Inside Putin’s Secret War: A Conversation with Former CIA Officer Sean Wiswesser
By Matthew Parish
Matthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief of the Lviv Herald, talks to former CIA operations officer Sean M. Wiswesser about Russian intelligence, recruitment, surveillance, kompromat and the methods by which Moscow’s intelligence services wage a clandestine struggle against the West.
There is a tendency to imagine espionage through the imagery that cinema has given us: dead drops beneath bridges, encrypted messages, beautiful women in hotel bars and men in raincoats following one another through darkened streets. The reality is at once more mundane and more unsettling. Intelligence work takes place amidst ordinary human relationships. It begins with dinners, introductions, friendships, professional opportunities and the endless weaknesses, ambitions and vanities that make human beings interesting to one another.
Sean M. Wiswesser knows this world from the inside. He spent nearly three decades in the CIA and wider American intelligence community working extensively on the Russian target. A Russian speaker with a longstanding interest in Russian history, literature and culture, he nevertheless came to regard the country’s security and intelligence apparatus as something quite different from the Russian people themselves. His concern about the loss of institutional knowledge concerning the Russian intelligence services eventually led him to lecture colleagues across the American intelligence community and, after retirement, to write Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War.
Published by Naval Institute Press in 2026, the book examines the SVR, GRU and FSB and the operational culture surrounding them. Its subjects include illegals, surveillance, dead drops and agent communications, double agents, honeytraps, technical espionage, sabotage, assassination, active measures and, finally, a case study of the Russian intelligence services’ role in the invasion of Ukraine. Wiswesser is explicit about his purpose. He wants to make Russian tradecraft better understood and therefore less effective.
I approached Sean because his book also intersects in curious ways with experiences of my own. My forthcoming book, The Spy: A Memoir, recounts a series of encounters with the Russian world in which it was not always immediately apparent where ordinary professional or social relationships ended and the activities of intelligence services began. The perspective is very different: Sean spent a career as a professional intelligence officer. I did not. That makes the comparison potentially illuminating.
This is the first part of our conversation.
Matthew Parish: Sean, perhaps the best place to begin is with the expression in the subtitle of your book: Putin’s Secret War. You argue that there is a conflict being conducted by Russia that is considerably broader than conventional warfare and that, in important respects, long predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. What exactly is this secret war? Who is it being fought against and when, in your view, did it begin?
Sean Wiswesser: The central argument of my book, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, is that Putin’s war against the West did not begin with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It did not even begin in 2014. For more than two decades, Russia’s intelligence and security services have been conducting what I call Putin’s Secret War — a sustained campaign against the United States, NATO, Europe and, ultimately, against democratic institutions themselves.
It includes espionage, cyber operations, sabotage, assassinations, election interference, information warfare and all the other “hybrid war” tactics. Their services are fed by corruption and practise coercion — the stick, not the carrot, as we say in espionage work. The most dangerous of their warfare techniques is what the Russians historically call “active measures”.
Ukraine is where this confrontation became a massive kinetic war, but the broader struggle is taking place far beyond Ukraine. The target is not simply one country, not any one political party, not even a President from any one country. The larger target is democracy itself. Putin wins when Western societies become divided, cynical, distrustful of their institutions and convinced that democracy does not work.
Matthew Parish: One of the things that struck me about your book is that Russian intelligence does not appear to regard espionage as a discrete activity in quite the way Westerners sometimes imagine it. Intelligence, diplomacy, business, organised crime, political influence, personal relationships and occasionally violence can seem to merge into one another. From your experience dealing with Russian intelligence, is that a fair description? Is there something fundamentally different about the institutional culture of Russian intelligence from that of the CIA and other Western services?
Sean Wiswesser: Yes. That is one of the most important differences I try to explain in the book.
Westerners often think of intelligence as a distinct government activity conducted within defined legal and institutional boundaries. Russia does not operate that way. Under Putin, intelligence, politics, business, corruption, organised crime and coercion frequently overlap and the Russian intelligence services are deeply embedded into the state, corporations and all of society.
