Power Lines Episode 9 Transcript
Anastasiia: The Russian Intelligence Services have a certain mystique. A sinister and insidious aura. It’s always been this way.
Jakub: Litvinenko, Kim Philby, the Skripals, the spy rings of Silvermaster and Ware. You recognise all these names. You’ve heard about these missions. The shady dealings of the Russian Intelligence Services has launched a thousand novels, movies and thrillers.
Anastasiia: As an organisation they are pretty much unparalleled in their reputation, and their jurisdiction is immense. They can requisition any Russian assets or infrastructure they like, and their doctrine allows them to use and target civilians at will.
Jakub: But now? Something has changed. Since the full scale invasion of Ukraine and the failure to install a puppet government, Russian intelligence’s star has faded. That aura shimmers less bright.
Anastasiia: To open this week’s episode, Jakub and I want to tell you a few stories about the Russian Intelligence Services - to paint a picture of their rise under Putin, and his attempt to bring them back to a warped kind of Soviet glory.
Jakub: But then also their fall in recent years, leading them to make one of the biggest blunders in intelligence history.
Anastasiia: The language we use in times of war is really important.
Archival in Ukrainian
Anastasiia: There’s a reason why you’ll hear Ukrainians unanimously describing the tanks rolling across Ukraine’s borders in February 2022 as the ‘full scale invasion’. It’s because this is not when Russian forces first entered Ukraine. That was in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula. A move designed and directed by the hand of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the FSB, Russia’s civilian intelligence service and successor of the KGB.
Jakub: The impact of the Maidan Revolution in 2014, was felt throughout Ukraine.
Archival: Slava Ukraini!
I remember the fighting on the streets of Kyiv, the EU flags on Maidan, the feeling of pride in a people overcoming corrupt elites who had plagued the country for so many years.
But I also remember the reaction across the globe. Considered, optimistic support from the West, yes. But from the East, anger, and a rising tide of disinformation.
Anastasiia: For Russia, seeing a pro-western, pro-EU democracy taking its first steps in Ukraine, instead of the kind of puppet government that Yanukovich was increasingly embodying, was bad news.
But the revolution also caused Russia to take steps to secure what it has for centuries seen as one of its major geographical weaknesses. Russia has no meaningful warm water port on its own coast. Hence, since 1997, its Navy leased a Black Sea port in Sevastopol, a strategically vital city on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
Putin, seeing that the revolution could jeopardise control of this, knew that Crimea had to be secured. So when the Maidan Revolution reached its zenith in February 2014, certain people started appearing on the peninsula.
Jakub: So-called “Little Green Men'' started popping up at key facilities and checkpoints, dressed in military fatigues and armed to the teeth, but without any state insignia. So who were they? They weren’t Ukrainian, that was for sure, their camo was foreign. Russians? Putin, of course, denied it. This was a masterstroke in FSB and GRU deception.
But quickly these Little Green Men had spread across the peninsula. In the chaos of the revolution on the mainland, this went relatively unopposed. The Ukrainian military in Crimea remained in their garrison. This allowed the foreign agents to use a not insignificant pro-Russian apathy in Crimea to forcibly seize key government buildings, and by March they had secured the entire peninsula.
Archival: Russian troops spreading out across the strategic Crimean Peninsula…
Anastasiia: Things were now moving quickly. The Crimean Supreme Council scheduled a referendum for March 16th to decide Crimea’s future. The choices were rigged before voting even began.
Archival: Groups of Pro-Russia troops, surrounding Ukrainian bases…
Anastasiia: Crimeans were given two options: join Russia or return to Crimea’s invalidated 1992 constitution, effectively becoming independent of Ukraine, and a vassal of Russia. This was a Russian kind of democracy - one enforced by jackboots and gun points.
Archival: This morning, more unidentified, pro-Russia armed militias, controlling the streets of Crimea’s capital…
Anastasiia: You can guess how the results were reported. A turnout of 83 percent, with 96.7 percent voting to join Russia. No international observers were there to qualify this result.
Jakub: A leaked report from the Russian president’s Human Rights Council estimated turnout for the referendum was in reality just 30 percent, with roughly half of that voting to join Russia. On March 18th, Crimea’s annexation by Russia was officially signed.
Anastasiia: So how had this happened? Was this an expert piece of opportunism by Russia in the wake of the chaos of Maidan? Sure. But the role of the intelligence services can’t be overlooked. The annexation was based on meticulous prior intelligence gathering, planning and a careful choreography of special operations forces and political messaging.
It showed that Putin had succeeded in his goal of taking the services back to their infamous Soviet capabilities.
Jakub: With the successes of Crimea fresh in mind, you might forgive the Russian Intelligence Services a bit of arrogance, a grotesque kind of swagger, even.
This was not some small operation. This was not a botched attempt at driving tanks into Tbilisi or even giving a little air support to the blood soaked regime of Al-Assad in Syria. This was the illegal annexation of a strategically vital piece of land. It was a coup for Putin’s cherished FSB. Their actions over the ensuing years, however, were anything but.
