The new spies, p.15
The New Spies, page 15
According to Leonid Shebarshin, a senior intelligence officer who resigned rather than change the KGB, the CIA began setting up a new network in the Baltics in early 1992 with a headquarters in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
‘I know that foreign intelligence services have not only not ceased their activity against Russia, but on the contrary have increased it,’ said Shebarshin. ‘Already in early 1992, after I had resigned, the US intelligence services began creating a bridgehead in the Baltics for work against Russia. The Baltic republics’ authorities were quite receptive.
‘At the beginning of 1992, the CIA station in Vilnius had about fifty people. The main activity of this office was not so much work in the Baltics but in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. And it is not only what is happening today, but what could happen in the future. One must not allow foreigners the run of the place with impunity on the territory of Russia, whether their intentions are good or bad. One must not allow them to interfere in our internal affairs, form their own lobbies and recruit their agents from among us.’[65]
The MBR, the Russian internal security service, has set up a special department for problems relating to the former Soviet republics and to promote Moscow’s interests in the ‘near abroad’, as the republics are known. There is concern, particularly among the Russian military, that unfriendly governments in power in the fourteen republics could have serious political and economic consequences. In part this is because the new republics have been developing their own trading links with countries such as China and Iran to further weaken the Russian economy. But there is also the worry that ethnic tension, especially among the seventy million Muslims living in the Asian republics might spread to Russia and destabilize the whole region.[66]
To address these problems, the MBR, in concert with the SVR and the GRU, has orchestrated an extensive campaign in some of the republics to promote pro-Moscow leaders and to destabilize those who are seen as a potential threat to Russia. In Azerbaijan, for example, President Abdulfaz Elchibey was forced to flee the country after a rebel army led by Gaidar Aliyev, a former member of the Politburo, marched on the capital. Elchibey had upset Moscow by withdrawing from the Commonwealth of Independent States and planning to export oil not through Russia but to Turkey.
Russian troops pulled out of Azerbaijan ahead of schedule and left behind enough weapons to equip a 20,000-man army under the control of Colonel Suret Guseinov, an Aliyev ally who was later appointed prime minister.
In Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, who is hated by many in Moscow for his pro-West leanings during the Gorbachev era, has been targeted by both the GRU and the SVR. This led the CIA to send a team to the country at the beginning of 1993 to try and bolster the Shevardnadze government and to provide training to the local intelligence service in surveillance and counter-insurgency methods. The CIA team was led by forty-five-year-old Freddy Woodruff who became a regular feature at the bar of the Metechi Palace Hotel in Tiblisi where he enjoyed drinking with Eldar Gogoladze, the head of Georgian intelligence.
On August 6, 1993 it was Gogoladze who was driving a jeep with Woodruff and two women as passengers on a sightseeing trip in the Caucasus Mountains when the vehicle was ambushed by highway robbers. When Gogoladze refused to stop, one of the bandits fired a single round from his Kalashnikov rifle which hit Woodruff in the head, killing him instantly. He was the first casualty of this new war and his death left Georgia awash with rumours that he had been gunned down by a Russian hit squad.[67]
While this was untrue, Georgian intelligence told the CIA during August that they were convinced Russia was planning a coup against Shevardnadze. In December 1992, thirteen billion roubles were transferred from a private bank in Moscow to banks in Gaduata, the main city in the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia. According to the Georgians, the money has been used to pay for equipment and training for a rebel army. At the same time, several hundred men from the 345th Guards Parachute Regiment of Russia’s 104th Guards Division, which is normally stationed in Azerbaijan, were secretly moved to Abkhazia. Other Russian special forces are training the rebels to use weapons supplied by Moscow.
During July and August, Georgian intelligence recorded a number of meetings and conversations between officials from the Russian embassy in Tiblisi and opposition figures around the country. On two occasions, the conversations involved two members of the GRU, which keeps a staff of eight at the embassy. In the talks the Russians suggested the dissidents organize demonstrations against the government in the hope that Shevardnadze’s position would weaken.
Russian Spetsnaz forces have been training forces loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the former president of Georgia who was fired by Shevardnadze. At the same time, Russian intelligence officers have been acting as a bridge between Gamsakhurdia and other opposition leaders in an attempt to form a united front against Shevardnadze.
The listening posts and spy missions that are now firmly established in the new republics will be a focus for Western efforts to underpin the new democracies. They will also be a running sore for the Russian government which has still not got used to the idea of having such a prominent Western presence so close to their border. What particularly infuriates the Russians is not just the lack of influence they now have in countries where they once held total sway but also the fact that now they feel every conversation is being overheard and every traveller outside Russia’s borders is being targeted for recruitment. The Russians have always had a paranoid view of their own vulnerability; this constant attrition is wearing them down and provoking the aggressive policies which are now evident in Azerbaijan and Georgia.
