As the scandal over the alleged British diplomats – spies and their super-rock gadgets unravels in Moscow and the Russian court is supposed to seal the fate of the captured agents in the spring, AIA decided to bring to our readers a dossier on British intelligence activities in Moscow since the fall of the USSR, including several cases before the collapse, which seem important for an understanding of the current scandal…
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| British embassy in Moscow in 1931, on Sofievskaya Quay |
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This dossier is based on Russian sources and the memoirs of high-ranking secret service officers. The British embassy first appeared in Moscow in 1931, in the luxurious building on Sofievskaya Quay as the UK was one of the first countries to recognize Bolshevik Russia. Soon enough the building became, as Soviet veterans call it, "the lair" of the Secret Intelligence Service – SIS or MI-6. SIS was rather active in the USSR but the Moscow branch was a pretty quiet one, as head of KGB counter-intelligence against the United States and Britain, the late Major General Rem Krasilnikov
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Rem Krasilnikov |
wrote in his book, KGB against the MI-6 (2000). The branch "woke up" in the beginning of the sixties with the case of GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who voluntarily became a British and US agent. In 1955 Penkovsky, codenamed Yoga or Young, was appointed military attaché in Ankara. Later he was appointed to the Coordination of Scientific Research where he became deputy head of the foreign department. In April 1961 he began passing important information to his British contact in Moscow, Greville Wynne. Penkovsky revealed information about Soviet missile developments, nuclear plans, locations of military headquarters and the identities of KGB officers. This included evidence that Nikita Khrushchev had been making false claims about the number of nuclear missiles in the Soviet Union. Over a period of 14 months Penkovsky passed photographs of 5,000 secret papers to the CIA and MI6.
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| Oleg Penkovsky |
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Penkovsky, described by one intelligence officer as the "best spy in history", was considered so important that a meeting was arranged between him and Sir Dick White, head of MI6. The Soviet Union had two double agents, William Whalen and Jack Dunlap, working in Washington. Eventually information was passed to the KGB that Penkovsky was spying for the West. On October 20, 1962 Russian intelligence officers raided Penkovsky's apartment and discovered a Minnox camera that had been used to photograph secret documents. Penkovsky was immediately arrested and it was not long before he gave the name of Greville Wynne as his British contact. A few days later Wynne was arrested at a trade fair in Budapest, Hungary. After being convicted, Penkovsky was sentenced to death and executed on May 16, 1963. Wynne was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, but in 1964 he was exchanged for the Soviet agent, Lonsdale. Penkovsky's case, being very old, is interesting for two reasons tying this case to the recent spying scandal. First, Penkovsky reported to Mrs. Janet Chisholm, the wife of the British Intelligence "residentura" head in Moscow at that time, Roderick Chisholm, whose office was on Sofievskaya Quay. Second, the SIS intended to equip Penkovsky with a new James Bond style gadget – a transmitter, capable of sending bursts of data as far as 800 meters. But his disclosure and arrest prevented that.
Moscow's Experience with the Current MI-6 Chief
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John Skarlett in Moscow (1976) |
Another important event prior to the fall of the USSR was the case of the "renegade Soviet Navy officer" in 1975-1976, which was a great operation of the KGB's counterintelligence. The head of the British Intelligence "residentura" in Moscow, Peter Brennan, got in touch with the officer, who allegedly wanted to sell data. As was figured out later, it was a KGB's bite, which let the Soviets know who was working for the SIS in Moscow. It was a part of revenge for the September 1971 expelling of over 100 Soviet officials from Britain for spying. Oleg Lyalin, the first Soviet intelligence agent to defect since WWII,
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| Peter Brennan |
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exposed them all. First, Russia responded by expelling 18 British embassy staff members from Moscow. Later the "renegade" trap was used. One who almost paid for the failure was John McLeod Scarlett, the current head of the MI-6. In 1976, being the second secretary of the British embassy, he replaced Peter Brennan as the curator of the "renegade Soviet Navy officer". Several months later Scarlett was suddenly recalled home, as Rem Krasilnikov wrote, to be saved from the scandal. 15 years later, after the Soviet Union's collapse, he came back to Russia, as the officer of the MI-6 for contacts with the local secret services. But the FSB's agents, who replaced the KGB's experts, knew of his biography. He was under strict surveillance by the Russian secret services, but managed to arrange for the defection to Britain of Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist who copied hundreds of secret files, which he handed to MI-6. In 1994 Scarlett was expelled from Moscow, for allegedly recruiting a spy in Russia's Defense Ministry, and one other reason, which will be noted later. Scarlett's cover was blown, as the Russians made the information available to the press on his return to Britain, and a picture of him was taken in Heathrow Airport. Ten years later this man, who fluently speaks Russian, headed the MI-6. But before the expulsion he took part in the first stages of the Russo-British Intelligence confrontation, which commenced under cover of "cooperation talks". As the Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, SVR, (1991-1996), Evgeny Primakov, remarked in his The Years of Big Politics (1999), the SIS – "the most dangerous opponent", tried to play with the Russians, creating in 1993 a "coordination staff" in Moscow, but blocking a similar SVR staff appearance in London. Scarlett was part of the British staff, together with the MI-5 representative, Slatter. The Russians, according to Primakov, had to use pressure to establish SVR's legal representation in London. They sent a memorandum to the UK government claiming that there were 13 British spies in Moscow and naming them. Official London agreed to station a legal SVR representative, withdrawing its demand to the SVR to reach an agreement with the Russian Military Intelligence (GRU), so they would both have only one representative in the British capital. However, the British disliked the candidacy of Vyacheslav Gurginov as the official SVR man in London, and he was denied a visa in February, 1994. The British said he was involved in supplying secret data to Saddam Hussein. The Russians retaliated, demanding that Scarlett leave Moscow, under a pretext of his participation in the recruiting of Vadim Sintsov, former official of a military metallurgical firm. As director in charge of foreign relations of the "Special Machine-Building and Metallurgy", he was arrested in January, 1994 and charged with treason for giving information to the British intelligence service and taking bribes from representatives of various foreign companies. He was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. In his apartment the FSB found large quantities of spying equipment used to copy and cipher data as well as to transmit it.