Russia is fundamentally a kleptocratic system and the intelligence services are integral to that system. The FSB in particular resembles, in important respects, less a conventional Western intelligence service than a mafia organisation operating with the authority of the state. Its officers are not constrained by the kinds of laws, oversight and political prohibitions that constrain the CIA and other Western services.
That gives Russian intelligence enormous latitude, but it also introduces corruption, internal rivalries and the constant pressure to please the leadership. So the same system that feeds them makes the security service state deeply flawed and vulnerable to espionage. That is why, ultimately, we have won in the past — not just the CIA against their services, but the West against the USSR and now Russia.
It is why Ukraine will win too. In the end, freedom is something they cannot fight against. Our message wins in the end; we are on the right side of history.
Matthew Parish: We should probably pause over the alphabet soup, because outsiders often hear “Russian intelligence” and imagine a single organisation. Your book distinguishes principally between the SVR, GRU and FSB. How different are these organisations in practice? Do they possess different institutional cultures and methods, and what happens when their responsibilities overlap?
Sean Wiswesser: They are absolutely not interchangeable.
The SVR is Russia’s principal civilian foreign intelligence service and is the closest institutional successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence directorate. Traditional espionage abroad — recruiting human sources, running officers under diplomatic or other cover, influence operations and illegals — is central to its heritage.
The GRU is military intelligence. Its mandate is remarkably broad by Western standards: military intelligence, HUMINT, signals intelligence, cyber activity, sabotage and special operations. It is far broader than the US Defense Intelligence Agency and encompasses a huge swath of intelligence missions. The GRU — or GU, as it is known now as well — has also played a major role in Russia’s war in Ukraine and in aggressive operations throughout Europe.
The FSB is primarily Russia’s domestic security and counter-intelligence service, but under Putin its role extends far beyond anything Americans would recognise as an FBI-type organisation. It is a monolithic bureaucracy numbering probably over 400,000 officers across Russia, including some 200,000 border guards. The FSB is enormously powerful politically and has increasingly operated abroad, particularly involving Ukraine and Russia’s so-called “near abroad”. They use this term for Ukraine and the Baltics because they can’t accept that they are independent states and functioning democracies.
The Russian intelligence services — RIS, as we call them in the CIA and the US intelligence community — are not friendly towards one another. They compete. They are bitter rivals. Russian intelligence bureaucracies have always competed. And in Putin’s system, there is an additional incentive: everyone wants to impress the Boss, or the nachalnik, as they call him.
Matthew Parish: This brings me to an area in which your professional experience intersects rather intriguingly with mine. One theme of my forthcoming book, The Spy: A Memoir, is that recruitment rarely looks like recruitment when it begins. In my own encounters with Russians, what interested me in retrospect was the gradual accumulation of hospitality, introductions, opportunities, expensive dinners, access and implied obligations. There need never be a moment when somebody leans across a table and says, “Would you like to become a Russian spy?” How closely does that correspond with what you observed from the professional side of the intelligence contest?
Sean Wiswesser: Absolutely. Intelligence recruitment is usually a process, not a moment.
A professional intelligence officer does not normally meet someone and immediately announce, “I would like you to spy for Russia.” Relationships develop. Access develops. Trust develops. Boundaries move gradually. The Russians call the process razrabotka, or development, as I detail in the book.
That is precisely why good intelligence tradecraft can be so effective. The person being assessed may initially believe he is simply developing a friendship, a professional relationship or a useful contact. The Russians have degrees of recruitment and types of agents I detail in my work.
Eventually the intelligence officer wants to determine whether that relationship can be developed into something more. But ambiguity can be tremendously useful along the way.
Matthew Parish: That brings us to what intelligence professionals call spotting and assessing. Imagine that I am a Russian intelligence officer attached to an embassy and I meet an ambitious Western lawyer, businessman, diplomat, academic or journalist. What am I looking for? Popular culture tends to suggest money, but presumably human motivation is considerably more complicated. How important are vanity, loneliness, resentment, ideology, professional ambition or simply a person’s desire to feel important?
Sean Wiswesser: There is no single vulnerability, but the Russians rely on what they call “compromising material operations”, or kompromat. They want to use the stick, to coerce and extort eventually.
