Late last month, Sweden expelled a Chinese journalist who had been reporting from the country for nearly two decades. She had, it turned out, been engaging in what the government described as activities harmful to the country—espionage, in other words. But being expelled was not the end of the world for the journalist, who, judging by her social media presence, seemed to quite enjoy getting back to Beijing. Like her, most of the growing number of foreign spies caught in the West only face expulsion, and often a hero’s welcome at home. It may be time for Western governments to adopt the Estonian approach and put all arrested spies on trial.
“After 18 years away from Beijing, I’m back. I’m going to rediscover the miracle of loving you!” the Chinese journalist posted on her webpage after being expelled from Sweden late last month. Last fall, Swedish authorities picked up the trail, arrested her, and put her in pre-trial detention. Now they’ve removed her from the country. Problem solved—but not much of a deterrent to future efforts.
These days, Western authorities are unmasking a whole lot of spies, especially ones working on behalf of Russia and China. In the United Kingdom, authorities have charged two young Britons—including a parliamentary researcher—with spying for China. Last year British authorities identified Christine Lee, a Chinese businesswoman well-connected in Westminster, as a Chinese agent of influence. This April, a Chinese staffer working for a German member of European Parliament, Maximilian Krah, was arrested after reportedly working for Chinese intelligence for over a decade. Around the same time, German authorities arrested three Germans who had been spying for China.
Last August, the United States arrested two U.S. Navy sailors—naturalized U.S. citizens of Chinese ethnicity—on charges of espionage for China. Two years ago, Norwegian authorities arrested Mikhail Mikushin, a GRU officer who had been working undercover in the country posing as a Brazilian academic. The year before that, Swedish authorities arrested a married couple that had entered the country as Afghan refugees after establishing that they were Iranian intelligence agents. Jan Marsalek, the fugitive ex-chief operating officer of the billion-dollar German payment-processing firm Wirecard, turns out to have spent years working closely with Russian intelligence while also running the firm. Indeed, Russia may have used Wirecard to pay its undercover operatives in other countries, the Financial Times reports.
These arrests are just part of the haul, and Western jails are likely to become fuller still, because powers hostile to the West are expanding their espionage. Over the past couple of decades, Russia and China—and in some cases also Iran—have expanded traditional espionage on targets like the armed forces and other national-security institutions. But that’s just part of what they’re interested in. Every aspect of Western societies, from startups and university R&D to civil society, interests the intelligence gatherers and their masters.
It doesn’t matter that much of the information they collect can be found in newspapers and other publicly accessible sources: The objective is to hoover up as much information as possible. To be sure, agents coming from closed societies may not realize, or may find it convenient to sell to their bosses, just how much information is open in the West. But there’s also value in sheer quantity. And because Western governments have expelled a considerable number of Russian diplomats over the past few years, the number of undercover operatives is thought to have grown even more. Just this May, the U.K. expelled Russia’s defense attaché, Maxim Elovik, for spying.
But what should Western governments do after arresting the suspected spies? Like the two Britons arrested for spying, Western citizens caught in their home countries face prosecution. But what about Chinese, Russians, and other foreigners spying on our countries? Until now, Western governments have usually simply expelled them, as Sweden did with the Chinese journalist. Sweden has also expelled operatives who have been spying on Chinese dissidents, Uyghurs, and Tibetans on Beijing’s behalf. In 2010, after arresting a network of 10 Russian undercover spies including the flame-haired Anna Chapman, the United States swiftly expelled them to Russia in exchange for four Russians serving prison sentences for alleged espionage on behalf of America.
Eight years later, the FBI arrested another glamorous Russian spy, Maria Butina, who had been infiltrating U.S. political circles. By the end of the following year, though, she was safely back in Russia after serving a brief jail sentence. (In the case of diplomats and military officers serving under diplomatic accreditation, expulsion is the only punishment available.)
Expulsion, though, is hardly a deterrent. Russia rewarded Chapman with an extraordinary career as a television personality, while Butina was smoothly elected a member of the Duma.
One European country already takes a radically different approach and does so consistently: Estonia. When the Baltic country began building up its security institutions in the 1990s, after winning independence from the Soviet Union once more, its budding spy catchers eagerly learned from Western colleagues. Then, though, they did things their way. “Over the past couple of decades, Estonia has caught more spies than many larger Western countries, and we prosecute them,” Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former president of Estonia, told me. “And since we have rule of law, we don’t prosecute unless we have a clear case.”
The decisive moment was Herman Simm, said Arnold Sinisalu, a veteran counterintelligence officer who until last year directed Estonia’s counterintelligence agency, the Internal Security Service. In 2008, the ISS arrested the respected top Ministry of Defense official on charges of spying for Russia, and soon thereafter he was put on trial. “After we prosecuted Simm, we decided that we should go to court as much we can every time,” Sinisalu told me. “And one of the most important decisions we made was that we won’t hide any information. We had those discussions in 2008 and 2009. Since that time, we have done it like this every time.”
Estonia has indeed done so, including last month, when a professor at the University of Tartu was convicted of spying for Russia and sentenced to over six years in prison. “Lots of Western academics said, ‘he can’t be a spy, he’s anti-Putin,’” Ilves noted. “But would a spy go around saying, ‘I’m for Putin?’ This is the world we live in. Anyone can be spying on us.”
Prosecuting foreign spies is gutsy. “If somebody is in prison, it’s the best way, honestly, to send a message,” Sinisalu told me. It’s also risky, because the spies’ paymasters can retaliate by arresting random Estonians or other Westerners on bogus espionage charges. In recent years, Russia, China, and Iran have shown they’ve no compunction about doing so. But, Ilves said, “taking a tough line hasn’t hurt Estonia. The standard policy of being hush-hush, just sending the spies away, what does it give you? It’s certainly not going to give you better relations with that country.”
Indeed, the risk of having Westerners arrested by hostile regimes may be a price worth paying to reduce spying against our countries. (And these days, Western citizens with no pressing need to visit hostile countries should avoid doing so.) Yes, Sinisalu conceded, hostile countries may retaliate with by arresting Westerners, “but if our guys are arrested in Russia, then there we have something we can use in negotiations with the Russians. If you come empty-handed, what are you going to do? Arrested spies are like a treasure that you can trade with them.”
Put differently, an expelled spy is a treasure unnecessarily relinquished. Modern Estonia came late to the counterintelligence game. But an immeasurable advantage of belonging to the Western alliance is that it’s composed of friends who can learn from one another. And at the very moment Western governments have to tackle growing espionage, there’s a country whose blueprints they can study. We may soon see more prosecutions of foreign spies.