The West is in a state of a new cold war with Russia, writes the FA. The nature of espionage in the confrontation has changed: basic information is obtained not from secret, but from open sources. The ability to work with this information will determine the outcome of the new Cold war, the publication notes.
Calder Walton
How China and Russia use intelligence agencies to undermine America.
The Cold War never ended. At least, that's what Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks. The most striking evidence that the Kremlin continues its titanic struggle with the West even after the collapse of the Soviet Union is the activity of the Russian security and intelligence services. In their operations and the use of the enormous power they wield in Russian society, they have continued where Soviet intelligence left off. Since 1991, these agencies have been guided by a revanchist strategy, which consists in making Russia great again and overthrowing the international order that emerged after the end of the Cold War, led by the United States. Putin's military special operation in Ukraine is a brutal end to this strategy.
China is also seeking to reverse the outcome of the Cold War. With the union "without borders" proclaimed on the eve of the start of the Russian civil war in Ukraine, Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are trying to turn the international system around — and in this they rely heavily on their intelligence agencies. Spy agencies can do what other branches of government cannot: conduct foreign policy by secret methods. Both Russian and Chinese intelligence did this to achieve their revisionist goals, using the distraction of the United States to the war on terrorism and pursuing the goal of damaging US national security, undermining Western democracies and stealing as many scientific and technical secrets as possible.
The whole royal army
Russia's special services consider themselves the direct heirs of the KGB. Although the State Security Committee was disbanded in 1991, many of its former officers and all its experience, documents and even agents in the West were transferred to the new Russian security service, now known as the FSB, and the foreign intelligence service — SVR. For many years after the end of the Cold War, Russian intelligence continued to manage former Soviet agents in the West, including CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen. For Russia, this was a common thing. The first director of the SVR, KGB veteran Yevgeny Primakov, continued the traditions of Soviet intelligence coercion and blackmail — tactics of which he himself became a victim in his youth. According to materials unofficially obtained from the KGB archives, Primakov was blackmailed into working for the Committee when he was a journalist in the Middle East in the 1960s. The founding father of the FSB, Rem Krasilnikov, was also a former KGB officer and a staunch communist. His wife's name, Ninel, was the word "Lenin" spelled backwards. According to a defector from the FSB who worked under Krasilnikov in the 1990s, the FSB used the same manuals as the KGB, but the ideological sections about communism were simply torn out.
In addition, there is Putin himself, whose experience in the KGB's Foreign Intelligence Directorate profoundly influenced his subsequent political career. While in Dresden in East Germany (a branch of the KGB representative office, headquartered in East Berlin), Putin saw with his own eyes the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It was, as he later said, the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. Putin calls himself a "Chekist" in honor of the first Soviet secret police, the Cheka (Emergency Commission). And when he was the director of the FSB, there was a bust of the founder of the Cheka Felix Dzerzhinsky in his office. To this day, Putin walks with the gait of an FSB officer, waving his left hand, but not moving his right, so that everyone knows that he has been trained in special techniques.
Like many Russians, Putin has suffered from something like phantom limb syndrome since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, it took him very little time in the 1990s to convince himself that NATO was by definition hostile towards Moscow. Soviet intelligence called the United States "the main enemy." And since this is the main enemy, it means that it is always the main enemy. In the 1990s, Russian special services were more aggressive towards the United States than the KGB in the later Soviet period. Nothing breeds aggression like humiliation.
By the end of the 1990s, the SVR had already used the Internet to spread disinformation in order to discredit the United States. SVR officers working in the United States bombarded the American media and social networks with materials directly from the Soviet propaganda scenario, including about the secret racist program of the US government and the illegal development of biological weapons. Around 1996, Russian hackers provoked a massive hacking of confidential databases of the US government, including NASA and the Pentagon.
American intelligence, of course, also did not sit idly by. When the Russian economy collapsed in the late 1990s, the CIA managed to acquire some very valuable Russian sources who betrayed - for cash — their masters and damaged Moscow's intelligence operations against the West. But then came September 11, 2001.
