So it could work if a member of parliament is recruited by the Russian secret service: The member of parliament just wants to get money and locks up his racing bike on Unter den Linden. He meanders past a man who is also locking up his bike. There are coincidences. It’s the same model, nineties, turquoise. The politician’s gaze lingers for a moment. “Nice bike,” says the other man, “what year?” He has a slight Russian accent. Three sentences later, the two are on first-name terms, as it is among bikers. “Your rear derailleur needs an update,” says the man with the accent, “I still have one in the garage.” He should call him, he says and writes his number on the card.
That’s the beginning of a friendship, at least that’s what the politician thinks. Over the next few months, the two drive through Grunewald on weekends and meet up for a beer in the evening. They talk about screwing and politics. The new Russian friend says he works for a think tank specializing in economic policy. He always has a lot of questions. The politician tells what he knows and has heard. What he doesn’t know is that his answers end up on the server of a Russian secret service.
It’s a fictional example, but it’s not unlikely. Russian cyber attacks are often talked about, but what is less well known is espionage “by means of harmless-looking contact maintenance”, as the current report by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution puts it. There are no reliable numbers of how often such initiation attempts are made and how often they succeed. But it is clear that espionage is a main focus of the Russian embassy in Berlin. At the beginning of the year, a good third of the roughly three hundred employees at the embassy pretended to be diplomats.
Small pieces of the puzzle so nobody suspects anything
In truth, they were employees of SWR, FSB, GRU or another Russian service. In April there were forty fewer, the federal government declared them undesirable people and expelled them from the country. The others are still there.
Of course, they want to know what alternative energy sources the federal government is opening up and how the goal of becoming independent of Russian gas by 2024 is progressing. And which politicians express doubts about the sanctions of the West in internal meetings. But the interest goes beyond that. The Russian services are working on a complete picture of the political and economic situation and possible future developments. A lot can be gleaned from publicly available information. Human sources, as it is called in agent language, are used to check the knowledge gained in this way and to close gaps. They are small pieces of the puzzle that seem so insignificant that politicians, company employees, journalists or whoever else falls victim to such investigations often fail to suspect them.
The agents are particularly creative when making contacts. One secret service agent becomes a think tanker with a passion for bicycles because he knows that the politician who sits on the economic committee and is supposed to tell what’s going on there spends most of his free time on his bicycle. Others pose as businessmen or scientists, the most common being diplomatic cover as a cultural attaché or similar.
