Citat:
On a morning earlier this year, Ukraine’s top intelligence officials woke up to discover that the country's spy agency had been ransacked and torched by intruders who seemed to know what they were looking for.
The previous night, it turned out, the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, had ordered his operatives to steal a trove of state secrets from Ukraine's Security Service, known as the SBU, before fleeing to Moscow on Feb. 22.
During their raid on the spy agency, the thieves also stole data on more than 22,000 officers and informants as well as anything documenting decades of cooperation between the SBU and its Russian counterpart, the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
What the burglars weren't able to carry, they burned or destroyed. In the ruins of the offices, scorched files and empty folders lay strewn on the floors.
“Every hard drive and flash drive was destroyed — smashed with hammers,” said one current Ukrainian intelligence official recently. By the time he and his colleagues got there, "it was all ash and dust."
For a country in the shadow of Russia and embarking on an uncertain path toward democracy, the break-in was devastating.
As the current SBU director Valentyn Nalyvaichenko put it, the thieves took “everything that forms a basis for a professional intelligence service."
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So far, 235 agents, including the former counterintelligence chief and his cousin, and hundreds of other operatives believed to be working for Moscow, have been arrested and 25 high treason probes against Yanukovych-era SBU officials have been launched. All regional directors for the agency have changed, as well as half of their deputies.
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To overhaul the agency, the SBU has brought in scores of fresh recruits. But while the young agents come from more Kiev-friendly western regions of Ukraine, many of the recruits — who are mostly in their early twenties — have little experience. Still, the intelligence service has little choice.
“What is better, to have professional former KGB guys who probably still have more friends in [Russia] or have loyal young guys who can learn and who we can be confident he will not leak secrets to Russia?” said Melnyk.
And it may not be very hard to turn the new recruits as pay is meager — about $200 per month — and moonlighting as a Russian informant may pay "three, maybe four times more," according to one SBU officer.
To test their loyalty, new and old agents are subjected to recurrent interrogations and lie detector tests. But, as one security officer put it: “the rifle is the best lie detector.”