Money certainly matters, but popular culture exaggerates the idea that espionage is always about somebody receiving a suitcase of cash. Human beings are infinitely more complicated.
Ambition matters. Ego matters. Resentment matters. Ideology matters. A person’s desire for access, status, recognition or companionship may matter. So can greed or personal difficulties.
The fundamental task of an intelligence officer is understanding people: What does this person want? What does he need? What does he resent? What does he believe he deserves but has not received?
That human element is why HUMINT remains so important despite extraordinary advances in technology.
Matthew Parish: In The Spy, I describe a Russian whom I call K., whom I eventually came to understand as probably connected with the SVR and who at one point proposed introducing me to the Russian ambassador. What fascinated me in retrospect was precisely the ambiguity. There was no dramatic recruitment pitch. There was instead a succession of doors being opened. How deliberately do Russian intelligence officers preserve that ambiguity? Is part of the purpose to ensure that a person has travelled quite a long way before he appreciates the nature of the relationship?
Sean Wiswesser: Yes, and I think the ambiguity can itself be part of the tradecraft.
If someone believes he is simply accepting introductions, attending dinners, meeting interesting people or participating in legitimate professional opportunities, there is less psychological resistance than if he believes he is being formally recruited by an intelligence service.
Over time, those apparently innocuous steps can create obligations and relationships. The Russians take advantage of naïve academics, journalists and scientists. I share anecdotes and examples in the tactics described throughout my book and in my media appearances to raise awareness.
By the time the nature of the relationship becomes unmistakable, the person may already have travelled considerably farther than he ever intended. That gradual movement is far more realistic than the cinematic version of espionage. The Russians want to develop an emotional dependence. For example, in the case of their honeytraps — or lastochki in Russian — they want an emotional bond to develop as much as, or more than, just the sex involved.
Matthew Parish: Your book discusses surveillance and what the Russians traditionally call naruzhka. I learned in Moscow, and subsequently elsewhere, to ask myself a peculiar question: not merely, “Am I being watched?” but, “What do I want the people watching me to see?” How sophisticated is Russian physical surveillance today? Once somebody knows or strongly suspects that he is being watched, does the relationship between observer and observed itself become a psychological contest?
Sean Wiswesser: Russian physical surveillance has a very long tradition and naruzhka is deeply embedded in Russian intelligence culture. I spend a lot of time on this in Chapter 4 of the book.
But surveillance is not simply a technical exercise. It becomes a psychological contest between the watcher and the watched.
Once you believe you are under surveillance, everything changes. You begin thinking about what the surveillance team can see, what they believe they are seeing and what conclusions they may draw from it.
That is why counter-surveillance is not merely about detecting somebody behind you. It is about understanding the surveillance operation and, where appropriate, controlling what the adversary learns.
Matthew Parish: There is a further psychological dimension that is difficult to communicate to people who have never experienced surveillance. We tend instinctively to assume that if you notice the people watching you, they have failed. Yet sometimes letting somebody know that he is being watched may itself exert pressure. Have Russian services deliberately used conspicuous surveillance in this way?
Sean Wiswesser: Certainly. Russian society, as I relate, is one where everyone says “the walls have ears”. They are used to it — in the West we are not. Americans abhor the very idea of surveillance but, for the Russians, they are conditioned by their past to it.
Surveillance, or naruzhka as they call it, does not always fail merely because the target discovers it. Sometimes discovery may serve the Russian purpose. There is an enormous psychological difference between wondering whether someone is watching you and knowing that someone is watching you.
Russian security services have historically understood intimidation extremely well. In their own country particularly, the message can be very simple: We know where you are. We know whom you meet. We can reach you.
That is not surveillance merely for intelligence collection. It becomes coercion.
Matthew Parish: Let us turn to kompromat, because it is one of those Russian words that has entered the Western vocabulary without necessarily being understood very precisely. People tend to imagine incriminating photographs or recordings. But is the concept actually much broader? Does compromising material even have to be entirely true to be effective?
Sean Wiswesser: The Western understanding of kompromat is often too narrow. People imagine photographs of somebody committing an embarrassing act in a hotel room. That certainly exists, but compromising material can be far broader.
The objective is leverage.
