by Paul Simpson
The FSB weren’t overly keen on the new culture of openness that was supposed to characterize the new Russia. A survey of the Russian press in the mid-nineties shows a number of cases where the FSB arrested people on charges of spying although what they were doing was revealing information publicly, rather than selling it to foreign governments.
Boris Yeltsin made a key appointment to the FSB in July 1998, when he placed Vladimir Putin in charge as director, a position he held until becoming Acting Prime Minister in August 1999. Putin had served in the KGB between 1975 and 1991, resigning on the second day of the attempted coup that August. His more hardline approach would be cited as the cause of Russia’s sometimes more intransigent attitude during his presidency of the country in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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Echoes of the old Cold War tensions flared up more openly from time to time. When retired KGB officer Vladimir Galkin landed at JFK airport in New York in October 1996, he found himself an involuntary guest of the FBI, based on charges that a few years earlier he had tried to gain information on Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme from Data General Corporation. The FBI had caught the men he had been running, but without his testimony they didn’t have a case, so in violation of the unwritten agreement between the CIA and the Russians that former intelligence officers would be left alone, they arrested Galkin. Although the Bureau offered him a choice between thirty years in prison or assistance as a defector, he created a third option, demanding a phone and calling his wife in Moscow. She alerted Russian intelligence, immediately escalating the situation. In response, DCI John Deutch put pressure on the FBI and the Justice Department to drop the charges; Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin personally complained to US Vice President Al Gore. The FBI caved in, which probably saved countless former CIA operatives then working in Russia from problems.
A clear distinction was made between intelligence operatives for foreign countries who had previously been enemies but were now (however loosely) allies, such as Galkin, and those who they ran, whose treacherous activities had not previously come to light. Some of these were uncovered as a result of the incredible and painstaking work carried out by Colonel Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to the West in 1992 bringing with him the fruits of his labours in the KGB archives. Over a period of ten years, he made copious notes on classified files, which he concealed in milk churns near his dacha upon his retirement. These gave details on past and present KGB agents, and as they were analysed, provided the basis for numerous arrests around the Western world.
These included former NSA clerk Robert Lipka, who first started working for the KGB in the mid-sixties. According to the head of the Washington residency at the time, who was responsible for assessing the information, Lipka was passing over whatever he got his hands on, some of which was ultra-sensitive, but was mostly of little value. He was motivated by money — payments of $1,000 being standard — which he used to put himself through college. He worked for the KGB until 1974, and then was willing to be reactivated when approached by ‘Russians’ in 1996. MI6, who had access to Mitrokhin’s papers after the CIA turned them down, had passed on a warning to the FBI, who set up a sting operation to catch Lipka.
The Mitrokhin papers also assisted with the eventual arrest of George Trofimov. They gave enough information to identify Trofimov and his KGB handler in 1994, but under Germany’s Statute of Limitations, they could not be charged. It seemed as if he would walk clear but the FBI were determined to get sufficient evidence to arrest him. When Trofimov returned to Florida after his retirement, he was approached by an FBI agent posing as a member of the SVR. Trofimov would later claim that he made up a story of passing information to the KGB to try to gain cash: ‘I can’t explain the logic behind it anymore,’ he told CBS in 2009. ‘My major logic was, I need money, they need a reason to help me. They need a justification, so I’m going to try to provide them with that. And that’s what I did.’ In an unusual twist, one of the star witnesses against Trofimov at his eventual trial in 2001 was the KGB’s Oleg Kalugin, who had described meetings with the American in his memoirs. Still maintaining his innocence, Trofimov was sentenced to life imprisonment.
If the upper echelons of the American agencies had hoped that information from the Mitrokhin archive, coupled with their own trawling of the various Eastern bloc countries’ intelligence agencies’ papers in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism, would mean there were no more nasty surprises coming similar to Aldrich Ames, they were in for a nasty shock in 2001. Robert Hanssen was finally caught red-handed; according to some accounts, his immediate reaction was: ‘What took you so long?’
It was a fair question, and one that was asked at many levels during the inevitable post-mortem. Hanssen had curtailed his own work for the Soviets two weeks before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, shortly after visiting another priest and confessing his sins, as he had a decade earlier. He had warned the KGB that he was about to receive a promotion which would move him ‘temporarily out of direct responsibility’ although he quoted General Patton’s remark before the Normandy invasion: ‘Let’s get this over with so we can go kick the shit out of the purple-pissing Japanese.’ It wasn’t the only time that he would cite the general — and this particular coarse phrase would prove to be Hanssen’s undoing.
Hanssen briefly reactivated contact with the GRU in 1993, interested to see if the information he had previously passed to the KGB had been shared with Soviet military intelligence. However, although he introduced himself as ‘Ramon Garcia’, expecting to be recognized, the GRU man he approached thought it was an FBI entrapment, and nothing further happened. Hanssen kept an eye on the FBI computers for any hint he was under suspicion, occasionally causing questions to be asked about his behaviour when he claimed to be testing the system security or was found with a password hacker on his hard drive. Surprisingly, no one thought more of it, even when Earl Pitts mentioned Hanssen’s name during his interrogation. FBI Special Agent Thomas K. Kimmel Jr. was convinced that there was a second mole within the Bureau, but couldn’t find enough evidence to prove his theory.