These policies would undoubtedly continue even if the CIA and SIS were not so prominent in the region. To Russia, simple economics are as much a policy driver as security concerns. As these new nations become more independent so they will cut their traditional economic ties with Moscow and the Russian economy will slide even further into chaos. But Russia is in no position to dictate the terms of this new war. As long as the SVR and the GRU remain active trying to destabilize democratic governments in the new republics, Russia will not be able to discard the old image of the aggressive and expansionist Russian bear.
THE NEW WORLD: BRITAIN
CHAPTER SEVEN - OUT OF THE SHADOWS
It was one of those parties where the glitterati go to be seen, where politicians rub shoulders with actors, and tycoons actually talk to television presenters over white wine and delicate canapes of shrimp and smoked salmon. The occasion was the farewell party for Sir David Nicholas, the retiring chairman of Independent Television News, held in October 1991 at the Savoy Hotel in London. David Frost, John Smith, then shadow chancellor, and Richard Branson, head of Virgin Atlantic, were among the guests.
For one guest, the invitation to the party had posed a serious dilemma. Although he had known Nicholas for some years, he had never been introduced to any of Nicholas’s friends. It was not because he was shy or even because he disliked such entertaining company. Rather, he was the heir to generations of British tradition that ensured he lived his professional life in darkness, forever hidden from public and parliamentary scrutiny. But that evening, after months of agonized debate, he had decided to come out, to reveal his true self.
It was with some nervousness that he went to the Savoy that night and with some pride that he introduced himself with the words: ‘My name is Sir Patrick Walker. I am the director-general of the Security Service.’
Thus the head of MI5, one of Britain’s top spies, broke with tradition and marked the beginning of a new era for the Security Service. Until the party, Walker had been almost completely anonymous. Until he was knighted in 1991, he did not appear in Who’s Who, and even now there is only a two-line entry stating that he was born in 1935 and works in the Ministry of Defence, until now the usual hideout for spies. Kenneth Baker, the Home Secretary, who sanctioned Walker’s outing, was also at the party and must have watched with interest to see how the British establishment reacted to this brave step into the new world. According to friends of Walker, the reaction both at the party and since has been typically British. Some people have never heard of the Security Service, others believe it is a private company like Securicor and the remainder shuffle their feet and change the subject.
(A similar reaction occurred after Prime Minister John Major acknowledged the existence of SIS and its chief Sir Colin McColl in the House of Commons on May 6, 1992. Later that week, the SIS station chief in Washington, who had been operating under cover as a counsellor, turned up at the weekly meeting of senior staff which is chaired by the ambassador. ‘I have something to say,’ he announced. ‘I am now able to tell you that I am the SIS representative here.’ This statement was greeted with neither a handclap nor a cheer as everyone around the table had known exactly who he was and what he did from the moment he arrived, a measure of how farcical the policy of secrecy regarding British intelligence had been.)
But whatever the disappointment within MIS about the reaction to the new openness, the Savoy party was important and marked the beginning of a new policy in the Security Service. In future, the director-general will no longer be a mystery figure and his name can be published without fear of a D notice or arrest under the Official Secrets Act.
In fact even before Walker’s emergence into the limelight, the intelligence community had been tentatively opening lines to the outside world. The new era really began with the appointment of Sir Anthony Duff as director-general of the Service in 1985 by Margaret Thatcher. This was an extraordinary appointment as Duff was a liberal and not from the tough Tory mould of many other Thatcher appointments. (He spent some of his retirement working in a food kitchen serving London’s homeless.) But Duff was always both forthright and courteous in his dealings with Thatcher, two attributes she respected.
By appointing an outsider, the Prime Minister was sending a signal that she wanted changes and Duff immediately set about trying to deliver. He was shocked to find that the organization was extraordinarily old-fashioned, with traditions and structures that owed more to the old boy network and the fears generated at the height of the Cold War than the realities of the late twentieth century. Duff began with simple measures: he personally toured every department, meeting staff who had never before met the director-general; he instituted an internal monthly newsletter and required every department to contribute articles about their work. This met strong resistance from many who had hidden inefficiency behind anonymity, using secrecy to disguise failure. Today the newsletter is read by everyone and is even used to air grievances such as the justification for the firing of two homosexuals.
He made moves, too, to broaden the recruiting network of MIS. Traditionally, the organization had relied on graduates, with a bias towards Oxford and Cambridge. Unlike SIS, which is more elitist, the Service also draws on the army and the police for its recruits as well as taking in others from what remains of the Empire. It was clear, however, that if the modern terrorist was to be combated effectively, the recruiting base would have to be broadened to include men and women from all walks of life, both graduates and non-graduates. Today, out of the 2,000 members of the Security Service, 40% are under thirty and the majority of these were recruited outside the narrow Oxbridge net.
Duff made no secret of the fact that he questioned the value of much intelligence work. He was appalled by the traditional methods which seemed cumbersome and frequently unjustified, and the traditional enemies targeted by MI5, often, he felt, for no reason other than that they had always been there and were a threat many years ago.
