A Web Site That Came in
From the Cold to Unveil Russian Secrets
By SALLY McGRANE
ANDREI SOLDATOV
sits down in the lobby of the Hotel Rossija in Moscow, orders tea, flips open
his Sony Vaio laptop and logs on to the Internet to demonstrate his Web site
via his wireless modem. A Vaio may not be an exploding pen or an umbrella that
doubles as a machine gun, but in modern Russia, a high-tech laptop and wireless
modem are about as James Bond as gadgets get. This is appropriate, given that
his Mr. Soldatov's Web site, www.agentura.ru, is about Russian espionage.
Mr.
Soldatov is a 25-year-old journalist who covered the espionage beat for the
newspaper Izvestia from 1996 until last month. He and a dozen journalist
friends who wrote about spies and intelligence for Izvestia and other Russian
newspapers like Versiya, Segodnya and Kommersant, decided this year that it was
time to centralize information about their subject on the Web.
"We
decided that now in Russia we have an information vacuum about the secret
services," Mr. Soldatov said.
Since its
start in September, Agentura.ru (the name means agents, and the ru is the
country code for Russia) has been posting newspaper articles about
international intelligence organizations, and providing an outline of how the
Russian secret services are structured. The site also posts biographies of
secret service officers, documents pertaining to the security and intelligence
services, book reviews, discussions and Q. and A.'s with secret service
officers. It draws material from Russian newspapers and official sources,
including Web sites of some espionage agencies. "Information is difficult
to find," Mr. Soldatov said. "Agentura helps find it."
Reporting
on secret service activities has changed fundamentally since the fall of the
Soviet Union. During the Soviet era, nothing was published about the K.G.B. or
foreign services that was not officially approved, according to Mark Kramer,
the director of the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard University. The
newspaper articles that were approved, Mr. Kramer said, were "puff pieces,
laudatory stuff with no bearing on what the organs did."
Now the
quantity and quality of secret service coverage in the Russian press has
improved, though access to documents is still far from complete. Agentura's
existence marks the degree to which post-Soviet openness regarding the secret
service has changed. Ten years ago, there would not have been any content to
post.
Mr.
Soldatov's father, Alexei Soldatov, who is president of Relcom.ru, one of
Russia's leading Internet service providers, told him that Relcom was starting
a series of Russian-language content projects. (Relcom pioneered dial-up
Internet access in Russia while the Soviet Union still existed, said Mr.
Soldatov and to Robert Farish, a research manager at IDC Russia, an
international information-technology consultant firm based in Framingham,
Mass.)
Mr.
Soldatov proposed his idea for Agentura and his father gave the go-ahead. The
timing, Mr. Soldatov said, was particularly good because Russia's president,
Vladimir V. Putin, was a K.G.B. official. "Now that we have President
Putin from the K.G.B.," Mr. Soldatov said, "people in Russia want
more information on the secret service."
Mr.
Soldatov said that Agentura was modeled after an American site, the Federation
of American Scientists' Intelligence Resource Program (www.fas.org/irp). Steven
Aftergood, a senior research analyst with the federation, said that although
his organization's efforts to make intelligence resources available to the
public have attracted a good deal of interest from abroad, Agentura is the
first foreign site that has explicitly followed his group's lead. "The
world looks to the U.S. to define what's possible in terms of openness and
government accountability," Mr. Aftergood said. The existence of a site
like Agentura.ru, he added, "has political significance above and beyond
anything posted on the site."
Agentura
visitors (the English site is www.agentura.ru/english, though many pages are
available only in Russian) can find an article about "noiseless
pistols" or link to newspaper articles with topics ranging from possible
C.I.A. involvement in the sinking of the Kursk submarine to the case of Edmond
Pope, the former American naval intelligence officer convicted of espionage
last week in Moscow. There are biographies of spy fiction authors like John le
Carre and Tom Clancy, and Agentura users can read a letter to the site from
David E. Murphy, the former C.I.A. chief of Soviet operations, who points out
errors in Agentura's review of a book he helped write, "Battleground
Berlin: C.I.A. vs. K.G.B. in the Cold War." Other sections include a
Russian translation of the Unabomber's manifesto and articles on the history of
intelligence organizations worldwide.
So far, the
response from users has been positive, with a few exceptions. "We got one
e-mail from a man who works at one of the private security services in another
city in Russia," Mr. Soldatov said . "He wrote that it's terrible to
publish information about the Russian security service, that those are
government secrets."
But, Mr.
Soldatov hastened to explain, Agentura is not a Russian-language Drudge Report.
"Some people think that this site is for publishing compromising
materials," he said. "That's not true." He said that if users
send Agentura materials that reflect negatively on the Russian secret services,
the site will not post them. However, he added with a smile: "We are
journalists. If we can verify the information, then we publish."
The site's
content rates very well with Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst who reads
Russian. "I'm impressed," he said. "The site offers a good look
at intelligence issues from a Russian perspective. They're keeping up with
current issues, they've got a good balance and they can write. This is the best
site I've seen coming out of Russia."
The K.G.B.
was dissolved in December 1991, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What had been the K.G.B. is now four organizations: the domestic Federal
Security Services, or F.S.B., the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Federal
Border Guards and the Federal Government Information and Communications Agency.
There is also an intelligence branch — the Main Intelligence Directorate of the
General Staff — that is run by the military.
The F.S.B.
has its own Web site (www.fsb.ru) — in part, as an effort to give its image a
face lift. "The F.S.B.," Professor Kramer said, "isn't releasing
documents that show the K.G.B.'s predecessor, the N.K.V.D., and its role in the
terror of the 1930's, but it will release documents that show N.K.V.D. agents'
heroic actions."
Mr. Thomson
lauded Agentura. "It's not obvious propaganda," he said. But the
site's evenhandedness has caused problems for Mr. Soldatov. In November, he was
fired from Izvestia, which he described as a "pro- Putin" paper. He
said that his firing may be linked to his involvement with Agentura.
"I
can't relate Agentura and my sacking from Izvestia," he wrote in an e-mail
message, "but fact is fact: After I opened Agentura, Izvestia refused to
publish my articles about Russian secret services."
Laurent
Murawiec, an analyst with the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group,
said the post-Soviet thaw on investigation, research and comment on the secret
services has begun to chill again. "One implication," he said,
"could be that the site's life expectancy is limited."
Nonetheless,
the number of daily visitors — mostly specialists — to the site has grown from
500 in October to 1,100 last month. To broaden appeal, Mr. Soldatov and his
team have added a "Culture 007" section, named after Ian Fleming's
renowned secret agent. Why choose the quintessential Western agent to reach out
to a Russian audience? The answer judging by Mr. Soldatov's face, is patently
obvious: "In Russia, everyone knows Agent 007."
