Living The Spy Life

I hope I'm not wrong in finding the story of the Russian spy ring embedded in suburban America to be both fascinating and amusing. It's a telling reminder of how dramatically the world has changed since the end of the Cold War: what once would have been seen as insidious and invasive now appears quaint. Russian spies masquerading as soccer moms? Dead drops and clandestine meetings? There's a great sit-com pitch in there somewhere.

But seriously, hasn't the Russian spy service ever heard of the internet? The kind of 'confidential information' these spies were digging up is the same stuff that Google Reader serves me up every morning. The NYT has an interesting article on how such an ambitious infiltration program might have gotten a little out of touch:

“It strikes me as a very well-organized, very well-thought-out and very out-of date approach,” said Olga Oliker, a senior policy analyst for the RAND Corporation. “I would lay money on bureaucratic inertia. It’s a terribly ineffective approach, but it’s something that might have made sense in a previous period. ”

After the 1917 October Revolution, the Soviets had good reason to develop a specialty in undercover intelligence-gathering. Few countries formally recognized the Soviet Union, so no diplomatic cover was available.

It was a simple matter to fabricate a foreign identity — the agency mined records of foreign babies who had died, wrote Galina Fedorova in a 1994 memoir about life as an illegal. What followed was grueling training, psychological screening for a life of isolation and stress. The ideal candidate was single; while some agents enjoyed the comfort of deploying as a couple, any offspring they produced were immediately sent back to the Soviet Union, Ms. Fedorova wrote.

Maj. Gen. Yuri I. Drozdov, 85, who ran the illegals program for more than a decade while he was in the K.G.B, called his recruits “wunderkinds,” people who often spoke three or four languages with native fluency. He would say little about the training process, except to call it “very long.”

“We have our process of raising them,” General Drozdov said. “You have your Dr. Spock method; we have our own ways.”

Throughout the Soviet era, such agents were rewarded with adulation. Illegals like Rudolf Abel and Konon Molody became such national heroes that the External Intelligence Service, or S.V.R., still posts their biographies on its Web site. A beloved television serial chronicled the fictional life of one undercover agent, Max Otto von Stirlitz, as he penetrated Hitler’s inner circle. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who served as a K.G.B. officer in East Germany in the 1980s, has said the Stirlitz character helped shape an entire generation of Soviet youth.

Recent arrests have come as a reminder that the tactic is still in use.

And why is it still in use? Beauracratic inertia, most likely.

Experts on Tuesday pointed to institutional politics. Russia’s intelligence services were thrown into chaos during the early 1990s, when agents left in huge numbers and vast overseas assets went missing. But within a decade they rebounded, rebuilding their networks to the proportions they had at the end of the Soviet era, said Leonid M. Melchin, the author of five books about cold war intelligence services.

Nikolai Zlobin, an analyst at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, said the network of illegals received support from people intent on “returning to the old system that they were familiar with.”

“It was glorified. It’s a romantic business for several Soviet generations, including Putin’s generation,” he said. “People who work in the central structure, they did everything to rebuild the system. I know some of them, and many of them believe they did the right thing for Russia.”

I think it's also important not to underestimate the appeal of the assignment for the illegals themselves. While the Western portrait of a sleeper agent is of a dark, lonely individual whose entire life is a lie, lying in wait for decades until they are 'in position' to activate and report to their masters, the eleven people arrested this week paint a different picture: one of young, multi-lingual Russians getting to live the high life in America.

'Femme fatale' Anna Chapman liked posting pictures of herself posing in London or Times Square on Facebook. Richard and Cynthia Murphy posed as a married couple in New Jersey and argued with their handlers over whether they could buy a house. Vicky Pelaez worked as a reporter for a New York newspaper. Donald Heathfield was a partner in a technology trends forecasting firm.

Add in Russian contacts who occasionally hand you bags of money and you have the kind of deep cover that makes you want to forget it's a cover at all.

So while the sleeper agent operation may not seem to be the most effective espionage operation ever concieved, there's a certain rationale to it from the perspective of the beauracrats and the agents involved. It's just a lifestyle that they had gotten used to.

Meanwhile, Language Log has determined that the best headline of the story so far is The Scotsman's lead The Spy Who Loved Herself.

I also like From Russia With Oven Gloves and The Spy Who Came In From The Suburbs.