Do calm down, dear – our spies are no angels

SPEAKING as a Kremlin stooge (this silly phrase is applied to everyone who doesn’t join in the current wild anti-Russian panic), can I make some points about the frenzy surrounding Russian agents caught in the act in The Hague?

No doubt Russian intelligence sometimes does wicked things, and also makes a fool of itself. But shouldn’t we be examining our own spy and security services before squeaking piously about others?

On Thursday, an astonishing letter written by the former premier David Cameron was disclosed. It says: ‘In the discharge of their function to protect national security, the security service [that’s MI5] has a long-standing policy for their agent handlers to agree to agents participating in crime, in circumstances where it is considered such involvement is necessary and proportionate in providing or maintaining access to intelligence that would allow the disruption of more serious crimes or threats to national security.’ In other words, they are licensed to commit very serious crime.

British undercover police officers have also fathered children with women they were spying on, and then vanished, which seems pretty cruel and ruthless to me.

And the free West in general has not always been wholly competent. The CIA’s absurd attempts to kill Fidel Castro, including exploding cigars, come to mind. So does the more tragic episode of the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship blown up by French spooks, in which an innocent man died. Remember the ridiculous ‘fake rock’, which MI6 installed in Moscow, a hightech dead letterbox designed to look like a lump of stone? Russian agents detected it and in 2006 released film of MI6 handlers passing secret messages through it, presumably intended for Russian spies in British pay.

Russian TV showed a British diplomat walking past the rock with his eyes shifting wildly as he was secretly watched by FSB counter-intelligence. Another British diplomat was filmed kicking the malfunctioning rock, and then picking it up.

My advice in all such matters is ‘Calm down, dear’. Russia is in no position to attack us. Its economy is the size of Italy’s and failing badly.

Meanwhile, we pay no attention to the real threat from China, which has now extended its influence into South America, and into Eastern Europe, and which grows more powerful every day.