International Friendship by A. Tekhmenev. 1972.
So I saw John Hudson cover this new spy story where the FBI is making accusations against the Russians for using a cultural exchange agency as a cover to recruit spies (and no surprise, as he was the one who covered the story making fun of McCain for retorting to Putin on Pravda).
The original source was actually Mother Jones, and I had to wonder: how did Mother Jones come to cover this story? Does the hard left still have that Russian hook-up it always had in the old days?
This made it sound as if the Americans questioned by the FBI came to Mother Jones:
On September 30, Richard Portwood, a 27-year-old Georgetown University graduate student, received a phone call from an FBI agent who said the bureau wanted to meet with him urgently. Portwood didn't know why the FBI would have any interest in him, but two days later he sat down with a pair of agents at a coffee shop near his apartment. They told him they suspected that Yury Zaytsev, the US director of a Russian government-run cultural exchange program that Portwood had participated in, was a spy.
Since 2001, Zaytsev's organization, Rossotrudnichestvo, has footed the bill for about 130 young Americans—including political aides, nonprofit advocates, and business executives—to visit Russia. Along with Portwood, Mother Jones has spoken to two other Rossotrudnichestvo participants who were questioned by the FBI about Zaytsev, who also heads the Russian Cultural Center in Washington.
Rossotrudnichestvo has been around for awhile -- it is the descendent of the Soviet Friendship Societies and other Russian agencies created to keep tabs on Russian emigres or Russian citizens abroad and to forge ties useful to Russia abroad. OF COURSE it is run by Russian intelligence since emigre/ex-pat communities and communities of those interested in foreign affairs are obviously where Russians trawl for intel and of course they do try to scrape foreigners for intel. If there's somebody pretending that they don't do this, I don't know what I can do to help their ignorance. One of Anna Chapman's key activities was to hang out in AMBAR, a Russian-American entrepreneurs' group and make ties that led to some of the highest figures in Silicon Valley.
But if in the old days, the Soviet Friendship Societies were fairly crude in their propaganda shows and "front" group machinations, now the Russians have a grander and more sophisticated vision with Rossotrudnichestvo -- the name means "Russian Cooperation" -- which is a kind of Russian USAID for the exercise of Russian "soft power" -- you know, like American "soft power". Vodka diplomacy instead of Coca-colonization, as the loony left Naomi Klein calls it. There have been articles recently about this in the Russian media, and I just read something the other day (I have to find) which talked about how Russia will give aid to other countries through Rossotrudnichestvo now, in a mimic of USAID.
I had to contemplate what it meant that young people in their twenties, just graduating from International Relations courses, and involved in Russian-American exchange, would think to run to Mother Jones to tattle about this -- that they'd see the FBI as the problem in this story, and not the SVR (KGB's descendent). Of course, we know that it's almost a sign of hipster foreign journo street cred to be recruited by Russian agents.
So I ask Richard Portwood, the young co-founder of the The Center for American-Russian Engagement of Emerging Leaders, which was involved in the Rossotrudnichestvo exchanges, why he went to Mother Jones.
He said Mother Jones came to him.
OK, but then how did Mother Jones find out? Portwood didn't answer, but it doesn't take much imagination to figure out that either Cooper Henderson, the other co-founder of CAREEL, or someone else in the social graph of these two could be that source who ran to Mother Jones -- the "nonprofit worker" mentioned in the article.
Or else it could be that Richard's email to the hundred-plus participants in the exchanges somehow got to the journalist at Mother Jones who did the story, Molly.
Again, I'm trying to get in the mindset of these people who think they should be on the side not of the FBI doing its job, but of the wily and cunning Russian diplomats exploiting naive kids -- they must be in the IR Realist school and imagine that they are participating in great moments of statecraft and diplomacy.
I'm very familiar with this psychology -- in fact, long before these young people so animated with the idea of "leadership" through exchange with Russia were even born, in the 1970s in the detente era, and then again after some hiatus after the invasion of Afghanistan, in the 1980s in the "citizens' diplomacy" era, there was the same sort of myopic, oblivious zeal.
Each delegation that went to visit the Soviet Union on some friendship cruise or hands-across-the-sea excercise would feel that they alone were building bridges of peace and understanding, while all around them were hostile forces of reaction against "the people" and their "desire for peace". Each one's vanity was shamefully stroked by the Soviets so they would think that they alone were building peace and others were "in the way" or "reactionary." Peace was always illustrated in those days not by counting SS20 war heads or civilians killed in Afghanistan (more than a million ultimately) but by "those lost in World War II" (20 million). The very fact of the losses of civilians was supposed to be a stand-in for peaceful intent which you couldn't question. No matter that Lenin and Stalin massacred far more than 20 million themselves, and that Stalin in particular executed the heads of the armed forces on specious treason charges, weakening the Soviet Union on the eve of battle with the Nazis. But don't let facts confuse you...
That really is the trouble I think with all of these young people and "mid-career" types who don't get it about Russia and embrace Putin as a pillar of strength -- they never studied, much less understood the Communist Great Terror. They have never stood in a mass grave, as I have, and looked out at all the hundreds of depressed hollows under the trees in the woods which are all the other mass graves (in Kurapaty, outside Minsk, Belarus). They've never seen the photographs of the skeletons exhumed -- jaws spread wide in terror, and that one Nagan bullet that was used to shoot a row of people -- with the last few not quite being dead when they were thrown in the burial pit, leaving the signs of struggle. Inside people's pockets, newspapers showing that it was 1937, not the era of World War II, which is what the Soviets pretended for years. And half-eaten chicken sandwiches, still wrapped, and torn train tickets, showing people literally grabbed from trains and shot...