Anastasiia: Following Crimea, the Russian intelligence services continued operations to destabilise foreign countries and pursue Russia’s frequently malign interests. You probably remember the failed assassination attempt of the ex-KGB agent Sergei Skripal in Sailsbury in the UK.
Archival: It is now clear that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, of a kind developed by Russia…
The FSB had been caught red handed on foreign soil - a public humiliation.
Archival: The government has concluded that it is highly likely Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal…
Jakub: But there’s more - post-Crimea, the FSB appeared almost careless. There was the failed attempt at orchestrating a coup d’etat in Montenegro in 2016, attempts to add to destabilisation in Catalonia during the 2017 independence referendum. Poisonings in Czechia, explosions in Bulgaria.
The common thread among these actions? They all failed in their objectives. Following the highs of Crimea, it was failure, after failure.
Anastasiia: Which brings us up to 2022.
Archival in Ukrainian
Anastasiia: Since the annexation of Crimea, and indeed before, the FSB had an eye trained solely on Ukraine. Spying on its political leaders, attempting to co-opt its institutions, working to bring down its pro-Western government.
Archival in Ukrainian
Jakub: In the months leading up to the war, the FSB unit responsible for Ukraine had swelled hugely in size. Their intel had led them to champion a lightning fast Blitzkrieg style attack on Kyiv, toppling the government and putting a puppet government in its place.
Expect flowers, flags and smiling people greeting you with open arms, the FSB told Putin and their military counterparts, the GRU. They would be welcomed as heroes and saviours, free from their decadent, soft, pro-Western leaders at last.
This… did not happen.
Anastasiia: So how did the FSB read this so wrong? Militarily, sure, Ukraine’s army would never have been able to hold out without Western support. But misreading the Ukrainian people’s steadfast and unwavering commitment to defending their country?
How the services reached this complete failure in intelligence is as extraordinary as it is baffling. And some put it down to an institutionalised fear of Putin. No one wants to displease the Tsar.
Jakub: For example, a report commissioned by the FSB from a Kyiv-based marketing agency, delivered in February 2022, just weeks before the invasion, looked at the political attitudes of Ukrainians and their readiness for a change in government.
The report showed dissatisfaction with tough economic times, a fear of the increasing cost of living, apathy about the state of modern politics. The government didn’t favour particularly well either - Zelensky had a negative approval rating of minus 34.
Anastasiia: But this is not unusual. You could read this sort of polling in any European country. And one thing is glaring in its omission. There was nothing in the reports that showed a particularly pro-Russian sentiment.
According to reporting by Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and expert on the security services, the findings of that report made it all the way up to the top of the Kremlin, to Putin himself. But they were twisted, warped in a way to match what Putin wanted to hear.
Jakub: In every step up the chain of command, these findings were altered by the FSB to fit the narrative of invasion. And this sentiment was equally clear in Putin's televised address before the invasion began
Archival in Russian
where he spoke at length about the failures of Ukrainian governance, even Nazism, mirroring the altered surveys produced for him by the FSB.
Archival in Russian
Anastasiia: This complete misreading of the situation on the ground in Ukraine meant the Russian military was met with a fightback it never expected. Or it had tricked itself into ignoring.
Archival: The first time I held this thing it was two weeks ago, so it blast over the top of the tank…
Anastasiia: When tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022, the world gave Kyiv, Zelensky, the whole country, 72 hours. 72 hours before regime change, a Russian puppet government, and the end of Ukraine’s long journey from corruption to democracy.
The world, like the FSB, was wrong.
Jakub: The Russian Intelligence Services rely on their image to convert and coerce. Exposing them as incompetent is a powerful blow. And since the full scale invasion, it has already led to a rise in defections and recruitment, as we’ll hear later in this episode.
Anastasiia: Do the Russian intelligence services still maintain that mystique, that aura? Does the agency which infiltrated MI6 and the US treasury, which carries out assassinations indiscriminately on foreign soil, which orchestrated the annexation of Crimea in 2014, still have the same level of perceived prestige?
Jakub: After building up Russia’s intelligence services for decades, it is hubris and arrogance - fed by the spy in chief Putin - that may very well lead to their undoing.
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Anastasiia: From Message Heard and the Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.
Jakub: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.
Anastasiia: And I am Anastasiia Lapatina. This week we're going into one of the most mysterious and sinister organizations in the world, the Russian’s Intelligence Services and what their history and actions during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine can tell us about the way the Kremlin works.
So Jakub, you know how everyone perceives the Russian Intelligence Services to be this incredibly mysterious organization and these hundreds and thousands of spies around the world doing dirty work. I have like a weird story from Washington.
Jakub: Okay.
Anastasiia: Sounds really mysterious.
Jakub: Let's hear it. It does.
Anastasiia: I had a really kind of spooky time thinking about this when I was in Washington, in Washington DC. Roughly a month ago, I was just driving around with my friend and I remember we were passing down this one building and my friend goes, “Oh, this is where this scandal happened.” And it was about some Russian spy who was uncovered, who used to live there for like a decade or something.
