The British Parliament’s Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released a long-delayed report into Russia’s intelligence service and influence operations against the United Kingdom.
The report follows two decades of extensive Russian oligarchic wealth sheltering in London, and the Russian GRU military intelligence service’s 2018 attempted murder of one of its defectors using a highly toxic nerve agent. The Russians’ disregard for the British public was appalling — an innocent woman died after mistaking the discarded nerve agent delivery device for a perfume bottle. The attack shook Britain’s threat perception of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The first major takeaway pertains to Russia’s intelligence activity in Britain — I have also written separate entries on the report’s attention to Russia’s political and financial influence and on how Britain can better counter Putin.
Contemplating its findings, the committee notes, “Most surprising, perhaps, was the extent to which much of the work of the [British] Intelligence Community is focused on ***.”
The *** redaction here almost certainly refers to “cyber and data” related operations. While the report’s findings on U.K. “offensive cyber” operations are left to the classified annex, it notes that Russia’s offensive operations pose an “immediate and urgent threat.” One serious challenge here is Russian “cyber [attack] pre-positioning” in Britain’s critical national infrastructure. The committee says it has been told of “*** [likely: widespread] Russian cyber intrusion into the UK’s [critical national infrastructure] — particularly marked in the *** [likely: energy/power] sectors.”
What we see here is the hyper-aggression by which Russia operates its cyber capability. While the United States and, to a degree, Britain, have infiltrated their own cyber pre-positioned weapons in Russia’s critical infrastructure, Russia’s general disregard for civilian suffering and its inferior conventional military power, especially at strategic levels, leads it to tolerate a more aggressive cyber strategy here.
Assessing British “human intelligence (HUMINT) operations,” the committee observes that “technological advancements that gather and analyze data on individuals have generally increased the difficulty ***.” I am guessing this redaction says, “of agent recruitment and operation by SIS officers.”
The report continues: “The expansion of smart city technology (such as CCTV, smart sensors and mobile device tracking), and the capability that this provides, has increased the ability of ***… ***…” Likely: Russia’s domestic intelligence services to detect and disrupt agent operations.”
Translation: it has become harder to recruit British agents in the Russian government on Russian soil, and to run those agents once on Russian soil. The report adds that “It is the difficulty of recruiting Russian agents with the right accesses, and the careful planning, tradecraft and operational security around any prospective agents — so as to ensure their safety and minimize any political risk to [the British government] — which means that it takes a relatively long time for intelligence efforts to produce results.”
We see here the challenges facing Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service/MI6, its equivalent of the CIA. While MI6 is particularly talented at recruiting agents in foreign governments and organizations, it places a greater premium than the CIA on high-value agent recruitment versus scaled recruitment with the hope that some agents will rise into positions of greater access to intelligence. Fortunately, MI6 and particularly the CIA have a number of high-value assets in place in Russia. In addition, both the CIA and MI6 have developed impressive data collection and analysis capabilities, which complement human intelligence operations.
Top line: The intelligence challenge remains significant.
