So is Russia indeed a pistocracy ruled by its bumps? Competing for influence in the just like everybody else. Hello, I'm Galeotti, and welcome to my view of Russia in Moscow Shadows. This podcast, of varying length, frequency, and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the Crisis Exercise Software Company Conductor. Hello. So I gave a little presentation at Soyuz in Berlin the week before last on the Russian intelligence services and political power. And really what I want to do is just use this as an opportunity to expand and play around with some of the ideas that I discussed then. And it very much came off the back of having to think about this question about as some people are claiming that Russia is a Czechistocracy from Czechar, the uh original Bolshevik political police, and that therefore it's about Russia being dominated by, controlled by its spooks, its intelligence and security services. However, the truth of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, that really we should think of them more as just another set of institutional actors. Admittedly, ones with certain distinctive characteristics, powers, and opportunities, but nonetheless that they are in a very similar kind of political entrepreneurial role as many other groups. Sometimes they're cooperating, often they're competing, and they certainly also have all kinds of divisions within them. But so when it comes down to it, yes, they are more like bureaucrats in trench coats or political entrepreneurs in epaulettes.
And one of the ways of thinking about this, I think, is when we talk about power, we kind of treat it as if it's one big thing. And I think we too rarely think about the particular varieties of power in this kind of a system, or indeed in any kind of system, but obviously we're particularly talking about Putin's Russia. And so what I want to do is, and this is something that is more broadly applicable, and there may be other sorts of power that I'm not contemplating, but break down the different sorts of power and discuss how far we can really say that the intelligence and security community can indeed wield that. And
at the top we have controlling power, which is precisely where you are able to actually dictate policy. And to be able to say that the Czechisti, the spooks have got that, we would have to be able to find some examples when precisely they were able to clearly force Putin to change his policy, adopt one line, abandon another. And I confess, and look, I'd be delighted to hear from any of you if you could put any examples, but I confess I haven't seen any such. When it comes down to it, Putin is able to control these agencies or work with them. Because
then the next form of power, which I'll dwell on in a bit more detail, is what we could call personal or court power, which is precisely that capacity to have a quiet word with the boss, to know that he will be listening to you, that he will actually take your advice, your guidance, your perspectives seriously. And in such a personalistic system, that is precisely about the people involved. For example, Alexander Bortnikov, director of the FSB, the Federal Security Service. I mean, he clearly is someone whom Putin rates highly. He's not really a kind of a close friend. We don't see them socializing, but nonetheless, you know, Putin actually trusts him, which is no small thing. And in fact, that might actually have redounded to Bortnikov's disc disservice. This is a guy who is old, he's well past the 70-year mark, which is meant to be the obligatory retirement age. He's ill by all accounts, he can't really do more than a couple of days' work a week. But Putin is not allowing him to leave. For all sorts of reasons, not least the fact that he doesn't really know and trust necessarily the people below him, and I'll come on to that in a moment. So Bortnikov is on the one hand prized and therefore presumably listened to, but on the other hand, that also means that he has made himself inconveniently indispensable. We can contrast that with Sergei Narishkin, the director of the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service. You remember the guy whom Putin had such fun tormenting during that televised Security Council meeting before the Ukraine invasion? Narishkin, again, it's someone whom Putin, I think, trusts on a political level, but clearly doesn't have that same esteem for him, doesn't have that same sense that what he says has weight. And this is also, I think, an explanation for why the GRU, military intelligence, or GU technically, but we'll call it the GRU henceforth, doesn't seem to have much political influence at the moment, because its head, Vice Admiral Kastjuk, doesn't have any kind of personal relationship with Putin, doesn't on the whole even brief Putin directly, and that matters for reasons I'll I'll come to in a moment. And generally speaking, if you don't have that personal relationship with Putin, you're not going to have court power. And this is something, as I talked about why Bortnikov's staying in place. We've got to remember that the next political generation down, especially within the intelligence community, do not have that kind of relationship with Putin. They're not people whom Putin knew back when he was in the KGB, or whom, let's say, when he was in St. Petersburg, or who were close to him when that one year when he was director of the FSB. They are a different generation. They're people whom he did not try and reach out and build alliances or personal relationships with when he was president. Why should he? He was president. But conversely, their positions meant that they were not people who would find themselves in the president's circle in that time. So he knows them in the sense of no doubt he's seen them talk, they've briefed him at some point, he's read their dossiers, but he doesn't have that kind of genuine human-level connection with them. And that means that he won't necessarily give them the same degree of weight. And it's also worth noting, Shoigu is not one of the Czechisti. Even though clearly he has been through various points in his career Czechist adjacent, and he's now a Secretary of the Security Council, one of what is meant to be the sort of key figures articulating the consensus of the security community to Putin. But the point is he's still not one of them. And although he may or may not, it's hard to know quite what his relationship with Putin is these days, he may or may not have that personal relationship. Nonetheless, his job does give him that access. But the point is that he's not someone who will automatically and instinctively believe that his role is to advance the cause of the intelligence and security services and present their own perspective. Unlike his predecessor, Nikolai Patrushev, himself a career spook. And although the Security Council Secretariat, in other words, the staffing of the apparatus around Shoigu is still really the one that Patrushev built up, and therefore just by inertia, it remains spook central. Without that same push from the top, without that the guy at the top actually going and talking to Putin and bringing forward the perspectives. Remember, Patrushev very much became de facto national security advisor because of his role, a role that Shoigu is unable, or more likely I would suggest, uninterested in taking up. So that's one fewer element of personal or court power that the security agencies can mobilize. And I think over time we'll find the Secretariat becoming a bit less of a Czechist lobby. But then there's a third sort of power, and the other two have been very much about essentially advancing your own initiatives.
