How Russia is bringing the cost of global sabotage to zero

Danny Crichton:

So Daniela, thank you so much for joining us today.

Daniela Richterova:

Thank you for having me, Danny.

Danny Crichton:

So we had reached out to you because you, along with one of your colleagues, Patrick Berry, have written to this report along with two others. So it's four folks all together in the RUSI Journal, the Royal Uniform Services Institute Journal over in the United Kingdom. But you had this report on Russian sabotage and the gig economy and the gigification of Russian sabotage, and you are a historian of Russian espionage. You're in the archives and the historical documents. So you have this panoramic long-range lens on this particular subject that I thought was just fascinating. And so I wanted to talk today both about the history, through continuities and discontinuities of how Putin is sort of approaching Russian espionage and specifically around sabotage and sort of what's changing in this market. I think when you look at the economic incentives and the economic changes, the pricing changes of sabotage, it really is sort of opens your lens to what the Russians are doing today in Europe and increasingly in the United States and around the world.

So let's just start at the beginning. So let's talk about your archival research. You've done a lot of work in the Czech archives and elsewhere. What have you seen around Russian sabotage doctrine and how the Russians sort of approach that sort of gray zone activities going in history?

Daniela Richterova:

I've seen all sorts of things in the archives and continue to see things, so that's great. Yeah, so maybe just a quick intro but over the past 15, 20 years, we've seen somewhat of a revolution in declassification of historical material from the various Central Eastern European states who used to be a part of the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Bloc. And basically as a part of these democratic government's ways of dealing with the past was to declassify most of what their security and intelligence services, most of the documents that they created during the 40 years of the Cold War. And in most of these countries, the legislation is a lot more liberal than it is in the States and in the UK. By the way. In the UK, the MI6 famously doesn't declassify any documents. The CIA does declassify a lot of documents, but there's very little, if anything, operational, which obviously makes sense why.

But when you go to the archives in Central Eastern Europe, you get a lot of detail. Okay. You see officer's files from the first day they were recruited to their last day in office. You see target files, you see minutes of meetings, minutes of meetings with key partners such as KGB, such as the East German Stasi. There's a lot of detail there. And I started looking into this about 10 years ago when I first started working with the archives and looked at the Soviet Bloc's relationship with various terrorists and revolutionaries. But about three or four years ago, I stumbled across a fascinating set of documents on a special unit that was created in the sixties in Prague as part of its state security service.

And this unit was designed to come up with various sabotage plans that were meant to be kicked off if and when it was decided that it was time to blow up those pipelines or attack that NATO headquarters in Brussels. And it wasn't set up just out of the Czechoslovak's own volition, but it was done in tandem with the Soviets, with the KGB. So there's beautiful detailed documents talking about these meetings between the Soviet's KGB men who met their Czechoslovak counterpart and are explaining to them how to run sabotage operations. And this is how I reconstructed the doctrine of Soviet book sabotage, which one of the pieces it is on.

Danny Crichton:

Well, I have to say, first of all, it blows my mind that you have operational level details, even if it's from the sixties and seventies, and we'll get into the continuities in a second, but it blows my mind that you have availability of these documents, detailed operational manuals, details on specific operations and people so you can actually reconstruct some of those social networks, some of the tactics that people are using, how they did it, which is breathtaking to me, which when I think about Russia, I think of a place that's hermetically sealed, the Stasi archives, everything is sort of locked and key. And to see that it's kind of the complete opposite depending where you look, obviously it's not comprehensive, but depending on the exact archives, you can actually get that level of data.

So that's first and then second, what was surprising to me, and this comes from your paper and some of our earlier conversations, was that there was this immense amount of sabotage related planning that was going in, that there were comprehensive goals to knock out facilities, infrastructure, et cetera. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit because I find that it's both interesting that there were so many plans, but that so many of them were not actually executed

Daniela Richterova:

Yeah, for sure. So basically from the Czechoslovak documents, we know that the Czechoslovaks by the mid-sixties had about 12 sabotage operations planned down to the T. So that's everything from finding the facility, finding a contact agent or an access agent, and figuring out how this was going to go when they get the go ahead. So these were plans that were already created by the mid-sixties. I guess the ultimate goals of these plans were threefold. So the main goal was to disrupt policies and military plans of the adversaries of Western states, the US, the UK, but for Czechoslovakia was primarily the France, Germany, and Belgium. And ideally you would try to, I mean you would use these kinetic operations to demoralize the government's resolve to pursue various policies that at the time the Soviet Union and its partners saw as adversarial, but also to undermine the public's support for these governments and for these particular policies.

