Spies Have Been Hidden In Embassies For Years. But For How Much Longer?
6 min read
Spies have operated under diplomatic cover in foreign cities for decades. What does the future hold for this legal peculiarity? Ben Gartside reports
On a cold Tuesday in 2018, a group of a dozen well-wishers stood in Notting Hill, peering across the streets and waving to a group of people boarding a minibus.
The supporters had come to bid farewell to 80 people leaving the UK at short notice. They did not have time to say a formal goodbye, only to stand outside the Russian embassy and see them off as they headed to a government plane in minibuses donning diplomatic plates.
Of those leaving, only 23 were required to do so. They were spies operating under diplomatic cover, deported from the UK in response to the state-sponsored assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal.
For all the focus on deep cover spies, FSB assassination squads and sleeper cells, the majority of spies operate in a hybrid existence, under roles like “cultural attaché”, often without the knowledge of many of their colleagues.
Not all of those will have lives resembling that of a John le Carré or Mick Herron book: retaining the pretence of being a civilian and operating in anonymity and near invisibility. At a cautious estimate, hundreds of spies reside within the realms of central London.
Matthew Dunn, a former MI6 intelligence officer, describes London as the “global capital” for such espionage.
“London is the epicentre of espionage. That volume and number will not have changed since the Cold War. It’s business as usual.”
“Some [diplomatic spies] are declared to the United Kingdom, and are working in collaboration with MI5, and then there are diplomatic and undeclared [spies]. [Foreign] security services are known largely to MI5, and what they are up to.”
The role is a unique one. A legal spy operates in a public-facing role: to everyone they encounter, they are a representative of a country’s embassy. Chris Costa, a former US army intelligence officer who spent 25 years in counterintelligence, working against agents including diplomatic spies, says the days can be gruelling.
“In general, all countries that have mature intelligence services will have a diplomatic presence overseas, and they will have intelligence officers under diplomatic cover,” he tells The House.
“During the day, they will do administrative tasks, like taking care of passports or visas. In the evening, they will have the opportunity to conduct traditional espionage. Spotting, identifying, and meeting targets and cultivating them.”
The dual role means a unique level of exposure. There is a higher level of suspicion, but also a higher level of profile.
Costa says everyone in a foreign embassy is under suspicion of being a foreign agent, and it is an “occupational hazard” to be described as persona non grata and asked to leave the country.
Dunn says: “They will have to wear those two hats of being a public diplomat, with a full daytime job and nighttime work as an intelligence officer and a spy. There are significant pressures as a result of that, even if there are equal if not greater dangers with non-diplomatic cover.”
It can also mean that deception to one’s friends and family can be exposed. The House is told of a case where one ‘diplomat’, upon gaining a posting to Moscow, let out his family house in leafy south London to a friend.
Shortly after his move, he was expelled along with a handful of other British diplomats, to return home following a similar rebuke for Russian diplomats in Britain. The chastened diplomat had to explain to his lodger that he would need his house back: as soon as the expulsion hit the headlines, his friend put two and two together.
China gifting bundles of tech will play into their tactics far more than Russia, which relies a lot more on human intelligence
The system can be a problem for the British state, and also the Metropolitan police. One job of the Met is to provide police protection to the embassies, in which numerous likely spies are housed.
The relationship can be tempestuous anyway – often high-profile embassies want crackdowns on protesters or have strained diplomatic relations with the UK – as seen recently with the Chinese embassy.
Those relationships are also a potential way to build connections or even gain intelligence within the British state. Alarm bells rang earlier this year in one case with the Chinese embassy.
According to Metropolitan police records, a police constable was persuaded to take a USB stick by Chinese diplomats as part of a tech hamper presented as a gift to the officer.
The officer claimed he repeatedly tried to turn down the gift, but did not want to cause offence and “engagement has been difficult with this embassy and now I have a rapport with individuals, I did not wish to offend as, culturally, gift giving is a big part of maintaining relationships with Chinese diplomats”.
Globally, a number of cases have been noted where Chinese spies have used USB sticks as a form of cyber spying, most recently in cases of corporate espionage.
A Met police spokesperson told The House that the device was not used on Met IT systems, and that all necessary precautions are taken in regards to security.
Dunn, a former MI6 officer, says the description of the engagement fits with a typical Chinese espionage ploy.
“The Chinese are very big fans of technology in terms of espionage. China has been less confident with human intelligence, and more confident with tech. China gifting bundles of tech will play into their tactics far more than Russia, which relies a lot more on human intelligence.
“The Chinese cast their net wide – it’s not a tactic that western agencies use as much, as the chance of getting meaningful intelligence out of these tactics is pretty low.
“It’s not a productive tactic, but it’s what they do. It’s been identified in this case, but there will be others. They will try to dig one nugget of gold out of a gazillion pieces of pointless rock. It’s incumbent on the police to be prepared for this, regardless of cultural norms.
“MI5 in particular will be very savvy to that tactic, and the police will be briefed on this.”
The Chinese embassy in London has previously said: “China never interferes in other countries’ internal affairs and always acts in an open and aboveboard manner.”
Despite the long history of diplomatic spies, modern technology raises questions about how long the embassy handler in the mould of le Carré’s Polyakov will survive.
Costa, now the director of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, says: “There’s a ubiquitous surveillance environment. I was trained in the Cold War, and then I crossed over into the war on terror – a completely different surveillance environment.
“The ubiquity means that because of things like biometrics, travelling on false passports is almost quaint. It is very, very difficult to use an alias or to use a false passport – the old tradecraft measures are going out the window.
“You’re transitioning from old-school tradecraft around embassies to non-traditional cover, even remotely via services like LinkedIn.”
Within this challenging environment, Dunn says intelligence agencies still hope to hit much the same targets as before.
“Despite advances in [artificial intelligence and open source intelligence], human intelligence remains gold dust.
“Foreign intel services, especially hostile states, know this. Hostile actors will always look to do whatever they can to get intelligence”.
