The biggest disaster for the West was the war of August 2008. The aim of foreign assistance to Georgia had been to make a conflict less likely, by calming and reassuring the Georgian leadership in the face of escalating military provocations from Russia. Instead, it produced the opposite result. Georgian politicians wildly overestimated both their own military strength and Western support. This was a colossal intelligence failure. NATO countries failed to read Russia’s intentions, and the way that their Georgian protégés would behave under pressure. Intelligence officers in the region reported the increasingly dangerous situation regularly and accurately to their controllers. But analysts blurred or misinterpreted those reports, controllers failed to pass them on with sufficient urgency, and the services’ political masters failed to appreciate the implications of what they were being told. That the whole affair happened when many top decision makers were on holiday did not help. A particularly striking and systemic failure was in America’s CIA. The small analysis division dealing with Russia has attracted particular criticism (belatedly) from its ‘customers’ elsewhere in the US government for interpreting raw intelligence in a framework that took great account of Russian sensitivities, fears and interests, but discounted other interpretations.
The American, British and Estonian training of Georgian human and electronic intelligence resources created structures that still lacked the clout and insight to interpret or influence events adequately. Decision-making circles were thoroughly penetrated, certainly by electronic means and possibly through the use of witting traitors or unwitting intelligence assets, recruited and run under the noses of the agencies responsible for security. Russia knew what Georgia knew, and how Georgia would react. It was therefore able to provoke the Georgian leadership successfully into attacking the breakaway province of South Ossetia, in the belief that a short victorious war would topple the separatist regime there and forestall a Russian troop build-up that the Tbilisi authorities believed was a prelude to a full-scale and potentially devastating military offensive.
That proved a disastrous miscalculation. Russia counterattacked, and the expensively equipped Georgian forces performed, for the most part, poorly (though to be fair the best part of the armed forces were in Iraq, or on leave having just returned from duty there). Command and control broke down. Expensive battlefield radios didn’t work (leaving officers to communicate by insecure personal mobile phones). The reserve forces fared particularly poorly.11 Russia’s victory owed more to weight of numbers than to military prowess. But it was a triumph for the Russian intelligence agencies, which had a startlingly clear picture of events on the Western side. In one revealing cameo, telephones at a major NATO military facility in Europe became unusable: the NATO Office of Security (NOS) was aware that they were penetrated, but was unable to take immediate countermeasures. Officials instead had to use their personal mobile phones (which may have been even less secure than the landlines). Russia knew to a high degree of certainty that America would not go to war to defend a friendly country that was under attack; it also knew that the European Union was in no state to act as a decisive, well-informed mediator. It was able to follow in detail the zigzag diplomacy of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the evolution of the amateurishly imprecise ceasefire document that he finally produced with a triumphant flourish on 13 August.
Since the war, many in the West have come to see Georgia as a faraway country of which they never knew much and would now like to know less. Certainly Mr Saakashvili’s erratic behaviour in the run-up to the war in 2008 did little to boost his country’s credibility. It will be a long time before any NATO country’s spymaster sticks his neck out on behalf of a Georgian leadership that has gained a reputation for chaos and unreliability. Politicians in the EU and America still maintain rhetorical support for Georgia’s territorial integrity, but have produced scant support in practical terms. Foreign assistance efforts in Georgia have wound down, as have Georgian efforts to meet Western concerns about the rule of law and political pluralism.
These trends are indeed cause for concern. But whole-scale pessimism is unfounded. Following the lost war, Georgia has picked itself up and resumed reforms and economic growth. For all its faults it remains the only post-Soviet success story outside the Baltic states. Outsiders flock to observe its tax system and administrative reforms. The Georgian leadership has also, belatedly, begun taking security more seriously, and paying heed to the long-standing suggestions and complaints of their Estonian and other advisers. Tighter scrutiny and better counter-intelligence tradecraft have begun to pay off, most recently in July 2011 with the arrest of a presidential photographer, who confessed that he had been recruited by Russia to spy on Mr Saakashvili. The round-up started in November 2010 when nine Georgians and four Russian citizens were arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia. The Georgian Interior Ministry described the group as consisting of military pilots and a sailor and a number of businessmen who had passed on data about flight schedules and military equipment and procurement, as well as the personal details of top Georgian officials.
A documentary broadcast on 5 November, the GRU’s ‘birthday’, on the Georgian Rustavi-2 television channel featured a double agent, code-named ‘Enveri’, shown only with his face hidden, who said he had worked for the GRU at the Georgian port of Poti in the late 1980s. On the instructions of Georgian intelligence, he made contact with his old employers and met three GRU officers who gave him instruction in how to embed secret material in innocent-seeming email attachments. Enveri allowed the Georgians to spot dozens of other locals and a GRU liaison officer, Yuri Skrilnikov. When this officer attempted to meet his source in May 2010 Georgian counter-intelligence officials arrested him, along with another Russian citizen and a Georgian. Both had previously worked at a Russian military base in Georgia until its closure in November 2007.
Enveri reported that his Russian case officers were interested in NATO warships’ visits to Georgian ports and Western training of Georgian military forces. But the true aims of the GRU are wider and more alarming. An analysis by Georgian officials lists them as: discrediting the country’s foreign and domestic political course; preventing accession to NATO and European integration; denting foreign investors’ confidence; creating ‘spots of instability’ to highlight the state’s weakness; creating a pro-Russian ‘fifth column’; consolidating Russian control over South Ossetia and Abkhazia; supporting secessionist tendencies in other parts of Georgia; and creating an intelligence network inside the government.
In other countries, such tasks would be mainly the job of the SVR – the foreign intelligence service. But in Russian eyes, Georgia is not ‘foreign’ enough for that. Instead, the military intelligence agency, the GRU, has the main role. The FSB, once a big presence, now plays a second fiddle, chiefly in targeting the Georgian diaspora inside Russia; in previous years it was involved in scams such as protecting a counterfeiting operation in South Ossetia that produced large amounts of forged American currency.12 The GRU’s prime targets are Georgia’s defence capabilities, links with NATO, energy security, the transport infrastructure (especially ports), the structure and composition of the border police and all electronic communications. But it also mounts special operations, including bombings and other stunts. These, Georgian officials say, are run from the southern regional headquarters in Krasnodar, with a sub-station in the coastal resort of Sochi. At least according to the Georgian authorities, the GRU is also actively involved in stoking violent political protest by marginal parts of the country’s opposition. On 26 May 2011 the Interior Ministry in Tbilisi released an audio recording of a bugged meeting in which an opposition leader, Nino Burjanadze, and her son appeared to be expecting the intervention of GRU special forces if a planned violent demonstration turned into an insurrection.