During both of his administrations, President Donald Trump has placed a premium on improving relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
Part of that effort involves bringing diplomacy between Moscow and Washington back to normal levels. Tensions over the last decade greatly reduced the respective U.S. and Russian diplomatic presence in each other’s countries. In response to Russian interference in our 2016 election, former President Barack Obama at the end of his second term expelled numerous Russian diplomats, many of them suspected spies, while shutting Russian diplomatic facilities in several locations, including New York and San Francisco.
In 2018, Trump shuttered the Russian Consulate in Seattle over spying fears due to its proximity to U.S. Navy Base Kitsap, which homeports nuclear submarines. Trump also expelled Russian spies following a Russian assassination attempt against a defector in the United Kingdom. An innocent Briton was killed in that incident when the assassins carelessly discarded their highly toxic nerve agent poison.
Russia’s renewed aggression against Ukraine in early 2022 led to yet more expulsions by President Joe Biden. Moscow retaliated in similar fashion at every turn, expelling large numbers of American diplomats from Russia.
Those diplomatic expulsions are termed declaring persona non grata, PNG for short. Today, however, little more than 200 Russian diplomats are currently accredited in the United States, divided among the embassy in Washington, D.C., Russia’s mission to the United Nations in New York, plus their Houston consulate. That’s nearly a 90% drop-off compared to a decade ago. The decline in American diplomats accredited to Russia is similar.
This matters in the spy business since posing as diplomats is the most common cover employed by intelligence officers serving abroad. Masquerading as diplomats doesn’t just provide plausible “cover for action,” as spies say, it offers protection. An intelligence officer pretending to be a diplomat enjoys internationally recognized protections: getting busted for espionage means getting expelled, rather than an extended prison sentence or worse.
Nobody employs diplomatic cover more expansively than the Russians. At least one-third of their diplomats serving abroad are usually spies, mostly from the Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, or the Russian General Staff’s Main Directorate, commonly called GRU. In high-value locations, as many as 40% of the Russian diplomats are really spies. This doesn’t count the significant number of bona fide Russian diplomats who are “co-optees” of the SVR or GRU, meaning they serve as part-time eyes and ears for the spies, sharing with them any intelligence they encounter on the job. Put another way, if you meet any Russian diplomat, it’s a safe bet that s/he is a spy or otherwise collaborates with the SVR or GRU.
All Russian diplomatic missions abroad of any size contain a secret intelligence station, what Russians call a rezidentura, for the SVR or GRU (often both). The drastic drawdown in Russian diplomatic missions and personnel since 2016 inflicted a serious blow to the Kremlin’s ability to collect intelligence inside the United States. Moscow puts a premium on human intelligence, old-fashioned espionage and agent-handling. Putin, a career KGB officer, loves HUMINT and he wants his spy services to collect as much of it as possible.
To counter Russia’s well-honed HUMINT acumen, Western counterintelligence agencies collaborate, sharing information about Kremlin diplomats as they move from embassy to embassy abroad. Establishing who’s an intelligence officer, not a real diplomat, is a key aspect to what’s termed the Spy War since counterespionage resources are scarce and can’t be wasted on unimportant targets. Establishing who’s a spy is facilitated by tracking the careers of suspected SVR or GRU officers.
Take the case of Dmitri Iordanini, a 55-year-old Russian diplomat who’s just been appointed the head of the Belgrade office for the Office for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Western counterintelligence deduced that Iordanini, who previously served with the OSCE mission to Bosnia, is in fact an SVR officer. He left Brussels quietly in 2023, part of a group of 20 Russian diplomats who were about to get expelled from Belgium for involvement in espionage.
Western counterintelligence possesses files on hundreds of suspected SVR and GRU officers who have served abroad as “diplomats.” Many have been expelled since 2016. American counterspies are on the lookout for them coming back to the U.S. since the diplomatic rapprochement announced in Riyadh on Feb. 18, between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sergey Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. That meeting endorsed “taking steps necessary to normalize the operation of our respective diplomatic missions.”
At a follow-up meeting in Istanbul at the end of last month, U.S. and Russian diplomats began the work needed to renormalize diplomatic mission staffing in each other countries. Spies from the SVR and GRU are coming back to America, mixed in with genuine diplomats — it’s a matter of when, not if. Putin hailed this breakthrough “to work to restore relations and gradually solve a colossal amount of systemic strategic problems in the global architecture.” while chastising that some “Western elites are still determined to maintain global instability.”
As part of this deal, American diplomats will be returning to Russia in considerable numbers too, and among them will be intelligence officers under cover. Everybody spies. However, this isn’t an equal exchange. On Russian turf, the Federal Security Service, the powerful FSB, possesses vast resources and can marshal intense counterintelligence monitoring of any American diplomats they believe are spies. The Russians also engage in harassment of U.S. diplomats and spies at a level that far exceeds the FBI’s reciprocal treatment of Russian diplomatic passport holders in the U.S. Therefore, restoring an equal number of diplomats to each other’s countries privileges Russia over the U.S.
That means more work lies ahead for American counterspies. Because the Spy War never stops nor even sleeps.
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John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.