Russian spies, like spooks the world over, do not like having their activities dissected in the mainstream media, let alone criticised.
Yet Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, the successor agency to the KGB’s powerful First Chief Directorate, has been subjected to a flurry of unprecedented and largely hostile media attention on home soil in recent weeks.
In a country where the media is mostly tightly controlled by the state, this sudden and very public denunciation of the SVR, the equivalent of the UK’s MI6, is as extraordinary as it is unusual. Unnamed intelligence sources have taken turns to leak highly damaging revelations about the SVR to the press, accusing its leadership of rank incompetence and a dangerous lack of professionalism.
The central allegation is that the SVR was to blame for Russia’s biggest post-Soviet spy failure: the FBI’s arrest of ten illegal Russian agents, including the glamorous Anna Chapman, in America in June.
The debacle triggered the biggest spy swap since the Cold War, left Russia’s reputation as a spying superpower badly tarnished, and handed the West four men Moscow had convicted of espionage.
It was, in short, a disaster for Russia’s spymasters and now, it seems, the blame game has started.
The SVR’s so-far mostly anonymous critics have said that the ten Russian agents were caught not because they were rank amateurs as the Western media claimed but because they were betrayed by a high-ranking traitor deep inside the SVR.
Worse still, they added, the “mole” had managed to escape to the United States with his family before the SVR had even realised what was happening.
State news agency RIA Novosti captured the mood in a story headlined “Something rotten in Russian spy Kingdom – source.”
In the article that followed, RIA Novosti’s shadowy source twisted the knife into the SVR with undisguised malice.
“It means that things are really bad with the internal security at Yasenevo (the SVR’s Moscow headquarters),” he said. “They are probably keeping themselves busy with the wrong kind of things.”
Other slurs against the SVR followed, making the secretive agency look like a joke that couldn’t even protect its own agents from mundane house burglaries. The smear campaign is no coincidence.
According to experts, there is a simple explanation: Russia’s spies are at war with one another.
“There is something to fight over using any means necessary,” wrote Pavel Felgenhauer, an intelligence agencies expert, in the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
“The price of (winning control) of the SVR is unimaginably high. It is, after all, the agency that monitors all the main foreign trade and financial transactions, arms dealing, the import and export of technologies, and also foreign investments in the unfolding system of state capitalism.”
“The volumes are such that extracting a kickback worth a fraction of a percent (of the transactions) is enough to make a fortune.”
Mr Felgenhauer and other experts say the rival agency behind the black propaganda campaign is none other than Russia’s domestic FSB security service.
The FSB, the equivalent of the UK’s MI5, is the main successor agency to the KGB and is headquartered in central Moscow on Lubyanka Square.
Responsible for internal security, counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence, it assumed many of the responsibilities of the KGB’s defunct Second Chief Directorate.
It is an agency close to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s heart.
He was head of the FSB from 1998-1999, and though he was a foreign intelligence operative in then-East Germany in the mid 1980s, he spent most of his KGB career in domestic espionage roles.
Experts believe that the FSB is now vying for control of the SVR, possibly with Mr Putin’s tacit support, and that it wants to return to the Soviet model, under which both foreign and domestic spying was controlled by one all-powerful organisation: the KGB.
The US-Russian spy flap has, they believe, given the FSB all the ammunition it needs to discredit the SVR.
“The mass collapse, arrest and subsequent deportation of ten Russian illegal agents from the USA has become a pretext for the FSB to start a campaign,” said Mr Felegenhauer.
It was deliberately leaking details of the fiasco to heap further embarrassment on the SVR, he added.
“The aim of the leaks is to speed up a decision about the reorganisation of the SVR,” he wrote. “We’re talking about either a straight merger with the FSB or replacement of the current SVR leadership with ‘strong loyalists’ who will eradicate any hints of betrayal and the atmosphere of giving away secrets.”
The leaks have been coming thick and fast though a variety of authoritative sources. Most of them have focused on the identity and background of the SVR traitor, who has been variously named as Colonel Scherbakov and Colonel Alexander Poteyev. Intelligence and even Kremlin sources have used the language of the Cold War to describe the fate that awaited him.
“We know who he is and where he is,” a Kremlin source told the daily Kommersant newspaper. “Have no doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already.”
Ramon Mercader was the KGB assassin who murdered exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in 1940. A “Mercader” is a synonym for a hit squad.
“The fate of such an individual is unenviable,” the Kremlin source continued. “He will fear revenge every day (of his life).”
Vladimir Putin hinted in the summer that he knew the identity of the traitor. “This was the result of treason and traitors always end badly,” the Russian prime minister said.
Biatch fight at the Kremlin.