If your toilet is full of excrement that you don’t remember depositing there yourself, you may be the victim of a particularly unsanitary Russian intelligence operation. Or perhaps you’re just going mad. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think.
That is the unsettling possibility confronting Finnish MPs, several of whom have, it was revealed earlier this month, reported break-ins at their homes. One found human waste in his lavatory; Ben Zyskowicz, of the country’s National Coalition party, suspects the hand – well, not quite the hand exactly – of Russian spies.
At first glance, such reports could easily be attributed to Russophobia, paranoia or simply the poor state of Finnish plumbing. Yet, as Captain John Foreman, the UK’s defense attaché in Moscow from 2019 to 2022, tells me, “the turd in the toilet is one of many well-known calling cards of direct entry into homes.” Sarah Rainsford endured agents leaving “a large unflushed deposit in each toilet” when working in Moscow as the BBC’s correspondent. In another incident, a senior official visiting from Washington found feces in his suitcase. One can only imagine the difficulty he faced answering the customs officer’s question about whether he was carrying goods on behalf of a third party.
Such operations are cruel fun for the Russians – and vengeance
One also wonders about the preparations such operations entail, stripping espionage of whatever glamour it might once have possessed. The days of prune juice consumed in advance. The painstaking coordination of the target’s movements with those of one’s own bowels. The hushed arguments of operatives – of a degree of intimacy rarely encountered among colleagues – as to who is best placed to launch the coup de grâce. And, above all, the pressure to produce something sufficiently intimidating to uphold the FSB’s fearsome reputation. Between this and the intelligence failures at the start of the Ukraine war, Russian spies seem to have made something of a specialty out of producing shit.
It is well-established that the FSB’s dirty tricks are sometimes dirty in the most literal sense. But the agency’s talents for intimidation and disruption are hardly confined to the bathroom, often invading the bedroom as well. Like zookeepers overseeing pandas in Beijing Zoo, Russian spies are eager to help Westerners mate. Luke Harding, author of Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State and former Moscow bureau chief for the Guardian, found a sex manual next to his marital bed with the page on female orgasms bookmarked.
When Harding first arrived in the capital, such tactics had mostly been deployed against diplomats and officials. That changed after the Guardian ran an article in which Putin’s enemy Boris Berezovsky claimed to be plotting the overthrow of the Russian president. “The next day, the sky fell on my head,” says Harding, with people buzzing his apartment, asking for his phone number, following him and sitting alongside him in cafes. “Fairly soon after that, these FSB break-ins began.”
The Russians decided Harding was working for MI6, presumably “having instructions transmitted through a rock or a pigeon.” “They mirror-think,” he says:
Many of their journalists abroad are spies or co-operate with Russian foreign intelligence. They can’t understand that having a full-time job as a Moscow bureau chief is quite a lot of work. When is one supposed to do one’s espionage? They had cameras everywhere. We didn’t even have a car.
Turning to the British embassy, Harding was informed that the FSB were using techniques also deployed against British diplomats and, in particular, locally employed Russian staff. His apartment was bugged. Since he did not work for the government, they would not remove the bugs – but they explained that there was no point, since the Russians would reinstall them. That can take seconds sometimes. MI6’s Janet Chisholm and her husband once tried to pull a bug from the wall of their Moscow apartment, only to get into a tug-of-war with the KGB men on the other side.
“The FSB and the KGB before them have been harassing foreign diplomats – and their families – of nations deemed hostile to Russia for time immemorial,” explains John Foreman:
I was followed every day for three years. I just assumed I was under constant close surveillance, both physical and electronic. Looking back, my own car may have been tampered with. I was threatened by FSB stooges after the invasion [of Ukraine] in an attempt to get a reaction on video. Worse has happened to others, including being beaten up, their property damaged, or – for single females – being followed home. [Other tactics include] leaving locked external doors open, moving objects around and even – in the case of one former UK naval attaché – tidying the place up.
Such operations serve multiple purposes. They are cruel fun for the Russians – for example, leaving meat in the home of vegetarians – and vengeance, whether for sanctions, Western support to Ukraine or Finland joining NATO. There is plausible deniability. It is domination of someone else’s environment, forcing them to clean up after the enemy. Yet, ultimately, the Russians want Western reporters and diplomats to leave, disrupting their operations. As Foreman notes:
The Russians do it to increase psychological pressure, deter people from traveling and meeting Russians, find out what we are up to and to identify potential recruits. It’s par for the course and not a bargaining tactic. Everyone gets the love.
