Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [247]
In October 2001 President Putin announced that Russia would close its major SIGINT facility at Lourdes, Cuba. Located within one hundred miles of U.S. territory, the Lourdes complex reportedly could intercept telephone, microwave, and communications satellite traffic and was also reportedly used to manage Russian spy satellites. It was a major irritant in U.S.-Russian relations and an added difficult aspect of the U.S.-Cuban relationship. The closing appears to have been motivated primarily by economics. Russia paid Cuba $200 million annually for the use of the site—a sum that one Russian general said could be better used to buy “twenty communications and intelligence satellites and 100 modern radars.” Two other factors that may have prompted the decision were the deterioration of the Russian spy satellite fleet, limiting the importance of Lourdes, and the steady shifting of U.S. communications from microwave to fiber-optic cable. Some Russian officials expressed the hope that the United States would reciprocate by closing some ground-based SIGINT facilities on the Russian periphery, particularly the one at Vardo, Norway. At the same time, Russia announced the closing of its base at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, which had been a major U.S. base during the Vietnam War. Soviet and Russian forces used it as a base for reconnaissance aircraft and a SIGINT facility targeting China.
The Soviet intelligence apparatus conducted assassinations, or what they termed “wet affairs.” The most famous was the assassination of Josef Stalin’s former rival, Leon Trotsky, in Mexico City in 1940. Some analysts believed that the Soviet Union was behind the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul 11 in 1981, but no conclusive proof has been uncovered. It is not known if Russian policy on assassinations has changed. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 via radioactive polonium is widely thought to have been a “wet affair.” In August 2007, ten persons, including former intelligence and police officers, were arrested for the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had been very critical of corruption and brutality under Putin. Interestingly, the Russian prosecutor argued the murder was motivated not by a desire to silence Ms. Polikovskaya but to embarrass the Russian government by suggesting its involvement—a doublethink motivation that hearkens back to the cold war.
The Russian services have lost important former liaison partners. The intelligence services of former Soviet satellites served, in effect, as subcontractors. The East German and Czechoslovakian services both had contacts with guerrilla and terrorist groups. The Polish service was used for industrial espionage in the West. The Bulgarian service was occasionally used for assassinations. Bulgaria also assassinated one of its own dissidents, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978. The East German state no longer exists; Poland and the Czech Republic are now part of NATO.
Putin has referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest political catastrophe” of the twentieth century. The renewed Russian intelligence services are unlikely to allow their power to be threatened as it was during the days of the Soviet collapse. At the same time, they no longer have the same internal mission or power that they had during the Soviet era to suppress dissent. Instead, they have a huge interest in the economic status quo but then also bear a responsibility if the economy falters, an area in which most of these officers have little practical experience.
CONCLUSION
When assessing different intelligence services, keep in mind that most have liaison relationships with other services, thus increasing their capabilities. The degree to which these relationships complement or overlap one another is important.
As should now be evident, comparing intelligence services with one another is an inexact and somewhat pointless endeavor. Each service is—or should be—structured to address the unique intelligence requirements of its national policy makers.