On the face of it, it's difficult to see why the media made such a fuss over the Illegals Program.
Ten individuals in the United States were arrested and charged with carrying out long-term, deep-cover espionage against America on behalf of Russia. Sleeper agents. Spies. That Russia has spies in the US should surprise nobody. Every major nation of the world undoubtedly has spies in every other major nation of the world, with some - Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Oleg Gordievsky - operating at high levels indeed. Very few people would have been shocked or even surprised that Russia had embedded long-term illegals inside a potentially hostile nation - it's a certainty that America has a fair few of it's own inside Moscow. No-one, then, was outcrying against the SVR for not "playing by the rules". In spying there is after all only one rule: Don't get caught.
And herein lies the problem. The ten illegals were caught, as part of an elaborate and intense FBI investigation. On June 27 2010 they were all arrested under suspicion of espionage against the United States. They are termed illegals because they are not officially registered as agents of a foreign power - improving your chances of working undetected, but increasing the risk if you get caught. Perhaps it was the very fact that the ten essentially failed that brought such attention - the hallmark of a good spy is to stay out of the clutches of your enemies, and none of the Ten managed this. This was heaven for the FBI and the Western media, having a ready-made crushing success to wave in the faces of the Kremlin officials. As I've said before, the actual act of spying surprised nobody - but the spies getting caught was a shock. Whether the agents were bad, betrayed or simply unlucky, they were undeniable failures - and no-one loves a failure quite like the media.
Part of the media interest can certainly be pinned down to the involvement in the case of Anya Kushchenko, better known as Anna Chapman. The media went wild for this photogenic spy, with photos of her splashed across every newspaper and website in the land - especially after the stories told by her ex-husband. Even Vice-President Joe Biden, when asked by Jay Leno on the latter's talk show, "Do we have any spies that hot?" replied, "Let me be clear... it wasn't my idea to send her back!" There can be no doubt of Chapman's attractiveness, but I am slightly dubious about her personality profiles on the social networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn. While some may argue that the successful spies blend in in every conceivable way, there's a limit - and posting conspicuous photographs of yourself that others might recognise it not the best way to go about it. Chapman may never have expected to be caught, but the photos were still an unnecessary risk that she chose to take.
Besides her appearance - there's another reason why the media perhaps latched onto Chapman - she doesn't appear to have been a particuarly good spy. Her initial tradecraft was sleek - transmitting information through an encrypted computer network at internet cafes, while her handler passed by in a vehicle in the street outside and received the traffic. It was when she began to suspect she might be on the verge of being discovered that Chapman began to lose her composure. A man purporting to be a Russian superior asked her to meet him in person in New York - something that should have aroused Chapman's suspicions immediately, given that her brief was never to meet face to face. It was to be her undoing. "Roman" turned out to be a very different man to whom he said he was. And he asked her to deliver a false passport to another sleeper in person.
Anna agreed, and bought a new cellphone and transaction cards. Her father - a high-ranking KGB official - advised her to turn in the passport to the police. Chapman duly did so, and this proved to be the rope which hung her, as she was arrested and questioned. Why she did not dispose of the passport another way without bringing it to the attention of the authorities is anybody's guess... although Chapman does not exactly have form in this area. She registered a cellphone at a ficticious address - 99 Fake Street - even Clancy Wiggum would be able to see through that one! And she threw the receipt in a public bin, and it was swiftly retrieved by the FBI. Hardly the actions of a Master Spy. (And while we're on the subject, I doubt Anna Chapman possessed shoes with a blade that flicked out of the end - surely this is standard equipment for all Russian femme fatales? Then again, looking at her, she's definately no Rosa Klebb...)
The nine others were arrested in short order, and all admitted being Russian sleeper agents. They pleaded guilty in court to a charge of conspiring to act for the Russian government, but avoided a five-year prison sentence in return for agreeing to act in a spy swap. America would gain four prisoners, and the Russians their ten in return. America was widely perceived as getting the better end of the deal.
Here, perhaps, lies one of the reasons why the case gained so much coverage and notoriety - the fact that 'we', as the Western World, had actually won this round of espionage. When was the last time we could celebrate a triumph like this? Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London right under the notices of MI5. Hanssen and Ames may have been caught over the pond, but the damage they collectively did was so heinous that those arrests must have felt like defeats. In the case of the Illegals, however, America couldn't put a foot wrong. "The tradecraft used by the SVR ring was amateurish...", the Guardian newspaper here in Britain affirmed. "To have a spy ring uncovered before they could do any serious damage is doubly embarassing."
The spy swap itself could have come straight out of Le Carre. Two planes landed in Vienna, a few hundred feet apart. The agents to be swapped emerged, walked briskly across the tarmac to the opposing jet, climbed in, and that was it. The planes soared towards Washington and Moscow, and an embarassing occasion in the history of detente was over.
Except, of course, it wasn't. The scandal continues to rumble on quietly, even today. For the major players, of course, the mission is over. Anna Chapman's British passport has been revoked. Of the others, none among them are allowed to return to America. It is likely that several months of debrief in Moscow await the ten agents - including tests to see whether any of them were in fact double agents. It's not the future they would have wished for - but that's the risk you take in this game. The world's second-oldest profession takes no prisoners.
I'll be posting a follow-up article dealing with what lies ahead for US-Russia relations in the wake of the Illegals affair, but for now it's interesting to note an epilogue of sorts to the story. An eleventh man, going by the name of Christopher Metsos, was arrested in Cyprus but released on bail. He has not surfaced since. It was later discovered that the name 'Christopher Metsos' belonged to a deceased child - leaving the mysterious man's true identity unknown. His continued absence - and the questions over his identity, location, and goal - show that this is one story that is by no means finished. The Cold War is back, comrades. Perhaps it never really went away...
No comments:
Post a Comment