Jun 30 2010
What have we learned about spying?
What have we learned from the arrests of accused Russian spies?
I need to be sure to say that coming to historical or present-day conclusions about intelligence is very difficult. To borrow a concept from Donald Rumsfeld, the known unknowns are bad enough and the unknown unknowns are nightmarish. If it turns out that a bunch of Russian sleepers work in the Department of Defense, then I’ll look quite silly.
That said, I think there are some conclusions we can draw.
First, there’s a clear pattern in the covers of the accused spies: they’re in professions that involve a lot of travel, and provide plenty of excuses for chatting up wealthy and influential people: journalist, high-end real estate dealer, travel agent, and (best of all) consultant. The odd thing, which a number of commentators have pointed out (like here and here), is that most wealthy and influential people are happy to talk about themselves and their work. Why go to the trouble of putting an illegal in place at great cost in time and expense when open cover as a Russian journalist or a Russian firm needing to hire expertise would get just as much at a fraction of the risk? Or just google it?
Second, background checks work. None of the names that have popped up so far have been associated with jobs requiring a security clearance. Moscow Center thought that the background stories of the alleged spies could withstand a background check (paragraph 85 of the FBI affidavit); the sleepers themselves weren’t so sure. I’m with the sleepers.
I’ve been on the other end of background checks a number of times (i.e., investigators have asked me about students of mine) and I’ve always wondered about the efficacy of the process. If someone’s taken the birth certificate of a dead child to build a new identity, though, it would be tough to manufacture a lot of friends, neighbors, relatives, and teachers to confirm the legend.
Third, not all cosmopolitan people are spies, but a lot of spies claim to be cosmopolitan people. A striking number of the arrestees claim to be born in one place, citizens of another place, resident in a third (and none of those places Russia). That minimizes the odds of running into somebody from your ostensible home town who might ask awkward questions. And it makes checking somebody’s credentials much tougher. And (previewing the next comment) it helps to explain talking funny.
Fourth, accents are a problem. Even the arrestees with US or Canadian passports seemed to friends and neighbors to be vaguely European. That would almost certainly raise red flags in a background check, or even in interactions with people familiar with Russia and the former Soviet Union. During a research trip to Russia, I read The Charm School, a thriller by Nelson DeMille. The premise was a super-secret school to train Soviet spies to become totally Americanized. I couldn’t buy it–it’s just not possible to take someone past childhood and teach them to speak a foreign language without an accent.
OK, so Vlad just had to keep his hand in the old game. It appears that this group was on to nothing that wouldn’t be available to legal Russians doing business in the US. Without the underlying philosophical driver of internationalist Marxist/Leninist communism the planting of deep cover teams to do political intelligence gathering just doesn’t seem worth it to me. The only place I can see deep cover as being worth the expense and risk is in weapons technology and it appears this team wasn’t headed in that direction. The magic duo of Tareq and Michaele Salahi showed just how easy it is to rub shoulders at the highest level of government.
Last thought, some of the folks in the office are babbling things about long jail sentences, etc. Since it’s all part of the great game, I say we issue some vitriolic statements of anger and disappontment and send them home – and expect that our folks become entitled to the same treatment when they do something that allows the FSB to break their legend.
Overall, this is a well-written piece that draws the right conclusions based on what we know. Your first conclusive paragraph makes them sound like lobbyists, and in the case of Anna Chapman, the analogy is accurate.
That said, I disagree that background checks are the counterspy tool you suggest. I’d agree they are relatively efficient at exposing clumsy amateurs, people who are not actually spies at all, and those who decide on a career in spying – or are “turned” before they get a job which places them in a useful position. Unfortunately, none of those are people who do any real damage. Spies who rocked the American intelligence business to its foundations, such as Aldrich Ames, John Walker and Robert Hannsen all turned to spying after securing jobs in positions for which they had already been thoroughly vetted (CIA/USN/FBI, respectively). Ames and Hannsen also passed regular polygraph tests as part of their service, which should tell you how useful that is. It’s good for getting a confession out of people who actually feel guilty about what they did, such as hotel employees stealing towels, but that’s about it. The polygraph has never caught a real spy, but has made a lot of innocent people’s lives a misery.
Really good and effective spies are masters of exotic tradecraft and comprehensive checklists to minimize the possibility of their making a mistake. U.S. counterintelligence is good, but they missed all 3 of the men named above, for year after damaging year.
You’re right, to an extent, that an accent will always be a problem. That’s why the most valuable spies are recruited in-country, and have always spoken the target language.
Good article, very interesting.
Certainly security clearances miss things. My point is that, given my experience of answering questions for background checks, I’m amazed they catch anything at all. What I conclude from the experience of our Russian friends is that a background check CAN catch false legends and faked backgrounds. Ames, Hannsen, and the like didn’t need fake legends–their real stories looked just fine.
[...] Yesterday’s Johnson’s Russia List (#210, 11 November 2010) had a very interesting piece from Kommersant offering up an explanation for the Russian spies uncovered and summarily expelled from the US this summer (previous commentary here, here, and here). [...]