Monthly WIN Short-Form Book Review

Sean M. Wiswesser’s Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks (Naval Institute Press, 2026) is a rare find in the contemporary library of works dedicated to chronicling the activities of the Russian Intelligence Services (RIS).  The author’s operational career afforded him extensive face-to-face interactions with RIS officers, either those targeted for recruitment abroad or those already resettled after successfully concluding their espionage work on behalf of the U.S.  He makes deft use of both his and their stories, as well as “inside baseball” anecdotes to portray the day-to-day human side of Russian intelligence work.  

Since “What’s past is prologue,” the author traces the long and bloody czarist, then Soviet history of terror that has coalesced into the intelligence and security bureaucracies that we know today as the RIS.  His detailed organizational blueprint may be slow going for the novice, but the teaching point is clear:  the RIS is not a monolith but rather a hydra of agencies, departments, military units, academies, directorates, and institutes, each with its own specialized expertise and foibles.

The real achievement of the book is the telling of the RIS story from the viewpoint of the individual RIS officer.  If you’ve ever wondered what RIS officers sound like in conversation about their daily work, this book aims to fill that need.  Their lives are beyond stressful:  years of training, indoctrination into the absurdities (and dishonesty) of Russian bureaucratic life, hazing, the pressure to collect intelligence (either real or imagined), academic corruption, financial corruption, bribery, etc.  It’s no wonder that vodka is an RIS daily staple.

Widespread diplomatic recognition of the fledgling Soviet state in the years immediately following the 1917 revolution came slowly.  Illegals dispatched without diplomatic cover or immunity were already an established Czarist tool, so illegal-centric intelligence operations and collection continued unabated into the early Soviet times and continues worldwide to this day.  Mr. Wiswesser’s chapter on RIS illegals is especially rich with examples of illegals, their successes and failures over the last one hundred years.  He intersperses a review of these cases with some startling never-before-published vignettes that will convince the reader of the difficulties inherent in the RIS illegals program.  The glaring exceptions, of course, are the well-publicized and quite terrifying lethal assassinations that have taken place in the West’s backyard.

When it comes to RIS information and influence operations, credit to Mr. Wiswesser’s ability to maintain his intelligence officer credentials and to avoid signing on to the various partisan narratives that have competed for attention in the U.S. news cycle.  Disinformation, misinformation, politology, active measures, dirty tricks, influence operations, and propaganda are all valid and related terms that trace their DNA to Lenin’s views on the importance of agitation and propaganda to achieve Soviet revolutionary goals abroad.  Putin’s entire educational experience is in fact Leninist, so it is no surprise that Mr. Wiswesser stresses that RIS active measures mirror Lenin’s views that (bourgeois) democracy is inherently weak and that its contradictory divisions are ripe for RIS exploitation and disruption.  Cheerleading one side or another is at cross purposes with this mindset.  The author provides a most readable and authoritative account of the RIS’ spreading of false narratives about US election integrity and other disturbing themes designed to inflame and to agitate the U.S. population. 

The case study on the Ukraine war brings the reader full circle and into the present day with an analysis of the RIS performance in pre-war planning and the post-invasion conduct of hybrid warfare.  Where did Russian and RIS planning go wrong?  How did the RIS contribute, if at all, to the failure to achieve a quick and decisive victory?  Has Putin now lost faith in his favorite power ministries?   There will be no spoilers here, but suffice to say that the author delves headfirst into these questions.

Mr. Wiswesser’s comprehensive compendium of RIS history and his exploration of their present-day policymaking input into Putin’s decision-making will be of interest to the next generation of Russophile intelligence officers, analysts, and anyone who follows the predictably unpredictable decision-making of the USA’s main foreign affairs antagonist.  “Cold Warriors” will enjoy the espionage retrospective that covers everything from the Clayton Lonetree case to the bugging of the U.S. State Department conference room—serious cases with serious lessons learned that should never be forgotten.  

As reported in the book, RIS officers drink to the following toast: “We beat them, we are beating them, we will beat them.”  Not on our watch. 

AFIO member Charles Jones is a retired CIA Operations Officer with overseas experience working the Russian target. He holds a M.A. in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown University.