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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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How a Russian operative snared an Irish politician
Classic Cold War tradecraft lured a sitting member of the Oireachtas to offer his services to a spy
John Mooney
Sunday October 06 2024, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
Despite his extensive counter-surveillance training, Sergey Prokopiev failed to notice the surveillance officers monitoring his activities at quarters. Officially, Prokopiev served as a counsellor at the Russian embassy on Orwell Road in Dublin, but this was a cover story.
Prokopiev was a spy: a high-ranking military intelligence officer sent to Ireland by Russia’s armed forces to operate under diplomatic cover. His mission was to recruit and handle agents, sources and assets from the worlds of politics, business and media, but also to engage in what Russians call active measures: the modern iteration of the political warfare tactics employed by the KGB during the Cold War.
At the time of his arrival in Ireland in March 2019, Prokopiev was focused on rebuilding Russia’s intelligence network on both sides of the border. He was particularly interested in establishing contacts with loyalist and republican paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, which had sprung to life during the Brexit negotiations between the European Union and Britain.
Loyalists were threatening violence over the negotiations, which proposed creating an invisible border in the Irish Sea to prevent the return of a land border. The Kremlin was interested in exploiting these tensions as part of its covert efforts to destabilise relations between Ireland and Britain and the West.
Russian intelligence officers are experts at recruiting what they call “useful idiots”, people who act in their interests and can be easily exploited to make the right introductions or provide information. At the time, Ireland’s intelligence services and the military knew Prokopiev was holding meetings with lots of people. Among them was a member of the Oireachtas, whom we shall call Cobalt. When a meeting held outside Dublin was monitored, their suspicions were confirmed: Cobalt offered to do whatever he could to assist the spy, despite never having engaged with paramilitaries in his career.
This revelation triggered a top-secret investigation, uncovering one of the most significant national security issues in recent history. Now, for the first time, following years of investigations by The Sunday Times, the story of how Russia cultivated an agent of influence inside the Irish political establishment is being told.
Prokopiev arrived in Ireland a year after the state expelled another Russian diplomat in response to the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter Yulia by two Russians in Salisbury in England. The attack had involved a form of novichok, a lethal nerve agent that originated in Russia. One Russian diplomat was forced to depart Ireland but four left, possibly to provide cover. Ever since that original meeting, Cobalt’s activities have been of deep interest to both J2, the military intelligence branch of the Defence Forces, and garda intelligence. Initially, he was thought to be just another useful idiot. However, this assessment came into question after garda special branch approached him with a formal warning that he was being targeted by Russian intelligence. He dismissed their concerns, prompting further investigations. By this stage, military intelligence were already aware of Cobalt’s willingness to assist Prokopiev with meeting loyalist paramilitaries.
The activities of Russia’s intelligence services are not regulated by legislation or codes of conduct but by the possible outcomes of their operations. Russian spies study their targets, looking for any personal vulnerabilities they can use to convince a person to co-operate. But their active measures have become more ingenious as western intelligence services disrupt them. Russian assets now include everyone and everything from organised crime gangs to civil servants.
The four main issues that make people psychologically vulnerable to recruitment by spies are money, ideology, coercion and ego. Cobalt’s finances were initially examined to try to establish whether he was receiving money, but these inquiries produced nothing suspicious. The security services later came to believe the Russians might have obtained kompromat (compromising information) on him, possibly during his travels abroad. According to flight data seen by The Sunday Times, Cobalt has travelled to countries, including outside the European Union, where Russian services operate without fear.
Andrei Soldatov, an authority on the activities of Russian spies, said organisations such as the GU, SVR and the federation’s FSB internal security service had become more aggressive in targeting politicians across the West using such techniques.
“This all sounds very familiar,” said Soldatov, who explained how Russia’s spy agencies used an assortment of tactics to obtain kompromat. “If the surveillance teams see something compromising, they will use it. For example, if anyone important travels to Moscow or another Russian city, their hotel room will be monitored. If they see anything, they will alert their sister intelligence services to say they have identified someone who could be targeted. Why do they do these types of things? Influencing opinion in Ireland is very important to Russia,” he said.
• Killings, coups and chaos: inside Putin’s secret spy war on Europe
The Kremlin’s recruitment of an agent within the Oireachtas happened during a period of escalating tensions between Moscow and Dublin. Until this point, Ireland was viewed as a permissive environment for Russia’s intelligence services to operate in the European Union compared with countries such as France and Britain.
But that changed in 2018 when the government moved to stop Russia from expanding its embassy on Orwell Road following the publication of an investigation by The Sunday Times that disclosed the federation was constructing an intelligence-gathering base inside the structure.
