BERLIN—The perfect intelligence officer does not look like an intelligence officer. He does not spend his evenings exchanging envelopes beneath railway bridges, and there is no reason for him to possess a pistol hidden behind a false wall. He may have a mortgage. His children go to school with everybody else’s children, neighbors have known him for fifteen years, somebody from work remembers drinking too much with him at a Christmas party, while his passport, tax returns and professional biography describe a life so tediously ordinary that nobody would dream of looking at it twice.
We publish this newsletter every day at 9:05am NYC time / 4:05pm Kyiv.Your subscription fuels our work.
This is precisely the point. In the vocabulary of Russian intelligence such people have traditionally been known as illegals, officers operating without the diplomatic protection that normally surrounds embassy intelligence personnel, sometimes beneath identities patiently constructed over years. They are expensive to create and dangerous to lose, but their great advantage is obvious. A diplomat suspected of espionage can be watched from the moment he arrives. The friendly consultant who has lived around the corner since 1997 is another matter entirely. It is entirely plausible that these illegals are everywhere in the West. A few cases highlight that they have been around since the cold war.
The system is not a paranoid fantasy left over from John le Carré. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, inherited the Soviet tradition of illegal residencies and continued using it after the Cold War supposedly ended. What makes the phenomenon unsettling is precisely the amount of time involved. A useful illegal does not necessarily arrive with instructions to steal the defense minister’s papers next Thursday. His first assignment may simply be to become somebody. Education follows, then employment and friendships, perhaps marriage, while the invented biography slowly acquires the most useful quality a false biography can possess. And large portions of it become true. After twenty years there really are colleagues who have known this person for twenty years. The house is real. So are the children. Only the foundation underneath the life is fraudulent and build upon a mission: Infiltrating the enemies of Russia.
Germany discovered an almost textbook version in October 2011 when Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag were arrested after having lived in the Federal Republic of Germany for roughly two decades. Their names were false. According to the German authorities they were Russian intelligence officers who had originally been inserted under the Soviet system and subsequently worked for the SVR. Their apparently unremarkable German existence concealed communications with Moscow and intelligence work that ultimately reached into NATO and the European Union. Particularly valuable was a source in the Dutch Foreign Ministry, Raymond Poeteray, who supplied large quantities of classified material. The Anschlags were convicted of espionage in 2013. Whatever one thinks about the romance attached to old-fashioned spy stories, there was nothing especially romantic about the result. Just two people had spent a substantial part of their adult lives inside German society while secretly serving Moscow, and through them Russian intelligence obtained access to a European official handling sensitive NATO and EU information.
