FLASH
Shkruar nga Irina Borogan & Andrei Soldatov
At the height of the battles between secret services during the Cold War in the 1980s, collaborators recruited by Western agencies in the Soviet Union were never part of a group.
Last week, the Russian parliament, the Duma, approved several new and longer prison sentences of up to 6 years for those who use the internet to lure children into "criminal and anti-social activities". The reason for the adoption of the new law is the war in Ukraine.
This was made clear by the head of the Security Committee in the Duma, Vasily Piskarev: "There have been cases of children, even elementary school students, being involved in acts of sabotage. And very often the communication with the child is carried out via the Internet". And this claim is true.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian children have repeatedly been caught attempting to commit acts of sabotage. Only during the first 9 months of this year, the Russian financial intelligence agency Rosfinmonitoring added 93 minors to the list of terrorists and extremists, an absolute record in this respect.
One of the youngest was 14-year-old Yegor Lauskis, who was sentenced to two years in a maximum-security prison in Siberia for setting fire to a switch box on a railway line last year. The damage was less than $10.
According to investigators, the teenager, who along with his friend was recruited by the Ukrainians through the Telegram application, threw a bottle of flammable liquid into the control box, recorded the act and sent the video to his Ukrainian recruits.
It seems that recently more and more minors have become victims of the new approach of the secret services. In September, Russia's federal security service, the FSB, arrested two 16-year-olds for burning a helicopter at a military airbase in Omsk, Western Siberia.
They admitted that they had been offered $20,000 by an unknown man, who contacted them through the Telegram network, giving them the relevant instructions. Two weeks earlier, two other boys, aged 13 and 14, set fire to another helicopter at another base in a Siberian city. The fire not only destroyed the helicopter, but also caused severe burns to their faces and hands.
They were caught and taken to hospital. The FSB reacted harshly, treating the children the same as regular criminals. The names of the minors were displayed alongside those of real terrorists on Rosfinmonitoring, alongside Islamic extremists accused of the Moscow concert hall massacre in March this year, which left 145 dead.
It seems that the war in Ukraine has dramatically changed the idea of what an agent recruited by a foreign intelligence agency or terrorist organization might look like and act like. The Cold War introduced the concept of a collaborator as an adult, motivated by ideology or money.
Before successful recruitment, that individual needed a period of development, and then a period of training and then support. This gradual process made him (in most cases) a member of a secret group of spies, with a very clear and fixed division of responsibilities, led by a superior who was also the point of contact.
And this was true whether he was an underground resistance militant in the Soviet Baltics in the 1950s, a member of the RAF (Red Army Faction) in West Germany in the 1980s, or a famous terrorist such as Carlos Jackal.
At the height of the battles between secret services during the Cold War in the 1980s, collaborators recruited by Western agencies in the Soviet Union were never part of a group. However, they had a long-term superior with whom they exchanged messages over secure networks.
Soviet spy agencies used the same techniques and usually went to great lengths to train their collaborators in the West how to work with their superiors, according to plans drawn up and approved in Moscow.
Consequently, the number of potential collaborators available for recruitment by the secret services has never been very large. At one point, Western spies tacitly recognized that the people most likely to be recruited were those who first decided to work for the West, and then found a way to approach Western intelligence agencies.
This was how the CIA recruited Adolf Tolkachev - the so-called Billion Dollar Spy - who leaked Soviet high-tech secrets between 1979-1985. The KGB also recruited Aldrich Ames and Robert Hannsen, two of the most valuable Soviet agents, into the CIA and FBI, respectively.
Both had volunteered to spy for Soviet intelligence in exchange for large financial rewards. The war in Ukraine changed this perception to something much less glamorous. Among the Russians recruited by the Ukrainian secret service - or among those caught so far - are young idealists and activists, but also children who were contacted through the Telegram platform and offered money.
Also, the Russian secret service has turned to a different type of recruitment. It's about common criminals, recent immigrants, lost souls and all kinds of crooks who are eager to make a quick buck. They join acts of sabotage or Russian propaganda operations in Europe.
One of the culprits for this change is partly the development of telecommunication technologies. But the main reason is the fact that what we have now in Europe is not a Second Cold War, but a real hot war, where ethical constraints, including those for intelligence agencies, become the first casualty. The masks have fallen./ Adapted "Pamphlet" from "Center for European Policy Analysis"
*Note: Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are members of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of the Agentura.ru portal, which monitors the activities of the Russian secret service.
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