Britain wages information war against Russia

ON MARCH 10th 2000, two weeks before a Russian presidential election, Tony Blair made a trip from Downing Street to St Petersburg to accompany Vladimir Putin to a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s “War and Peace”. The idea came from a senior KGB officer, who suggested to his MI6 counterpart that it would help boost the international legitimacy of Mr Putin, who as prime minister had just launched a brutal war in Chechnya. Mr Blair obliged, becoming the first foreign leader to endorse the incoming president.

Nearly 20 years on, Britain is again leading the West’s engagement with Russia—but in the opposite direction. Since March, when two officers in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, deployed a “novichok” nerve agent in Salisbury to try to murder a former Russian spy, Britain has been on the front line of efforts to counter the Kremlin’s clandestine operations.

Russian campaigns of subversion and disinformation have paved the way for the annexation of Crimea, a war in Ukraine and interference in several Western countries’ elections. In each case Mr Putin has denied responsibility, while also making sure that his message was received and understood. After Britain presented evidence against the two Salisbury suspects, the pair appeared on RT, a Kremlin-backed television channel, cocking a snook at the police.

But a few days later they were turned into a laughing stock. First an investigative outfit, Bellingcat, and its Russian partner, the Insider, exposed their true identity, and their spectacular incompetence. Then on October 4th British and Dutch spymasters held a highly unusual press conference, revealing details of another botched operation, by four GRU agents who had tried to hack into the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, to disrupt its investigation into Russia’s use of novichok.

The Dutch officials showed photos of a car boot packed with spying equipment, and even a taxi receipt for a ride from the GRU’s headquarters in Moscow, which one of the agents had kept in his wallet. At the same time, America indicted seven Russian officers, including the four identified by the Dutch and British, for various cyber-attacks, including one on the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Western intelligence agencies have long known that Russia was the source of such attacks. The bungled raid on the OPCW took place in April, when Dutch counter-intelligence, tipped off by British counterparts, detained and expelled the four GRU men. What was new, however, was the decision by Britain and its allies to publicise its intelligence.

This marks a new approach. Counter-intelligence agencies normally keep their findings under wraps, says Sir Mark Lyall Grant, a former national security advisor: “firstly because they don’t wish to alert the adversary to their own capability, and secondly because they don’t necessarily want to escalate the conflict.” This time Britain and its allies decided that the benefits of exposing the Kremlin outweighed the risk.

The information divulged in The Hague led to the exposure of more than 300 suspected agents by Bellingcat and the Insider, marking Russia’s biggest security lapse since the cold war. It made Mr Putin and his thugs look ridiculous, not terrifying. And it put the Kremlin on the back foot, justifying itself with ever-less credible stories, such as the notion that the spooks were there to test IT systems at the Russian embassy.

More Austin Powers than Rosa Klebb

Yet raising the stakes in this way is a forced measure. Mr Putin and his security services have long used intelligence to frustrate and embarrass Western countries. In 2014, for instance, they released bugged conversations between American diplomats in an attempt to portray the uprising in Ukraine as an American plot. But the chemical attack on Sergei Skripal, in which a British citizen was accidentally killed, was a step too far.

Sergei Boeke of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, at Leiden University, says Russia has broken an unwritten rule of the spying game by using intelligence for offensive purposes, something normally reserved for war. The British-Dutch press conference amounted to an information counter-offensive.

The new tactic serves several purposes. One is to deter the Kremlin from carrying out further attacks. Another is to isolate and undermine Mr Putin. It may now be harder for his sympathisers abroad to look the other way when he breaks international rules. Russians, including members of the security services, may also have growing doubts about their president. Lastly, exposing Russian plots could make Western populations more resilient to disinformation. “We need to learn how to protect our open societies, without copying their methods,” says Bob Seely, a Tory MP and member of the parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee.

After the second world war, Britain developed an Information Research Department to counter Soviet propaganda. Sir David Omand, a former head of GCHQ, Britain’s signal-intelligence agency, says it may be time to relearn from its experience of making threats transparent. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he says. “Lies cannot thrive in the light.”