Like many people, I was puzzled at first by the round up of a dozen or so Russian spies right after the summit. Huh? There are still illegals in deep cover like that? I thought that sort of thing finished in the 1980s, no? Aren't we supposed to be even Twitter friends with Russia now and have put all that sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff in the past?
And of course, the alleged spies immediate neighbors seemed the most shocked:
“They couldn't have been spies,” said one neighbor of the "Murphys" in New Jersey. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”
But after thinking about this strange episode for awhile, I've come to the conclusion that it is some sort of masterful decoy -- a caper put on by the Kremlin to distract from something else -- and quite possibly even with U.S. connivance or some kind of concession.
Why do I think of something so devious? Because the real people who continue to influence policy on behalf of the Kremlin remain firmly in place, and are probably having a laugh riot at spectacles like the New York Post trying to find 101 ways to turn this average-looking young female spy into some red-haired Mata Hari. Because these people appear to have not yet become the thing they were supposed to be, or if they did do some spying, seem to have done rather low-level stuff -- begging the question as to where the real spies are.
I'm waiting to hear who that New York financier active in politics is ordered to be contacted by Cynthia Murphy by her handler, who would be relevant to a report about Obama's Moscow trip plans. And I'm scratching my head how the Russians could in fact learn anything about *Obama* from a lady in New Jersey and even a financier with a cabinet connection -- *makes no sense*. They'd learn more about Obama's nuclear strategies from reading his college paper, where he raged about "the military-industrial complex" and reiterated a slogan that the Soviets themselves were known for in the 1980s during their nuclear war scare -- "No First Use".
In today's spy story, what really stood out for me was this strange, very obvious and clumsy message, sent to these people who had supposedly been recruited years ago and kept in deep cover for years, a message that sounded more like it came from day one of their training:
You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. — all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles and send intels [intelligence reports] to C[enter].
That just sounds too obvious. It's the sort of thing you say to a spy in person at the beginning of the recruitment, or maybe tell them again in person if they are waivering but it seems odd as a message over encryption -- which I guess wasn't so encrypted after all. It's like a *too obvious* admission of what they are, that makes no sense to be communicating when *it is already understood*.
These spies seem to have created a network that was about...itself. Unless the secrets are so classified we're not hearing about them, they largely seemed to be preoccupied with setting up their spy network and honing their spycraft with maneuvers out of Le Carre novels like brush passes and stashes of cash. If they actually got to the point where they influenced something in their actual jobs in...Yonkers...and...New Jersey and...Boston -- I'm not seeing it. Huh? What is wrong with this picture?
I see there's been some effort to try to compare this lackluster bunch with the Rosenbergs, who, whatever you want to say about them, were true believers. There were such true believers who truly thought there needed to be balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, especially after Hiroshima where the U.S. used the bomb -- and you know something -- Andrei Sakharov was one of them!
So, I have this hunch that somebody -- the Russians or the Americans or both -- decided that this particular network from...New Jersey...should be sacrificed instead of other bigger fish. The story is that one of them was flying out of the country, so they had to nab that one and his whole network -- or never get them. That just makes no sense. They could have watched these message-passers another year or so and seen if the could have gotten some bigger fish or bigger catches of stuff. But maybe this is as good as it gets.
But what's the net effect of all this?
Obama is portrayed as being "angry" -- as if Eric Held and Robert Mueller could be doing *a single thing* without Obama's knowledge in this regard?! As if they didn't make sure to have this happen *after* the summit and its deals were behind them!
Hundreds of thousands of Americans sounding off on forums everywhere are delivering a message now, all on their own, without any Russian prompting, like a kind of giant deluge of confetti set off from this case. What are these messages:
o "The Cold War is over, this is stupid, look how pathetic it all is, spies are just greedy people who want big houses and they soaked the Russians, poor Russians."
o "Israel is really the country that we should target with spies, look what they get away with, they're more evil than Russia."
o "These are the spys that can't spy straight. Russia isn't evil, it's incompetent. It's all not serious. It's a big laugh!"
o "So what secrets did these people pass? Something about nuclear disarmament? But you could get that from Google! There aren't any secrets anymore."
And so on. Thousands -- hundreds of thousands -- of statements that all amount to one point: Russia is not on the axis of evil; the U.S. and Israel are.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, what's happening? Droves of people are carrying water for the Kremlin all over the place. In heckling anonymous twitters. In op-ed pieces. On Johnson's List. On their highly visible foreign policy blogs. In various interventions in Congress and in think-tank and NGO meetings. In the "managed democracy" civil society meetings that are so muted about human rights and so boosterish about tech gimmicks and gadgets that feed Silicon Valley big IT, and not human rights activists. Who needs spies?! The Kremlin's work is handily outsourced now -- or crowdsourced -- or opensourced. Replicated a zillion times over by people who don't have to be paid and who sincerely believe they are moral and right -- and don't confuse them with the facts!
Nowadays, the Kremlin doesn't especially have to go buying people to spout its line, although it probably still does that anyway, for insurance and for fine-tuning some stuff. That was the funniest thing about this spy case -- the notion that you'd have to buy somebody a house in New Jersey (!) to get them to spout the Kremlin symp line! You could probably just buy them a blog or ...just watch as they get a free Twitter account for themselves and achieve the same thing, Ivan!
