Agitprop Trumps Counterespionage

British rock invasion gets rolled

The spy segment which aired on RTR Russian Television on Sunday January 22, is being seriously doubted. For that matter, the government-run Russian Information Agency’s headline, “FSB detains a group of British spies,” has not cleared the matter up. As of press time, no foreign spies have in fact been detained.

The name of the only person so far arrested – a Russian, by the way – is being withheld, while the names of those not arrested (the British citizens) have been proclaimed. This violation of the canons of espionage proves only one thing: the last thing this scandal is about is spying.

There is an unspoken iron rule of charging foreign spies with espionage. While military attaches and intelligence officers may work in embassies under rather transparent cover, it is not enough to simply know that they are carrying out espionage. One has to have concrete proof of their spying activities. Like arresting them red-handed. In order to suck the guilty government into a loud international scandal, you ideally capture two citizens: one of your own and the foreign national. Preferably while they are in the act of exchanging documents, money, etc. And of course the documents in this case should be top secret.

But British intelligence, one of the world’s strongest spy services, is a tough nut to crack with these methods. First, the British never meet with their agents on the agents’ native soil. Instead, they set up meetings in third countries. That is how the British worked with the most famous of their agents in the 1990s, Platon Obukhov, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs functionary. They met with him in the Baltic states.

The English arrange the transfer of information in the same way (without direct contact between spies): Platon Obukhov connected with MI6 from a trolleybus. While riding past the British Embassy, he used a radio transmitter to send them information.

If we accept on faith the story of the stone as demonstrated on RTR, then it seems as if the British have held true to their rules. Counterintelligence agents of the FSB did not succeed in arresting the Brits while they were meeting with their agent, since there were no such meetings. What is more, the Chekists did not even collect the stone as evidence of espionage, allowing one of the Brits to take it away (the stone which the FSB picked up, pictured below, according to agency spokesman Sergei Ignachenko, was found in a completely different, unnamed, part of the city).

Most likely, the operation unfolded in the following way: the Russian citizen, whose name is unknown, attracted the attention of counterintelligence agents, was picked up and gave incriminating evidence. There things hit a dead end: the FSB uncovered several employees of the British embassy hanging around a rock, but this information led nowhere,  since that is really not a crime.

The operation documenting the strolls of the British agents around the rock was conducted in the autumn and gives the appearance of just one stage in the huge counterintelligence game. In this instance, no counterintelligence agent would try to bring this to the level of scandal. His goal is to drag out the time of arrest as long as possible, so as to snare and identify as many foreign agents as possible. The ideal variant is actually to make no arrests at all, but to turn the traitor and use him to convey disinformation to the foreign spy.

As is now known, the operation ended with nothing but the stone, some pictures of strolling Brits and an arrested Russian. There must be very serious reasons someone wanted to construct an international scandal with such weak trump cards.

There are just two possibilities: First, counterintelligence activity was somehow breached and the English found out they were being “led.” Since they had not caught anyone red-handed, the FSB decided to create a public scandal. Second, the Kremlin pressured the FSB, seeking some kind of proof of spying by non-governmental organizations (to provide public support for the newly-signed law restricting such organizations’ activity). And at the Lubyanka, they have found that such agitprop [political theater] of this sort works just fine for internal consumption.