THE APPEAL of fake Irish passports to international secret services may well be a tribute to their standing and perceived security as identity documents. But it is a currency that is debased and diminished with every revealed abuse, whether in 1986 by Col Oliver North and his fellow US agents in Iran, by eight of the Israeli assassins of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in January or now, apparently, by an alleged Russian spy in the US.
A criminal complaint filed on Monday in New York federal court by the US justice department alleges that New Jersey-based Richard Murphy was ordered by “Moscow Centre” to travel in March to Italy where he received an Irish passport in the name of “Eunan Gerard Doherty” to facilitate his journey on to Moscow.
The forging of a passport represents the usurpation of an important national prerogative and, no less than spying, is a violation of sovereignty that cannot go unanswered. As Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin made clear in expelling an Israeli official over the al-Mabhouh affair, “the misuse of Irish passports by a state with which Ireland enjoys friendly. . . relations is clearly unacceptable and requires a firm response”. The department will certainly convey as much to Russia in seeking an explanation. If it fails to get a satisfactory response, the consequences should be similar.
The latest episode has all the elements and tradecraft of a John le Carré cold war plot: long-term sleepers, radiograms, invisible ink, “brush past” exchanges of packages, secret drops, buried cash, GPS tracking devices on cars, covert filming, spiced with the modern technology of wireless laptop communications. Even the flat denials from Moscow have the ring of authenticity. And in this war of mirrors many of the agents have apparently been tracked for years by the FBI, and so Moscow Centre may now be struggling to disentangle truth from carefully planted fiction in its agents’ reports.
But to date little in the public accounts suggests that the penetration was any more serious than the outer circles of the political chattering class; the damage little more than gossip. The charges of “conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government” – rather than of spying – reflect as much. The legislation is more usually used to deal with unregistered lobbyists and more than one commentator has rightly asked if there is anything that the Russians learned that an analyst couldnt have picked up by trolling the internet? Smiley would hardly recognise it as spying.