I’m a former CIA agent – this is how Russia spies on the UK

They’re known in the business as tradecraft: the ingenious techniques and devious tactics used by spies to carry out their missions without being detected.

Some of these methods have barely evolved for a century. Take signal sites, where an agent might chalk a cross on a particular wall, to indicate they’re ready to share a vital message or important documents.

They’ll do this by leaving them at pre-agreed locations, often in parks or remote areas, where one spy can deposit an item for a comrade to pick up without them ever having to meet. KGB spy John Walker, who shared US secrets for decades until he was caught in 1985, would place film in empty drinks cans and received money from Moscow the same way.

Sean Wiswesser, who only left the CIA two years ago, has spent his 30-year US intelligence career studying how spies operate in the field. No doubt he used some of these skills himself while serving as a CIA station chief in parts of the former Soviet Union (he still can’t reveal precisely where he was based). Later, he taught colleagues how to use tradecraft and ways of spotting an enemy’s work.

One Russian tactic that has existed for decades is the use of proxies: hiring outsiders to do their dirty work for them, sometimes without these people realising what they’re doing or who they’re helping. It’s make their operations harder to detect and avoids risking the lives of experienced agents.

In recent years, recruiting single-use assets to carry out sabotage and assassinations – known by spies as “wet work” owing to the blood that is usually spilled – has become far more common, according to Wiswesser. The UK is a prime target, he warns.

Russia’s FSB and GRU agencies look for “misfits of society” to serve as “disposable” contractors, he tells The i Paper from his home in Alabama. “They might pay a young teenager who’s upset with his or her parents, give them a few thousand dollars to go take pictures of a rail line or even put an explosive down.”

This level of “reckless” activity is now at a level “that we’ve never seen before” says Wiswesser, author of new book Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks, which analyses the methods used by Vladimir Putin’s spies. “It’s a sign of just how desperate the Russian intelligence services have gotten.”

In 2024, for example, plotters in Russia’s Wagner Group recruited UK drug dealer Dylan Earl through the Telegram app. He then found several young British men involved in petty crime to carry out an arson attack on a warehouse in Leyton, east London. It contained relief supplies for Ukraine.

Six Bulgarians were also jailed in the UK last year for spying on two investigative journalists who helped to expose Moscow’s links to attacks on Skripal and the late opposition leader Alexei Navlany. The spy cell, who also communicated on Telegram, discussed potential kidnappings and killings.

One of the most surprising cases occurred in Poland. In November, two men damaged part of the country’s rail network used to take supplies to Ukraine by planting a bomb on one section of track and targeting overhead cables at another location. Perhaps what was most shocking about this “unprecedented act of sabotage”, as the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described it, was that the nationality of the pair responsible. They were Ukrainian.

“They’re using a lot of Ukrainian emigres,” says Wiswesser. Many of them speak Russian and may not be happy with their lives after fleeing abroad to escape the Russian invasion of their country.

Russian spies may also seek to hire proxies among their own countrymen living ordinary lives abroad, which is a reason for the UK to be concerned, says Wiswesser.

“You do have a unique challenge in the UK: you have a lot of Russian immigrants. London has an awful lot of Russian emigres who are legal residents or citizens. Most of them, I’m sure, are completely loyal and beholden to the UK for their lives. But there are also some, no doubt, that still have allegiances back to Russia.”

Investigators believe 22 suspects from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia, most of whom were in a “vulnerable socio-economic situation”, were recruited by Moscow to send self-igniting parcels on DHL cargo flights across the continent in 2024. One of these detonated at a depot near Birmingham; if it had gone off while the aircraft was in the sky above Britain, it could have been disastrous.

During the rise of Isis in the 2010s, the Islamist terrorists radicalised thousands of impressionable and disaffected young Muslims in the UK and around Europe using social media. Wiswesser argues Moscow’s intelligence agencies now operate in the same way via Telegram, which ironically was blocked inside Russia last month over security fears.

He is “fully confident” about British intelligence’s ability to keep a lid on the Russian threat, however, having worked with “top notch” officers from MI6.

