A guard stands against a snow-covered wall of the Kremlin. KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images
Though it is a struggle fought in the shadows, espionage has its own etiquette, its own rules meant to prevent it from escalating. The Kremlin currently seems willing to break those rules, with its Friday decision to name the CIA station chief in Moscow.
In part, it looks as if the Kremlin is crafting a narrative for domestic consumption. First came the arrest of alleged CIA agent Ryan Fogle, bizarre enough to dominate the news cycle, serious enough not to be dismissed as mere fluff. Then came the news that another embassy staffer, Benjamin Dillon, had been more quietly expelled in January, accused of being a CIA case officer out to recruit Russians.
This allowed the Russians to present themselves, especially to their domestic audience, as the pictures of reasonable restraint. In a no-doubt-conscious echo of U.S. language on Syria, they said that the CIA had “crossed ‘the red line’” by trying to penetrate the Russian security apparatus — even though this is common practice for all spy agencies — and so Moscow was “forced to react.”
Speaking to the Russian press, a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) spokesman named the CIA station chief in Moscow, an almost unprecedented move.When, for example, Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency outed two successive CIA station chiefs in Islamabad in 2010 and 2011, this caused a diplomatic incident.
The station chief’s role is not to be a field agent but to coordinate operations — and also sometimes to act as a diplomat in negotiations with the host agency’s intelligence services. As such, his or her identity is known to the locals.
By releasing his name — which has been widely circulated in the Russian media and increasingly abroad — the Russians are keeping the story bubbling at home. This keeps the spotlight on U.S. espionage in Russia and keeps the Americans off balance. After all, even given the constraints of responding to espionage-related allegations, the embassy and State Department have not proven especially adroit in handling the story.
At the same time, Moscow is challenging Washington. A tit-for-tat expulsion would worsen relations at a time when the Americans are still looking for cooperation and intelligence in the Boston bombing investigation. The station chief has not been made persona non grata — PNGed, in diplomatic jargon — so there is no obvious symmetrical response beyond simply naming the counterpart Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Rezident in Washington, which would be a fairly pointless and petulant act.
Meanwhile the FSB is enjoying the publicity. The generally docile Russian press is trumpeting its successes; the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, for example, wrote that “the FSB got sick of American spies and demonstratively and publicly slapped one of them,” to prove who was the boss. Given that the FSB is also involved in a behind-the-scenes battle with the Investigations Committee for President Putin’s favor, this affair has a distinctly political flavor.
