THE KREMLIN FILES / COLUMN — There are similarities among intelligence agencies worldwide. All professional services rely on tradecraft to recruit and manage assets. They all operate within bureaucratic systems and ultimately answer to political leaders. At a basic level, espionage tradecraft is a common professional language. However, Russian intelligence services (RIS) differ significantly from their Western counterparts in several key aspects. First, their primary mission is not to serve the interests of the Russian people, nor to protect the country's constitution; instead, their loyalty is to the regime and Putin’s personal political survival. And secondly, in terms of tradecraft, they differ from the CIA and other Western services in their approach and tactics. One of the most important—and often misunderstood—aspects of Russian intelligence is their use of double agents, known in Russian intelligence doctrine as operational games (operativnye igry).
For Russian intelligence, operational games are not just niche skills or occasional counterintelligence tactics. They are fundamental. Double agent operations are central to how Russian agencies define success, justify their importance, and maintain their institutional identity. Whether other collection methods succeed or fail, the RIS reliably and continually default back to operational games. Therefore, understanding how and why the RIS use double agents is essential to understanding Russian intelligence itself.
Before examining how these operations work, it is important to get the terminology right, and something that even experienced national security reporters, espionage writers, and analysts in the West frequently get wrong. The term double agent is often misapplied to describe penetrations of one intelligence service by another. In reality, these are two very different phenomena.
A penetration is an agent who betrays their own service to spy for a foreign power. Aldrich Ames, who recently passed away three decades after he was arrested, was a traitor and a penetration of the CIA by Russian intelligence. He was not a double agent.
A double agent, by contrast, is an intelligence asset who is knowingly and deliberately directed by one service to engage another in espionage. The controlling service uses that agent to feed information (called feed material) —true, false, or mixed—to the adversary. They do so to simultaneously study the adversary’s tradecraft, collection priorities, and decision-making.
In the Russian system, double agents also serve a bureaucratic function: they generate statistics, “success stories,” and operational narratives that demonstrate effectiveness to political overseers and ultimately to Putin himself. Putin knows this; after all, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB Second Chief Directorate (responsible for Counterintelligence for the USSR), and he later headed the FSB himself.
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Double agents are used in the West and by the U.S. services, but we don’t lie to our government about the origins of the cases or pretend they are real counterintelligence successes when they reach their conclusion. The distinction is not academic. It lies at the heart of how Russian intelligence thinks about espionage. Every year, the FSB publishes an annual report and claims statistics on hundreds of alleged spies it has caught. The vast majority of them are invented, manufactured, or the FSB’s own double agents. In other words, they are not real cases.
Russian services employ multiple varieties of double agents and operational games. They have many names, including the initsiativnik, which is a false volunteer who often “walks in” to an embassy. Also used is the podstava, or dangle, in which Russian services will use the routine of an intelligence officer, diplomat, or journalist and insert the “dangle” right in front of the target at a gym, reception, or other function to appeal to the target. There are still more different varieties and names for other types of double agents.
These operations are not limited to targeting foreign intelligence services. They are also used against businesspeople, journalists, diplomats, nongovernmental organizations, and even Russian citizens themselves. The objective is often not solely intelligence collection, but also control, as the Russians say, to have the target “pod kontrolem,” or under 100% operational control and influence. That is why the Russians prefer, though not exclusively, to carry out double agent operations on Russian soil. Abroad, they are less confident that the SVR or GRU can fully control their double agent during meetings with the adversary.
The end goal is to ensnare, compromise, manipulate, arrest, or extort targets for recruitment and long-term exploitation. A few examples from history help illustrate Russian intelligence’s fixation on double agents, dating back to its earliest institutional roots.
The Cheka and later the NKVD/OGPU perfected operational games in the 1920s through landmark deceptions such as Operation TRUST. With the TRUST operation, the OGPU (Soviet counterintelligence at the time, another forerunner of the KGB) created a fictitious anti-Bolshevik underground to lure in Western intelligence services and Russian émigrés. TRUST sent intelligence officers to the West, or cooptees, who they intimidated to pose as members of this fake organization that claimed to stand against the Bolsheviks.
The operation ran for years, successfully feeding disinformation to multiple foreign services while identifying, neutralizing, or recruiting their agents. They often lured Russians home to “help in operations” only to have them arrested, interrogated, and usually shot in the back of the head in a Chekist-style vyshama mera (highest measure) execution. The TRUST culminated in the capture of the famous British intelligence officer Sidney Reilly, one of the most celebrated spies of the era, who was executed in a similar fashion.
That double-agent tradition continued throughout the Cold War, when Soviet intelligence used double agents not merely to mislead adversaries but also to validate its own competence. Kim Philby, while often remembered in the West as a Soviet penetration of British intelligence, was also used as part of broader operational games to shape Western threat perceptions and protect other Soviet assets. Scores of Western intelligence officers or special operations team members were wrapped up in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe immediately after World War II, the victims of KGB and OGPU/GRU operational games Philby had detailed to the USSR. Most were eventually executed.
In later decades, the KGB ran controlled double agents against Western services to exaggerate Soviet capabilities, mask vulnerabilities, and manipulate counterintelligence priorities. The Soviet KGB ran a wave of double-agents at the CIA in the late 1980s with false feed material to explain the 1985 U.S. intelligence losses. Rick Ames volunteered and compromised a dozen agents working for the CIA and FBI (Ames was not arrested till 1994). The KGB and later SVR used these operational games and false volunteers to protect him, trying to give CIA and the broader U.S. IC reasons why the compromise may have happened (Circle of Treason is a classic read on this period and all the various games the KGB was playing to protect Ames with false feeds to CIA and the FBI).
These operations reinforced an internal belief that intelligence success could be measured by how convincingly one could influence the enemy’s perception of reality. In Russian intelligence culture, the double agent is not an exception — it is the ideal. In today’s FSB, however, as well as their foreign counterparts, the SVR, the double agent too often is used to justify their very own existence, instead of paying dividends in terms of tradecraft learned or secrets protected. Operations like TRUST are mostly a relic of the past. Today, the FSB is too busy entrapping innocent foreigners like basketball players, teachers, and NGO workers.
The U.S. IC and our Western allies have learned over the decades that the FSB/SVR and GRU have presented double-agent cases to their political leadership as if they were genuine agents caught and arrested, all the while the case was simply that they were double agents. They feed statistics from the FSB each year about exaggerated intelligence operations—more than all the services in the world could carry out against Russia—and also claim to have thwarted all of them. These reports reach Putin and the Presidential Administration to justify larger budgets, which in turn breed more corruption and line the pockets of senior and middle managers.
This is not unique to Russia; it is often the case across the former Soviet countries of Central Asia, where many of the services remain close and subservient to the Russian FSB and SVR. These services, often serving despotic regimes, swear by double agent operations because, in many cases and over many years, the only “spies” they can really uncover are those they falsely created under a double agent operation. They use them against a range of unwitting foreign citizens, including in legitimate business practices, to extort them and their companies for money when brought up on false charges.
The practice has been expanded in recent years by the Russian FSB, particularly its counterintelligence division, DKRO (the Department of Counterintelligence Operations), which uses double agents against journalists, businesspeople, and others to trap them and hold them hostage for exchanges with the West. DKRO was responsible for the false arrest and imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich before his 2024 swap with the West.
In sum, operational games and the double agents associated with them allow Russian intelligence to shape narratives, manufacture threats, and create the appearance of omnipresence. They are dirty tricks elevated to doctrine. And they remain one of Moscow’s most effective tools for compensating for broader institutional weaknesses.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
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