It is no surprise to discover that the Russian secret state is alive and well and up to its old tricks. After all, it is not so long ago that Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London, poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. The discovery of a Russian spy ring operating across the United States, however, was surprising in the scale of activity that it revealed and the evident investment that the Russian intelligence service must have made over a long period in building up the identities of these illegals operating outside the normal conventions of diplomatic cover.
In one sense, the news offered a rare and unexpected trip down memory lane: agents disguised as locals burying cash in beer bottles and swapping it in stairwells was classic Cold War stuff. Old hands from the intelligence community will have read the reports and thought it’s just like the old days.
Of course, in almost every sense, the world of modern security and intelligence is very different from that of the Cold War. Cyber-attack by other states is now a much more feared form of intelligence gathering than old-fashioned spy drops. And the weight of effort in our intelligence community is now devoted to protecting the public from terrorism and frustrating the serious threat of nuclear arms proliferation. Intelligence briefings of ministers will nowadays concentrate on counter-terrorism and how to protect the country from terrorist attacks.
Recent indications are, however, that the level of Russian activity in the UK has risen again and the Security Service, MI5, will still have to keep a watchful eye on this, despite having had to reduce significantly the proportion of its effort going on counter-intelligence work in order to give priority to countering the jihadist threat of violent extremism. The news from the US may mean that more effort will be needed in future here on detecting and countering intelligence activity of Russia and other states.
By far the biggest shock of this story is the sheer scale of investment that it represents in terms of time and money. These were obviously professionals. They would have been highly trained before being deployed. And there were an awful lot of them.
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It takes an enormous operation to put these people in place and support them — as evidence from their expenses claims shows. They have to build up their credibility and their contacts, with no protection and no political cover, and sustain it over many years.
The tradecraft bears many of the hallmarks of the Portland spy ring, a previous Soviet intelligence operation in England in the 1960s. Gordon Lonsdale was a 37-year-old Canadian company director living in northwest London, who turned out to be the KGB Colonel Konon Trofimovich Molody, living in Britain as an illegal resident.
In 1961, after a trail that led to an antiquarian bookshop in Ruislip containing fake passports and thousands of dollar bills, he was one of five spies convicted of obtaining secrets on nuclear submarines from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland in Dorset.
Of course it is possible the Russians are operating the same sort of spy ring here in Britain too. We still have secrets and we are close to the Americans. But I hope they will be chary of attempting to operate at that scale in London because they have caught a series of colds here in the past. A series of expulsions of Russian spies have helped MI5 to establish its reputation as a world-class counter-espionage organisation. And the SIS success in running Oleg Gordievsky, a senior officer of the old KGB, as a British agent, including when he was operating as head of the KGB station in London in the 1980s, shows how well British Intelligence had honed its counter-intelligence skills during latter part of the Cold War.
This latest case similarly reflects well on the American intelligence services. They have clearly cracked a serious group and had them under surveillance for a considerable time, which is not an easy thing to do.
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The Cold War and the world described by John le Carré had spy exchanges after the capture of secret agents on both sides. Today’s world is different; with no diplomatic cover those caught in America can face trial through the courts. There will be plenty of media fuss and excitement about this operation, and for the Russian intelligence service this will represent a failing in the eyes of their political masters — as well as perhaps some reining-in of the ambitions of the Russian secret state; but such things rarely have a long-term impact on diplomatic relations, and we must hope that remains the case.
Sir David Omand was UK Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator and is visiting professor at King’s College London. His book, Securing the State, has just been published by Hurst & Co