Counterterrorism magazine published my Q&A with Sean M. Wiswesser, a retired CIA officer and author of Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War.
You can read the pages above and below or the following text:
Mr. Wiswesser has nearly thirty years of experience working as a national security professional with intelligence, foreign service, and defense organizations.
As a senior operations officer with the CIA, he served on multiple overseas tours and many other deployments on temporary duty, including war-zone service. He was a chief of station and had multiple joint-duty assignments with intelligence community partners.
Mr. Wiswesser was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a bachelor's degree in history and Russian & Slavic linguistics. He was awarded a Master of Strategic Studies in 2023 from the Air War College and received the Russia Integrated Deterrence.
Mr. Wiswesser is the author of “Tradecraft, Tactics and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Dirty Tricks,” published by the Naval Institute Press.
Sean M. Wiswesser was interviewed by Paul Davis.
IACSP: I enjoyed your book on Russian intelligence. I’ve been interested in Russian intelligence since I was a teenager and read spy thrillers. I did security work while serving in the U.S. Navy as a young sailor on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War and later as Department of Defense civilian employee. I was trained to guard against Russian intelligence and I attended many FBI, NSA, DIA and CIA briefings and training sessions on Russian intelligence, but there was still a lot in the book that I didn't know.
My first question is why did you write the book?
Wiswesser: There is a saying, if you're going to write a book, write the book only you can write. In the CIA I was a Russia guy, which meant I had to focus on my career and tradecraft, particularly denied area tradecraft, so in other words how we operated in the toughest of environments overseas, like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. As a member of our senior expert cadre with a focus on those areas, I had an idea about writing a book and then I went to the War College towards the end of my career, and it gave me some faith that maybe I could actually do it. I got published in a couple of books at the War College and another one with the Cambridge Publishing House on the Ukraine War. I would never do a memoir; I’m not interested in that. I knew it would be focused on our adversaries, because that's where I want to do damage to them. I don’t have any grudges or concerns, and I didn’t want to do an expose on us. In fact, I want to do an expose on them, the bad guys. So that was the motivation and there was the added burden of having to get CIA to clear it, so that was an extra step in the process, but in the end it all worked out.
IACSP: You say the book was written for general readers, but why should everyday Americans be concerned about Russian intelligence in particular?
Wiswesser: Well, Paul. They are an implacable foe. Early in the book, I talk about a Russian intelligence officer in the period post 911. Even though I was trained, I wanted to ask him, maybe somewhat naively in retrospect, I said, well, what about Bush and Putin agreeing that the Global War on Terrorism is more important, are we all going get along? And he was betraying his country and helping us, he just laughed at me and said you have always been the main enemy, you are the main enemy, you will be the main enemy of Russia and our security services. For us, the United States comes first.
So I think that we’ve been engaged in 20 years of war, the Global War on Terrorism, the Iraq War, and now we have another war with Iran, Russia has never taken its eyes off of us, because democracy is the only ultimate threat to Putin that he's really concerned about. Democracy and Democratic institutions. Those are the only true threats to his rein.
Wiswesser: The secret war is the hybrid war, the gray zone tactics. Traditional espionage, but also cyber operations and the information war. Now in Europe you see the other aspects that I touched on in the later chapters of the book. Sabotage, assassinations and “wet work.” It’s not a new thing. These are old Cold War tactics going back decades into the Cold War, even to the time of the Bolshevik revolution.
IACSP: How would you briefly describe the Russian SVR, the FSB and the GRU?
Wiswesser: The FSB is the largest of the services, going somewhere around 400,000 officers across Russia, including 200,000 border guards. There are there are no equivalencies to the U.S. intelligence community. People say they are sort of like the FBI. Nothing could be further from the truth. They don't swear their allegiance to the Constitution; there are no laws that they have to worry about breaking. The FSB has the singular mission of protection of the regime, and the protection of Vladimir Putin as the head of it. Remember, he is the former director of the FSB. Their allegiance is to him. The FSB is responsible for counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and wide swaths of activities, including corruption and feeding their own pockets.