There's also the power of resistance, the capacity to at least ignore or foil those policies that you regard as antithetical to your interests. And here we absolutely have seen the intelligence and security services. I'm sorry, it's such a mouthful. I mean, so I either use spooks and checkists or intelligence and security services because it's also about the internal security agencies. Sorry about that. Anyway, there is clear evidence of them actually being able to protect their interests in particular by actually challenging and pushing back against what the boss wants. Now, for me, one of the best examples was back in 2016, when Putin wanted to make his former bodyguard Dumin head of the GRU. This was not something that went down well with the agency, because you know Dumin, I mean, he clearly is a smart guy. He's turned out to be actually quite an effective politician, first as governor of Tula and now as Secretary of the State Council. But the point is he did he was he was a bullet catcher, not a strategic intelligence analyst. GIU didn't think he was the right person for the job, and they also resented the idea of an outsider being foisted upon them. Shoigu and Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, were also unhappy with the idea. Now they couldn't just outright say to Putin, no, not going to happen. What they could do, and then what they did do, is drag their feet and at the same time sort of try and build a campaign to create some notion that there was a consensus that this was not the right idea. And interestingly enough, the FSB supported them in this, not because there's any particular friendship between the FSB and the GRU, but because they didn't like the idea of the precedent being established of an outsider being parachuted in to run one of these services. So from their point, because it's it's different. The head of the SVR has a rather different role. The head of GRU, head of FSB, they are operational roles, and there is a sense it needs to be an insider. And so over time they they dragged it out, and Putin in part lost interest and in part was convinced that maybe this wasn't the right move, and therefore Duman went elsewhere. We could perhaps also talk about ways in which the agencies can just simply ignore what's being said. Particularly, for example, in 2019 Putin was making a lot of promises about tax amnesties and the like because he wanted to encourage de-offshoring. The FSB essentially ignored it. Indeed, they actually used a lot of the tax records that were being provided as the basis for prosecutions and what really were kind of raiding operations to steal assets. One could perhaps also look at the way that the FSB in particular has evaded the blame for misinforming Putin so that he launched his invasion of Ukraine, telling him that there are all these agents ready to rise up and support the Russians when in fact they weren't, and indeed its failure to prevent a string of assassinations of senior military commanders. I do have an alternative explanation for that, which will which will follow. But you know, it is clear that to a degree the intelligence services can try to foil Putin. They can't absolutely refuse him. This is why it's not a controlling power. If he'd actually just flat out said Duman's going to be the next head of the GRU, do it, then they would have done it. But because that's not Putin's style, especially when it comes to the spooks, they had a window of opportunity in which they could lobby him to resist, or else they just simply say yes, sir, and go back, particularly when it's not something as obvious and high profile as that, and just simply ignore or reinterpret, put it more kindly, what the boss wants.
The fourth kind of power, which to me is, I think, also the most interesting kind of power, is what I'm calling conceptual dominance. And on a very crass level, this is familiar to anyone who has ever watched the thoroughly splendid British political sitcoms Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, in which the urbane civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby, consistently bamboozles his notional political master, Jim Hacker. And the idea here, and you know, obviously that's that that's a comedy, so it's a caricature, but nonetheless, the degree to which you may well be the political decision maker, but you are nonetheless dependent upon the information that you are being given by those around you. You are cocooned, you are surrounded by people who will be presenting a certain view of the world, they will be painting a picture of the world, and also of the risks, opportunities, and the options at your disposal. And therefore, yes, you are the decider, but arguably the menu of choices from which you are picking have been very, very heavily set by those around you, especially when they can insulate you from rival perspectives, which is definitely something we see with Putin. Putin has deliberately insulated himself from uncomfortable alternative perspectives. So I think this is a crucial area. We know that Putin is a spook fanboy. You know, he joined the KGB having wanted to do so as a kid. And although he was a mediocre intelligence officer, nonetheless he continues to have considerable reverence for the quote-unquote new nobility. So he listens to them and he pays more attention to them than many other interest groups. You know, we've heard time and again about these infamous three briefing books that Putin gets first thing, I wasn't saying in the morning, doesn't always start work in the morning, first thing when he starts work. One from the FSB on the situation inside the country, one from the SVR on the situation abroad, and one from the FSO, the Federal Protection Service, on the situation within the elite. And I imagine that these days that's an even thicker document than before. And the degree to which that conditions his view of the challenges of the day. And as I say, I've heard from Russian diplomats who grumble that about the degree to which by the time they get, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gets to make its case and present what it thinks are the key issues and the key best responses, Putin has already had his mind more or less made up because of what the intelligence community are telling him. And when he sees a discrepancy between what the spies and the diplomats are saying, he will generally assume that the spies have it right. And look, obviously again, here the invasion of Ukraine is a classic example of that. And yes, it it's a it's a feedback loop here. You know, Putin believes certain things, and the intelligence community flatter those assumptions rather