According to an unclassified report from the United Kingdom’s Defense Intelligence, Russia has resurrected a Cold War-era spy-hunting organization called SMERSH, meaning “death to spies.” The SMERSH mission is to hunt down alleged traitors in Ukraine, which is consistent with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calls for Russian counterintelligence to “raise its game” on the domestic front.
So, Putin’s security and intelligence services continue to rebrand their brutal conflict against Ukraine by nostalgically going back to Joseph Stalin’s dystopian Cold War past.
All of this should be a warning to the United States and NATO that sabotage and shadow networks of saboteurs and spy catchers are not a phenomenon of Cold War fiction.
To put a finer point on the situation, there’s an ongoing regional war in the Middle East, North Korea’s saber-rattling is trending alarmingly upward, China’s threat to invade Taiwan is disquieting and Europe, and NATO partners are deeply concerned about long-term Russian belligerence.
Taken all together, saboteurs and spies are insidious force multipliers that must also be countered by NATO and any other democracies seeking to protect its people.
As I’ve modestly stressed to foreign intelligence partners, alongside the need to bolster Western conventional military capabilities, rethinking counterintelligence for this competition is necessary and urgent. While Putin’s secret services are romanticizing the heady days of the Soviet Union’s Cold War past, today’s Russian intelligence and security services are busy hunting spies in parts of Russian-controlled Ukraine.
More worryingly, Russian intelligence services are obversely dispatching would-be saboteurs and spies against NATO member Poland. Russia’s spying and Poland’s effective counterintelligence work came into sharper focus last spring when Russian-dispatched spies were caught mapping out Polish seaports, placing cameras along railways and even surreptitiously placing tracking devices in military cargo.
The spy versus spy competition was surreally right out of a Hollywood script; saboteurs were even preparing to derail trains bound for Ukraine.
Subsequently, nine foreigners were initially accused of spying for Russia and preparing sabotage operations to disrupt a Western logistical hub and the flow of war materiel into neighboring Ukraine. This is exactly the kind of amorphous covert campaign for destabilizing a NATO member that combines nonmilitary means and surrogates to undermine and circumvent the strengths of a target state.
Not long after the dust was settling in the wake of Poland’s arrests last spring, I was in Warsaw and had the privilege of spending some time with officers serving in Polish counterintelligence — the Internal Security Agency, Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego (ABW).
I believe that Poland’s counterintelligence enterprise is well-prepared and grounded in how the Russian threat could manifest in its homeland. It’s an open secret that Poland has gone into overdrive the last few years to counter aggressive Russian intelligence operations on Polish soil. In fact, between 2016 and 2023, Polish counterintelligence arrested 46 individuals for spying against Poland at the behest of Russian and Belarusian intelligence services.
None of this should be surprising. Guerrilla warfare — including sabotage, derailing trains and attempts to blow up ammunition depots — is amping up, given that Ukraine and Russia are failing to make progress on the conventional battlefield.
Still, what’s most alarming is that Russian surrogates are operating, albeit amateurishly so far, in a NATO country. More aggressive use of Russian proxies outside of active combat zones in a NATO country risks crossing the threshold from a shadowy netherworld to passing Western redlines that could escalate into a NATO-Russia shooting war.
All of this shadowy Cold War past may be a harbinger of more spy versus spy battles to come.
And parenthetically, if SMERSH sounds familiar to you, it’s more than likely because Ian Fleming fictionalized and retooled SMERSH as an archvillain in “Casino Royale”, the first James Bond novel that helped to popularize the iconic Bond character and spy genre. Even today, all things James Bond still captivate wide audiences and hold a special place in popular culture. But unless you’re a student of Soviet counterintelligence or read Nicola Sinevirsky’s 1950 revelatory book about real-world SMERSH spy hunters, you might not make that connection.
So far, the good news is that Russia is losing its clandestine war in Poland. In the end, 14 members of the disrupted Moscow-directed spy network were found guilty in Polish courts for preparing acts of sabotage. The defendants included Ukrainians, Russians and Belarusian nationals. They were indicted for planning to derail trains carrying aid to Ukraine and spying. They also distributed propaganda materials sowing hate and disunity against Ukrainians.
James Bond fiction serves as both entertainment and a useful departure point for more serious thinking about real-world spying. Long-held conventional wisdom rings true: James Bond foes over the years are another way of better understanding how fictional adversaries reflect real-world societal fears. All of this suggests that today’s real villains may very well be Russia’s spies and saboteurs.
Sometimes art imitates life. And sometimes life imitates art.
Christopher P. Costa is the executive director of the International Spy Museum and an adjunct associate professor with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a former career intelligence officer and was special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.