Getty In The Arena Why Obama Was Smart to Kick Out Russian Spies In fact, he might have just prevented the next intelligence disaster.

Calder Walton is an Ernest May Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Follow him on twitter @calder_walton.

When President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian officials from the United States last week, closing two compounds, including one cast in the media as a swanky “dacha” on the Chesapeake Bay, his critics mocked the move as too little, too late.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani dismissed the retaliatory actions as “almost silly”; South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said the Obama administration should have thrown rocks at the Russians, not “pebbles”; Donald Trump praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as “very smart” for declining to retaliate in kind.


It would be tempting to suppose that public expulsions of suspected intelligence officials, like those Obama ordered, yield few practical intelligence results, as the real activities of the secret world are presumably just that: secret. Perhaps the president had motives other than U.S. national security—revenge against Putin, partisanship, the urge to fire a parting shot at his successor. Whatever his reasons, Obama’s eviction orders were hardly feckless political grandstanding, and it is important to understand why. History shows that kicking out foreign intelligence officials can yield valuable results—as Western countries proved many times during the Cold War. Even in the delicate world of espionage, sometimes a blunt instrument like mass expulsion is necessary.

The largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any government in history occurred in September 1971, when the British government ordered 105 Soviet officials expelled from Britain, or not permitted to return. The British operation was codenamed “Foot,” perhaps a sly reference to kicking them out the door. Operation Foot was the result of pressure by MI5, the British security service, on successive British governments to deal with swelling number of Soviet officials suspected of intelligence activities. In 1950, there had been 138 official Soviet representatives in Britain, but by 1960 this had grown to 249, accompanied by a proportional increase in the number of Soviet intelligence officers.

This number likely underestimated the vast scale of the Kremlin’s spying efforts in Britain at the time. As the former chief historian of the British Foreign Office, Gill Bennett, has shown, there were equally large numbers of semi-official Soviet representatives in Britain, especially in the trade delegation. By 1971 the Soviet Trade Delegation in London had almost as many people working for it as the Soviet Embassy. The latter also had a staggering number of “working wives” on its staff, who were used to get around limits imposed by the British government on the number of Soviet Embassy personnel. In total, by 1971 there were nearly 1,000 Soviet officials and wives in Britain—higher than any other Western country. MI5 estimated that possibly a quarter of these were involved in “undiplomatic activities,” a polite name for espionage. MI5 could not keep track of them all.

At first, British officials tried reasoning with the Soviet government. This got nowhere. In June 1970, the British foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, raised the issue privately with his Soviet counterpart, Andrei Gromyko, but he absurdly replied, “These figures you give cannot be true because Soviet Union has no spies.”

Events changed in September 1971, when a KGB officer stationed in London, Oleg Lyalin, defected to Britain. Lyalin was a senior officer in the section of KGB foreign intelligence dealing with sabotage and covert attack, known as Department V. During his debriefing by MI5 at a safe house in London, Lyalin explained that he had been tasked with preparing sabotage networks in Britain to be activated in the event of World War III.

Lyalin’s defection, and his information about Soviet sabotage plans in Britain, gave the British precisely the excuse they needed to crack down. Through surveillance and other investigations, MI5 identified 90 KGB and Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) officers working under official cover in Britain, and a further 15 then on leave. Based on MI5’s advice, on September 24, 1971, the Foreign Office summoned the Soviet chargé d'affaires in London and informed him that the total of 105 Soviet officials were personae non gratae in Britain.

The Kremlin was caught completely by surprise. Immediately after issuing the expulsion list, an MI5 surveillance team spotted a Soviet intelligence officer in Kensington Palace Gardens sprinting across the road from the GRU station to the Soviet Embassy opposite, doubtless summoned for an urgent briefing on the mass expulsion. That evening, MI5 and Foreign Office officials celebrated with a cocktail party at MI5’s London headquarters. The FBI and the CIA sent their hearty congratulations, though the CIA failed to persuade the State Department to follow the British example. Soviet intelligence collection was highly successful in the United States in the later Cold War, thanks partly, it seems, to the State Department’s hesitance. (The KGB achieved phenomenal penetration of American defense contractors and businesses and stole their science and technology secrets. During the early 1980s, probably 70 percent of all weapons systems then in use in Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact countries were derived from Western—largely American— technology.)

As the authorized history of MI5, published in 2009, shows, Foot marked a turning point for the success of British counterespionage during the Cold War. It made Britain, for the first time, a hard espionage target for Soviet intelligence. After Operation Foot, the KGB was forced to ask Soviet bloc and Cuban agencies to help plug the intelligence gap in Britain. One high-ranking former KGB officer, Oleg Kalugin, later claimed that Operation Foot dealt Soviet intelligence a blow in Britain from which it never recovered.

But Operation Foot shows that while mass expulsions may be necessary, they are not always sufficient for counter-espionage. Foot did not affect probably the most important British agent the KGB ran in the 1970s, Geoffrey Prime, who worked undetected at Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, until 1977. The KGB recruited Prime in Germany and his KGB handlers ran him as a mole in GCHQ exclusively from outside the U.K.; he was therefore unaffected by Foot.

Hopefully, the U.S. intelligence community today has managed to do what MI5 did before Operation Foot: correctly identify intelligence operatives for expulsion. Unfortunately, however, this will probably not be sufficient. As the U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, noted in his Senate testimony on Thursday, counterespionage today is more complicated than it was in the past. Russian hackers cannot be expelled from cyberspace—though one can target their physical assets and recruiting grounds in the U.S. It is unclear whether deterrence will work for cyberwarfare, as it did with the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War.

However, even in the new era of cyber-espionage, there is still a place for traditional human intelligence—that is, recruiting agents. U.S. government agencies and contractors, holding vast quantities of classified data, would make tempting targets for Russian operatives. Note that Obama expelled several officials from the Russian consulate in San Francisco, a short drive from Silicon Valley, where many companies carry out highly classified government work. In doing so, Obama may have done Trump a favor—preventing the next dangerous cyberbreach. There is, however, one question Obama’s critics are right to ask: Why did he not do this sooner?