London, who spent 34 years in the CIA's clandestine service, writes:
Espionage is a predatory business, and there’s blood in the water. Mr. Putin’s self-inflicted damage has done more to turn his own people against him than anything the West could have done.Mr. London goes on to tell us about Russians in the old Soviet Union who spied for the West because they were embittered at how their families had suffered under Kremlin corruption or because they were disgusted with Soviet aggression in places like Czechoslavakia.
Mr. Putin’s disastrous choices are causing military strategists to reconsider which tactics could be used against Russia’s overrated and underperforming armed forces. Political experts and economists are rethinking tools for punishing malign behavior. Other potential aggressors—namely China—must take notice. If your job is cultivating spies, I suspect that recruiting must be good....
Resurrecting the Soviet empire, as Mr. Putin wants to do, brings with it the same forces that prompted most of the Warsaw Pact’s best CIA agents to turn against the Kremlin. Agents across the Soviet bloc often shared the same desire: to inflict whatever harm they could.
They took up the fight not for money, but to undermine a toxic system that enriched a corrupt elite, wrought suffering and economic stagnation, and occasionally brought the world to the brink.
He then continues:
Mr. Putin has delivered a rival intelligence officer a great gift: a precipitating crisis. The desire to take control over their own destiny amid crisis drives people to spy. Intelligence officers take advantage of that desire to secure an agent’s cooperation through inspiration, trust and means to make a difference.It is tragic what Mr. Putin has wrought in Russia. As London notes, he has in a few weeks undone 30 years of progress for the Russian people.
Mr. Putin’s bumbling has provided the crisis, Ukrainian courage the inspiration, and the response of the U.S. and its allies the trust and tools for Russians to strike back.
Some of the CIA’s best agents have been volunteers who finally are pushed over the edge by a life-altering event and offer their services to an intelligence service....Thanks to Mr. Putin’s deplorable behavior, I expect an increase in Russian volunteers who have toyed with the idea of doing something to better Russia’s future and might now be receptive to an encouraging nudge.
Mr. Putin will use intimidation, violence, repression and bribery to combat counterintelligence risk and will reward blind loyalty from the incompetent and opportunistic sycophants who lord over his system. But these measures will only create incentives for the brave to act — and it takes only a few to make an extraordinary difference.
There was a growing middle class in Russia whose members were enjoying a standard of living much improved over what they had suffered through during the Soviet era. Now their money is worthless, their sons are dying by the thousands in a war that few understand, Russia's vaunted military has been humiliated and reduced to slaughtering civilians, and soon food, medicine, and all manner of consumer goods will be scarce in Russia.
In conditions like these disillusioned generals and government bureaucrats will be thick on the ground, and not a few of them, perhaps, will be eager to be recruited by Western agents. When they are Mr. Putin's reign of terror, and possibly Mr. Putin himself, will be nearing an end.