Bonus Episode 9

 Power Lines Season 1 Episode 9 Bonus Transcript

[Music Playing]

Jakub: Hello listeners, welcome to your bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.

Anastasiia: Today we're going to do something a little different, because instead of providing an extended version of the interview as we would usually do, we asked you for your questions about Russia's Intelligence Services.

Jakub: And we got a whole range of questions. From how many are nepo babies?

Anastasiia: What is it? What is that?

Jakub: It's a TikTok term for people who are like children of celebrities and who are celebrities themselves, basically.

Anastasiia: Okay.

Jakub: I'm explaining 20-year-old culture to-

Anastasiia: Yeah, I didn't mention that I'm domesticated, like I don't know trends anymore.

Jakub: For the people who don't see us and who have maybe missed the earlier episode, I am considerably older than Nastya. And definitely not in the generation that there's videos about nepo babies on TikTok.

Anastasiia: Well, you learn something new every day.

Jakub: So anyways, we got a whole range of questions from how many are nepo babies to is Russian Military Intelligence an oxymoron?

Anastasiia: Yeah. A lot of people ask that question. Just a disclaimer before we get into the questions, neither of us are experts, neither of us are Michael Weiss.

But we do know the local context and we obviously follow this issue quite closely. So, just keep that in mind.

[Music Playing]

Jakub, so the first question is really key here. James is asking, “How is it that people keep falling out of windows in Russia?”

Jakub: Obviously, there's some very serious issues with health and safety standards.

Anastasiia: Definitely.

Jakub: As well as building standards, et cetera. But more seriously, I don't think that all of the people falling out of windows or being defenestrated to take the technical term, this is not all Putin. This is not all them Intelligence Services.

Anastasiia: Really?

Jakub: Russia is a pretty lawless place, if you think about it. Crime has gone down around the world over the past couple of decades. It used to be much higher than it is today.

One place where that trend hasn't happened as much is Russia. And for all of this sort of senior executives who are dying all over the place from multiple gunshot wounds to the heads that are ruled as suicides or falling out of windows or things like that, a lot of it is just their rivals, the local gangsters.

It might be people in the Intelligence services, but it might be not for political reasons. It might be because somebody gave a bribe to somebody or made off with some money.

So, I'm sure that there are political assassinations and in fact we have some pretty credible cases of those, but I think a lot of them are just Russia being Russia.

Anastasiia: That's extremely well said. What's our next question?

Jakub: Well, our next question comes from Dmitry Nabokov who asks, “Do Western Intelligence Services have sources in the Russian Intelligence Services?”

Anastasiia: I think this one is pretty straightforward because probably all countries in the world have spies everywhere else, but especially if we're talking about the U.S. and Russia, I am 100% sure that they've infiltrated each other.

There was a story actually in 2019, I think CNN released an article saying that some of their sources told them how the U.S. got one of its top spies out of Russia because they were scared that Trump's kind of attitude with the Intelligence Services and his mishandling of the services and their jobs would end catastrophically for the spy.

So, the U.S. extracted one of its like highest level spies from the Russian government. And this was some sort of super-secret mission obviously, and I'm pretty sure this wasn't confirmed by either sides.

But since these case studies and articles and leaks exist, you can probably be sure that something like this is going on. It's pretty obvious, isn't it, Jakub?

Jakub: Yes. So, we actually have cases that are pretty well known of Western services running agents within the Russian services.

Very famously there is the case of Oleg Gordievsky who was actually the KGB resident-designate and bureau chief in London for a while. And he was a double agent working for the British MI6, for over a decade, which was a huge success.

You can actually read quite a detailed account of his life and sort of the work with Gordievsky in a book by Ben Macintyre, which came out a couple of years ago. It's called The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, recently finished it as an audio book and highly recommended.

More recently you have the case of Sergei Skripal, who also was double agent in the Russian Military Services.

So, the answer is definitely yes. But to what extent is something that is a closely kept secret.

Anastasiia: Another kind of point of discussion that people would mention when the war began is that how come the U.S. Intelligence just can't know Russia's next move? Or how come they can't predict exactly what Putin is going to do next? Because everyone sort of assumes that the U.S. has this spy networks and signal intelligence, et cetera.

But the truth is Putin's circle is extremely tiny. As far as I understand, not even most of his military generals knew what the heck they were doing until the very, very last moment.

