Yesterday Today Tomorrow. Espionage is forever, in peacetime and even more so when the drums of war are beating. The Ukraine crisis has awakened old shadows and brought new ones. All fight, guard, dig. To obtain information or provide counter-information.
In our notebook we have recounted numerous episodes that have taken place in European theaters along each geographic axis in recent months. One of the youngest was Carsten Linke, a German intelligence operative who tipped in favor of Moscow. Linke, who was a far-right wing according to the latest Spiegel revelations, secretly overtook Russians on Himars, American long-range rocket launchers, with the help of an accomplice who acted as a courier: Arthur Eller, a Russian-born gemstone and metal merchant based in Bavaria. Lefte’s choice was an ideological choice coupled with economic interest: his “managers” rewarded him with thousands of dollars. The Washington Post returned to the case to explain the Kremlin’s espionage offensive and the West’s response.
There are many exposed “illegals”, agents who have established or attempted to establish themselves in Europe using false identities, mostly South American. Russia has been accelerating its operations, sending men and women to different countries and taking risks because there is an ongoing conflict in which Westerners play a major role, imposing sanctions and most importantly sending arms to Kiev. It is a flow of supplies that has never stopped and that Putin’s services could not influence to impede. A feared danger, even if caution always applies: We don’t know what we don’t know (has happened). Sometimes the Russian services dared too much or were not smart enough. At the same time, the opponents were waiting for them “at the river crossing”, which emphasized cooperation between the allies.
Over the past year, Russian spies have been arrested in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Poland and Slovenia, while around 400 suspects have been expelled from Russian embassies across Europe. The German couple, the American newspaper recalls, were also involved in the FBI’s investigation, an involvement made possible by the fact that Eller, the courier, had made a trip to Miami. This is where they then “hooked”, turned and literally put him in the corner just before he got on the jet that took him on the 21st trip. After landing in Munich, Eller was arrested by the German authorities.
According to Washington Post sources, a phone call the FSB received at the time of Linke’s December 21 arrest warned him of the danger, but he left for Florida with his family anyway. Mole hunting is a fascinating but also tedious, sometimes tedious task. We have to question behavior, private life, economic resources, work, social contacts. It’s not always a “brilliant” world: there are routines, seemingly “innocent” habits, even boring existences to follow. And then you have to be sure that you have enough elements to first substantiate the suspicion, then the charge before the superiors. Security organs tend to protect themselves, clothes are washed at home and indoors. After the loss of the men in the field – who were arrested or deported – Moscow was content to rely on the flow of refugees that came to Europe with the war, and mostly on cyber-espionage.
These days in the United States, The Fourth Man, written by former CIA agent Robert Baer, a character often featured in the media as a pundit, has been causing quite a stir in the United States. In his book, devoted to the 1990s, a tough time of great challenges, he claims that one of the agency’s counterintelligence managers, Paul Redmon, was actually connected to the Russians. He was, as he writes, the “fourth man” after Edward Lee Howard, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, characters who created immense holes. However, the thesis, based on internal CIA and FBI sources, was rejected by others as it was seen as fragile, with potential legal queues and controversy. Perfect little storm for current scenarios and even more fascinating because the human factor is central, sometimes overtaken by technology but essential if you want to understand.