In April 2023, a prominent Russian national with suspected ties to Russian intelligence pulled off an impressive escape from Italian authorities. Artem Uss, a Russian businessman and the son of a former Russian governor, had been detained in Milan a few months earlier on charges of smuggling sensitive U.S. military technology to Russia. According to an indictment issued by a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in October 2022, Uss had illegally trafficked in the semiconductors needed to build ballistic missiles and a variety of other weapons, some of which were being used in the war in Ukraine. But while Uss was awaiting extradition to the United States, he was exfiltrated from Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang and returned to Russia.

The escape, which was reported in The Wall Street Journal last spring, was only one of a series of recent incidents suggesting how much Russia’s intelligence forces have regrouped since the start of the war in Ukraine. Back in the spring of 2022, in the months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, the Russian intelligence agencies had seemed disoriented and confused. One by one, European countries had kicked out Russia’s diplomats; according to one British estimate, some 600 Russian officials were expelled from Europe, of which perhaps 400 were believed to be spies. The FSB, Russia’s internal security service, had also badly misjudged the kind of resistance that Russian forces would face in Ukraine, assuming that Russia could quickly take Kyiv. This contributed to Russia’s humiliating performance.

Now, Russia’s foreign intelligence network appears to be back with a vengeance. And it is becoming more inventive, increasingly relying on foreign nationals—such as the Serbian gang that assisted Uss, for instance—to help it get around restrictions on Russians. Before the war, Western intelligence agencies mostly dealt with Russian operations being carried out by Russian nationals. That is no longer the case. Today, Russian intelligence activities draw on a range of foreign nationals, and that includes not only spying on the West and tracking arms shipments to Ukraine but also applying growing pressure on Russian exiles and opponents of the Putin regime who have fled abroad since the war started. Evidence of such activity is turning up everywhere from Georgia and Serbia to NATO countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. In early 2023, for example, British officials arrested five Bulgarians who were accused of spying for Russia, including in an effort to keep tabs on Russian exiles in London.

At the same time, Russia’s spy agencies also appear to have shifted their orientation. Before the war, there was a division of labor among the three principal intelligence services—the SVR (foreign intelligence), the GRU (military intelligence), and the FSB (domestic security). In the past, it was generally understood that the SVR mostly focused on political and industrial espionage and the GRU on military issues, while the FSB was primarily focused on Russia itself, using its foreign branch mainly to conduct operations against Russians abroad and to keep friendly regimes in neighboring countries in power. Now, these distinctions are no longer so clear: all three agencies are deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, and all three have been actively recruiting new assets among Russia’s most recent exiles abroad.

The return of Moscow’s spying apparatus has significant implications for the West in its efforts to counter Russian meddling and Russian intelligence operations. If recent indications are correct, Russian intelligence activities in Europe and elsewhere may pose a significantly greater threat than had been assumed in the early stages of the war. At the same time, these changes offer insight into Putin’s own wartime regime and the extent to which it is increasingly rebuilding Russia’s spy agencies according to earlier models from the Soviet decades. Putin is not only attempting to make up for the Soviet KGB’s failure in its confrontation with the West in the late twentieth century. He is also trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service, which had considerable success against the West in the decades from the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II.

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

Before Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, the country’s intelligence services looked fairly weak. They had long suffered from interagency infighting and turf wars, as well as from a breakdown in trust between the generals and the rank and file, which led to significant delays and failures in getting information from the ground to the top level. Russian intelligence operations, meanwhile, increasingly became known chiefly for their sloppiness, as in the cases of the botched poisonings of the former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018 and the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. In short, the Russian spy services seemed to have lost much of their former luster, a problem that burst into the open with the embarrassing misreading of Ukraine in the planning for Russia’s invasion.

But as the war in Ukraine entered its second year, the Russian intelligence agencies regrouped and found a new sense of purpose. Instead of dwelling on their mistakes and questioning why they had so utterly failed to anticipate Ukrainian resistance in the initial invasion, the agencies moved on, taking new strength from the fact that they were withstanding a confrontation with the entire West.  They have not only increased their activities in Europe and in neighboring countries; the FSB has also stepped up its efforts to fight back Ukrainian ops on Russian soil.  That Putin did not make any radical changes in the security services despite the catastrophe of 2022 has been seen as a virtue: since the tumultuous 1990s, there has been a widely shared view both among the intelligence leadership and the rank and file that any attempt to overhaul the agencies will weaken their capabilities.

