Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

A new cold war means spies. But what can Russia offer Oxbridge graduates these days?

If that nice Mr Medvedev is right, and Russia is indeed braced for a new cold war, then the spooks must be on a recruitment drive. Ours, obviously, but theirs too. So spare a thought for the Russian intelligence human resources office, because a career in post-KGB espionage can’t be an easy sell.

The modern British teenager merely believes himself to have a God-given right to be an Arctic Monkey. His Russian counterpart, by contrast, surely considers himself a failure if he reaches the age of 21 without a majority stake in the world’s third largest steel corporation, a medium-sized British football club and a girlfriend who looks like a saucier version of Katie Holmes. With horizons like this, how excited will he be by an economy Aeroflot ticket to London and a briefcase full of dodgy fish that can make you look like Darth Vader without his mask on?

Recruitment abroad must also be tricky. The Russian spymaster needs foreign agents. He needs Oxbridge toffs and dilettantes; inscrutable cold-eyed killers who are prepared to form sleeper cells under the cover of a cut-glass accent and a professed love of Radio 4. But where to find them? How to make them turn? It’s not like it was. Melita Norwood was a lifelong communist, groomed to spy by her own mother. Philby, Burgess, Maclean and the others were all equally ripe, being enamoured of socialism and too posh to join the Labour party. Back in the day, a traitor had a cause.

Does modern Russia have a cause? If the Kremlin has any basic ideology at all, then it is a Ryanair ideology — a brutal, minimalist, we-can’t-believe-you-are-falling-for-this-ideology-crap ideology. That’s why this cold war is going to be different from the last cold war. These days, looking east, there is nothing to believe in. There is no reason to betray your country to the Russians except for cold hard cash.

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