Blinded by the struggle
At first it seemed that the war on terrorism could be a chance for a reset, the basis for closer cooperation between US and Russian intelligence. After his first meeting with Putin in 2001, US President George W. Bush once remarked that he had "looked into Putin's soul" and believed that he could be trusted. Russian special services initially cooperated with the United States in the fight against terrorism. But, according to representatives of the CIA, the honeymoon of American-Russian intelligence after September 11 was short-lived, giving way to the era of secret Russian aggression. Meanwhile, Washington was looking the other way. Throughout the war on terror, the US government has invested huge resources in it to the detriment of efforts to combat threats from resurgent powers such as Russia and China.
So did many US allies, including the UK. According to a 2020 report by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, in 2006, the British MI5 security service devoted a staggering 92% of its work to the fight against terrorism. It was the same year that Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, was killed using radioactive polonium in London. Later, a British public investigation revealed that Putin himself probably approved the murder, as did the then head of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev, another KGB veteran who is now secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. There is no publicly available data on how the US intelligence agencies distributed their attention and resources between the fight against terrorism and other priorities after September 11, but the American intelligence officers I interviewed said that counterterrorism was the focus of the American intelligence community. Back in 2017, this struggle was still the main budget item of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of the United States.
Putin's genius was that he managed to hide from the Western powers after September 11 that, although he cooperated with them in the fight against terrorism, he also used his intelligence services to strengthen his authoritarian regime and turn Russia into a great power. At home, he suppressed dissent, the free press and eliminated his opponents, following the Stalinist tradition of "no man, no problem." In Russia's near and far abroad, Putin sought to prevent NATO expansion and deter what he considered U.S. subversion in Eastern Europe. In this regard, Russia entered Georgia in 2008, occupied Crimea in 2014 and began its military operations in the rest of Ukraine in 2022. The expansion of NATO fueled Putin's fears about the West's subversive activities against Russia, but it would be naive to assume that without the expansion of the alliance, Russia would remain a peaceful and responsible player in global politics.
Since coming to power three decades ago, Putin has turned Russia's security and intelligence services into a virtual state within a state. He relies on a clan of security officers, or simply security officers, who have an intelligence and military background and have disproportionate influence in his police regime. According to CIA insiders, in 2020, the vast majority of Kremlin technocrats running the Russian economy have such a past.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Russian strategy and tactics seem to be taken straight from a Soviet textbook, albeit updated for the cyber era. Social networks and digital communications provide new means for old purposes, providing Russian special services with opportunities that the KGB could only dream of. Putin used various secret methods to undermine the positions of his opponents in the West. He interfered in democratic elections in Western countries, especially in the US presidential elections in 2016, preserving the Soviet tradition that goes back at least to 1948. Putin also retained the practice of transferring deeply clandestine "illegals" to the West, some of whom were discovered, arrested and returned to Moscow as part of a spy exchange reminiscent of the Cold War operations of the last century.
Although Putin has always encouraged the idea of himself as a super spy, in fact he has witnessed a series of failures of Russian intelligence. In 2010, for example, the FBI and the CIA eliminated a network of Russian illegal immigrants in the United States. They did this by recruiting a key leader in the illegal intelligence of the SVR, who gave away the entire Russian illegal network in America. But Putin's biggest intelligence mistake preceded his decision to launch a military special operation in Ukraine in February 2022. American and British intelligence agencies have successfully put together Putin's military plans and exposed them to the world, depriving him of the opportunity to come up with excuses to justify his actions.
If it ever becomes possible to see the intelligence that Putin received on the eve of his war in Ukraine, it will not be surprising that they confirmed, rather than refuted, his overestimation of Russia's military power. There is little room for truth in Putin's environment, just like in Stalin's. Since the beginning of the special operation, Russian intelligence has suffered a number of operational failures, including the elimination of its spy networks in Norway, Sweden and Slovenia.
Not just an old spy service
Like Russia, China has also used the US-led war on terrorism to advance its interests. According to CIA officers well versed in China, Beijing's main intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security, declared war on American intelligence in 2005. Since Washington was engrossed in the war on terror, the MGB has thrown its best resources and intelligence agents at the US government and American corporations, trying to steal as many scientific and technical secrets as possible to support China's economy and its military might. The internal debates in the MGB of that time were marked by jubilation over the fact that the United States, they say, was mired in the Middle East and did not pay attention to China's successes on the secret front.
