INTELLIGENCE Russian spying on U.S. increases, officials report

Russia's secret agents gather gossip about U.S. political leaders, experts say.
BALTIMORE SUN
WASHINGTON -- Even as the United States and Russia are cooperating to resolve international crises and track militant Islamic groups, Moscow is working at least as hard at stealing U.S. military and industrial secrets as during the Soviet era, current and former intelligence officials say.
Moscow's spies operate under a larger variety of "covers" than in Soviet days, experts say, and their morale is the highest since the mid-1980s. The Russian diaspora has created a pool of emigres, some of whom can be bribed, cajoled or blackmailed into helping.
"The Russian target is still very much there, still doing the things they did years ago," said Michael A. Donner, chief of counterintelligence for the FBI, in an interview this month. "We are scrambling to keep up."
Different type of spying
The twist, perhaps, is that the United States-vs.-Russia spy game can no longer be painted in black-and-white, good-against-evil terms, as it generally was when members of the Politburo gathered each year atop Lenin's Tomb. The two nations are not just rivals, they are partners in efforts to resolve nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea, and they share intelligence on groups such as Al-Qaida.
"You're allies and friends in one arena, and you kind of battle each other in the other arena," said David W. Szady, who served as the FBI's chief of counterintelligence from 2001 to January of this year. "Those relationships are absolutely essential. It is crucial that that cooperation exists [to combat] terrorism. But everybody has needs for intelligence, and therefore there are those needs to collect it."
Experts say Russia's secret agents spend a lot of time gathering inside gossip about America's political leaders, although much of what they get is probably available in newspapers, magazines or on the Internet.
"There is a Soviet tradition," said Dimitry Simes, a scholar who studies Russia at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in Washington. "You only trust the things that are classified and the things that you steal."
Ups and downs
The amount of Russian espionage in the United States dipped in the wake of the Soviet collapse in 1991, officials and experts say, but rebounded by 1994 under then-foreign intelligence chief and later Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a "massive" expansion of intelligence-gathering efforts in Western Europe and North America, Jane's Intelligence Digest reported. Officials and experts say Russian spying has significantly increased under Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel.
"In 1989 and 1990, after the Berlin Wall fell, we all wanted to light candles and sing 'Kumbaya' and wait for the peace dividends to role in," said James Casey, chief of the Eurasia section of the FBI's counterintelligence division. "But things haven't changed as much as we thought they were going to change in 1989."