In an interview with Russia's National Defense magazine last week, the director of that nation's foreign intelligence service reminded us of his penchant for creative fiction.

Sergei Naryshkin leads the SVR, Russia's successor to the Soviet Union's KGB First Chief Directorate. This is a history in which Naryshkin, a Putin loyalist of aristocratic heritage, takes great pride. Evincing as much, Naryshkin returned to a familiar refrain: the so-called "Cambridge Five." This was a group of United Kingdom agents the KGB operated between the 1930s-1950s. It was the gold standard success for Soviet human intelligence operations in the Cold War, doing much damage to Anglo-American operations.

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It is a point of great Russian pride that the Cambridge Five were motivated to spy for the Soviet Union based on their ideological sympathies for Communism.

But this is very rarely the case for the SVR today. The CIA and Britain's MI6 are often able to recruit foreign officials due to those individuals' disaffection with their autocratic or corrupt governments. Russian officials have also recently offered to spy for the West in response to their disenchantment with the war in Ukraine. For the SVR, Vladimir Putin's mafia state rarely offers a motive for foreigners to commit treason. Instead, the two main methods of SVR agent recruitment are compromise/blackmail and money.

This is not a reality that Naryshkin likes to admit. Hence, his more heroic fiction as to how the SVR recruits its agents.

The SVR is able to recruit agents, Naryshkin says, because they share Moscow's desire to "build a multi-polar world on the principles of sovereignty, equality and mutual respect for countries and peoples, in preserving universal human values, getting rid of the dominance of transnational elites... the fight against international terrorism and [Nazis]."

See?

Just as the Soviet Union was fighting for human equality and liberation, or what Naryshkin calls the KGB's effort to defeat "colonial oppression and achieve sovereignty and independence," the SVR is helping challenge an immoral American hegemony. A thin fiction, maybe, but one the SVR revels in. Indeed, the delivery of fiction as fact is a centerpiece of Russian intelligence modus operandi reaching back to the Tsars.

This fiction-fetish sometimes has success but often gets absurd. In 2020, for example, Naryshkin invented a supposed CIA plot to assassinate Catholic clergy in Belarus. The plot did not exist.

Still, there's a practical element to Naryshkin that sets him apart from his GRU military intelligence service colleague and rival, Admiral Igor Kostyukov, and imperial fantasists such as Nikolai Patrushev. Asked by the interviewer about his meetings with CIA Director Bill Burns, Naryshkin endorsed dialogue. But he couldn't resist a dig: "Even in such a businesslike face-to-face conversation," the former Russian parliamentarian said, "[the CIA] cannot free themselves from the use of ideological clichés."

This is the height of hypocrisy coming from an SVR director. After all, senior Russian intelligence officers are renowned — Putin does the same — for using meetings with U.S. and British counterparts to offer long-winded lectures on the wrongs that they have committed to earn Russia's mistrust and ire. It's a running joke in the U.S.-U.K. intelligence community that any even semi-productive dialogue with the Russians doesn't actually start until about an hour into a meeting. And, at least on the U.K. side, a semi-serious assessment that the best way to get the Russians talking substantively is to meet them at a bar.

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This is not to say that the SVR is a clown show. It carries a professionalism superior to that of the reflexively vicious GRU. It has a small number of highly talented officers. The SVR is also adept at manipulating the lies of others to bolster its own deceptions. And the intelligence service has had its share of major successes in recent years, such as the Solar Winds cyber-hack.

In the end, however, this interview reminds us that Naryshkin and his service revel in the realm of fiction as much as they do reality. This is partly why Putin regularly gets such inaccurate intelligence briefings.