Covid-19: spies emerge from the shadows to fight the pandemic

The fight against the coronavirus is also a shadow war. In mid-March 2020, the Russian government created a task force against the Covid-19. Directed by the Prime Minister, Mikhaïl Michoustine, this coordinating council welcomes the main heads of the internal and external security services. For his part, the president surrounded himself with a working group made up of customs officials, the Ministry of Defense, civil defense, border guards and the FSB (internal intelligence service). Vladimir Putin has also mobilized the country's armed forces and defense industry to manufacture medical equipment, such as respirators and thermal imaging devices.

Officially, the objective of the Russian services is to coordinate the collection of information on the contagion, but also to follow the evolution of the disease as well as its economic and social impact in the world, and finally to protect the borders. "There is little doubt," said France 24 Alain Juillet, former No. 2 of the French secret services. "The Russians are watching their own population, especially those who are infected, and they are watching closely the reaction of other states to the pandemic."

Just like the CIA, which had known for several weeks that China had largely underestimated the spread of the virus and its political and economic damage. Since January 2020, the American intelligence community has constantly warned the White House about the threat of the pandemic without getting a real return from President Trump. This question is not new to the American intelligence services. They have been alerting their governments to the effects of an influenza-like pandemic on national security for years. On February 12, 2009, National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair warned: "The most pressing transnational health challenge for the United States remains the potential for a severe pandemic to emerge, with the main candidate being a highly influenza virus. mortal". And yet, according to a dispatch from Reuters on March 30, American spies are having difficulty collecting and gathering information on the impact of the Covid-19 in China, North Korea, Russia and Iran.

Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet very committed

Russia and the United States are not the only countries to launch their agents into battle. In Israel, the Shin Bet, an internal service, was commissioned by the Prime Minister to monitor the movements of the sick. The skills of the Israeli services in this area are world renowned. Thanks to their cyber tools, they collect, aggregate and cross information from mobile phones, social networks, video surveillance cameras ... "With its exceptional ecosystem of start-ups working in security and surveillance, explains Bernard Barbier to France 24, former technical director of the Directorate General of External Security (DGSE), the Israelis have no difficulty in obtaining and analyzing these millions of data. " In recent weeks, Israeli spies have received support from the military in dealing with the health crisis: in late March, the Jerusalem Post revealed that Sayeret Maskal, an elite unit of special forces, was deployed to ensure the hospital supply of breathing apparatus.

Israeli spies also engage in the battle for the acquisition of medical equipment such as masks or respirators. And they are not the only ones if we judge by the statements, Tuesday, March 31, of a Mossad official: "All countries are currently engaged in a fierce secret battle to take control of the limited supply of respirators, and at any cost. " Even if it means taking over, he said, equipment ordered and paid for by other countries.   

Ditto in China where surveillance technologies have just passed a milestone. "The Chinese have cameras capable of making the facial recognition of an individual wearing a mask," worries Alain Juillet. Beijing also has world renowned companies in big data analysis using artificial intelligence software: Xiaomi, Huawei, Hikvision…. Recently, the government asked the company MiningLamp to help it fight the virus by monitoring the population, according to the site Intelligence Online.

Russian and Chinese spies against Western democracy?

European and American agencies point to the activism of Chinese and Russian services on social networks. They designate their troll farms and accuse them of activating and feeding thousands of fake accounts in order to manipulate Western public opinion. The objectives of Beijing are numerous: to make people forget the Chinese origin of the contamination and the confusion of the beginning of the epidemic, but also to promote its political model in the fight against the Covid-19 and finally, to praise its solidarity with the rest of the world thanks to the sending to Europe and the United States of hundreds of millions of masks.

Moscow is downright suspected of destabilizing democracies. On March 17, the Financial Times revealed the content of a study by the diplomatic services of the European Union. This alerted Brussels about the propaganda of the Russian services intended to sow "panic, fear and confusion" in order to undermine the morale of Western populations in the midst of a health crisis. Between January 22 and mid-March, Europeans reportedly recorded 80 cases of false accounts linked to the "Russian State" in French, English, German, Spanish or even Italian.

Paris and London on alert

On the British side, the intelligence agencies are preparing for the post-containment and pointing out the threat of the will of Chinese power. In mid-April, the intelligence community alerted the government to the risks of espionage and hostile Chinese investments in Her Majesty's cutting-edge businesses, particularly in digital communications and artificial intelligence. She challenged the government on the need to limit the number of Chinese students in research laboratories.

At the end of March, a report from the bloodhounds of the French defense company Thalès warned against computer intrusions carried out by hackers often supported by the services of their State, in particular Russia. "These attacks are extremely intrusive, warns a Thales executive. They generally go through false emails allegedly sent by international institutions like the WHO ..." The French Directorate General for Internal Security (DGSI) is raising the number of flashes of alert. Three were issued in April alone to warn against economic interference in French companies and against cyber attacks linked to Covid-19.

Haro on Palantir

According to the Bloomberg agency, Paris but also Berlin, Vienna and Bern have been approached by the Palantir company to trace the spread of the virus and follow post-containment measures. Created with money from the CIA via In Q Tel, the American intelligence investment fund, Palantir is a provider of big data analysis software. Its name is inspired by the "vision stone" taken from the saga of JRR Tolkien "The Lord of the rings". The company takes responsibility for its links with the American intelligence community. Its main clients are the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the US Marines, the US Air Force, the Special Forces….

The French intelligence community has however mobilized to block the rapprochement between the hospitals of Paris (AP-HP) and Palantir. The American company proposed to help the AP-HP to locate and analyze the spread of the disease but also to manage its stocks of materials and drugs. "It’s a mistake to do without such technology, regrets intelligence specialist Floran Vadillo. It would have been better to impose a trusted third party between our hospitals and Palantir in order to ensure that the data collected remains good in France."

What about French services?

French intelligence has not been officially activated to manage this crisis. "It is not at all in the culture of our services", assures Bernard Barbier. Certainly, the former "Mister Q" of the DGSE (the technical manager of the secret services, a term inspired by the universe of James Bond, Editor's note) is very well placed to know that his former employer has advanced technological resources to set up global monitoring. But it ensures that its statutes prohibit it from intervening on the national territory. 

"This is not a problem," explains Bernard Squarcini, former boss of the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI), interviewed by France 24, who can perfectly use his digital tools supplemented by those of the DGSE. "We just need a green light from political authority. We have wasted a lot of time," he added. "We would have had to monitor borders, airports and know the potentially contaminated people in order to follow them."

For Alain Juillet, the problem is not the use of intelligence services or their methods; according to him, everything must be done to block the spread. "The problem is that absolutely nothing guarantees that these means will not be used tomorrow during other crises. I am afraid that once we have set foot in it, we cannot go back."

A first version of this article was published on April 8, 2020.

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