Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
In this week’s One Decision In Brief, Christina Ruffini and former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove assess Russia’s latest gray-zone provocations — from fighter jets entering Estonian airspace to swarms of drones over Poland. What do these incursions reveal about NATO’s readiness, Europe’s vulnerabilities, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy? And with One Decision heading to the Warsaw Security Forum, these questions will be put directly to Europe’s leaders. Plus: inside MI6’s new dark-web recruitment portal, and how British intelligence is adapting to the digital age.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Raffini: Hello, and welcome to One Decision in Brief. I'm Kristina Raffini, joined today, of course, by my co-host, Sir Richard Dearlove. Sir Richard, how are you?
Dearlove: I'm very well, Kristina.
RUSSIAN INCURSIONS INTO NATO AIRSPACE
Raffini: First, I wanna start with these Russian incursions, gray zone testings. You know, we have this new report of Russian jets violating Estonian airspace. You have three MiGs entered Estonian skies without permission and remain there for about twelve minutes. Of course, Estonia shares border with Russia, and they're saying it was the fifth airspace violation from Russia this year. Finland, Italy, and Sweden, under a NATO mission intercepted the jets. Russia certainly is putting on some sort of a show. Why do you think all of a sudden we're seeing so much more testing of the NATO line, either with drones or with jets? What is the end goal here? And what has Putin learned from doing this?
Dearlove: Well, I guess they're probing NATO preparedness. In a way, it's a bit surprising because the more you do that, the more ready NATO gets for a more serious incursion. But maybe they use this to gather intelligence or confirm their best disposition of forces on the other side of the border. It's really hard to work out. I mean, all I would say is that I think, you know, Putin considers himself in the state of gray conflict with Europe and that these sorts of incursions are part of that general policy to up the ante. I think the more serious event with these 19 drones that flew over the Polish border, there's no way 19 drones is an accident. And I don't think there's any way that three aircraft actually was up on the Northern Coast of Estonia, wasn't it, in the Baltic airspace, but it was a clear incursion to which there was a ready response, a quick response. I think the more difficult one to deal with were the drones because a number of those drones were dummies. I mean, they were very cheap plastic things with engines, and, obviously, you don't spend 5,000,000 on a missile to shoot them down. So the question is what you actually do with these damn things. So it's a complicated calculation, but I'm sure it's the Russians probing and being provocative.
Raffini: But to your point, it does seem a bit counterintuitive because Putin tried to take down NATO with this Ukrainian action, and it ended up strengthening the alliance for a time and expanding it to countries like Finland and Sweden. And I'm wondering if this will have the same effect, if you'll see a more unified response from these countries, who don't always get on the same page if Putin's gonna start probing their borders and their airspace.
Dearlove: The thing is that both the Finns and the Swedes are incredibly sophisticated in terms of their armaments and their air forces, and therefore, it's really training them and getting them ready, sort of making sure that they have a sort of response when these incursions occur. I mean, the interesting thing is that there are a lot of provocative Russian flights around the British Isles, but, of course, they're done in international airspace where they come right up to the border, and the incidence of this have massively increased over the last two to three years. And they're constantly scrambling jets from air bases, particularly in Scotland, to intercept and then escort them away from The UK. And in this particular instance, that seems to be what happened. Although it was a complete — we haven't had, I don't think, any incursions into airspace. They're provocative flights very close to the frontier, which have to be responded to. This is definitely an escalation.
MI6'S SILENT COURIER DARK WEB PORTAL
Raffini: Alright. I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about something a little lighter. MI6, this organization with which you are innately familiar, has launched a new dark web portal called Silent Courier to recruit spies online to support the UK government. This represents the largest investment in defense since the Cold War. What is this? What does it do? Why is it needed? And do you think it's gonna work?
Dearlove: Well, interesting question. Interesting development. I think you need a little bit of intelligence history here. During the Cold War, many of the sort of great espionage cases were what we would have referred to either as offers of service or walk-ins. How is a walk-in different than an offer of service? Well, a walk-in really describes someone who might walk into your embassy or consulate or some British organization somewhere and say, look. I'm Sensei, and I want to spy for you. That's technically a walk-in. An offer of service is much similar, but it's just slightly different term. And an offer of service is someone who has got, you know, phenomenal intelligence access who is saying that. And they may not do it in person. They may sort of send some secret message to you somehow. During the Cold War, if you were gonna sort of present yourself to the West as a potential spy, the actual act of doing that was hugely risky because of the surveillance, particularly in states like Russia and in China. And, you know, at the point when you're making the offer, the chances of getting caught or identified were very, very high. And if people now in Russia, let's say, are opposed to Putin's — strongly opposed, ideologically opposed to Putin's policies, they think, oh, the only thing I can do about this is to spy, you know, how do they actually get in touch given the degree of surveillance and control that's exercised in a place like Moscow, for example? So I think that the secret to this announcement is, if you read about it, it describes a secure portal. So the key adjective there is secure. So clearly, they seem to have developed something whereby you can go on the dark web and, you know, be a sort of, let's say, a technical IT walk-in and say, here am I. I've got very valuable intelligence. I'm gonna work for you without risking your identity. I mean, I think that's my interpretation. And there's no question that you can do this sort of thing on the dark web if you know how to operate it. I think it's been in existence actually some time, and the reason for advertising it is that somebody imagines or thinks they've got a secure answer to the problem. So that's my expectation. And in fact, I think it's quite a sensible thing to do. I mean, as an example of what you can do on the dark web, I don't know — you'll recall the attempted murder of Skripal, a Russian defector in Salisbury, when two Russian GRU officers came and tried to murder him with Novichok chemicals.
Raffini: And ended up killing a civilian. Right? Yeah.
Dearlove: Yeah. And the identity of those officers — I mean, who they were because they were obviously traveling under alias and interestingly stupidly have sequentially numbered passports. They so they were being rather incompetent, but their identity was worked out by this organization in Vienna called Bellingcat, Christo Grozev's crowd, who had bought on the dark web, is my understanding, records of Russian military officers. So this is an example of, I mean, almost open source intelligence solving a problem which, you know, professional intelligence services hadn't solved at the time. They were the first to do it. So it's a very good example of how you can use the dark web for intelligence purposes.
Raffini: My question is, though, don't you risk, like, any tip line? Don't you risk just getting overwhelmed with BS and useless stuff?
Dearlove: You do. And, you know, probably you're using a sparrow team of people to sift through the dross. Maybe you're using AI to sift through the dross. Because, I mean, the only proof of a good spy is the quality of the intelligence. There'll certainly be offers of service which are provocative, I mean, which are made under control to try and persuade you to take up a contact and then discover, you know, it's under Russian or Chinese control or whatever. But, you know, this is the intelligence game as it's always been played, but in a completely new technical dimension.
Raffini: Alright. I think that'll do it for us this week. Thank you all for listening. Sir Richard, thank you for joining me. Next week, we're gonna be in Warsaw at the Warsaw Security Conference. So we'll have a bunch of livestreams and interviews with some world leaders there. Of course, if you like the podcast, please leave us a rating and a comment. Visit our YouTube or 1decision.com for a whole lot more content. I'm Kristina Raffini. Thanks for listening.
