ONCE the pride of the Soviet Union, Russian’s foreign intelligence has suffered a serious blow with the US spy scandal.
Seasoned ex-KGB spooks have queued up to denounce the apparent amateurism of the 10 Kremlin spies arrested and then deported by the US, who naively used social networking sites and could not conceal accents.
“I’m appalled by what has been happening. It’s a farce. If this is espionage then I do not understand their methods,” scoffed Mikhail Lyubimov, a former Soviet spy who was a longtime KGB resident in Britain. He told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper: “I see no sleeper here. In fact I see nothing in this whole story resembling espionage.”
The glamorous Anna Chapman, who with nine others pleaded guilty to being a Kremlin agent, stupefied Russian espionage veterans by remaining active on Facebook and Russian social networking site odnoklassniki.ru.
The agents’ methods included tactics as archaic as the use of invisible ink, Morse code, and the exchange of matching orange bags to transfer false passports.
In their final hearings, some of the 10 spoke English with thick Russian accents, hardly the hallmark of a sleeper agent.
“The self-promotion that they created on the internet looks unprofessional to me,” said Gevork Vartanyan, 86, one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated foreign spies and still a proud bearer of the title Hero of the Soviet Union. In a rare interview with the Trud newspaper, he added: “The fact that people from the espionage profession allowed such things to happen is very strange.” Vartanyan, who said he speaks eight languages “to a good standard”, is the archetypal successful Soviet spy.
He worked in Tehran in World War II and up to 1951, and was famously credited with foiling a plot to assassinate Allied leaders at the 1943 Tehran conference. Until 1992 he was deployed as an agent in Europe, Asia and the US – in operations that remain classified to this day.
He worked in tandem with his wife, Goar, who he married in 1946 and with whom he still lives in Moscow.
There has been speculation the spy ring was an elaborate conspiracy aimed at discrediting the reputation of the Russian secret services. But independent defence analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said they were genuine agents.
“These spies were laughable but they were real. They worked badly and heads are going to roll in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service,” Felgenhauer said.
He said the tactic of using sleeper agents abroad was outdated and Russian military intelligence the GRU had stopped using such methods back in the 1960s.
The episode is a highly unwelcome 90th birthday gift for the SVR, which started with the Foreign Department of the early Soviet intelligence agency, the NKVD, in 1920.
“Our spies have forgotten how to work,” Gennady Gudkov, deputy of the Russian parliament’s security committee, told Moskovsky Komsomolets paper. “Now we know that not only do our legal system and security forces work badly. The last bulwark of the image of our legendary secret services has also collapsed.”
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