Russian spying isn't quite what it used to be. The impassive, stern, determined types who refuse to co-operate in Le Carré novels have apparently been replaced by absolute morons.

You'll recall the interview the two men accused of being spies gave to Russia Today in an attempt to prove that they were actually on a quick weekend getaway built around visiting Salisbury Cathedral - which is why they stayed in Bow in east London, went to Salisbury on both Saturday and Sunday, didn't visit the cathedral and flew back to Moscow immediately after getting back from Salisbury - and managed to remember most of the first two paragraphs of the cathedral's Wikipedia entry.

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That sloppiness seems to be becoming endemic within GRU, the Russian secret service. Dutch investigators laid out every single stupid mistake the spies made during a plot to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which was working on the Skripal poisoning case at the time, at a press conference in The Hague yesterday.



The agents they sent could be easily Googled

The plan was to hack the OPCW while it was verifying the nerve agent used in the Salisbury poisoning by parking a car outside the building and jumping onto the WiFi with a computer set up in the boot of the car. However, the gang were interrupted by Dutch authorities who'd been tipped off by their British counterparts. That's partly because a cursory Google showed Alexey Minin, Oleg Sotnikov, Evgenii Serebriakov and Alexsei Moronets are graduates from an elite spy academy, the same one where Anatoliy Chepiga, the alleged Skripal poisoner, is supposed to have finished his education. The fact that one of the gang tried to smash up his phone after being disturbed during the hack looks a teensy bit suspicious too.

One of the spies registered five cars at said spy academy

While the Russian database of car registrations isn't officially available, it's easy enough to find on Google. One of the spies used the address of an elite training base known as 'the Aquarium' - he included the base number, helpfully - to register his Honda Civic. One former GRU spy who defected to the West once said the base was so secret that Soviet citizens could be jailed just for revealing that it existed, so this might not end too well for the Honda driver.

Another played for the Moscow spies' Sunday League team

According to another quick Google, Serebryakov was a member of the Moscow amateur league team Radiks between 2011 and 2013. One of Serebryakov's former teammates, Yan Yershov, told the Moscow Times that Serebryakov's job as "some sort of government agent" was an open secret in a team "known as the 'security services' team" because "almost everyone works for an intelligence agency". Serebryakov was, Yershov said, "a decent player" and still sends encouraging texts to the team occasionally.

They couldn't resist sorting out their expenses

The Dutch investigators dug up taxi receipts showing the accused spies took a ride from GRU barracks straight to Moscow airport, presumably keeping them to claim a few quid back on their return. The bottomless expense account is obviously one of the big boons of getting on the GRU grad scheme, but there's a time (whenever you're nowhere near the spy HQ) and a place (hotel with Kinder Buenos in the minibar).

They travelled on sequentially numbered diplomatic passports

Bit of a coincidence, that.

Russia has angrily denied the claims, despite the multinational consensus against it. As journalist and long-time Russian media-watcher Julia Davis pointed out, the response to the furore in Russia has been somewhere between bemused shrugging and withering sarcasm, with one TV pundit asking, "If we're so incompetent, how come we put Trump in power?"

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#Russia's state TV:

Dmitry Nekrasov:

"We're so incompetent that all of our [GRU] agents can be identified based on their [sequential] passport numbers."

Expert in American studies Mikhail Sinelnikov-Orishak:

"If we're so incompetent, how did we manage to put Trump in power?"©️ pic.twitter.com/0o7snRuOpH — Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) October 4, 2018

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