May 23, 2017
Russian
intelligence services are using martial arts clubs to recruit potential
troublemakers in Germany and other EU countries, security experts have warned.
The number of
clubs is higher than previously reported and the “sleeper cells” could stage
violent provocations ahead of the upcoming German elections, they said.
The warnings come
amid concerns by enemies of the Russian state who live in the EU that they
could be harmed for their work.
The martial arts
clubs, which teach an offensive style called “systema”, all have “direct or
indirect” links to the GRU military intelligence or FSB domestic intelligence
services in Russia, according to Dmitrij Chmelnizki, a scholar of Russian
espionage who lives in Berlin.
He said the GRU
was using them to recruit agents in the West the same way that it used to when
it had bases in the former East Germany in Cold War times.
His investigation
found 63 systema clubs in Germany and dozens more in
other EU states, in the Western Balkans, and in North America.
Many of the clubs
publicly boasted that they had links to Russian special forces and used GRU or
FSB insignia, such as images of bats or of St. George.
“None of this is
a secret to the German authorities, I hope”, Chmelnizki said.
The 63-year old
academic fled from Russia to the then West Germany in 1987 after being put on
trial for doing research on the KGB, the former name of the FSB.
He conducted his
investigation of the systema clubs using open sources on the internet. He also
did it in collaboration with Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU officer who was
posted in Geneva, Switzerland, during the Cold War before he moved to the UK.
Chmelnizki told
EUobserver that based on an estimate of “approximately three to five agents on
average for a training group”, the 63 clubs in Germany meant that the GRU’s
fifth column there could number up to 315 recruits.
According to GRU
doctrine, these agents could be used to attack targets such as military bases
or civilian airports if war broke out with Nato, but they could also be ordered
to create “general terror in the enemy’s rear” or “an atmosphere of suspicion,
insecurity, and fear” in an enemy country’s population during peacetime.
“They are
organising combat sleeper cells”, Chmelnizki said.
Looking ahead to
the German elections in September, he said that Russian agents could try to
start a cycle of racist violence during the vote. “They could be used to
destabilise the situation, for instance by instigating violence during
anti-government demonstrations, or by throwing molotov cocktails at a mosque or
a migrant shelter”, he said.
He said the
Systema Wolf school was of “special interest” because it was “developing very
fast” in Europe.
It has, in just
seven years, opened branches in Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Serbia, and
Switzerland and it has created a German chapter of the Night Wolves, a Russian
biker gang whose leader is friends with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Chmelnizki said
the Systema RMA school appeared to be targeting recruits inside German security
services.
He noted that
five alumni from its club in Bonn were from Germany’s special police, for
instance.
Chmelnizki said
he wanted to speak out because he felt unsafe and because the publicity might
help to protect him.
“So far, I have
not had any clear threats, but I know who I’m dealing with”, he told
EUobserver.
“The GRU feels
just as at home today in united Germany as it used to in the former USSR”, he
said.
A previous investigation by Boris Reitschuster, a German journalist,
published last year, also said the GRU was using systema clubs to recruit
agents.
It cited a
classified report by a Western intelligence service, which said the GRU had
recruited 250 to 300 agents in Germany and that the foreign service was
surprised the German authorities had done nothing to stop it.
An earlier report by Focus, a German magazine, said there were
systema clubs in 30 German cities and that the BfV, the country’s domestic
intelligence service, saw them as a security threat.
A senior FSB
officer who quit the service in 2008 told ZDF that the FSB had used martial
arts clubs in Chechnya, a Russian province, to recruit men whom it later sent
to Germany posing as refugees.
The Chechen
“sleepers” could be “given any kind of order,” said the FSB officer, who asked
to remain anonymous.
EUobserver
contacted the largest systema school, Systema Ryabko, for a comment on
Chmelnizki and Reitschuster’s allegations.
It said by email
from its office in Toronto, Canada, without giving the name of the respondent:
“The allegations you heard are a fruit of someone's malicious imagination and
are completely false”.
German elections
With the German
election four months away, the GRU already stands accused of trying to meddle
in the outcome by hacking German MPs.
“We recognise
this [cyber attack] as a campaign being directed from Russia”, the BfV
director, Hans-Georg Massen, said at a conference in Potsdam, Germany, on 5
May.
“Whether they do
it [use the hacked material] or not is a political decision ... that I assume
will be made in the Kremlin”, he said.
German
intelligence and police services declined to comment if they thought that
Russian intelligence services posed a physical threat as well as a digital one.
“We do not
disclose our security concepts”, a Berlin police spokesman said.
Stefan Meister, a
German expert on Russia, said Russian intelligence was targeting Germany as
part of a wider anti-EU campaign, but he said it was unlikely that the Kremlin
would go beyond propaganda and cyber operations.
Meister, from the
German Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in Berlin, told EUobserver
that the Russian general staff and intelligence services first discussed how to
counter Western influence after anti-Putin protests in Russia in 2011 and 2012.
He said Putin,
who is a former FSB director, felt “under attack” by the West, whom the Russian
leader blamed for organising the rallies.
“The Kremlin
discussed how to fight back, how to meddle in our societies, how to manipulate
public debate, how to exploit EU weaknesses to disable the EU,” Meister
said.
He said Germany
was a “target” because it backed EU sanctions on Russia and because it was
vital to EU economic and political stability.
Meister, who took
part in the ZDF documentary, added that there was “speculation” in “expert
circles” in Germany that either Putin or Ramzan Kadyrov, the governor of
Chechnya, could use Chechen agents to “influence the Muslim community in Europe
and support them in organising terrorist attacks”.
