My recent observations on the arrest of the network of Russian sleeper/illegal spies in the USA have been noticed and commended by Boris Volodarsky:

Finally, out of a wall of stupid and totally unqualified media reports, including two articles in The Sunday Times (July 4, 2010) not to mention the Independent of the same date, there is something worth reading…

Boris is someone who knows quite a lot about such things:

The role of illegals is threefold:

  • to act as cut-outs between important sources and the Center (directly or via the SVR station);
  • to serve as talent-spotters finding potential candidates for further intelligence cultivation and possible recruitment (a rather long and complex process, where the illegals only act at its early stage);
  • and to establish the right contacts that would allow other intelligence operators (members of the SVR station) or the Center (visiting intelligence officers under different covers, journalists, diplomats or scientists tasked by the SVR) to get intelligence information and/or receive favors that the Center is interested in.

The illegals also have a number of technical tasks like renting accommodations that could be used as safe houses, finding places for dead drops, planning hit operations like assassinations that are also carried out by illegals (but from a different department of the same directorate).

They also collect sample documents that could be used in other covert operations and update Moscow about some standard proceedings (buying a house, getting a job, registering a company, and so on)…

All of which (and plenty more) puts to shame the mass of British media so-called  comment/analysis on this episode in the UK. Although it’s hard nowadays to put the facile commentary down to pro-Russian or some other ideological gullibility – more like chronic triviality and sheer laziness.

But the effect is the same, of course.

To belittle a first-class technical intelligence effort by the Western agencies who work hard and diligently to protect our freedom, and thereby to add another lump of moral relativism to the vast stinking pile of it now obscuring the public’s view of grown-up issues..

Useful idiots indeed.