An analysis of the architectural plans submitted to Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown county council had disclosed the existence of underground rooms to house ventilation, storage and heating equipment — facilities that would normally be located elsewhere in a similar-size building project. The government was forced to introduce emergency legislation to revoke the planning permission.
Until then, Russian services had used Ireland as an operational base. For example, in 2011, a diplomat from the embassy was expelled after he cloned six passports from Irish people who had applied for visas. The passports were used by Russian spies to enter the United States.
And further back, in 1983, Guennadi Saline, a first secretary and press attaché at Orwell Road, and Viktor Lipasov, a second secretary, and his wife, Irona, were expelled after they were unmasked as KGB officers. Irona Lipasov had led a spy ring that tried to supply arms and ammunition to the IRA. Until that point, Ireland had never previously expelled a Soviet diplomat.
In all likelihood, Prokopiev’s assignment was more hostile than those of his predecessors, which explains why he used diplomatic cover as opposed to operating in Ireland as a Russian illegal, someone using a false identity. His diplomatic credentials provided him with immunity from arrest should he be detected.
Prokopiev was expelled in March 2022 after Russian tanks started rolling towards Kyiv. Ireland was among the European countries that collectively expelled 600 diplomats, 400 of them spies, along with several Russian “illegals” — agents operating without diplomatic cover. At the time, Ireland expelled four diplomats, though six people left, identified as Colonel Igor Molyanov and his wife, Aelita; Prokopiev and his wife, Elena; and Vladimir Vasilchik and his partner, Elena Muraveva.
Vasilchik was a member of military unit 33949 — a branch of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service — but later joined Russia’s foreign ministry. He had trained at its military academy, according to information obtained by this newspaper. Prokopiev’s background, if that was his real name, remains shrouded in mystery, however.
The removal of Prokopiev and Vasilchik from Ireland by the Department of Foreign Affairs didn’t go unnoticed. It prompted an immediate response from the Kremlin, which moved to disrupt the operations of the Irish embassy in Moscow by placing its staff under intense surveillance and disrupting their activities. The bank accounts of the Irish embassy in Moscow were restricted, prompting the state to devise colourful ways of sending money to embassy staff so they could pay bills.
The expulsion of Prokopiev from the state did not halt his contacts with Moscow’s intelligence services. The Russians at one stage are understood to have used a “honeypot” — a striking looking female agent — to entangle the politician romantically, thus compromising him further and encouraging him to co-operate. This woman was monitored entering the state on multiple occasions for short periods of time before leaving again, but no action could be taken as Cobalt was not breaking any law.
Cobalt could not be arrested or charged with espionage because he did not have access to any classified material, therefore could not disclose its contents to a hostile state. Instead the security services believe he was used as an asset: an easily influenced person who could make introductions, disrupt public discourse or air the Kremlin’s views if and when prompted. There are still conflicting views on whether he was pressured to co-operate or agreed to allow the Russians to use him because they massaged his ego, according to multiple sources familiar with the affair. The full scale of Cobalt’s activities is still a mystery.
[continued below]
Kevin Riehle, a lecturer at Brunel University in London who previously served in various counterintelligence roles in the United States, said the activity was consistent with Russian active measures.
“It’s normal for Russian services to target people in political life. They rarely get a senior person but usually someone who is a friend of a senior person, or a supporter who has the ear of someone in power. Rarely does a Russian intelligence officer get the luck of recruiting a political representative,” Riehle said.
“That’s a win for any intelligence officer. As far as Russian intelligence is concerned, anyone who is an elected representative is a senior official. That’s a big deal.”
Riehle suspects the Russians who secretly interacted with Cobalt let him know they knew certain things about him.
“If a Russian intelligence officer studied a target and discovered they have a predilection for one thing or another that might be embarrassing, then it provides an angle to work on. Whether it is sex- related or being in debt, it gives an angle. And the intelligence officer will use this in conversations, sometimes overtly, saying, ‘We know you do such and such,’ or sometimes it’s more subtle, they will mention something fleetingly. They tend to pride themselves on being subtle rather than putting a gun to someone’s head,” he said.
Russia’s spies are likely to have learnt from their errors following Prokopiev’s expulsion, and have adjusted their tradecraft and embarked on a new phase of political warfare against the West since the invasion of Ukraine. In recent years, they have become more inventive, sending spies posing as Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war to Ireland. They are also using criminal gangs, republican paramilitaries in left-wing fringe groups and far-right extremists as proxies. The threat is continuing to evolve.