I find nowadays, aside from the people who are paid -- and perhaps even registered agents (did Russia Today register as a foreign agent, I wonder?), and aside from those PR firms purchased by the Kremlin to flog their line, and aside from the totally "managed democracy" newspapers, and aside from various "agents of influence" -- there are plenty of people already sympathetic to the Kremlin, who help it out either from genuine or cynical belief systems (either will work fine), or maybe with a little bit of expense money, and who easily, casually, even belligerently spout the Kremlin line without pay, without even consciousness.
These are people born in the 1970s, who reached their 20s and politically-conscious adulthood in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the ruble was crashing, when the supposed "wild 1990s" were in swing and ending with Putin's crackdowns, when the story was expats behaving badly in Moscow clubs, the eXile's eXcesses, Americans being caught in various investment schemes with shady Russians, drive-by shootings of bankers and mobsters, oligarchs buying real estate in Virginia, all that sort of stuff.
Younger people starting their political clocks during this period, and not in the 1960s and 1970s when masses of dissidents were jailed, Czechoslovakia and then Afghanistan were invaded, the Korean airliner was shot down. People who start their political watches with Yeltsin's tippling or pensioners ranting about "priKHVATizatsia". So they see Putin as a strong hand, cleaning up messes. Of course, as Paul Goble's column expertly highlights, the Kremlin propagandists deliberately exaggerate the "wildness" of the 1990s -- they weren't so wild, and I was there to know that they weren't so wild. The evil Amerika quotient in them was also nothing like the way it is portrayed by the twitterers now. It's conventional Washington liberal wisdom to say that; there aren't always people around to explain the facts.
There's a paralysis that has come over this new generation shaping politics, without any Russian spy masters to report to, that enables them -- to cite but one recent and typical example -- to casually post a clipping from Russia Today, and start a thumb-sucking, thoughtful discussion about how unwise it was that Ghimpu, speaker of the Moldovan parliament and acting president, declared Soviet Occupation Day.
When someone like me strenuosly objects, and points out that it's ok to remember 300,000 killed in the Soviet occupation, or remember that Russian troops have no business in Transdniester and should be gone under all kinds of international agreements, I'm told that not only am I objectionable and "rude" and uninformed, I don't understand how in politics with communists, you have to...consult. How unfair that these communists weren't consulted! To which I blandly stick to my lasts: I'm not getting this. Yet another political discussion with people gingerly picking their way around the sensibilities of communists, the anger of Russia, the need for consensus, the need to forgive and forget (and I could cite similar Facebook and Twitter fights on Georgia, Ukraine, etc.) -- although there has never been a Nuremberg, and never been justice -- and likely never will be (which in my view, is one of the chief reasons this region continues to spawn new conflicts and all kinds of other social ills).
The Kremlin propaganda paralysis extends into every single debate. Some years ago, I learned that if you try to criticize *anything* on the Johnson's list regarding Russia *really*, without about 10 genuflections first, banging on the U.S., banging on Western perfidy, condemning Israel, sneering at Georgian adventurism, you couldn't be entitled to make a claim and will be deluged with hate mail offline or on the list. You can either endlessly polemicize with these paid or fervently organic and nature Kremlinoids -- or get a life.
It's really an awful, *paralyzing* atmosphere.
The Kremlin agitproppers can, of course, make use of a very basic liberal Babinski reflex: the desire to be fair, to allow free speech, to have plurality of views.
Except, having conceded that, the liberal and his Babinski reflex seldom find they are really in a field of plurality. As you can see from many of the debates in my past posts and my twitter debates, the Kremlin perspective ultimately can't brook any dissent. It has to prevail, always and everywhere. It can't compromise. It can't lose. It can't concede maybe there are different ways of looking at things. It has to prevail, and will stop at nothing to do so. Faced with that much malicious and pervasive force, people of conscience can do little more than point and say, "Look how they are." And not even that, often, because of the violence they face in return.
The pro-Kremlin perspective gets so aggressive, that not only is it willing to look at what a spy did with their hydrangeas as exculpatory, they're willing to portray the Soviet Union polluting Lake Baikal as a function of...the Western-driven nuclear arms race (!). Or to say that if we don't know who killed JFK, that it's ok that scores of Russian journalists have been assassinated by mysterious killers, too. Or to imagine that NATO's bombing of the aggressive Serbs over Kosovo exonerates the Russians from carving out parts of Georgia. This constant sensation that actual two wrongs by both sides make a right that is always about making the wrong of the Kremlin right. You keep hoping that the Russians, the Kremlin propagandists, will realize they don't need this overkill; that it discredits them and they don't have to keep doing this. But they find overkill works fine.
I don't have any solution to this problem of blanketing propaganda, paralysis, and people who just don't know any better. On this American story, however, what I suspect is that we've been had here. That the Russians may have even sacrificed these people in some fashion, burned their own agents deliberately so as to distract from something else, or clutter the semantic field with lots of signals at cross-purpose just to make havoc.
What's clear is that we got to roll up a spy network. But...just what did we give in return?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/29/AR2010062904525.html
Patricof says he thinks he's the financier.
Posted by: Catherine Fitzpatrick | June 30, 2010 at 01:05 AM