than challenging them, telling him, yes, of course, the Ukrainians, they're all miserable, they're not really going to fight to defend this artificial country. Yes, of course, there are all sorts of people who are willing to throw their lot in with some kind of imposed occupation regime and such like. But it's not just that. I think we can also look at the general hostility and the with the West and with NATO in particular, and that sense that it is indeed a force that is truly committed in its desire to at the very least humble Russia, but quite possibly also break it up. Now, there's always a problem in trying to unpick reality from propaganda, but I really don't think that it is just propaganda. I genuinely think that Putin himself probably it's always hard to know quite what he says, but certainly a lot of the people around him genuinely believe that that is the case, that NATO is a lot more active and aggressive than I would say it really is. And again, this is particularly because of this pernicious alliance of Pathrushev back when he was National Security Advisor in de facto and the intelligence services. But of course, again, it goes with the grain. It's most effective when it goes with the grain of the boss's prejudices and assumptions. And this is indeed one of the problems that the GRU has had without the kind of personal link. It gets to present its perspectives, generally speaking, not directly, but rather through the Minister of Defence, through the Chief of the General Staff, through the Security Council Secretariat. And when it can't present alternative perspectives, and there are quite a few data points I would suggest, suggesting that there were certainly within the GRU there were serious concerns about the invasion. And Shoigu may well have been willing to a degree to express them, but they were watered down by Shoigu's own natural political caution. Gerasimov, on the other hand, does not seem to have been willing to stand up and argue the GRU's perspective because he was already inside Putin's little informal kitchen cabinet drawing up plans for this stupid invasion. In that case, it was actually very difficult for them to present any kind of alternative perspectives and challenge the conceptual dominance of, for example, the FSB. But this is not also, sorry, not only done through direct briefings and papers reaching Putin's desk from the agencies. It's also often about influencing those people and those institutions which themselves would have influence on policy. So this might well be the controlled leaks that you use to shift the media coverage in the direction that you want. The think tanks that you have commissioned or lent on or flattered into presenting the right kind of perspective. And the example that I would give is how the FSB has been pushing back against the degree of, as it sees it, undue tolerance given Chinese intelligence operations inside Russia. I mean the FSB has become increasingly open. At first, it was making more public coverage of those cases of Russians caught passing secrets to the Chinese, particularly, this tends to be technical espionage of various particular advances in naval and other technologies. And then we have the FSB openly saying that there is more Chinese espionage on Russian soil now than there was before 2022. These are all attempts, through, in a way, building a climate of opinion, to influence the boss, but precisely by painting a picture. By in this case, painting a picture of a China that is maybe a necessary ally at the moment, but also a strategic rival. So I think conceptual dominance, I think, is one of the most interesting forms of power, in which you just simply you don't, as it were, force the boss to say anything, but you you put the boss in a situation in which he will naturally be inclined in the directions you want. I mean, there's this term reflexive control that gets thrown about a lot. I think it's used too much. There is an assumption that the Russians have these sort of magic capabilities, and one of them is reflexive control, is precisely where you basically manipulate your rival, your target, into a position in which they, feeling they have no option or feeling it's their best choice, will do what you want them to do. Well, that reflexive control is very much used, I would suggest, against the leadership.
Next kind of power, what I'm calling preemptive authority, which is not where actually you can force the leadership to do something or to not do something, but rather because the leadership doesn't want to challenge or undermine you, it you might say it it censors, it limits its own options in advance. It kind of automatically avoids challenging your interests. So again, it's a it's a it's a fairly subtle form of power. It's one where I mean I don't necessarily say that the leadership fears you, though it might be, but it also fears doing anything to undermine you. And I think this is one of the reasons why, for example, again, I mentioned there was an alternative explanation, why Putin hasn't gone after the FSB, despite the fact that it has failed so many times and so signalling, it's not necessarily that it fears the FSB, but that it really can't afford the sort of churn that a change in leadership, a purging of various departments just generally sort of bearing down hard upon the FSB, what that would do to morale and staff retention and the like, at a time when it feels it needs the FSB to be fighting the Ukrainian spies and saboteurs, as well as dissidents at home. So it goes easy on the FSB, not because the FSB said, Oi, Putin, hands off, but because it itself. Thinks, well, this is not the time to be doing so. Another case could have been for how long certain ultranationalists were allowed to mouth off about the Kremlin in ways that no liberals could ever have got away with. Classic example, Igor Gierkin, Strelkov. I mean, he he was breaking that most important of taboos in that he didn't just simply criticize policy or people around Putin, he criticized Putin directly. Sorry, quote, our unique strategic advantage, as he tongue-in-cheek presented him, and yet got away with it for so long, really until the Pragosian mutiny. Well, in part, I think this was because Putin was aware that people like Strelkov spoke for a small minority of Russians, but one which was disproportionately represented within the military and within the security apparatus. So there was a sense of, hmm, we want to allow this as a way of them blowing off steam. So rather than challenge this constituency, we'll let the Strelkovs of this world get away with it, and said, until it seemed to become a little bit too dangerous.