And the second objective was to undermine the unity of the hostile camp or western camp. So basically it was to sow discord among various political parties operating in various states, but also to generate strife within NATO. And specifically in the documents I found that they mentioned creating Greek or Turkish tensions. I mean, you don't have to do much to spark up those. They wanted to create conflict between the Brits and the Germans, the French and the Americans. And then the third objective I'd say of these plans was to tactically undermine some of the military and economic programs in the West. So typically to halt production of certain armaments. So these were the threefold objectives.

And then when it came to operational targets, and I think we might talk about this a little bit later, they're not dissimilar to those that we're seeing being attacked today, but basically we're talking about energy supplies and it was communication infrastructures and then other objects such as of industrial importance or public importance such as drinking water reservoirs or chemical plants, that kind of stuff. And then finally, our military facilities. And the second type of the specific target are what the Soviets would've called Western propaganda hubs. These would be, for instance, Radio Free Europe that was based in Munich.

Danny Crichton:

So I think there a couple of things I want to highlight. One is there was a huge range of targets, but a lot of diversity around the kinds of places you're going after. So you have these propaganda hubs, you have the industrial base, you have civilian infrastructure, so water systems and subways and transportation networks. And whether they were actually executed or not, there were large plans to go after all of these. What was interesting to me though, secondarily was this high priority around deniability as well as sort of a propaganda value of saying, "Look, if I can create tension, if I can create division around these sorts of attacks, that would be great."

So you want to implicate a terrorist organization that's not Russia, but would exacerbate existing political tensions within the polity that were already present. So left-right distinctions or Greek-Turkish distinctions, sort of placing the blame not only knocks it away from Russia as a target, but you're also getting the secondary advantage of saying like, "Look, not only is the water out, but you've also created some chaos and sowed some discord that wasn't there previously and sort of intensified the cleavages in a lot of these sorts of places."

And so there's this multi variable benefit from these sorts of acts that I think was sort of unique where I look at some of the CIA history, which I'm a little bit more familiar with than say the KGB. Sometimes you can't get that kind of parallel going in a lot of the work that the United States did in the sixties and seventies. Let me talk about continuities and discontinuities. So you're in these archives, you look in the sixties, seventies, particularly in Czech, but elsewhere now you are changing your gaze to the present day. You're looking at sort of Russian sabotage efforts in the West.

And according to NATO intelligence, according to kind of the five eyes, we're seeing a pattern. It's very hard to prove that this is sort of Russian in derivation, but a pattern of attacks that seem to align with Russian goals that are lightweight enough but seem too frequent to be coincidental and too focused and targeted. And this is particularly from your gig economy paper of Army depots that are supplying shells to the Ukraine, major sites of aid that's going into the Ukraine effort. It seems unlikely that all these places suddenly have fires and cyber attacks that are going after them, and they're not sort of being coordinated behind the scenes. And so there is, and I'd love to talk more about this continuity of doctrine from the sixties into the present day, and then we'll talk about the discontinuity.

Daniela Richterova:

Yeah, that sounds great. No, I think there's quite a lot of parallels there, especially when it comes to what the target states are, when it comes to operational targets. I also would argue that there's parallels in terms of timings and the nature of the perpetrators, although that's a continuity, but also a difference. But let's take it from the top. So I think that there's parallels with regards to which states are targeted during the Cold War. These plans that I've seen were targeted against major Western states, which would've been crucial for any war effort if war between the West and the East would've kicked off in Europe. So especially France and Germany would've been key geographically, but also in other ways for the West.

And so we see parallels between that and basically the states where we have seen what multiple governments have now called sabotage operations carried out by Russian intelligence services. We are basically seeing a continuity in which states these are, and you could call some of them the front line states or the kind of key adversarial states. The second parallel I think, is with regards to these operational targets. If we look at the Cold War list of communications, energy pipelines, all of this stuff, we're basically seeing fires and attacks on all of the above.

I also think that there's a parallel in terms of timing. So as I said, there seems to be this doctrinal difference in terms of how you operate or how you run a sabotage operation before wartime or during time of escalation crisis, but still peace and how you run it during war. And I would argue that we have seen an intensification of attacks from Russia over the past almost a year. This has been, I think basically started happening after the West increased its financial and military support for Ukraine. Plus, after the US basically consented to and allowed the Ukrainians to use Western weapons on Russian territory. And I think other countries joined as well.

