JULES EVANS, LONDON
IT’S IN THE FSB’S INTEREST, BUT NOT RUSSIA’S, TO TURN THE UK INTO A ‘THREAT’
The British Council has finally bowed to the inevitable and suspended its operations in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. I don’t see why it tried to continue operations when the government had made it clear it wasn’t welcome – you can’t operate in a country unless the government wants you there.
Still, it’s a great pity, not for the UK, but for the million or so ordinary Russians who have used the British Council’s services in the past, who have learnt English through its libraries and classes (until the FSB banned the classes), who have seen British acts like Lily Allen or Matthew Bourne which the Council has brought to Russia, or who have been helped by the Council in their attempts to go to Britain to work or study.
The British Council acted as a bridge, helping Russians to come to the UK. With that bridge now blocked by the FSB, it will be more difficult for ordinary Russians to go and study in the UK.
For the Russian political elite, it’s as easy as ever – their children learn English at top schools in the UK or Switzerland, and have no difficulty in securing places in top British universities, as Sergei Lavrov’s daughter did. For the elite, London is like St Tropez or Corcheval, just one more stop on the oligarch fun-train.
But for ordinary Russians, it is hard, learning the language and finding places to work and study. And it just got harder, thanks to the FSB.
And why? Because the FSB seems to think the British Council is but one part of the UK’s widespread network of espionage and subversion in Russia.
Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, says the UK is plotting to destroy Russia. MI6, he told Argumentiy I Fakty in October, is “now hatching plans aimed at dismembering Russia”.
Patrushev’s conspiracy theory regarding the UK managed to stretch back to the sixteenth century: “Since the time of Elizabeth I, agents have been guided by the principle of the end justifying the means. Money, bribery, blackmail and exemption from punishment of crimes are their main recruitment methods."
You can see that the FSB has certain things against the UK: chiefly, its sheltering of Boris Berezovsky, who’s certainly a malevolent and troublesome person, who I wish lived anywhere else but the UK. Unfortunately, the government can’t kick him out, only the British courts can, and they won’t.
Secondly, the unfortunate fact that our Moscow ambassador, Anthony Brenton, attended a conference / rally organized by The Other Russia. This, I’m afraid, was a mistake – diplomats shouldn’t get involved in political rallies.
Still, these two incidents don’t mean that the UK would be devoting huge time and resources to plots against Russia. Why would it? Is Russia a military threat to the UK, as it was in the Cold War? People talk about the ‘energy weapon’, but Russia can’t single out the UK and punish it, without punishing the rest of Europe, which is its most important market for gas.
You have to think clearly and rationally about the situation the UK is in. We’re involved in two wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq – neither of which are going well. We could well be involved in another, against Iran, if relations worsen. We have a domestic population exposed to multiple terrorist threats every year – bomb threats, hijacking, attempted poisonings.
MI5 and MI6 have its hands absolutely full trying to stop terrorists killing British people. Sometimes, they manage to prevent attacks by a matter of minutes, as they did the bomb outside a bar in London last year. Sometimes, it is simply luck that stops people dying, as when two suicide terrorists failed to harm anyone at Glasgow airport last year.
Why, in this situation, would MI5 or MI6 be devoting large amounts of resources to spying on Russia, or even less probably, trying to dismember it?
On the contrary, MI5 recently complained that it is wasting resources having to track all the FSB agents in the UK, resources that it could be using to fight terrorism. Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, recently said in an interview: “Since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the numbers of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK -- at the Russian embassy and associated organizations conducting covert activity in this country.”
"It is a matter of some disappointment to me that I still have to devote significant amounts of equipment, money and staff to countering this threat. They are resources which I would far rather devote to countering the threat from international terrorism -- a threat to the whole international community, not just the UK."
But actually, for all the pointlessness of the FSB’s paranoia against the UK, you can see that it makes sense for it, as a bureaucracy, to continue to inform the president of the heinous threat that the UK poses to Russian interests.
The bigger the ‘UK threat’, the bigger the FSB’s budget. The FSB’s budget is only as big as the external threats it can discover. Every time Patrushev uncovers another act of Georgian aggression, or another sinister British plot stretching back to the sixteenth century, it means a bigger budget for the FSB, and more money for him.
And if the UK is a serious threat to Russia, then that justifies sending hundreds of Russian agents to London. Wonderful! What a delightful posting! You could be sent off to Ghana or Uzbekistan, but instead you get to live in London, to see the shows, to eat in fine restaurants, to drink at China White’s, to watch Chelsea, and feel like one of the offshore aristocracy.
I remember Alexander Lebedev telling me of being posted to the UK by the KGB in the 1980s. “It was one of the best postings you could get”, he said. And many of the agents adored being posted there. Indeed, they put down roots in the UK, and even left their children there to be educated, as Lebedev’s son was. In fact, Lebedev junior still lives in London, and runs a chain of restaurants there.
So the more the FSB plays up the UK threat, the more money it gets, and the more it gets to send its agents to live it up in London. The FSB’s closure of the British Council, meanwhile, means it’s harder for ordinary Russians to go to the UK. So ordinary Russians can’t go, while the FSB can. Just like it was in the Soviet Union.
Jules Evans, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, London
January 22, 2008
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