And then on the same like drive, we were passing down a restaurant and he was like, “Oh, and this is where people joke that a bunch of Russian spies always go to like meet.” And this is kind of like common knowledge.
And I then went and talked to my friend who works at a think tank there and he also was like, “Oh yeah, that's the Russian spy café.” And I just like nearly got chills down my spine, because I was like, “Why is this like common knowledge stuff, that there are spies everywhere and everyone's just kind of okay with that?” It's really spooky.
Jakub: I've sort of experienced something similar in Brussels, a couple of times. They say that of the two places on the planet with the highest concentrations of spies, DC is probably number one. And then, Brussels is number two.
And I think it comes down to the fact that, look, this isn't some kind of James Bond movie. There's a whole lot of people that are working in this industry.
Anastasiia: Right.
Jakub: And then the second thing is a lot of the work is done well and what defines well for the intelligence community, at least I'm led to believe, is that it stays secret. But then a lot of it is also done poorly and it comes out and people hear about it all over the place.
Anastasiia: The more I like read into it and talk to people who’ve actually had these experiences, I realize that this is an actually really serious problem and a very real thing. And when Ukrainians would talk about something as basic as like banning visas for Russians or kind of tightening the grip on visas, so it's not that easy to get just a regular tourist visa for a Russian citizen, one of the arguments we use is that you guys have no idea the Europeans, who is actually going to be coming into your country. Many of these people very well could have been Russian spies.
Jakub: So, it's interesting that you bring that up. A couple of months ago I was in Georgia, it was a few weeks into this massive wave of Russian refugees sort of crossing into the country. And talking to some of the activists and the journalists on the ground, that's actually something that they mentioned quite consistently, is that-
Anastasiia: Interesting.
Jakub: Upon arrival to Georgia or on their way out, they were contacted by various organizations and asked to sort of work for them.
Anastasiia: That's crazy.
Jakub: Both on the Russian side and on the Georgian side. And people in the Westchester realize how big of an issue it is.
Before we dive into this deeper, would it make sense to just give a few terms and concepts out of what we’ll be discussing on this episode?
Anastasiia: Right. Do you want me to do it because I-
Jakub: Yeah, go ahead.
Anastasiia: Did a little chart.
Jakub: Sure.
Anastasiia: Okay. So, there is the KGB, which is the historical body, which basically no longer exists, but has existed for decades. And that was the main secret police is what they're called. But they were a very highly political body, which was tasked essentially with making sure that communist and socialist principles are in place and continue being in place.
Jakub: The Sword and the Shield, as they called themselves.
Anastasiia: Yes, exactly. So, it was this like highly bureaucratic structure. And when the Soviet Union fell apart, various of these directorates were either just completely disbanded or they became a whole separate organization.
So, after 1991, we have a few of the main bodies within the Russian Intelligence Services, starting with the FSB, which is something everyone has heard of. Basically, Russia's Federal Security Services.
They work mainly domestically, especially on counterintelligence. So basically, finding foreign spies within Russia. They also deal with counterterrorism, surveillance.
Jakub: So, they work domestically, but there's a big exception. While most counterintelligence agencies focus just on the country that they're from, for the FSB, this sort of near abroad, as they call it, meaning the former Soviet countries, are part of their domestic operations.
Anastasiia: It's kind of interesting because they basically take the word domestic as if it's still the Soviet Union. Like that is still domestic to them. So, they work in all of the Eastern Bloc countries essentially.
And then we also have the GRU or the GRU in English. It is basically Russia's military intelligence. So, they focus on foreign military intelligence and they have their own special services that do reconnaissance and sabotage for them.
There's also the SVR, which is Foreign Intelligence Services. And then there is FSO, those are Federal Protective Services. They're essentially bodyguards of politicians and state facilities.
But the main bodies that we’re focused on are FSB, the Federal Security Services and the GRU.
Okay Jakub, you spoke to someone pretty exciting this week, right?
[Music Playing]
Jakub: I did indeed. This week we were lucky enough to have a chat with Michael Weiss, the journalist and author, who is one of the leading voices in the West when it comes to looking at Russian espionage and the organizations which carry it out.
As well as being the director of special investigations for the Free Russia Foundation, Michael has written about Russia and the war in Ukraine for publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs and The Daily Beast, where he is a contributing editor.
In 2015, he co-authored the bestselling book, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror and is currently working on a new book about the history of the GRU, something which we of course discussed at length in our conversation.
But as we've already outlined and you might have guessed, the Russian Intelligence Services are completely shrouded in mystery. So, first I wanted to know how on earth Michael goes about researching a subject like this, particularly their history during the Soviet years.
Michael, thanks so much for joining Power Lines. To kick things off, let's maybe go back to the origin, so to speak, of Russian Secret Services. You've been researching this topic quite a bit. How do you go about researching the topic?
Michael: The GRU is a very tricky subject because unlike the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which at least disclosed some of their archives and files and allowed Western and Russian scholars to come in and have a look, the GRU never did.
