The star-struck Mr Anishchenko even organised a song contest in honour of his city’s most famous daughter. The winner was ‘Anna Chapman is not Mata Hari’ – a reference to a Dutch dancer and courtesan shot for spying in the First World War. It captures the nationalistic pride that Russians hold in their spies, though the doggerel lyrics are equally dire in the original Russian as in this loose translation.31
This knee-jerk nationalism is a perfect antidote to public apathy and disgruntlement. Ms Chapman also contrasts sharply with the ranks of United Russia, mostly filled with balding middle-aged men. Sergei Markov, a Duma deputy with close Kremlin ties, says:
People are bored with the talking heads on the TV; they are interested in adventure and in action. Spies like these are really popular in the country. She fits the bill perfectly and she is really attractive.
He also sees Putinesque qualities in Ms Chapman’s curves:
Vladimir Putin is regarded as a sexual champion as he is very cool and very sexy. Both [Ms Chapman and Putin] are spies – both of them young, healthy, energetic, sexually attractive – and they met publicly. This is about making United Russia sexier and cooler… a successful political message needs to be combined with a successful non-political message.
This linking of Putin and Chapman has already started to sink into the popular consciousness. In May 2011 a shoot-em-up game called Voinushka (Punch-up) was launched on popular Russian social networking websites. A youthful-looking khaki-clad Mr Putin features as the commander, setting tasks for the person playing the undemanding game. He has a redheaded assistant, showing voluptuous décolleté, wearing a Soviet-style military hat and toting a rifle. The game’s designers say they did not consciously choose Ms Chapman as a model.
It would be easy to dismiss this as harmless fun and games – a kind of circus in which an exotic bout of public service turns into an equally exotic private-sector phenomenon. If Ms Chapman and her colleagues seem to have done no real harm in the West, except perhaps to our image of invulnerability, then maybe it is time for bygones to be bygones. Outsiders may ogle her lightly clad figure, but must be resigned to the fact that her most interesting feature – her career in intelligence – is forever cloaked in shadow. Moreover, that someone who embodies superficiality rather than achievement has become a female role model speaks volumes about Russian femininity. Ms Chapman also embodies the contradiction between the regime’s xenophobic attitude to the West in general, and its senior members’ personal enjoyment of foreign fleshpots. As the journalist Ms Latynina notes caustically: ‘This great heroine of the Putin youth was crying, crying buckets when she was told she was going to be banned from Great Britain.’
Sleazy and sex-crazed, crass yet sinister, xenophobic yet obsessed with the West, an artificial creation of an ailing regime: Ms Chapman is emblematic of the country that recruited, ran and promoted her. She exemplifies too the threats and the failings of Russian intelligence: nepotistic in recruitment, with an increasingly blurred line between the professional and private duties of its officers, but still able to plant undetectable and effective agents in our midst.
I have explained Russia’s motivation for spying, how it spies, and why we should mind. The next section of the book looks at the history of Western espionage efforts against Russia. Despite some occasional successes, these have in many respects been feebly focused and disastrously executed, something of which British and other Western taxpayers are largely unaware. The biggest losers in this saga of fiascos have been not the Western spymasters and their staff, but the locals who trusted them. This section also sets the scene for the final part of the book, looking at one of the most serious and damaging episodes in recent years: the case of the Estonian Hermann Simm. In both the Western bungles and Russian triumphs, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania play a central role. Too small to be able to determine their own destiny,[40] they are also too important for outsiders to ignore. That has been a fateful combination: both Russia and the West have tussled for influence in the Baltic region and states, and used them as springboards for espionage efforts elsewhere.
8
The Cockpit of Europe
A Hollywood blockbuster would hardly do justice to the stories. A masterspy disguised as a ragged pianist plays in his foes’ canteen – and receives a knighthood for his efforts. A blundering colleague believes his enemies’ tale of a vast underground army just waiting for his visit, and pays for his credulity with his life. Bungling spymasters dismiss espionage scoops that could change history. Souped-up torpedo boats, once the pride of Hitler’s navy, rocket across the sea on moonless nights, their heavily armed passengers bearing ciphers, radios, treasure – and cyanide pills. Hidden in forest bunkers, desperate men risk death by torture in a forgotten and futile war. A star military commander in the Waffen-SS becomes a top man in British intelligence. Among his superiors is an undercover KGB colonel. Neglected and misunderstood, these events from past decades are the background to the spy wars of the present day.
Big countries’ interests collide in the Baltic, often secretly and mostly tragically. In the past hundred years the region has been the front line of two big wars and several small ones, with coups, uprisings, pogroms and guerrilla struggles as footnotes.1 The tides of history have swept the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians along, just as they have drowned their now-forgotten ethnic cousins.[41] The region was one of the central killing grounds of the Holocaust: Germans and local collaborators murdered around 228,000 Jews, around 90 per cent of the pre-war population.2 It is also a spies’ playground. Trade, tourism, culture and family ties make foreign visitors plentiful and inconspicuous, whether they have really come to admire the architecture, do a business deal, see relatives – or empty a dead-letter box. Targets are plentiful and loyalties fluid: locals know from bitter experience that fortunes shift and that many irons in the fire are better than one.
40
an Compared to Russia, the Baltic states are tiny. But so are most countries. Their combined land area is around the size of California; the total population of the three countries is just under 7m, rather less than Greater London (7.8m). Lithuania, with 3.2m, is the largest, Latvia has 2.2m people and Estonia has 1.3m.
41
ao The Kreevians died out in the nineteenth century in Latvia. Probably the last mother-tongue speaker of Livonian died in 2009. The Prussian language became extinct in the eighteenth century, though German colonisers adopted the placename. Around ten thousand Vepsians survive, mostly in Russia. The Vends ceased to be a distinct ethnic group in the sixteenth century.