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It is unusual for spymasters to openly mock their rivals. But last month Bill Burns, the CIA director, couldn’t resist observing that the war in Ukraine had been a boon for his agency.

“The undercurrent of discontent (among Russians) is creating a once-in-a-generation recruiting opportunity for the CIA,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

“We won’t let it go to waste.”

The remark may have struck a nerve in Russia’s “special services,” as the country describes its intelligence agencies. Russian spies failed to prepare for war and were then expelled en masse from Europe. But evidence gathered by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a think tank in London, and published exclusively by The Economist, shows that they are learning from their mistakes, fine-tuning their craft and entering a phase new political war against the West.

The last few years have been difficult for Russian spies. In 2020, operatives of the FSB, Russia’s security service, failed to poison Alexei Navalny, the recently deceased opposition activist. Then the FSB gave the Kremlin a rosy picture of how the war would go, exaggerating Ukraine’s internal vulnerabilities. It failed to prevent Western agencies from stealing and publishing Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine. And it was not ready to stop a brief rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, last year.

The SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, saw its presence in Europe dwindle with around 600 officers expelled from embassies across the continent. At least eight “illegals” – intelligence officers operating without diplomatic cover, often posing as non-Russians – were exposed.

The study, written by Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, a pair of analysts for the organization, and Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister and foreign intelligence chief, is based on documents “obtained by Russian special services” and interviews with “relevant official bodies” – apparently intelligence agencies – in Ukraine and Europe.

By late 2022, the study says, Russia realized it needed more honest reporting from its agencies. He put Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, in charge of “committees of special influence”. These coordinate operations against the West and then measure their effect.

This change in personnel seems to have produced more coherent propaganda campaigns. In Moldova, for example, a somewhat scattered disinformation effort against the country’s bid for European Union membership became more sustained and focused last year. He tied the offer of admission to the president personally, blaming him for Moldova’s economic problems. Campaigns aimed at undermining European support for Ukraine have also increased. In January, German experts published details of bots that shared hundreds of thousands of German-language posts per day from a network of 50,000 accounts over the course of a month on x (Twitter). On February 12, France exposed a large network of Russian sites spreading disinformation in France, Germany and Poland.

Meanwhile the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, has also reassessed its trades. In recent years its Unit 29155 – which had attempted to kill Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer, in Salisbury, Britain in 2018 – saw many of its personnel, activities and facilities exposed by Bellingcat. The investigative team is relying on publicly available information and on declassified Russian databases of his exposures.

The GRU concluded that the expulsion of Russian intelligence officers to Europe had made it more difficult to organize operations and control agents abroad – one reason why the invasion of Ukraine went wrong.

The result was wholesale reform, which began in 2020 but accelerated after the start of the war. General Andrei Averyanov, head of Unit 29155, was promoted to deputy head of the GRU and created a new “Service for Special Activities”. Unit 29155 personnel – once exemplified by Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga, Skripal’s ill-fated poisoners, who insisted they had traveled to Salisbury to see its famous cathedral spire – no longer keep their personal or work phones on its facility, using landlines instead.

Training takes place in a series of safe houses rather than on site. While half of the personnel once came from Spetsnaz, Russia’s special forces, most of the new recruits no longer have military experience, making it harder for Western security services to identify them through old photographs or databases discovered.

A special branch of the Special Activities Service, Unit 54654, is designed to build a network of illegals operating under what Russia calls “full legalization” — the ability to pass muster even under close surveillance by an intelligence agency. foreign spy It recruits contractors through front companies, keeping their names and details out of government records, and places its officers in non-defense ministries or private companies. The GRU has also targeted foreign students studying at Russian universities, paying scholarships to students from the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.

For another example of how Russian spies have turned disaster into opportunity, consider the case of the Wagner Group, a series of early stage companies overseen by Mr. Prigozhin. Wagner initially served as an undeniable arm of Russian influence, providing firepower to local autocrats in Syria, Libya and other African countries. In June 2023, Mr. Prigozhin, angered by the mismanagement of the war by the Russian defense minister and army chief, marched on Moscow. The rebellion was stopped; two months later Mr. Prigozhin was killed when his plane exploded in mid-air.

