UK targets Putin allies with covert attacks
Covert attacks launched in retaliation against Russia, former cabinet secretary reveals
Tom Newton Dunn, Fiona Hamilton, Francis Elliott, Michael Evans
Saturday October 24 2020, 12.01am, The Times
Global politics
thetimes.co.uk
Britain has launched a series of covert attacks on Russian leaders and their interests, the former cabinet secretary has revealed.
Lord Sedwill said that clandestine operations had been mounted to punish President Putin and his senior allies and signalled that this included deploying Britain’s newly declared offensive cyber-capability.
The “series of discreet measures” were used to “impose a price greater than one they might have expected”, he said in an interview with Times Radio. It is the first time a senior British figure had confirmed such tactics.
The disclosure marks an escalation in British action against a resurgent Russia. Britain and its allies increased their public pressure on the Kremlin over its international transgressions in recent weeks.
Lord Sedwill, who was also national security adviser until he stepped down last month, refused to disclose the exact nature of the attacks, “because they are covert”. But he revealed that they targeted Russian “vulnerabilities”, such as oligarchs’ illicit money trails. He also admitted that Donald Trump’s presidency had created “some ups and downs” with No 10, and said that dealing with the US can be like “waltzing with a brontosaurus”.
He hit back against Tory hawks to insist that it was right “to establish a close and businesslike relationship with the Chinese government” and that “doesn’t mean we are being naive”.
Asked why Britain’s cyber-arsenal had not yet been deployed against Russia, the former top civil servant said: “The fact you don’t see that we use it doesn’t mean that we don’t.
“Russia is operating in what the aficionados call grey space, that gap between normal state relations and armed conflict, with cyberattacks, information warfare and disruption campaigns.
“It is important that we are capable of manoeuvring in the grey space and doing so effectively. We can’t leave the initiative to our adversaries. There are some vulnerabilities that we can exploit too. We just don’t always talk about those.”
Covert measures were sanctioned against Russia’s leaders after the Salisbury attack in March 2018, in which a nerve agent was deployed, he said. “We seek to impose a price greater than one they might have expected when we believe it is right and necessary.
“It does break through from time to time. After the Salisbury attack, the first use of chemical weapons against a country in Europe in a century, we retaliated in visible ways. We expelled the entire Russian intelligence network in the UK.
“But we also took a series of other discreet measures, including measures tackling some of the illicit money that flows out of Russia, and covert measures, which obviously I can’t talk about as well.”
The intelligence services have acknowledged cyberattacks against Islamic State only. GCHQ blocked its access to data and suppressed its propaganda, and the military used malware to disrupt cash transactions to make it harder for the group to buy weapons, food and supplies.
Security sources said that similar tactics could be adjusted and deployed against Russia, although the situation is more complex because of the intertwining of politics and organised crime.
Last year the National Cyber Security Centre, an offshoot of GCHQ, was involved in bringing down Evil Corp, a cybercriminal group that used malware to steal millions of dollars in more than 40 countries and had links to Russian intelligence.
This week Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, told a defence conference that both offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities were important. He said: “[Britain] needs, in extremis, to have the ability to contest in cyberspace, to compete, [and] occasionally to use it in a warlike construct where destruction would result.”
Intelligence experts suggested that covert measures against Russia would be likely to have involved a mixture of cyberattacks and classic “human intelligence” operations.
Under one scenario, GCHQ experts would insert malware in a Kremlin email system to extract sensitive information on senior officials and Putin allies. That could then be put into the public domain to embarrass them or disrupt their business affairs so they pressurised the Russian president to end his confrontation with the West.
Sources said that the British authorities would not engage in “like for like” cyberwarfare with the Russians. However, taking down internet systems and networks to disrupt their propaganda efforts were seen as appropriate engagement. A former senior intelligence official said that a move to use cyberattacks to, for example, freeze the bank assets of President Putin or the senior hierarchy at the Kremlin would be seen as an “act of war”. Attempts to hack into bank assets could be made only against less senior officials.
Last week Britain and the EU imposed asset freezes and travel bans on Russia’s most senior spy, Aleksandr Bortnikov, the FSB director, and five other senior Putin allies for poisoning the dissident leader Alexei Navalny.
Five days ago the Foreign Office publicly attributed a cyberhack of the postponed Tokyo Olympics this year to a Russian military intelligence unit.
• The head of a Russian scientific institute that handled the novichok nerve agent communicated repeatedly with military intelligence officers before they tried to kill Sergei Skripal, a new investigation alleges. Sergei Chepur, 50, was in direct and frequent contact with the commander of the clandestine Unit 29155 of Russia’s GRU before Mr Skripal, a double agent, and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with novichok in Salisbury in March 2018. The findings have been reported by the Bellingcat investigative website. Mr Chepur, who heads the state institute for experimental military medicine in St Petersburg, denies contacting the spies.
Listen to the full interview with Lord Sedwill on Times Radio’s G&T programme tomorrow from 10am. thetimes.co.uk
Covert operations carried out by Russia’s FSB and GRU intelligence agencies are more often than not “down and dirty”, as they’re known in the trade.
From chemical weapon assassinations to destructive cyber-attacks, they are crude but effective.
Little attempt is made to hide their authors’ identities, with the terror they instil calculated to add to the Russian state’s prowess.
In stark contrast, GCHQ and MI6 pride themselves on operating in the clandestine world’s shadows. Far more subtly but no less effectively, they argue.
British agencies’ activities usually remain within the law to preserve the moral high ground.
A major operation against Russia today is likely to fuse all wings of Britain’s secret state. GCHQ’s cyber-expertise is highly prized. It is considered one of the top five cyberspace players in the world, along with the US National Security Agency, Israel’s hackers, China’s and Russia’s.
The Cheltenham-based eavesdroppers might begin the operation by targeting a Kremlin email system. One former intelligence official who has witnessed GCHQ’s expert hackers at work describes the sessions as “a bunch of geeks surrounded by boxes sitting in a basement and eating crisps for 24 hours”.
Once sensitive information has been gleaned, MI6 gets to work on how best to exploit it.
Unravelling the FSB or GRU’s espionage networks in hotspot areas such as the Middle East is a regular pursuit.
The information would be passed to the friendly nation’s government, who would round up agents and prosecute or expel them.
Britain’s offensive cybercapability is believed to be rarely used to wreak material damage on hostile states because of the ethical challenges that poses. But British and ally agencies are thought to have gone after Russian or Chinese hacking units in self-defence. Russia’s relatively small impact on the US presidential election in contrast to previous years, is seen by some as a sign of significant success.
President Putin’s oligarch allies are now seen as targets. He relies on wealthy friends and a strong state security apparatus to keep him in power. If their enterprises can be disrupted enough, or they suffer sufficient embarrassment, they will put pressure on Mr Putin to change course. Or so the theory goes.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/uk-targets-putin-allies-with-covert-attacks-hnl0nl27z |
