America’s focus on counterterrorism could lead the country to subordinate counterintelligence to a dangerous degree, as it partners with nondemocratic countries that engage in substantial and sophisticated espionage against it. Professor and research associate Paul Goble observed recently that the U.S. is not paying attention to the threat posed by Russia, its ally in the war on terrorism.

Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Russian president and ex-foreign intelligence officer Vladimir Putin, calculating that the U.S. military would respond with force against Osama bin Laden’s Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, conveyed to President Bush that Russian forces would stand down. In an unusual convergence of interests, Moscow, Tehran and Washington all supported action to crush the Taliban and thwart the expansion of radical Sunni Islamic influence in Central Asia.

From an intelligence perspective, the warming of U.S.-Russia relations following 9/11 was remarkable. Only seven months prior, FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for spying for Russia and 50 known or suspected Russian intelligence officers were expelled from the U.S. Although the impact on Russian foreign intelligence was less severe than the mid-1980s Operation Famish that followed the arrest of notorious Navy spy John Walker and resulted in 100 Soviet spies being expelled from the U.S., it was, nonetheless, significant.

Putin thereafter intensified his efforts to rebuild the Russian intelligence presence in the West, using cooperation in the war on terrorism as a means of access to U.S. intelligence and military forces. His cooperation also provided the political cover needed to seed other countries with intelligence officers and agents at levels not seen since the height of the Cold War. From the Baltics to the new NATO member Eastern European countries to Latin America, the number of Russian foreign and military intelligence officers active today exceeds any period in the 20th century.

The intelligence threat emanating from Russia is growing its presence and influence by means of lucrative oil and arms deals throughout the world. Putin’s oft-expressed desire to regain for Russia the power and influence of the old Soviet Union means foreign policies and the intelligence tasking to support them are designed to reduce Western influence and subvert American political-economic goals while stealing military-technical and political-economic information.

With Russia’s manufacturing and technological base deteriorating, the most practical way for it to speed development is through espionage, using primarily human intelligence, a Russian tradition and the chekists’ long-time forte, to steal Western technology. The revelations of the 1981 Farewell case, in which KGB Col. Vladimir Vetrov revealed to French Intelligence that the Soviets had saved billions of dollars in weapons research and development through espionage from 1975-80, is instructive in this regard.

Putin, an old-school Soviet chekist (the term endures from the days of the Cheka, the secret police organization established in 1917), retains fierce loyalty to his intelligence services, which serve as his main support base, with chekists dominating the Russian government at all levels. Their political power has expanded into control over economic policy and key enterprises, with corruption reaching new heights because they closely partner with organized crime in a symbiotic relationship based on maximizing profits.

Thus, the police state that has taken shape under Putin’s tutelage is taking in billions of dollars derived from its control over strategic resources such as oil and gas and arms exports, with intelligence tasking directed toward geopolitically shaping a world that only enhances its substantial wealth and growing power. At the same time Russia has been America’s ally in the war on terrorism, the Kremlin has significantly intensified its espionage against the U.S. and its allies.

AN OLD PRECEDENT

History provides rich lessons in Russian foreign intelligence strategy. The VENONA papers reveal that from 1932-45, at least 157 identifiable Soviet agents operated in the U.S., with Moscow having penetrated every government agency at the national level except the FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence. The Mitrokhin files reveal that by April 1941, the NKVD (a previous name for the KGB) agent network numbered 221. Then, as now, the U.S. was seeded with Russian spies en masse during a wartime partnership.

At that time, the Lend-Lease aid program provided the USSR with more than 17 million tons of cargo valued at more than $9.5 billion (in 1940 dollars). Stalin and NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria exploited the warmer relations, much like in the ongoing war on terrorism, to ease the infiltration of a substantial number of spies into the country.

As authors William Corson and Robert Crowley note in “The New KGB: Engine of Soviet Power,” “Although the American contribution to the Soviet war effort is not secret to Western historians, a factor generally forgotten, if known at all, is the extraordinary exploitation of the Lend-Lease effort by the NKVD. In scale and scope it can be considered among the most remarkable undertakings in the history of espionage.”

Red Army Gen. Leonid Rudenko and his Soviet Purchasing Commission oversaw at least 1,000 GRU (the Soviet military intelligence agency) and NKVD officers assigned to the commission as purchasing specialists, in addition to numerous experts from Amtorg, the Soviet trade organization that had served as a major espionage base in New York since 1924. All sorts of demands were made, and every opportunity to collect useful material was exploited.

Today, with Western political leaders focused on the war on terrorism and directing huge resources into counterterrorism efforts, fewer resources are dedicated to counterespionage. Yet buoyed by high oil prices, which only increase as does the instability in the Middle East, the Kremlin has the funds to rebuild rezidenturas, or bases, throughout the globe and offer large sums of money to spies, a perennial motivation for selling out one’s country.

