MOSCOW. (Vladimir Simonov, RIA Novosti commentator). -- If the technical angel "Q" who probably earned half the credit for Mr. Bond-James-Bond's incredible professional and other victories ever existed, he must have been spinning in his grave earlier this week with shame for his modern peers as news came about MI6 people caught with a malfunctioning spy gadget in a Moscow park.
Indeed, the transceiver rock found in a Moscow park was working too unsteadily not to be uncovered - in Russian technical jargon, there is "either no contact or too much of it." The videotape broadcast on Sunday on Rossia, a leading national TV network, showed a British diplomat kicking the rock desperately, trying to make it work - or maybe just for fun, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. We might never know why he tried to carry it away, for repair or to dispose, but one thing was clear, especially after an X-ray test: the rock must definitely have had a "Warranty Void If Removed" or a "Make Sure This Product Is Repaired by Licensed Technicians" label inside.
Four British spies have been caught red-handed - is it something people on one side should celebrate, and their counterparts on the other lament or deny vehemently? Hardly so, for many reasons.
What we can do is just state that for all the Russian and Western claims that we are standing back to back in a global struggle against terror, neither side seems to be looking at it as a reason to deprive the intelligence community of their daily bread. Standing back to back is not the same as not looking for skeletons in each other's cupboards. Probably to avoid any misunderstanding - what else can be expected of officers and gentlemen? - MI6 has publicly committed to that on its website: "The Secret Intelligence Service operates world-wide to collect secret foreign intelligence in support of the British Government's policies and objectives."
I don't think the Russian government will send me to a Siberian labor camp if I acknowledge in public that this country is doing the same, globally and 24/7. Tonight some Britons were caught in Moscow, tomorrow fortune might turn its back on Russians elsewhere - after all, you don't complain when night comes after day, right? For such are the rules of the world's second oldest profession which, like it or not, will exist as long as there is demand for it.
Times are changing, gadgets come and go - while Oleg Penkovsky, the famous Soviet spy of the 1960s, had to play with bulky microfilm containers, shoving them behind a heater in a Moscow residential block, Marc Doe, 27, the man on FSB's Sunday footage, used the famous "talking stone" and a Wi-Fi'd PDA - but the game remains the same.
In Britain, people who stand on the cutting edge of intelligence technology are hired openly, notably through the website where "high calibre graduates as well as experienced professionals with strong practical skills and experience in specialist fields from IT, software, networking, communications and technical management" are promised involvement "in operational work or the installation of IT systems around the world" and "opportunities for travel," although "careers are more likely to be UK-based."
Personally, some people might now be regretting they once chose the "around the world" option - because of professional failure as well as because British stonemakers' "strong practical skills and experience" turned out to be not as strong as they were meant to be. But institutionally, personal seems to be not the same as important here. The British Government will hardly try to deny the fact outright and certainly will not lament the minor setback. Foreign & Commonwealth Office is going exactly the right way, not acknowledging but also - wisely - not denying the accusations, only expressing "surprise" and "distress," which to the students of Diplomatese means totally unsurprising and not in the least distressful.
What is important is the rest of the iceberg - Mr. Doe has signed up thousands of pounds in funding for Russian human rights organizations, including the Moscow Helsinki Group and Eurasia Foundation. In the footage, the Russian secret service showed invoices with Mr. Doe's legible signature. A diplomat caught spying can hardly hope to lead anyone in a normal state of mind into believing he would never be tempted to use his connections with NGOs to operate "in support of the British Government's policies and objectives."
So, the rest of the iceberg is that an increasingly clear equality sign is looming between foreign intelligence and western-backed human rights efforts in Russia. This is bad. This is bad not so much for Britain with its centuries-old democracy, but above all for Russia, where ordinary people are just getting used to the taste of genuine civil freedoms.
Here and now, human rights groups are doing a great job. In the face of an independent court pressured by a human rights activist, a young man who is physically unfit for military service is coming to believe that his parents need not bribe the overzealous draftsman. Old and lonely people know where to find free legal assistance to stand up against ravenous landlords trying to evict them from their flats. People abused by corrupt construction companies successfully press the city government to act on their behalf. What civil rights activists do is change people's minds, screaming and kicking, into the minds of free-thinking people, and this is exactly what this country needs to become prosperous and democratic.
Now they have got a shot in the foot - not because, as Western media were quick to note, the FSB has broadcast the video, but primarily because the man officially responsible for addressing human rights in Her Majesty's Embassy to Russia was in fact a spy.
Eurasia foundation has already acknowledged that Mr. Doe took an active part in the foundation's daily activities, not just transferring the money but also handling financial statements and running seminars training journalists for local media.
The SIS has provided knock-out evidence that might be misused against the Russian human rights movement at large because NGOs run by a spy obviously feel the way they are driven. Now few will be surprised to hear that most NGOs - mysteriously - avoided putting such issues as fight against corruption and bureaucratic hindrance on top of their agendas and preferred to raise a row each time the Russian military would ban "ecological" teams from entering areas close to army test fields. Few will deny that such institutions intentionally used democracy as a cloak and human rights as a dagger, and that their leaders were totally aware what they were paid for.
The spy scandal should become a lesson Russian secret services must have learnt from a classical shot-in-the-foot story of East Germany where Stasi, the secret police, spent two decades carefully promoting their man Gunter Guillaume to the inner circle of Willy Brandt, the then West German chancellor - only to see him uncovered in 1974, upon which Mr. Brandt had to resign, burying all hopes of the GDR and Soviet authorities for detente in Europe.
Most people will think that perhaps not always but often enough the end justifies the means. The means that have been chosen here, however, hardly correspond to the gravity and importance of the goal they were ostensibly employed to achieve.
