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Since I was a member of those "higher political circles" during the period between the August 1991 putsch in Moscow and the December 1991 putsch in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, serving as Soviet foreign minister, I may be able to shed some light on what happened during those blessed months.
In November 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev signed ?€” and Boris Yeltsin approved ?€” an order reducing by one-third the number of military intelligence and KGB foreign intelligence agents working under the cover of Soviet embassies and other Soviet organizations abroad, including media outlets.
Shortly thereafter, newspapers connected to the security organs began attributing this "scheme" to me, claiming that it was the result of previous conflicts "between the ambassador and the station chief." As a matter of fact, there were some conflicts of this sort ?€” involving, for instance, Alexander Yakovlev in Canada and Rafik Nishanov in Jordan. Personally, my cup of patience overflowed when the KGB station chief in Stockholm made it clear that, in his opinion, the only significant reason for having embassies at all is so that they can serve as cover for intelligence agents.
I encountered an even more striking situation shortly after I was named ambassador to Prague in 1990. At that time, our fraternal socialism had reached the point where some of our real diplomats pretended to be important by claiming to actually be intelligence agents.
I wouldn't even deign to call most of these people "intelligence agents." Whole swarms of them were just following their own diplomats around, including even ambassadors.
After I became minister, I was surprised by the domination of these "colleagues" in the area of personnel and came to the conclusion that it was imperative to get them out of my ministry as quickly as possible. I don't know whether he was being sincere or not, but surprisingly my efforts were completely endorsed by Leonid Shebarshin, who was then the head of this section of the KGB and who even served as acting KGB director for three days after the August 1991 putsch. He made an appointment to see me, at which he admitted that he too was suffering from this overstaffing. Apparently the Soviet fashion for grotesque nepotism had not bypassed even his department.
After I was appointed ambassador to London at the end of 1991, I saw for myself that Gorbachev's order was being carried out even though Gorbachev himself was no longer president. However, I don't know what happened to this process after 1994, although there are a number of indications in mass media that it was reversed.
Over the last few years I have wondered a bit about the fates and roles of those intelligence agents in the post-Soviet period. How have they fared since the thawing of the Cold War, the dawning of global openness, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and other visible and invisible barriers, and since world leaders began proclaiming a new era of strategic partnership? Everyone declares that spying on one another is bad form, but no one is ready to abandon this unseemly business.
Obviously, no one is going to renounce spying unilaterally. And they are right not to. Just as was the case with nuclear weapons, moving away from espionage requires multilateral agreements and mutual concessions. Just as with nuclear weapons ?€” where first atmospheric testing was banned and later underground testing and where a long process led to minimizing the threat from tactical nuclear weapons, the most insidious type ?€” shutting down the spying game will require a step-by-step process.
Perhaps the place to start would be a ban on recruiting foreign nationals. That is, all civilized governments will agree to stop trying to induce, blackmail or bribe people to spy for them ?€” especially by using people who face nothing more than the threat of expulsion if they are discovered. One of these recruiters who worked as a diplomat in my embassy in Stockholm made it public later that his work was just like that of a collective farm chairman who would exaggerate his harvest figures: He would invite some naive citizen of the country where he worked to dinner and then write out a report to headquarters about how he had recruited a new agent.
I think that the old saying that every cloud has a silver lining is true. The recent exchange of blows between Russia and the United States has shaken the entire world and served to demonstrate that there should be some international legal controls on such jousting. It is time to retrain our spies as scholars and analysts. After all, in the age of the Internet, that would be more practical. And a lot safer.
Boris Pankin served as the Soviet foreign minister from August to December 1991. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.