The Cursed Gadget…
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Platon Obukhov |
But the Scarlett-Snitsov scandal was rather small, considering the next one with the arrest in Moscow by the FSB on April 17, 1996 of Platon Obukhov, a former Russian junior diplomat. Obukhov, 28, the son of a former deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR, the Russian ambassador to Denmark and top arms-control negotiator, Alexei Obukhov, was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in a high-security prison. At the time, he was working as a second secretary in the Foreign Ministry’s North America department. His arrest led to the biggest spy scandal between London and Moscow since the end of the Cold War. Moscow expelled four British diplomats over the affair (threatening to expel 5 more), and London responded by expelling four Russians. As the KGB high-ranking officer, Evgeny Strigin, wrote in his book The FSB under Barsukov, 1995-1996 (2005), over 14 British agents had contacts with Obukhov. The Russian sources claimed that agent Masterwork was recruited during his business trip abroad, being caught on something hot and compromising and agreed to work for money. He allegedly received over $300 thousand for his services.
As Anatoly Elisarov writes in his book The FSB's Counterintelligence Vs the Best Foreign Secret Services (2000, compiled with the support of the FSB's public relations office) Obukhov, codenamed Masterwork, was also provided with, guess what - an electronic gadget. With the help of it he was transmitting data to the British embassy or to British agents in other locations, as he was passing by them. A two-second long burst was strong, but hard to catch and decipher. However, Elisarov notes, the use of the hi-tech gadget was the reason for catching the British spy. The FSB’s radio-surveillance unit in Moscow managed to localize strange radio signal eruptions and the hunt started. One of the British agent’s failures became the beginning of the end of Masterwork’s spying career. He was supposed to transmit data at the coffee bar, which was closed for some unknown reason. Apparently he tried to find another location and was transmitting data several times, leading to his discovery.
Elisarov also quotes the document of the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which the catching of Obukhov is called "an unprecedented failure of the Secret Intelligence Service, the agents of which underestimated their opponent and could not see that they were being followed by the FSB".
The Caught Spy and Political Leverage
Another Russian citizen accused of spying for Britain with the aid of the Estonian security service was arrested in March 2000. Few details were available as to where or when the alleged agent was caught, or whether the person concerned was a man or a woman. It was also known that the agent was previously an employee of the Russian secret services, recruited by the first secretary of the British embassy – the MI-6 officer, Pablo Miller. He also allegedly met with the highest Estonian security officials and was supposed to transfer data on the activities of all the Russian intelligence structures.
The arrest of the spy was, as many commentators noted, used as political leverage. It was an embarrassment to Britain, coming just four days after Prime Minister Tony Blair met Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The latest scandal, before the current "intelligence rock" affair, happened in April 2004, when the Russian weapons expert, Igor Sutyagin, was convicted of treason and passing classified military information to a British company alleged to be a front for the CIA. Sutyagin was sentenced to 15 years in prison. MI-6 involvement in the case was circumstantial, as the FSB did not make an issue over it.
The media forgot most of the abovementioned cases as the Russian FSB reported the latest case of espionage. However, they seem to be a very important reminder, which shows at least two tendencies – over-infatuation of the British SIS-MI-6 with hi-tech gadgets and the use the Russians make of the spying cases in order to apply political pressure.
A short timeline of the confrontation:
1931 - The British embassy opened in Moscow
1961 - Oleg Penkovsky started passing data to the SIS
1975 - 1976 - The case of the "renegade Soviet Navy officer"; John Scarlett, recalled from Moscow
1991 - John Scarlett returns to Moscow as the officer of the MI-6 for contacts with the local secret services
1992 - Vasili Mitrokhin defects to London
1994 - Vadim Sintsov case; John Scarlett expelled from Moscow.
1995 - Platon Obukhov started passing data to the MI-6
2000 - A Russian citizen accused of spying for Britain with the aid of the Estonian security service
2004 - The Russian weapons expert, Igor Sutyagin, convicted of passing classified military information to a British company
2005 - The British Home Office estimated the number of Russian spies in the UK at 40 agents.
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