Spies Like Them, Actually

On Monday, I published a glib piece about the apparent humor of the Russian spy-swap.

Then StratFor doused it in cold water with this great piece that seems to suggest that more was going on.

It is difficult to know what the Russian team was up to in the United States from news reports, but there are two things we know about the Russians: They are not stupid, and they are extremely patient. If we were to guess — and we are guessing — this was a team of talent scouts. (Friedman)

Spy stuff revisited

It’s only after reading this that I had even considered alternative jobs for spy teams. We all know that spies routinely rappel down buildings, take pictures on tiny cameras and smuggle microfilm in stuffed Pandas, right?

It turns out a portion of spying is somewhat admin-related. As StratFor speculates, there could be many other objectives that are hard to nail down.

Which is just a fancy way of saying that if we haven’t found any evidence of Russian operations, it doesn’t follow that they’re not there. It’s spying. It’s supposed to be hard to detect. And what are the odds that the most spy-proficient nation on the planet got something out of it?

But why would they suspect a Russian recruitment team?

One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings. There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was. (Friedman)

I wonder how many organizations fell for it? And in that moment, I wonder if the spies we traded were as incompetent as they’ve been portrayed. The Kremlin would love some American underestimation.

The Limits of Spycraft

Let’s consider two cases: Iran in 1979 and the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991. The fall of the Shah of Iran and the collapse of the Soviet empire were events of towering importance for the United States. Assume that the United States knew everything the shah’s senior officials and their staffs knew, wrote, or said in the period leading up to the Iranian Revolution. Or assume that the shah’s prime minister or a member of the Soviet Union’s Politburo was a long-term mole.

Either of those scenarios would not have made any difference to how events played out. (Friedman)

If you were spying on Russian or the Iranian officials, you weren’t going to learn much because they didn’t know enough. There was a mismatch between their intentions and abilities. This is why the popular conception of spycraft is so quaint.

In big-picture matters, conventional spy operations might as well include Tarot card readings.

Keeping Perspective

The more powerful a nation is, the more important it is to understand what it is doing. (Friedman)

When Russia spies, it’s about knowing our capability and intent and those are elusive details. Even the most innocuous of intentions might not be telegraphed properly. Nations may even spy just so they can adjust their foreign policies not to collide with ours.

Worse, since institutions are made up of a bunch of individuals, we aren’t completely sure of what we’re doing. The giant game of telephone sometimes gets out of hand.

So every nation spies. It’s not all cloak and dagger. There’s administrative stuff. And the lesson here – regardless of what the spy ring was tasked with – is this: No matter how poetic a thing is in my imagination, it’s best not to assume incompetence. They’re Russian spies, after all.