Not so lang ago, David Shambaugh, (who might be the leading American expert on the PRC armed forces) said that Russia isn’t selling China some of its more sophisticated weaponry for reasons which might relate to possible Russian fears about how such weapons might be used in the future.

The ability to qualitatively copy civilian technology doesn’t often match a similar talent when it comes to weapons systems.

‘Cold Sore’ again? Very old skool. Still, after the ‘peace dividend’ where spying budgets were slashed, economic espionage grew exponentially and in the last few years, budgets for ‘classic’ non-commercial espionage have boomed.

Russia in particular has put significant resources back into HUMINT (HUManINTelligence = spies), though considering what a pitiful state the FSB had been in for the last 15 years, its now back to ‘normal’. Still, the Russians aren’t nearly so clearly as obsessed as the West (the US in particular) with high-tech multi-billion dollar projects when a man(or woman) or two on the ground can do the same thing. Their buck goes further in that sense, though cheap microprocessors and intelligent software is often a very good alternative (the Russian government has recently announced that it will fund to the tune of a couple of billion dollars some latest generation silicon processing/microprocessor fabs (0.45 process)).

One day, we will find out how much the West managed to purloin from Russia during the dark years of the 1990s. We know of intelligence fronts like Edmund Pope, a ‘former’ intelligence officer (who are they kidding?) who were arrested and finally sent home, but not much at all about all the others.

The use of ‘fronts’ also makes it very difficult for legitimate researchers to do their jobs. For example the case of the former north sea fleet submariner Nikitin(sp?) who work/ed for the Bellona foundation researching radioactive leakages from old subs.

Unfortunately, it seems as if most of the ‘old rules’ about spy covers has gone out the window such as not using journalists as spies or members of the UN (particularly Bosnia & Kosovo where they gathered targeting data and spied on each other too), NGOs and supposedly ‘neutral’ organisations but this has always happened to a degree.

The big increase by far is in economic espionage, the US being famously uncovered for bugging various delegations during talks on globalization, the french nicking economic data, confidential airbus documents going missing etc. etc.

What is also interesting (but not surprising) is that no mention is made on the level of chinese espionage against Russia. Every now and then there is a ‘small’ story of industrial/military espionage, but nothing that they have considered for a good rattling in the media.