And the reason for that is simple, unlike the KGB, which was disbanded and then kind of reconstituted into different services, primarily the FSB and the SVR, the GRU continued uninterruptedly from the Soviet to the post-Soviet period.
So, it was founded in 1918, so it had its centenary just a few years ago. The trick with trying to figure out what they got up to, what the sort of organizational culture was, how it changed, how it evolved, what their relationship, which was characteristically a rival, one with first the OGPU, then the NKVD and then the KGB.
Getting all of this material, it's sort of a pastiche of scholarly books that have been written, memoirs chiefly by defectors, which are of varying degrees of reliability because defectors are notoriously not reliable or many of them are not.
So, this is the difficult thing, you take not on faith, anything that an actor in your historical psychodrama says, you have to dig into it, but unfortunately you can do only do so much digging. So, it's difficult. That's where you spend most of your time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff as it were.
Jakub: Yeah, lots of secrets, lots of lies. I imagine it's pretty tricky to wade through that, a lot of work.
Michael: They go hand in hand, don't they?
Jakub: So, we have all of these Russian security services, KGB, GRU. Again, for the listeners, KGB is let's say the political one. GRU is the military one.
Michael: I would say that KGB is the civilian one.
Jakub: The civilian one, yeah. Thank you. So, Russian Secret Services have almost this mythic character. Like in the popular imagination whereby they're capable. They're absolutely ruthless, have agents absolutely everywhere. To what extent is that something that was true? Were they really this grand secret service agencies?
Michael: So, I would make two points. The things that made the GRU and I would argue in the 1930s, the GRU was probably the most capable and successful intelligence agency on the planet. And they far eclipse the work of the NKVD to such a degree that some of the shining stars of the GRU were subsequently poached by the NKVD, which is the KGB's prior incarnation.
Two things that stood out. One, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which was very seductive, very attractive across countries, across classes, across races, particularly after the ravages of World War I, particularly after the stock market crash in 1929 and global depression. All of these things sort of conspired to make an entire generation radicalized.
But the other thing I would say is this, the Soviet Union, by definition was a cosmopolitan enterprise. I never used the word Russia in the book, when I'm referring to the USSR, for a reason; Soviet is more encompassing.
The protagonists in my story, at least up until the post-Soviet period, most of them are not Russian. I have Germans, I have Austrians, I have Poles who grew up in Galicia, in what is now Western Ukraine. I've got Americans, I've got Canadians. It is a kind of United Colours of Benetton, kind of phenomenon.
And one of the things that makes this a virtue for espionage is the sons and daughters of Europe and North America, whether or not they go to Moscow and get properly trained or they're simply recruited in place, they blend in, they speak the languages, they are to the manor born. They don't look alien, they don't look foreign, they don't raise suspicions. They had this kind of global, international background.
And some of them were very famous writers and journalists. We forget Kim Philby, his first real assignment by the KGB, with NKVD was in fratricidal Spain. And what was his role? He was the correspondent, war correspondent for The Times of London. Posing as a fascist sympathizer embedded within Franco's retinue. And this made Kim Philby, well, several things.
One, nobody assumed he was a communist because his by-lines were all fascist propaganda. And two, made him a subject matter expert on the Iberian Peninsula, which is basically his start in MI6.
So, one of the deep penetration moles, that the Soviets ever ran, one of the most successful spies they ever had was a journalist, who everybody knew his name and was reading his work. It doesn't get more provocative than that, does it?
Jakub: One of the most interesting things about the intelligence services in the late Soviet period, and particularly their demise, is that the current Russian President, Vladimir Putin, was there to witness it. So, what was Putin's role in the KGB?
Anastasiia: So, I think it's pretty common knowledge that Putin worked there, but I think people don't realize for how long, because he was there for 16 years. And working there was — I don't know if it was his first job, but I counted he was 23 when he joined. And he spent 16 years there from 1925 to 1991.
And then everybody also knows that he was interested in East Germany for five years, but he basically didn't do anything especially exciting. He did a lot of recruiting. He was really good at communications. He built a lot of networks.
I think the fact that he worked there for so long definitely must have had an impact on how he approached his career in politics, because he finished his time at the KGB and went straight into politics after that, right?
Jakub: Yeah. So, for all the mystique of the KGB, every time I listen to these stories about Putin's job back then, and I think he was not exceptional in any-
Anastasiia: No, not at all. He was just an operative.
Jakub: The thing is, it sounds actually incredibly boring, like very sort of government administrative. It's almost like a mixture of the HR and the accounting departments without wanting to hate on either of them. So, it sort of feels like a very kind of mundane job.
Anastasiia: Yeah.
Jakub: So, one thing that Michael pointed out and it seems to be consistent across the Russian Intelligence community, is that they're always at a state of war.
Anastasiia: Right.
Jakub: They're always sort of thinking about how they can undermine, threaten, damage their adversaries. It doesn't really feel like something that comes across from a lot of the Western agencies, but-
Anastasiia: Yeah. Because one of their institutional assumptions is that war is eternal. They basically forever live in this atmosphere of this other huge grand enemy. Like this isn't just, I think a Cold War thing. This has always been there and this is how they operate to this day.