Underlying this new activity, however, has also been a larger goal: revitalizing Russia’s overall intelligence war against the West. This is a war that for the main Russian agencies goes back to the earliest years of the Soviet era. As Russian intelligence officials see it, the war in Ukraine has launched the third round of a great spy war that has been playing out since 1917.

Putin is trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service.

The first round of this struggle, in which early Soviet operatives faced off primarily against their British counterparts, started soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. In that original conflict, Soviet agents successfully compromised any chance of fomenting resistance to the Bolshevik regime from abroad. They did this by conducting a massive and very successful false-flag operation, code-named Trust, in which they lured politically active Russian émigrés, as well as British spies, to the Soviet Union to help a fake anti-Bolshevik organization. These anti-Soviet activists were in this way identified and killed. The conflict reached its peak during World War II, when Russian spies successfully penetrated British intelligence and, in the United States, got access to the Manhattan Project and stole the secrets of the atomic bomb. Overall, Soviet officials believed they won this first round with the West.

The second round of the intelligence war, however, did not end so well for Moscow. During the Cold War, the KGB failed to save the Soviet regime it swore to protect. Then, in the early 1990s, the agency was nearly destroyed after being split apart and dismembered. The collapse left lasting scars on Putin, who witnessed it firsthand, and his security elite, as they struggled to rebuild a Russian state that had lost its former power. (Putin ultimately built the FSB on the KGB’s former foundations.)

Now, with the onset of a new grand conflict with the West, Russia’s intelligence agencies are seeking to reverse the setbacks that unfolded at the end of the Cold War. And they sense a new opportunity, seeing the war in Ukraine as the opening salvo in the third round of the intelligence war. The sense of continuity with their Soviet predecessors has even taken visible form in Russia: in September, Sergei Naryshkin, Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, inaugurated a new statue to the founder of the Soviet secret police in the courtyard of the SVR’s Moscow headquarters. And in November, the FSB reinforced that message by celebrating the 100th anniversary of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and stressing the role of the OGPU in crushing political émigré organizations.

But the continuity goes well beyond celebrating early Soviet exploits. In the run-up to the war and since, Putin has made notable use of former KGB generals who share his eagerness to avenge the humiliation of the Soviet collapse. Nikolai Gribin, who in the 1980s served as deputy head of foreign disinformation operations at the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, has a lead role in a new Russian think tank launched in 2021, the National Research Institute for the Development of Communications, which seeks to shape pro-Kremlin opinion in countries near Russia, with a particular focus on Belarus. (Gribin himself has written several research reports on public opinion in Belarus.) In the 1980s, Alexander Mikhailov served in the KGB’s infamous Fifth Directorate—the branch given the task of rooting out ideological subversion, including dissidents, musicians, and church leaders—and ran disinformation operations for the FSB in the 1990s. Since the fall of 2021, a few months before the invasion, Mikhailov has been the FSB’s unofficial mouthpiece for the Russian media, promoting the agency’s view of events in Ukraine. As Russian intelligence portrays it, the war pits the United States and Europe against Russia, with the Ukrainians serving merely as the puppets of their Western spymasters.

Putin giving a speech near the FSB’s headquarters in Moscow, June 2022

Along with Putin, Russia’s spy agencies have also drawn some important lessons from the earlier Soviet intelligence wars. Because it pitted Russia directly against the West, the war in Ukraine has prompted the Kremlin and its spy agencies to rethink several major national security questions that had not been closely studied since 1991. For example, there was the question of Russia’s borders and whether to close them. The Kremlin decided against doing so, and that has benefited the intelligence services, which can use the new exodus of Russian nationals to Europe and other neighboring countries to help make up for the expulsions of Russian diplomats from European capitals. Putin has clearly set out to avoid the mistakes made during the Cold War, when the Soviets significantly restrained the cross-border movement of people, hampering Soviet intelligence.

