Of rocks, Russian reminiscences and spy rituals

In 2006 the Russian authorities announced they had discovered that Britain’s foreign intelligence service – MI6, now renamed the Secret Intelligence Service – was using a rock to help it uncover the secrets of the Russian state.

A rock?

When the allegations were put to him at a London press conference at the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair made light of it, repeating the formula that the “government does not comment on intelligence matters” – and adding, “except when we want to, obviously”.

Old hands murmured that the Russians had watched too many James Bond films, in which “Q”, the irascible head of technical supplies, introduces 007 to a panoply of useful gadgets packed into lighters, pens, car exhausts and the heel of Bond’s handmade brogues.

But it was true. With a breezy phrase this past week, the rock was promoted from a ridiculous notion to a serious piece of kit. In the first episode of the BBC’s Putin, Russia and the West, Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff, was asked about the rock, which had lain in a Moscow park and which the Russians said was a vital link in the British intelligence effort. “They had us bang to rights!” said Mr Powell, reminiscently. “Very embarrassing.”

The old hands had to come up with another narrative. Spying, especially in Moscow, wasn’t just a question of passing over an envelope in a café or calling your control from a phone box (if a working one could be found). Bizarre machinery and activity was part of the great game. In his memoirs, the former KGB London station chief (and defector) Oleg Gordievsky writes that Moscow, during the tensions of the early 1980s, ordered him and his colleagues to take shifts near the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall to count how many windows were lit each night, so any surge of nocturnal activity that might presage some monstrous anti-Soviet plot would be detected.

In Moscow at the end of the Soviet period, when people were beginning to speak about forbidden things, one of my Russian colleagues in the office told me, with a mixture of shame and amusement, that she had had to write periodic reports on all the correspondents for the KGB. “It was all rubbish,” she said. “I am sure they never read them. Anyway, they were bugging you.”

Telling me this – we were by that time friends – seemed to relieve her mind; but such confessions did not always need a long gestation period. On a trip to Latvia in 1989, when its independence movement was becoming more militant by the week, I was met from my train by the deputy foreign minister – a purely formal title, a threadbare disguise for an intelligence officer. Rather sadly – as I learnt from later conversations, he knew and feared the end of his precarious measure of power in a society turning against the Soviet system – he said: “Of course you will know I am here to spy on you.”

Norma Percy, director of the series in which Powell spoke out, recalled at a seminar earlier this week her efforts, near the end of Gorbachev’s term, to persuade a former politburo member to tell the story of a particularly fateful meeting. She asked him to imagine he was telling his wife. “Over his face,” she said, “there came a look of horror at the very thought of telling his wife about a politburo meeting.” A culture in which state and Party business was so closely held to leaders’ chests was one that bred layer upon layer of paranoia, circles of mistrust in which no relationship could be seen as safe – and in which spying was the one way to approach something like the truth.

The ritualistic aspect to spying wasn’t confined to the Russians: British military attaches, charged with sending back analyses of Soviet troop deployments and weaponry, would go off for grim days in military base towns, taking their wives to make a pretence of being tourists. But they would be followed every inch of the way; what was the pretence for? Themselves?

In the block in which the FT flat was situated, a top floor was permanently barred, with an iron mesh gate half way up the stairs leading to it (the elevator stopped on the floor below). This was (it was said) a listening post for the block, inhabited exclusively by foreigners, journalists and diplomats, the latter including the MI6 bureau chief.

The rock was dismantled, but no expulsions followed. Vladimir Putin, then president, explained with acid wit that if he got rid of the offending diplomats, the British “might send someone smart next time”. He used the incident to further his crackdown on NGOs, both foreign and Russian, whose promotion of democracy he saw as an effort to destabilise his rule and Russian society. He alleged that one of the British officials who took information from the rock also gave money to Russian NGOs: thus proving, at least to his own satisfaction, that espionage and democratic activism came from the same source and pursued the same end: destabilisation.

The pro-Kremlin organisers of a conference held in Vienna on Friday insisted that no candidate in the Russian presidential elections set for March – neither the veteran leaders of the Communist party and far-right (misnamed) Liberal Democrats, nor the younger leaders of small liberal parties, nor the spokesmen for the anti-Kremlin demonstrators who came out on the streets in December – could offer a coherent programme or bind the country as Mr Putin can. The first to suffer from Russian instability would be Europe.

On this analysis, the Europeans are between a rock and a hard place. With the rock gone, the hard place remains: and the hope that, with time and a better economic climate, the hard place will soften.

john.lloyd@ft.com