyev had direct access to the personal files of every illegal operating in North and South America. The illegals—people like Donald Heathfield and Cynthia Murphy—were not faceless agents to him but people he knew personally and whose daily lives—secret and public—he managed from afar. Every illegal was managed by someone back in Moscow who directed their work and kept a detailed file of their activities, cover, travel, legends, and intelligence product. Each three-hundred-page volume of the file took a year or two to fill with codes, telegrams, and reports. Poteyev had access to all this and could pass it on to the FBI. He was sending orders to the illegals and receiving details of what targets they were cultivating. In many cases, he personally would meet with them when they made one of their rare returns to Moscow. Bezrukov and Vavilov have said they knew him personally and met him a number of times. Bezrukov would later say Poteyev did not make a good impression and did not seem as professional as the others in the department, although that judgment likely involves a degree of hindsight. All his knowledge and insight, though, was being fed back to the FBI, allowing them to identify and monitor their targets.
Poteyev also picked up knowledge of other illegals operating in other countries around the world. Th
is would also be fed back to the United States and lead to a complicated dilemma—if you knew of illegals operating in allied countries should you tell them? Those illegals would not be under watch like those in America were, which meant they could potentially be doing real damage to allied (and often American) interests. But what if telling them pointed the finger at your source? There is always this tension with the most sensitive intelligence sources—protecting the agent is vital, but intelligence is there to be used. In cases like the Enigma breakthrough in World War II, Britain pretended the material came from human agents to mask its true source. In modern cases, the opposite is often true. Intelligence is often portrayed as having come from intercepted communications when in fact it comes from a human agent. In practice, even if intelligence was carefully masked, if other countries acted on it, then it would get harder to avoid someone in Directorate S becoming suspicious that they might have a bad apple in their midst.
On January 25, 2003, Poteyev suffered a strange incident, the kind that makes a spy nervous. He lived in the Krylatsky Hills district, to the west of Moscow’s center, an area of green parks. The drive to work at Yasenevo would have been just under an hour if the traffic was not too heavy. Just before 8 a.m. that day, his wife opened the door of their apartment to three men. They claimed they were police officers. Two of them were wearing masks; another was dressed in a black leather jacket. As they came in, they pulled out two guns, according to a police report. Poteyev himself and his son were tied up with tape. Was it the FSB having found out about his work for the Americans? Fortunately, the men were just robbers after money. And there was a lot in the apartment—they took more than three thousand dollars and thirty thousand rubles. That might in itself have been suspicious since it could raise questions about where it all came from (neighbors remember Poteyev frequently changing the foreign cars he owned and tipping the janitor five hundred rubles for helping him to his apartment when he had drunk too much). For now, though, Poteyev wasn’t suspected of anything and could breathe.
Russians Among Us Page 16
