Hiding in plain sight
Forty years after an infamous KGB-assisted ‘umbrella murder’, Russian henchmen are now unabashed, says Michael Burleigh
The rise of Putin’s shameless secret killers
On September 7 1978, an Italian assassin codenamed “Piccadilly”, working for Bulgaria’s DS intelligence agency, tracked the exiled dissident Georgi Markov to a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge and jabbed him in the right thigh with a device that inserted a tiny pellet containing ricin.
Upon reaching 37 degrees, the wax seals holding the toxin inside the pellet melted. Markov died in agony four days later. Ten days earlier, another Bulgarian exile had a lucky escape in Paris after a similar attack in which the wax held.
Markov had been a prominent writer in Bulgaria and a friend of dictator Todor Zhivkov and his only daughter. His crime was to broadcast too many personal details about Zhivkov. The Bulgarian secret service were too primitive to devise such an attack, hence they relied on the technical know-how of their Soviet KGB colleagues.
But when this connection was implied, the Soviets reacted with wounded amour propre. As if professionals like them would stoop to aiding and abetting murder…
Contrast this indignant response with the mocking glee with which Vladimir Putin’s regime responded to British revelations last week that two GRU officers (the intelligence wing of the Russian military) were the attempted killers of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in March.
As the world reacted to the suspects being named and pictured, a video posted on the Russian foreign ministry’s official Instagram account showed spokeswoman Maria Zakharova mocking Theresa May’s dancing in South Africa. The Kremlin accused British authorities of doctoring security camera footage of the two suspects arriving in Britain.
It followed pathetic efforts to blame the British themselves for the striking number of exiled Russians who have met suspicious deaths in England. Now Moscow is in Millwall FC fan mode: “No one likes us, and we don’t care.”
So what has changed in the last 40 years, and why are the Russians so ruthlessly insouciant about targeting Britain? Unlike the old Soviet regime, Putin’s minions are gamblers who imagine that, in this chaotic era, they can use media manipulation to cast enough doubt on every factual truth. They are doing it now with the CCTV footage of the two assassins. The KGB was always firmly subordinate to the Soviet Politburo, from its foundation in 1954 to its dissolution and division in 1991, following the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. After 1991, the KGB was split into an external service (the SVR) and the domestic FSB.
But there was another agency, which has survived undisturbed from the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. This was the GRU, or the catchily named Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
Historically, it was – and is – a subordinate branch of the armed forces, answerable to the Minister of Defence and the Chief of the General Staff. Its logo is derived from the Batman symbol and its headquarters nicknamed the Aquarium, apt if one imagines it filled with piranhas.
The GRU has done what spies do all the time, usually in the guise of military attachés within Soviet and Russian embassies: to recruit anyone of influence. In the Sixties, Colonel Georgi Bolshakov of the Washington embassy hit the jackpot when he persuaded Robert Kennedy to join him twice a week for lunch when the latter was US attorney general, hoping he would know about US military dispositions, which he didn’t.
Less exceptionally, they try to recruit double agents, like the treacherous Canadian naval officer Jeffrey Delisle, who was unmasked in 2011, and monitor military installations and arms fairs in the host nation.
Our spies do exactly the same. They also have an interest in maximising external threats, but not only to justify their own existence. In Russia’s case, they help the armed forces justify massively inflated military budgets in what is a relatively poor country.
The political framework in which the GRU operates has altered under President Putin, himself a former colonel in the KGB. Many members of the Russian governing class are former intelligence officers. They regard themselves as a holy order with a sacred task, a theme brilliantly satirised in Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Day of the Oprichniks. To betray that ethos is akin to heresy, for which the penalty is death.
As it was for GRU colonel
Oleg
Penkovsky, who in
1963 was filmed being chucked alive into a
Moscow crematorium, and as it was for Alexander Litvinenko and the Skripals. No longer the “sword and shield of the Party” – the motto of the old KGB – these men and women defend a regime based on gangster capitalism and ideas that blend conservative Orthodox religiosity with gobbledygook about Russia’s “Eurasian destiny”. Anything cynically serviceable goes into this post-modern mix, including dollops of fascism from the French or Italian new Right. The GRU has mutated from an agency primarily focused on spying and threat assessment into a paramilitary force. Silent spying in the shadows is supplanted by the noise of more gung-ho violent types with their fair share of fantasists.
Over the objections of the Russian army, the GRU, SVR and FSB have each elaborated Spetsnaz, or special forces
– in the case of the GRU, numbering at least 25,000 men. These units seek to establish chaotic conditions that sit somewhere between peace and full-blown war. It can involve cyber-attacks and hacking, of the kind the GRU employed in recent French or US elections, or it can entail the recruitment of local insurgent forces in countries where Putin has grabbed a piece of territory.
Uniquely, Britain has allowed itself to become home to any number of dodgy Russians, including defectors and crooks. At the same time, our intelligence agencies are among the most effective in damaging Russian spying operations and then loaning them out in roadshows to allied services with a Russia problem, which MI6 did with Oleg Gordievsky and Litvinenko.
Putin has decided that Britain is uniquely vulnerable to violent counter-attack, since so many of our European partners, as well as Trump, have hedged their bets with the Russians. It does not help that Russia is no longer widely viewed as an ideological menace, but rather in many respects just a much rougher version of ourselves, with allies and friends who are also ours. Putin has many Western admirers.
That is why Putin’s agents hardly bother to disguise acts of murder on our streets, leaving trails of polonium or Novichok and their real faces on CCTV, if not their real names (although our security agencies apparently know these). We even have their fingerprints from their visa applications.
While we know the GRU was responsible, it remains to be seen whether the relatively solid international response to the Skripal affair will hold. Initial signs from Canada, Germany and France were positive, but Israel and Turkey have expelled no Russian spies. Since the GRU fully reflects the hard, macho mentality pervasive in the Kremlin, only the most drastic responses will be effective, regardless of how they impact on the oligarch’s venal British flunky class, or future relations with what has become a rogue state in its very un-Soviet unpredictability.
For that is what has really changed since the day in 1978 when Markov was poisoned. This new Cold War involves dealing with the modern equivalents of Al Capone.