Thinking of penning a spy thriller? I have good news: aspiring writers need only scan recent headlines for inspiration. Here is a brief starter list, one that suggests we may not merely be reading spy novels, we may also be living in one.
Pagers exploding in Lebanon. Plots to smuggle incendiary devices on transatlantic aircraft. A bounty programme in Afghanistan paying for dead western soldiers. Remotely operated robotic machine guns killing scientists. Use of neurological weaponry and microwave radiation. Mysterious drone sightings over New Jersey. A honeytrap spy case in Britain. Poisoning by smearing nerve agent in the target’s underpants. Terrorist leaders killed by precision guided “flying Ginsu” blade weapons sent from above.
Had an imaginative novelist tried to weave these ideas into a book before the headlines were printed, I strongly suspect their editor would have thought it all a bit hyperbolic and unrealistic, the sort of mayhem cooked up by Gru, Dr Evil or some ludicrous Bond baddie.
But eagle-eyed observers will note that, in addition to being real, many of the wild plots above are the work of Moscow’s secret services. Indeed, a casual examination of recent operations undertaken by Vladimir Putin’s spy agencies reveals a long list of sabotage, assassinations, sexual entrapment, hacking and influence operations targeting countries as far afield as the US and Montenegro. Yes, in 2016 the Russian secret services attempted to influence the US presidential election and instigate a coup in Montenegro.
Russia, although badly bloodied in Ukraine, is back, and its intelligence officers and operations are front and centre. Why?
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At the deepest level, Russia is not a normal country. For centuries its leaders have tended to view their state as something closer to a civilisation on a mission that, to protect itself, must continually expand. During the Romanov dynasty, from the mid-17th century to the eve of the First World War, the land ruled by the Russian state grew by an astounding 55 per cent, largely through conquest.
Putin has compared the Ukraine invasion to these imperial salad days, linking his land grabs to a broader civilisational mandate of restoring a greater Russia. To quote the present tsar: “It is also our lot to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country] … We proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence.”
Conflict is central to this world view. The arc of Russian-instigated or supported conflicts during Putin’s reign — from Chechnya to Georgia, Syria to Ukraine — demonstrates his desire to make this vision a reality. “We are faced with the task of building a new world,” he says.
• Killings, coups and chaos: inside Putin’s secret spy war on Europe
But how to achieve such lofty goals? One of the peculiarities of modern Russia is that, unlike Britain or the US, its spy services are its most trusted and effective instruments of statecraft and thus on the front lines of implementing Moscow’s foreign policy. The former CIA officer John Sipher argues that by the Soviet Union’s twilight years the KGB had become its most effective institution. Russia was transformed into an intelligence state, the KGB its sword and shield.
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When the KGB alumnus Putin assumed power in 1999, he recruited many of his former colleagues to join his administration, and the regime that they have built and consolidated over the past generation is anchored in the mindset of the Russian espionage business. And it’s a dirty business, a system in which targeted killings, sabotage, political subversion and disinformation campaigns are features, not bugs.
Such tactics, pursued with an eye towards neutralising threats and weakening opponents from within, are practically coded into the DNA of Moscow’s secret services. Felix Dzerzhinsky, the chief of the Cheka, the first Soviet spy service, remarked: “We stand for organised terror.”
• 25 years of Putin: how an ex-KGB agent turned Russia ‘upside down’
This Chekist playbook distinguishes the behaviour of Russia’s secret services from that of their western counterparts, such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service or America’s CIA. For example, CIA forays in the 1950s and 1960s into coups, poisons, mind control and domestic surveillance were curtailed by a wave of domestic outrage and Congressional oversight beginning in the 1970s. The same could be said for the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques and torture after 9/11.
In Britain and America, the secret services, operating in the shadows, live in tension with the otherwise open society. They tend to be policy instruments of last resort. Not so in Russia. When Russia is strong, so are its spies.
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Spy novelists have paid attention. Remember all those headlines? This is great source material. Moscow’s muscle flexing has powered the return of the Russian spy villain, a character who had gone a little out of vogue in the 1990s, when Russia was weak and its president stumbled drunkenly through Washington in his underpants. Same for the decade after 9/11, when most fictional intelligence officers were cracking terror plots or skulking round the Middle East.
The former CIA officer and author of the terrific Red Sparrow trilogy Jason Matthews credited Putin with generating plot ideas. “I wake up every morning and I think, thank heavens for Vladimir Putin,” Matthews said. “He’s a great character and his national goals are the stuff for spy novels.”
