Don’t be fooled by Putin’s bungling spies

Suddenly Russian spies seem funny rather than fearsome. ‘More Johnny English than James Bond’ as Security Minister Ben Wallace put it, as if the Salisbury pair had not killed on British soil.

It’s certainly true that we have seen some big blunders on the part of the GRU, Russian military intelligence: Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins presenting themselves as innocent sports nutritionists with a taste for thirteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture. Hackers caught in the Netherlands with laptops that had not been sanitised between operations. The names of 305 GRU officers made public because they registered their cars at their base, presumably in order to avoid paying car tax. The unmasking today of the second Salisbury spook as Alexander Mishkin, a military doctor working for Russian intelligence, is just the latest blow to the reputation of Putin’s spy agencies.

Yet while it is comforting to think that all we face are bunglers and petty crooks, that way of thinking leads to dangerous complacency.