Putin’s keystone spies

In 1985, Viktor Suvorov, a defector-turned-historian of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, penned a novel, “Aquarium.” It was a brilliant tableau of that deadly Soviet organisation, in which ruthlessness was equaled only by efficiency. The book’s most shocking scene was of a traitor being burned alive. It was made into a video shown to all new recruits. The message: There was no way to quit the organisation alive. “A ruble for entry and two for exit” became the agency’s informal motto. But earlier this year, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, this grandiose image of the Great Evil was forever destroyed in a Chernobyl-scale meltdown experienced by the GRU in the wake of the British indictment of two GRU hit men, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who bungled an attempt to poison their former colleague Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

The two intended killers were no James Bonds. They were clowns. Murderous, for sure. But clowns nevertheless. Rather than stay in the Ritz, they stayed in a two-star East London hotel with no private bathroom, but plenty of mice; a witness claimed they smoked marijuana and romped noisily with a prostitute. Rather than carefully disposing of a bottle of Novichok, the hypertoxic nerve agent they used, they threw the evidence into a charity collection bin. And they had chosen a poison quickly diluted by water; in the end, damp weather saved the victims’ lives.

How well hidden were the spies? Not very. A database of passports, available for purchase online, testified to their secret service affiliation: In fact, it contained a consecutive list of passports issued to secret GRU agents, Could some hapless GRU clerk have thought it easier to submit the whole bunch in a single file? After all, such botches were nothing new. In 2016, a GRU agent in Montenegro sent money intended for a coup (which failed) via Western Union, with the return address recognisable as that of GRU headquarters. Last April, four agents were apprehended upon arrival in the Netherlands for a hacking mission; one had kept a taxi receipt for traveling from GRU headquarters to the Moscow airport.

And earlier this year, some 305 supersecret James Bond wannabes were outed by a shared blunder: They all registered their vehicles to the address of their supersecret operating base. “Spying is one of the most important jobs in the world,” Putin proclaimed recently. But if he really thinks it’s so important, why does he put up with such sloppy spycraft? The easy answer is: because there’s no efficient state machinery. The state apparatus is customised for graft, ineptitude and corruption. Spies are no exception. Then why doesn’t he clean up the apparatus? The blunt answer is: because he is afraid to. An efficient military could stage a coup against him.

So inefficiency is a price Putin will pay. And when did the sloppiness start? The first public poisoning we know about — apparently with dioxin — was the attempt on Sept. 5, 2004, to kill Viktor Yushchenko, a candidate opposing a pro-Kremlin favourite in a Ukrainian presidential election. He recovered and won the presidency. Within two weeks of that poisoning, and soon after the Georgian Rose Revolution, a series of terrorist attacks struck Georgian infrastructure. That Sept 14, a power line in the Hashuri region was blown up. That was followed by explosions on Sept 20 and Oct 9 and 10. The Georgian police said the group responsible was headed by a GRU major, Roman Boiko.

A later group was run, according to Georgians, by another GRU major, Yevgeny Borisov. But the attacks were not always successes. The agents blew up an old pipeline, mistaking it for a new one. Instead of blowing up a wall of the American Embassy, they blew up an adjacent wall. When a bomb set to blow up a railway bridge on Oct 2, 2010, didn’t go off, the agent responsible for the attack tricked his handlers by claiming, incredibly, that the Georgians were hushing up an explosion. To check his story, Borisov’s deputy called a European Union monitoring mission in Georgia with profuse offers of help, all but admitting the provenance of the device.

Five days later, it was discovered intact, completing the major’s humiliation. When Vano Merabishvili, formerly in charge of the Georgian police as internal affairs minister, discussed these attacks with me in 2011 (before he was ousted by Georgia’s corrupt and often pro-Kremlin elite and imprisoned on trumped-up charges), he opined that graft and greed were the real causes of all this bungling. The Russian officers, he suggested, were stealing most of the funds allocated to carry out the attacks. What was left was peanuts, and for peanuts you can hire only losers. Why is all this history important? Because the timing hints at the motivation behind all of this skulduggery.

The Yushchenko poisoning occurred on Sept 5, 2004. The attacks on Georgia started a week later — in the wake of “colour” revolutions for democracy in Ukraine and Georgia, and also during the American-led war in Iraq. A former economic adviser to Putin, Andrei Illarionov, is undoubtedly right when he says that the war was the turning point of the Russian president’s policies, Before it, Putin presented himself as an ally of the West and even sought Russia’s membership in NATO. But he considered Iraq within Russia’s sphere of influence and adamantly opposed the war America began there in 2003.

When the colour revolutions swept through Georgia and Ukraine the next year, Putin — then a 51-year-old ex-KGB lieutenant colonel — acted as if they were the result not of political mistakes, miscalculations and the inability of corrupt governments to contain discontent in those former Soviet republics. No, he apparently thought, all of this was one nefarious plot hatched in Washington to encircle Russia deep in its historical sphere of influence. Americans had smiled when they persuaded him in 2002 to accept Lithuania and Poland as new NATO members, and all the time they were just waiting to plant a dagger into his back. We need to understand that in the Kremlin’s warped worldview, the Yushchenko poisoning or the Georgian explosions were not attacks, but payback.

To the Kremlin, Yushchenko was a United States agent, simply because he had an American wife who worked for the United States Treasury and whom he had met by chance on a plane. It seems never to have occurred to Putin’s spymaster that Russia was losing influence because of its own actions. Which leads to a final question: Why is Putin doing all this? The answer is obvious: because he thinks he has no other choice — that Americans, not Russians, are the aggressors, and he’s just striking back. And he can’t renounce this view. It would be tantamount to renouncing his vision of himself as a powerful leader who wants to Make Russia Great Again.

He’d have to acknowledge the truths that he, not America, is turning Russia into a third-world country haemorrhaging its smartest brains, with a failing economy and no chips with which to bargain with the rest of the world. So more of the same is to follow, and God help us all.