But finally, there's transactional power, which is actually the sort of power you get just simply because you are able to form alliances, form coalitions. I mean, and this, I mean, in some ways it's a it's a kind of sense of mutual assistance, which clearly presupposes a degree of equality. It's that I will do things for you, not because I have no option, but because you will do things for me. We'll make reach a bargain. So I think this is not so much happening at the level of the apex of the system with Putin, but below the apex. And again, I think this is crucial and this is sometimes sort of not fully taken on board. The degree to which precisely power is often not so much about directly influencing Putin, but building up coalitions, especially with those people who can influence Putin, or at least whose views will eventually percolate into Putin's information space. I mean, again, it's worth noting that case I mentioned about Dumin, you know, where we actually had the Ministry of Defence, the Chief of the General Staff, GU and the FSB all operating together. And often this is actually going to be at a sub-institutional level. So in other words, it's not the FSB, it's a particular service or a particular individual or a particular group of people who have their own interests, which may or may not be anything to do with the institution. I mean, we see a lot of raiding of assets, in which clearly we have cabals in which, say, the FSB, people or people from the FSB, people from the investigatory committee, as well as people from within the courts and the wider judiciary work together in order to seize assets and have them transferred to some business person who is essentially either paying them off or is their front man. So, you know, we we have all these kind of alliances forming. We have regional alliances forming, and again, and this is one of the interesting, still relatively unsung stories. Just as happened in later Brezhnevism, when the perspective of regional elites is that Moscow is becoming the problem, and when social mobility is down, and it's certainly true that if you look at, for example, the FSB, the chances of people transferring from regional FSBs into the plum jobs in Moscow is much, much less these days. So you're always thinking, well, look, you know, here I am in Chabarovsk or wherever, and this is where I'm probably going to be staying. So I might as well form local links instead of thinking myself as Moscow's eyes and ears in Chabarovsk, and I've just picked that city at random. Instead, I will forge alliances here. And if that means that we, in effect, are going to end up ripping Moscow off because I'm telling them that nothing's going on, and my mates in the mayor's office are embezzling this and that and so forth, well then so be it. So I think there is a lot of this kind of alliances going on, but again, very transactional. Just simply you do something for me and I'll do something for you. And we can also see this uh taking place in national
policy. And the case study that I use is of the internet outages and of the campaign against the Telegram social messaging service. The FSB had long wanted to try and close its grip on the RUNET, on the Russian internet, but for technical and political reasons it hadn't been able to do so. Then you had the FSO for purely protective reasons, wanting and pushing forward the idea of localized internet outages wherever Putin and other key people might be to prevent them being used exactly for coordinating attacks, vectoring drones and the like on it. And once that principle had been established, the FSB runs with it, especially the Second Service, because they see this as an opportunity to A, do their job more easily if they can basically cut off the internet from the outside world, and also break certain hard to intercept channels within the country. Secondly, that this is a power grab, it makes them important, it gives them control over a whole set of different economic interests, really. And thirdly, of course, there's the pure corrupt angle in that you can monetize this. The internet outages work on the principle of whitelists. So, in other words, you can only reach sites and services that have been explicitly unlocked. Well, the point is that means that you have the power to basically say, lovely online business you've got here, shame if you couldn't actually connect with your customers and extort money as a result. So this is confluence of you know wider political issues and just venality. And the interesting thing is that the coalition that is currently in support of these campaigns of controls, it includes obviously not just much of the FSB, but also Roskom Nadzor, which is the telecommunications watchdog and overseer agency. And interestingly, I mean that is under the Ministry of Digital Development. And the minister in question, Maksu Shadaev, is actually opposed to the internet outages. So, you know, we see this point about we shouldn't just assume that, you know, ministries, agencies, and the like are monolithic blocks. The coalition also includes, for example, people who are frankly we could call them influencers, like the propagandist Vladimir Salayov. I mean, he's he's quite keen on on this because he has been granted access. You know, he has he's on the whitelist, he's not on Telegram, he's on the government's favoured news service Max and such like. So this actually allows him to both big himself up as a great patriotic force and at the same time see his rivals excluded. And indeed, that also applies more broadly. I mean, there are companies that are supporting the outages precisely because they can use the whitelists as a way to exclude their competition from the market. Against them, on the other hand, well, obviously there are the most of the business interests, most of the technocrats. Interestingly, for their own reasons, we have both first deputy heads of the presidential administration, Sergei Kiryenka and Alexei Gromov, who are opposed. There's even some suggestion that DVKR, which is the branch of the FSB that is technically called the Military Counterintelligence Service, but it's more generally the sort of watching over the military service, who actually have expressed some doubts precisely because of the degree to which clamping down on telegram limits the use of this on the front line by Russian soldiers to communicate necessary tactical information. So again, power is complex, and we shouldn't just think of it as you know big institutions and a single ladder or hierarchy of power. There's a whole variety of different forms of power mobilized in different ways at different times, and that's what makes the political scene so complex. Even if, yes, you have just one decider, but you have all kinds of different ways in which you can influence and shape that decider's decisions. So that's a kind of a broad sense, which is really just an appeal to be thinking in more complex ways about power in the Putinist system. But
following on this spookish theme, let's have a break and then let me talk about three particular recent books, all of which essentially relate to covert actions and what in one form or another. Just
the usual mid-episode reminder that you're listening to the In Moscow Shadows podcast. Its corporate partner and sponsor is Conductor, which provides software for crisis exercises in hybrid warfare, counterterrorism, and civil affairs. But you can also support the podcast yourself by going to patreon.com slash in Moscow Shadows. And remember that patrons, as well as knowing that they're supporting this peerless source on all things Russian, get a variety of additional perks depending on their tier, including articles I've written, the most weekly Gavarit Moscovar press briefing, and other bonus content like the Chronicles of a Different Russia alternative histories. And you can also follow me on Twitter at Mark Galliotti or on Facebook, MarkGaleotti on Russia. Now back to the episode. Before I start, let me just briefly mention that on Tuesday evening I will be speaking at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College London as part of the event to relaunch Slova, the student-run academic journal, which a long, long, long time ago I was one of the co-editors. I'll leave a link in the programme notes if you're going to be around and you want to come. I imagine the Mazaric room in which will be held has air conditioning. I can certainly hope so. Anyway, so maybe see you Tuesday evening. So, as I said, I wanted to talk about three books, a trio, all written by journalists, and all truly, in my opinion, first rate. Now, I should just mention a little point about my philosophy of book reviews.
