Everybody loves a good spy story. The ten people accused by the United States of spying for Russia include several married couples with children, a high-profile Spanish-language newspaper columnist, and an attractive young woman who posed on her Facebook page in a red dress.
Since the late 1990s, they are said to have used invisible ink, buried money, exchanged packages, and communicated in John le Carré-style code: all of this while attempting to infiltrate influential circles in their target country, and scrupulously maintaining all-American cover stories. “They couldn’t have been spies,” said the astonished neighbour of one couple based in New Jersey. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”
If spies they were, they do not appear to have been very good at the job. Observed by the FBI for years, none is even now being charged with espionage, but with lesser offences of money laundering and failing to register as foreign agents. In controlling them, the SVR (the foreign intelligence successor to the KGB) appears to have been behaving as a hackneyed parody of itself — less James Bond, more Austin Powers.
Our amused curiosity, however, should not blind us to the glaring issue revealed by all this, which is a problematic Russian mindset that, in a post-Cold War world, continues to employ a Cold War approach. The death of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian agent poisoned in a London sushi restaurant in 2006, should dissuade us from regarding this as essentially comic. It is not.
Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, must take responsibility for Russian diplomacy’s failure to evolve. His background is KGB, and he is the former head of its domestic successor. If a fondness for intelligence based around Cold War-style illegals has endured, that surely is down to him.
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This approach is not merely unpleasant, but expensive and politically counter-productive. Oleg Gordievsky, a former deputy head of the KGB in London who defected in 1985, has estimated that there could be as many as 60 similar Russian “deep-cover” couples active in the US. Most will spend the bulk of their time living exactly the lives they are pretending to. There is little indication that any of the accused have delivered information that their handlers could not have gleaned more cheaply and easily by employing a Washington political consultancy firm, or by exploiting American technology, such as Google.
In fairness, Russia is not always alone in failing to appreciate that the Cold War has ended. Britain was caught blushing in 2006, in a bizarre episode involving an alleged communication device hidden in a hollowed-out Moscow rock. Within the US, one has to ask why the FBI has been content to toy with this group for more than a decade. Perhaps it was just having too much fun.
Covert intelligence will always have a place, but these are the games of an earlier age. The announcement by President Obama and President Medvedev last week of a reset in relations should not have been hyperbole. The two countries have many common concerns, including terrorism, a nuclear Iran, the growth in Chinese power, and the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
There is no longer an Iron Curtain across Europe. If Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin are truly keen to learn about America, the most simple option of all would be merely to pick up the telephone.