But he added:
“That is not the way the Russian security forces work. They want to weaken the
[German] system, show its weaknesses, but they don't want to organise some kind
of coup”.
There was “panic
and overestimation” in terms of “what the Russians were capable of”, he said.
Another Russia
expert disagreed.
Eerik-Niiles
Kross, who used to hunt Russian spies when he led Estonia’s security service,
the Kapo, from 1995 to 2000, said that an anti-government rally in Berlin last
year already “bore the hallmarks” of a “special operation” by Russian
intelligence that was designed to influence German politics.
The International
Convention of German-Russians, a Berlin-based group that denies having links to
the Kremlin, put 700 men and women on the street outside German chancellor
Angela Merkel’s office on 23 January last year.
It called on
anti-Muslim and neo-Nazi extremists to join them via Facebook.
It held the rally
in conjunction with a Kremlin-sponsored propaganda campaign about fake
allegations that migrants had raped a Russian girl.
’Systematic,
aggressive’
Germany aside,
Chmelnizki’s investigation showed that GRU and FSB-linked martial arts clubs
have also mushroomed elsewhere in Europe.
He said there
were nine systema-type schools whose founders were “all officers of the GRU or
KGB-FSB” and whose “intense” foreign expansion in the past 10 years had “no
visible natural explanation”.
The expansion
looked like a “well-thought-out, large-scale operation of the secret services
with powerful government funding”, he said.
The Systema
Ryabko school, for instance, has branches in Austria, Belgium, the Czech
Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg,
the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and
the UK as well as Germany.
The Systema
Siberian Cossack school has students in Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK.
Another systema
school associated with Vadim Starov, whom Chmelnizki described as “a GRU
officer who only formally retired”, has branches in Cyprus, Greece, and Italy
and was the “most blatant” in its use of GRU insignia and slogans, he said.
Kross, the former
Kapo chief from Estonia, said EU authorities should pay more attention to
Russian intelligence "special operations".
He noted that GRU
officers recently gave combat training to a neo-Nazi group in
Hungary, the Hungarian National Front, and to similar groups in Slovakia, the Slovak Conscripts
and the Slovak Revival Movement.
Looking at the
GRU-alleged cyber attacks on German elections, he said special operations were
more “aggressive” and “dangerous”.
“A cyber attack
can cause a lot of damage, but this requires posting a team of covert
operatives to the target country”, he said.
“Russia’s recent
use of special operations in Europe seems to be more than just a list of random
incidents. There’s a systematic increase and it’s going on not just in the
Western Balkans, but also in the rest of Europe,” Kross said.
Mark Galeotti, a
British expert on Russia, told EUobserver that Russian intelligence sometimes
outsourced tasks to Russian organised crime groups in Europe to conceal its
hand.
“There is
evidence that some Russian-based organised crime groups are sometimes
contracted by Russian intelligence to carry out certain acts,” he said.
Galeotti, from
the Institute of International Relations in Prague, said in a report out in April that Russian criminals
in Germany were doing “mundane” tasks for Russian spies, such as “simple
surveillance” or delivering “materials or messages”.
He said the GRU
and FSB used the Russian mafia “to raise operational funds for active political
measures [bribes] in Europe that had no Russian ‘fingerprints’ on them”.
Pointing to the
GRU combat training in Hungary and to the GRU-alleged coup in Montenegro, he
said the mafia could also help the Kremlin’s fifth column in Europe to carry
out more serious attacks if hostilities broke out.
The Russian
mafia’s “capacity … to smuggle weapons and military equipment” into the EU
would be “of particular use to the Kremlin”, Galeotti said.
Putin’s list
Chmelnizki was
not the only enemy of Putin living in Europe who did not feel protected by the
EU or Nato border.
Egmont Koch, who
made the ZDF documentary on Chechen agents, told EUobserver that the former FSB
officer to whom he spoke wanted to remain anonymous because he feared
reprisals.
A list of
Kremlin-alleged killings on Western territory in recent times would include
Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB defector, who was poisoned in the UK in 2006, and
Alexander Peripilichny, an anti-FSB whistleblower, who died suddenly in the UK
in 2012, among others.
The sudden deaths
in Germany of two top MPs on Russia relations – Philipp Missfelder in 2015 and
Andreas Schockenhoff in 2014 – also prompted conspiracy theories.
Meister, from the
German think tank, told EUobserver that he knew Missfelder and that the MP had
been in poor health, but said some of his associates felt that the two deaths
“couldn’t be normal”.
Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oil chief who fell out with Putin and who fled
to the UK, also told this website that EU states should pay more attention to
physical threats posed by Russian intelligence.
He added, echoing
Galeotti, that if the Russian regime wanted to kill him, it would probably
outsource it to Chechen criminals in Austria.
Khodorkovsky said
that Russian intelligence services had a list of people in Europe “whose death
would be a pleasant thing for Putin and his circle”.
“The list is not
that short. It’s not hundreds of people either, but even if you killed just 10
people that would make everyone else think,” he said, referring to intimidation
of Putin’s adversaries in the West.
“The West stopped
thinking about Russian special operations about 30 years ago [when the USSR
fell], but it needs to understand and view this threat differently today,” he
said.
Correction on 26
May 2017: The article incorrectly stated that Andreas Schockenhoff died in
2015. In fact, he died in 2014.
Andrew Rettman