John le Carré got back into the Russia game towards the end of his career and Karla’s Choice, the posthumous le Carré novel written by his son, travels back to the height of the Cold War for a showdown with, who else? Moscow Centre.
Another reason it may feel as though we’re living in a spy novel beset by Russian baddies is that much of what we’re seeing isn’t in fact new. It’s just the old Chekist playbook applied to modern times, the sort of Russian spy trickery that has already fuelled countless Cold War spy stories.
• The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey review — a molehunt in le Carré’s mould
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Illegal intelligence officers living under deep cover in the West? A tried-and-true tactic of Russia’s spy services going back decades and sufficiently up to the moment that two such characters, a Dallas-based couple with a dog named Stalin, play a prominent role in my latest novel, The Seventh Floor.
Gordon Lonsdale, a Canadian businessman living in London in the 1950s and running a company that fabricated bubblegum machines, was actually the KGB deep-cover officer Konon Molody, responsible for running agents and servicing dead drops. Likewise in Slovenia, in 2022, two illegal intelligence officers, a couple living undercover as an Argentinian art dealer and entrepreneur, were arrested and traded back to Moscow. Their two children apparently discovered that they were Russian on the flight to Russia.
A Russian-directed honeytrap, using sex to compromise a target, then blackmail them for information? The KGB did just that against a French ambassador to Moscow in the 1960s, just as Russian intelligence officers have seemingly tried again in recent months, this time targeting an investigative journalist breaking stories about the misdeeds of Russian spies.
Assassinations using poison? In the early decades of the Cold War, KGB-trained assassins killed a Bulgarian dissident in London with a ricin-tipped umbrella and Ukrainian nationalists with a gun that spewed cyanide. More recently, officers of its GRU (Russia’s chief intelligence office) have used nerve agents against two exiled Russian intelligence officers living in the UK in 2006 and 2018, as well as the oppositionist Alexei Navalny — the latter by slathering nerve agent in his underpants.
How about conducting sabotage operations in the West? In the late 1960s the Soviet Union trade delegation’s knitwear representative in Britain was (I’m shocked!) an undercover KGB officer charged with scouting how to sabotage early warning systems and flood the London Underground. Fast-forward to the present and the GRU — featuring for its apt seal a sinister-looking black bat with its wings spreading across the globe — was caught sneaking incendiary devices on to planes bound for Europe that would burst into flames once unloaded.
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But if the guts of the playbook aren’t really new, technological advances have created new vulnerabilities. Russian disinformation and misinformation campaigns are venerable features of Moscow spycraft — in the 1980s the KGB ran a campaign sowing lies that the Pentagon created the Aids virus — but the surface area for these active measures has grown exponentially. Social media and a wildly fragmented information landscape have made it much easier for Moscow to influence the way we think and more difficult for us to spot when they do.
The digital environment also offers promising terrain for Moscow. Sabotage operations no longer require a physical presence near the target, as demonstrated by the ransomware operation against the Colonial gas pipeline in the eastern US — probably perpetrated by a gang inside the former Soviet bloc — which succeeded in shutting down the pipeline for six days, wreaking havoc on filling stations and airline networks.
Perhaps one of the most profound changes to the spy game in the past decade is the combination of three dynamics that, taken together, constitute a revolution in the way intelligence services conduct their business. First, the proliferation of mobile phones, sensors, cameras and biometrics, resulting in an explosion of data. Second, the ability to store huge quantities of that data cheaply, for ever. Third, powerful analytic tools, many AI-powered or assisted, that help to make sense of it all.
One practical example of this: when I joined the CIA in 2006, the way we spoke about hostile counterintelligence environments was for the most part geographically determined: China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Russia (of course). No more. The reality of ubiquitous technical surveillance is that, if a spy service is sufficiently committed, they can learn almost anything about you (wherever you may be), then use that information to create ways to reach out and touch you.
As a husband and father, as an American and a human, I find all of this deeply worrisome, and this is before even mentioning China, Iran, North Korea, the archipelago of failed states and ungoverned spaces across the Middle East and north Africa, lone wolf jihadi terror, the proliferation of nuclear technology, space weapons, genetic drugs, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, to name but a few bugaboos. As a spy novelist, though, I have great hope. After all, there is going to be loads to work with. And, lastly, to the intrepid reader of spy fiction? I say take heart. Not only will you get to read all these novels, it’s going to feel like you’re living in one.
David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst. His new novel The Seventh Floor is published on Jan 30 (Swift Press £20 pp400). His podcast The Rest Is Classified is available on podcast platforms