It is definitely a very secretive, but a very, very active, unpredictable to outsider's organization. And I think in a way, we could see that with how Putin functions in his foreign policy. Because he's definitely not somebody who just passively sits out and hopes for international peace around him. He actively seeks out conflict and actively seeks armed engagement and wars.
Jakub: The other thing is that his experience in Germany seems to have led him to believe that there is a weak response or sort of a momentary lapse in sort of this aggression, in this offense, is essentially something that is a deadly threat to the survival of the regime.
He saw the East German state crumble. There's sort of this famous and I'm pretty sure slightly apocryphal story that essentially when the Soviet regime was crumbling or sort of the East German regime was crumbling, they called Moscow and no one answered. There is this sort of mystique that because he saw that-
Anastasiia: Another mystery.
Jakub: Yeah. Essentially, he witnessed a moment of weakness, a moment of failure and that led him to believe that no, the only sort of policy that you can have that is going to be ultimately successful is one of a perpetual hard line.
[Music Playing]
Anastasiia: What do we have next?
Jakub: I wanted to hear Michael's thoughts about modern Russia, the collapse of the Soviet services and why Putin was so determined to build them back to their former glory.
You have this world class agency in the interbellum throughout the war. And then the Soviet Union changes, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Jakub: It loses it’s let's say intellectual flair, diversity and so forth, becomes more brutish. So, before we jump to Ukraine in the present day, like to what extent is that something that Putin himself has been driving as a former intelligence officer?
I understand he was KGB, not GRU. By all accounts, wasn't that prominent within the KGB?
Michael: No.
Jakub: Would you see this as being a coherent campaign to rebuild and I would say almost resupply the security services, the intelligence services?
Michael: So, there's a period where I have to be honest and this is either my fault as a scholar or just them’s the breaks when you're dealing with the spy agency that doesn't want to talk about its own internal history, at least not with an outsider.
The immediate post-Soviet period is almost a black hole to really get an understanding for what's going on. I actually, in my book, in one of the early chapters, which talks about special tasks (which is another kind of Soviet euphemism for assassination, sabotage, terrorism),I locate the year 2007 as kind of a fulcrum point in the reconstitution and also repurposing the special services under Putin.
What happened in 2007? Several things. One, most famously, most notoriously, the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London using a weapon of mass destruction, a radioactive isotope, polonium-210. Very chilling, goes beyond even the darkest periods of the Cold War.
Two, there was a situation in Iraq, as the U.S. was occupying Iraq at the time, several Russian diplomats were taken hostage by insurgents and demanded, they gave like a 48, 72 hours, “Russia must pull all of its forces out of the Republic of Chechnya or we're going to behead these hostages or these diplomats on camera.”
Well, of course, Putin did not give into terroristic demands. And all of the guys were killed. Some beheaded, I think some shot. He went nuts, Putin, and demanded that the Duma grant him authority, which of course it did, because it was still just a rubber stamp parliamentary body at that point, grant him the authority to conduct extra judicial assassinations, not just in Russia, but overseas.
So officially, the gloves have now come off and the services special forces operators, Spetsnaz, but primarily intelligence operatives, can now do mokroye delo; wet work. Kill people abroad. And this is written into Russian law.
This is kind of a very symbolic, metaphoric thing, isn't it? It shows that all of a sudden, the services are back and they're now back with the same kind of core foundational remit that they had once had, which was to again, ensure the sanctity of the regime and the state and make sure that no enemies either within or without, can tear it down ever again.
But also, to become more aggressive and to do the sort of things that the old KGB had got up to in the Soviet period.
And then, lo and behold, in 2009, a GRU special task unit called 29155, which is very famous now (even if you've never heard that numerical sequence), is born. And this special task unit is devoted to assassination and other forms of state terrorism.
Look at what they've got up to in the last 10 plus years. Christo Grozev, who's a subject in my book, given his work, unmasking members of 29155 and identifying the culprits responsible for trying to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, Emilian Gebrev and his son and factory manager and Sophia, and now blowing up depots in Czechia and Bulgaria as well.
He told me something very terrifying, which is he can only locate for the last 10 years or so, only about 15% of the operations known that have been prosecuted by unit 29155.
So, 85% of what this unit, which consists of, I don't know, maybe over a hundred members, maybe fewer now, because they've all been rolled up, 85% of what they've done we don't know about.
So, this has to be borne in mind when we talk about, well, the GRU is this kind of ridiculous keystone cops-like organization that fails because they keep getting caught red-handed. Well, they do get caught, but again, we don't know what their successes are because by definition, a success in intelligence work is secret. Nobody knows about it.
Jakub: They only know your failures.
Anastasiia: They only know your failures. Exactly. So, I would argue that that time period is when Putin felt confident enough in his kind of restoration internally of some of the grandeur and the stability of the Russian Federation, particularly after the tragic comic Yeltsin, late Yeltsin period, that he could now begin to reconstitute the former Soviet Union's ability to project power abroad.
