Bungling agents leave Putin exposed in the global spotlight

Spies do not always want to advertise their victories, preferring John Le Carré’s advice “better to be silent, be blank”. But in the case of the battle between MI6 and the GRU, a decision has been made in Whitehall to highlight and isolate the Russian military intelligence arm, aiming to turn it from a source of Vladimir Putin’s power to an impediment.

In part, the double exposure of the GRU – first wandering around Salisbury in search of the doorknob of Sergei Skripal’s home, and then caught in a carpark in the The Hague hacking into the chemical weapons watchdog – has simply been made possible by Russian incompetence.

Both missions by the GRU, the most adventurous of the Russian intelligence agencies, were bungled. Its agents not only failed to assassinate Skripal with novichok, but they were also caught in April trying to discover how far OPCW scientists had progressed in detecting the nerve agent.

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But part of the Dutch operation started to leak. Dutch and Swiss media reported in September that two Russians were arrested in April in The Hague after trying to hack into the OPCW headquarters. It was also reported that the two agents had been planning to travel on to the OPCW-registered laboratory in Spiez near Berne. Further details emerged, but the extent to which the Russians had been caught red-handed was not disclosed.

But once the damning photographic evidence of the GRU agents in Salisbury had been revealed, reducing Moscow to largely incredible explanations, Whitehall took the decision to go on the offensive, and broaden the case against the GRU by revealing the extent to which Russia has been seeking to disrupt western institutions.

A British government official explained: “Shock went around the world after the novichok incident in Salisbury. We said we would call them out both to deter and to defend. We are not seeking to escalate, but we will defend ourselves, partly by shining a light and partly by sharing the information we have in a new way.”

It was felt that the public in the west had no inkling of the scale of the Russian hacking operation.

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Those dastardly Russian dastards Boris and Natasha had their plans foiled by the Keystone Koppers Rocky and Bullwinkle. This would be as true as this silly article don't you think? This is what passes for journalism?

Update

Apparently there was a concerted propaganda effort yesterday against Russia.

This tweet is the first of maaany tweets describing the nefarious things that Russia has been up to.

THREAD

The attempted hacking of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) by the Russian Military Intelligence Service - the GRU - part of a sustained pattern of hostile cyberspace activity.

What we know ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/UyAYGKlPp2

— Foreign Office (@foreignoffice) October 4, 2018

Moon of Alabama's discussion on this campaign.

The allegations against Russia over nefarious spying operations and sockpuppet campaigns are highly hypocritical. The immense scale of U.S. and British spying revealed by Edward Snowden and through the Wikileaks Vault 7 leak of CIA hacking tools is well known. The Pentagon runs large social media manipulation campaigns. The British GHCQ hacked Belgium's largest telco network to spy on the data of the many international organizations in Brussels.

International organizations like the OPCW have long been the target of U.S. spies and operations. The U.S. National Security Service (NSA) regularly hacked the OPCW since at least September 2000:

According to last week's Shadow Brokers leak, the NSA compromised a DNS server of the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in September 2000, two years after the Iraq Liberation Act and Operation Desert Fox, but before the Bush election

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As usual b has written a brilliant essay on this latest campaign to make Russia into a badder guy whilst it's the other countries that are involved with those things. Worth a full read.