Rick Spence

The fellow who was the head of the chief revolutionary terrorist organization, which wasn't Bolshevik, but the so-called socialist revolutionaries, actually the biggest revolutionary party, the SRs, who aren't even actually Marxists, more anarchists. But they went all in for the propaganda of the deed. They really like blowing people up and carry out quite a campaign of terrorism.

The fellow who was the head of that terrorist organization was a fellow by the name of Yevno Azev. And Yevno Azev was, guess what? An Okhrana agent. Everything he did, every assassination that he planned, he did in consultation with his control. So he kind of run out his string. There was increasing suspicion of him. He was also asking for a lot more money.

So the Akrona itself arranged to have him ride it out. And what did that do? Well, what do you do in your party when you find out the chief of your terrorist brigade was a secret police agent? It's consternation and mistrust. Nobody in the party would ever trust and you couldn't tell who you were sitting around. I know that a fellow I wrote a biography on, Boris Sevenkov, who was a

Russian revolutionary, and the second in command within the terrorist organization. By the way, the guy that wanted Azev's job so bad he could taste it. Well, on the one level, he expressed absolute horror that his boss was a police agent. And well, he should, because Savinkov was a police agent too. See, they already had the number two waiting in the wings to take over.

But he was legitimately shocked. He didn't really suspect that. So it's a way of manipulating this. And then finally we come to the E. That, I think, is the most important. Ego. Sometimes people spy or betray because of the egotistical satisfaction that they receive. The sheer kind of Machiavellian joy in deceit. An example of that would be Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five.

Now, Philby was a communist, and he would argue that he always saw himself as serving the communist cause. But he also made this statement, I think it's in the preface to his autobiography, and he says, "...one never looks twice at the offer of service in elite force." And he's talking about his recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s. And he was absolutely chuffed by that.

The mere fact that they would want him, what he considered to be a first-rate organization would want him, satisfied his ego. And if I was to take a guess as to whether it was... ideological motivation, whether it was the romance of communism or whether it was the appeal of ego that was the most important in his career of treason, I'd go with ego. And I think that figures into a lot.

You know, people don't, someone doesn't get the promotions that they wanted. Again, if you look at something like Aldrich Ames' career in particular, you've got these kind of, his career in the CIA was hit or miss. He didn't get the postings or promotions that he wanted as a valuation. He never felt that he got credit for doing that.

And that's the type of thing that tends to stick in someone's craw and can lead for egotistical reasons and added incentive to betray.

You're the only one that knows that the person who is sitting across from you to which you have sworn your loyalty, you are simultaneously betraying. What a rush that must be for some people.

It can also be a combination of the two. I mean, you can create a recipe of these things.

Certain amount of money, ego, and a little push of coercion.

If you look at both the Okhrana and the KGB, one of the things that you find consistent is that a single organization handled foreign intelligence, that is, spying upon hostile governments, and also internal security. So that's all part of it. Whereas if you look at the U.S.

models that evolves, you eventually have the FBI, who under Hoover, quite insists that he's going to be the counterintelligence force. If there are commie spies running around America, it's the FBI who's supposed to ferret them out. The CIA is not supposed to be involved in that.

The charter, the basic agreement in 1947, did not give the CIA any... It's often said they were barred from spying on Americans, which isn't quite true. You can always find a way to do that. What they don't have is they don't have any police or judicial powers. They can't run around in the country carrying guns to use on people. They can't arrest you. They can't interrogate you.

They can't jail you. they have no police or judicial powers. Now, that means they have to get that from someone else. That doesn't mean that other agencies can't be brought in or local police officials, corn, or whatever you need, you can eventually acquire. But they can't do that directly.

So you've got this division between foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence, often split between hostile organizations. The relationship between the FBI and the CIA, I think it's fair to say, is not chummy, never has been. There's always been a certain amount of rivalry and contention between the two. And it's not to say that something like that didn't exist between the

domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence components of the KGB. But there would be less of that to a degree because there was a single organization. They're all answerable to the same people. So that gives you a certain greater amount, I think, of leeway and power because you're controlling both of those ends.

I remember somebody telling me once that, and he was a retired KGB officer. There you go. Retired. One of the things that he found amusing was that in his role, one of the things that he could be is that he could be anywhere at any time in any dress. which meant that he could be in or out of uniform and any place at any time. He was authorized to do that. So more freedom, more power.

I think one of the things that you would often have the view is that the Russians are simply naturally meaner. There's less respect for human rights. There's a greater tendency to abuse power that one might have. I mean, frankly, they're all pretty good at that.