SpyChess Interview (Part 1): Author Andrei Soldatov on the Russian security services, Putin's present, and Russia's future.
What are the forces shaping Russia's present and future?
(Editorial Note: This interview, part one of a two-part interview, was originally published for SpyChess subscribers on Saturday, September 25, 2021. Part two is now available to subscribers.)
Former CIA Case Officer Tennent H. Bagley once wrote, “the past pervades counterintelligence work–or it should.” Modern Russia, its leaders, and its strategic priorities are the products of a very particular past. A past that saw the fall of an empire and the rise of men from its security service, the KGB, to the pinnacle of power.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of brave journalists have emerged as authors and experts in tracing the ties between whatever represents the present in Russia to this particular past. Andrei Soldatov is one of these journalists. Since the 1990s, alongside his frequent collaborator, journalist Irina Borogan, Andrei’s unparalleled work and expertise have charted and explored the operations and power dynamics of Russia’s security services, the military, and the Kremlin.
In a recent article, Andrei wrote about the FSB (traditionally viewed as Russia’s domestic security and counterintelligence service) and the clandestine operations of a foreign intelligence component operating within the FSB. Following that article, I had the opportunity to discuss a range of issues with him—including the SVR (officially Russia’s foreign intelligence agency), FSB operations, Putin’s challenges, Russian military influence inside Russia, and what we can expect in the future.
For strategic purposes, counterintelligence (including counterespionage) should be rooted asking why questions, in why something is occurring or may happen, in trying to understand intentions and motivations as much as operations. In the case of modern Russia, it begins by peering into the long dark shadows cast by the KGB and the former KGB men who run the Kremlin and its security services.
I want to thank Andrei for sharing his time and his insight.
I hope you enjoy part one of our conversation. Part two is now available to subscribers.
Andrei Soldatov is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Andrei is a Russian investigative journalist, co-founder, and editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999. In October 2012 Agentura.Ru, Privacy International, and Citizen Lab launched the joint project 'Russia’s Surveillance State' with Andrei Soldatov as a head of the project, to undertake research and investigation into surveillance practices in Russia, including the trade in and use of surveillance technologies.
He is co-author with Irina Borogan of The New Nobility. The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (PublicAffairs, 2010), The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (PublicAffairs, 2015), and The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad (PublicAffairs, 2019).
(Editorial Note: In Russia, they typically refer to what the West calls intelligence services as security services. For our purposes, these terms should be viewed as interchangeable.)
Germán: Your most recent article focuses on the activities of an FSB component, the Fifth Service and its role through a subcomponent, the Department of Operative Information (DOI), in intelligence operations in Russia’s near abroad and now globally, as the foreign intelligence arm of the FSB. How should we assess the competition between these FSB activities and the SVR? On a global scale.
Andrei: That's actually a very tricky question right now because the FSB has been ambitious for many, many years. Two decades at least. The idea to have its own foreign intelligence arm was a sign of that ambition. It is a problem [its ambition now added to the SVR’s own] we are faced with right now because the SVR has been years ahead for many years. The SVR, as a service, was thinking deeply about its reputation in the West. As we describe it in our book, The Compatriots, the SVR launched a very sophisticated and very successful operation to whitewash its own reputation. They wanted to be seen as some sort of a civilized intelligence operation, just like what you have in the United States and in Western Europe.
Recently, however, the head of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, who is a politician and a former intelligence officer, has become more ambitious.
And it is quite astonishing. Every month you see him saying something or giving an interview or commenting about something. Many people think that he has his own political ambitions, maybe as foreign minister or maybe as prime minister, or maybe even higher.
So now we have this competition between two ambitious intelligence agencies fighting for essentially the same ground because the SVR is collecting foreign intelligence, but it's also traditionally about political intelligence. The FSB was always about political intelligence. But the FSB foreign intelligence operations are looking abroad to serve the bigger purpose of protecting the political stability of the regime and the Kremlin. And now Putin is getting more paranoid. For him, everything, almost everything, is seeing through the prism of a potential threat. So that is why the FSB is gaining in importance. That is why it's actually very tricky to understand how they can even collaborate. It's a fierce competition right now.
Germán: There is a view that the Kremlin and Putin encourages or doesn’t mind the competition between security services. Do you think he does prefer to have the FSB operating more aggressively overseas globally right now? Because that's what you described in The Compatriots and in the recent article. They [the FSB] have been pushed out [to operate] globally far beyond the Russian near abroad, which was their original mandate. How do you think the Kremlin sees this?
Andrei: First of all, we need to look at this in the historical context. The concept of a competition between the intelligence agencies encouraged by Putin was probably correct for [approximately] a period of the first 10 or 15 years of Putin in the Kremlin.
Sometime around 2015, however, it changed. Putin became much more obsessed with control, the idea of control over his own intelligence agencies. These agencies started losing, gradually, some of their independence. As a result, we’ve seen a new climate of selective repressions, with even the FSB being hit. We got several people [put] in jail, including high ranking officers of the FSB—sign of the new mood in the country.
At the same time the FSB was remarkably resourceful at exploiting the tactical situation of the time, of the situation we find ourselves in right now, after the Western sanctions were imposed. In a normal country, you have institutions, like a foreign ministry, responsible for things like defining foreign policy. And that definitely changed after the annexation of Crimea, and even more after 2016.
