By Patricia H. Kushlis
“Whatever organization we try to create, it always ends up looking like the Communist Party.” Viktor Chernomyrdin, (April 9, 1938-November 3, 2010).
You’d think that the detritus from the Cold War would have long been relegated to the pages of John Le Carré spy novels and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. Yet a dysfunctional Russia that had once been the head and heart of the Soviet Union still seems to struggle on and not just between the pages of those and other popular thrillers.
The revelations in the Moscow newspaper Kommersant about the Russian spy chief who defected to the US last June just before the round-up of ten of his sleeper agents who had been hibernating - for the most part - on leafy-green streets in American suburbia indicates otherwise. Why Russian intelligence chose to leak this embarrassing story through its own print media last week is a question in search of an answer.
What were the Russian leakers' motives? And why now?
Was the goal to embarrass President Medvedev when he met President Obama at the G-20 in Seoul in light of the upcoming Russian Presidential elections? I doubt it, but this was suggested as one or several possible motives in an article in the November 12 Financial Times.
Was it to warn Colonel Shcherbakov, the defector, and perhaps as significantly other members of the Russian Federation’s spy apparatus of the deadly consequences that could await them if they turned coat and then fled into the enemy’s arms despite the ending of the Cold War nearly twenty years ago? How many other Russian intelligence officers have children in the West who, unlike ex-spy Anna Chapman, apparently prefer it to Moscow? Or were the threats printed in Kommersant against Shcherbakov's life by his former employer hyperbole?
All the more reason to ratify New START
Yet if so, all the more reason for the US Senate to ratify the New START Treaty that will allow American verification inspectors back into Russian nuclear sites after a year’s hiatus rather than having to rely on satellite surveillance and possibly far riskier on-the-ground human intelligence information gathering methods.
Agent 90-60-90
Could the leak have been to help promote femme fatale Anna Chapman’s modeling and, er um, otherwise high profile career? The latter, at least, seems to be doing quite well – thank you very much - although her previous employment will likely keep her off European runways and covers of American fashion magazines for the foreseeable future. It's highly unlikely Chapman’s career had anything to do with the leak. She doesn’t need the extra exposure.
Why, then, was the Shcherbakov story leaked to the newspaper Kommersant? Why didn’t the Russian government first broadcast it over the country’s airwaves – television and radio – outlets that, for the most part, the Kremlin controls? A print story by itself simply does not have the impact a report does when run in the electronic media. The Russians have long known that - beginning in Stalin’s time.
Tip of a Russian iceberg?
Did the leakers want to embarrass either Medvedev or Putin - the Kremlin's dueling duo - in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election as suggested by Fred Weir in the Christian Science Monitor on November 8? Or what? Was this part of a high stakes poker game foremost pitting one Kremlin faction against the other?
Or was it, as Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein suggested on last Friday evening’s Newshour an internal fight within the SVR itself – still known in popular parlance as the KGB – designed to relieve Mikhail Fradkov, the agency’s head and former Prime Minister under Putin, of his position? Not only losing the ten sleeper agents but the official overseeing their US activities, after all, doesn’t look good for the organization or its chief.
Whatever the motive or motives, maybe this is just another indication as to how schizophrenic the Russian government and polity remain – another example that elimination of the Communist system neither truly cured body nor soul. As the recently deceased Viktor Chernomyrdin observed: “Whatever organization we try to create, it always ends up looking like the Communist Party.” One can also say as much for the country’s still powerful intelligence services – whose importance to the Russian leadership and their modus operandi date back to Czarist times.
Russia's morning after the morning after - still a long way to go
I think the Communist Party’s removal from control of the government gave rise to an aberrant successor state and a troubled society that took the place of a fraying Soviet Union, a surreal place that is still etched in my memory from the time I worked in the US Embassy in Moscow’s Cultural Section from 1978-80 near the end of the Brezhnev era.
Some of the worst excesses of that system are gone: citizens can now own property (although property rights are still fuzzy), they can travel, study and live abroad; they can open shops, run bars and restaurants and sell things including the automobiles that clog Moscow and St. Petersburg streets. Jeans – which went for the ruble equivalent of US$150 on the black market in 1980 - are also readily and legally available. They can open banks and own newspapers if, that is they can cope with a deadly mafia with tentacles buried deeply into a deep state. Economically the country is on far better footing than it was in the 1980s and 1990s but it remains way too dependent on the fluctuating prices of oil, gas and other raw materials on the world market for its own long term good.
Even though Moscow and St. Petersburg have revived, the Russian population continues to decline, press freedoms have been reigned in yet again, investigative journalists, newspaper editors, and former intelligence operatives are hounded, beaten, poisoned or murdered, political opposition is threatened, jailed or worse, corruption and extortion thrives, and the insurgencies in the North Caucasus have yet to disappear.
See the July 2010 WhirledView post on the rounding up of the spy ring: Moscow's Spy Ring Around the Barbeque Pit, Old Habits Die Hard.