The MGB's attack on the United States soon paid off. According to an investigative report published by The New York Times, in 2010, the Chinese intelligence agency dismantled a large CIA network in China, which led to the execution or lengthy imprisonment of more than a dozen American sources. It remains unclear exactly how Chinese intelligence uncovered the CIA network, but the damage was undeniable. Ten years later, an American intelligence officer who personally knew about these events told me that the CIA still has not regained its position in China.
Since Xi Jinping came to power, China's intelligence attacks against the West and the United States in particular have grown exponentially. The general task of Chinese intelligence is to implement Xi's grand strategy: to turn China into the number one military and economic power in the world and turn the existing technological landscape around, making other countries dependent on Chinese technologies, not on American ones. Chinese intelligence agencies use the tactic of involving the whole people in intelligence gathering. They use intelligence, cybernetic and communication capabilities (using balloons and, apparently, a listening base in Cuba), as well as publicly available sources, including social networks. Through a series of draconian national security laws passed under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party is forcing Chinese enterprises and private businesses to cooperate with intelligence agencies whenever required, thereby combining espionage and commerce. The result was a Chinese mercantilist authoritarian model that has no analogues in the West. The CCP uses training programs abroad and cultural exchange for espionage under another name. Beijing also actively engages Chinese communities in Western countries, forcing them to hand over intelligence data, often blackmailing them or threatening their family members in China.
According to the FBI, under Xi Jinping, China has become the main "cyber thief" in the world, stealing more personal and commercial data from Americans than all other countries combined. In 2021, the FBI announced that every 12 hours it opens a new counterintelligence investigation related to China. And in July 2023, the UK Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee reported that the Chinese government had penetrated all sectors of the British economy.
Phrases such as "US-Chinese competition" do not reflect the full extent of the existing ugly reality. Like Russian, Chinese intelligence services compete with the enemy according to fundamentally different rules than their Western counterparts. Unlike US or European spy agencies, the MGB is not subject to law or independent public oversight. It also does not bear public responsibility to Chinese citizens and is not subjected to scrutiny by the free press. These differences imply that statements such as "all states are spying", often used to superficially treat Chinese espionage, are dangerously misleading. Just because all armies have guns doesn't mean they're all the same. Unlike Western intelligence agencies, Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies practically do not experience any significant restrictions. In fact, Chinese and Russian services are limited only by their operational efficiency — that is, by what they can get their hands on. Western governments and the public should be aware of this threat.
Old enemies, new weapons
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union industrialized intelligence gathering by using computers to attack each other's cryptography. Espionage moved from the land to the depths of the sea, into the stratosphere, and then even into space. Today, Western governments are in a state of a new cold war with Russia and China, which is again changing the nature of espionage. The current new Cold War is not a direct repetition of the previous one, but it has elements of continuity and similarities, including a sharp asymmetry in the conflict between Western and Eastern intelligence services. It was very difficult for Western secret services to collect reliable information about closed police states behind the Iron Curtain. Now it is even more difficult for them to operate effectively in Russia or China with their Orwellian internal surveillance systems. Meanwhile, it is relatively easy for Russia and China to steal secrets from the open, free and democratic societies of the West, as it was for the Soviets before them.
But the similarities between the current conflict of superpowers and the previous one should not hide their differences from us. China's enormous economic weight and its tight integration into the world economy distinguish it from the Soviet Union. Today's information landscape is also very different from even the very recent past. Commercial satellite companies, for example, now offer opportunities that until recently were the prerogative of States. Open source intelligence and commercial intelligence are changing the concepts of national security. During the last Cold War, approximately 80% of US intelligence was obtained through covert capabilities, and only 20% came from open sources. Today it is believed that these proportions have changed in the opposite ratio. The future of Western intelligence is now more closely connected not with governments, but with the private sector. The task of Governments is to maximize the possibilities of commercial sources of information. This will require completely new approaches to public-private partnership.
However, when it comes to gathering intelligence about closed police states, Western governments need imagination more than anything else. It was imagination that led the CIA to develop high-altitude U-2 aircraft capable of spying behind the Iron Curtain when other methods were impossible. The same imagination is needed today in areas at the forefront of national security, including the collection of intelligence data from open sources, the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as quantum computing. It will be the weapon of the cold war of this century that will determine its outcome.
