On Tuesday, Russian dissident journalist Arkady Babchenko strolled into a Ukrainian press conference to prove that he is, in fact, still alive.
Put another way, Babchenko proved that he was not in fact killed on Tuesday evening while returning to his Kiev apartment, as had been previously reported. News that Babchenko had been assassinated went viral across the world on Tuesday after Ukrainian authorities declared that he had been found dead. Now the Ukrainian authorities say that faking Babchenko’s death was necessary to draw out Russian assassins who had been ordered by the Kremlin to kill him. Those responsible for the plot are supposedly now in custody.
This might appear like a cool spy game, but it is already looking like a pretty stupid gambit by the Ukrainians.
By lying to its own people and to the world, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has damaged its credibility. Every statement that the SBU makes in the future, whether in relation to Russian threats on Ukrainian soil or other national concerns, will now be judged skeptically by those who hear it. This credibility deficit will also make it harder for the SBU to recruit sources in that those prospective sources will be unsure whether their SBU handlers are telling them the truth.
Equally important, the intelligence service has also damaged the credibility of its foreign intelligence service relationships and its own government. We can say this based on the SBU’s director claim on Wednesday that “According to information received by the Ukrainian security service, the killing of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was ordered by the Russian security services themselves.”
Considering how closely guarded that information would be, it likely came from U.S. National Security Agency or British Government Communications Headquarters signal intercepts of Russian communications. And if it was the NSA or GCHQ that told the SBU of the threats, those services will now be indirectly associated with this operation and thus embarrassed. Seeing as the British government was unaware of the Babchenko fakery until today’s press conference, it can safely be assumed that the NSA and GCHQ were uninformed (NSA would have shared its intelligence with its British counterpart GCHQ). There will be anger among Kiev’s allies that the SBU has played them here.
But really, the SBU have played themselves. Although it would taken a little longer, the Ukrainians could have done this in a different way and thus avoided the melee they will now find themselves in.
The SBU might, for example, have contacted the Russian foreign ministry to condemn Babchenko’s murder. They might also have had a senior official speak on his or her phone — in knowledge that the Russians were monitoring that phone — and declare that Babchenko has been found dead but that it would be kept secret. They might even have had Babchenko draw out the assassins by attending a publicly announced event or by sucking in the assassin’s surveillance team with the dangle that Babchenko was going to meet a Russian military spy who wished to defect to Ukraine (the Russians would have bitten at the prospect of killing a prospective traitor).
All these tactics would have given the SBU a good chance of the desired outcome: capturing the suspects. Employing one of these tactics would also have avoided the Russians using this scenario as a deflection from Vladimir Putin’s other hits against journalists around the world, and prospective future targets of such hits like myself.
I suspect that the SBU’s main motivation here was emotional: Its officers are likely frustrated by similar Russian mind games and wanted to give the Kremlin a taste of its own medicine. That emotion is understandable, but it has no place in an intelligence officer’s calculations. Because it risks just that which has now occurred: blowback.