And that indeed is what I would say the last 10, 15 years of Russian foreign policies look like. Whether it's the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which by the way was an idea for the GRU and they were deeply criticized for their failure to perform more militarily, capably, I suppose, in rolling tanks right up to the doorstep of [inaudible 00:23:12], to the intervention in Syria, to indeed the takeover of Crimea in 2014.
If Georgia was the low point for the GRU as a service, Crimea was its high point. That is why I think they have been given such a wide birth, certainly in recent years. That was an almost flawless operation from their perspective.
[Music Playing]
Anastasiia: I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that the FSB and the GRU, one of them is the body that gives Putin his first daily briefings. So, they're the people that not just broadly influence the policy in the Kremlin, but they're the ones who are being listened to first and the most in some way.
It's pretty crazy though, how powerful they are. Everyone constantly talks about their internal competitions. How the FSB and the GRU are competing to be Putin's favourites and how important they are to the Kremlin's policymaking.
Jakub: Yeah. Well, in every country, the intelligence services provide briefings to the leadership. I think the difference in Russia is just the level of influence and decision making that they have.
So, you have people, for example, like Nikolai Patrushev, who is former Director of the FSB. And is widely believed to be one of the sort of leading figures in Putin's inner circle.
Anastasiia: Right.
Jakub: So, you have this really outsized role. It's not just that the services are so influential, it's also that they are a core part. They're the pet project, they are the vehicle through which Putin has been building modern Russia.
When he's been building his empire, it's been through agencies like the FSB, like the GRU and all of their various programs and projects about whether it's cyber warfare, recruiting all over the … like they have been the instruments of the empire.
Anastasiia: A part of this must be personal. Again, having spent almost two decades there, the amount of connections he has within these services, many people who are high up there are genuinely his friends. And he spent his youth working on the idea that he is this great patriot that's working for the betterment of his country.
So, the core of all of these services must have been his biggest driver when he was young. His biggest motivation. And I've read in interviews that he spoke very highly of that time and he really said that it wasn't some decision to just like, go and make a buck. It was highly ideological, kind of, “I'm a patriot, I have to do this right thing and serve my country.”
Jakub: Absolutely. It was his youth. People always think fondly about the time of his youth. He spent two decades building them up. These are really his people.
Which then raises the question of, if this has been such a fundamental part of the project, how is it possible that things have gone so terribly, terribly wrong? Especially I think with the FSB, which as a successor of the KGB would, is probably where Putin has spent more of his time.
[Music Playing]
So, let's fast forward until today, we have now nine months, 10 months almost of a three-day operation. The failure to take all of Ukraine and it seems like there's a host of reasons for this, but one is clearly a failure of intelligence.
Michael: Correct.
Jakub: It was poorly planned, poorly researched. Who's responsible? Let's maybe start with that one.
Michael: Well, I would even go further than what you just said. The very conception of a war in Ukraine, particularly after eight years of war in Ukraine, which has turned the majority, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians into Patriots on the one hand, but on the other hand, deeply hostile to Russia and to Russian influence in their country. The very concede of this was just a colossal disaster and a failure of imagination and a failure of everything.
Now look, if you're asking who's to blame, well I think there's plenty of blame to go around. I alluded earlier to the FSB’s fifth service, which under Putin, because the FSB is one of his kind of legacy, it came from the KGB and that's kind of his tribe, as it were. He decided he wanted to create a foreign intelligence arm for the domestic security service.
So, the FSB fifth service was tasked, if you listen to Andrei Soldatov and his partner Irina Borogan, with gathering all the intelligence on Ukraine, running or cultivating fifth columnists, agents, deep penetration agents who at the outbreak of war would serve the occupying regime instead of their own country.
And also, just getting a lay of the land, how are Ukrainians disposed to Russia? Will they cheer and throw flowers and chocolates at tanks, Russian tanks that roll down Kreshchatyk and Kyiv and all this stuff. They didn't get it right.
And there is now a supposition that the GRU has been tasked with sort of picking up the pieces of this campaign. And that's interesting for several reasons. The commander of Russian forces, Surovikin, what's his name? General Armageddon, he was running the intervention in Syria, which was also by Russian lights, very successful, even though it was very limited operation, mostly air power, with the GRU however, essentially in the cockpit as it were.
So, the GRU has had a pretty good few years and now I think the problem for them is they have to inherit this disastrous war and somehow-
Jakub: Salvage it.
Michael: Save face or somehow salvage it. Exactly. And again, there's more that we don't know than what we do. And my focus in Ukraine, funnily enough … and this is sort of one of the cheats or one of the workarounds for not being able to, as I said earlier, go to Moscow, knock on the door of the aquarium and say, “Can I see your library and can I meet some of your top spies? Because I'm writing a book on you guys.”
What I have to do is rely on counterintelligence agencies and counterintelligence sources in the West, particularly in NATO, but also in Ukraine, who are essentially the adversaries of the GRU.