On the whole, I'm not going to be bothering to cover books that I think are either bad or okay. I think it seems a waste of my time and a waste of yours. I will occasionally, very occasionally, cover books that I think are bad, either because they have some aspect of them that I think is particularly interesting or relevant, or precisely because I really, really want to push back against some aspect of their central theme. Generally speaking, though, I'm only going to bring to your attention books that I think are good. So it's not that I think that all books are good, it's just that the other ones I don't waste your time with. Anyway, so three books. I I know it's always a bit of a cliche to they say these kind of books, you know, read like spy thrillers. But in this case, in different ways, they all do, and I think all benefit in the process. Anyway, the three books are Sean Walker's The Illegals, Russia's Most Audacious Spies, and the Plot to Infiltrate the West, from Profile Books in 2025. Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson's Swap, A Secret History of the New Cold War, Harper Collins, 2025, and Bojan Panchevsky's The Nord Stream Conspiracy, Hutchinson, 2026.
So let's start with Sean Walker's book. Now, you know, I imagine that many of my listeners are going to know who Sean Walker is, long time Russia correspondent for The Guardian. Now there's an East Europe person, very good journalist, and we actually have a shared experience of the two of us were on the first Russian stop list of people indefinitely barred, back in, or of Brits rather, back in June of 2022, and the surreal thing was that Sean and I were about the only people on that list who actually ever really traveled to Russia. Now, I will confess that in the main I tend to have a slight prejudice against the sort of books that journalists, in particular journalists that they go to Russia, and it's almost that sense of, well, if you've been a Russia correspondent, well then when you leave, it's time to write your book. And that these books tend to be often very readable, but more than a little bit routine. You know, usual cast of characters, the quietly resolute dissident, the chain smoking artsy types, the cheerfully cynical government hacks, and well no, you you know the drill. If if AI could actually write like a human being, what you might get. The exceptions, though, do tend to be exceptional, and and this is one such. Walker starts with the 2010 Illegals case. Do you remember that? All those Russian deep cover agents who were sort of rounded up, with with one exception, pro the exception being the one of them who actually probably had did any real good. I mean, this was an extraordinary case in which the Russians spent a huge amount of resource building up the cover identities, the so-called legends, for these people, implanting them, and probably learnt very little other than perhaps the best place to get a latte in downtown DC. The point is then from that, Walker broadens it out to sort of a wider history of Russian illegals. Again, so these are specifically those kind of, you know, the Americans style, the TV series, um, sort of deep cover agents, on the basis of you know, loads and loads of interviews and archival material and the like. And one of the things that interested me was precisely why Russia historically, because it's not just under under post-Soviet Russia, it's very much a feature of the of the old uh Soviet system, why they're so enamoured of illegals, in that this is something that is incredibly expensive, because you you know you do have to train these people so that they can plausibly present themselves as being totally different people from totally different countries, speaking languages fluently and the like, understanding all those unspoken little sort of national idioms and quirks and characteristics. It's incredibly complex and it is so often so deeply ineffective. And in many ways, I would suggest, this is just my take, is that this is a kind of a metaphor for a lot of intelligence gathering. Most intelligence that is gathered is no big deal. Is just the same as you would get from open source reporting. And I mean, I know this just again going back to my own very brief experience back in the 1990s when I was a consumer of classified material in my time at the Foreign Office. Most of it you think, yeah, well, yeah, I knew that. The point is not the 95% that is banal. The point is the 5%, or whatever the percentage, even if it's 1%, which actually may well be truly pivotal, that really does change your perspective, or that absolutely confirms your hunch, because often the value of intelligence is not that it tells you something you really didn't have any idea about. It's that you had a sense that something was happening, but it was just a sense, and sure you could assemble some open source in support, but you could also just as easily assemble open source questioning it, but that then this gives you some greater degree of confidence in the outcome. So in some ways, one has to accept that most intelligence gathering is is doomed to be pointless, but that's the necessary price for those nuggets of gold that you'll get amidst all the gravel. And in particular, you know, it certainly made sense for the early Bolshevik state to be so obsessed with with these illegals, because remember, most intelligence