Western Agencies Offer an Open Door for Russian Defectors

On July 19, Richard Moore, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6), offered rare public comments during his visit to Prague—including a direct appeal to Russians to “join hands” with MI6. “Our door is always open. We will handle their offers of help with the discretion and professionalism for which my service is famed. Their secrets will always be safe with us, and together we will work to bring the bloodshed to an end. My service lives by the principle that our loyalty to our agents is lifelong—and our gratitude eternal.”

Coming on the heels of the mercenary Wagner Group’s short-lived mutiny, this must be a very worrying message for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian autocrat understands that his last bastion of power is his security services. But Moore’s message was that even—and especially—they can choose to be on the right side of history—and do it securely, at a time when Russia’s security apparatus is already in a heightened state of angst.

Moore’s call for Russian bravery in a time of moral crisis may be the first time a British intelligence chief has made this kind of public appeal. He claimed that those who came forward would be following in the footsteps of other Russians who have made the brave choice to serve as MI6 agents in or outside of Russia. In Moore’s telling: to “do what others have already done this past 18 months.” If some agents with access to the Kremlin’s deepest secrets is good, more is better still.

This might be a new tactic for the United Kingdom, but Moore is joining public recruitment efforts by MI6’s closest liaison partner, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. In November 2022, David Marlowe, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, revealed, “We’re looking around the world for Russians who are as disgusted with [Russia’s war in Ukraine] as we are, because we’re open for business.” Marlowe’s boss, CIA Director William Burns, more recently echoed this sentiment that, from an agent recruitment perspective, the CIA isn’t “letting [Putin’s shambles] go to waste.”

Intelligence agencies exploit uncertainty, division, conflict, and chaos. These conditions often sharpen disgruntlements, force confrontations with moral dilemmas, and leave people looking for a safe harbor, sometimes financially, sometimes psychologically, and sometimes physically. Former Director of U.S. Central Intelligence Richard Helms once observed that “civil wars create an optimum espionage venue.” Putin is not (yet) facing a civil war; however, as Moore reminded him in mentioning mutinous Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, his position is not secure. His military and security services have let him down. He has not achieved a quick victory in Ukraine; he’s suffered attacks on his borders and bridges to Crimea, even letting through a small drone attack on the Kremlin. Most alarmingly, the disloyal Prigozhin and his mutinous forces charged perilously close to Moscow. Putin’s authority is clearly shaken; his position is more precarious. In uncertain circumstances, loyalties that once appeared ironclad can suddenly dissolve.

But while the public appeal is new, the moral force of defection itself is an old story for Russians. Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine created an “unprecedented” opportunity for human asset recruitment—one with clear Cold War parallels. The 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring triggered a wave of defections by Czechoslovak security and intelligence officials. By one count, in just over a year after the Soviet-led invasion, more than 40 Czechoslovak intelligence and security officials defected to Western intelligence services, disgusted by Moscow’s occupation. The invasion prompted further defections from across the Warsaw Pact.

Most famously and consequentially, disillusionment with Moscow’s violent suppression of the Prague Spring was a powerful factor in Soviet KGB Col. Oleg Gordievsky offering his services to the British. The Kremlin’s clampdown led Gordievsky to recall, “I had become increasingly alienated from the communist system, and now this brutal attack on innocent people made me hate it.” Once he formally switched sides upon his recruitment by MI6 in 1974, Gordievsky proved his incalculable worth as an agent during the waning years of the Cold War, by providing crucial insights to the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan administrations to navigate the denouement of the superpower standoff, before his betrayal by a Soviet mole in the CIA and subsequent dramatic escape to the West.

More than 20 years after the Prague Spring, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 set off yet another once-in-a-generation wave of defections. In 1992, former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom with thousands of pages of notes detailing Soviet foreign intelligence operations during the Cold War, which he had accumulated in secret at great personal risk over the decades. Several years later, a KGB general-turned-FSB critic, Oleg Kalugin, became a U.S. citizen and wrote a candid account of his three-plus decades of service for Soviet foreign intelligence. In 1995, Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer, switched allegiances and became a British agent. Twenty-three years, a jail sentence, and one dramatic spy exchange later, Skripal would be poisoned by the next generation of GRU officers in his adopted hometown of Salisbury, England, in 2018.

