Medvedev's Matthias Rust
moment By M K Bhadrakumar
Spy stories are never quite what they
seem. Having dealt with India-Pakistan relations
for donkey's years as a career diplomat, I can
tell you that. Spy stories may have happy endings
or unhappy endings but the narrative is seldom
straight. In fact, the actual narrative is not
even meant for onlookers, who should satisfy
themselves with savoring the seductive details.
The post-Soviet era's first Cold War-era
spy story that erupted this week in Washington DC
is no exception. As Britain's Guardian newspaper
put it, "This story about the Russian spy ring
living undetected in American suburbia will end up
being turned into a film. It has to be. It's got
everything - the long shadows and uncomfortable
paranoia of a classic Cold War film, the hidden
identities and dark secrets of an introspective
piece by British
playwright Stephen
Poliakoff and the zany, fish-out-of-water antics
of say Uncle Buck, the family comedy
starring John Candy.
Yet, the plot is
pitiably thin. It seems to have been patched
together in unseemly hurry. The United States
Department of Justice said on Monday that 11
people had been charged as "unlawful agents of the
Russian Federation within the United States". But
did they spy on the US government? No, it seems
they were not interested in penetrating the US
government and apparently produced remarkably
little espionage. As things stand, the main charge
against them could be, yes, money laundering. The
outlines of the story are indeed bizarre.
The mission of the "embedded" Russian
spies was apparently to worm their way into the
upper echelons of US decision-making. Towards this
end, they took on American identities and embarked
on a normal American lifestyle - little knowing
that despite their top-notch training at the KGB
school back home the Central Intelligence Agency
was all along stalking them, their movements,
their contacts, their antics - even their love
life. By way of the normal intercourse of conjugal
bliss, they even begat children who are now caught
up in a tragic grey zone not even knowing who they
indeed were, are and can be. Are they Russian
children? Yes. Or, are they American children?
Yes, too.
What emerges from present
indications is that these Russian agents were
infiltrated into the US during the Boris Yeltsin
era (1991-1999) when the US and Russia thought
they had a great thing going between them. Just as
well that the American with whom the Russian
leadership first raised the matter is, well,
former US president Bill Clinton. While doing that
at a Moscow meeting, according to the Russian
media, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin resorted to
the informal address of "ty" instead of the
formal "vy".
Now, anyone who speaks
Russian will tell that the subtle shift of address
made a big point in itself. There is a rumor
floating around among locals in Moscow that Putin
addresses President Dmitry Medvedev as
"ty", while the latter sticks to the formal
"vy".
Anyway, Putin told Clinton,
"Your police have gotten out of hand, and people
are being thrown in jail. I hope the positive
developments that have accumulated recently will
not be damaged. We hope people who cherish
Russian-America relations understand this."
Putin then added somewhat intriguingly,
"I'd like to see you more often. You've come at
just the right time." Indeed, Putin has a way of
conveying things.
We don’t know how
Clinton responded. The official Russian propaganda
is that the Americans have concocted the entire
spy scandal by vested interests in the US for
putting President Barack Obama's "reset" policy
with Russia on the back foot. It is a contrived
explanation and lacks credibility. Washington
quickly clarified that Obama was in the loop on
what the US agencies had been doing on the trail
of the Russian spies and implying that no
undercutting of the Oval Office is conceivable.
All the same, the question arises: why has
the Obama administration resorted to such a
thorough tarnishing of Russia at this juncture?
Medvedev has been making a strenuous effort to
establish that "Russia is changing" within a
"changing world", to use his words at the recent
St Petersburg annual economic summit that is
commonly dubbed as the Russian Davos.
Over
the past 72 hours, Medvedev has been pushed back
to ground zero as far as Russia's image in the
West goes. The British press have gone to town,
gleefully grabbing the terrific opportunity to
mock Russia and make it look a very strange nation
still coddling bad Cold War habits that refuse to
go away.
Second, why has Obama risked his
"reset" with Moscow? After all, from all accounts
he seems to have had a great summit meeting with
Medvedev in Washington last week and they
established a close rapport. Within no time the
spy scandal breaks out. Yet, Obama knows how
brilliantly the "reset" is working for the US and
why it should remain on course at the very least
so long as he has that annoying, terrible problem
to grapple with in the Persian Gulf - Iran. And
this was a problem, unless deftly handled, that
once cut short Jimmy Carter's promising political
life in the White House to a single term.
In the entire episode of the spy scandal
so far, Medvedev has kept mum. The big question is
whether this is Medvedev's Matthias Rust moment.
Any longtime chronicler of
Russian-American relations will recall the
dramatic episode in May 1987 when a 19-year-old
amateur German pilot, Matthias Rust, flew a rented
Cessna aircraft to Moscow from Helsinki,
hoodwinking the formidable Soviet air defense
systems and improbably landed on the cobbled
stones of Red Square in Moscow right in front of
Vladimir Lenin's mausoleum, to the utter shock of
the ceremonial guards manning the ramparts of the
Kremlin.
No one cares even today who Rust
was and whether he acted on his own. For those of
us assigned as diplomats in Moscow at that time,
it took an instant to figure out what a
devastating blow the incident would inflict on the
Soviet military establishment. The escapade took
place at a most critical phase of the then
Communist Party of the Soviet Union General
Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's political
consolidation.
We, the foreign diplomats
interminably gossiping, were for once spot on.
Gorbachev seized the incident to dismiss hundreds
of Defense Ministry officials who were doggedly
opposing perestroika (opening up),
including defense minister Sergei Sokolov and the
air defense chief Aleksandr Koldunov.
Gorbachev literally tore into the Defense
Ministry and by 1988 perstroika touched its
high-water mark. The rest, as they say, is
history.
Is Obama signaling something to
Medvedev? The fact remains that Obama has been
deliberately puffing up Medvedev as the man the
Western world can do business with. During his
last visit to Moscow, Obama studiously downgraded
his interaction with Putin. The US media too never
once misses the chance to put down Putin, while
treating Medvedev with velvet gloves.
However, ultimately, the gnawing worry
remains within the Obama administration that Putin
still commands immense support among the Russians
and he has a formidable power base. From the US's
point of view, time is running out as the next
presidential election in Russia due in 2012 draws
close. Not a day passes with the Russian press not
having one feature at least weighing in which
direction the Medvedev-Putin "tandem" is likely to
tilt in the run-up to that election.
Obama
has reason to be worried. Medvedev, after all, has
shown little stomach so far for challenging the
so-called siloviki in Russia, meaning
politicians from the security or military
services. How can the "reset" of relations with
Russia go on to touch newer heights, how can
Medvedev's zest for "innovation" and "reform" be
taken seriously, how can Russia be treated as a
"normal" European country, how can it be ensured
that Putin doesn't get re-elected as president in
2012 - so long as the siloviki calls the
shots in the corridors of power in the Kremlin?
This is the question haunting the Obama
administration. The spy scandal rubbishes the
image of Russia's spy engine. It has been made to
look clumsy, archaic and unreliable. The incident
also points to the existence of an American mole
at a very high rung of the Russian spy agency's
echelons at its Federal Security Service
headquarters in Moscow.
Ambassador M
K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included
the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and
Turkey.
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