agent officers abroad, not agents, officers, they are operating under diplomatic cover. Yeah, they're the classic, I mean, oh, cliche, the sort of second cultural attache or the defence attache or whatever, who actually, as their second job, are off recruiting and running human intelligence sources. But the point is the Bolshevik state didn't have diplomatic relations with most Western countries. So, you know, again, it it had to use alternative ways of recruiting and moving agents into these Western countries that they regarded very much and frankly much more credibly than now as a genuine malign threat. And likewise, perhaps in the height of the Cold War, one could argue that their diplomatic, you know, officers under diplomatic cover were much, much more sort of carefully monitored. And it also reflects a state that historically has been more willing to take risks. It's a lovely little anecdote about in 1936 the British ambassador in Moscow refused permission to have an MI6 station operating in the embassy because their presence might, quote, cause embarrassment, unquote. Well, Moscow very rarely worries too much about embarrassment. So, anyway, it's a story of the illegals, lots, you know, fascinating cast of individuals. I I particularly loved the story of, again, this is going back to the interwar period, um, Dmitri Bistro Lyotov, who had been a seafarer, a gravedigger, and a law student, I mean, how's that for a resume, before being recruited, and then took on a whole series of false covers. So there was the Hungarian count fallen on hard times, Canadian timber merchant, a Greek businessman, Dutch artist, a British aristocrat, and in particular, I mean he groomed as a source a disaffected British Foreign Office staffer, an alcoholic by the name of Ernest Oldham, who then would become, and this is a real intelligence coup, a cipher clerk. In other words, had access to the coding. Anyway, so lots and lots of nice vignettes, very good also on the use of illegals monitoring Czechoslovakia before and after the 1968 Prague Spring was crushed. Got to remember that intelligence activities that don't always take place around what you might think of as the outside world. And also a nice little tale of a young Sergei Ivanov, remember who who's just died, who'd been posted to Helsinki in the 80s, striking up a friendship with his US opposite number, and apparently a, you know, a sort of a very cordial relationship. They went for dinner at each other's and so forth. But it later transpired that once when he was at dinner, he had sprayed the American with this odorless, colourless dust with a special chemical marker, so that later the Soviets could check the clothes and belongings of their diplomats, and if any of them showed traces of this dust, they knew they'd have a potential traitor. I mean, such is the paranoia of intelligence life. And also, little note, actually, I should mention, that there's a case about Yuri Andropov, while he was head of the KGB, meeting the legendary agent runner Yuri Drozdov, whom he would then go on to appoint as head of director at S, which ran the Illegals program, over lemon tea. Well, as longtime listeners will know, as my view is clearly that it is, indeed, as I sip it right now while while we're talking, that is the true beverage of distinction. But of course, the real big question is whether or not in an era of biometric identities, of belling cat and other open source analysts, and indeed of social media, illegals have any place yet. And honestly, I'm I'm not so sure, although the point is made at the end of the book that it only takes just one of these illegals to pull off an a sort of a genuine intelligence coup to justify the whole program, which again going back to the 5% versus 95% argument. And indeed, as Hinshaw and Parkinson note in the book that I'll come to next, you know, it was illegals who pulled off some of the greatest intelligence coups of the 20th century, from infiltrating the Manhattan Project to recruiting the Cambridge Five. But the thing is that, you know, one of its real values of this uh whole program is precisely what it does about getting inside the heads of its enemies, of the degree to which Western counterintelligence services are going to see, if not reds, red, white, and blues, under every bed and actually end up counterproductively sort of hunting traitors within their own ranks. I mean, that's that's also a valuable effect because there's nothing more disruptive to an intelligence service than a mole hunt. But what does it say maybe about power in Moscow, though? Well, again, I think that it actually speaks to the whole notion of conceptual dominance because there's also a particular value in claiming that you have information that is coming from an insider. It's one thing to say this is what our, you know, telecommunications intercepts suggest, or this is what our analysts believe. But to be able to go to a political leader and say, we have a guy on the inside who can tell us this as a fact, that has a lot of power. And I think again, one of the one of the things that drives intelligence services is, after all, not just gathering intelligence, but relevance. They have to be able to breathe. They have to be able to actually convince the policymakers of their significance and their accuracy. And this is a powerful asset in that respect for them.
