The idea to tell that intelligence is not cool came to me while studying at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Then one of the students of the Faculty of Economics asked me to tell you about the ways to "penetrate" into the intelligence service. By his naive desire to devote himself to this "exciting" business, I realized that the guy needed to be warned, because for this he was ready to drastically change his life plans - right up to the transition from the Diplomatic Academy to the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University, which I graduated under the program second higher education, which my interlocutor knew about.
The fact that GRushnikov is trained at ISAA is an old bike, but there is no smoke without fire: many ISAA personnel become employees of the SVR. As well as graduates of MGIMO, MGLU and other civilian universities with deep language training. Those who have achieved success in learning oriental languages are especially appreciated. At the final exam in the main oriental language, there is certainly a certain person in civilian clothes, whom none of the students has ever seen before. At some point, this someone gets up and leaves without saying a word to anyone. After some time, the most capable graduates are invited to join the intelligence community.
Future candidates for service in the SVR are monitored even during their studies, because, in addition to language skills, there are many criteria that a future intelligence officer must meet: a biography without "spots", including several generations of ancestors, good health, a psychological portrait, etc. There is no doubt that the SVR and the FSB know about everything that happens in these universities, since they are sources of personnel for foreign intelligence, even if they are additional ones.
You can, of course, refuse the "tempting" offer. But if you agree to become a career intelligence officer, you will have to perform the function of a cog in a state structure called SVR with all the ensuing consequences. Yes, you will be provided with housing. But they don't make big money in intelligence. There are also few opportunities to satisfy your ambition: they are often awarded either in secret orders or posthumously. If you are lucky, you will visit 3-4 countries at the state expense. In this case, all the time you will be under the control of your own colleagues. Of course, one can object: what about Putin, Ivanov, Naryshkin, Yakunin, Lebedev? The answer is simple: well, well …
By the way, in my life I crossed paths three times with the family of an Arabist intelligence officer, Lieutenant General Vadim Alekseevich Kirpichenko: with his granddaughter Ksenia at lectures at ISAA, with his daughter Ekaterina at the Russian-Arab Business Council and with his widow Valeria Nikolaevna at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where we worked for several years at one time (I can't say together, because we worked in different departments). So, his son Sergei, Xenia's father, graduated from MGIMO and became a "pure" diplomat (currently the ambassador to Egypt), as well as his grandchildren. And parents, as you know, wish their children only good.
Frankly, I was interested in intelligence problems even before I, having passed the competition in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ended up at the Russian Embassy in Yemen and began to carry out assignments of the SVR resident. By the way, if one of the "pure" diplomats says that he worked in a foreign establishment and did not cooperate in any way with the special services, you can laugh in his face. It doesn't work that way! All MFA members are involved in cooperation with the residents in one way or another and are used by the residents for their own purposes.
Even at the history department of Tver University, I read a book by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun) "Aquarium". In it, the author wrote a lot of all sorts of nonsense about the life of the embassies, as I understood later, but there is no doubt about the following: “Both residents (GRU and SVR. - PG) are not subordinate to the ambassador. The ambassador was invented in order to only mask the existence of two strike groups as part of the Soviet (read - Russian. - PG) colony. Of course, in public, both residents show some respect for the ambassador, because both residents are high-ranking diplomats and they would stand out from the others by their disrespect for the ambassador. All dependence on the ambassador ends with this respect. " It would be more accurate to say that the ambassador was not invented, but the embassy. Working in Yemen, I was convinced from my own experience that the main purpose of any embassy is to be a “roof” for special services, and only then all this tinsel with diplomatic receptions, warm handshakes, ornate phrases about friendship and cooperation, etc.