So, I have several chapters on Ukraine, but the first is about GUR, Ukraine's Military Intelligence Service. And they were already known by the way, before February 24th of this year as one of the premier and most talented military intelligence services in Europe. That comes from the CIA. So, very high marks for GUR.
But one of the things that they managed to do quite effectively from 2014 until now is hoover up GRU agents and operatives in mainland Ukraine, outside of Crimea, another country that is superb, but this is Estonia.
So, a few months ago I get a call on Signal from the former press officer of KaPo, which is the Estonian Internal Security Service or their FBI, and he said, “How soon can you be in Tallinn?” And I said, “Oh, interesting. Why?” He's like, “Well, I can't tell you, but let's just say it'll be good for you and good for your book.” Well, that's telling me, without telling me that they've got a crack in GRU story.
When I get to Tallinn, I went into the headquarters of KaPo and I met with Alexander Toots, who's the head of CI, and I said, “Why am I here?” He said, “Well, you'll never guess. But the first GRU agent that we ever caught and unmasked and tried and convicted and then traded back to Russia in 2018, Artem Zinchenko, he's just defected to us from Russia.
I said, “What do you mean he's defected to you?” He's like, “He came back to us, he asked, he wanted to get out of Russia, and we helped him, and we knew him because we arrested him.”
And I said, “Why did he do this?” He said, “Because of the war in Ukraine, he has family in Ukraine fighting on the government side. He thinks Putin is a tyrant on par with Stalin and he's here and you'll meet him in an hour.”
So, spent four hours with this guy and the Russian government didn't even know that he had just defected to a NATO territory.
Jakub: Wow.
Michael: So anyway, you see kind of the epiphenomenon or phenomena of this war has now affected and I would say degraded all levels of the Russian security and military establishment.
And I was led to believe that there have been a lot of defections from the Russian services since February. And if not defections in terms of crossing the border and fleeing, which obviously the regime in Moscow will know about at some point, perhaps becoming double agents or defectors in place.
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Jakub: For all the failures of the invasion, of the initial plans of the invasion and the heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, counter attack, et cetera, in the beginning, there was actually quite a few people who betrayed Ukraine, Russian agents, saboteurs, defectors from Ukraine to Russia, in the initial phase of the war. There's quite a few of them, no?
Anastasiia: Yeah. And we can talk about this in the context of like human intelligence and spies, but there's also some level of corruption, just broad corruption-
Jakub: Sure.
Anastasiia: Within the industries. Like just a few weeks ago, I think there was another Ukrainian factory that supposedly was making parts that were sold to Russia, that then were used to manufacture Russian weapons. Like that's really bad.
It's really interesting because every other week or even every other day these days, you see this piece of news about somebody uncovering a Russian spy or a Russian agent or a Russian sympathizer. And you see all of these photos usually with books. It's usually like, “Oh, this person has a Bust of Lenin in their apartment and look at the red Soviet flag and like all of these Russian media pamphlets,” or whatever.
So, like you could clearly see that these are highly ideologically motivated people who … I'm sure a lot of these spies are doing these things with money, but also many of them seem to genuinely be interested in whatever Russia is saying.
Jakub: But when I think about sort of how the FSB and the GRU have been preparing the invasion or just operating in general, this has been years and decades of cultivating relationships and building up all of these characters all across the country.
And I think it's not crazy to say that they had really broad networks of people across Ukraine, that they were hoping would do their bidding. And many did.
Anastasiia: Take just Telegram channels. Remember we had these waves of basically censorship and banning of Telegram channels that our intelligence services uncovered to have been manipulated and set up and managed by Russian Intelligence Services.
Like Russian FSB operatives, literally setting up like news Telegram channels in Ukrainian or in Russian within Ukraine to influence information that was flowing around and just spread Russian propaganda. This was a huge effort.
I remember digging into it, this was like hundreds of people like straight up on FSB pay checks within Russia or within Ukraine spreading all of this false information, all of this dis-info.
Jakub: Yeah. And you get the same thing in the West.
Anastasiia: Definitely.
Jakub: For decades, the Soviet agencies would sort of leverage anti-war movements, anti-nuclear movements. If you've sort of been approached, if you feel like for whatever reason Russia plays an important role in countering the U.S. or whatever. There's a lot of people who have their own reasons, for that.
How likely are you going to go along with it after all of the sort of disasters of this year. All of the people who have been uncovered, all of the incompetences that you've seen, like basically just this long list of failures.
You look at this sort of cartoonishly weak organization and you think like, “Really, do I want to risk working with them? Like are these people going to be competent enough to entrust my career, my safety, my life perhaps?” I think a lot of people say, “Maybe not. Maybe I'm not quite ready.”
Anastasiia: Yeah, I think definitely this war has completely ruined Russia's reputation around the world and in specific circles. And there will always be people who do not fall for this and who really keep on being completely persuaded in a huge NATO, U.S, whatever led enemy.
Jakub: By the way, like, if it completely fails, like I think the narrative is going to be betrayal of the top. Like this is what you already see on the Vagner Telegram channels and in their videos is that they believe that like the people in charge are essentially betraying the ideals.