Now moving on, Hinshaw and Parkinson and their book Swap. I mean, they're both Wall Street Journal veteran journalists, and so it's not at all surprising that the heart of this book is the case of Evan Gershkovich, who was the Wall Street Journal's Moscow correspondent, was arrested in Yerkaterinburg in 2023, charged by the FSB with acting on behalf of foreign intelligence, and attempting to collect classified information about Ural Vagon Zavod, which is one of the biggest tank making tank makers in Russia. And well, there was no surprise he was going to be convicted. He was indeed duly convicted in June 2024, because let's face it, the FSB doesn't lose cases in Russian courts, and he was sentenced to 16 years in prison. And therefore, despite the admittedly slightly overbroad subtitle, um, you know, remember the book is called Swap, a secret history of the new cold war, it's first and foremost about the whole process that led up to the massive 26-person prisoner exchange in Turkey that saw Gershkovich released in August 2024, the largest prisoner exchange in post-Cold War history. And it uses this just to spin off and talk about some of the wider dynamics of Western cooperation, collaboration, and confrontation with Russia, how nonetheless contacts could be made and a deal struck. And you know, it's worth noting after all that essentially most of the people whom the West got back were poor bastards who were caught in the firing line when the Russians were just simply assembling uh commodities to bargain with. Whereas what the Russians got were a collection of spies, money launderers, and cyber criminals. Especially, I think the one person they really wanted to get back was Vadim Krasikov, who was a Russian contract killer, who'd then been recruited by the FSB, given a rank within their Wimpel Special Operations Unit, and who had been used to go and kill Zelenkan Kangoshvili, a Chechen, very virulently anti-Moscow Chechen, who had fought against the Russians in both Chechnya and Georgia and was passing information on to the Western Intelligence Services. Anyway, he was gunned down in Berlin by Krasikov, and the Russians really wanted him back. Now, Hinshorn and Parkinson very much write, I mean they say it themselves, in the narrative non-fiction style. So it's, you know, it's very much gives all the background stuff of the pencils on the desk and such like. And I will confess this is just a pedant within me. Sometimes I wonder how far they are embroidering a little bit too much on precisely what they know. I mean, the one that for whatever reason just stood out for me was this little details that when FSB's Major General Vladislav Minchikov is briefing Putin over a secure video call and they say he was unsmiling. Now, he probably didn't exactly crack a broad grin while he's chatting to the dictator president of his country. But I'm thinking, well, unless you really got to see that, how do you know he was unsmiling? A trivial point. It makes for a very good read. But as I say, the pedante me occasionally does keep missing a beat for this kind of storytelling. However, I absolutely am not challenging in any way the information that's being presented, and it is undeniably vivid. I mean, they have a great, for example, cameo of Pablo Gonzalez, the um Basque Spanish journalist who had incidentally a Darth Vader tattoo on his leg, lovely little detail. Um, but he was a fixture of reporting from the Maidan in 2014 and then Crimea. And, you know, again, his access seemed extraordinary. Well, perhaps not quite so extraordinary when you realize that he was actually born Pavel Rubsov and was a deep cover GRU illegal operating under the guise of a Spanish journalist. So lots of nice things. And the other weird thing, actually, is also that ironically they have less of the sort of personal insights of their newspaper colleague Gershkovich himself. But then again, he does have his own memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land, coming out this later this year, so maybe he was saving the goodies for that. Still, where this book really shines is in unpacking the complex, fraught, morally challenging negotiations behind this swap. Which, as I say, was clearly a ruthless Russian operation to collect enough Americans and other swappable commodities from ex-US Marine Paul Whelan through to dissidents like Karamurza, Vladimir Karamurza, and Ilya Yashin, until they had reached a sufficient critical mass, really, that the White House was ready to deal. And it's clearly a sign, I would say, that hostage diplomacy is here to stay. And it's also indeed a reminder of the whole process of what the global initiative against transnational organized crime is calling geo-crime. In other words, the instrumental use of organized crime as a tool of statecraft. I mean, Krasikov mattered. He had to be brought home because it was part of the social contract that frankly went back to KGB days, is that you know, if you're one of ours and you get caught abroad, we will get you home eventually. It might take a week, it might take a month, it might take a decade, but one way we will get you back, which is an incentive for people to keep their mouths shut when they get caught. But also it's an incentive for people to actually do dangerous things. They need to get Krasikov back, in my opinion, because they wanted there to be more Krasikovs in the future. And that's something that we will actually have to deal with. Now, again, what does this say? What does this get book say about power in Moscow? Well, there was a nice little note that when Maria Boutina, if you remember, this Russian American who you know could hardly be described as a sort of covert source. I mean, she's very openly a sort of essentially a political activist, very close to various right-wing Russian American institutions like the NRA, and very much pushing a line about how frankly America should be doing deals with the Russians and so forth. When she was arrested, she faced perhaps five years in prison. But according to Hinshaw and Parkinson, Putin was briefed that actually it was 15 years that she faced. Now, was that an honest mistake, I wonder? Or was it a bid to outrage the boss into demanding some kind of retaliation and a swap? So, in other words, we know was this a manipulative operation. And also the book very much highlights the way that intelligence officers, intelligence services are used as a back channel, even in very difficult times. And we've seen this in other cases, like, you know, Mossad talking to the Arabs back in the day when the Arab nations weren't even recognizing the existence of Israel. So, for example, we saw Nikolai Patroshev and his counterpart Sullivan being used as sort of contact points, and in particular Sergei Biseda, so-called known as the Count, who was at that time head of the FSB's Fifth Service, and he was being used as very much the sort of point negotiator on these swaps, but he would only, I mean he wasn't willing to talk to diplomats because he didn't think they mattered. He was only willing to talk to counterpart intelligence officers, with whom he would be very genial and such like. And maybe in this respect there is a kind of degree of transactional power. Um, not so much between the Russian and American intelligence community, though obviously once you sit down to make a deal, you do feel a certain shared imperative to make that deal when your political leaderships want it to happen. But rather the degree to which you had Besida negotiating, but negotiating also for agents who are associated with GRU and SVR, not just FSB. So in some ways he was actually doing them a favor, and no doubt at some point this is a bargaining chip that that could be redeemed for the for the FSB's advantage.
