Russian newspapers are, of course, full of news and views of the ongoing Russian spy saga in the US. All agree that, of course, there would be Russian spies in America, just as there would be American spies in Russia – that's life. The majority also agree that the American security services needed the scandal to happen just now, right after the meeting of the American and Russian presidents, who happily went on pressing the "reset" button, and that somebody in the CIA or FBI is clearly dead set on jamming it. All are stunned by the lack of professionalism.
But here, the consensus ends.
Whose professionalism? According to a Russian foreign ministry spokesman, all the arrested are "Russian citizens" who have not done "anything against the interests of the US". So far, this has been the official line. In this vein, many Russian commentators dwell on the lack of professionalism of the American security services, who "cooked" the matter so clumsily that their charges look improbable and contradictory, and do not actually entitle them to accuse the Russians of spying. Representatives of the Russian security community (none in active service) quoted by Russian newspapers say that some of the accusations are laughable as if taken from outdated spy novels. Who would need or use Morse code language, for example?
But there are as many comments on the lack of professionalism of the Russian security services. There have been too many scandals involving them in the recent past. The assassins of both Alexander Litvinenko in Britain and a Chechen leader, Sulim Yamadayev, in Dubai acted so crudely that their actions immediately led investigations to the Russian security services.
Similarly, four Russian spies caught in Georgia dispensing money to the opposition had neglected all precautions, using their ordinary mobile phones to make appointments and meeting their proteges right next to their hotel. What happened, many ask, to the celebrated professionalism of Stalin's KGB that could fool the best security services of the time?
Yulia Latynina, a prominent liberal journalist, thinks that the corruption that has permeated all pores of Russian society has not stopped at the door of the Foreign Intelligence Service. She blames the failures on the rush to get decorations, promotions and money. The wider the ring, the bigger the operation, the more officers involved, the more promotions and decorations will follow.
One should not be surprised by the seemingly pointless tasks that the Russian spies were set, another commentator writes. If you just sit in the embassy and send back information on America's foreign policy collected from the internet and open publications, you get nothing. If you send the same information collected from a spy and marked "top secret", you get promotion. Add to that the "lost goals" and "lost ideals" quoted by other authors, and the picture gets really gloomy.
Yet, questions linger. Who benefits from the scandal? The American hawks, of course, Russians answer. But some suspect a more sinister plot, for the Russian hawks benefit from it, too. They do not really like presidential "reset" games – after all, the US is still listed as Russia's main opponent and the main threat for Russia in the most recent security document, Strategy of the National Security of the Russian Federation. So, some commentators ask, is it not possible that, having failed to catch real American spies in Russia and having failed to derail the process of rapprochement between Russia and the US by charging innocent Russian scientists, our spy masters decided simply to hand in to their American colleagues somebody who would look like spies but, in reality, are not even professionals?
How else to explain the strangest of the instructions to them – not to forget what they were sent to the US for? Or is the scandal meant to distract the attention of the US security services from something much more important that the Russians are trying to achieve in their country?
And is it a coincidence that none of the accusations is connected with American technologies? After all, this is what Russia needs most now. It is wrong to say, as some do, that it has become useless for the Russians to steal these real secrets, for Russia now is so technologically backward that it would not be able to use them.
Whether applicable or not, it is such secrets that the Russians are doubtless after, and it must be something connected with such secrets that is the heart of the matter. Unless, of course, as the famous former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky said, they were supposed to go right to the top of the American establishment, the state department included. Stalin-era KGB nostalgia …
Russian emigration throughout the world may offer ample opportunities for such penetration. But even the end of the cold war and the "reset" mood among the political elites cannot bring back the pro–Soviet mania of the western intelligentsia of the 1930s, which was what enabled the greatest espionage coups of all.
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