Make no mistake: whatever higher moral authority they may have invoked in their defence, Soviet and Russian spies have never been good or honourable people. Kim Philby, the suave Martini-sipping traitor sent dozens of brave anti-Communist volunteers to their deaths. Konon Molody – alias Gordon Lonsdale, Canadian vending machine salesman and kingpin of the Portland Spy Ring – did not balk at blackmailing and threatening his hapless sub-agents into doing the KGB’s dirty work.
But as the sordid revelations about the latest crop of Russian spies convicted yesterday in the Old Bailey’s Courtroom Seven reveal, the major difference between Moscow’s agents of yore and those of today is how lowbrow, how pathetic, how amateurish Russian intelligence operations appear to have become. The practice of Russian espionage was always ruthless, brutal and murderous. But once it was at least ingenious, technically sophisticated, intelligent, well funded and highly effective. Today the world’s second old profession, as practiced by Moscow, has become a seriously debased trade.
Back in the day, Moscow was able to install its agents in the upper echelons of the Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park, MI6’s Washington liaison office with the CIA, the heart of the FBI and the British Foreign Office and even the Queen’s Gallery. The latest crop of Bulgarian nationals convicted of spying for Russia were barely able to penetrate the bookings systems of Swissport.
The spy ring whose details were revealed at the close of judicial proceedings are a sorry bunch. The only member of what we might ironically dub the Great Yarmouth Spy ring who actually seems to have had any direct connection to Russian military intelligence, or GRU, the Old Bailey heard, was the one who got away: Jan Marsalek, a fugitive businessman accused of involvement in a €1.9 billion (£1.6 billion) fraud involving the German payments company Wirecard, had fled to Moscow in 2020 and was apparently recruited by the GRU.
He soon began exchanging messages on the Telegram social media and messaging site with Orlin Roussev, 47, an IT specialist and private investigator based in Britain. The GRU’s target was the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, who had revealed details of the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Tasked with tracking and gathering information, Roussev recruited a motley group of assistants he described as “minions”: medical courier Biser Dzhambazov, his girlfriend beautician Vanya Gaberova, her flatmate lab technician Katrin Ivanova and her ex-boyfriend decorator Tihomir Ivanchev. Roussev’s espionage lair was in a former guest house in Great Yarmouth. On his arrest, these premises were found to be filled with expensive surveillance equipment and fake ID documents.
Roussev’s activities did repeat – often parodically – some of the elements of a classic espionage operation. At least two of his minions claim to have believed they were working for Interpol, rather than Moscow – known in the trade as false flag recruitment. Just as his predecessor, the KGB illegal Konon Molody did, Roussev sought out vulnerable lowlifes to serve his ends. Molody’s key to penetrating the secrets of the Royal Navy’s secret nuclear submarine establishment at Portland between 1953 and 1961 was alcoholic and wife-beater Harry Houghton and his mistress Ethel Gee; both eventually jailed.
Spying has always been a dirty business. But at least once perhaps it resembled a profession
That is more or less where the resemblance between the KGB operations of yore and today’s amateurish efforts ends. Molody was born in Russia but raised in the US – recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1938, he was given a Canadian passport and sent to the UK years in advance to build a cover as a businessman.
The couriers and radio operators for the operation were Morris and Lona Cohen, alias Helen and Peter Kroger, American Communists recruited during the Spanish Civil War, who were veterans of the epic Soviet penetration operation of the Manhattan Project. These operatives were caught only because a Polish defector revealed that the Soviets has a well-informed spy in the British Admiralty who was passing sonar and nuclear submarine secrets. (Molody escaped. The Krogers were jailed and eventually spy-swapped in 1969 for several Soviet citizens, including my mother, Lyudmilla Bibikova. But that is another story).
We don’t know how Roussev first came onto MI5’s radar. But we do know that when he was arrested police found 78,747 Telegram messages on his telephone that he had neglected to erase. Though his group successfully surveilled Grozev in Vienna and followed him on a flight to Valencia, Spain, their tradecraft was marked with a trail of tragicomic amateur errors that made them easy to follow. The group even adopted childish nicknames for themselves, including Mad Max, ‘Van Dam’ and Jackie Chan. Their activities, traced by investigators, cost at least €210,000 (£180,000) that flowed from Roussev to his minions.
Amateurish they may have been, but they were nonetheless dangerous. There is plenty of talk of kidnapping Grozev in the chat. And even an idiot can pull a trigger. The Russian assassins sent to murder Sergei Skripal in 2018 were GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a Hero of Russia, and Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Mishkin. Their controller was a GRU Major General, Denis Sergeev. High ranking, highly-decorated, highly professional; yet these bozos left a trail, not only of their faces from Heathrow Airport all the way to Salisbury and back (twice), but also a spoor of novichok poison from the Skripals’ doorknob to a local dumpster.
The main business of Russia’s security agencies seems to be low-level hooliganism
Open source investigators – including Bellingcat, the outfit that Grozev later worked for – unearthed every piece of personal information about them from their passport details and car registrations to their GRU class photos and social media posts by their buddies from Chechnya.
It was a similar story with the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, when the killers left a radioactive polonium trail from Dusseldorf all the way to London’s Millennium Hotel. If these Kremlin-backed killers had not fled, they too would be on trial in the Old Bailey, utterly bang to rights through their own epic incompetence.
Chepiga and Mishkin were idiotic enough – though they did kill one innocent bystander, Dawn Sturgess, and endanger the lives of dozens of Britons. But by employing the likes of Marsalek and Roussev, the GRU was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. There’s a clear reason why – in the wake of Salisbury and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of Russian diplomats and intelligence officers have been booted out of the US, UK and dozens of other Western countries. Moscow simply no longer has nearly enough spies under legal cover in Western capitals, so their intelligence services have resorted to recruiting criminals.
Once, the Soviet leadership expected its lavishly-funded and privileged intelligence services to penetrate and report on the upper echelons of Western government. Today, other than stealing whatever they can, the main business of Russia’s security agencies seems to be low-level hooliganism and whatever acts of sabotage and murder they can get away with.
Some of these are fairly trivial: attacks on the personal cars of Baltic state defence ministers, arson against warehouses of equipment destined for Ukraine. Others very much are not: an alleged bomb plot against a DHL cargo plane, for instance, or a foiled plan to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall.
In Britain, we tend to romanticise the exploits of spies – even those like the Cambridge Five who have worked against our country. In truth, spying has always been a dirty business. But at least once perhaps it resembled a profession. The latest convictions, sordid and pathetic in equal measure, indicate that Moscow is now stooping to the level of basic banditry.
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