Rules of the spy game lose clarity

It’s to be hoped that British investigators are getting closer to knowing what poisoned the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain. That doesn’t mean they’ll have any idea who did it. So it’s far too early to talk of a Russian “declaration of war,” as some have done.

Understandably, though, the theory most popular in the British media at the moment is that it was Russian spies who poisoned the former military intelligence colonel and his daughter, Yulia. This would surprise no one. That Russian intelligence is back in the business of executing traitors has been known since the case of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium in 2006. If the Skripal situation is part of this practice, two things are striking about it because they would suggest that Russia has blown up unwritten spy game rules from which it has repeatedly benefited: first, that Skripal had been “off the board” after being tried, convicted and traded to the U.K. and, second, that his daughter had apparently been targeted along with him.

In 2010, the ex-colonel was one of four people who came to the West as part of a widely covered spy swap, in which the U.S. released 10 Russian “sleeper agents.” There had been at least a dozen spy exchanges between Western countries and the Soviet Union and its satellites during the Cold War, but this was the first publicly announced one in the Vladimir Putin era.

None of the people traded to the West in these swaps has ever been assassinated. The possibility of a swap is a perk that makes it marginally worthwhile to spy for a foreign power. The money paid to spies or the moral satisfaction of working against a hated regime is never enough to compensate for the dreadful risk of this work; not even the implicit promise that the side you work for will take care of you will tip the scale if you have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life. A swap, however, has been a guarantee of peaceful retirement. If that’s no longer the case, this raises the stakes for spies — and makes swaps pointless.

Having resumed the Cold War-era practice of swaps, why would Putin or his spy chiefs want to ruin it by approving the assassination of a former spy who had served part of his sentence in a Russian jail and was then put out to pasture in the U.K.? One answer could be that Skripal perhaps continued working for British intelligence after he was traded. But since the Russian government now can’t admit anything without setting off a major confrontation with the U.K., we’ll likely never know if this is what happened — and because of this, the unwritten rules of spy swaps have still been put in doubt as far as Western intelligence services are concerned.

Then there’s the matter of Skripal’s daughter, Yulia. It was never Soviet or Russian practice to attack traitors’ relatives; even the 1938 case of Leon Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, is not a clear-cut assassination. Nor is there a single known case of “collateral damage” to families. The Soviet and Russian approach to retribution was always pragmatic rather than vendetta-like. All of that amounts to good reason to be skeptical of the conventional wisdom until there are real facts to support it.

Whether or not the attack was sanctioned by the Kremlin, or reflects a new culture in the intelligence services, the assassination attempt sends a clear signal to Russians who work, or who have worked, for Western intelligence services: There is no arrangement they can make to stop looking over their shoulder.

This is a powerful message, and its flip side is that anyone working clandestinely for Russia can also expect harsher treatment, if not poison in their drinks and attacks on their kin. Would the Kremlin risk such reciprocation — and the almost inevitable U.K. response — just to take out a retired spy? If not, the Kremlin had better hope an alternative explanation surfaces quickly and that, if rogue elements were involved, they are punished.

There will hopefully be more clarity to come. In the meantime, perhaps the best thing the West can do is fortify itself against further attacks. This means stepping up the protection of Putin foes, especially those who could be viewed as traitors by the regime, keeping a close watch on Moscow’s formal representatives, and working to reduce any informal influence it might have. That might mean increased scrutiny for Russian communities abroad, such as London’s large and lively one. Even this would be difficult: Their numbers are too great and security services are already overextended in counter-extremism and counterterrorism efforts. Whatever investigators uncover, the harder task will be responding to it.

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.