SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation)

Origins

According to the International Spy Museum’s glossary, the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki) was established on 18 December 1991. The UK government describes it as Russia’s civilian foreign intelligence service and the successor to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.^1,2

The Foreign Intelligence Law

Under Article 1 of the law of 10 January 1996, foreign intelligence is a set of state bodies, forming part of the security forces, that protect the security of the individual, society and the state against external threats. Its purpose (Art. 5) is to provide the President, the Federal Assembly and the Government with the information they need to take political, economic, defence, scientific and technological, and environmental decisions.³

Article 11 divides tasks among the intelligence bodies: the SVR operates in the political, economic, military-strategic, scientific and technological, and environmental spheres, and is also responsible for encrypted communications abroad and the security of Russian missions; the intelligence body of the Ministry of Defence (the GRU) covers the military and military-technical spheres; the FSB conducts intelligence in cooperation with them.³

Direction and oversight

General direction of the foreign intelligence bodies lies with the President, who sets their tasks, coordinates them and appoints their heads; he appoints and dismisses the SVR director after consulting the Federation Council (Art. 12).³

For parliamentary oversight, the law provides for the Accounts Chamber, which audits budget implementation, and committees of both chambers, whose members must have access to state secrets (Art. 24). Prosecutorial supervision does not extend to information about human sources, or about the organisation, methods and means of intelligence (Art. 25).³

Illegals in the United States (2010)

In a criminal complaint of 27 June 2010, the US Department of Justice charged ten people with working for the SVR as illegals; the complaint refers to the SVR’s headquarters in Moscow as Moscow Center.⁴

According to the FBI, its agent Robert Hanssen, arrested on 18 February 2001, spied for the KGB and later for the SVR.⁵

Attribution of cyber attacks

On 15 April 2021 the UK and US governments attributed a series of intrusions to the SVR; the UK’s NCSC assessed it “highly likely” that the SVR was responsible for the compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, discovered in December 2020. According to the press release, SolarWinds confirmed that 18,000 organisations worldwide were affected; the impact on the UK was assessed as low.²

The same release states that SVR cyber actors are known in open sources as APT29, Cozy Bear and The Dukes, and have been gaining access to the networks of foreign and defence ministries in Europe and NATO countries since at least 2011 (see APT, attribution).²