Kremlin has shot itself in the foot
IT IS likely that most folk do not realise the full and final price that Russia will have to pay for the vengeful attack with the nerve agent Novichok on former spy Col Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. I suspect it will damage their own espionage service the SVR for years to come, perhaps for up to a decade. The reason is this.
We the British nation have received an extraordinary and heartening solidarity from almost all other democratic nations over this business. We may have occasional spats with European neighbours over Brexit and even with our long-term ally in Washington. But on this issue they have sided with us in practical terms: the expulsion of Russian agents posing as diplomats. Basically this is how it works.
All countries who run an external intelligence service house their agents in their embassies under the cover of diplomats. This gives them all the protection of the Vienna Accords, meaning diplomatic immunity. They cannot be arrested and charged or tried unless their own country voluntarily lifts their immunity, which is very rare.
In the diplomat list some are “declared” which means their country openly admits to the host nation that they are intelligence officers or IOs: the preferred word in that world for spooks. There is a surprising amount of perfectly civilised communication between opposing agencies. But the majority are undeclared, meaning they pose as “assistant cultural attaché” or some such fiction. But that does not stop any halfway decent counterintelligence service such as our MI5 from working out pretty quickly who they really are and what they really do. These are the ones now being expelled right across Europe and from Washington.
Outside of these are the “illegals” who are much harder to find. These live among us, fluent in our language, posing as harmless citizens. But for that reason they are unlikely to have access to our secrets. The true “spy”, so beloved of the media, is almost certainly right inside a secret workplace with access to a host of classified material who has decided
to betray his/her country and work for a hostile nation. Such a person has to be “handled” or “run” by a real agent of the hostile nation.
Continuous recruitment of fresh spies and the running of existing ones is absolutely crucial for that hostile country, such as Putin’s Russia operating inside Britain. Some of this agent-running is done by buried illegals but much by undeclared spooks inside the embassy. The relationship is often close and trusting since the betrayer of his country is nervous as hell – with good cause. Exposure and trial are not funny for the spy.
This is where the mass expulsions of Russians are likely to bring the SVR in Moscow the sort of heartache that will cause them to come to the view that their boss Putin has struck a very bad deal indeed.
Over in their HQ, a Finnish constructed seven-floor office block at Yazenevo, 30 miles south-west of Moscow in a birch forest, they are likely to be tearing their hair out as spy-handler relationships that took years of patient spookery to build are wrecked by the sudden disappearance of the handler – on a oneway plane seat to Moscow.
It could take the SVR years to reestablish all these chains of espionage against us. To kill or cripple one elderly Russian in Salisbury out of pure vindictiveness was ocean-going stupidity.