And finally, we have Panchevsky, uh also of the Wall Street Journal, writing on what is very timely in a week that the German authorities have charged a Ukrainian with responsibility for the 2022 bombing of the $20 billion Nord Stream gas pipelines. And doing so as part of a Ukrainian government-backed mission. That's a crucial thing. And this is, I mean, this is really an amazing inside story. It takes the reader not just into the plot, but also the, and I hadn't realized quite much of the detail here, the very dogged German investigation that is only now bearing fruit. And it's fascinating the degree to which they operated within a very, well, a very Germanic system of all kinds of limits and constraints, but nonetheless they they kept at it. And yes, so this investigation is now bearing fruit. Many of the prime movers in this book are described and discussed, but still shrouded behind pseudonyms. So you have all these sort of picturesque, you know, the colonel, the grandpa, the respectable. And look, it's a great read. The prose is a little journalistically fragmented into lots and lots and lots of short paragraphs, but still, great read. I devoured it in terrifyingly little time, but also very, very solidly sourced. I can't recommend this this book too highly. And it's it's it's a very useful reminder that at the time there were those who, however implausibly, were blaming Russia for blowing up its own pipeline, or the CIA, or the Scandinavians, or Poland, or whatever. It always seemed that Kyiv had the most to gain. And well, indeed it turned out that it was Kyiv that did it. But still, this is a very, very Ukrainian story, in that it it really stems not from policies decided at the top, but a bottom-up initiative, what Panchevsky calls the start-up, fueled, funded, shall you say, rather, by figures like this, a businessman called the Walking Lawsuit. Not, indeed, it's worth noting, former President Poroshenko, though he did try and cash in on the popularity of the incident later. But anyway, so you have this kind of start-up that operates to a degree under a kind of latitude that only then is brought into official service, but still with considerable autonomy, operating with extraordinary flair and a willingness to take risks that US Navy SEALs or British special boat service divers would never consider. It's one of the reasons why people saying, oh, it has to have been something else. It can't just some pin, it's simply been some guys operating off a rented yacht. But also it's a reminder that these are people willing to carry out sabotage against what is a German economic asset, by which I don't mean that the Germans owned the Nord Stream pipelines. I mean Nord Stream 1 is 51% owned by the Russians, and Nord Stream 2 entirely owned by Gazprom. But the point is it provided gas to Germany. So it's a useful reminder in that case that nations have their own interests, even while they might maybe ostensibly working together. You know, Ukraine's interests are not exactly those of the West, and vice versa. Panchevsky closes by saying it had an effect that its authors never really contemplated. It crossed a red line in modern conflict. Critical infrastructure, once considered off-limits, became fair game. It created a world of shadow warfare where pipelines, deep sea cables, tankers or satellites can be struck with relative impunity, introducing a new and deeply unsettling uncertainty into the global order. Where Western capitals sometimes suffer paralysis by analysis. The hive mind in Kiev acts first and argues later. So again, that that is worth noting because this is indeed the new environment in which we operate, in which all of these ancillary support infrastructures of the modern economy have been sucked into the covert political struggle. Ukraine's intelligence officers, once they achieve a certain rank, are a small community. Their relationships generally range from hating to despising one another. At some point, they all will have rubbed one another the wrong way, caught one another stealing, or wronged one another somehow. They are not shy about slandering each other. Now it's, I mean, I mentioned that because just it was it's interesting that, you know, despite, as we know, how extraordinarily effective the Ukrainian intelligence community is, this is something that I had heard from other sources, but I'd heard from other sources that were, I think it's fair to say, distinctly critical of the Ukrainians. So it's it's quite interesting to find someone who, you know, while retaining journalistic neutrality, you know, clearly does have a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainian perspective, also adding that. Um, and generally speaking, look, this book confirms that while Western intelligence agencies were not behind this attack, the CIA, Dutch military intelligence, the MIVD, and others were aware of the plan beforehand and explicitly warned Kev to abort the mission weeks before the actual attack, and yet Kyiv ignored them. And then the Western agencies cooperated in covering up Kiev's involvement. I mean, just remember that when next you see some newspaper story citing unnamed Western intelligence sources, of course they lie to us. Sure, they do so convinced it is for the greater good, but they lie to us. Conceptual dominance happens in all kinds of contexts.
But finally, this is also this the whole book is also a useful reminder when we pivot back to looking at Russia, never to presume that institutions are other than collections, of sometimes collaborating, often feuding individuals and interests, that they may well share certain collective interests and worldviews, but in practice this often takes second place to self-interest. But of course, that self-interest can become a collective one. We have seen far greater cooperation between the SVR, the FSB, and the GRU than we ever saw before 2022, when they were engaged in a often cannibalistic struggle for remits, responsibilities, budgets, access to Putin, generally his favour. Now, in part this is understood as because being the Kremlin has put out the word that it expects everyone to play nice with each other. But it is more than that. It is the fact that these agencies all regard themselves as now being in a common struggle. It is obviously much, much less powerful a force than for the Ukrainians. But nonetheless, again, when it comes down to it, these are constellations of individuals and interest groups. And power itself is a deeply fractured and contested factor. So am I arguing anything more than just simply, hey, the world is a complicated place? Well, I am trying to do so a little bit more. I'm trying to bring a certain degree of framework onto it. But yes, when it comes down to it, what I am saying is the world is a complex place, and Putin's system perhaps even more so. But, well, for me, that's part of the fun.
Well, that's the end of another episode of the In Moscow Shadows podcast. Just as a reminder, beyond this, you can follow my blog, also called In Moscow Shadows. You can follow me on Twitter at Mark Galliotti or Facebook, MarkGaleotti on Russia. This podcast is made possible by generous and enlightened patrons, and you too can be one. Just go along to my Patreon page, that's patreon.com slash in Moscow Shadows, and decide which tier you want to join, getting access to exclusive materials and other perks. However, whether or not you contribute, thank you very much indeed for listening. Until next time, keep well.