So yeah, I just don't think they get it -- and they've never looked out over a sea of hundreds of thousands of people marching in Moscow, each bearing a sign for one of the stops in the GULAG archipelago where they had served a sentence, or where their relatives have died. Imagine coming to an entire expo of mass graves and lists of disappeared and prisoners -- the Memorial Society, which tries to keep track of all this, will once again lead a symbolic list of some of the names of people this October 31, which is Political Prisoners Day -- it is a kind of echo of All Souls' Day. I will never forget the very first such occasion in October 1990, when the Solovki Stone was put up from the labor camp by the same name where many had been tortured and died, and where Yuri Afanasyev, a historian and leader of Memorial spoke, his voice hoarse and torn away by the wind, the old ladies crying...It was so packed with people I thought I'd be crushed against the stone.
People like this young men in exchanges don't seem to think about Magnitsky or pogroms or Pussy Riot, but complain that when a delegation of Russians came to our country to see "democracy in action," they couldn't have any meetings because of the shutdown. Then why wasn't their trip postponed instead of using them as yet another showcase in the propaganda wars around the shutdown?
People like this suck up to McFaul (who now has me blocked, after my many years of criticism of his handling of these exchanges, most recently the awful meeting of human rights activists in which they took up time discussing convicted felon Manning and wanted fugitive Snowden instead of pogroms and political prisoners in Russia).
"Thank you for your inspiration to institutionalize dual-track engagement between young Americans and Russians," gushes Portwood. But that's exactly what I condemned -- I thought it was awful to institutionalize the bad-faith insincerity the Russians brought to the table in pretending to discuss civil society and human rights issues. There was never any need to create these unequal hybrid creatures and accentuate false moral equivalency.
But of course, it's the right of young IR Realists to do what they want, and if they think it builds their resume and their leadership skills to go hang out with United Russia operatives and Kremlin apparatchiks in all-expense-paid deluxe trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg, then they're free to do so. In fact, they're probably right, this might be a way to build a resume these days, although I think China and the Arab world are more popular and will have a lot more funding.
I think it's problematic, however, hanging with the Kremlin because it builds that false equivalence and also covers up the very real problems in Russia. I mean, the Magnitsky List. How could you be interested in business and diplomacy and go waltzing around with the people who refuse to do anything to prosecute those on the Magnitsky List?
Now, are these people actually working for the FSB or SVR or whatever? Oh, who knows. To be literalist in that way is only to be accused of McCarthyism and to sidetrack the discussion. The Russians don't have to recruit and pay people in the peace movement or the Communist Party as in the old days, they can take their pick of hundreds of eager IR grads and hundreds of young aspiring foreign affairs journalists and just take them out to lunch -- and even let them pay out of their Soros nonprofit budgets.The thing is, nowadays Ivan doesn't have to lift a finger to get people to look dewy-eyed at Red Square -- they fall into his lap.
Why go out of your way to recruit people in obvious exchange programs, when nowadays, there are so many more outside of formal exchanges -- Americans who go to school in Russia, or work at the UN, or work at Citibank, or law firms or Coca Cola.
James Schumaker, an old Soviet hand with a great deal of experience in the foreign service, makes this point in the comments on the article at Mother Jones:
Just one point on tradecraft. You don't normally invite people to come to your country so you can pitch them to be a spy. In this day and age, it's just too easy for the other side to trace. It's an outmoded technique. On the other hand, so is putting in illegals like Anna Chapman, and the SVR, for some reason, thought that this would work. Sounds like somebody needs to junk the SVR's manual typewriters and start passing out iPads.
So he's actually saying in fact it might be possible that Rossotrudnichestvo is used this way, despite good tradecraft practice -- even though most people will likely read his line and say he's saying that proves they would not use it for such. Of course Rossotrudnichestvo is used for vetting agents of influence, if not worse. By its very nature, it's designed to vacuum up intel. And the subjects of interest don't even have to know they are being vacuumed -- they could just jabber away and be useful.
In the old days, there was a Soviet Film Club in New York where the Russian mission to the UN used to show movies -- they would specialize in the sort of World War II movies that made older Russian emigres come and weep and become vulnerable to "cooperation". I used to go to them as a naive 21-year-old and found no end of Russians willing to be my "friend". Years later, I met a former Soviet diplomat out of government who explained quite frankly that the club was indeed used to recruit and handle spies. No surprise there! To be sure, in the old days, the Soviets had less points of contact and were watched much more -- and visa versa. Today, there are so many zillions of Russians coming here to shop at Tiffany's or buy real estate in Virginia that you don't need special friendship clubs anymore. They can just come and recruit whomever.
Still, it's funny how at a time when the Russians have kicked out USAID and started a furor about "foreign agents," stopping the work of US granting foundations, both government and private, that they themselves put more money into their foreign "cooperation" agency and become more aggressive in their programs. No, not funny, but sad because our people are wimps. I can't believe they let USAID be kicked without barely a whimper or even any kind of struggle. They didn't make any tit-for-tat, although they could not only with this exchange agency, but other entities, including the RT.com bureau. This would be "against our values," and "against the Helsinki Accords," of course, which were meant to foster the free flow of people and ideas.
So the FBI is doing the next best thing which is fluttering the participants, at least making a tat for the tit that the Russians indulged in with kicking out our spies, and accepting Snowden. Geez, that took a long time, were they waiting for presidential approval?
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