Russian spying in a changing world

As Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service this week marks 90 years since its founding, the country’s spies are seeking to shrug off one of the organisation’s most embarrassing scandals – when 10 deep-cover agents were betrayed and arrested in the United States this summer. “This year, like many others, was a difficult one for foreign intelligence,” President Dmitry Medvedev told SVR officers as he congratulated them ahead of the service’s 90th anniversary on Monday, reminding them that they should draw lessons from the spy exchange and investigate why it happened.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was, as usual, more categorical. “I assure you, they will expire on their own,” he said of the supposed traitors during last week’s call-in show with the public. “Just think! A person dedicates his whole life to serving his motherland, and some cad turns up and betrays him. How will he look into the eyes of his children, the swine?”
Gennady Yevstafiyev, a retired SVR lieutenant general who spent decades working under diplomatic cover in Japan, Pakistan and India (among other places), knows first hand the devastation of betrayal for an agent who is driven by zeal.
“Everyone has their own path towards betrayal,” he told The Moscow News in an interview at his Moscow apartment last week. “It is very different each time. Sometimes it is forced, when a person is blackmailed and turns out that he is weak.”
Unsurprisingly, Yevstafiyev would not disclose exactly when he joined the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, the foreign intelligence service that Vladimir Putin also served in during the 1980s. But a career of some 40 years made him well placed to observe the change in morale of fellow agents, he said. . . . .
. . . . For Yevstafiyev, many of the internal changes undermined morale and the quality of the work. Today, he sounds somewhat dismayed with the gradual transformation of a closely knit, ideologically-motivated force into a swollen bureaucracy that young men increasingly joined for perks like cars, dachas, and apartments.
There was a reason, after all, why the heyday of Russian espionage ended after World War II. The great spies of the 1930s got by on little else but ideological zeal. A smaller staff meant that each agent had to be resourceful and rely on his analytical capabilities rather than gadgets. . . . .