Russia’s special services quickly divided Prigozhin’s vast military-criminal enterprise among themselves. The FSB would keep domestic businesses and svr media arms, such as the trolls who interfered in America’s 2016 presidential election.

The GRU received foreign military units, divided into a volunteer corps for Ukraine and an expeditionary corps, managed by General Averyanov, for the rest of the world. The latter missed its target of recruiting 20,000 troops by the end of last year, the Russian says, although its strength is “steadily growing”.

Immediately after the death of Mr. Prigozhin, General Averyanov visited various African capitals to deliver what the Russian describes as a “regime survival package”. In theory, the proposals involve gru providing local elites with military power and propaganda against local rivals. In Mali, they observe, the grass-roots Lengo Songo radio station is one of the most popular in the country. In return, Russia would receive economic concessions, such as lithium mines and gold refineries, and thus leverage over enemies, possibly including the ability to cut off France from uranium mining in Niger (France needs uranium for its power plants). its nuclear). Mr. Prigozhin is dead; its malevolent influence continues.

Mission accomplished

Russian intelligence, although bruised, is firmly back on its feet after recent humiliations. In recent weeks Insider, an investigative website based in Riga, has published a series of stories documenting Russian espionage and influence across Europe. They include details of how a foreign intelligence officer in Brussels continues to provide European equipment to Russian arms manufacturers and the revelation that a senior Bundestag aide and a Latvian member of the European Parliament were both Russian agents, the latter possibly for more than 20 years.

“It’s not as bad for them as we think,” says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist, who thinks Russian services are “back with a vengeance” and increasingly inventive. Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and once a (mediocre) KGB officer, “is trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s fearsome secret service,” explains Mr. Soldatov. It tells of a case in April 2023 when Artem Uss, a Russian businessman arrested in Milan on suspicion of smuggling US military technology to Russia, returned to Russia with the help of a Serbian criminal gang – a common intermediary for Russian services.

In the past, says Mr. Soldatov, FSB, SVR and GRU had a clearer division of labor. All three agencies have been particularly active in recruiting among the flood of émigrés who left Russia after the war.

It is easy to hide agents in a large group and it is simple to threaten those who have family still in Russia. Germany is of particular concern, given that many Russians who have moved there could form a recruitment pool for Russian espionage troops. The influx of newcomers is partly thanks to the Baltic countries becoming more hostile to Russian immigrants.

Moreover, Russian cyber activity goes from strength to strength. In December, America and Britain issued public warnings about Star Blizzard, an elite FSB hacking group that has been targeting NATO countries for years. The following month Microsoft said that “Cosy Bear,” a group affiliated with svr , had infiltrated email accounts belonging to some of the company’s top executives. This came on top of a sophisticated cyber attack by Greece against Ukraine’s power grid, causing a blackout apparently coordinated with Russian missile attacks on the same city.

The revamp of the Russian intelligence apparatus comes at a crucial moment in the East-West competition. An annual report by the Norwegian intelligence service, published on February 12, warned that, in Ukraine, Russia was “taking the initiative and gaining the upper hand militarily”. Estonia’s equivalent report, published a day later, said the Kremlin was “anticipating a possible conflict with NATO within the next decade”.

The priority for Russian spies is to prepare for that conflict not only by stealing secrets, but by widening fissures within NATO, undermining support for Ukraine in America and Europe, and eroding Western influence in the global south. In contrast, there has been precious little Russian sabotage against Ukraine-related supplies in Europe. One reason for this is the Kremlin’s fear of escalation. Another is that the Russians cannot do everything, everywhere at once.

Meanwhile, the spies will continue to fight against their peers. In their report, Estonia’s foreign intelligence services released the identities of Russians working on behalf of the country’s intelligence services.

“For those who prefer not to see their names and images alongside those of FSB or other Russian intelligence officers in our publications, potentially affecting their associations with the West, we invite them to contact ,” the Estonian cowards pointed out. “We are confident that mutually beneficial agreements can be negotiated!”

👁️[WPPV-TOTAL-VIEWS]