Spies keep busy as ever, quietly

Following Russia's historic rapprochement with the West after Sept. 11, even celluloid superspy James Bond has forgiven his traditional nemesis in Moscow and gone in search of fresh enemies. The latest Bond flick, "Die Another Day," has the evergreen hero battling bad guys from the hermit state of North Korea.

That's fiction, but in the real world, actual spies appear to be busier than ever. In the past month alone, Canada and Sweden angrily expelled Russian diplomats for "activities incompatible with their status," the familiar code for espionage. Moscow announced Friday that it will no longer accept US Peace Corps workers, after denying visas to 30 of 64 volunteers, charging they were up to more than humanitarian work.

"The leading intelligence agencies of the world have strengthened their presence in Russia," complained Oleg Firomolotov, deputy chief of counterintelligence for the FSB security service, in a recent interview with with the government paper Rossiskaya Gazeta. "Russia is a priority object of their activity."

From the other side, the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Digest warns that "Russian intelligence operations in the West appear to be rapidly escalating." In London alone, the number of operatives of Moscow's SVR external spy service has jumped from just one in 1991 to 33 today, the journal estimates.

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by moving Russia into solid geopolitical alignment with the West. In the past year, Russian and US special services have cooperated closely in the war against terrorism, and Moscow has even forged an historic friendship pact with the Western military alliance NATO.

Experts say Mr. Putin's gestures were genuine, and that the Kremlin sees cooperation with the West as crucial, to overcome Russia's post-Soviet economic malaise and national identity crisis. "In the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Russia provided more help to the United States than all the countries of NATO combined," says Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the independent Politika Foundation, and a former political adviser to the Soviet KGB security service. "We have a common enemy now, and such contacts are very much in the interests of both sides."

In the short term, however, Russia's political shift has not brought the hoped-for wave of foreign investment to revive its sluggish economy, particularly the crumbling military-industrial complex. One traditional solution, with which former KGB foreign agent Putin is personally familiar, is to ferret out Western technological and managerial secrets by means of espionage.

"Intelligence services will always exist," says former KGB operative Stanislav Lekarev. "It's a mistake to associate espionage with war. In fact, the less shooting is going on, the more spying there will be. Russia's secret services were much depleted in the post-Soviet era, so they're only now beginning to get back up to speed."

Two Russian diplomats expelled from Canada recently were reportedly agents of the GRU armed forces intelligence wing, seeking access to high-tech military secrets. Two Russians kicked out of Sweden in November were allegedly trying to penetrate Telefon AB LM Ericson, a company that makes cellphones and aircraft radar systems. Both cases resulted in old-fashioned tit-for-tat expulsions of Canadian and Swedish diplomats from Moscow.

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