Noc, Noc, Who’s There? KGB’s Moscow Center

I’ve never before been encouraged by a threat to our national security. But last week’s news that the FBI arrested ten Russian spies is reassuring – even rejuvenating – in a very odd way. (That an eleventh, apprehended in Cyprus at the FBI’s behest, has skipped bail and disappeared only adds to the effect.)

And when the Washington Post reported that the New Jersey home of two of those arrested was owned by the fabled “Moscow Center” – the principal operational group of the KGB – I had to catch myself short of searching the wine cooler for a bottle of champagne. Let me explain.

Since President Reagan oversaw the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s been nekulturny (sorry; ill-mannered, uneducated, unsophisticated) to point out that Russia is still our adversary. And since Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton hit the “reset button” to improve our relationship with Russia, it was beyond the pale to suggest that former (?) KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Putin and his sock puppet, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, were up to no good.

But the arrests of the Russian agents and the revelation of the apparently rejuvenated Moscow Center put all of the other things that Putin’s Russia are in sharp relief. Russia is still what it has been since the time of Peter the Great, a half century before America was born. It is an adversary, not a friend. It’s not the Old Cold War, but it is a new one. If only President Obama were willing to face it.

Despite Russia’s actions, Obama is trying to sell the senate his new arms limitation treaty with the Russian Federation. There are a few problems with it.

Such as the fact that major portions of the treaty Obama and Medvedev signed on April 8 are still being negotiated despite calls by the president and others for its quick ratification. One “annex” still being talked out is the verification process. Obama is trying to reduce Reagan’s “trust, but verify” to just “trust.”

It’s time to remind ourselves who the president is trusting. Here’s the pravda on Putin.

Vladimir Putin served at least seventeen years in the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch. He was, according to an old Washington Post report, stationed in what was then East Germany for about five years and worked with the brutal East German Ministry for State Security, also known as the “Stasi.” Part of his job was to recruit spies.

Putin is on record refusing to condemn even pre-KGB Russian intelligence’s role in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Five years ago he said, “First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Putin added, “As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”

Those “fellow citizens” apparently include the citizens of Georgia, Estonia, Ukraine and who weren’t Russians then, and really don’t want to be Russians now.

The arrest of Putin’s B-list spies is a wake-up call, if only we’ll listen. We have eleven “nocs” – “non-official cover” spies operating without official status such as embassy trade attaches with some sort of diplomatic immunity – discovered and arrested. From that, we must infer that many others are still in place, probably better at tradecraft than those who were caught.

And these same Russians who Obama wants to trust and not verify are the same who are building Iran’s nuclear reactors, arming Venezuela and who invaded Georgia two years ago and attacked Estonia by cyberwar three years ago.

Under Putin, Russian reporters and dissidents have been murdered – especially those who we might once have called defectors – outside Russia’s borders. (According to one estimate, 21 Russian reporters have been murdered.)

Yes, the Bear is prowling the woods again. And we know how to contain him, and preserve freedom. We’ve done it before and we can do it again. Well, we could.  If we had a president who was interested in doing so.

George Smiley, please call your office. Someone named Karla has sent you a message.