Earlier than analyzing how these operations work, it is very important get the terminology proper, and one thing that even skilled nationwide safety reporters, espionage writers, and analysts within the West incessantly get unsuitable. The time period double agent is usually misapplied to explain penetrations of 1 intelligence service by one other. In actuality, these are two very completely different phenomena.
A penetration is an agent who betrays their very own service to spy for a overseas energy. Aldrich Ames, who lately handed away three many years after he was arrested, was a traitor and a penetration of the CIA by Russian intelligence. He was not a double agent.
A double agent, in contrast, is an intelligence asset who’s knowingly and intentionally directed by one service to have interaction one other in espionage. The controlling service makes use of that agent to feed data (referred to as feed materials) —true, false, or blended—to the adversary. They accomplish that to concurrently examine the adversary’s tradecraft, assortment priorities, and decision-making.
Within the Russian system, double brokers additionally serve a bureaucratic operate: they generate statistics, “success tales,” and operational narratives that display effectiveness to political overseers and finally to Putin himself. Putin is aware of this; in any case, he was a Lieutenant Colonel within the KGB Second Chief Directorate (answerable for Counterintelligence for the united states), and he later headed the FSB himself.
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Double brokers are used within the West and by the U.S. providers, however we don’t mislead our authorities concerning the origins of the circumstances or fake they’re actual counterintelligence successes after they attain their conclusion. The excellence is just not educational. It lies on the coronary heart of how Russian intelligence thinks about espionage. Yearly, the FSB publishes an annual report and claims statistics on a whole bunch of alleged spies it has caught. The overwhelming majority of them are invented, manufactured, or the FSB’s personal double brokers. In different phrases, they don’t seem to be actual circumstances.
Russian providers make use of a number of sorts of double brokers and operational video games. They’ve many names, together with the initsiativnik, which is a false volunteer who typically “walks in” to an embassy. Additionally used is the podstava, or dangle, wherein Russian providers will use the routine of an intelligence officer, diplomat, or journalist and insert the “dangle” proper in entrance of the goal at a health club, reception, or different operate to enchantment to the goal. There are nonetheless extra completely different varieties and names for different kinds of double brokers.
These operations are usually not restricted to concentrating on overseas intelligence providers. They’re additionally used in opposition to businesspeople, journalists, diplomats, nongovernmental organizations, and even Russian residents themselves. The target is usually not solely intelligence assortment, but in addition management, because the Russians say, to have the goal “pod kontrolem,” or underneath 100% operational management and affect. That’s the reason the Russians want, although not completely, to hold out double agent operations on Russian soil. Overseas, they’re much less assured that the SVR or GRU can absolutely management their double agent throughout conferences with the adversary.
The top purpose is to ensnare, compromise, manipulate, arrest, or extort targets for recruitment and long-term exploitation. Just a few examples from historical past assist illustrate Russian intelligence’s fixation on double brokers, courting again to its earliest institutional roots.
The Cheka and later the NKVD/OGPU perfected operational video games within the Twenties by way of landmark deceptions corresponding to Operation TRUST. With the TRUST operation, the OGPU (Soviet counterintelligence on the time, one other forerunner of the KGB) created a fictitious anti-Bolshevik underground to lure in Western intelligence providers and Russian émigrés. TRUST despatched intelligence officers to the West, or cooptees, who they intimidated to pose as members of this faux group that claimed to face in opposition to the Bolsheviks.
The operation ran for years, efficiently feeding disinformation to a number of overseas providers whereas figuring out, neutralizing, or recruiting their brokers. They typically lured Russians house to “assist in operations” solely to have them arrested, interrogated, and normally shot at the back of the top in a Chekist-style vyshama mera (highest measure) execution. The TRUST culminated within the seize of the well-known British intelligence officer Sidney Reilly, some of the celebrated spies of the period, who was executed similarly.
That double-agent custom continued all through the Chilly Battle, when Soviet intelligence used double brokers not merely to mislead adversaries but in addition to validate its personal competence. Kim Philby, whereas typically remembered within the West as a Soviet penetration of British intelligence, was additionally used as a part of broader operational video games to form Western menace perceptions and shield different Soviet belongings. Scores of Western intelligence officers or particular operations workforce members have been wrapped up within the Soviet Union or Japanese Europe instantly after World Battle II, the victims of KGB and OGPU/GRU operational video games Philby had detailed to the united states. Most have been finally executed.
In later many years, the KGB ran managed double brokers in opposition to Western providers to magnify Soviet capabilities, masks vulnerabilities, and manipulate counterintelligence priorities. The Soviet KGB ran a wave of double-agents on the CIA within the late Eighties with false feed materials to clarify the 1985 U.S. intelligence losses. Rick Ames volunteered and compromised a dozen brokers working for the CIA and FBI (Ames was not arrested until 1994). The KGB and later SVR used these operational video games and false volunteers to guard him, attempting to present CIA and the broader U.S. IC the explanation why the compromise might have occurred (Circle of Treason is a basic learn on this era and all the assorted video games the KGB was taking part in to guard Ames with false feeds to CIA and the FBI).
These operations bolstered an inner perception that intelligence success might be measured by how convincingly one may affect the enemy’s notion of actuality. In Russian intelligence tradition, the double agent is just not an exception — it’s the preferrred. In at this time’s FSB, nonetheless, in addition to their overseas counterparts, the SVR, the double agent too typically is used to justify their very personal existence, as an alternative of paying dividends when it comes to tradecraft realized or secrets and techniques protected. Operations like TRUST are largely a relic of the previous. At this time, the FSB is simply too busy entrapping harmless foreigners like basketball gamers, academics, and NGO staff.
The U.S. IC and our Western allies have realized over the many years that the FSB/SVR and GRU have introduced double-agent circumstances to their political management as in the event that they have been real brokers caught and arrested, all of the whereas the case was merely that they have been double brokers. They feed statistics from the FSB every year about exaggerated intelligence operations—greater than all of the providers on this planet may perform in opposition to Russia—and in addition declare to have thwarted all of them. These stories attain Putin and the Presidential Administration to justify bigger budgets, which in flip breed extra corruption and line the pockets of senior and center managers.
This isn’t distinctive to Russia; it’s typically the case throughout the previous Soviet nations of Central Asia, the place most of the providers stay shut and subservient to the Russian FSB and SVR. These providers, typically serving despotic regimes, swear by double agent operations as a result of, in lots of circumstances and over a few years, the one “spies” they will actually uncover are these they falsely created underneath a double agent operation. They use them in opposition to a spread of unwitting overseas residents, together with in respectable enterprise practices, to extort them and their corporations for cash when introduced up on false costs.
The observe has been expanded in recent times by the Russian FSB, notably its counterintelligence division, DKRO (the Division of Counterintelligence Operations), which makes use of double brokers in opposition to journalists, businesspeople, and others to entice them and maintain them hostage for exchanges with the West. DKRO was answerable for the false arrest and imprisonment of Wall Road Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich earlier than his 2024 swap with the West.
In sum, operational video games and the double brokers related to them enable Russian intelligence to form narratives, manufacture threats, and create the looks of omnipresence. They’re soiled methods elevated to doctrine. And so they stay certainly one of Moscow’s handiest instruments for compensating for broader institutional weaknesses.
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