So, how far do you have to go as a double agent or as a spy to really know what's in Putin's head? Like the circle is probably what, two/three people?

Jakub: Absolutely. It's one thing to sort of have a view of what's happening on the ground in, in some country or like some limited operations, but having people who are deep in Putin circle is a completely different one. And given how paranoid everyone must be over there; I think that's rather difficult.

The other thing is, and here I'm obviously guessing, but I can imagine that there's a lot of cases where the people around Putin prepare different scenarios of moving forward and he makes a final decision.

Anastasiia: On his own?

Jakub: On his own, at the last moment. Even if he sort of has a couple of advisors, that's a decision that's made very late in the game. So, you can sort of guess like what are the scenarios that are being prepared, but you might not be able to say what will finally be done, because that's something that Putin will decide in a mercurial fashion. It's difficult to get inside his head.

Anastasiia: The next question is slightly connected. It's from Marcus D, “Have Russian Intelligence agents defected in Ukraine, like they have done in mass, in other countries?” Jakub, have you heard stories like this?

Jakub: Not really. We have heard a bit of stories and my sense as well from the interview with Michael Weiss was that there have been defections, especially to the various international services.

If I had to guess, I'd probably say there's fewer defections to Ukraine for two reasons. One is that if you want to defect, you have to do that physically. Like you have to somehow communicate your intentions and show up somewhere and my guess is that it's very difficult to communicate to Ukrainian government officials for Russian government workers.

Anastasiia: I'm also not sure how safe staying in Ukraine would be. Like if you're going to a NATO country, if you're going to an EU country, you can assume some kind of level of safety that that country can provide for you. And that's the reason why many of these defectors choose those countries.

But if you go to Europe, I'm not sure our security services are paying as much attention to defectors and not to Russian spies that are still operating within Ukraine, for example.

There also may be some sort of retribution, we may be not really interested in working with them, right?

Jakub: There's definitely that, although I think a lot of the people in the Intelligence Services would be pragmatic.

But I think it's just technically more difficult to do that with a country that you are in an active war. There's also, as you mentioned, like look, Ukraine, there's a war zone. There's the front lines, but there's people operating all over the place.

And we have a case from a couple of months ago where, this wasn't a spy or anything, but this guy who was working for Vagner was killed with a sledgehammer-

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: In a very sort of ISIS style video.

Anastasiia: Very graphic.

Jakub: If you can get kidnapped on the streets of Kyiv, that's probably not somewhere where you want to be if you're a Russian defector.

Anastasiia: Right.

Jakub: Our next question comes from Matthew Townsend who asks, “What is the history of tension between the Russian military and the FSB?”

Anastasiia: This is actually really interesting because when I was researching this one, it looks like, well, of course this whole field is very secretive and there isn't much info that we know for sure, et cetera.

But especially this rivalry between the different Intelligence Services, it's not really well covered. Like I haven't found like a single book for example, or like an article that analysed specifically that.

But you can still gather some info from reporting within Russia and outside of Russia too. There is a very obvious rivalry that's been going on since like the 2000s when Putin came to power and it's mainly just for his praise, but that's not like a symbolic kind of thing, but it's very pragmatic. It's money and it’s resources, right?

Jakub: You're absolutely right. You can probably go back a little bit to the Soviet era and try to extrapolate.

So, back then, I mean basically a lot of the analysts were sort of pointing out that the Soviet dictatorship was based on having different centres of power, one of them being the party, the other one being the KGB.

And then the army. And the army was the biggest and had a lot of physical resources to ex deploy violence, but wasn't really connected to sort of political issues. Then the party was kind of the opposite and the KGB was kind of in the middle.

Dictatorships tend to be based on this kind of rivalry between different institutions. So, I would assume that there's a little bit of that going on still today.

There's also an interesting question to where does the GRU fit in with that? And most of the accounts of Russian Intelligence Services talk about the GRU and the FSB or the KGB earlier talking about each other as neighbours, near neighbours, further away neighbours.

So, there does seem to be a little bit of camaraderie between the service as well, but I'd expect that they're quite competitive between each other.

Anastasiia: So, even though the GRU and FSB in principle are separate organizations, because the FSB mainly works domestically or within the post-Soviet space, because as we said in the main interview, they kind of take the word domestic in the Soviet sense still. The GRU works with the military and it works abroad most often.

