The return of the spies

Just when an era of espionage was coming to an end, with the death of Britain's most famous Cold War double agent in Moscow, the United States has received an unexpected and monumental slap in the face from Russian cyber-espionage. Spies are livelier and far sophisticated than ever before. With fewer traces of romanticism and new cyber weapons, the new digital spies are now poking their noses into the fabric of states and businesses with more interest and danger than ever.  

The big debate after Donald Trump's election as president in 2016 was the existence of a Russian plot to boost his candidacy against Hillary Clinton. There was a lengthy investigation, resignations and speculation of all kinds that led to Trump's first impeachment, and forced a special watch on the security of the electoral system.  Four years later, General Nakasone, in charge of US cybersecurity, ruled that the system was safe. All of this despite the troubled situation created by the recent recount. But just days after the result was announced, the press reported that the United States of America had just suffered the largest penetration of its computer systems - both government and private - in its history. Worst of all, there is no certainty that the cyber spies have left a back door open to continue snooping into the sanctum sanctorum of America's once impregnable security. 

Washington, the Pentagon and its spy and counter-espionage agencies, from the CIA to the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security, created after the Twin Towers attack, have not only suffered the attack, but even more seriously, none of the aforementioned agencies were aware of it. It was a private company in the communications and digital security sector, Fire Eye, that alerted the public to the espionage and claimed it came from the cold.

Moscow and especially its former spy chief Vladimir Putin were busy celebrating their longest-serving and most effective counter-spy, the British KGB agent George Blake. He was awarded the Lenin Medal in 1966 and was buried with the obligatory gun salute in a cemetery for the privileged who rendered singular services to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Russian secret services located in a tall yellow brick building in the very centre of the Russian capital, in full view of everyone, but closed to the curious. Now known, after the demise of the Soviet Union, as the FSB (Federal Security Service), the Lubyanka has been the scene of Soviet intelligence's juiciest and darkest secrets and the place where the current Russian leader, Putin, built up his CV and power base. 

The recently deceased Blake was considered, along with Kim Philby (the spy who might have killed Franco while masquerading as a war correspondent in Spain for conservative British media), to be one of the "black legs" of double espionage. Who will emulate them today?  The recent case of massive espionage affecting US government services, but also companies with derivatives that may even reach Spanish firms, seems to be the work of agents acting from within the United States. Possibly, as in the golden age of espionage: double agents?

The carelessness of the American agencies, which have already suffered some huge surprises in the recent past, such as that of the infiltrator in the Cuban espionage department, is surprising to all and sundry.  The case of Ana Belén Montes. For more than seventeen years, the Puerto Rican-born employee rose through the Pentagon ranks undetected, becoming the "number 2" in her department from where she gained access to US espionage data on Castro's island and revealed the information back to the regime in Havana. Once discovered in 2001, the so-called Queen of Cuba was such an emblematic figure of monumental US intelligence cluelessness that she was not included in the exchanges that took place during the thaw in relations in the Obama era. She remained locked up in a maximum security cell in the Fort Worth prison in Texas, reserved for the most dangerous criminals or those with psychiatric illnesses. 

In this new case, while the American generals were singing victory at having prevented a new Russian action on election day, the cold spies could be rubbing their hands because they would have penetrated the systems again without being detected. Diversionary manoeuvres? Focusing on the old pattern of avoiding fake news in the campaign as in the 2016 election, the cybersecurity holes had been more exposed than ever. Four weeks after the election, a small company with a more open eye than the still Trump-ruled administration, called Fire Eye, exposed the breach. The data now revealed by outlets such as The New York Times seems frightening to national security officials. The problem may have gone undetected for nine months. 250 federal agencies have been "touched", thus affecting the entire structure of the US government and other large corporations as well. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated that the scope of the case "continued to grow", without knowing its extent and limits.

After the first evidence, there was an attempt to blame China for this new episode. Pre-emption of the development of IT systems is well known, and has been the basis of tension with the Asian giant since Trump came to power. The battle to exclude China from 5G deployment in Europe or even the United States was just the tip of the iceberg in the "battle for the future" between superpowers. China has largely stayed out of the networks of American cyber expansion. It has tightly controlled social networks and digital communication mechanisms, from Facebook to Whatsapp, to avoid not only succumbing to its trading mechanisms but also to keep its doors closed to digital intruders. It has preferred to develop its own applications and its own networks in order not only to avoid propaganda, but also to avoid having its systems penetrated. 

From what has been investigated so far, the belief is that the attacks on American systems came from Russia, perhaps via software that some of the penetrated networks had been configured by Eastern European companies or professionals. But there are also fears that the operations are being carried out from inside US territory and that there is no way to detect and stop the invasion. When the radical Islamists succeeded in flying planes into the World Trade Center in South Manhattan, they not only performed a spectacular act of war, but also demonstrated for the first time that the US territory was not safe from attack. Only the bombing of Pearl Harbour in faraway Hawaii was a precedent.  America was vulnerable to the outside enemy.

The apparently massive penetration into its government computer systems raises the degree of vulnerability of the America that Joe Biden inherits this month to a superlative degree. Could the Trump administration have neglected its national security obligations and refused to provide the usual information to the election winner in the run-up to the handover? The letter co-signed by the most recent US defence secretaries welcoming the election result and calling for an end to procrastination and claims is also a clear call to maintain a national security alert. In the last months of his term, Trump dismissed the Pentagon chief, the CIA director and the director of Homeland Security. He put at the helm of the main defence and counterintelligence branches men he absolutely trusted, who no one knows whether they were up to the task. Nor will it be clear what national secrets Donald Trump has amassed during his time in the White House and given his turbulent end whether knowledge of them will compromise the country's security. 

The other big question, given the suspicions of Russian infiltration, is whether Putin is armouring himself against the new US administration under Biden. It will not be the only conjecture as to the reasons for this stealthy and smokeless attack, but one that is raising increasing dust and reviving the spectre of the best days of inter-bloc espionage.