But there was another pressing problem for the Kremlin: how to enforce discipline within the ranks. Putin could have followed Stalin’s approach, embarking on large-scale purges and mass repressions. But he seems to have learned that those measures ultimately backfired for the Soviets. Putin understands that instilling fear is a useful tool but that outright purges would hurt the agencies—as they did in the 1930s when the Soviets’ foreign intelligence lost its most talented agents. Thus, the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, Sergei Beseda, was initially detained and held incommunicado after the first disastrous days of the Ukraine invasion. But after several weeks, he was reinstated, and the broader purges in military intelligence and the FSB that many expected after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, led a mutiny in June 2023 never materialized.

Overall, Putin has taken a flexible, pragmatic approach to his intelligence services, playing between the ever-present fear of purges and encouraging the agencies to be more innovative at regaining ground in the West. One result seems to have been a noticeable rise in more ambitious foreign operations over the past year, including alleged sabotage operations, as well as the exfiltration of the Russian operative in Italy and stepped up recruitment efforts in several NATO countries, as is apparent in the case of a member of Germany’s BND intelligence agency who was arrested in December 2022 on charges of allegedly transferring highly classified information to the Russian government, and is now on trial for treason.

SPIES LIKE US

In staging their comeback, Russia’s spy agencies have also internalized another important lesson from the Soviet years: the strategic use of ideology. In the 1930s, Moscow was able to win over many Westerners to the Soviet cause by aiming its arguments at Western deficiencies rather than promoting Marxist doctrine. At the time, Soviet agents learned that they did not really need to sell a full-fledged communist ideology; instead, they could portray the Soviet Union as an alternative to Western imperialism, emphasizing the West’s double standards and hypocrisy and offering in contrast a leader who stood up against global powers. These ideas are exactly what Russian agencies can now pedal to potential allies and recruits in Russia’s new intelligence war with the West.

As Russia prepares to enter a third year of war, its intelligence agencies know that the Kremlin supports them and shares their paranoia and prejudices. This reality suggests that the spy services can count on the Kremlin’s protection. But it does not mean that Putin himself is more secure in power.

For much of the past 20 years, Putin has struggled with the challenge of how to control his vast security and intelligence community, spread over an enormous country and abroad. In the early 2000s, he destroyed former President Boris Yeltsin’s concept of competing spy services, making the FSB the top agency. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin tried to bring his intelligence forces to heel by sending several middle-rank officers to jail on corruption charges. But this did not result in tighter Kremlin control of the agencies. Now, with the war in Ukraine, Putin has tried to avoid the mistakes of the past and keep his intelligence forces loyal. He has also succeeded in making them stronger, for the time being, than at any previous point in the war.

But it is unclear if any of this has improved his control over them. And so far, Putin has done nothing to fix the problem: he is unwilling to repeat Stalin’s mistakes of purging his agencies on an industrial scale, but he also understands that unlike during the Soviet years, when the Communist Party controlled the KGB, he has few other ways to rein them in. If things began to go badly for Russia in the war, this one-sided dynamic could mean that Putin’s spies might be in no rush to save him.

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FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed in February he existence of a memorandum within the FBI’s field office in Richmond, Virginia, that labeled Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. Last Monday, almost a full year after Seraphin’s disclosure, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on it.

The House committee’s report, titled “The FBI’s Breach of Religious Freedom: The Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans,” details how the FBI “abused its counterterrorism tools” to target Catholics. But there are some key issues that Capitol Hill—and most media—missed completely.

The FBI stigmatized a vast number of United States citizens as potential “radical traditional Catholic” terrorists based upon the existence of one criminal case involving a man who self-described as such a Catholic. The FBI’s version of the facts, detailed in an “intelligence note,” describes a man who likely suffers from mental illness—hardly a cross section of the Catholic population.

The most shocking aspect of this, one that largely escaped public attention, is that the FBI memo states the subject wasn’t even Catholic. He was taking catechism lessons in the hopes of becoming a baptized Catholic, but he was neither baptized nor confirmed.