So, by definition they seem to have very separate responsibilities, but in practice it's not always that way. And very often their boundaries of work are blurred and they often work with the same networks, for example. And they compete for those networks and they compete for resources because they can work in the same territory, for example, and they have similar operations and they try to undercut each other.

And there have been stories, I'm not sure how much they are a conspiracy theory, but there definitely have been media speculations about the GRU and the FSB kind of undercutting each other and leaking information about each other's operation to the authorities and stuff like that. So, there definitely is some rivalry going on.

Jakub: So, they actually run into each other and sort of undermine each other in practice.

So, there was this case where the FSB essentially forged a document to try to undermine relations between Ukraine and Turkmenistan. Turkmenistan being a major gas supplier and sort of strategically important Central Asian country.

And basically, the document described that Ukrainian services were financing the Turkmen opposition and the SVR, which is the Foreign Intelligence Service, accidentally found this report and reported it as being authentic in the Kremlin. And so-

Anastasiia: That's so funny.

Jakub: Yeah, they definitely do undercut each other, whether by accident or by purpose.

Anastasiia: During the big negotiations that we had to bring back Azov fighters and have a swap with Medvedchuck, the GRU was the one that was dealing with Medvedchuck and the FSB was the one that was dealing with Azov.

And the Ukrainian government said that it was like literally two different groups of people were negotiating and that's why it took so long.

Jakub: I think actually Ukraine has been quite adept at exploiting this kind of rivalries between different Russian services and different groups.

I haven't really heard about specific examples with the Intelligence Services, but I remember early on in the first sort of weeks and months of the war when there were a lot of Chechen troops being moved in and there was this quite senior commander that was killed, there was a lot of chatter on telegram, which experts sort of attributed to coming from the Ukrainian Intelligence Services, about how the FSB is leaking the location of Chechen fighters to the Ukrainian Intelligence Services, because they want to get rid of a rival.

Anastasiia: That's crazy.

Jakub: Now, if you are Chechens, whether you believe that or not, the mood suddenly becomes a lot more sour.

So, I think Ukraine has been quite adept at manoeuvring around these different rivalries. We don't really see a lot, but my guess is that under their service, they're operating pretty smoothly, to make the best of this situation.

Anastasiia: Also, just a note, when we say Chechens, we actually mean people of Kadyrov because they … like actual Chechens hate everything about Russia, obviously because of the two wars that destroyed any hope that they had for democracy and freedom. So, when we say Chechens, we mean the army of Kadyrov.

Jakub: Yeah, that's a really important thing to point out. Thank you, Nastya.

Anastasiia: The next question that we have is from Maliek Banat, who's actually my friend, because both of us started in journalism almost at the same time. We were interns at the Kyiv Post before we were all fired.

So, two years ago he was there on my first day in Kyiv Independent’s newsroom. So Maliek, hello. Maliek’s question is, “Is Putin being misled by intelligence to please on the battlefield?”

So, I think this rivalry in a way feeds into that, doesn't it Jakub? Because you really want to please the Tsar and you do whatever you can. And if that is undercutting your opponents in a way, if that's feeding specific information from specific networks that is similar to the other Intelligence Service, then you are going to do whatever you can.

Jakub: So, there definitely seems to be cases of that this survey that was produced about the Ukrainian attitudes towards Russia and potential Russian rule would say quite an explicit example of that.

And if you look at the reporting of Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, who are two expert journalists covering the sector, it seems that the FSB has done this on multiple occasions.

Again, this is something that is quite difficult to judge, but my sense is that the GRU is seen as more reliable and in cases where operations have gone badly or it has seemed like things are getting a little bit out of hand, we've seen sort of GRU being sent in to take control and take over from the FSB, which again suggests that they seem to be more competent.

Anastasiia: We have another question from somebody called Snappy Goose who's asking, “Are Russian Intelligence Services spying agencies or as seems to be the case, do they spend more of their time trying to undermine change and modify public opinion and governmental policy?” This is a really good question.

Jakub: That is an excellent question.

Anastasiia: I think it mainly depends on the agency. So, if we're talking about the FSB, which mainly works domestically, then yes, they spend a lot of time controlling domestic moods because the FSB is the most direct successor of the KGB in a way that they're the governmental agency that controls opposition and squashes opposition.

