Much has changed in Russia since I briefly lived there two decades ago. Including, apparently, the identity of an old acquaintance of mine.
Or so he says.
Upon my first trip to Moscow in many years, I was keen to reconnect with a Russian diplomat I had known years ago in the U.S. and who I had discovered now works in the Kremlin. I asked my fixer to get his office number a few days after landing in the gleaming metropolis.
That in itself was no mean feat and involved a payment to some shady contact, putting me in mind of the old days when getting anything done involved a “consideration.”
Makeovers can only get you so far, it seems.
The change in the Russian capital is nothing short of startling. As my cab weaved its way into Moscow’s center from Sheremetyevo International Airport, which was surprisingly free of glum, Soviet-style border guards, I could only mutter to myself expressions of surprise.
When I lived in Moscow in the 1990s, the city center was in dreadful disrepair — testimony to 80 years of communist rule. Grand old buildings have been restored; a huge financial center has arisen. And there is a spring in the step of Muscovites, now better dressed, having thrown off the drab communist fashion code of gray, black, or brown. Even the blank Soviet stare has gone. Younger Muscovites are now expressive in public.
But there’s a Potemkin village feeling, too. The newfound openness and transparency has its limits.
Armed with the number, the fixer called my old pal on his Kremlin phone just to make sure we had the right man. Yes, he was the diplomat I’d known. But when the fixer mentioned my name, reminding him I was a journalist, the diplomat suddenly denied all knowledge of me.
My translator tried, but she’s a woman of a certain age who grew up in Soviet times and has retained a deferential fear of authority. In a shaky voice after her brief phone brush-off, she told me, “I don’t like dealing with people like that. Never ask me to make a call like that again.”
Peeved, I then called for myself, only to have him deny his identity, which he’d cheerfully acknowledged earlier to my Russian fixer. Of course, I recognized his voice.
So, why the lies?
Maybe with diplomatic tempers flaring over the poisoning in England of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, the “diplomat” had no wish to reconnect with me and not over a Kremlin phone line that was probably monitored.
Certainly, the Kremlin hasn’t shaken off the tiresome attitude that all Western reporters are spies in thin disguise. I noticed playbacks on my phone, a telltale sign of eavesdropping. A former British army officer who is now a security consultant told me over a drink in a Moscow hotel bar to be very prudent even when using WhatsApp, the encrypted digital messaging application owned by Facebook. “Yes, I know it is meant to be impenetrable, but there are ways of monitoring even that,” he said enigmatically.
What a waste of time all this surveillance is. Anyone eavesdropping on me during the Moscow trip would only have discovered what they could have read more easily in my published articles, namely, that the fearsome Russian intelligence services can indeed be fearsome, but alongside their successes, they still can botch things up royally, makeovers notwithstanding.
The bungled attempted assassination of Skripal (and his daughter) has opened up the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, to a series of public embarrassments. “It is an extraordinary belief there’s something new about” such Russian intelligence bungles, British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew told me as we discussed Russia recently.
Indeed, some things never change.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
