Moscow's Espionage Addiction

„The secret-police state, as best we can judge from the Russian prototype, is a much more evasive beast. The people who run it prefer to spend their time away from the public eye. They take minimal interest or pleasure in the traditional business of government, such as providing public services. They care little for public or private morality. Their method is to monopolize power, not so much by crushing rivals, as by preventing potential rivals from gaining any traction in the first place—which requires, naturally enough, an extensive domestic spying apparatus capable of infiltrating all social and economic structures.

Foreign policy fascinates them, because they are conspiratorial by nature, and they imagine other countries to be conspiring permanently against them. Based on their own habits and history, they find it difficult to believe that any foreign government can possibly be telling the truth about what it is doing. Whatever might be said publicly is being said in order to distract attention from what is being done privately, which is going to be quite different. It follows from this that the only really useful type of diplomacy is espionage, getting at the hidden story. The rest of diplomacy is either useless protocol or useful cover.(...)

America’s way of ending the affair has been exemplary. By arresting the spies, it has demonstrated the efficacy of the FBI and humiliated Russia’s intelligence services, at little or no diplomatic cost. By swapping them, instead of putting them on trial, America has avoided a big public row, at a time when there does otherwise seem to be some hope of progress in US-Russia relations.”