The problem right now for people in the West, they still need to talk to the Kremlin because there are still lots of things to talk about—from counterterrorism to nuclear proliferation, Iran, Ukraine, Syria, etc. The problem is that it's becoming more and more obvious that it's absolutely useless to talk to the foreign ministry and Lavrov.
Lavrov makes all this noise about himself and his agency—they are extremely active online and social media, as well as on Russian television. But you cannot talk to him or his people about the most sensitive topics like Ukraine or Syria, it's not his area of responsibility. And, within this context, you have other agencies filling this void. The FSB, among them, is one of the most prominent agencies, because the West still needs a partner to talk about counterterrorism. The US still remembers the legacy of the Boston marathon bombings. The FSB role in [identifying] information [on the bombers]. The idea [for the Russians] was of a public image of conversations between American and Russian security services. This type of legacy adds to an idea the FSB fully exploited in presenting themselves as a useful partner—if you want to talk serious business with Moscow.
When you see Lavrov being, or rather, not being very important anymore, that was also noticed by the Kremlin. So now you have this strange new scheme where the FSB is more important in a role which is very far from their traditional area of responsibility.
On the other hand, as I said, the SVR is getting more active in areas which traditionally have nothing to do with the intelligence agency, like ideology. For the Russians, ideology is all about our history. If you want to make a point about something, about [for example] the role of Russia in the present world or what they think about themselves globally, then we need to look at what they're saying about their history. About the second world war, the first world war, or the 19th century.
And you see that Naryshkin [head of the SVR] is getting more and more involved in defining these historical narratives, which means he is now taking over [promotion of] this aspect of Russian politics. So now you have these institutions, which on the surface should be responsible for things like security and intelligence, and they're doing something very different from what we expect them to do. But that's how the game is played right now.
I do not think that Putin wanted it this way. Bu he found himself in a very tricky situation after 2016.
It looks like he is getting less and less strategic. He was always good at tactics. That was his genius. At seeing opportunity and exploiting it. But he's getting more and more adventurous and that means the traditional institutions are changing roles.
Germán: If you penetrate (recruit an officer/official inside a particular agency) the intelligence services in China, you're only going to get a certain view. If the Russians penetrate CIA or the FBI, they're only going to get a specific lens that those agencies have about issues. They're not necessarily going to get inside the mind of the top levels of political leadership. In Russia, however, it’s about the presidential administration and the intelligence services. That's where you need to go and everything else is kind of noise.
Andrei: If you want to understand how these things actually work, you need to go into that level of the presidential administration. It is now, perhaps, the closest thing we have to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In the late 1980s, you have party control through the Politburo and the bureaucracy of the Central Committee. They controlled everything. We are getting closer and closer to that.
There are some differences, of course. Now there are friends of Putin and his business partners. There are tactical changes, so when you have some new crisis, that [crisis] can reshape the positions of people inside. But it looks like Putin, as he gets older, is trying to replicate something closer to what he remembers from the 1980s. Because at least it worked or at least in his mind there is a sense of it having worked.
Germán: One of the salient points in your recent article is about the widespread use of FSB officers operating, within Russia, undercover across all levels of civil society to penetrate and take advantage at the same time. Dual hatting (two jobs—an official clandestine job and a second full time public one) by FSB officers domestically is a unique model. Certainly not one found within the West for domestic intelligence or law enforcement purposes.
It would seem that the successful operational use of this practice domestically might find itself applied to overseas operations.
Meaning, is there the possibility of the use of what Western intelligence calls NOCs (non-official cover officers) but on a large scale (separate from traditional Illegals [NOCs in Russian parlance] used by the SVR and GRU) compared to other models of collection/intelligence operations?
Especially if Russian intelligence operations are about influence and deception and not primarily aimed at collection/analysis (like Western services).
Andrei: I think it will sound quite natural for them because it's not a tactical thing [tied to a specific operation]. It was an essential thing for the KGB. It started back then, and it's thought that [today] we have something they call counterintelligence support. It means that when you have something sensitive, like a particular enterprise, and you need to protect this from foreign intelligence penetration as well as keeping watch on your own people, then you appoint openly or covertly [FSB] people to it. It was a very widespread thing back in the Soviet Union. It was how the KGB and its predecessors were able to pursue widespread repressions. You need to have lots of people involved.
That is why we had so many regional offices of the KGB and now it’s the FSB. For example, MI5 doesn’t have a huge regional apparatus in the UK. In Russia it is the opposite. You have a central apparatus, but you have people everywhere. In every region, in every city, in every town. This approach is central to the mentality of how this type of [clandestine] operations should be conducted. And that's why I would say that it's very natural for them to expand this practice abroad. Look at how the KGB used these officers to target foreigners, even domestically, where you had these Soviet trade organizations based in Moscow and Leningrad looking for targets. I'm just stressing that this was the KGB mentality and is now the FSB mentality. And now as we have a new, recently launched, system of organizations intended to support Russians abroad, you will have some of these positions filled by military intelligence, some by the SVR, and some by the FSB.
The problem [in identifying who is working for whom] is that sometimes there is overt/open attachment [to a civil society organization], sometimes covert, and in many cases it is retired officers. So, you might think that somebody [an NGO] just picked up a general because of personal reasons and for mutual advantage but you never know whether he's really retired or he's still reporting to the FSB.
This concludes part one of the SpyChess interview with Andrei Soldatov. In part two we talk about the FSB’s leaders, more on Russian intelligence operations, the rising influence of Russia’s military, how to analyze Putin, and future Russian leadership.
Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.