President Dmitry Medvedev made the right decision to downplay the importance of the latest spy scandal between Russia and the United States and to arrange for a quick exchange of 10 clandestine Russian operatives. This should allow the scandal to die off quickly, while letting Washington and Moscow maintain the momentum of the “reset.”
Medvedev now has to order a high-profile investigation into the most humiliating intelligence failure in Russia’s history. He needs to appoint a commission led by a respected former intelligence official to develop a report on the investigation.
It is now evident that the awkward timing of the arrests — two days after Medvedev’s departure from Washington — had more to do with a U.S. intelligence operation to secure the escape of a highly placed mole in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, than with hawks scheming to undo the reset. It is obvious from the documents filed in U.S. courts that the FBI had been alerted to the identities of Russia’s undercover agents from the moment they arrived in the United States. It was an act of betrayal by someone from a very small circle of the SVR’s most senior officers.
Herein lies a political entrapment that Medvedev needs to evade. The spin on the spy story from Washington is that the operation was the brainchild of former President Vladimir Putin — U.S. hawks’ favorite bogeyman and cold warrior — who allegedly ordered it in the early 2000s. That it has ended in such a humiliating failure discredits Putin and his style of government, which relies on the use of security services to achieve political objectives.
Another shot at Putin has been the recent publication on U.S. web sites of top-secret reports from the Federal Security Service — some intended for Putin’s eyes only — detailing highly sensitive Russian intelligence operations in the former Soviet republics from 2002 to 2006.
This sends an unsubtle message that the United States views Putin as a “man of the past” and wants to deal with Medvedev after 2012.
Medvedev should be wary of U.S. efforts to bolster his political standing by discrediting Putin and his power base within the security services.
He needs to meet with the undercover agents who were expelled from the United States and energize the demoralized Russian intelligence community with a new mission that best suits his objectives.
Vladimir Frolov is president of LEFF Group, a government-relations and PR company.