More casualties for Putin: Russian spies are being expelled en masse from the West

Vasily Nikítich Mitrojin could not have concealed his astonishment. The chief archivist of the KGB who managed to make a copy of all the folders of Soviet spies operating in Europe and the United States for half a century was boasting the ease with which agents camouflaged themselves in major capitals. The rezidenturas (stations called them the CIA) that operated inside the embassies were extremely efficient. When he handed over his file to the British, in 1992, and became a counterspy in the service of His Majesty at IM6, he exposed the huge network of spies operating around the world.

Vladimir Putin, was one of those agents operating in Germany. Starting in 2000, when he began his rise to power in Moscow, he rebuilt that secret service on the old KGB in Lubyanka Square, named it FSB and re-planted spies in all embassies around the world. Now, with his invasion of Ukraine, the neat structure admired by Mitrojin and venerated by the Kremlin leader himself, is crumbling again. More than 400 Russian officials were expelled in recent days from America and Europe, the vast majority of them spies camouflaged as diplomats. It is believed that the Kremlin agents operating in Europe are more than 1,000. Last year, the head of German espionage said that the number of Russians operating in Berlin was at the same levels as during the Cold War.

Austria was the last to send home, on Thursday, a large group of Russian officials stationed in Vienna. The United States and Bulgaria expelled a dozen Russians each in the first week of the war. Slovakia and Bulgaria in mid-March, followed by Poland and the Baltics on March 23, and then a long string, including 75 from France and Germany on April 4. On April 5, nine countries, and the European Union itself, sent home more than 150 countries. Lithuania went a little further and expelled the ambassador.

The expulsion of spies on this scale is unprecedented. That's more than double the number expelled in 2018, when 28 Western countries returned 153 suspected spies to Moscow in response to Russia's attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who had spied for Britain, in Salisbury, England. The latest expulsions are “exceptional” and “should have occurred a long time ago,” Marc Polymeropoulos, who led CIA operations in Europe and Eurasia until 2019, told The Economist. “Europe is its historic playground and its diplomatic personnel have always been confused with that of intelligence agents.”

Many of these spies from the FSB, the Russian security service, the GRU, the military intelligence unit, and the SVR, foreign espionage, played a key role in the planning and execution of the war. They were the ones who gathered the information that the generals needed to plan the invasion of Ukraine. Also, presumably, those who committed serious errors of interpretation about the Ukrainian defense capability and the reaction that Western governments would have. The transfer of military material to troops fighting in Ukraine was underestimated and they could not advance information on the effectiveness of the anti-tank systems that ravaged Russian forces as they tried to advance over Kyiv. The return of these agents to their modest Moscow offices will not be very pleasant. Much less for their families who were already getting used to good salaries in euros or dollars and forays into boutiques in Paris and Rome.

Of course, these expulsions also bring difficulties for their counterparts in Moscow. The Russian Foreign Ministry has already ordered the expulsion of officials and spies from the main embassies accredited to the Kremlin. This means that the West will also be less able to obtain information about troop movements and the political repercussions of war in the tighter circles around Putin.

The capacity of Western espionage had already been damaged last year when the Czech Republic accused the GRU of bombing an arms depot in its country and in April 2021 expelled 81 Russian diplomats. In solidarity, the United States kicked out ten others and several European countries to 14. Moscow responded with the return of 189 Western officials to their countries. This complicated the activities of the US CIA and British MI6 in Russia. On their own territory, the Russian security services have more resources and powers to track Western intelligence agents based in the embassies in Moscow than the other way around: a GRU agent can move and meet people more easily in Berlin than a CIA agent in the Russian capital.

Spies are as replaceable as football players in the second half. They take one out and immediately send another. And local counterintelligence has to try again to find out which of the new employees of the consulate, who is apparently only there to stamp passports, is the new head of the rezidentura. Although now, according to a report by a Washington think tank related to the CIA, there is speculation that there will be mass defections of Russian spies as occurred in other invasions of sovereign countries. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 disappointed KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who defected and went to tell the Americans everything he knew. Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet resident in London, was disgusted by Soviet executions and became a double agent in 1974. The invasions of Hungary and Afghanistan also led to major defections. The massacres of Bucha, Irpin or Mariupol could have the same effect.

“Many who serve in Europe's embassies realize that Russia has been humiliated by this disastrous war and that the communications revolution is making everything known instantly,” Jonathan Haslam, a historian specializing in Russian espionage, told the Economist. “They also know that their return to the Motherland is not going to be the best. Once they are exposed, their bosses at the FSB stop trusting them. Many end up in dark bureaucratic posts.” And the former spy Polymeropoulos believes that it is a great opportunity to capture these dissidents: “If they return to Moscow they already know that they will be visited by some of their colleagues who will interrogate them until they are exhausted. It's better if we do it first.”

Archivist Vasili Mitrojin knew about all these maneuvers of his colleagues. He had been stationed in several embassies around the world until a misstep demoted him to the KGB basement. When he defected, he handed over 25,000 folders with the names of all his colleagues to the rezidenturas he had hidden in a basement of his dacha outside Moscow. He first went to see the Americans in Tallinn, Estonia. They didn't believe him. The British turned out to be much more perceptive and kept the largest archive of Russian espionage that has ever reached the West. Years later he wrote a book with journalist Christopher Andrew, “The Mitrokhin archive: The KGB in Europe and the West” that inspired the famous series “The Americans”, by the family of infiltrated Russian spies. In the book, Mitrojin says that the most vulnerable moment for a Russian spy is when he is frustrated by what he sees in the Western press about the Kremlin's brutal action. That is what happened in the cases of the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia or that of Chechnya. And now, presumably, it can happen with that of Ukraine.

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