I was accepted for diplomatic work by Ambassador Alexander Sergeevich Zasypkin (currently Ambassador to Lebanon), with whom I had an interview during my internship at the Central Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Upon arrival at the Embassy, for obvious reason, I wanted to give him the nickname "Griboyedov", but then, in order not to incur trouble, I changed my mind: the Yemenis, of course, are friendly people to Russians, but you never know …
One day the Minister-Counselor (the second person in the embassy, in fact, the deputy ambassador) told me that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is just postmen for diplomatic correspondence. Developing his thought, you come to the conclusion that the Foreign Ministry is the main post office for official foreign correspondence, and foreign missions, in turn, are local post offices.
There is also little romance in the work of the guys from the "Office". More precisely, the romantic mood quickly passes. I experienced this myself when Zasypkin suspected me of collaborating with my "neighbors", that is, with foreign intelligence, and began to gently discourage me from them. If he had asked me in plain text about my dealings with the resident, then questions could have appeared to Zasypkin himself. Since I continued to provide all kinds of assistance to the resident, including communicating with the CIA at those diplomatic receptions where I was not supposed to be (at the prescribed diplomatic receptions you can communicate with anyone and as much as you like), I soon began to have troubles at work. The fact is that the Foreign Ministry still wants to consider themselves more important than any intelligence officers and are very jealous of their subordinates who follow the instructions of someone else, even if it is in the interests of the state.
As for communicating with foreigners, this is strictly prohibited for the staff of the office and the office, and the rest of the embassies are required to report in writing to the security officer, that is, the FSB officer, with whom they communicated, when, under what circumstances, whose initiative was and what they talked about. By the way, diplomats communicate with each other, as a rule, in the language of the host country.
I was surprised when I saw that the head of the office duplicated the work of a security officer and even kept an eye on the ambassador, trying to find out from me who Zasypkin was meeting with.
I must say that everyone in the embassy is always checked for "lice", so I was not indignant when the resident did this to me. This must be treated with understanding, and it is best to pretend that you did not notice or did not understand anything.
It came as a surprise to me when the security officer allowed me to photograph the Embassy and Sana from our water tower, the highest point of the Embassy. Of course, I did not miss this opportunity, and as a token of gratitude, I presented the security officer with several photos with panoramic views of the city and the Embassy. By the way, the photographs were taken in an ordinary city photo studio on at-Tahrir square.
How did I “make friends” with the resident? My father’s last position in the army was "intelligence chief of an anti-aircraft missile regiment." As a child, my father jokingly told me: "Do not forget, you are the son of a scout!" But these words sunk into my soul, and when the resident attracted me to cooperation, his seeds fell on fertile soil, and I did not hesitate for a minute, not realizing that this could complicate my life. I also liked that the resident appreciated my regional interest and love for geographical maps: my first task was to find a map of Sana'a in bookstores and purchase it for the residency, which I did in the next exit to the city. Later it became clear to me that this was a psychological trick of the resident, so that I would get involved in cooperation. By the way, I completed one cartographic assignment for the military attaché, but in this case there was a personal request from the military attaché to the ambassador, who, of course, deigned to place his employee at the disposal of the “distant”, that is, military intelligence.
How do “near” and “far” differ from each other? The first are mostly intellectuals, with whom it is pleasant and interesting to communicate. At the same time, one should not forget who is in front of you. The latter, for the most part, behave as if everyone owes them something, as if the rest of the embassy staff should be happy that the GRUs condescend to communicate with them. In fairness, I must say that the military attachés themselves, with whom I had to communicate, were not arrogant people. So, one of them explained to me who the regional military attaches are: they are persons accredited in several countries of a region at once.
It occurred to me conditionally to call SVR workers by the principle of phonetic similarity as welders, and GRushnikov as loaders. So they work the same way: welders try to make the welded seam neatly, for years, but the main thing for loaders is not to break or break the load at a given time, and the further fate of the cargo does not bother them at all.
Here I cannot but tell about one significant case. On the instructions of the Minister-Counselor, I translated the Charter of the Sanai Cooperation Group for the Central Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And after a while, looking through the information materials of the Embassy, I found my translation included in the certificate of one of the military attaché's assistants, as if he had done it. When I asked how this could have happened, I never received a clear answer from the military attache. By the way, upon my return from a business trip, I, as the author, published the named translation in my book "The Republic of Yemen and Its Cities."