The next largest is the GRU, known today as the GU, military intelligence. They number probably between 70,000 and 100,000. They incorporate our DIA, NSA and NRO. They have a vast bureaucracy that they're in charge of in terms of military intelligence and signals intelligence, imagery and otherwise. And they have the Spetsnaz Brigades, the equivalent of the Tier-1 Delta Force and the Navy SEALs.
The SVR is the smallest of the three. They are the foreign intelligence service directorate, numbering probably around 30,000. They are the remnants of the old First Chief Directorate of the KGB, which was in charge of foreign intelligence. That’s a brief summary of the three.
IACSP: You mention in the book something that was new to me, at least on the grand scale that you note, of how corruption is rampant in Russian intelligence and is a major weakness of their intelligence services. Would you explain that?
Wiswesser: The life of a Russian intelligence officer is overwhelmingly obsessed with and dominated by corruption. Russian intelligence officers and their bureaucracies are deeply embedded to the overall Russian kleptocracy, which is their government. They are constantly on the take for graft, greed, scamming and scheming of all different types, in order to make money for themselves and their patronage networks. I point out in the book that Russian intelligence services resemble more mafia gangs and giant feudal systems then they do anything that resembles the government bureaucracies in the West. These are systems that are set up where you have to make your boss look good and you have to literally line the pockets of your boss all the way up the chain. Every Russian intelligence officer that I worked with him in my career all said the obsession of their services is corruption, making money.
IACSP: In the book you state that you debriefed several Russian defectors. Why generally do they defect and how do they adjust to the US?
Wiswesser: Defectors by and large come to the West because our message resonates. Another journalist asked me if we were losing the intelligence war. No, we're winning. The reason is we will always be winning because our message is far more appealing to Russian intelligence officers. They know that corruption is there, and they know there's no chance of their children ever achieving great things based only on their merits. That's what they seek out eventually, especially in middle age. They realize they have been struggling their whole life for a lie.
IACSP: What sparked your initial interest in Russian language and culture?
Wiswesser: When I was 14 years old, I was really fortunate that I won a scholarship at an all-boys boarding school outside of Philadelphia. The school had a great language program, and I got to study Russian for four years with an excellent instructor named Rick Borger.
I don’t have a strong
American accent, which later in my career that was a huge benefit for me. When I
was trying to meet Russians for the first time at receptions out there it was a
huge advantage that they didn't immediately identify me as an American. With that
interest in Russian language came a desire to go to Russia to study, which I
did in college. I was fascinated and I hopefully it comes across my great respect
for the Russian people and their great language and culture and literature, but
I also saw the darker side of their society. The people lived in fear. I
decided that I wanted to join the intelligence community and fight back against
the Soviet regime.
IACSP: One of the things I found most interesting in your book is that you write about how Russian intelligence interfered with our presidential elections. Did they interfere in favor of Trump or were they just interested in dividing Americans and damaging our electoral process?
Wiswesser: Their attack was fundamentally against democracy more broadly. This is not new. They have been doing it for decades. They want to spread the false idea that you can't have free and fair elections in the West. They want our youth in America and other democracies to give up. Any benefit to an individual candidate is incidental.
IACSP: You write about Putin, the former KGB Lieutenant Colonel and later the director of the FSB. He's a big supporter of Russian intelligence. What do you think will happen when he dies?
Wiswesser: I don't believe fundamentally that there's any opposition to Putin whatsoever. Whoever replaces him, he's going to be a hand-picked successor, most likely from Putin’s inter circle of those veterans of the KGB that came with him when he was the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg. Those veterans are fiercely loyal to him. They're completely beholden to him. So, Putin is going to decide who's going to succeed him.
IACSP: Thank you for your service with the CIA and thank you for speaking to us.
Paul Davis, a longtime contributor to the Journal, also writes the online IACSP Threatcon column.
Note: Sean Wiswesser posted:
Thank you, Paul! Am honored by this kind review. Here is link to my book for those that want to order, much appreciated:
https://a.co/d/07sduvsz
Thank you!
Sean Wiswesser
CIA Senior Operations Officer (Ret.) Author/Lecturer on Russian Intelligence/Defense/Security
Issues