Anastasiia: Isn't it crazy just how much history repeats itself?
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Jakub: First as a first, then as a tragedy and then just endless sequels.
Specifically, this failure of the FSB early on in the war, sort of in the run up to the war. I remember I spent quite a few years in Kyiv and there was always this kind of … it was almost like a cliché that Russia would send diplomats agents very highly trained, very highly skilled, speaking local languages, learning everything about the country that they go to, but to Ukraine, they would never speak Ukrainian. They never made the effort. There was always sort of this incredible blind spot.
And then I think the Washington Post had this story and there were some documents that were circulating about the FSB sort of commissioning, essentially sociological research that said, don't invade because nobody really supports you.
As that report was carried up the hierarchy of the FSB and towards Putin, every time the title of it would change to, well maybe you can invade and then actually you probably should, to Ukrainians are pining for Russian liberators, right?
Michael: Exactly. You never want to displease the tsar.
Jakub: So, you think that's credible. That's a credible interpretation of what happened?
Michael: Absolutely, absolutely.
Jakub: That's crazy.
Michael: And then, you can evenly distribute culpability in Russia. What is the old line? The Kremlin has many towers. Look Putin, we obviously don't know what's going on behind closed doors and who he's yelling at, to put it mildly.
But let us recall that extraordinary dressing down of Naryshkin at the start of the war, the SVR director, speak plainly, remember that brusque bark that Putin had to his own head of foreign intelligence.
One could in hindsight look at that and say, well, maybe the sort of … and the SVR is considered to be the gentleman spy service. These are the more educated and refined and sophisticated and nuanced intelligence officers of Russia. Maybe the SVR was saying, “This ain’t going to go the way you think.”
Whereas the FSB and perhaps even the GRU were saying, “Oh no, don't worry about it, be a cakewalk.” Again, tanks rolling down Kreshchatyk in 72 hours in all of this.
Ukraine is going to be studied for generations to come. Ukraine, in a way, and this may upset some of your listeners, it doesn't need to join NATO anymore. It has getting a NATO standardized military, it has done single-handedly where it counts, the heavy lifting that which NATO was founded to do collectively, which is defeat the Russian or Soviet military.
And at the intelligence level from captured kit to interrogations of POWs to just studying granular detail at close proximity, the Russian way of war, to what the Ukrainians, what the SBU is doing with these interceptions to recruiting guerrilla warfare actors inside Russia who may or may not be ethnic Russians themselves. All of these things are going to be — it is a bonanza for NATO.
Jakub: Absolutely.
Michael: It's a bonanza for the West. And so, even if you don't have a humanitarian imperative to help Ukraine win the war, if you're just a cynical bastard and you just care about utilitarianism, this war so far and Ukraine's victory in it is a gift. It is going to be an object lesson for, as I say, generations to come.
And honestly, it's also debunked so many myths that we have either received or seamlessly integrated into our own discourse and understanding of Russia and its role in the world, the 10-foot-tall giant that can destroy the globe.
All of these things that for years some of us have been arguing against, have been demolished within the space of not even nine months.
Jakub: Yeah. And I imagine, just to close off on the intelligence service part, you were talking at the beginning about sort of the international appealing, cosmopolitan, intellectual kind of nature of Soviet Intelligence Services in the 1930s, last decade or two at least, there was this powerful actor. I imagine that now recruiting people around the world is just-
Michael: They're going to have a hard time.
Jakub: Yeah.
Michael: They're going to have a hard time. The global south notwithstanding, which is a whole other topic of discussion. But in Europe it's going to be tricky.
There are always going to be people who will offer themselves up to an enemy nation, whether it's for money or resentment and recrimination. All these people are always going to be with us, unfortunately.
But the ideological zeal or the kind of idealism that drives a lot of people to go over to the other side, sure you have far left anti-imperialist tankies. You have fascists who still like Putin and defend him, but it's not in the zeitgeist anymore.
And this is not to downplay or diminish the threat posed by Russia. I didn't agree with the Obama administration's characterization of Russia as this kind of transactional power and a regional nuisance. We've seen they're not just a regional nuisance.
So, I'm not trying to say that Russia is this kind of like spent force in the world. It's not. But will they ever get what they used to have? No. And that politics of nostalgia, as Timothy Snyder puts it, that that longing to have this restored grand juror that they are a great power in the making.
And I think another historian, Ronald Hingley puts it well, he says, the sort of the Russian mindset is an inferiority complex wrapped in a superiority complex. They think of themselves as the greatest nation on earth and the greatest people on earth, but they resent the fact that nobody agrees with them.
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Jakub: That's a really good characterization. Thank you so much, Michael.
Michael: Anytime. Thanks for having me.
Anastasiia: In two weeks in Power Lines, we're going to be looking into the work that is done by NGOs, who have been bringing aid and advocating for the people of Ukraine. And asking the question of why the major NGOs have found it so difficult to do so and what they can learn from smaller, more effective ones.
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Anastasiia: Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It 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.