And I think that these would be two points of escalation that we could go back to, but it's not war yet, right? So I think it was from these two points on when we started seeing a wave of attacks that seemed sub-threshold. So that seemed to be those accident-style attacks that the Soviets would've said 60 years ago should be happening before or in the absence of war. So that's the timing bit. And then the context, I think the context, there's also continuity that it's not just physical kinetic attacks, arson attacks, or explosions that we're seeing, but we see that these are accompanied by what the Soviets and what the Russians would also called active measures. We in the paper called it strategic vandalism.

So these would be various graffiti operations or the so-called coffin affair in Paris where a bunch of coffins were dropped off coast to the Eiffel Tower wrapped in French flags after President Macron suggested that France might be sending soldiers to Ukraine. So we see these kind of attacks also amplify some of the divisions that actually the sabotage operations are also meant to amplify. And last thing I'll say, there is a model of outsourcing these kind of operations. Now we know that some of the most high-risk operations that we've seen in Soviet or Russian history were carried out by actual officers. But we have also seen quite a lot of cases in the past where Soviet services have used agents to do this.

So they have, in other words, outsourced these kind of operations, maybe not the most high-profile ones, but kinetic operations to so-called agents saboteurs or agents executioners. And for instance, we saw this in the case of a very famous case of killing of a dissident called Georgi Markov in 1978 on Waterloo Bridge, which is just outside my office here, when he was allegedly poisoned after he was stabbed by an umbrella. So this attack was carried out by someone who we could call an agent executioner, someone who wasn't employed by the Bulgarian Intelligence Services, but someone who was their agent. So we see in all of these five areas, we see quite a lot of continuity.

Danny Crichton:

I think obviously we see this wave, and as you pointed out, there's an intensity that's very focused on intensity of the support for Ukraine. So we're seeing differentiation. The closer the people are to Ukraine and the more efforts and aid that they're giving, the more that these sabotage acts seem to be taking place. And so there is a sort of spectrum, and this was particularly in your paper of the level of focus that say, Russia's Intelligence Services are giving to certain countries given the level of support that they have to Ukraine.

The second thing, which is the last piece you'd give and I think is the most interesting component, is there's this structural change in how Russia is conducting these sort of sabotage acts. And so rewind back to the seventies, eighties, you had well-trained KGB agents who may have had years of experience, learned multiple languages, were building up a track record. They would get sort of almost apprenticeships where you sort of learned trade craft and did this over a long period of time. That model seems to be changing dramatically. And this was sort of the focus of your gig economy paper. What's happening there? Who are these people and what is kind of Russia building in terms of an economy around sabotage?

Daniela Richterova:

Yeah, that's exactly right. So basically over the past year, maybe year and a half, we've now seen dozens of cases that were covered in the media in various government reports, and some of these perpetrators are now being tried as well. So soon we'll also see some evidence from trials on who these people are and how they were recruited. But you're absolutely right. We're seeing a shift from these well-trained and tested agents executioners to basically amateurs who are being recruited in all walks of life from all sorts of countries. There was one from Latin America, a number of Eastern Europeans who were recruited, but also other nationals, some western nationals as well. And from what we saw, this recruitment happens online now, and that's where the whole gig economy idea comes from. Google platform such as Telegram, these individuals are able to basically volunteer for a job.

They are told how much this job would cost, where this would take place. They're not always told what the purpose is. They can bid for a job as if they were an Uber driver. I think that's the main shift we're seeing here, is that these guys are not well-trained. They often don't know what they're doing. Even if they are told what they're doing, they might not really know what it takes to do it. I would argue that that's also why we've seen so many arrests actually. And there also seems to be a shift to different types of compensation, which is done in cryptocurrencies. So in the past, this would be obviously cash. We argue that this is a new model and that it's a gig economy model.

And then there's four key changes apart from the ones that I've mentioned. One is that it's a cost saving exercise. We've seen, and we detail this in the report, that these people who are hired for these jobs aren't being paid thousands and thousands of dollars for this. Is often a couple of hundred pounds or a couple of hundred dollars, and that's a major cost saving exercise. And this model we argue also introduces quite a lot of flexibility. And then I think what's one of the most crucial differences here is that there's a change in scale. That really in the past, it would've taken a really long time to train someone to make sure they understand the operational environment. I found this in archives where they talked about these agents executioners and talked about how they would be trained in whatever method they would be using to conduct these sabotage operations, be it chemical attacks, be it arson, be it explosions. We don't see any of this training with these gig economy saboteurs here.