Sometimes the information is genuine. Sometimes the circumstances have been manipulated. Sometimes only part of the story is true. And sometimes the mere threat of disclosure creates enough fear that the factual nuances become almost irrelevant.
That connects to a much broader Russian intelligence tradition: maskirovka — deception, concealment and creating uncertainty.
The target does not necessarily have to believe every allegation. He only has to fear what other people might believe.
Matthew Parish: The mythology of espionage is naturally fascinated by honeytraps: the beautiful woman, the hotel room and the hidden camera. Your book uses the wonderfully lurid expression “sexpionage”. Yet presumably the reality is more psychologically sophisticated than simply arranging for somebody to be photographed in a compromising position. What does sexual or romantic recruitment actually look like, and why does something everybody knows about nevertheless continue to work?
Sean Wiswesser: The mythology is entertaining — the beautiful woman, hidden cameras and hotel room — but the underlying method works because human vulnerability has not changed.
Russian intelligence has used sexual entrapment for generations. I discuss what I call “sexpionage” in the book as part of their broader repertoire of dirty tricks.
The important point is that the operation may not initially appear to be an operation. A relationship can appear genuine. Emotional attachment may develop. That can be far more powerful than simply photographing somebody in an embarrassing situation. In the case of Clayton Lonetree, the Marine at Embassy Moscow that I detail and go through in Chapter 6, they wanted an emotional bond to form, and it did.
Technology changes. Human beings do not change nearly as quickly. That is why techniques that worked against targets during the Cold War can still work today. The Russians love to use honeytraps of every flavour and variety.
Matthew Parish: There is a related subject that particularly interests me because it can seem so utterly innocent at the time: hospitality. I encountered environments in which extraordinary generosity itself became a kind of currency — dinners nobody seemed to pay for, introductions, parties and access to people whom one would not ordinarily meet. Yet hospitality is also simply a normal and pleasant part of human life. When does hospitality become tradecraft?
Sean Wiswesser: Sometimes you cannot identify the precise moment — and that can be exactly the point.
Dinner is dinner. A professional introduction may simply be a professional introduction. Hospitality is a normal part of diplomacy and business throughout the world.
But intelligence officers use ordinary human interaction as their operating environment.
When favours, introductions, access and generosity begin creating expectations or obligations, the nature of the relationship can gradually change.
Good tradecraft often exists precisely in that grey area where the target can still tell himself that nothing unusual is happening.
Matthew Parish: That seems to lead naturally to the final question for this first part of our conversation. Popular imagination supposes that somebody “becomes a spy” at a clearly identifiable moment: an offer is made, an agreement reached and from that moment the person is an agent. But your description of razrabotka suggests something much messier. Can somebody begin by providing apparently trivial assistance — an introduction, an observation, an opinion, perhaps even publicly available information — and only much later appreciate what sort of relationship he has entered?
Sean Wiswesser: Often reality is much messier.
People can begin by providing something that appears trivial: an introduction, an observation, an opinion or even information that seems publicly available. The Russians prey on what they call “useful idiots”, or those who align ideologically and whom the Russian intelligence services can take advantage of. We have lots of these in the West, I am sad to say.
The Cambridge Five were a spy ring who, for all their intellect, were essentially “useful idiots” whom a Russian illegal — Arnold Deutsch — recruited to betray Great Britain for the corrupt cause of a failed Soviet state. Kim Philby was MI6, British Intelligence, and he should have known better, but he fell into the mythology of the Soviet Union. Some say on his deathbed he realised how much folly that was.
To be continued.
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In Part II of this conversation, Sean Wiswesser and I will turn from the recruitment and cultivation of human beings to the darker reaches of Russian intelligence activity: organised crime, active measures, sabotage and assassination, the peculiar relationship between truth and deception in intelligence work and, above all, the role of Russia’s intelligence services in the war in Ukraine.
Sean M. Wiswesser’s Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War is published by Naval Institute Press. Wiswesser spent nearly three decades in the CIA and US intelligence community, principally working against the Russian intelligence target. The book was subjected to CIA prepublication review; its opinions and conclusions are Wiswesser’s own and do not represent the views of the CIA or other US government agencies.
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