London beware. Putin sees it all

I was rattled, but this was only one of several eerie incidents that have alerted me to the scale — and brazenness — of Russian intelligence here in Britain. It’s easy to dismiss this as paranoid reactionary Cold War talk. But Vladimir Putin is a paranoid reactionary from the Cold War. The man is a former intelligence officer — a lifelong worshipper of the intelligence services — who has expanded them to monstrous size.

Russia now has more than 3m employees in a bloated security state. In 2015 an astonishing 40% of the national budget will be spent on security and defence. That makes it easy to maintain a large spying operation in London.

MI5 says there are more Russian spies in London than there were during the Cold War. We still talk about the Cold War in the past tense. But Putin doesn’t. He has told the Russian people that the Ukrainian army is a “Nato foreign legion”.

Britain’s global city, not St Petersburg, is the second capital of the Russian oligarchy and opposition. Putin’s shadow state wants to make sure that in London the oligarchs know it has its eyes on them. This makes London a front line in Putin’s campaign on the Russian opposition.

Who are these people and how do they operate? Russia has a good number of seasoned operatives in London, known to the authorities in the same way that MI6 is in Moscow. We know that at least half of the Russian embassy staff are engaged in intelligence work. “The only difference between a diplomat and a spy in the London embassy is that the spy can use money to gather information,” said one diplomat who later translated for Putin.

How many Russian spies are there? Russian intelligence probably fields fewer than 100 actual agents in London. But there may be up to 1,000 informants that the agents can call upon. These informants riddle the Russian community, which numbers at least 50,000 in London.

They are always recruited in the same way: the FSB might offer you a university place in Moscow, medical treatment for your mother or funding for your business. But then it has you in its grip. “They turn people into a dangling chain of slaves,” said one Kremlin insider. “Once they have you, you can never really leave.”

Who are the people that these shadowy figures are reporting back on? London’s Russians are a top priority. Enemy No 1 is Khodorkovsky, who is based in Switzerland but is always in and out of London. Since the oligarch’s release from prison he has been convening a self-styled government-in-exile. He is trying to create an opposition network of activists in Russia and says he is ready to swoop when Putin is next in trouble.

Intelligence operatives have wormed their way into every level of his circle. “When this government-in-exile convened,” said a person familiar with the matter, “we knew that at least a third of the opposition figures in the room would be writing reports back to Moscow on what was said — immediately afterwards.”

The intelligence work on dissenters goes much further than this, however. One opposition figure who recently fled to London says he fears he is being followed and that his staff are passing information to the FSB: “They have made us paranoid.”

For the FSB, making people paranoid is a victory in itself: a frightened and suspicious community of exiles is one unlikely to unite vociferously against Putin. The FSB has already succeeded in bringing Soviet paranoia into Mayfair mansions and art galleries. “Never say anything in public you wouldn’t want them to know,” said one socialite from that world.

The second most important work for Russian intelligence in this country is following British elites. This means the usual suspects for intelligence work: Downing Street, parliament, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and retired politicians.

Gathering intelligence here is practically a doddle: vast numbers of MPs engage in “consulting”. The recent cash-for- access scandal that brought down Sir Malcolm Rifkind was a case in point. Here was a former foreign secretary, chairman of the intelligence and security committee, offering his consulting services to a “Chinese company”. It could easily have been FSB operatives rather than journalists.

In the 21st century the super-rich can sometimes be more influential than governments, so they need watching too. The hedge fund boss Bill Browder has mounted a non-stop campaign, since the murder of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, to impose visa sanctions on the killers. He succeeded in the United States and is keeping up his relentless campaign to make the European Union follow suit.

“At every public event there are between one and three FSB people in the crowd,” says Browder. “They’ve had surveillance outside my offices. We’ve got pictures of them. And they send in various people to keep tabs on me, either from Russian news agencies or pretending to be opposition journalists, to find out what our plans are.”

Russian intelligence wants accurate analysis on likely British foreign policy moves, especially concerning sanctions. Russian intelligence knows that an analyst in Moscow can never fully decipher the actions of western governments; it needs analysts and double agents on the ground.

It also keeps a close eye on the experts: the small community of western journalists and think tankers who shape the way Putin’s Russia is viewed abroad.

Russian operatives, or those compromised by them, float around London in the foreign policy set and the think tank world trying to befriend Russia watchers. They are often pushed by the Kremlin to seek jobs in western think tanks that give them maximum exposure to the elite. “I told Peskov [Putin’s press secretary] and Timchenko [a Putin oligarch crony] that I would use that position to say whatever they wanted me to say,” said one.

Operatives often pose as anti-Putin journalists or compromise them into becoming informants. Befriending western experts enables operatives to call them up whenever their bosses need to make a snap judgment on what Britain will do.

Russian intelligence seeks to co-opt western experts by tempting them with access. This way it can muffle or silence the voices of those who know the most about Russia. Russian intelligence knows full well that for these experts their main currency is access to insider information from Russian officials: they can then monetise this by acting as consultants to western companies dealing with Russia.

I was approached some months ago by one Kremlin insider as to my interest in running a “track two” between Europe and Russia. The implication was access in exchange for being quieter. I refused.

On a recent trip to Moscow I fell into a depression. As recently as 2011 in Russia there had been real optimism in the air about the economy and — among the middle class — where the country was heading. At the centre of Moscow life was a party set of Russian activists, journalists and politicos in their twenties and thirties who thought of themselves as the post-Putin generation. These were my friends: some had extensive ties to the Kremlin, others were the backbone of the opposition — but they all went to the same parties.

No more. Amid accusations of compromise and collaboration, this generation has fallen out: into pessimism and paranoia. “Don’t judge,” said someone I had known for years. “They enslaved me when I was very young.”

One night over drinks I told an old friend, who I was no longer sure I trusted, that I thought it was such a tragedy we had slipped back into Putin’s Soviet paranoia. I will never forget what he said: “Ben, you don’t understand. You wouldn’t be Ben Judah the castigator of the Putin regime without Putin. And I wouldn’t be who I am without Putin. The truth is: our generation is Putin.”