During the Cold War, when I lived in Mexico for a few years, I had a Russian friend named Sergei. He was a journalist, he said, but everyone knew he was a Soviet spy. The only question was whether he worked for the KGB or for the military intelligence service, the GRU.
We had breakfast together quite often, always to talk about Central America, whose wars I covered. I was hoping that Sergei would give me information about what Russia or Cuba were doing in the region, where both countries were operating covertly against the interests of the United States. He knew that in my newspaper, The London Times, I frequently denounced Washington's support for the Nicaraguan contras and the bloody regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. He wanted to see me as a viable source of information.
The truth is that for me these encounters turned out to be funny but useless. For him they should have been too, since I never told him anything that I had not previously published. But I think they did work for him. To give his bosses in Moscow the impression that he had stumbled upon a valuable “Western” source. What I remember most about those breakfasts is that punctually, every half hour, Sergei would get up and go to the bathroom. I have no doubt that his purpose was to change the tape in the recorder that he hid on top.
I remember this story today in light of the arrest last week in Russia of Evan Gershkovich, a correspondent accused of being a spy for the United States. “What the Wall Street Journal employee was doing,” explained the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, “has nothing to do with journalism.”
Well, the most obvious thing here is the hypocrisy that the phrase betrays. Today all Russian journalists whose work is published in their country are working, as in Stalin's time, for the state. They don't do journalism; they make propaganda. They know that if they don't repeat the official lies they will be jailed or killed. (More than two dozen have already been murdered in the years Vladimir Putin has been in power.)
However, what the spokeswoman for the ministry said, however crude the intention may have been, leads me in a not-so-obvious way to a truth rarely recognized: that espionage and journalism are not that they have nothing to do with each other, they have A lot to see. As for the modus operandi, they are very similar jobs.
In my years as a correspondent I met several spies of all stripes. I even married one. They and they have secret and non-secret sources. We have secret and non-secret sources. Like spies, we try to find out what is really going on in the circles of power, not just what they tell us. Sometimes, like spies, we must pretend to be more naive than we are or express more sympathy towards our interlocutors than we feel. Frequently we have a common point of betrayal with spies: we present ourselves as friends, but we are not.
The difference is, first, that the spies are paid by the states and we are paid by the newspapers; second, that what they write is seen by two or three people and what we write is seen by everyone; and, third, that we are subject to the law and they are not. Oh, and we also don't have a mission to buy agents or officials of rival states.
I am not a spy, although I had my chances, because being a journalist seems more honest to me. I couldn't lie to everyone about what I really do in life, nor could I be in the service of a government regardless of whether I agreed with its policies or not.
But to some extent, I understand how Putin and his people, from their totalitarian perspective, could come to play the role of Evan Gershkovich as that of a spy. An article he published in December with three other Journal reporters offers a comprehensive and shattering look at why Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been a failure. I dare say that if a team of CIA agents had obtained such detailed information about the ins and outs of the Kremlin, and Putin's relationship with his intelligence services and his military, they would have given each of them a medal. .
In other words, Gershkovich and company did brutal “spying” work. Most of their sources were people they couldn't name because if they had, those people would have ended up in jail, or worse. But the fact that his investigations were published in the great city of New York, and not sent in secret code to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, should have served as a clear signal that Gershkovich was a genuine journalist and that putting him in jail would be barbaric.
Every day we come across the cynicism and cruelty of Putin's state apparatus, and we see it once again with the arrest of the American correspondent, caged in a notorious Moscow prison where he could remain, according to what in Russia they call " law”, for twenty years.
Many say that what the United States did in Iraq was just as bad as what Russia is doing in Ukraine today. I would add that they also did what they did in Central America in the eighties. Or almost. This is not why I am going to stop condemning Putin, and this is not why I am going to fall into the nonsense of saying that Washington presides over a system as vile as that of Moscow. The difference – no small thing – is in the degree of respect that exists in the United States towards the concept of justice and individual life.
When I was working in El Salvador I published an article about the complicity of the Yankee military in the atrocities of the Salvadoran regime. My sources were, among others, a spy. The embassy of the United States, very pissed off, could have asked their Salvadoran subjects to arrest me, and they would have. But not. The response they limited themselves to was a letter to my newspaper in London from the head of US diplomacy, Secretary of State George Shultz, complaining about my "falsehoods." Shultz was the fake, I say, but he would never have had the shamelessness or bad faith to suggest that I was working for the same people as my friend Sergei.