For the first time, I encountered military intelligence "live" back in the army in the mid-90s: a "merchant" from the Conservatory, as the Military Diplomatic Academy is called, came to the unit where I served. Biennial students are not invited to the Conservatory, and I did not sign a 5-year contract with the Armed Forces for a ghostly opportunity to be in the ranks of military intelligence, where all regular officers rush from the routine of army service. The "merchant", as the selected candidates told me, advised them to focus on the study of history and English. Of course, no one took exams in history and English at the ACA: they are screened out without exams.
Let's go back to overseas missions. The question arises: why do "neighbors" attract "pure" diplomats to cooperation? First, they do not want to expose their people once again: let the CIA officers think that the "clean" one is the SVR officer. Secondly, the resident often lacks his own people. In addition, it is precisely on the "clean" that an initiator can come out, who will later become a valuable agent, which will help the resident to move up the career ladder.
CIA officers at diplomatic receptions are the first to make contact. Charming smiles, shameless flattery, etc. should be alarming. It was evident that the CIA officers were impressed that I was a historian by my first education. In addition to other general questions - what I graduated from, what languages I speak, what countries I have visited, whether I drink whiskey, etc. - They also asked about my specialization as a historian. To be honest, communication with the CIA officers was interesting. They were surprised when they learned that baseball, their national sport, is about the same as Russian rounders. I remember how the face of one CIA officer stretched out, who told me that he could hardly bear the heat above 80 degrees, and I immediately translated this value for him from the Fahrenheit scale to the Celsius scale (approximately + 27 ° C).
Gradually, the CIA are still trying to assert their intellectual superiority. I managed to discourage them when we started talking about music, and I told them, switching from Arabic: "By the way, my basic instrument is the accordion, but I play the piano better than the accordion because I like it very much." None of my three interlocutors could answer me with anything.
Not only the CIA, but also other foreigners are very interested in one question: how many employees work in the embassy. After one of the ambassadors asked me this question in anticipation of a meeting with Zasypkin, I began to bend my fingers, pretending to count in my mind, and “counted” this way until Zasypkin came.
The American theme and everything connected with it is the prerogative of the "neighbors", so the ambassador was very annoyed when, out of inexperience, I touched on this topic at information readings, which are necessarily conducted by the diplomatic staff of the embassy at the beginning of each week.
Everyone at the Embassy was delighted when they sent me a translation of the Constitution of Yemen into Russian: I multiplied it and handed it over to the “necessary” people: the ambassador, the minister-counselor, the resident and the consul. Of course, with an authoritative translation by M. A. It was much more convenient for Sapronova to work than with the Arabic text.
I will not deny that the book “Eastern Faculty of the Military Academy of the RKKA named after M. V. Frunze”I wrote under the impression of the same book by Rezun. In "Aquarium", let me remind you, tells about the training at the Military-Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Army in the 70s. My task was to show how the system of training Soviet military intelligence officers, so entertainingly described by Rezun, began to take shape. To do this, I had to show some persistence in communicating with the staff of the Russian State Military Archive. By the way, in the RGVA, not all cases have yet been declassified, despite the fact that most of them were before 1940.
Unfortunately, none of the teachers and graduates of the Eastern Faculty was left alive by 2014, and no one had developed this topic before me: there were only fragmentary information in books dedicated to VA. Frunze in general, and no interviews.
Maria Vodopyanova, the granddaughter of Lieutenant General Kochetkov, one of the chiefs of the Air Force Academy, told me when she was working on the film “Kochetkov” from the “Descendants” series about her grandfather’s studies at the East Faculty and told me that he had been studying for three years. She could not remember anything else, although she remembers the details of family life and the grandfather himself very well.