Believing that he was in the clear, Hanssen contacted the Russians again in October 1999. The SVR couldn’t believe their luck: ‘We express our sincere joy on the occasion of resumption of contact with you,’ they wrote back. Delays in communication started to worry Hanssen: ‘I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and I get silence,’ he wrote in March 2000. They replied in July asking him for ‘information on the work of a special group which serches [sic] [for a] ‘‘mole’’ in [the] CIA and [the] FBI’ to help ensure his security, but warning him not to send them messages through the mail. Hanssen asked for the funds the Russians had put aside for him to be transferred to a Swiss bank, but they refused ‘because now it is impossible to hide its origin’. A dead drop was set up in Foxtone Park for 18 February 2001.
Hanssen’s luck continued to hold. The molehunt focused its attention on CIA agent Brian Kelley, since he matched the profile they had prepared. Kelley was completely innocent, but three years were wasted investigating him; the cloud over him only began to lift after Hanssen’s arrest.
Hanssen was unaware of the molehunters’ plan to find a Russian source that might be persuaded to reveal the mole’s identity, at this stage still expected to be Brian Kelley. A retired former KGB officer, living in Moscow, was targeted: he wanted to expand his business overseas so was invited to a meeting in New York in April 2000. To the surprise of the FBI, he claimed that he had access to the KGB file on the mole, which he had removed from KGB headquarters before his retirement. It didn’t contain the name of the agent, but had all the details that he had given the KGB over the years. He even had access to a tape of the mole speaking. After considerable negotiations, he sold the file to the Americans for $7 million.
When the file was extracted from Russia by the CIA and passed to the FBI, it was treasure far beyond what the mol
ehunters could reasonably have hoped for at any stage of their investigations: descriptions of the documents the mole had provided; computer disks with copies of the letters exchanged between the Russians and their asset. When they listened to the tape, they realized that it wasn’t Kelley speaking, but it was someone who sounded familiar — and the phrase ‘purple-pissing Japanese’ had also been heard at the FBI. To their horror, the team realized that the person they were seeking was Robert Hanssen.
At this closing stage of his career, Hanssen was assigned to the Office of Foreign Missions at the State Department, but in order to watch him properly the Bureau wanted him back at FBI headquarters. He was therefore offered a new posting, which apparently recognized his computer expertise, and brought him back in-house. There he was watched constantly, and his home phone tapped. When he went to meetings, his office was searched, where messages from the SVR were found on a memory card.
Hanssen began to get suspicious, both of the ‘make-work’ element of his new job and ‘repeated bursting radio signal emanations’ from his car. He wrote to the SVR noting that his ‘greatest utility to you has come to an end, and it is time to seclude myself from active service… Something has aroused the sleeping tiger.’
However, he still made his appointment on 18 February 2001, which the FBI knew about from the memory card. Maybe by that stage he had a death wish anyway. He had once told a friend, Ron Mlotek, ‘A person would have to be a total stupid f***ing idiot to spy for the KGB because you would be caught. Because we’re going to get you.’
And they did. Robert Hanssen was arrested as he slipped a package of documents in the dead drop location under a bridge in Foxstone Park. As Attorney General John Ashcroft said at the press conference announcing the capture: ‘This is a difficult day for the FBI.’ Hanssen pleaded guilty and promised to cooperate; it saved him from the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Some observers, notably including former CIA chief Milt Bearden, believe that another mole has yet to be found who was operational simultaneously with Ames and Hanssen. Neither of them had access to some of the information that found its way into the KGB’s hands, and led to the arrests of, among others, Oleg Gordievsky. With the current level of tension between East and West, the spy’s identity is unlikely to be learned, at least while he or she remains alive.
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Although much of their concentration was, of necessity, on countering potential and actual terrorist threats from radical extremists in the months following 9/11, MI5 were still actively involved with counter-espionage. Two sting operations successfully led to the arrest of British Aerospace employees who were trying to sell highly classified documents to the SVR. Both Rafael Bravo and Ian Parr were caught after they’d contacted the Russian Embassy offering their services, although, intriguingly, the official MI5 history doesn’t explain how the Security Service discovered their approaches! Bravo was sentenced to eleven years, Parr to eight. And MI5 received a formal protest from the SVR that their operative had impersonated a Russian intelligence officer to trap Bravo.
There was an element of humour to the first exchange between the Russian Federation and the UK in 2006. In a programme on Russian television, the FSB accused four British diplomats of spying, in concert with a Russian citizen. A fake rock on a Moscow street contained electronic equipment that was used to transmit and receive information. The FSB filmed its use and linked it to allegations that the British were making covert payments to human rights groups. Asked about the allegations at the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair commented, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to get the old stock-in-trade, of never commenting on security matters. Except when we want to, obviously.’ In 2012, his chief of staff Jonathan Powell admitted to a BBC documentary that the rock affair was ‘embarrassing’, but ‘they had us bang to rights’.
