Ich bin ein ehemaliger CIA-Agent – ​​so spioniert Russland Großbritannien aus

They’re known in the business as tradecraft: the ingenious techniques and devious tactics used by spies to carry out their missions without being detected.

Some of these methods have barely evolved for a century. Take signal sites, where an agent might chalk a cross on a particular wall, to indicate they’re ready to share a vital message or important documents.

They’ll do this by leaving them at pre-agreed locations, often in parks or remote areas, where one spy can deposit an item for a comrade to pick up without them ever having to meet. KGB spy John Walker, who shared US secrets for decades until he was caught in 1985, would place film in empty drinks cans and received money from Moscow the same way.

Sean Wiswesser, who only left the CIA two years ago, has spent his 30-year US intelligence career studying how spies operate in the field. No doubt he used some of these skills himself while serving as a CIA station chief in parts of the former Soviet Union (he still can’t reveal precisely where he was based). Later, he taught colleagues how to use tradecraft and ways of spotting an enemy’s work.

One Russian tactic that has existed for decades is the use of proxies: hiring outsiders to do their dirty work for them, sometimes without these people realising what they’re doing or who they’re helping. It’s make their operations harder to detect and avoids risking the lives of experienced agents.

In recent years, recruiting single-use assets to carry out sabotage and assassinations – known by spies as “wet work” owing to the blood that is usually spilled – has become far more common, according to Wiswesser. The UK is a prime target, he warns.

Russia’s FSB and GRU agencies look for “misfits of society” to serve as “disposable” contractors, he tells *The i Paper* from his home in Alabama. “They might pay a young teenager who’s upset with his or her parents, give them a few thousand dollars to go take pictures of a rail line or even put an explosive down.”

This level of “reckless” activity is now at a level “that we’ve never seen before” says Wiswesser, author of new book [*Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks*](https://www.waterstones.com/book/tradecraft-tactics-and-dirty-tricks/sean-michael-wiswesser/9798892410199), which analyses the methods used by Vladimir Putin’s spies. “It’s a sign of just how desperate the Russian intelligence services have gotten.”

In 2024, for example, plotters in Russia’s Wagner Group recruited UK drug dealer Dylan Earl through the Telegram app. He then found several young British men involved in petty crime to carry out an arson attack on a warehouse in Leyton, east London. It contained relief supplies for Ukraine.

Six Bulgarians were also jailed in the UK last year for spying on two investigative journalists who helped to expose Moscow’s links to attacks on Skripal and the late opposition leader Alexei Navlany. The spy cell, who also communicated on Telegram, discussed potential kidnappings and killings.

One of the most surprising cases occurred in Poland. In November, two men damaged part of the country’s rail network used to take supplies to Ukraine by planting a bomb on one section of track and targeting overhead cables at another location. Perhaps what was most shocking about this “unprecedented act of sabotage”, as the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described it, was that the nationality of the pair responsible. They were Ukrainian.

“They’re using a lot of Ukrainian emigres,” says Wiswesser. Many of them speak Russian and may not be happy with their lives after fleeing abroad to escape the Russian invasion of their country.

Russian spies may also seek to hire proxies among their own countrymen living ordinary lives abroad, which is a reason for the UK to be concerned, says Wiswesser.

“You do have a unique challenge in the UK: you have a lot of Russian immigrants. London has an awful lot of Russian emigres who are legal residents or citizens. Most of them, I’m sure, are completely loyal and beholden to the UK for their lives. But there are also some, no doubt, that still have allegiances back to Russia.”

Investigators believe 22 suspects from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia, most of whom were in a “vulnerable socio-economic situation”, were recruited by Moscow to send self-igniting parcels on DHL cargo flights across the continent in 2024. One of these detonated at a depot near Birmingham; if it had gone off while the aircraft was in the sky above Britain, it could have been disastrous.

During the rise of Isis in the 2010s, the Islamist terrorists radicalised thousands of impressionable and disaffected young Muslims in the UK and around Europe using social media. Wiswesser argues Moscow’s intelligence agencies now operate in the same way via Telegram, which ironically was blocked inside Russia last month over security fears.

He is “fully confident” about British intelligence’s ability to keep a lid on the Russian threat, however, having worked with “top notch” officers from MI6.

> Russia’s FSB and GRU agencies look for “misfits of society” to serve as “disposable” contractors

Sounds like he’s blowing Nigel Farage’s cover. 🤣

ETA: A very interesting read. I worked for Russian clients in the 1990s. Countless times they tried to get Kompromat on me. And knew they had kompromat on some Western ppl I met.