‘The internal threat to the state is virtually dead,’ he said. ‘People did believe in it at one time and perhaps they were right to do so. But the Labour Party have shown themselves to be quite capable of taking care of the most serious threat today which was Militant Tendency. Now it is hard to conceive of any organization that could actually threaten the stability of the nation. But I suppose you have to keep an eye on things in case a political organization turns to terrorism.’[68]
A number of defectors, notably Oleg Gordievsky, the designated KGB head of station in London, had provided a wealth of detail about the work of the KGB against the West. (Duff spent many hours talking to Gordievsky, a man he came to admire and respect as a true idealist. In the autumn of 1988, Gordon Brook Shepherd published The Storm Birds, which gave the first detailed account of Gordievsky’s contribution to the end of the Cold War. To celebrate the publication and as a mark of their friendship, Gordievsky inscribed a copy of the book and put it in a plain brown envelope. SIS, who were looking after Gordievsky and still had him in hiding, put a Carrickfergus stamp on it and posted the book to Duff at his home in Devon. With an Irish stamp, a handwritten address and a book shape, it had all the hallmarks of an IRA letter bomb and Duff called the police. Since he lived in a remote country village, the nearest bomb squad was at an army base in the next county, and arrived two hours later. The army propped the package against the compost heap at the bottom of the garden and blew it up. Only by piecing the bits together did they learn the nature of the gift.)[69]
The evidence of people like Gordievsky was that the KGB was far from being the all-seeing, all-knowing intelligence organization the West had feared for so long. It still managed occasional coups but generally achieved little. It made Western intelligence bureaucracies appear monuments to modern management.
‘The vast amount of material gathered by the KGB was really pretty unimportant,’ said Duff. ‘They were not working to politically undermine the state but were trying to learn what is confidential and secret,’ he explained.
Even with that reality, continued Soviet/Russian attempts to recruit sources in Britain to gather political, economic and technological secrets were clear. At the time of Duff’s review there were around thirty KGB agents active in Britain along with some ten GRU agents.
‘If the other side insist on sending in vast numbers of people to spy then it really is unacceptable to allow them to operate freely however puerile their efforts may be. It is also absolutely crucial that you should be secure enough that your signals should be safe.’
With that as background, Duff ordered a major reduction in the counter-subversion efforts of the Service. Already there was little effort expended on trade unionists or members of what in the 1960s and 1970s would have been described as ‘left-wing’ groups. There were no organizations left that could be considered a threat to the state. However, work continued on watching those groups who could pose either an economic threat or provide support for terrorist groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front. This narrowing of the remit allowed the service to focus more attention on countering terrorism, and Duff ordered a major recruiting drive to hire agent-runners and to recruit agents to counter that threat.
That recruiting drive was accompanied by a more general attempt to bring some new blood into the organization. Demographics and poor management had led the Service to have a serious shortage of high grade people to promote to director level. To improve the management, an additional deputy director-general was appointed to handle personnel and administration. There was ample talent to fill the assistant director slots at the middle management level but no people readily available for promotion from the ranks below. So, efforts were made to find mature recruits in the armed forces and the police, which proved successful. One of the new directors appointed in 1992 to head G Branch, for example, is a former policeman.
MI5 continues with its traditional role of vetting and providing security advice to government officials and departments. But the actual expenditure is small compared with other departments such as the Ministry of Defence (‘A grain of salt on a peanut compared to what is spent on security generally,’ is how Duff describes it).
To underline the changes, Duff appointed Stella Rimington to head up Directorate G, which is responsible for counter-terrorism. The position was also elevated literally and figuratively to the top table. She became one of four directors invited to Duffs private dining room at MI5’s headquarters in Gower Street near King’s Cross for a buffet lunch which has become known inside the building as Directors’ Buns. To improve the dialogue between departments there is now a meeting every three months with the fifty assistant directors and directors to discuss matters of mutual interest and to generate ideas.
When Duff first arrived, the private lunches were served by an ancient retainer whose heavy smoking prevented him from moving at more than a snail’s pace. An equally ancient cook prepared the worst kind of English public school food with duffs and sponges a regular feature on the dessert menu. He was replaced by a cordon bleu cook called Henrietta who produced less school food and a few more quiches. To complete the culinary reform, Duff insisted that the restaurants in Gower Street and Curzon Street be changed to produce food that people wanted to eat, telling friends that ‘there is no communication between branches, but to be effective we must have good inter-departmental gossip and therefore there need to be good restaurants where people can talk freely.’
These were largely cosmetic changes. They certainly helped improve morale within the organization, which had begun to suffocate on its own obsession with secrecy. At the same time, the reforms broke through the barriers that had been built up between MI5 personnel and the world outside the confines of Gower Street. These changes were essential if normal, well-adjusted people were to join the service, rather than those who wanted to live, work and play within the very narrow confines of the Service ethos. While the cosmetics made a difference, of more serious interest were the efforts Duff made to have MIS placed on a legal footing for the first time.
