It is unusual for spy chiefs to mock their rivals in public. However, in January Bill Burns, director of the CIA, could not resist observing that the war in Ukraine had been fortunate for his organization. The comment perhaps struck a chord with Russia’s “special services,” as the country describes its intelligence agencies. Russian spies behaved clumsily in the preparations for the war and were then expelled en masse from Europe. Now, new evidence compiled by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London think tank, shows that they are learning from their mistakes; They have adapted their methods and are embarking on a new phase of the political war against the West.
The last few years have been disastrous for Russian spies. In 2020, agents of the FSB, the Russian security service, failed to poison Alexei Navalny, the most prominent opponent, who then mocked them for having sprayed his underwear with Novichok. The FSB then offered the Kremlin a very optimistic view of how the war would unfold, exaggerating Ukraine’s internal weaknesses. He failed to prevent Western organizations from stealing and publicizing Russian invasion plans. And, last year, he was unwilling or unable to prevent a brief mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) saw its presence in Europe decimated with the expulsion of some 600 agents from embassies across the continent. Disastrously, at least eight “illegals” (intelligence agents operating without diplomatic cover, often posing as non-Russians) were unmasked.
The RUSI study, the work of Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, two analysts of the organization, and Oleksandr Daniliuk, former advisor to the Minister of Defense and the head of foreign intelligence of Ukraine, is based on documents “obtained from Russian special services.” and in interviews with “relevant official bodies” (presumably intelligence agencies) of Ukraine and Europe. By the end of 2022, Russia realized that it needed more reliable reporting from its agencies. He put Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy chief of the Kremlin General Staff, in charge of “committees of special influence,” charged with coordinating operations against the West and then evaluating them.
That change in personnel appears to have produced more coherent propaganda campaigns. In Moldova, for example, the disinformation effort against the country’s candidacy for the European Union, which had previously been scattered, became more systematic and targeted last year. He linked the membership candidacy to the person of the president, whom he blamed for Moldova’s economic problems. Campaigns aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine have also intensified. In January, German experts published details of bots that spread hundreds of thousands of daily messages in German on X (Twitter) from a network of 50,000 accounts over a single month. On February 12, France uncovered a large network of Russian sites spreading disinformation in France, Germany and Poland.
Meanwhile, the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, has also been reviewing its methods. In recent years, Unit 29155 (responsible for the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer, in Salisbury, Great Britain, in 2018) has seen many agents, activities and facilities exposed by Bellingcat. That research group bases its revelations on public information and leaked Russian databases.
The GRU concluded that its personnel left too many fingerprints; above all, because they entered and left sensitive places associated with Russian intelligence with cell phones. He also realized that the expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in Europe had made it difficult to organize operations and control agents abroad, one of the reasons the invasion of Ukraine went wrong.
The result was an in-depth reform, which began in 2020 but accelerated after the start of the war. Despite his long list of blunders, General Andrei Averianov, head of Unit 29155, was promoted to deputy head of the GRU and created a new Special Activities Service. The agents of Unit 29155 (of which Alexander Mishkin and Anatoli Chepiga, Skripal’s bumbling poisoners, who insisted they had traveled to Salisbury to see the famous spire of its cathedral, were once represented) no longer carry private telephones. or from work to the facilities, but rather use landline telephones. The training is carried out in various safe houses and not at the headquarters. In the past, half of the personnel came from Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces; However, most new recruits now lack military experience, making it difficult for Western security services to identify them through old photographs or leaked databases.
A separate branch of the Special Activities Service, Unit 54654, is designed to form a network of illegals who operate under what Russia calls “full legality,” that is, the ability to pass even the filter of the meticulous scrutiny of a security agency. foreign espionage. It recruits contractors through front companies, does not enter names or data into state registries, and infiltrates its agents into non-defense ministries or private companies. The GRU has also taken an interest in foreigners enrolled in Russian universities and pays scholarships to students from the Balkans, Africa and other parts of the developing world.
Another example of how Russian spies have turned disaster into opportunity is the case of the Wagner Group, a network of front companies overseen by Prigozhin. Wagner initially served as a covert arm of Russian influence, providing forces and weaponry to local autocrats in Syria, Libya, and other African countries. In June 2023, Prigozhin, furious at the mismanagement of the war by the Russian defense minister and the head of the Russian army, began a march on Moscow. The mutiny was contained; Two months later, Prigozhin died when his plane exploded in mid-flight.