The FBI never explained what “threat” the agency sought to “mitigate” by targeting Catholics. The intelligence note offers no history or example of political violence associated with conservative Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. It simply asserts, baselessly, that they pose a threat as potentially violent domestic terrorists.

Moreover, the FBI’s denigration of Catholics is not limited to Latin Mass worshippers. Rather, the bureau appears to have issues with the Catholic faith in general. The “intelligence note” laments a purported “intelligence gap” when seeking to identify factors leading to violence, “which may include increased religiosity and/or adherence to extreme religious teachings.”

Hence, the FBI literally claims that increasing one’s religiosity makes one a greater domestic terrorist threat.

The FBI never bothered to explain precisely what tenets of Catholicism or “extreme religious teachings” of the Catholic Church lead to political violence because, of course, there are none. Adherents of the faith who embrace extreme Catholic religiosity tend to become nuns in the streets of Calcutta.

The House Judiciary Committee also fails to address the most fundamental issue posed by the FBI’s abuse of Catholics’ civil liberties. The FBI labeled an amorphous and impossibly ill-defined faith community as potential terrorists without pointing to a single historical or current example of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” associated with any form of political violence, the preeminent and unnegotiable element required by the domestic terrorism statute (18 U.S.C. § 2331).

No political violence = no domestic terrorism. Contrast this to the Black Lives Matter riots that engulfed the United States in the summer of 2020. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project filed a federal lawsuit to force the FBI to provide evidence that the government conducted any investigation of BLM during that season of political violence and domestic terrorism. To date, the bureau has produced no such evidence.

In the pre-woke FBI, it took more than simply labeling a U.S. citizen as a potential domestic terrorist to open an investigation. Back then, the bureau was required first to show that an individual sought to engage in criminally violent or life-threatening acts to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government.

Today’s FBI, however, blissfully bypasses the most fundamental elements of the domestic terrorism violation when it comes to labeling large swaths of peaceful, law-abiding citizens (non-Catholics as well as Catholics) as potential terrorists. According to the Judiciary Committee report, the FBI’s targets are Americans who dare hold such disfavored political viewpoints as “pro-life, pro-family” and “support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction.”

Perhaps the clearest indication that the FBI itself knows it has ventured into constitutionally impermissible territory is its flippant use of a “First Amendment caveat.” The wordy exercise in psychological projection is worth reading in full, especially as this caveat is relied upon in similar exercises elsewhere:

Potential criminality exhibited by certain members of a group referenced herein does not negate nor is it a comment on the constitutional rights of the group itself or its members to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The FBI does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.

Obviously, the First Amendment implications of labeling an entire mainstream religious group are top of mind for in-house FBI lawyers. That should have been a cause for pause as opposed to further activity and laughable legalese.

Also, notice the looseness of the term “potential criminality.” The bureau now needs not rely on actual evidence of past criminality to determine threat levels. The standard now appears to be speech alone.

As the FBI continues to invent a new alphabet soup of terminological groupings, such as Radical Traditional Catholics and Racially Motivated Violent Extremist, and to open investigations for activities such as sporting Gadsden or Betsy Ross flags, the agency has reached apex weaponization as an ideological entity as opposed to a crime-fighting one.

Today’s FBI routinely opens domestic terrorism investigations targeting Americans who never have demonstrated any propensity toward political violence.

These civil liberty violations occur not merely because of inept or corrupt FBI leadership. Ideologically weaponized FBI employees at all levels gravitate toward FBI units, such as domestic terrorism squads, that allow them to indulge their political ideology. Working drugs or health care fraud apparently lacks that satisfying special sauce that working politically charged violations bring for the ideological agent. To such weaponized employees, political dissent in and of itself constitutes a threat to their preferred social order.

This is why virtually all FACE Act prosecutions target pro-lifers, while countless attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches go uninvestigated.

This is why the FBI pointed long arms at pro-life activist Mark Houck’s terrified children.

This is why geriatric grandmothers who committed misdemeanor trespass at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have taken FBI investigative priority over child predators and spies.

This is why a Republican internet prankster was sentenced to seven months in prison (the case is now on appeal) for posting a social media meme joking that Democrat votes might be texted while a Democrat who posted the identical meme suggesting Republican votes might be texted never was bothered by law enforcement.