And that's why I think we've seen quite a lot of amateurish work here. For instance, the attack on the bus depot in Prague before the summer, this was allegedly carried out by someone from Latin America. He didn't know the environment very well, and just out of the blue started trying to set up bunch of buses on fire. And maybe the last thing that I'll mention that we think is a part of this gig economy model is that it increases deniability. So we'll see how this plays out in the long run, because we'll see whether governments investigating these agent saboteurs who are caught recently, whether they'll be able to get into their mobile phones and get into their accounts and kind of follow the breadcrumbs all the way to Moscow. I'm not entirely sure whether they'll be able to do this, but it seems like this online gig economy model makes sabotage more deniable in today's day and age.

Danny Crichton:

We've seen this sort of gig economy model in very specific explicit circumstances outside of Russia. So famously, a couple of years ago, Kim Jong-nam, who was the eldest son of Kim Jong Il, was traveling at the Malaysia airport. Two women kind of ran up to him, sprayed something on his face, and he died a little bit later. And we learned in that story that these two had been handled by four North Korean intelligence agents. They were part of a TV prank series where they basically did pranks around Malaysia for a week and they were like, "Okay, here's a guy. Let's go up and spray paint them." They actually gave him basically a chemical weapon to go up and rub on his face and killed him. And we learned all this after the police and they had no idea what was going on. They didn't understand what they were part of.

They were getting paid sort of as being like TV pranksters, and they thought there was sort of a YouTube series. And so suddenly there was this whole challenge of how do you sort of prosecute them? How do you prosecute the four North Koreans who had flown back to Pyongyang? And so at this very explicit moment, there was this advantage of having sort of this gig economy, this sort of extension of the state where you have this deniability. They're left behind, they didn't know what was going on, they didn't even know who they were working for, and it was really effective. Now we're seeing this massive scale, to your point in Russia where whether it's putting coffins under the Eiffel Tower, I believe there's an example of spray-painting Stars of David in Paris, and people are getting paid a pittance for a lot of this sort of stuff.

So obviously on the messaging, okay, graffiti artists, it was not surprising. I think you put in the document it was 53 euros or 53 pounds, I forget what the currency was, but very diminished amounts of money, something you could do on a TaskRabbit or a Fiverr. The very similar equivalent. It just happens to have a political symbolism to it that maybe the folks who are doing this don't know. But what shocked me in your paper was there are examples of people basically murder for hire or something of a rough equivalence or arson of a building in which it's only a couple of hundred pounds. This is not, "Hey, I'll pay you $50,000 on the waterfront if you go and knock out this building." It's hundreds of dollars. The level of cheapness here is incredible, and we see the same thing. I mean, to bring it back into the venture capital world, we've seen the same dynamic over the last 10 years with Uber with a lot of gig economy platforms where professions that used to cost thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars annually, the prices collapse very, very quickly in those markets.

And basically in your paper, you're arguing the same thing is happening for Russia, that they're able to collapse a lot of these costs, which gives them scale and tempo, which also happens to give them deniability given cryptocurrency and the ICT platforms that they're using to build this. And that gives them a new kind of range that even with sanctions in a lot of the economic and financial pressures that we're adding from the West onto Russia, they're sort of disrupting themselves and creating a whole new economy and a cheaper way to go and get their objectives done.

Daniela Richterova:

It's quite striking how, especially the tempo and the costs, I mean, having looked at how this typically used to work, this is exponentially faster and cheaper. I would say that this is probably a model that will be used or is perhaps also being used by other nations today, and we'll have to learn more about this, but we know that other states recruit online and under false flags, which basically is what we discussed, that you're not always told. Maybe you're told what you're doing, but you're not told who you're doing this for. Perhaps your online contact who hires you, tells you, "This is a dispute I have with my business partner and I just want to force them to pay me out or whatever." So you're not even thinking you're getting into something substantial there. So I think this is a bigger issue that we'll be seeing more of in the future is other agencies, other states hiring people online.