The Russian special services soon divided up Prigozhin’s extensive military-criminal organization. The FSB was left with the national companies and the SVR with the media branches, such as the troll farms that interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections. The GRU was left with the foreign military parts, divided into a Volunteer Corps for Ukraine and an Expeditionary Corps, led by General Avérianov, for the rest of the world. The latter fell short of its goal of recruiting 20,000 soldiers at the end of last year, according to RUSI, although its numbers are “constantly increasing.” There have been setbacks: Prigozhin’s son, who is strangely still alive and at large, offered Wagner troops to the Rosgvardia, the Russian National Guard. This caused, according to the RUSI authors, a bidding war between the National Guard and the GRU.
The net result of all that consolidation is a revitalized Russian threat in Africa. Shortly after Prigozhin’s death, General Avérianov visited several African capitals to offer what RUSI describes as a “regime survival package.” In theory, the proposals entail the GRU providing local elites with military muscle and propaganda against local rivals. In exchange, Russia would obtain economic concessions (such as access to lithium mines and gold refineries) and through them influence over its enemies; perhaps even the ability to seize Niger’s uranium mines from France (France needs that mineral for its nuclear power plants). Prigozhin is dead; his malevolent influence lives on.
Russian intelligence, although bruised, is firmly back on its feet after its recent humiliations. In recent weeks, The Insider, a Riga-based investigative website, has published a series of articles documenting Russian espionage and influence across Europe. They include details of how a GRU agent in Brussels continues to supply European equipment to Russian arms manufacturers, as well as the revelation that a senior Bundestag adviser and a Latvian member of the European Parliament were both Russian agents (the latter since perhaps more than 20 years ago).
“They are not doing as badly as we think,” says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist, who believes that the Russian services “have come back strongly” and are increasingly more inventive. Vladimir Putin, once a (mediocre) KGB officer, is “trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service,” Soldatov explains. He points to a case that occurred in April 2023, when Artem Uss, a Russian businessman detained in Milan on suspicion of smuggling American military technology into Russia, was returned to Russia with the help of a Serbian criminal gang, a regular intermediary for the services. Russians.
In the past, according to Soldatov, the FSB, SVR and GRU had a clearer division of labor. Not now. All three organizations have been very active in recruiting among the flood of exiles who left Russia after the war. It is easy to hide agents among a large group and it is easy to threaten those who still have family in Russia.
Furthermore, Russian cyber activity is going from success to success. In December, the United States and Britain issued public warnings about Star Blizzard, an elite FSB hacking group that has been attacking NATO countries for years. A month later, Microsoft announced that Cozy Bear, a group linked to SVR, had penetrated email accounts belonging to some of the company’s top executives. That came on top of the GRU’s sophisticated cyberattack on Ukraine’s power grid, which caused a blackout apparently coordinated with Russian missile and drone attacks.
The renewal of the Russian intelligence apparatus comes at a crucial moment in the East-West competition. An annual report by the Norwegian intelligence service published on February 12 warned that in Ukraine, Russia was “taking the initiative and achieving military advantages.” Estonia’s equivalent report, published just the next day, stated that the Kremlin was “anticipating a possible conflict with NATO in the next decade.”
The priority of Russian spies is to prepare for that conflict not only by stealing secrets, but by widening the cracks within NATO, undermining support for Ukraine in the United States and Europe, and eroding Western influence in the Global South. In contrast, there has been very little Russian sabotage against Ukrainian supplies in Europe. One reason for this is the Kremlin’s fear of escalation. Another is that the Russians cannot do everything and everywhere at once.
Meanwhile, the spies will continue to fight their peers. In their report, Estonia’s foreign intelligence services published the identities of Russians working on behalf of the country’s intelligence services. “We extend an invitation to contact us to those who prefer not to find their names and images in our publications together with the names of FSB agents or other Russian intelligence agents, with the potential that this could have on their relationships. with the West,” pointed out the Estonian spies. “We are convinced that it will be possible to negotiate mutually advantageous agreements.”
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