Even in cases that don’t result in criminal prosecution, the FBI’s legally questionable activities can have a punitive effect on law-abiding Americans.

Keep in mind that the FBI’s anti-Catholic intelligence note was uploaded to the FBI’s databases under domestic terrorism file number 266H-RH-2893090. Anyone mentioned in this context case could fall prey to financial ruin in legal fees and soul-crushing anxiety as a result of this baseless domestic terrorism case. Even if they are spared financial and emotional devastation, being falsely labeled as a terrorist in the FBI databases is a grotesque abuse of federal authority—with malicious negative consequences.

When a person noted under that domestic terrorism file number is the subject of a background check in seeking federal employment or to purchase a firearm, or seeks any other form of public benefit that requires an FBI check, it will be noted that his or her identity has been identified in a domestic terrorism case.

This will require additional scrutiny, potentially extended bureaucratic delays, and possible denial of entitled government benefits. The person’s business may be denied contracts without explanation or subjected to unending IRS audits, and may even find himself and employees subject to law enforcement screenings at airports.

One of the first questions that comes to mind is why it took almost a year for a report from Congress to largely rearticulate what already had been known.

The purpose of congressional oversight is to inform legislation and fix problems that have been identified. Now that the House Judiciary Committee has finished its investigation and released its report, what meaningful accountability measures are being taken to address these abuses? Who has been held accountable? What has changed at the FBI as a result?

Lawmakers don’t seem to understand the urgency. A constitutional republic cannot stand without an even-handed rule of law. If lawmakers fail to deweaponize the FBI, the republic may not survive our generation.

Congress should embrace its oversight responsibilities and force an immediate audit of the genesis of all current FBI domestic terrorism cases. What percentage of cases target conservatives? How many cases involve the targeting of persons who never have demonstrated any propensity to engage in political violence?

Most importantly, who in the FBI is responsible for the bureau’s stomping on the civil liberties of peaceful political dissidents (in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241), and when will he, she, or they be held accountable?

At the beginning of the year, this and much more was what Americans were promised. They were promised a full-scope investigation into the FBI and other weaponized agencies that would stop the weaponization. This effort, to be funded at the same levels as the House’s select committee on Jan. 6, was to be supported by a committee modeled after the Church committee of the 1970s, a massive undertaking that examined abuses across the intelligence community.

In launching that committee, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said:

We want to focus on that because we want it all to stop. We want the double standard to stop. This idea that if you’re a pro-life activist, you’re gonna get your door kicked in, you’re gonna get arrested and handcuffed in front of your seven kids and your spouse for simply praying in front of an abortion clinic and telling the guy who was harassing your son to knock it off.

You’re gonna have the FBI raid your home, but the protests that went on at Supreme Court justices’ homes in the aftermath of the leak of the [Supreme Court’s] Dobbs opinion, oh, no problem there. Americans are sick and tired of it. And what we want, we don’t want to go after anyone. We just want it to stop. And we want to respect the First Amendment to the Constitution that the greatest country in the world has.

That’s what this committee is all about. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. That’s what we’re going to do.

I agreed then, and I agree now. The weaponization of federal law enforcement for partisan purposes is an existential threat to freedom. It needs to stop if we hope to pass along any semblance of America to the next generation.

But vague standards and constant cable news appearances aren’t an adequate measure of success. The only real standard is whether Congress actually deweaponizes the FBI and the other intelligence agencies. And so far, the agencies have skated this entire Congress without any real investigations.

The truth is, this job always has been too big for one existing committee or person. That’s why no real reform efforts are underway, and the FBI continues apace, fully funded and with no accountability. Indeed, the bureau is being rewarded with a massive new headquarters the size of the Pentagon.

Lawmakers have wasted enough time failing to prioritize deweaponization. Americans can’t afford to let them waste more time by failing to unite and make changes. And change is certainly what voters expected in 2022 when they flipped control of the House to the GOP.

Congress already has the information it needs to begin deweaponization efforts immediately. History will judge this Congress by that simple measure, not by its analysis and rhetoric regarding the problem.

This commentary originally was published by RealClear Politics

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