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Russian spy boss welcomes new Western cooperation
By Robert Eksuzyan
MOSCOW, Dec 20 (Reuters) - The head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency, in a rare interview published on Thursday, welcomed new cooperation with the West but feared it would be forgotten once the U.S.-led anti-terrorist campaign was over.
Sergei Lebedev, interviewed by the mass circulation Trud daily, also said his intelligence work was made easier by the fact that President Vladimir Putin was a former spy. He acknowledged that he and Putin had served at the same time in the former East Germany, but had never met then.
Lebedev, 53, refused to comment on the failure by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation to prevent the September 11 attacks on U.S. landmarks, saying there was "much to be learned from their bitter experience."
But events, he said, had forged new links with Washington.
"A real turning point occurred after September 11. Exchanges of information between the countries of the world community now take place on a different, improved level," he told the daily.
"Such exchanges were previously periodic and spontaneous, whereas now they are more constant. The world became more clever and came to understand the main threat came not from one or two countries but from a phenomenon -- international terrorism."
But Lebedev said he was worried what the future might hold.
"Suppose the operation in Afghanistan is completed and (Saudi-born millionaire Osama) bin Laden is found and all of a sudden everyone goes back to their 'own camps'," he said.
"Will we again believe that each side has its own terrorists, its own cockroaches to be rid of? In the next few years, we will see whether mankind has become smarter after this drama or whether memory endures only a few years."
He said the two sides had exchanged information concerning "threats to human life," but could disclose no more.
CAREER IN GERMANY, UNITED STATES
Lebedev was born in Soviet Uzbekistan and had intelligence training in Ukraine. He worked for 20 years in Germany, East and West and post-reunification, and in the United States before Putin appointed him to his current job in May 2000.
His public pronouncements are rare, though he did offer to help Washington after the September attacks.
Lebedev told Trud working with Putin was easy.
Putin was a KGB agent for 15 years, including a 1984-90 stint in Dresden in East Germany, and went on to head the post-Soviet FSB domestic intelligence agency before becoming prime minister and then president on New Year's Eve 1999.
"Naturally, the president's understanding of intelligence problems, of specific issues of such activity, makes it easy for me to talk to him," Lebedev told Trud.
"If I need to, I can speak to the president at any moment. ...Yes, we worked together in the German region, but never met. This was no deliberate conspiracy, it just happened that way."
Lebedev said he viewed "with the deepest contempt" traitors who had given away Russian spies operating abroad. Criminal cases had been launched against them, he said, but Russian intelligence had long abandoned exotic methods like "someone being run over by a car or pricked by an umbrella."
He said young people were now coming to work for the intelligence services, but acknowledged problems like low pay.
"At the moment, we are getting excellent guys. And they know full well that they are not liable to get the highest standards of living," he said. "The salaries of our foreign-based staff are not bad. And I constantly fight for higher pay for those in Moscow. Russian intelligence deserves better."
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