Alleged Ring Shows Cold War Still Hot in Spy World

WASHINGTON (June 29) -- The news of a suspected suburban spy ring couldn't have come at a worse time. Just days before, President Barack Obama stood beside Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the White House and declared they had "succeeded in resetting" the relationship between the two former Cold War rivals.

Perhaps something got lost in the translation.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, condemned the arrests and said he hoped "that all the positive gains that have been achieved in our relationship will not be damaged by the recent event."

Just because relations have thawed between the two countries, though, is no reason to stop spying on each other.

"Espionage is a fixture of international politics, for better or worse," said Charles Kupchan, former director of European Affairs at the National Security Council. The presence of the spies "is disturbing and comes at a very awkward moment, ... but this news is hardly a bombshell or a sign that Russia is behaving in a way that constitutes a dramatic departure from the norm."

The alleged spy ring is just the latest in a long line of Soviet and Russian spooks and fellow travelers who have sought out America's secrets. They are part of a legacy that dates back centuries, stretching from the czarist secret police, or Okhrana, to the Soviet KGB to its present-day successor, the SVR. According to the secret Venona program, there were more than 200 Soviet spies in the United States on the eve of World War II. And that was before the Cold War set in.

While the two countries are no longer enemies, former CIA analyst Mark Stout, now a historian at the International Spy Museum here, notes there is much Russia would like to know about the U.S. Not just military secrets -- one suspect in the alleged ring is accused of trying to get information on nuclear weapons -- but also "soft intelligence" dealing with policy and personnel at the top levels of U.S. government.

"Most of what they got they could have got by taking someone in a think tank out to a good lunch," said a Russia expert who has worked with the intelligence community. "A lot of what they wanted was not secret. They wanted influence, to meet people, meet someone who made policy. ... Cocktail party conversation.

"We're a very open country," this expert continued. "When someone tells you their name is Cynthia Murphy, you assume they are Cynthia Murphy. You don't think this is a Russian undercover agent. That's the most jarring thing about this."

Said a former senior intelligence official: "Russia is still smarting from having lost its status as one of the two superpowers and is very concerned about its position in the world. They are trying the best they can to understand what goes on here."

Deep Cover

The Russians "never quit spying on us," said Bill Harlow, a former CIA spokesman. "Perhaps it's not as aggressive as it once was, but it is still significant."

Peter Earnest, director of the International Spy Museum, notes that when many of the alleged ring's "illegals" were placed in the suburbs of New York, Boston and Washington, the NATO alliance was expanding -- much to Russia's chagrin. Fighting also raged in Chechnya, and the Russians would have been eager to know where U.S. policymakers stood on that ethnic war.

What puzzles Earnest, who spent more than 20 years in the CIA's Clandestine Service, is why the Russians planted so many spies. "It's very unusual to put deep-cover spies in a network [because] if one goes, they all go," he said, noting it was more common to place a single person or couple. He suggests that the SVR may have gotten sloppy.

Vincent Cannistraro, a 27-year CIA veteran who directed intelligence programs in the Reagan White House, traveled to Moscow after the demise of the Soviet Union to get a close-up view of that country's sleeper spy program. He went at the invitation of Yuri Drozdov, the head of the KGB's illegals section, and met four unidentified former plants who told him about their life as spies in America. One group set up a dummy contracting company to spy on NASA's Saturn rocket program. "We learned about that only after the fact," he said.

While the media has focused on "spy sex" and compared some of the alleged ring members to characters in a James Bond movie, intelligence experts agree their mission was to be as plain Jane as possible, blending into the woodwork for years and even decades so they could worm their way into positions of access. Their uniquely Russian way of espionage took time, patience and, said Cannistraro, lots of money. He said he met one couple who spent 20 years in the U.S. "They talked to each other in the middle of the night under the pillows," he said.

Cannistraro said that when it comes to deep cover, the Russians "are masters of it. They're the only ones who do it -- it's their culture."

Intelligence experts say the use of illegals is too expensive and too unwieldy to work in Western democracies. While Russia has planted illegals in the U.S., Britain, France and Germany, none of those countries' intelligence services, they say, has returned the favor of embedding moles in rivals' territory.

"We don't do it -- who would want to go live 20 years in Russia?" asks Arthur Hulnick, a former CIA officer who now teaches international relations at Boston University. He noted that while some illegals like Rudolf Abel lived for years undetected in the U.S., some of the most successful Russian spies have been American turncoats like Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson. "Now that the Cold War is over, there doesn't seem to be much motivation for anybody to sell out," he said.

Stout cited another reason the CIA doesn't rely on deep-cover operations: It doesn't have to. "Traditionally there have been plenty of defectors from the East Bloc volunteering intelligence so we didn't need to plant people in Russia," he said. "We have less need to do fancy long-term, frankly, dangerous things."

Spy vs. Spy

If 21st-century spying by Russia is done "with less vigor," Kupchan said, that may be because "the stakes are lower, the antagonism is gradually giving way to cooperation. But there's no doubt there is espionage going on on both sides."

In his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA," former CIA Director George Tenet wrote about trying to thaw relations between his agency and his Russian counterparts. He recounted sending an agent to Moscow to share information about al-Qaida's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Referring to intelligence officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, he wrote:

At the old KGB headquarters in Moscow, under a watchful portrait of former KGB chairman [Yuri] Andropov, Rolf pressed our Russian counterparts to work with us in ways that would have been unfathomable during the cold war. Heads nodded as all sides agreed that our two countries' national security interests were closer than one might think. Having moved past the promising opening remarks, however, it soon became evident that even high-level pressure had not prepared them for the intimate forms of concrete cooperation required to deal with the WMD threat. In the final analysis, it was still a game of spy versus spy. Both sides had spilled too much blood for too many years to expect a breakthrough on such an issue.

Intelligence veterans are understandably cagey about U.S. spy operations. "We're as interested in finding out about the Russians as they are in finding out about us," Hulnick said.

Just as Moscow still sends spies under traditional guise in its embassies and military attache offices, the CIA deploys spies under diplomatic cover. If they get caught, they have diplomatic immunity and can be simply ousted. The alleged spies arrested by the FBI this week have no such immunity as illegals and may face years in federal prisons if convicted.

That's not to say every American spy pretends to be a diplomat, however. Many, like Valerie Plame, pose as businesspeople. When her cover was blown, her days in the clandestine world were over.

Plame's case underscored the shift in emphasis away from Russia and the old Soviet bloc. After the end of the Cold War in 1991, the CIA's budget was dramatically cut back. Although the agency has rebounded since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the focus has been on domestic counterterrorism, the Iraq war, and now Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"A lot of assets shifted from more traditional targets" like Russia, Harlow said.

In recent years, the FBI has arrested an increasing number of Chinese spies on espionage charges, said Fred Burton, a former State Department counterterrorism agent and the author of "Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent."

He noted that as U.S. attention shifted to China and threats from the Middle East and South Asia, the Russians took advantage by planting more spies here. "The Cold War never died. There are no friendly counterintelligence services," he said.

Despite this recent episode, Kupchan said the threat of Islamic extremism remains a greater threat to U.S. security and with only so many resources and personnel to spread around, "this won't change" the focus of intelligence agencies.

But perhaps, said Harlow, it should.

"You can't afford to focus on only one geographic area or one type of threat," he said. "There is no part of the world that doesn't bear watching."