Intelligence
Ukraine's top intelligence agency deeply infiltrated
by Russian spies
Pro-Russian separatists with Russian national flags storm the regional
office of the Security Service of Ukraine in the eastern city of Luhansk on
April 6, 2014.
IMAGE: AP PHOTO/IGOR GOLOVNIOV
KIEV,
Ukraine – On a morning earlier this year, Ukraine’s top intelligence officials
woke up to discover that the country's spy agency had been ransacked and
torched by intruders who seemed to know what they were looking for.
The
previous night, it turned out, the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor
Yanukovych, had ordered his operatives to steal a trove of state secrets from
Ukraine's Security Service, known as the SBU, before fleeing to Moscow on Feb.
22.
During
their raid on the spy agency, the thieves also stole data on more than 22,000
officers and informants as well as anything documenting decades of cooperation
between the SBU and its Russian counterpart, the Federal Security Service, or
FSB.
What the burglars weren't able to carry, they burned or destroyed. In
the ruins of the offices, scorched files and empty folders lay strewn on the
floors.
“Every
hard drive and flash drive was destroyed — smashed with hammers,” said one
current Ukrainian intelligence official recently. By the time he and his
colleagues got there, "it was all ash and dust."
For a
country in the shadow of Russia and embarking on an uncertain path toward
democracy, the break-in was devastating.
As
the current SBU director Valentyn Nalyvaichenko put it, the thieves took
“everything that forms a basis for a professional intelligence service."
Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Valentyn Nalyvaichenko gives a
press conference in Kiev on March 11, 2014.
IMAGE: SERGEI
SUPINSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Just
days after the break-in, the director of the intelligence service, Oleksandr
Yakymenko, surfaced in Russia, having defected with four other top spies and a
dozen or so subordinates loyal to Moscow.
In
the following weeks and months, the security service was thrown into turmoil as
the agents' new allegiances played out. After the Russian invasion of Crimea,
thousands of Ukrainian spies switched sides and began reporting to Moscow.
Similarly, as the Kremlin-backed insurgency took off in eastern Ukraine, dozens
of Ukrainian agents in there became agents of the Kremlin.
“We
have no idea who we can trust right now,” said a top SBU spy, still loyal to
the government in Kiev.
When
Nalyvaichenko became the SBU’s new chief on Feb. 24, he inherited a spy agency
already riddled with spies. According to him, as many as one in five SBU agents
had either worked for the Soviet KGB or studied at its training academy.
Even
as Ukraine was in the midst of pro-democracy protests, a team of 30 Russian
agents from the FSB came to Ukraine to meet with Yakymenko, allegedly to
discuss assisting his officers in quashing the civil uprising…
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