But I also think that it's a symptom of another trend that we're seeing, which is an increased collaboration between state actors and non-state actors. And by them I mostly mean organized crime. And one of our co-authors, Magda Long, that's her focus, and she just has a new article that came out about how states use organized crime and criminals to pursue their goals, especially when it comes to various kinetic covert operations. So I think that what we talk about in the paper, that's also a symptom of a bigger issue that's been around for a while. But I think now we're also seeing this collaboration between organized crime, between criminals and various states such as, for instance, Iran and various criminal groups, be they Romanian criminal groups or other criminal groups. We see a rise of this practice.

Danny Crichton:

And one of the things that I think is interesting here is not only connecting criminal groups, but the entire concept of outsourcing. So when I think of an intelligence agency, I think of a place that is always struggling between risk and control. I want to control the outcome. I want to control the people I work with. I want to be well-trained. I want trade craft. I want to know everything going on. I need to manage my risk. And therefore kind of vertical integration, having everyone under one roof, even if you have to work with a source or an agent saboteur, I know that person. We've worked with them for five to 10 years, we've developed them, they're well-trained, they're going to handle the pressure. To me, what's interesting here is this sort of loosening up where they're giving up control. I mean, a lot of this is saying, look, in some cases I think there's evidence, maybe not the most violent examples, but in something like the graffiti examples. This is just posted to the web.

It's like, "Can someone please do this," like almost on a Craigslist equivalent for the us? Can anyone do this for 50 bucks? And it's like, sure, there's 25 people who sort show up and they sort of offer their services and they're just getting it done, and there's no training at all. There's very limited communication in some cases. It's almost one-directional. And so I find that sort of opening up of the risks there and the fact that I just, maybe it's my pessimism, but I feel like no US intelligence agency could ever give up that level of control. They would never allow sort of like, "Oh, we're just going to broadcast out and anyone who shows up at the front door, you can go blow up the building."

Daniela Richterova:

That's a good point.

Danny Crichton:

Go for it.

Daniela Richterova:

But you know what my question is, Danny, would they be so risk averse if they were fighting a war?

Danny Crichton:

That's the question, right?

Daniela Richterova:

And a war that they didn't want to fight or thought that they'll win within a week. So I think that the calculations in Moscow are quite different to those that we'd be making. Now, I actually think, and we make this point in the paper, that this is the most intense sabotage war without wanting to seem too dramatic that we've seen since World War II. We don't have any direct evidence of the Soviet Union or its allies blowing up any strategic targets in the West. They did plan, they had all these detailed plans that I discussed, but we don't have good evidence of them blowing anything up. And maybe in the near future when there's more and more archives coming out, we will find that some of the big accidents we thought were accidents were not. So basically, I think I'm saying this point because basically during World War II, all countries, the UK, the US, Germany, the Soviet Union had a different view of risk and had a different risk calculus, and that's when they were all using sabotage.

But you're absolutely right that at the time they were using sabotage and they were not subcontracting it to basically randomers on the internet. I think that there's two reasons why they are, additional reasons why they are happy to take on this level of risk. One is that the presence of Russian officers and even some of the agents in Europe especially and in the US, has been significantly downgraded since the kickoff of the war in Ukraine. So in the article in War on the Rocks, I talk about this pyramid of operatives who help carry out a sabotage operation like this. So under normal circumstances, you would have a case officer from the KGB or GRU who would be based in Brussels, Paris, or London, who'd be, I guess you could say the mastermind of this particular operation. They would be in touch, not personally, but would be in touch with an illegal, so a deep cover officer or officers who would invest in that country.

And then there would be a whole range of agents who they would be working with. So there would be a whole, I call it a pyramid of operatives who would be running this. But this pyramid has now been not even turned upside down, but you had to ... The war has bitten, and the expulsions of Russian diplomats and spies has basically meant that you lose that top bit of the pyramid, either are down to the illegals running some of this, or you have to recruit and manage those agents in some other way. And since it's the 21st century, and we're all do everything online, including podcasts about war games and sabotage, so you're going to do it online. So I think that that's another reason why they're willing to take the risk because they would otherwise would not be able to run or carry these operations out in the West.

And the second reason why I think they're happy to take the risk is that just like you said, I think that we will see operations, which God forbid, but I think there will probably be some assassinations, maybe kidnappings, maybe some of the very crude sabotage attacks that will not be carried out by these amateurs who we talk about. And I think that in these cases they will send out people who have been trained, who are officers, but I think that the goal of this particular wave right now is not to carry out one or two attacks really well or as well as they can, and for them to have a high and long impact. I think it's really to spread chaos and try to seem like you're the, a Russian hidden hand is everywhere. And you can do that through smaller scale attacks that are carried out by people who don't always know what they're doing.