So, if you want to talk about trying to change or modify public opinion or kind of restrict the society in a way from being exposed to certain opinions, then the FSB spends a lot of time doing that.

And at the same time, spying and trying to undermine or control public opinion, those are not exclusionary of course, right?

Jakub: Yeah, absolutely.

Anastasiia: For example, in Crimea, the FSB is the main body that persecutes Crimean Tartars in Crimea, and they don't do that out of thin air, though the accusations are, but they still do it only after spying on these people.

They spy on them, they listen on their discussions, they get into their private chats, into their private messages and they use all of that that they find as a result of the spying to try to pressure them and to persecute them, just so there isn't this kind of like oppositionary mood in Crimea.

So, I think in terms of FSB, in my mind it's really a very evil institution that combines spying with some sort of like social engineering almost, if you will.

Jakub: The famous active measures.

Anastasiia: Yeah.

Jakub: We definitely see Russian Intelligence Services do a lot of that, whether it's the cyber warfare, the misinformation, the hacking, the getting involved into different politics. And compared to other, well, especially western agencies, it seems like they are much more on the side of proactively trying to shape the situation rather than just collect data.

There's also a sense, and Michael was talking about this, that the GRU at least, and I assume the FSB as well, are at a state of perpetual war.

Anastasiia: Right, yeah.

Jakub: There's no peace time for them. And so, they're constantly trying to sort of get as much of an advantage on their opponents as possible.

So, we do see that, but to what extent does that mean that they don't really do as much of the spying? It's more difficult to say, they certainly seem to be doing it less effectively than-

Anastasiia: Than they could have.

Jakub: Yeah. It's really costing them something. So, Mark Strathan asks why the West has not treated them like gangsters after Salisbury, Litvinenko, et cetera, et cetera?

Anastasiia: Well, I think it's the same discussion as we had with terrorism. Like, you can't really treat the Intelligence Services of the biggest country in the world, which is one of the main international players both politically and financially as gangsters.

It's not an assumption that you can make, you have to continue pretending like they're your equal in a way. On the political stage, on the diplomatic stage.

Jakub: To some extent, they have been treated like gangsters, at least after Litvinenko and especially after Skripal, it looks like the British Intelligence Services and to some extent the other Western ones, which they work basically took that as a declaration of war.

There were a bunch of meetings on a very senior level, like they took that very seriously. This wasn't the latest sort of scandal. It was the use of chemical weapons on foreign soil. And that led to a ramped-up response.

And take a look at how decisive and clear the British response has been to the war. You can very well argue that Britain has been Ukraine's best ally in Europe after Poland and the Baltics arguably, it's sort of the same bunch of the countries that have stepped in 100% to support Ukraine from the beginning.

Anastasiia: Right, yes.

Jakub: Especially with lethal support, weapons, deliveries, all of that stuff.

Anastasiia: All other political stuff aside, kudos to Britain for doing that.

Jakub: Absolutely. But you also have to see that in a bit of context. Like there isn't some kind of historical treaty of friendship and alliance with Britain. It's not like Britain has been on the opposite side. They've been the opposed to Russia for quite a while now.

But one of the reasons why the UK was so quick to react and so clear to react is that they essentially have seen this as an undeclared war, already for quite a few years, potentially going back to Crimea, but certainly after the attacks on their soil.

Anastasiia: So, I really think this question and the answer to this question depends on what Mark meant by gangsters.

So, if we're talking about being dismissive or seeing them as some kind of crazy group of folks, then no, I think everyone only sees them as more dangerous because of this unpredictable nature of their operations.

And because of the fact that Russian spies and the Russian government to be frank, really just does not give a damn about any sort of international order and rules in any sphere, be it invading a country or killing somebody or poisoning them with chemical weapons.

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Jakub: Yeah. But I don't think that anyone is dismissive and I don't think they should be.

Anastasiia: Right. I agree.

Jakub: This is a very dangerous bunch of people. And while we may laugh at their mishaps that doesn't mean that we should treat them lightly.

Thank you so much for listening to Power Lines. Next week we'll be speaking about the challenges people have been facing in bringing humanitarian aid to Ukraine, since the full-scale invasion.

Anastasiia: Power Lines was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.