The history of Russian foreign intelligence is not, at bottom, a story about secrets stolen or ciphers cracked. It is a story about the deliberate manufacture of reality. The second volume of Ocherki istorii rossiyskoy vneshney razvedki — the SVR's officially sanctioned multivolume history, covering 1917 to 1933 — makes this argument without quite intending to: in cataloguing the founding operations of the Soviet foreign intelligence service (INO), it documents the earliest systematic weaponization of deception as an instrument of statecraft. The methods that emerged from this period — fabricated underground organizations, controlled double agents, coordinated disinformation fed simultaneously to multiple foreign services — are not historical curiosities. They are the genetic code of modern Russian active measures. Read More…
This is the first installment of a six-part series tracing the institutional and doctrinal history of Russian foreign intelligence, drawn from the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki's own commissioned history, Ocherki istorii rossiyskoy vneshney razvedki (Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence), edited by former SVR director and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov. Each installment will pair the SVR's official narrative, read critically, against independent scholarship. This post covers Volume 1: the period from Muscovite Russia through the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. Read More…
The post argues that China's maritime intelligence capability is best understood as a converging three-layer system rather than a set of parallel programs. Layer one is the PLAN's AGI fleet — Type 815/815G signals intelligence ships that shadow allied exercises to build electronic signature libraries and targeting data. Layer two is the undersea infrastructure: the "Great Underwater Wall" and "Blue Ocean Information Network" fixed sensor arrays in the South China Sea, plus a growing fleet of AI-enabled autonomous underwater vehicles capable of seabed mapping, submarine detection, and — most critically — accessing fiber-optic cables, including the cable concentration north of Taiwan that carries both Taiwanese and U.S. trans-Pacific communications traffic. Layer three is the commercial port network: Chinese SOEs operate terminals at 96 foreign ports, generating proprietary data on vessel movements, logistics, and supply chains that functions as a peacetime intelligence pipeline. The central analytical claim is that these layers reinforce each other operationally and are all oriented toward the same scenario — a Taiwan contingency in which the PLA must detect, degrade, and if necessary destroy allied maritime forces. Western analysis has engaged each layer in isolation, producing single-domain policy responses to what is a structural, integrated threat. Read More…
