I had a sense of déjà vu with Russia’s decision to kick out six alleged British spies in August. After the Salisbury nerve agent attack in March 2018, I sweated for a week in Moscow, waiting to hear if I’d be kicked out in the diplomatic tit-for-tat.
Russia’s announcement was timed to embarrass Keir Starmer as he travelled to Washington last week for talks with Joe Biden. It was also a blow to the critically small pool of Russia experts in the British government.
In the hostile goldfish bowl of UK-Russia relations, both sides are constantly on the lookout for ‘undeclared’ intelligence officers (i.e. spies) working covertly by masquerading as diplomatically accredited staff in the respective Embassies. We kicked out the Russian Defence Attaché earlier this year.
The Russians run a huge ‘guess-the-spy’ game around the clock, with all manner of covert and overt surveillance. I was regularly followed by Russian intelligence, including a fun chase round central Moscow on the day that the post-Salisbury expulsions were announced, with my kids in the back of the car.
Russia’s domestic intelligence service the FSB gleefully revealed details about the six expelled British diplomats and their inexplicable jogging habits around Moscow’s third ring road or curious meetings in towns close to Moscow. In a strange departure from the convention of keeping the details out of the public gaze, the names and photos of the expelled Brits have been flying around social media. That’s why Russia’s Ambassador Andrei Keilin was hauled into the Foreign Office for a tongue lashing.
But there was a big dose of ‘nothing to see here’ in the revelations. Russia hasn’t caught anyone red-handed, not now, or recently, even though they’ve laid on the charm with honey-traps and kompromat.
Yes, both sides work hard to gather secrets; the Head of MI6 recently called on Russians to spy for Britain. The relationship between diplomacy and intelligence is symbiotic; UK and Russian intelligence do have ‘declared’ channels to talk when they really have to.
But the Russians are winning in the real ground game of espionage and diplomacy anyway. Much like in war, having an edge can come down to a bigger supply of the right people with the right skills in the right places.
And Russia has a significant advantage over us in the number of staff they employ in the UK compared to our outfit in Moscow. It’s quite simple. Russia only employees Russians at its Embassy. Most staff at the British Embassy in Moscow are also Russian, because of the Foreign Office’s model of employing less expensive local staff. That’s a good model in friendly nations. Less so in Moscow where the FSB has been known to harass locally employed Russian staff. When I left Moscow in February 2019, almost 90 per cent of the staff across the Russia and British Embassies were Russian. Add to that, a community of over 150,000 Russians in the UK against a small number of British expats in Russia.
There are seldom more than a few dozen diplomatically accredited Brits at our Embassy Moscow. After Salisbury, the loss of twenty-three colleagues cleaned out the political wing of the Embassy, leaving a few people like me, with mere months left on their postings, in a two for the price of one deal. Kicking out six political officers in August will have put a bit dent in the Embassy’s ability to function again. Where those officers liked to go jogging in Moscow is really a secondary issue. I took a lunchtime run from the Embassy once surrounded by a crowd of twenty agents, in one of the weirder stunts they pulled on me. The point is, it will take months for replacement staff to get diplomatic visas, if they ever do.
So, this is really about degrading the UK’s ability to have a functioning Embassy in Moscow. Russia plays this game better than us. Fewer Brits in Moscow, means less insight for London policy makers and weaker advice being put to David Lammy.
And the UK struggles to generate officers with the right skills to fill the jobs we have at the Embassy in Moscow, as Russia expertise has been hollowed out over the last three decades. The Foreign Office has a poor record in ensuring political staff arrive in Moscow with the Russian language and diplomatic skills they need. I saw no real thought put into a strategic workforce plan to maintain a pipeline of Russia expertise over the longer-term. British universities are slowly cutting back on Russian language degrees.
When I arrived in Moscow in July 2014, the Foreign Office spoke often about the need to ‘rebuild’ after a period of post-Cold War disinvestment. This challenge has yet to be gripped with any vigour or purpose.
Russia, on the other hand, has no shortage of English-speaking staff queuing up to work in London. They are generally better qualified, as their Foreign Ministry invests seriously in its Diplomatic Academy and runs a feeder Diplomatic University, which some people call ‘spy school’.
There is a wider problem, too. In recent days, Russian military bloggers have taken great delight in circulating what they claim to be detailed organisation charts of the ‘massive’ Foreign Office’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia Directorate (EECAD), following an FSB information hack. But in my experience, most staff in this Whitehall Russia machine lack real experience of working on Russia or with Russians.
So, Starmer and Lammy are chest-beating their way around the world, reliant on advice from kids in London and a barely staffed Potemkin Embassy in Moscow. Little wonder they’ve brought no new ideas of their own to the table. Meanwhile, Russia is gaining friends in the global south with a systematic and well organised diplomatic charm offensive, as war rages in Ukraine.
By putting insufficient emphasis on our diplomatic capabilities, the UK has rendered itself a global bit part player on Russia behind the US, China, India, France and Germany. We need a better plan for Russia expertise if we really want to outsmart Putin.
This article was published by the Spectator on 20 September 2024.
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