Fight club: Russian spies seek EU recruits
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.
Russian intelligence services are using martial arts clubs to recruit potential troublemakers in Germany and other EU countries, security experts have warned.
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 recent
documentary by Germany's ZDF broadcaster also raised the alarm on Chechen agents.
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”.