But if half of them get arrested, they get arrested. You don't really care. They don't know where you live and you pay them 20 to 200 Quid to do it. But still it's going to obviously sow discord is going to make some governments a bit wary about their support of Ukraine. And finally it's going to take so much resource. I mean, there's a court case kicking off here in the Old Bailey, just down the street from where I am. And that's a trial of six Bulgarians who operated here under multiple identities in the UK and were allegedly tasked with various surveillance activities, perhaps aimed at kidnapping, assassinating, but also carrying out some of these sabotage attacks.

Now we'll learn a lot more in the coming months, but there's so much resource that goes into this. And this is all done by a unit here that's also designed to investigate and prosecute counterterrorism cases and other state hostile state activity, including Iran's and many other hostile state's activity. So it's an incredible burden on Western resources at a critical time when there's obviously major political shifts happening in the US, in many other countries. And when the war in Ukraine is still ongoing.

Danny Crichton:

One of the questions, I mean obviously you're on the Riskgaming podcast. We spend a lot of time talking about risk, both new risks that are coming to us, but also how does sort of create an immune system to risk? How can you create, and oftentimes it's not as simple as, okay, there's sabotage coming here, let's hire a security guard. The question is how do you change the risk calculus for Russia so they don't even do it in the first place. And so that's my sort of question to you. So you're seeing this decentralization of Russian intelligence and espionage activities. They seem to be much more willing to take risks. They're at war, they have limited resources, limited time. There's a lot of pressure to do something today, not tomorrow. But how do you change the risk calculus for Putin? How do you change the risk calculus for the Russians? What can the US five eyes, the UK, our allies do to change that so the risks are minimized on our side ?

Daniela Richterova:

If I give you a one line answer to this, I expect a million dollars to arrive in my account tomorrow morning. Okay?

Danny Crichton:

Yes, yes, yes. Only through cryptocurrency from some offshore bank.

Daniela Richterova:

I will send details on Telegram. Yeah?

Danny Crichton:

Exactly.

Daniela Richterova:

You know what? I don't know because there's far more qualified people who study Russian domestic affairs and study Putin. And I think even those who do, I think that they struggle with knowing what he's going to do next. So I don't know if there is a strategy that he has and that we can tap into and try to think about how to counter it. I mean, obviously, and we note this in one of the papers, although we don't develop it because we don't have enough material yet, but we're obviously seeing some sabotage attacks happening in the other direction as well. So whoever's into carrying those out, I think Putin got that message as well, is that they're not immune from that. But these attacks in Europe haven't stopped despite that. So I don't think you can kind of use the same weapon against him to signal that we're ready to, or the other side's ready to do the same to him. That clearly won't stop him.

I mean, there's a couple of things that the West has done since this is kicked off or since the war anyway, actually, there's very many countries at this point who are changing their national security strategies, which is quite fascinating. We've seen this, I think the last big wave was after 9/11. And we're seeing countries do that. There's countries who are changing legislation in order to be able to prosecute sabotage, right? So in the UK, we weren't able to, didn't have a specific legislation to prosecute sabotage. They introduced that I think earlier this year. Other countries are putting millions into basically their versions of counterintelligence, bits of their secret state to be able to monitor these operations. NATO, I mean, I think Stoltenberg, the previous Secretary General of NATO in June for the first time highlighted that sabotage now is a real risk.

NATO has set up various liaison channels. Obviously there were many existing, but these are now focused on very sabotage specific things such as exchanging information on arson attacks or ship monitoring routes, that kind of stuff. So this has now really gone up in the agenda. Some people have argued that you should hit back and hit back really strong to show Putin that he can't do this. Other people say that you should not try to exaggerate Putin's or Putin's role in all of these fires and maybe not see it as dramatically as other people do. I don't know what the right approach is. I think we'll just see it in the long run, but I think in some ways we were, or the West is prepared, there are liaison channels, there are liaison platforms where states, be it domestic security services or foreign security services regularly exchange intelligence.