‘Russians believe firmly in the stick’

Wiswesser became interested in Russia when he was fortunate to win a scholarship to a school that taught the language. While at university, he was able to visit a few times in the early 1990s. He loved the people and the culture – indeed, he later married a woman from the former USSR – but recalls seeing the “darker side of Russian society” during his trips.

“The KGB was supposedly gone… Yet the people were still living in fear. They would say things to us as students like: ‘Be careful what you say – the walls have ears.’”

For much of his career, Russia was not a security priority for US governments following the end of the Cold War.

However, the growth of the internet has presented Russia with ever greater opportunities to disrupt Western societies through cyber attacks and online disinformation campaigns, allegedly carried out by organised crime groups funded by the Kremlin. But Wiswesser says that older tactics remain in use, including “sexpionage”.

This involves agents using female sex workers known as “swallows”, or male ones termed as “ravens”, to seduce their targets in “honey trap” operations to secure compromising material or “kompromat”. Wiswesser refuses to discuss Donald Trump during our interview because he insists on remaining apolitical, but this is how some sources have alleged the US President may have been cultivated as a Russian intelligence asset in past decades – a claim that Trump has consistently and forcefully denied, with no clear evidence coming to light.

What the CIA veteran will say is that Russia continues to turn businesspeople or government officials who “can’t control their inclinations”. They might also take advantage of people’s financial weaknesses, perhaps if they have gambling debts they need to pay off. The FSB are “masters” of this age-old tactic which “still works for them”, says Wiswesser.

He claims Western agencies don’t use extortion, though this is not out of any sense of purity – it’s pragmatic because targets tend to be less useful and reliable in the long term. “In the West, we believe more in the carrot… The Russians believe very firmly in the stick.”

He is concerned about a growing lack of professionalism within the Russian agencies, meaning that rogue officers may feel free to carry out riskier missions without a green light from the top. “The Russian security services, they can do whatever the hell they want, as long as they don’t run afoul of their great leader.”

There is a curious duality, however. Russian officers are feared for their deadly attacks, like the murder of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko using radioactive polonium in London in 2006, yet sometimes embarrass the Kremlin through failings like the botched attempt to kill former double agent Sergei Skripal using a Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in 2016. In that case, both agents responsible were quickly identified and they inadvertently killed an innocent British woman, Dawn Sturgess.

“They are fallible, they make mistakes, they’re not 10ft tall,” says Wiswesser. “They’re impeded by horrendous corruption across their entire government, but especially in the security services.” He says these problems help the West because they encourage agents who are “disgusted” by Putin’s regime to defect. “That’s why they choose a new life for themselves and their families.”

West ‘already in state of war with Russia’

Many CIA veterans are concerned about the threat from Putin’s intelligence agencies to Europe and the US. Wiswesser is no different in believing that our nations are “de facto already in a state of war with Russia”.

Rumours and speculation spread this month about whether Putin could be vulnerable to a coup, after an intelligence dossier was shared with media outlets by an unspecified European agency reporting how the Kremlin had ramped up security around the Russian .

It said the dictator was personally concerned by “the risk of a plot” against him and even named former defence minister Sergei Shoigu as being “associated with the risk of a coup”. As a result, bodyguards and other staff close to the Russian president are said to have been banned from using public transport and can only use phones without internet access.

Wiswesser accepts that coups can happen when people least expect them. Nevertheless, he thinks the speculation is “nonsense”.

He believes the intelligence services are “completely 100 per cent beholden” to Putin – a former KGB officer who led the FSB before becoming president – because he has pumped more funds into these organisations and made their bosses wealthy.

Wiswesser worries the West is still too scared to fight back and genuinely deter Moscow from ordering further assassination and sabotage attempts. He is frustrated that only “piecemeal” support has been offered to Ukraine over fears it will be “too escalatory”, arguing the West should finally seize Russian financial assets in Europe to help Volodymyr Zelenskyy “end the war”.

“Are we going to be tough on Russia or not? What will it take for us all as an alliance, Nato, to say: enough?” he asks. “Enough of their hostile actions, enough of their hybrid war, their cable cutting in the Baltic Sea, their sabotage, blowing up a plane in Lithuania, setting a commercial centre on fire in Warsaw, trying to kill British citizens in your country. Enough.”

‘Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War‘ by Sean M Wiswesser is on sale now (£17.99, Naval Institute Press)