‘Friendly Fire’ Replaces Cold War Espionage

The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union and its feared KGB have disappeared and American and Russian troops are serving side by side in Bosnia. But in the shadowy world of espionage, nothing much has changed.

As the charges filed Monday against CIA officer Harold J. Nicholson indicate, the secret service of Russia’s new democratic government is targeting the United States in much the same way the old KGB used to do--and with some success.

And, as court papers make clear, the CIA continues to probe Russia’s secrets. According to an affidavit filed by the FBI, Nicholson’s first contact with Russian intelligence operatives came when the CIA assigned him to try to recruit them to work for the United States.

“I think that this case illustrates that the Soviet, er, the Russian intelligence services remain very active in targeting not only the CIA, but other U.S. national security organizations,” said CIA Director John M. Deutch, his Freudian slip showing just how little has changed in the spy business since the Soviet Union collapsed.

“We’ve seen no reduction in the efforts of the [Russian] external security service to penetrate the security services and the national security of the United States,” FBI Director Louis J. Freeh added at the press conference with Deutch.

Unlike Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA officer who pleaded guilty in 1994 to spying first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia, Nicholson was described in court papers as having been recruited by and working for only post-Cold War Russia.

Judging from the secrets the FBI accused Nicholson of passing to Moscow, the Russians are primarily interested in finding out what the U.S. government knows about them. According to court papers, Nicholson gave his Russian handlers the names and biographies of CIA officers scheduled to be assigned to the Moscow station.

He also turned over CIA documents concerning Russia, Chechnya, U.S. knowledge of Russia’s defense plans and a summary of information the CIA obtained from interrogating Ames.

Although intelligence experts say the Russians are almost certainly also interested in U.S. technology and industrial secrets, the Nicholson court papers show a Russian preoccupation with U.S. intelligence capabilities and with Washington’s intentions in its relationship with Moscow.

“What they are after is sources and methods of our intelligence activities,” said retired Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson, former deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the U.S. Army in Europe. “They really want to know how we are pursuing them. The old hands from the KGB and the GRU [Soviet military intelligence] especially, still suffer from a degree of paranoia, that the United States is out to do them in.”

“They really feel that they have to root out any weakness in their own system,” he said. For most of the Cold War, the United States and its allies concentrated their espionage against the Soviet Union, while Moscow and its satellites targeted Washington and the West. Although the rigid ideological rationale for spying has withered, espionage is alive and well.

Replacing the old bloc-against-bloc system is a phenomenon that might be called “friendly fire spying.” Earlier this year, the U.S. government accused a Korean-born U.S. citizen of spying for the friendly government of South Korea. And the United States and France have exchanged accusations of industrial espionage.

Although leaders of the United States and Russia profess mutual friendship and Russia receives U.S. foreign aid, the relationship has settled into a twilight area between cooperation and hostility in which the two nations’ professed common goals are overshadowed by the realization that both still possess enough nuclear weaponry to incinerate the planet.

Under these circumstances, it is not particularly surprising that the U.S. and Russian intelligence organizations--still staffed by many of the operatives who fought the Cold War--continue to look at each other with suspicion.

“The United States is certainly interested in some secrets in Russia,” said Roy Godsen, a Georgetown University professor and president of the National Strategy Information Center, a Washington think tank specializing in intelligence matters. “We are interested in the stability of Russia and control of its nuclear weapons.

“We would want to know what Russia intends to do” in its relations with other former Soviet republics, he said. “Russia is uniquely capable of inflicting damage on the United States. We are trying to work with the Russians to bring about a democratic transition. But we would want to know about any relationships between Russian criminal syndicates and Russian political leaders.”

There may be another, more mundane, reason for the continued U.S.-Russia competition in espionage--simple inertia. Intelligence networks take a long time to establish, and veteran spies are reluctant to give them up even if the primary reason for creating them has disappeared.

“A good intelligence service has to think long term and act long term,” said a former CIA analyst. “There might be absolutely nothing that you need it for today. You just keep people in place in case you need them later.”