I think this is quote, unquote thanks to 20 years of counterterrorism. Counterterrorism kind of opened the door for just unprecedented collaboration between security and intelligence agencies. And I think as states now understand that this also because of this big economy model, these attacks are not only going to hit major infrastructure or communication lines, but that actually these attacks can extend to the global south. And this is kind of the most worrying thing for me because this is explicitly written in the discussions between the Soviets and the Czechoslovaks and is in the doctrine from the sixties, seventies where they say, "If you want to attack a country, say like the US, and that's a hard target. It's difficult. It's difficult to create that network of operatives there."

Although we know many of the ghost stories and other stories which show that there were illegals and various operatives in the US, still very difficult terrain to operate in, and you just might want to attack their embassy in Buenos Aires or somewhere in East Africa or consulate or the British Cultural Center, anything like that. So this is the bit I'm worried about is that if the more we secure perhaps a part of the world, the more risky or open to attacks other geographical areas will become with regards to sabotage.

Danny Crichton:

I mean, there used to be this notion in the sixties, seventies, and eighties of a tit for tat. If we are starting to sabotage, they will sabotage us. If we assassinate their agents, they're going to assassinate our agents. And to my mind, there's this balance that was sort of the great game of espionage. And I am referencing specifically Ben Taub's recent article in the New Yorker, which I had put in the newsletter, our Riskgaming newsletter a few weeks ago called 'Russia's Espionage War in the Arctic'. And it was talking about exactly what your research is focused on, this sort of migration or transition from professional espionage agents to sort of what you would dub the gig economy, and Ben Taub calls sort of disposable agents. And there's this quote from one of the folks up there, which was basically, Russia ruined a great spy game with this stupid war.

And it's really interesting to me that we went from this sort of tit for tat, all of this culture that you sort of learn of what is acceptable, what are all the lines, what are the red lines, what are the gray lines, what are the black lines, etc. And now it's just a free for all. It's a mess. It's chaos. That's sort of what's Putin and the security services want in the West. And we don't seem to be able to deliver that back. But I just think it's really interesting to see that there were norms that were in place here, and those norms have changed, and I don't think the West has fully grasped that or adapted to it. And so there is an open question of what do we do next? How do we sort of respond? Can we put pressure that would say, whoa, if you're going to do that to me, I won't do that to you?

I don't know. And I don't know if that's more aggression, I don't know if that's putting different pressure points on other parts in the system. That is a huge open question I don't think we're going to answer on this podcast today. But Daniela, what is your sort of prognosis as sort of a final lightning round question over the next couple of years? You're worried about the global south, you're continuing to worry about this sort of gig economy. Does this scale another 10X? Is this sort of the new status quo norm in the same way to go to a totally different theater that we see with China, sort of flying flights all around Taiwan that, that is just kind of becoming the new international norm that we have to deal with. Does it get worse, better, stay the same?

Daniela Richterova:

It will either stay the same or it will get better or it will get worse, Danny. I think this online recruitment isn't going anywhere and not just when it comes to sabotage. So I think this is the new normal. And we also, I think now know from open source that the US is doing it. We had the chiefs of MI6 and the head of CIA at some point hand in hand say, declare to Russians that their arms are open and to reach out to them. You can go to CIA's website and you can follow the instructions there and you can get recruited online. So that's not going anywhere. And so I think that that's definitely an area to watch and to see how this develops. And obviously it's a problem when this, on one hand you could say that's the new version of this Cold War spy game, spy versus spy.

But the moment it becomes kinetic and lives are lost, I think that's when that's becomes very serious. So I think, let's see how this goes and let's see if Putin using these so-called agents of chaos as our friends and colleagues, Andres Foldato and Irina Borogan who are based here at King's as well have called them, whether this will pay off for him or whether maybe all the negative publicity abroad, the arrests and all that stuff, whether that will somehow blow back against him at home.

Maybe just one final thing that I'll say is that the key risky thing is whether we understand and how the Russians understand our thresholds. So we're all pretending like, "Oh, this is also threshold," but where is the threshold? And that keeps on, just like you said, the lines are changing, the red lines are changing. So is this, so I think that that's something that is quite sensitive, and I think no one really knows where their threshold is. So hopefully this will de-escalate soon. Let's see how things will develop in the US and elsewhere. And I guess, yeah, but let's watch how online recruitment impacts not only the war in Ukraine, but intelligence because I think it is a big game changer.

Danny Crichton:

That is the warning for everyone. If the offer is too good to be true, it probably is. But Daniela, thank you so much for joining the Riskgaming podcast today.

Daniela Richterova:

Thank you so much for having me. This was great, Danny.

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