Kremlin fury at FSB errors that put occupation strategy in peril

The FSB, a successor to the KGB, failed to use encrypted messages, allowing battlefield messages to be intercepted with ease by Kyiv.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is believed to be furious at the failure of his intelligence experts. Picture: AFP

President Putin’s security service failed to use encrypted communications in Ukraine, allowing battlefield messages to be intercepted with ease by Kyiv.

The FSB, one of the successor agencies to the KGB, is being blamed in part for Russia’s stuttering invasion of Ukraine, according to security experts, with President Putin, director of the FSB from 1998-99, said to be furious at inaccurate intelligence he has received.

The FSB, which specialises in sowing political instability, has hundreds of agents throughout the country, using tactical groups to intimidate civilians in occupied areas, the Ukrainian military said.

However, it has been exposed for numerous failings. These include a case when an FSB officer, embedded with the 41st army outside Kharkiv, phoned a colleague in Russia to report the death of General Vitaly Gerasimov this week.

Ukrainian forces have killed two top Russian generals in a very short amount of time. Andrei Sukhovetsky was killed on February 28th and Vitaly Gerasimov was killed on March 4th. pic.twitter.com/n7aWugAmB3

— 🇺🇦LyonTheHusky🇺🇦 (@LyonHusky) March 7, 2022

Rather than using the FSB’s secure communication channel, called Era, introduced with much fanfare last year, they were speaking using normal SIM cards on mobile phones. Gerasimov, 45, was killed outside the besieged eastern city, along with other senior officers. The call was intercepted by Kyiv.

“It is not a competent organisation,” said Andrei Soldatov, co-founder and editor of Agentura, an investigative website that has monitored the Russian secret services for more than 20 years.

“The final reports that they produced on the situation on the ground in the run-up to the invasion were simply not right, which is part of the reason why things have gone so badly for Russia.”

The primary responsibilities of the FSB are internal and include everything from counterterrorism to border security. Over recent years its fiefdom has expanded and it is also responsible for monitoring the countries of the former Soviet Union.

At the height of its powers, the KGB was among the most formidable intelligence agencies in the world, a weapon of the state wielded to promote the Soviet Union’s interests. Since then experts say that Russian intelligence has suffered a precipitous fall.

A member of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces looks at a Russian military vehicle in a forest outside Ukraine's second-biggest city of Kharkiv on March 7. Picture: AFP

From 2014 the agency spent a lot of time and resources on attempts to foment unrest in western Ukraine among far-right groups, which ultimately came to nothing, Soldatov said. Their assessments of popular support among Ukrainians for a Russian invasion and the extent to which the country would resist were also “terribly miscalculated”.

Soldatov said: “We can’t rule out the fact that the intelligence they gathered on the ground was in fact very good. The problem is that it is too risky for superiors to tell Putin what he doesn’t want to hear, so they tailor their information.”

Public embarrassments involving FSB officers over recent days have provided further humiliation. Last weekend an alleged report written by an officer emerged, complaining of overwork and meaningless “box-ticking exercises” that had left the country woefully unprepared for western sanctions.

During periods of crisis, agents are often required to sleep in the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the FSB that also served as the KGB’s head office.

A destroyed Russian military vehicle is seen on the roadside on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Picture: AFP

“When I speak to FSB officers, they are not doing it because of a big idea. It’s always because they are complaining about something relatively trivial,” Soldatov said. “They are narrow-minded people. They are not like MI6 officers who have been to Cambridge and are supposedly the cream of the crop. They have left school and been educated at the FSB academy. They often go into it because their father and grandfather had also been an intelligence officer – it’s well-paid and they give you an apartment.”

Philip Ingram, a security expert and former senior British intelligence officer, said the FSB had also attached its officers to each military unit to act as a “political commissar”.

Ingram said: “They will be making sure that there is no dissent and that the party line is being followed, scaring the commanders and therefore the troops on the ground.

“The FSB is still a relatively old-fashioned organisation trying to play espionage the old-fashioned way. They will be smarting at the moment as Putin is very angry. You can see it in his body language, the way he is gesturing, the terminology he is using. He blames them for feeding him the advice that led to the poor decision-making in Ukraine.”

The Times