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Cheka, KGB, now SWR: In the 100 years of its history, the Russian secret service, and especially its foreign department, has had several names. Even changes to the system, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, could not affect its continuity. With great and feared efficiency, the spies of Russia did everything they were given, or given.
Of course, a former agent also appreciates that: Vladimir Putin began his career from 1975 to at least 1990 in the ranks of the KGB and from 1985 onwards he deepened his knowledge of German as a foreign spy in Dresden. In the late 1990s, Putin was head of the FSB’s national intelligence service for two years, the climax of his secret service career.
His move into politics was swift and smooth afterward, but the current president hasn’t forgotten his roots: it’s no wonder he insisted on visiting SWR headquarters to celebrate 100 years of foreign intelligence.
“The lessons of history”
There were unctuous words, but also warning, from the president and former teammates. Putin said that the merits of Russia’s spies should never be forgotten: “But we also do not forget the lessons of history, crimes and repression against our own people.” Therefore, the head of the Kremlin warned to obey the law.
At the moment, it was not entirely without a friendly reprimand: In the case of the near-murder of government opponent Alexey Navalny, the Russian authorities are still busy with denials. Meanwhile, the debate about a hacker attack is boiling over in the US, the scope of which is seen as extremely threatening. Information technology experts and Democratic and Republican politicians believe that Russians were the perpetrators of the attack, which delved into the data structures of the United States government. The only prominent defender currently is President Donald Trump, who prefers to target China and complains that everyone always targets Russia when something like this happens.
Yet no one has thought of accusing Trump of too great a distance from Russia during his tenure: there are numerous indications that the Russian secret service intervened in the elections that brought Trump to power. Many experts now consider this to be proven, but what is evidence in digital forensics?
True to style: deny the activities, but praise the work
As the head of the Russian foreign intelligence service, Putin’s confidant Sergei Naryshkin has a lot of practice defending against such accusations from the West: Hacker attacks on American sites? Meddling in the American elections? Cyber attack on the German Bundestag in 2015? Assassinations of public enemies or critics of the government? Moscow’s response is usually the same: Russia has nothing to do with any of this!
But these days Naryshkin can show how proud he is of his people’s work, whatever it is. “Lighting is a difficult, dangerous and quite interesting job that goes with you all your life,” Naryshkin said on the anniversary.
The 66-year-old should know. Like Putin, he has already served in the notorious KGB secret service. But his work has nothing to do with movie clichés by agents like James Bond, an odd comparison insofar as in Bond movies the KGB always has one on their hat at the end. In any case, the reality is different: “These kinds of action films are far removed from the work of the secret services,” Naryshkin says in an interview with the Russian Historical Society, which he directs himself.
The main task of the service is to this day to collect secret information, record external threats, analyze developments and protect the Russian state. So everything is much more harmless than is often assumed. Naryshkin, a bony man, sees the SWR as one of the most effective intelligence services in the world. Above all, the great network of spies, which not all states can afford, is the “golden treasure.”
Looking back: Please look beyond the blood!
The communist revolutionary Feliks Dzierzynski (or: Felix Dscherschinski, 1877-1926) once founded the powerful apparatus of the secret service, called the Cheka. On December 20, 1920, he signed the order for the establishment of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (WTschK), which had been created three years earlier.
Dzierzynski, who gave his name to the regiment of state security guards in the GDR, was considered one of the worst “executioners” of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. To this day he is the idol of the Russian security services. In Russia there are not only monuments in his honor; The shops sell his busts and souvenirs with his photo. In the process, the “Chekists”, as secret service agents are still called in Russia today, fell victim to many.
The gory side of history is largely ignored during the celebrations. The focus is on the “spy heroes” who discovered atomic secrets in America. The “Cambridge Five”, including the famous double agent Kim Philby, are among Moscow’s overseas intelligence legends. Television documentaries, feature films, and an anniversary exhibit commemorate the World War II spies who helped the Soviet Union defeat Hitler’s Germany.
Also honored is Senior Agent Rudolf Abel aka William Fisher (1903-1971), who was captured in the US He was handed over to the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam in the first Cold War prisoner exchange in 1962 and so on. escaped the death penalty. To this day there are these internationally recognized agent exchange actions between the United States and Russia.
The most spectacular case since the end of the Cold War occurred in Vienna in 2010 when Russian agent Anna Chapman and other spies were traded for the imprisoned former GRU secret service agent Sergej Skripal. Skripal had later served a high treason sentence for giving the names of Russian agents to British secret service MI6.
Putin, who also met with Chapman at the time, said the “traitors” would end badly: if they were drunk or like drug addicts. He was referring to former SWR agent Alexander Potejew, who had discovered Chapman and others in the United States. But even after Skripal was poisoned with the Novichok neurotoxin in England in 2018, Putin repeatedly emphasized that treason was the “worst crime” of all.
Russian secret service expert Andrei Soldatov says regarding major cases in recent years, from American accusations of cyberattacks to the murder of former secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko in London with the radiation poison polonium 210 to the poisoning of the Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny with the neurotoxin. Novichok, that Moscow’s secret services were getting more and more brazen. I would have lost all fear of exposure. Soldatov’s conclusion is: “Russia’s secret service organizations are no longer very secret.”
They just don’t do anything they’re accused of, as their defense attorneys claim – but that’s obviously a good thing.
With material from the German Press Agency
