During the Cold War, when I lived in Mexico for a few years, I had a Russian friend named Sergei. He was a journalist, he said, but everyone knew he was a Soviet spy. The only doubt was whether he worked for the KGB or for the military intelligence service, the GRU.
We had breakfast together quite often, always to talk about Central America, whose wars I covered. I was going there hoping that Sergey would give me information about what Russia or Cuba were doing in the region, where both countries were operating covertly against the interests of the United States. He knew that in my newspaper, The Times of London, I often denounced Washington’s support for the Nicaraguan contra and the bloody regimes of El Salvador and Guatemala. He wanted to see me as a viable source of information.
The truth is that for me those encounters turned out to be funny but useless. They must have been for him too, because I never told him anything that I hadn’t previously published. But I think they did serve him. To give the impression to his bosses in Moscow that he had found a valuable “Western” source. What I remember most about those breakfasts is that, on time, every half hour, Serguei would get up and go to the toilet. I have no doubt that his purpose was to change the tape in the tape recorder he had hidden.
I am reminded of this story today in light of the arrest last week in Russia of Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent accused of being a spy for the United States. “What the employee of The Wall Street Journal was doing,” explained the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, “has nothing to do with journalism.”
Well, the most obvious thing here is the hypocrisy that the phrase betrays. Today, all Russian journalists whose work is published in their country are working, as in Stalin’s time, for the State. They don’t do journalism; they make propaganda They know that if they don’t repeat the official lies, they will either be imprisoned or killed. (More than two dozen have already been killed since Vladimir Putin has been in power.)
However, what the spokeswoman for the ministry said, as simple as the intention may have been, leads me in a not-so-obvious way to a seldom-acknowledged truth: that espionage and journalism are not unrelated, they have a lot to do. As for the modus operandi, they are very similar jobs.
In my years as a correspondent I met several spies of all colors. I even married one. They, and they, have secret and non-secret sources. We have secret and non-secret sources. Like spies, we try to find out what is really going on in the circles of power, not just what we are told. Sometimes, like spies, we have to cover up, pretend to be more naive than we are, or express more sympathy for our interlocutors than we feel. We often have a common point of betrayal with spies: we present ourselves as friends, but we are not.
The difference is, first, that the spies are paid by the states and we are paid by the newspapers; second, that what they write is seen by two or three people and what we write is seen by everyone; and, third, that we, the journalists, are subject to the law and they are not. Oh, and our mission is not to buy agents or officials from rival states either. I am not a spy, although I had my chances, because being a journalist seems more honest to me. It’s just that I couldn’t lie to everyone about what I really do in life and I couldn’t be in the service of a government regardless of whether I agreed with its policies or not.
But to a certain extent I understand how Putin and his people, from their totalitarian perspective, could come to interpret the role of Evan Gershkovich as that of a spy. An article he published in December with three other Journal reporters offers a comprehensive and devastating view of why the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a failure. I dare say that if a team of CIA agents had obtained such detailed information about Kremlin secrets, and about Putin’s relationship with his intelligence services and his military, they would have given each of them a medal.
In other words, Gershkovich and company did a brutal “espionage” job. Most of their sources were people they couldn’t name because if they had, those people would have ended up in jail, or worse. But the fact that his investigations were published in the great city of New York, and not sent in secret code to the CIA headquarters in Langley (Virginia), should have served as a clear signal that Gershkovich was a journalist genuine and that putting him in prison would be barbaric. Every day we encounter the cynicism and cruelty of Putin’s state apparatus, and we see it once again with the arrest of the American correspondent, caged in a notorious prison in Moscow where he could be, according to what in Russia in they say “law”, for twenty years.
There are many who say that what the United States did in Iraq was just as bad as what Russia is doing in Ukraine today. I would add that what they did in Central America in the eighties as well. Or almost That’s not why I don’t stop condemning Putin, and that’s not why I’ll fall into the foolishness of saying that Washington presides over a system as vile as Moscow’s. The difference – no small thing – is in the degree of respect that exists in the United States for the concept of justice and individual life.
When I was working in El Salvador, I published an article about the complicity of the Yankee military in the atrocities of the Salvadoran regime. My sources were, among others, a spy. The very busy US embassy could have asked their Salvadoran subjects to arrest me, and they would have. But no. The response they limited to was a letter to my newspaper in London from the head of US diplomacy, Secretary of State George Shultz, complaining about my “falsehoods”. Shultz was the fake one, I say, but he would never have had the shamelessness or bad faith to suggest that I was working for the same people as my friend Sergey.