This is psychological warfare. Luke Harding spoke to foreign women who studied in the USSR and came home to discover knots in their tights. Ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele would find his shoelaces tied together. Other tactics involve setting alarms in the early hours, switching appliances off or stealing possessions and replacing them later to make targets question themselves.
As Harding notes, the KGB took an interest in these techniques in the 1960s, but they were honed by the East German Stasi against dissidents in the 1970s (“Zersetzung,” meaning corrosion or undermining). Harding’s ex-Stasi contact insisted they did it “better” as the Russians were “more brutal” and “never subtle.” Harding tells me of an unmarried Russian colleague who found her beret moved to the middle of a room. She told her mother, who said she was imagining things. “This is what is so insidious about these tactics,” he explains. “She basically had a nervous breakdown. For single women, the idea of male intruders in your bedroom…”
This can shade into physical danger. Harding found the window of his six-year-old son’s room – on the tenth floor – busted open. Archives reveal the Russians leaving broken glass on the floor of a Japanese couple’s home, knowing they walked about barefoot. A US defense attaché’s dog was killed. Children are a frequent target. In 1995, UK deputy ambassador Andrew Carter came home from attending the Bolshoi theater with Princess Diana to discover his children had received a visit in his absence. “The school bus of embassy kids was diverted around Moscow, making parents frantic,” adds Foreman.
There can be a rhythm to the harassment. Harding endured between 15 and 20 break-ins over three and a half years. Each time, he would eventually relax. Four weeks later, he’d start thinking about it and then they’d do it again. One especially vicious cycle came after his reporting on the 2008 Georgia war. The Foreign Ministry asked if he wasn’t worried that staying in Moscow would mean something happening to his children. Even the Guardian offices were not safe, with phone cradles taken off in the early hours, windows opened from the inside and electric shocks emanating from his laptop. He believed they already possessed the keys.
“Things definitely have got worse since February 2022,” says Foreman. “Diplomats from previously ignored embassies started to be followed. There have been more physical attacks, whether planned or something that spun out of control.”
James Rodgers, former Moscow correspondent and author of The Return of Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin, says that, although it could be stressful reporting in Russia between 1991 and 2009, “the worst you felt could happen was expulsion”:
It’s different now. We have seen what happened to Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, and (ex-President Dmitri) Medvedev spoke of the need for Russia to “fill up the exchange fund,” i.e. of Westerners. It’s not a threat that’s going away.
So how to cope? Harding and his wife followed the embassy’s advice to communicate by writing notes and then flushing them down the toilet – for 24 hours, before deciding, “oh, fuck this.” “CCTV and better physical security help deter them, as does living on the embassy campus rather than in a rental flat,” says Foreman:
I have a picture of an FSB man in a flat changing the batteries in the bugs. We don’t do it back as we stay high while they go low. The UK has raised it formally to the Russians since the war in private and publicly. They’ll never stop it as long as Russia remains a police state i.e. indefinitely.
Former MI5 chief Dame Stella Rimington wrote of raising the issue with her KGB counterpart, only for him to claim that he was unsure he could do anything.
Humor is an important coping mechanism. Harding and his wife showed off the sex manual at parties. A healthy dose of contempt is also critical. “What kind of state,” asks Harding, “watches a married couple have sex? It’s ridiculous.” He discovered “reserves of stubbornness”, while Foreman’s own approach was to “keep calm, carry on and ignore them as far as possible.” Keeping your wits about you is also crucial. Rodgers tells me that “trips outside Moscow were always the trickiest. It was as if the local FSB did not want to mess up and get told off by their Moscow masters.” During one visit to Murmansk, someone he had interviewed phoned and tried to get him to criticize the Russian political system. The line had a “weird echo,” suggesting the call was tapped. “I didn’t take the bait.”
It is possible to communicate with agents, albeit indirectly. Harding hung a clock featuring Putin as well as former president and current alcoholic Medvedev so that it would be the first thing goons saw when breaking in. Rear Admiral Tim Woods, the UK’s former defense attaché in Kyiv and Washington DC, tells the story of an American colleague in the Russian capital who, after a long day, was taking a shower – only for the hot water to cut out. In exasperation, she screamed, “Can you just leave me alone for one day?” The following day, she came home to find a box of chocolates and a note: “Not us this time.”
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