The Armenian government has made a final decision on the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Service. It's hard to believe, but it still did not exist in the republic, which can even be suspected of sabotage. The Armenians will not be able to copy the Russian analogue – SVR - with all their desire. But their political intelligence will have a unique and valuable resource – the diaspora.The decision to create the Armenian foreign intelligence service was made following the results of the last war in Karabakh, which ended sadly for Armenia, and was included by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in the comprehensive program for the development of state power in the period 2021-2026.
Pashinyan officially announced this idea in November last year, and since then it has been discussed, traces of which are difficult to find.
The official language is formulated as follows: "Armenia needs a new quality of intelligence and the formation of its own intelligence school to ensure the continuity of intelligence activities and maintain the quality of improvement of the sphere. The fact that Armenia is the only country in the region that does not yet have a separate intelligence service also indicates the need to create a separate intelligence structure."
The fact that Armenia was and still remains the "only country in the region", unique in this sense, is strongly not in favor of the entire leadership of independent Armenia, starting with Levon Ter-Petrosyan. This is unthinkable at all: an eternally and existentially warring country, living entirely in a hostile environment, has never in its recent history had foreign intelligence and has not tried to create it.
And this is despite the fact that Armenia is among the countries of the world that have a unique intelligence resource – the diaspora, "spyurk". In addition to Armenians, Israel (this is one of the "chips" of the Mossad) and China with its millions of "huaqiao" can use the diaspora. At first glance, no one else.
No one knows what guided all the Armenian governments, who avoided creating an obviously necessary special service. Perhaps this is excessive self-confidence, which cost so much during the recent war.
There was and still is military intelligence as a division of the Ministry of Defense – there is no way without it. There is the National Security Service (NSS), which deals with counterintelligence and internal security. Now, according to the draft law and related documents, a three-year transition period is envisaged, during which there will be a mutual exchange of experience between these departments with the flow of personnel to the new one.
There should also be its own nomenclature of tasks. Military intelligence, by definition, is occupied with a rather narrow range of problems.
Yerevan emphasizes that the intelligence service will become civilian and will report only to the Prime Minister. He will appoint her leadership. This will expand the list of employees who now do not have to be military personnel.
Part of the opposition insists that the parliament should appoint the leadership. But in this case, the idea of direct subordination is lost, and political intelligence should be directly subordinate to the head of the executive branch.
In the statements of opposition figures, which are broadcast mainly by English-language media, another question is also discussed: how much new intelligence will be connected with the relevant Russian structures.
It is believed that the NSC has been quite closely affiliated with the FSB of the Russian Federation for all these thirty years, but it is still counterintelligence.
The Prime minister's team says that "a domestic school" of intelligence activities is needed. What is meant is not very clear, since almost all employees of the Armenian special services studied in Moscow, even if some of them received additional training in the West.
Everyone – both Pashinyan's entourage and the opposition to Pashinyan – believe that a break in contacts with the Russian special services will be fatal for Armenia. And this is despite the fact that Russian special services, according to confidential information, have not been eager to cooperate with Armenian structures for a long time because of the fear of information leakage. It started just with Pashinyan coming to power and reached a peak during the 44-day war for Karabakh.
A number of commentators in Armenia consider the fact that the Armenian intelligence service will be created from scratch to be a positive factor, since the current NSC is a "child of the KGB of the USSR."
This is not quite true, because in the wake of democratization in 1990-1991, the KGB of the Armenian SSR was simply dissolved. A significant part of its employees were loyal to the idea of Armenia's independence even in Soviet times, which caused hostility and distrust among the central office in Moscow and among the employees "sent" to Yerevan. Nevertheless, even now, 30 years after the collapse of the USSR, there are forces in Yerevan that insist on the "lustration" of the new intelligence officers. This is strange, since there are basically no others.
The preparation of the bill on the establishment of the department was entrusted to General Arshak Karapetyan, which caused a lot of additional discussions. Karapetyan is a man of Soviet leaven. He studied at the Nakhimov School in Kaliningrad, then at military schools in Moscow, but also for a couple of months in British York. But most importantly, he headed the military intelligence of Armenia for a very long time and was dismissed after a short war in 2016, because it was the military intelligence that was made guilty for it (in Armenia it is impossible not to become guilty for at least something).
Karapetyan left for Moscow as a military attache of the embassy, and then returned to Armenia and quickly became Minister of Defense after the 2020 war. In the fall of 2021, Pashinyan removed him from office, entrusting the preparation of all documents and projects for the creation of civil intelligence.
Karapetyan's public criticism sins with statements contrary in meaning. On the one hand, he is charged with close ties with Russia. On the other hand, the fact that the new Armenian intelligence may break with Russia, because, according to some of the public, the Russian special services did not help or did not help Armenia enough in the 2020 war.
At the same time, few people make claims against Pashinyan himself and his entourage, because of which, in fact, the exchange of information between Moscow and Yerevan stopped.
No one has yet published the structural and establishing documents of the new intelligence that Karapetyan or someone else wrote. However, in this case it is quite difficult to come up with something fundamentally new, and the organization scheme will have to be copied from something at all.
And here we must understand that it is almost impossible to copy the structure and methods of work of the External Work Service (SVR) of Russia. This is a unique model that cannot be built out of the blue even in a few years. The system of training illegal immigrants alone is worth a lot.
But it is possible to repeat on paper, with varying degrees of effectiveness, the structure of some European special service (such as the French one, which is very sympathetic to the Armenians) or even the Mossad. However, it is possible that this will disrupt the remnants of communication between Moscow and Yerevan.
By the way, Iran can also help Yerevan, but then there will be problems with Jews. A vicious circle, in the center of which, anyway, Moscow. Yasenevo microdistrict.
Thus, the main problem in the formation of Armenia's political intelligence will be an attempt to find a balance between maintaining communication with Russia and creating a new national system. What will be purely national in it, and what is drawn from recognized international experience, is still an open question. But there is still a chance that the political situation in the country, which, as practice shows, is not difficult to shake, will have a serious impact on the work of the new structure. And this is the worst birth trauma that can happen to intelligence.
Evgeny Krutikov