The discussions later in the year were anything but comical, and soured relations between the two countries, particularly as it seemed as if Cold War tactics were back in use. Former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko apparently died of poisoning after drinking a cup of tea that had been laced with radioactive Polonium-210 on 1 November 2006. He had been an outspoken critic both of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the Russian leader personally, claiming that the FSB under Putin had ordered him to assassinate Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky; that it had been responsible for a series of explosions blamed on Chechen separatists, which had been instrumental in bringing Putin to power; and even that Putin was a paedophile. He was granted asylum in the UK in 2000, where he advised both MI5 and MI6 and wrote increasingly vitriolic attacks on the FSB and Putin, accusing them of supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda, and being responsible for the London bombings of 7/7. Two weeks before his fatal drink, he said that Putin had ordered the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Litvinenko met with former KGB agents Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi on 1 November and fell ill shortly afterwards. He died in hospital on 23 November. The police investigation led to the preparation of an extradition request for Lugovoi from Russia, which was not processed. Lugovoi claimed the request was politically motivated, and was even willing to undergo a polygraph test. The test was carried out by a French media company who supply tests for daytime television programmes such as The Jeremy Kyle Show. Lugovoi said he had not been involved directly or indirectly with the murder, or had anything to do with polonium. ‘After careful analysis of all the diagrams obtained from the test, we have determined that the answers to these questions were not false. Thus, in our professional opinion, Andrey Lugovoi was telling the truth when answering the above questions,’ came the result. This seemed to fly in the face of evidence of polonium traces in his hotel rooms, and on the planes that he had used between London and Moscow. Lugovoi now has parliamentary immunity from extradition as a sitting Russian member of parliament; an inquest ordered in October 2011 had still not convened in July 2012, when Litvinenko’s widow lobbied the British parliament to assist with helping her find final answers.
The relationship between Russia and Britain has not fully recovered from the incident. Diplomats were expelled by both countries. Long-range bomber aircraft sorties were recommenced by the Russians in 2007, requiring RAF planes to scramble from time to time when they came too near to British airspace. The following January, the Russians claimed that the British Council in Moscow was riddled with spies. That July, a ‘senior security source’ told the Daily Telegraph: ‘Russia is a country which is under suspicion of committing murder on British streets and it must be assumed that having done it once they will do it again.’ Six months later it was revealed that the number of Russian intelligence agents in the UK was at the same level as during the height of the Cold War, a piece of information that MI5 considered serious enough that it placed it on its website. ‘If a country, such as Russia or Iran, can steal a piece of software which will save it seven years in research and development then it will do so without any hesitation,’ a ‘Whitehall source’ said. ‘Russian agents will target anybody that they believe could be useful to them. Spying is hard-wired into the country’s DNA. They have been at it for centuries and they are simply not going to stop because the Cold War has ended.’ And it was clear that Britain wasn’t the only target.
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The spy ring that was broken in America in 2010 was a gift to journalists, thanks to the involvement of future model and cover star Anna Chapman. It had all the ingredients of a classic spy thriller: sleeper agents planted a decade earlier in the heart of suburbia, a beautiful honey trap who got so close to a key member of President Obama’s cabinet that the FBI were forced to act, and a dramatic swap of agents at Vienna International Airport.
Ten Russian agents, including Chapman, were arrested on 27 June, 2010; an eleventh was detained two days later in Cyprus on his way to Budapest; two further members of the ring escaped back to Russia. In the indictment laid against the agents, the FBI included the instructions that the SVR had
given the sleepers: ‘You were sent to [the] USA for [a] long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill [sic] your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in [the] US and send intels [intelligence reports] to C[enter].’ They weren’t particularly competent though — evidence against Chapman was provided in part by the laptop that she herself gave to an FBI agent posing as her SVR contact, and she bought a cellphone giving the address ‘99 Fake Street’.
The FBI had been running the operation to catch them — Operation Ghost Stories — for many years. Documents that have been released on the FBI’s website, although heavily redacted, indicate that the ring was under surveillance as far back as 2002 and provided copious amounts of video evidence against them showing them using dead drops, ‘brush past’ exchanges of information with Russian officials and other elements of tradecraft. The Russians had in some cases taken the identities of American citizens and built a complete cover for themselves, including enrolling and graduating from universities and joining professional organizations. They started families as part of their cover and even, according to one of the children, intended to recruit them to work for the FSB when the time was right.
Chapman was a recent addition to the spy ring, and was targeted by the FBI. However, she felt uncomfortable when, on 26 June, the fake SVR agent asked her to pass a counterfeit passport to another spy. She contacted her father, a former KGB officer, for advice; he told her not to carry out the instructions and hand the passport in at a police station. This she did the next day, and was arrested. This attempted entrapment by the FBI may have been a ploy to get stronger evidence against her. According to Bureau counter-intelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi: ‘We were becoming very concerned,’ he told a British Channel 4 documentary in 2012. ‘They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue.’ This was the first confirmation that Chapman was more competent than the original reports had indicated.
