By Patricia H. Kushlis
In a July 2, 2010 FT column on this summer’s real life spy scandal, Charles Clover, writing from Moscow, concluded with the following observation:
“The Kremlin’s leadership seems to believe America is as secretive as Russia and the only way to understand it is to infiltrate it. But the fun being had by Moscow’s media shows that most Russians understand the openness of American society perfectly well. To them, the failure of the intelligence services lies not in the bungling of the operation by suburban spies gone native, but in the fact it was launched by a paranoid and conspiracy obsessed Kremlin.”
Why today’s Russian leadership apparently continues to view the West through the prism of murky secrets to be pried open through nefarious means remains puzzling. And why it still tries to abscond with this country’s mostly non-secrets through stolen identities, a ring - or rings - of sleeper, or deep cover, agents living false mostly-suburban lives in the New York, Boston or Washington suburbs is more likely the stuff spy novels are made of.
Media Blow-Back
The cost of legal fees aside, the negative blow-back by the adverse publicity of a spy ring or pieces of rings exposed in the world media should be enough, alone, to counter whatever black-box sort of intelligence the barbecue spies plus New York Barbie and two left-wing Peruvians - who still seemed to operate under the illusion that the successor state to the Soviet Union subscribes to Communism - might have acquired and passed on to their handlers.
The information the Kremlin seems to have obtained from this motley collection arrested last week likely could have been acquired by a few good Americanists reading and watching the US media. Or if the Russian government wanted to develop contacts with up-and-coming Americans and others through Harvard’s Kennedy School, why not just send a Russian diplomat or two to study there?
Yet, there is likely no single answer to Moscow Central’s choice of operations. Some have suggested 1950s bureaucratic inertia – this was how, after all, Soviet espionage was conducted in the past.
Sadly, the KGB lives on - operating abroad under the post-Soviet initials of the SVR and inside Russia as the FSB - with its outdated operations mentality that once-upon-a-time set the wheels spinning in continuous motion. One of those basic laws of Newtonian physics: a body in motion continues in motion. Until, that is, friction sets in or another object gets in the way to stop it or throw it skittering in an altogether different direction.
The more vexing problem, however, is that the paranoid mentality that the Soviets perfected under Stalin was part of the Tsarist legacy which means it is deeply rooted in the country’s governing psyche. Former KGB operative Vladimir Putin’s rise to the country’s leadership surely reinforces this mind-set and his presence has only exponentially increased the number of high level Russian government officials from KGB ranks with their KGB mentality intact.
Cultural mindsets don't change overnight
Cultural mindsets and entrenched ways of thinking don’t change overnight. And suspicion of American motives in the 1990s whether accurate or not – from NATO enlargement and support for the Colored Revolutions to Missile Defense – would have simply reinforced the suspicions of the already suspicious who continued to see the US not only as the enemy but as secretive as themselves.
Just as secrets are hard to keep in the U.S. – a democracy that prides itself on openness - suspicion has been the name of the game in Moscow and St. Petersburg for centuries. If you’ve ever watched the grainy black and white film by Sergei Eisenstein “Ivan Grozniy” about the horrific life of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (in Russian known as Ivan the Great) or the post-Soviet era “Burnt by the Sun” by Nikita Mikhalov you’ll know what I mean.
The fact that the George W. Bush administration viewed Moscow with its own kind of paranoid negativity intertwined with a Cold War winner’s arrogance would likely have only reinforced the Kremlin’s long held adverse perceptions of this country and the motives of its political leadership.
Twenty years later a child still follows in her father's footsteps
It’s nearly twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, but that doesn’t mean that long established patterns died with it. Tabloid bombshell Anya Kushchenko (or Anna Chapman), for instance, was, according to her former British husband, the child of a KGB (SVR) officer assigned to Africa. In the Soviet Union, children often followed in their parents’ career footsteps.
Whether the charges of money laundering and failure to register as foreign agents - as filed by the FBI against the ten accused Russian spies - will keep most behind bars for more than a few months is questionable. Unless, of course, the US government is able to come up with more compelling reasons between now and then. Failing to register as a foreign agent is, according to John Newhouse in a 2009 Foreign Affairs article on the influence of foreign lobbies on the US, a charge notoriously hard to make stick. Meanwhile, two of the accused were not even charged with money laundering. The alleged paymaster, Christos Metsos who had escaped before the ax fell, was arrested - then jumped bail in Cyprus.
The KGB's American fascination
Throughout the Cold War, the KGB used a variety of ways to elicit secret information about America and Americans. “Sleeper rings” were certainly one. Others ranged from microphones hidden in US Embassy apartments in Moscow and Leningrad and in one instance, the Charge's shoe - to attempting to blackmail select American researchers and academics studying or teaching in the Soviet Union. On occasion, a vulnerable American diplomat or Marine Security Guard was caught in the trap. Yet then too, the KGB could have obtained more in the long run through following the media and sending its people to classes in American politics and US foreign policy.
American and British intelligence services have cautioned that the espionage activities of the Russian and Chinese have become more, not less, active over the past several years.
Reportedly, Sergei Tretyakov, a senior KGB officer at the Russian UN Mission in New York, who defected to the US in 2000 may have warned the US about the existence of this deep cover ring. Or, as also has been suggested, pieces of more than one ring, given the unique characteristics of several of the accused spies who, except for the couples, did not know each other.
Why Now?
Why the FBI decided now was the time to expose these people as Russian agents is equally as murky. The supposed reason – one or more of them was about to leave the country – just doesn’t track since they had been coming and going on forged documents for years and the FBI had been patiently observing their wanderings. Presumably more will come as the questioning continues. It's not just the FBI that's involved in the investigation.
The US is a country, after all, where few secrets stay secret for long. So stay tuned for the inevitable next installment.