And with chekists in control of Russia’s strategic resources — particularly oil and gas, whose export provides the main financial support to the chekist regime — the intelligence services have as a main priority the collection of information and recruitment of agents who can enable Moscow to expand its control of foreign resources in the energy sector and use that control as powerful leverage over those states’ economic policies and political relations.

Arms deals serve the same purposes, although energy is the new weapon. Military-technical and political intelligence is also being sought to further the Kremlin’s geopolitical goals. Hence, recruitment of officials in not only the West but also in elite circles in the countries of the former Soviet bloc that have joined or seek to become members of organizations such as the European Union and NATO, is a major priority of the contemporary Russian intelligence services.

The counterintelligence services of numerous governments allied with the West have reported in recent years that the number of Russian spies operating in their countries is at or above Cold War levels. By February 2005, estimates placed the number of Russian intelligence officers operating in the U.S. under official cover alone at about 100. According to one report, the surge of Russian espionage entails the usual economic and industrial targets along with new weapons and missile-defense technologies, including dual-use items such as lasers, as well as government strategies toward the states of the former Soviet Union, China and the Middle East.

FBI officials say the Russian spies are targeting military and technical secrets, particularly in light of U.S. efforts to build a ballistic missile defense system and space-based weapons, and also seek information on stealth technologies, including those used to conceal warplanes and submarines. KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin noted this year that although Moscow no longer views the U.S. as the “glavny protivnik,” or main enemy, America is considered “Priority No. 1,” adding that in terms of manpower and activity level, there has been “a total restoration, even an intensification” of Russian spying in America.

AGAINST THE MIDDLE

Regardless of the rhetoric of U.S.-Russian partnership in the war on terrorism, rather than assisting in the interdiction and reduction of the arms flow to rogue states and terrorist groups, Russia continues to supply sophisticated weapons and provide intelligence training. Iran, Syria and their Palestinian, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad clients have particularly benefited from Moscow’s patronage.

Just as the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein and the subsequent insurgency were supplied and supported with an array of arms by Moscow in violation of U.N. sanctions — these weapons were used against U.S. forces in 2003 — Russia’s long history of providing intelligence, guns and money to terrorist groups and of supporting rogue states to counter U.S. interests and operations throughout the region continues.

Israel is fighting a Hezbollah in Lebanon that has been supplied with a substantial number of Russian-made Metis and RPG-29 anti-tank missiles, which are capable of breaking through the heavy armor of the Israeli Defense Force’s Merkava tanks, and possibly the Kornet, sold by Moscow to Damascus, and then to Hezbollah. Similarly, Iran, a long-time Russian client, transferred long-range Zelzal missiles to Syria, which Damascus passed on to Hezbollah.

Israel has long been a target for Russian spies. In 1923, the founder of the Soviet secret police, “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, sent a secret telegram to the chief of foreign intelligence, Meyer Trelisser, stating the necessity “to make friends with the Zionists, to be able to win their favor and to use them for our own ends.” It followed that a network of illegals began operating in Palestine that year, tasked to create a spy network in the ranks of the Zionist underground resistance group, “Hagana” (Defense).

Ultimately, both ETZEL and Hagana were penetrated by Soviet intelligence, with Moscow providing assistance to the Zionists in their efforts to expel the British and create their own state based on the expectation that they would be of strategic use in the event of a Russian confrontation with Britain. The Soviets were successful; some of the Zionist figures cooperating with Soviet intelligence in the 1920s through the 1940s later occupied high positions in the political leadership, army and intelligence services in Israel.

Since then, with Tel Aviv’s extremely close ties to the West, Russian intelligence interest in developments in the political and military spheres has remained intense. As analyst Hakam Aql of Axis Information and Analysis noted in June 2005; “In Israel, Moscow stakes its interest on influential representatives of a Russian-speaking community and the Israeli politicians having commercial interests in Russia. In Palestine, the Kremlin pins its hopes on figures of ‘the old guard’ and the ‘middle generation’ leaders of the PLO, who have maintained connections with Moscow since the Soviet era.”

While the West fights the war on terrorism, high oil prices have enabled Moscow to re-establish its residencies and rejuvenate its intelligence activities in regions and cities throughout the world. Under the auspices of countering terrorism or organized crime, the SVR, Russia’s civilian intelligence agency, and GRU have established themselves in countries for purposes completely unrelated.

Intelligence liaisons are used to exploit privatization processes in Eastern Europe, steal military secrets to further their arms industry and gain control of strategic economic resources. They partner with Arab intelligence services to counter U.S. goals in the Middle East. In Latin America, they seek to drive a wedge between these regimes and the U.S. through the favorable provision of arms and oil deals, complemented with a healthy dose of propaganda designed to turn traditional American allies against Washington, disseminated through sophisticated active measures programs.

Present realities dictate that the counterterrorism fight must not supersede counterintelligence. As David Major, president of the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, so succinctly articulated recently, “Which hurts more — espionage, which blinds us, or terrorism, which terrorizes us?”