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Perhaps Trump is right about one thing. Democracies are in desperate need of effective protection from foreigners. But not from the poor refugees he despises. The real threat comes from the subject of Trump & Co’s unceasing fascination: the world’s most powerful autocrats, sitting on trillions of stolen money, surrounded by hordes of their spooks, assassins and diamond-encrusted oligarchs.
In her latest book, Anne Applebaum aptly defined this murderous motley of interests as Autocracy Inc, as the world’s wealthiest despots increasingly cooperate on a global scale to attack, oppress, avoid sanctions and launder money wherever they want it. And while at it, undermining our democratic systems, as they use their considerable resources to sponsor Western complacency.
They do it by buying influence and friends in high places, and by weaponising a whole toolkit of political manipulation. Importantly, it includes “active measures”, ranging from social media and funding an array of MP’s offices, election campaigns, think tanks and research, to KGB-style dirty tricks.
After the summer of 2020, when the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report accused MI5 of “taking the eye off the ball”, the Service, together with SO15, has been scrambling to catch up with the Russian intelligence activities after years of neglect.
Delayed by Prime Minister Johnson until after the 2020 election, the massively redacted report did not go as far as to suggest that there has been any meaningful foreign interference in our democratic processes, but it did appear to effectively accuse the Security Service of not considering it a threat to national security.
A thriller BY PROJECT CITIZEN, featuring Carole Cadwalladr, Peter Jukes and Sergei Cristo that exposes an alleged secret spy ring operating at the very heart of the British establishment
Combatting Active Measures
Perhaps over-compensating for the criticisms in the Russia Report, MI5 is unusually open about its counterintelligence successes. We have witnessed a string of spy scandals being paraded by the authorities in front of the stunned British public, something unheard of in the past. There were spies from Russia and China with Parliamentary passes, and most recently a Chinese citizen in the inner circle of Prince Andrew, as well as a frightful group of Bulgarian freelance spies tasked by the Russian intelligence to follow, spy on, honey trap and kill investigative journalists.
While these showcases went some way towards reassuring the worried electorate, they only represented a small part of the Russian intelligence effort directed at Britain over the past decade. Back in the times of the USSR, the KGB used to spend most of its foreign budget not on the infiltration and running of agents in foreign governments but on the so-called “active measures” (up to 80% of the First Chief Directorate budget, according to some sources), operations to influence government policies and public opinion in Western democracies.
Active measures operations often do not require to have an agent in place. While the tools available to intelligence operations have evolved since then, there is little evidence that Moscow’s overall intelligence approach in that respect has changed in any drastic way.
In our podcast Sergei and the Westminster Spy Ring, produced by Project Citizen and funded by public donations, we will offer you some evidence that MI5 underestimated the power of Russian active measures around the Brexit referendum and subsequent elections. The Government seemed to protest that there was nothing new with the Kremlin trying to interfere in elections.
However, never before, as far we know, has the Russian Government managed to channel funds to the Conservative Party, which was in power at the time, and individual MPs (almost all of them dyed-in-the-wool Brexiteers), providing the financial muscle they needed to deliver the political result that Putin wanted all along.
It’s funny that in the country which enabled the world’s largest laundromat for the Russian kleptocracy, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament was apparently told by MI5 that they didn’t look for evidence of Russian interference.
One government minister even went as far as to rubbish the suggestions of interference because (and this is not a joke!) “[o]ne of Britain’s most valuable safeguards is the use of pencil and paper to vote”. Prime Minister Johnson also used this tactic of ridicule by stating to a Parliamentary Committee that he “ha[s] not seen a sausage” of Russian interference.