Listen to former Russian FSB officer and whistleblower Janosh Neumann | True Spies: The Money Spy. Neumann was given three options after grumbling about GRU spy agency corruption - shoot himself in the head, ask someone else to do it for him, or run.

Spying allegations against Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich have put the spotlight on Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s main successor once run by Vladimir Putin. Among its many roles, the domestic agency oversees internal security, counterintelligence, and revokes the press visas of foreign media who criticize the regime. Gershkovich’s arrest ups the ante as the espionage charge carries a prison term of up to 20 years.

"It’s certainly alarming that Russia would arrest an American journalist accredited by the Russian government. But we know Russia doesn’t play by the rules," said Alex Finley, a former CIA officer, Russia expert and SPYEX consultant.

So who are the FSB, the Russian spies behind the arrest? 

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FSB training and leadership

The FSB was created in 1995 after the dissolution of the much-feared KGB Soviet-era spy agency. Putin’s former agency inherited many of the KGB's functions, including domestic intelligence-gathering and counterintelligence operations. It is now headed by FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov, a spymaster sometimes described as the ‘brains and heart’ of the regime, one of Putin’s closest advisers, and a possible successor although Bortnikov is in his 70s.

Russia’s Federal Security Service officers graduate from the FSB Academy, the Russian equivalent of Quantico for the FBI, or the secretive ‘Farm’, where CIA officers cut their teeth. Ultimately, the FSB still reports to Putin as Russia’s president and is considered to be one of the most powerful and influential institutions in the country, with extensive powers to conduct surveillance, carry out arrests, and gather intelligence.

More recently, FSB officers have also been implicated in illegal enterprises from economic crime to state-sponsored hacking.
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FSB financial crimes ‍

Janosh Neumann, an FSB counterintelligence officer from 2008 to 2014, worked with Unit 1, the FSB investigators who root out foreign spies from MI6, Mossad, and the CIA who work undercover in Russia. Neumann (not his real name) blew the whistle on FSB corruption and fled to the US after he was transferred to the FSB’s Department of Economic Security: “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia itself has stolen close to $2 trillion,” Neumann told the SPYSCAPE True Spies podcast.

Neumann outlined the three choices his FSB bosses gave him when it became clear Neumann would not turn a blind eye to FSB economic crimes - none of those choices ideal. Neumann was told he could: i) “Be an officer” - to put it bluntly, shoot himself in the head; ii) Allow someone else to shoot him in the head, or; iii) Get the hell out of Russia. Janosh took the third option and recounted his incredible escape to the US and work with the CIA and FBI. 

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FSB illegal financial schemes & Novichok allegations‍

Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev also highlighted FSB corruption in a separate podcast. “Russia is a very online society and it's a very corrupt society as well. The two of these things together result in a lot of data being traded, people working for the FSB or for law enforcement.”

Grozev said FSB officers tended to download copies of their passport databases, which are on their office computers, to sell to detective agencies and the security heads of private companies. “Sooner or later, such databases leak onto the open market," he added. "By 2018, by the time we started looking at the Skripal case we had, already, a collection of more than 500 regional databases.”

Bellingcat believes the Novichok poisoning of Sergi Skripal and his daughter in England was the work of a separate Russian intelligence agency, the GRU military intelligence agency. Under the revised law on Russian foreign intelligence of January 1996, however, the FSB is also authorized to work outside Russia in target areas in cooperation with the Russian foreign intelligence services.

A Russian FSB agent sent to tail opposition leader Alexey Navalny in 2020 allegedly revealed that Navalny was also poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, which was planted in his underpants. Navalny recorded a phone call with the FSB agent whom Navalny described as belonging to an elite toxins team in Russia’s FSB security service. Navalny is now serving a nine-year prison sentence on various charges including fraud and embezzlement.

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FSB hackers‍

Among its other roles, the FSB is also considered to be the home to one of the most dangerous hacker groups in the world. In 2022, the US Department of Justice charged four Russian FSB officers with targeting the global energy sector. The FSB allegedly tried to hack power generation facilities between 2012 and 2018 that would allow Moscow to damage nuclear power plants and electrical grid companies. The Russian government hackers are also known as Dragonfly, Energetic Bear, and Crouching Yeti. 

The emblem of FSB 'Center 16' hints at its activities in cyberspace, according to the British government. The emblem incorporates a satellite dish (signifying SIGINT activity) and a key, broken by lightning that signifies breaking an encryption key. 

Konstantin Kozlovsky, jailed in 2022 on charges of hacking Russian banks, alleged that the creation of the Lurk and WannaCry viruses - which hit hundreds of thousands of US and other computer systems worldwide - was supervised by the FSB. Some believe the Agency was also behind the 2016 US Democratic National Committee email leak. Moscow denies their officers were involved.

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