Spying Is a Laughing Matter

It is tempting to regard the Russian spy scandal and the subsequent Cold War-style exchange involving more than a dozen prisoners from both sides on a tarmac in Vienna as an illustration of Karl Marx’s famous saying: “History repeats itself — first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Indeed, the Russian “illegals” seem to have spied like characters in a third-rate spy novel, complete with invisible ink and hollowed-out nickels. They also treated their assignments as an extended, all-expenses-paid vacation and appear to have done little work for their spymasters. The charges were grave, but the actual spying seemed trivial, even frivolous.

It showed how much Russian intelligence services have been degraded. Since the country’s “vertical power” structure was built by former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and staffed with his former colleagues in the security apparatus, this story goes to the heart of post-Soviet Russia.

The Soviet Union was notorious for its spy mania. The country produced books and movies about Western spies, and Soviet citizens dreaded speaking to foreigners. But it was in the West where Soviet spy rings were pervasive — and remarkably successful. Soviet intelligence officers co-opted the left-wing idealism and greed of many locals, in addition to employing their own agents. The list of infamous Soviet spies is a mile long, including the Cambridge Five in Britain, and the Rosenbergs, Rudolf Abel and Aldrich Ames.

Meanwhile, the only highly placed Western spies in the Soviet hierarchy were Colonel Oleg Penkovsky and Major Pyotr Popov — both of whom were executed in the early 1960s.

Nevertheless, in the end, the spy game came to naught. For all of its overwhelming edge, the Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War, lost its global empire and ignominiously collapsed.

Before contrasting the highly professional FBI with the bumbling incompetence of the Russian “illegals,” it may be useful to look at recent history. Let’s recall, for instance, Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for the Russians for a mind-boggling 22 years. And what about the notorious Bank of New York case? Russian authorities claimed that the bank assisted Russian individuals and companies in laundering more than $20 billion. Based on leaks from law enforcement agencies, both The New York Times and The Washington Post published alarmist articles about the Russian mafia laundering blood-soaked billions through the U.S. banking system. The result, however, was not a mountain but a molehill, with just two people pleading guilty and getting five-year probations for their monstrous crimes.

More important, when the FBI was busy chasing illusory Russian money launderers in 1999, Osama bin Laden was busy planning for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The current Russian spy ring is also a case in point. Although clearly an open-and-shut case, the FBI spent a decade investigating those clowns — getting juicy budgets in the process. If you want a great example of a government-funded boondoggle, you need not look any further.

The most interesting information on this case was provided by New York tabloids and by Graham Greene’s 1958 novel “Our Man in Havana,” which early in the Cold War poked fun at the hare-brained intelligence establishment, ours as well as theirs.