Since Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine last February, hardly a week goes by without news of Russian spies, agents or informants being unmasked somewhere in the world.
A security guard at the British embassy in Berlin, sentenced to 13 years in prison. An alleged mole inside Germany’s intelligence service, suspected of passing information to Moscow. Nine people arrested in Poland accused of tracking weapons deliveries to Ukraine and planning acts of sabotage.
Just last week, US authorities issued an indictment against four US citizens and three Russians accused of carrying out “a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States” on behalf of Russian intelligence. The list goes on and on.
Perhaps most eye-catching has been the arrest of several alleged “illegals” – deep-cover, elite Russian spies trained to adopt foreign identities to embed into western societies and steal secrets.
No Russian illegal had been publicly unmasked in the west since 2011, but in the past year, seven cases have come to light – involving Norway, Brazil, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Greece.
Taken together, the arrests raise a question: is Russia spying more, or is the west just getting better at catching Russian spies?
Part of the answer is undoubtedly to be found in Russia’s diminishing opportunities for traditional spying. During the first three months of the war in Ukraine, according to a count by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, more than 450 diplomats were expelled from Russian embassies, most of them from Europe.
Most of those expelled were people the host countries believed to be intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover. The SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and its GRU military intelligence agency both send their operatives abroad under diplomatic cover, and the round of expulsions is thought to have significantly hampered Russia’s intelligence-gathering capabilities.
“The time after the war, with all the expulsions, was a fateful time for the Russian intelligence system and they have tried to replace it with different things,” said one European intelligence official.
Despite all the recent success in capturing Russian spies over the past year, western intelligence professionals say Russia still poses a broader intelligence threat than any other country.
“I believe that the Chinese are mostly interested in economic issues, but for the Russians it’s also political, about the EU and Nato,” said Janez Stušek, who was the director of Slovenia’s main intelligence agency until June last year.
Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist with Bellingcat, said Russia’s spy chiefs had switched up the way they worked since the war started.
“They lost so much of the capacity they had with spies under diplomatic cover,” said Grozev, whose investigations have unmasked numerous Russian operatives by combining open source information with data available for purchase on the Russian black market.
“The short-term operatives they used from unit 29155 are also now considered to be burned,” he added.
Western intelligence agencies believe unit 29155, first reported on in 2019 by the New York Times, was a top-secret GRU unit tasked with the dirty work of sabotage and attempted assassinations across Europe, including poisoning attempts with the nerve agent novichok.
However, in a spectacular failure of basic operational security procedures, it turned out that the GRU was providing 29155 operatives with passports issued in the same Moscow passport office and with closely linked serial numbers, making it possible for intelligence agencies, and journalistic outfits such as Bellingcat, to identify many of the operatives and render them operationally useless.
The combination of losing the spies under diplomatic cover and the end of 29155 had led Russia to turn more to its long-term illegals, said Grozev. “They’ve had to activate their sleepers, and when you do that you risk much more disclosure,” he said.
Others speculate that there could be something more at play. John Sipher, formerly deputy director of the CIA’s Russia operations, said he believed the recent detection of illegals was probably due to someone inside Russia passing information to the US or another western intelligence service.
“It’s almost impossible for counterintelligence services to uncover illegals, except some of these GRU illegals who seem to have had sequential passport numbers. It is almost always a human source,” said Sipher.
However, in a world of biometric data and computerised birth and death records, tracking down illegals has become slightly easier, as Grozev and Bellingcat have shown. Although illegals are trained individually, similarities in the “legends” used for their back stories or other operative quirks may make it easier for the capture of one to lead services to others.
A senior Greek official claimed that the country uncovered an alleged Russian illegal who lived in Athens, ran a knitting shop and claimed to be a Mexican-Greek photographer named Maria Tsalla through long hours of manually checking documents, after receiving a tip-off after the arrest of another alleged illegal couple in Slovenia.
“We were told that one of the illegals arrested in Slovenia claimed to be born in Greece, so we started looking through birth registries and looking for potentially doctored birth certificates,” said the official.
The search turned up a dodgy birth certificate in the name of Maria Tsalla, said the official, and that put the Greek authorities on to the scent.
Whatever the truth behind how they were discovered, at least four alleged illegals – two believed to be from the GRU and two from the SVR – are now in detention in the west. They could be used in a swap for westerners incarcerated in Russia, such as Paul Whelan, an American convicted of espionage, and the recently arrested Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich. Some have labelled the arrest of Gershkovich as “hostage taking”, designed to boost Russia’s chances of bringing its busted spies home.
It is difficult to assess if the recent roundup has decimated Russia’s illegals network or is merely the tip of the iceberg, but Grozev said he thought the disclosures could be just the beginning, claiming he was already on the scent of other illegals.
“I feel like I’m in a rabbit hole, discovering more and more stuff in places where I didn’t think I would find anything,” he said.
