Spies and cyber spies, the new cold war of China and Russia against the West / Analysis by Mauricio Vargas

For United Statess, the platform aimed to spy on officials of Western governments, the military, security and intelligence agencies, private companies linked to the defense sector, political parties and parliaments. “Russian intelligence agencies turned to criminal gangs to help them,” an FBI statement detailed.

In the case of Europe, the objective since 2022 has focused on disrupting political decision-making processes to support Ukraine financially and militarily. According to the German ministry, Nancy Faeserthe hackers were looking for “information about Germany’s political-strategic orientation in relation to Russia and support for deliveries of military material to Ukraine.”

Some operations went even further. On April 18, Poland announced the arrest of a citizen of its country, accused of providing information to the FSBthe Russian spy service that rsummoned the KGB and that he keeps Vladimir Putin personally informed.

“His tasks – stated an official statement in Warsaw – included collecting and sending to the military intelligence of the Russian Federation data on the security of the Rzeszów-Jasionka airport,” an airfield in the southeast of the country, sometimes used by the president of neighboring Ukraine, Volodymyr ZelenskYo. Everything indicates that the spy was seeking to “help the Russian special services plan a possible attack” on Zelensky’s life.

This year, headlines with the word ‘espionage’ have multiplied as Western security agencies, on both sides of the Atlantic, reveal new cases. In Great Britain, where on December 7 the Foreign Office had accused the FSB of trying to interfere in British politics and democracy, the dissemination of findings has since maintained an intense pace.

In Vienna, which for decades was the epicenter of the battle of spies during the Cold War (1945-1991), this weekend the media reported an intrigue that the EFE agency considered typical of a novel by John Le Carré.

At the center of the plot is Egisto Ott, a former Austrian counterespionage agent (BVT) accused by the Vienna government of delivering classified information to Russia, directly or through Jan Marsalek, an Austrian who is believed to have fled to Moscow after being accused of a gigantic fraud with the online payment system Wirecard, which in the last decade defrauded its clients of nearly 2,000 million euros. Now, in addition to that fraud, Marsalek is accused of spying for the Kremlin.

Ott provided Russian espionage with information about the security and residence of Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist born in Bulgaria, who uncovered the names of the Russians responsible for the 2014 downing of a commercial passenger plane over eastern Ukraine, which left 298 dead, as well as the agents who poisoned several Russian opponents exiled in West.

Thanks to the information that Ott gave them, the Russian agents were able to bypass the security that Austria offered Grozev, raid his home and steal his laptop and a USB drive. On the other hand, Ott obtained the cell phone memories of three senior officials of the Ministry of the Interior of Austriaand also handed them over to the Russians.

The spy was connected to a Bulgarian network, the same one that the United Kingdom began to disrupt last December, when the Foreign Office revealed the investigation and summoned the Russian ambassador in London, Andrei Kelin, to protest Moscow’s “repeated attempts” to interfere in British politics, among other means by cyber means.

Apart from the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Poland and Austria, France He has also been in the crosshairs of Russian espionage. After failing, in February 2022, in his attempt to convince Vladimir Putin of not invading Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron began to toughen his speech against the Kremlin leader, until putting on the table, last February, the sending of Western troops to Ukrainian territory, as a step that cannot be ruled out in the future.

Since mid-2022 and with increasing intensity, the DGSE (French foreign security) has identified hundreds of cyber attacks of Russian origin against government organizations, political parties, personalities and the media. Discrediting Macron, and especially his foreign policy, has been a key part of the task ordered from Moscow.

In this new era of the cold war, these are not just operations ordered from the Kremlin. Also, and a lot, of espionage and cyber attacks by the Chinese government, especially in Europe. Last week, six people were formally charged before judges in three different cases: two will be prosecuted in the United Kingdom and four in Germany.

As the New York Times explained this weekend, these cases are “the first of their kind in two countries that once cultivated warm relations with Beijing.”

It’s not just about those countries: three weeks ago, by order of the Swedish government, a 57-year-old Chinese journalist, who had been living in the Scandinavian country for almost two decades, was expelled. She had married a Swedish citizen with whom she has several children. The woman maintained close contact with the Chinese embassy in Stockholm and with people identified as close to Beijing.

She was arrested in October, interrogated for weeks and deported in early April. Although Sweden did not elaborate on details because the investigations continue, the conclusion of the investigators, according to an official statement, is that the woman had become “a threat to the national security” of Sweden.

Martin Thorley, a British expert on China affairs and who is preparing the publication of the book ‘All That Glitters’, assesses that Europe is finally waking up to the risks posed by China. The thesis of his book, as he told the New York Times, is that “the golden age” of Sino-British friendship, under the leadership of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron (2010-2016), was actually “the mistake of gold”, which helped Beijing penetrate – even via bribes – political and business organizations in the United Kingdom.

Cameron is now Secretary of the Foreign Office, and in that role he has been a harsh critic of Beijing. “A lot has changed,” Cameron said in Washington in December, adding that China has become “an epoch-defining challenge.”

The head of German domestic intelligence (BfV), Thomas Haldenwang, goes further and maintains that “the state and communist party leadership in China has greatly intensified its efforts to obtain high-quality political information and to influence decision-making processes.” of decisions abroad”, especially in Europe.

The German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, thinks the same: “We are aware,” she told the New York Times, “of the considerable danger that Chinese espionage represents for business, industry and science.” And for politics. Among those recently detained in Germany by Beijing’s spy network is Jian Guo, a Chinese-German who combined his close ties with the Chinese Ministry of State Security with his regular work in Germany (and in Strasbourg, headquarters of the European Parliament) as assistant to German MEP Maximilian Krah, of the far-right AfD party.

Concern about the tentacles of Beijing It is expressed in the United States with the legislation that is advancing on Capitol Hill in Washington, to force the Chinese owners of the social network TikTok to sell that platform. Among several reasons for concern with this network, not the least is that it has to do with the immense amount of information that China can accumulate and process, which is posted by millions of users in the West, according to what defenders of the legislation have said.

In Europe, data is accumulating on Moscow and Beijing’s relations with far-right groups, the same in Germany as in Austria, France, Belgium and other countries of the European Union. “The explanation for this phenomenon,” an EU diplomatic source told EL TIEMPO on Monday, “is that the extreme right is, in almost all the countries of the Union, anti-European, that is, in favor of nationalism in each country and not of the union of Europe.”

If Europe gives in to the nationalisms of each of its countries and loses its unity, that favors the interests of Moscow as well as China. “So it is easy to understand,” he notes, “that the Russians have helped the Catalan independence movement so much, for example on social networks: they want division and not European union.”

“In several countries, starting with France, this extreme right that is close to Moscow, and in a certain way to Beijing, is winning the polls for the elections to the European parliament,” says the diplomat and notes that the Western intelligence services follow a indication after another of Russia’s cyber support for these parties, multiplying its messages on the networks and launching smear campaigns against other parties. An issue that, less than 40 days before the crucial votes, generates enormous concern.

MAURICIO VARGAS
TIME ANALYST
[email protected] /Instagram @mvargaslinares