Some of the post-1991 defectors, like Mitrokhin, had been disillusioned for decades but needed the opportunity offered by the system’s collapse to take the chance to leave. Today, thanks to advances in information technology—and encryption and anonymizers, in particular—disillusioned Russians have more ways than ever before to answer the call for clandestine service.

Approaching the other side was a deeply risky business during the Cold War. Some Soviet bloc volunteers were able to make contact with MI6 personnel in their home countries. In the late 1960s, one such asset, a Czechoslovak counterintelligence official, approached the MI6 station at the very place where Moore delivered his recent speech—the British Embassy in Prague. More often, however, volunteers preferred to make contact with MI6 or the CIA in countries far from the omnipresent eyes of Soviet security inside Russia and its vassal states. Some were “walk-ins”—making direct personal contact by walking into a U.S. or British embassy and offering their services. Others were “write-ins” or “talk-ins”—which is how the CIA described volunteers offering their services via intermediary, telephone, or letter. But many remained trapped inside Soviet walls.

Historically, open societies faced an asymmetry when it came to human intelligence collection. The freedom of people to associate with whomever they wished (and wherever they wished) in a democratic state eased the work of autocratic state intelligence services when it came to operating in the West. Western intelligence agencies enjoyed no such freedom of movement in communist capitals, and the Moscow Rules for operating in such a suffocating surveillance environment were developed for just this reason. The difficulty of operating in so-called denied areas remains. It applied to targeting the Islamic State in its territory at the height of its power, and it remains a challenge concerning competitor states with advanced surveillance capabilities like the People’s Republic of China.

Throughout their existence, Western intelligence agencies still managed to recruit and run agents even in the most challenging operating environments. Technology often helped. For instance, CIA assets used microdot cameras to reduce the physical size of their intelligence haul to a tiny film, thus enabling them to exfiltrate intelligence hidden in everyday items such as hollow coins or rings. Technological advancement also permitted security enhancements in agent and case officer impersonal communication. For instance, short-range agent communications devices were developed during the Cold War to enhance the security of both agent and handler by ensuring that they need not be in exactly the same place at the same time to communicate.

Recent advances in technology, encryption, and the birth of social media have all changed the intelligence landscape dramatically, creating vulnerabilities, challenges, and opportunities for the intelligence business. For instance, in 2013, a Russian security agency reverted to using typewriters for fear of cyberoperations, and the Islamic State has periodically banned people from carrying mobile phones for fear of security breaches and kinetic targeting. However, Western intelligence has also suffered from these developments; for instance, in the form of mass leaks.

But there is promise as well as peril for intelligence in the digital age. To keep pace with the times, the CIA has a presence across a variety of social media platforms, and, to offer two-way communication, the CIA’s homepage now features a “report information” link. While Moore offered no specifics on how potential Russian agents could get in touch with MI6, his organization also has a “share information” link one click into its website. However, digital advances are no human intelligence silver bullet and have their own technical vulnerabilities. They can be a double-edged sword.

In 2022, the CIA published instructions via Instagram (in Russian) for how Russians could securely connect via encrypted portals. One CIA-produced video explains how would-be assets can supply information via Telegram. Privacy- and anonymity-enhancing technologies like The Onion Router (TOR) and myriad encrypted messaging systems offer prospective agents the option of communicating from practically anywhere connected to the web. This probably worries Putin, a man notoriously distrustful of technology who already views the web as a tool of U.S. espionage. Putin, a spy by training and autocrat by inclination, must know the risks he faces as his authority becomes brittle.

Trust was a rare commodity in Moscow before the invasion; it is now extremely scarce. Will there be another Gordievsky? Or perhaps another Mitrokhin ferreting away the Kremlin’s secrets to accompany a future defection when the opportunity comes along? Putin is notoriously paranoid, and Moore just reminded him that the worse his Ukraine blunder becomes, the more intelligence will likely be leaving the Kremlin.

In issuing their invitations for clandestine cooperation, Moore, Marlowe, and Burns have adopted a practice that Putin’s minions have embraced in recent years: trolling. Even if the public calls from MI6 and the CIA for more clandestine sources do not yield additional agents, Putin may hobble his own intelligence and security apparatus by pulling it apart trying to root out traitors, just like Joseph Stalin before him. From a Western intelligence perspective, that’s also a fine outcome.