Time to Build a Wall – Against Autocracy

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. 

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.

Vulnerabilities in Electoral Law

Curiously, at the same time, the Electoral Commission issued an extensive analysis of the weaknesses in the existing rules around political donations, admitting that “while there is a general principle in Great Britain that funding from overseas is not permitted, “the rules do not explicitly ban overseas spending.” Moreover, “the law currently allows foreign companies to use subsidiaries registered in the UK that do business there, but that do not necessarily generate money, to give or lend money sourced from outside the UK to campaigners in the UK”.

In other words, it is easier for foreign funds to be channelled to a UK political party than to satisfy money laundering regulations (which, in contrast, are based on the “follow the money” rule) when opening a new bank account in this country. 

In 2023, the Government also brought in a new National Security Act, which introduced the concept of foreign interference and a brand-new objective to protect Parliamentary democracy. The new legislation widened the list of offences to “assisting a foreign intelligence service”, extending beyond traditional espionage activity.

EXCLUSIVE

Putin’s Plot Against ‘Great’ Britain – And How He Got Away With It

Peter Jukes tracks Vladimir Putin’s long war against the West and the allies he has found in the pro-Brexit establishment in the plot to derail Britain

Peter Jukes

So, now Britain has quite a few powerful legal safeguards… to protect against something that, according to Johnson, has never taken place. Perhaps the reason for his denials, as well as that of his Conservative colleagues, was the same as prompted him to delay the Russia Report until after the General Election of 2020. 

The recent events in Romania helped us to put our finger on what it was. Based on intelligence provided by the country’s security service, confirming the extent of the Russian interference during the election campaign, Romania’s Constitutional Court declared the election results invalid and ordered a re-run.

It is not only the Romanians who are more aware of such interference, as recent charges by the FBI in the US demonstrated. The talk in America is that the old-fashioned national security model is out of date. Moreover, with the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament having to ask the executive for permission to publish a report, and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal’s statute of limitations of just one year, the public oversight of national security agencies has quite a way to go to what is expected in a proper democracy.

To address foreign interference effectively, the Services will have to become even more clever and thick-skinned politically. For supposedly politically neutral young MI5 officers overdosed on Spooks, tracking a bomb concealed in a printer cartridge is arguably more thrilling – and certainly considerably less politically tricky – than untangling the foreign origins of dodgy-looking political donations to key Brexit campaigns. Or mapping out the historical dependences of various MPs on what in fact has/had been foreign funding and other types of support. 

So far, the British people have been denied a proper independent investigation into Russian interference in British politics. Before it happens, we will only see a very small part of just how successful Putin and the rest of Autocracy Inc. have been at penetrating and damaging our democracy.