Rural Ruminations

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and Barre Times-Argus.]

Nations get to be the way they are as a result of the broad sweep of their own histories. The Afghans are a tribal/warlord society because they have survived that way for centuries in a hostile world. The Polish are skittish because they have no natural, effective geographic defenses, and as a result, over the centuries, they have suffered land invasions from every direction.

The recent arrest and exchange of Russian spies underlines some very real Russian realities for us. Over the past millennium, the Russians have found that they are seldom immune from foreign meddling. For them, their “near abroad,” or the countries surrounding their borders, particularly to their west and south, is a national fixation, an imperative that is unlikely to change. It is their buffer against a constantly dangerous, potentially hostile world.

This is particularly important when you consider the fragile, unstable and vulnerable multinational nature of pre-Soviet Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It is part of the Russian psyche and for us to be able to deal effectively with them, we have to know and understand that.

This reality under the recent Bush presidency was either not understood or simply ignored. Like so many administrations before it, the only reality that the Bush administration acknowledged was the reality of internal U.S. politics. In the past decade this can most clearly be seen not only in U.S. policy toward Russia, but also in our Middle East policies. We rarely, if ever, let facts on the ground influence our national security policies — intelligence, diplomatic and military. Instead, those policies are crassly governed by the effect they will have on our domestic politics.

We Americans have our Monroe Doctrine, which states essentially that any attempt by foreign countries to meddle in the Americas (our “near abroad”) will be viewed by the U.S. as an act of aggression requiring our intervention. It was last implicitly employed in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or perhaps Grenada or Panama. The Russian “near abroad” doctrine, their Monroe Doctrine, doesn’t differ materially from ours in intent.

During the eight years of the Bush II administration, we took every opportunity presented to us to stick our thumb in the Russian eye, particularly when it came to their “near abroad.”

We pursued the integration of the Warsaw Pact countries into NATO. We solicited the cooperation of the intelligence organizations of the European “near abroad,” ostensibly against terrorism and international instability. We openly spoke of and planned the extension of our “missile shield” into the Russian “near abroad,” claiming it was designed to defend us against nations like Iran, even when those nations did not have the capability to launch nuclear weapons against us. We got involved in the Georgian spat with Russia, once again successfully pushing their “near abroad” button.

All of this was wildly threatening to the Russian weltanschauung, or view of the world. In their normal state of mild paranoia, irrespective of what we said we were doing, they knew what it really meant, and it represented a direct threat to them.

The last century had a powerful reinforcing effect on the Russians’ weltanschauung. During that period, the Russians have been confronted every step of the way by a variety of alliances led by the Western countries and designed to inhibit the growth, influence and power of the Soviet Union and its successor government — and they know it.

For that reason, it is naïve and probably dangerous to fall prey to the premise that today’s Russians are going to succumb to President Obama’s “reset” of American policy and suddenly become our best friends, however well-intentioned we may be.

With centuries of national insecurity behind them, the Russian psyche is simply not capable of such an abrupt “resetting” of the bilateral relationship with America. It is naïve, even dangerous, to think that they are. Having always been beset by enemies, both real and imagined, they have learned that no matter how rosy things may look for the moment, they will ultimately fall apart. Their national life experience compels them to hedge against such calamities.

That is why the Russians “reluctantly” incorporated the KGB Illegals Directorate into their new intelligence service in the 1990s, why they permitted it to operate, why there were 10 “illegals” arrested in the United States, why more will be found elsewhere and why more will be trained and dispatched for work here in America.

Given their history and experiences, the Russians have no viable alternates. It is simply in their DNA.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who worked during the Cold War in East and West Europe and the Middle East, primarily against the Soviet Union and its allies.

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[Originally published in the Baltimore Sun.]

The recent arrest of 10 Russian citizens in America on charges of espionage at first blush appears to be a typical Cold War scenario. But it clearly is not.

Human intelligence operations are uniquely equipped to ascertain an enemy’s intentions. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union ran extensive intelligence operations against the United States. They targeted just about any American they could, many of whom were insignificant employees of the U.S. Government and members of the armed forces. In short, the Soviets were omnivorous. They would take anybody. That is not to say that they were unsuccessful, only that their standards were not too high.

The Soviet espionage apparatus included an “illegals program.” “Illegals” were normally Soviet citizens who were documented as citizens of other countries. Armed with the necessary language fluency and area knowledge, they were dispatched to the United States and other countries, primarily to conduct the most sensitive and productive operations that the Soviets had. They had no contact with U.S.-based Soviets.

A Soviet couple who were exhaustively trained intelligence officers, carrying carefully forged or altered Argentine passports and speaking native Argentine Spanish might be sent to New York City to set up a support mechanism for the most sensitive and productive Soviet agent in the U.S. government in Washington. This would be done on the normally valid assumption that, as “Argentine” citizens, they would not be subject to U.S. surveillance and could thus securely handle the important assets in question.

They ran these illegals because they knew that their official representatives were subject to regular U.S. surveillance that might uncover Soviet intelligence’s most sensitive and productive American sources.

When the USSR came to an abrupt end in 1991, there were probably a handful of such illegals already in the U.S. There certainly were KGB officers in Moscow who had worked in support of illegals during the Soviet era. They would have stayed on and joined the KGB’s successor, the SVR, and continued to run illegals operations, albeit at a reduced pace, perhaps putting the Illegals they already had here on ice and continuing to infuse their original program with new blood.

The point is that the expertise required for running such costly, complicated and sensitive operations has almost certainly been alive and well in Russia since the fall of the USSR.

So, why is this different from the Cold War?

It has recently been reported in the media that in 2002 or 2003, at President Bush’s insistence, then-Russian President and former KGB officer Vladimir Putin quietly agreed to no longer run intelligence operations out of Russia’s legal rezidenturas (overseas intelligence offices) in diplomatic, trade and other official Russian enterprises in the U.S. Clearly in the knowledge that the old Soviet illegals program existed at minimum on paper, Mr. Putin had little difficulty acquiescing to President Bush’s proposal.

In addition, it now seems fairly obvious that not only had this Russian program been in place and functioning in the United States for a decade or more but that the FBI has been onto them for a number of years. It does seem a bit unusual that the arrests were not made years ago, which has led to additional press speculation that the White House, for reasons not yet explained, had not permitted the roll-up of the net until now.

Whatever the ultimate truths about this drama, it is clearly not a Cold War remnant. According to documents released by the government, these Russians were here not to handle the most sensitive Russian penetrations of the American body politic, as in the past, but to function as spotters of prospective new agents for the Russians to recruit outside the United States.

Maybe it’s as simple as the Russians sticking with Mr. Putin’s promise to President Bush not to conduct espionage from their legal rezidenturas, maybe they simply wanted to make use of old assets, but it’s more likely that they have simply changed their targeting.

Given the fact that they are now using illegals, their most complicated, costly and sensitive assets, in the mundane process of spotting Americans who have knowledge of and influence in important policy circles, the Russians clearly become far more selective in their targeting.

They would appear, finally, to have come to understand that in today’s post-Cold War world it is no longer profitable to target every American in sight and that the only Americans of any real espionage importance to Russia are those who can report on the most secret American intentions.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East. His 24-year career was focused on the Soviet Union.

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