Despite the ongoing investigations and recent diplomatic expulsions, Cobalt remains very much under the radar, with only a select few in the security services aware of his connections to Russian intelligence.
The Kremlin’s infiltration into the core of Irish politics has been uncovered for the first time, prompting concern among senior officials in intelligence and defence services. Many now contend that the government must urgently implement new espionage legislation and other proactive measures to safeguard Ireland’s national security.
For the time being, however, Cobalt remains in place.
KGB tactics still serve Moscow well today
Russia’s intelligence war against Europe is relentless, John Mooney writes. The recruitment of a person in the Irish political establishment as an agent of influence reveals what Moscow’s spies can and will do. It is also a reminder of Ireland’s vulnerability to espionage and covert influence operations.
“Russia has a long history of active measures — what we in the West would call covert action — designed to inflame and aggravate grievances in target populations,” said Calder Walton, a historian of intelligence and global security at Harvard University and author of Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West.
Given Ireland’s history of sectarianism and paramilitary violence, the country is fertile ground for Russian operations, he said. “The same was true for the wedge issue of Brexit in Britain. It’s important to remember that many of the Kremlin’s ‘useful idiots’ — a KGB term — in the West didn’t even know they were being manipulated. Others, however, were willing assets.”
Since the mass expulsion of Russian spies from the EU in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has redoubled its efforts to recruit assets inside parliaments, police forces and militaries, civic organisations and universities.
This year spy rings have been uncovered in Britain, Germany, France and Bulgaria. Agents have even been found in the European parliament.
The Kremlin has not confined its malign activities to espionage: it is conducting sabotage and even murder. In February, Maksim Kuzminov, 28, a Russian air force pilot who defected to Ukraine, was shot dead in Spain, murdered by a unit whose members lived under deep cover.
The details of how Russian intelligence recruited someone in the Oireachtas, revealed by The Sunday Times today, echo the covert actions pioneered by the KGB in Soviet times.
Flattery and seduction, also known as honeypot traps, were used as inducements to entice Cobalt, the pseudonym we have given an Irish politician who has assisted Russian spies.
In other cases, laptops, social media accounts and the smartphones of other targets have been used by hackers to steal compromising information. Families are also targeted.
John Sipher, a former CIA officer, said Russia had a long history of conducting such operations. “The Russian security services would most definitely consider this person an asset, agent or source,” he said. “Politicians who take money or other inducements to make decisions that benefit the Kremlin can be considered agents of influence.”
He added: “Intelligence services seek people who can help them in some way, with some level of control — whether it’s ideological, financial or through blackmail.
“In the US, we usually look for sources that have access to information the US needs but cannot get any other way. Think of access to Kremlin decision-making or someone in Iran’s missile programme.
“Russians, on the other hand, recruit intelligence sources for spreading propaganda, disinformation or sabotage. They call these active measures, and they include not just collecting secrets but taking action: injecting chaos or false information into a country or company, supporting violent or fringe groups, and even assassination.”
Sipher continued: “It could be a politician who takes money to make decisions that benefit the Kremlin. It could be an editor that puts disinformation into their work, a person with a public persona that can make comments that help Russia, or a technician that puts something in a computer system.”
Russian agencies aim to disrupt, which in part explains why they went to such lengths to penetrate the Oireachtas.
Agent Cobalt has engaged in many activities that have undermined public trust in institutions, though for legal reasons we cannot say how.
To this day, Russia appears to be protecting him. Using an alleged honeypot to snare him was part of its toolkit.
Across the EU, the Russians are targeting politicians, civil servants and their families through cyberattacks, hacking smartphones, compromising communication. The families of Russian immigrants are urged to co-opt relatives. In Ireland, Russia forges links with paramilitaries, criminals and extremists.
Ireland, with its traditionally neutral stance, has long been considered a soft target compared with other EU nations because of official naivety — though that has changed as the government has wound down Russia’s diplomatic presence to a handful of people, including its ambassador, Yury Filatov.
The presence of Russian illegals, intelligence officers who operate under deep cover, is not known and hard to discover.
While countries such as the UK, Germany and France have frameworks in place to catch foreign agents, Ireland’s legal and security infrastructure is unequipped to handle such threats. Politicians cannot be watched unless there is evidence to show they have committed a crime. Even then, there would be a reluctance to apply for a surveillance warrant.
Since discovering Cobalt, Ireland has stepped up its co-operation with partner agencies to catch Russian agents and their handlers. It has become a battle that is likely to intensify after Ireland’s decisions to raise spending on defence and support Ukraine.
Both policies will draw President Putin’s ire as the Russian leader becomes even more determined to undermine the West.