U.S. and British intelligence officers never really believed the old Cold War was over. Even at the height of the 1990s East-West love-in, when U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton poured money into supporting Boris Yeltsin’s rickety grip on the Kremlin, Russian spies were trying to steal secrets, exert influence, spot potential recruits, and penetrate foreign spy services.

Sean Wiswesser’s new book is Delphic about the details of his 30-year career in U.S. spookdom, chiefly at the CIA. But readers will infer that he recruited Russian intelligence officers, ran them as agents, and helped catch those who tried to spy on the United States and its allies. Now out of the shadows, he is continuing the fight against what in U.S. spy parlance are the Russian Intelligence Services (RIS). The avowed aim of this book, his first, is “to damage RIS capabilities … and to empower our services and those of our allies to counter RIS actions more effectively.”

U.S. and British intelligence officers never really believed the old Cold War was over. Even at the height of the 1990s East-West love-in, when U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton poured money into supporting Boris Yeltsin’s rickety grip on the Kremlin, Russian spies were trying to steal secrets, exert influence, spot potential recruits, and penetrate foreign spy services.

Sean Wiswesser’s new book is Delphic about the details of his 30-year career in U.S. spookdom, chiefly at the CIA. But readers will infer that he recruited Russian intelligence officers, ran them as agents, and helped catch those who tried to spy on the United States and its allies. Now out of the shadows, he is continuing the fight against what in U.S. spy parlance are the Russian Intelligence Services (RIS). The avowed aim of this book, his first, is “to damage RIS capabilities … and to empower our services and those of our allies to counter RIS actions more effectively.”

The crisp 200-page result is engagingly written, with a dose of modesty unusual in a profession notorious for its boastfulness. On one level, it is a useful guide to spycraft—chiefly but not only the Russian variant—and its jargon. For what the CIA calls the “sticks and bricks” of dead drops, Russian tradecraft favors rural areas over urban locations, with secret material concealed in things like soda cans, he writes. Wiswesser also depicts vividly the daily routine of Russian intelligence operatives based at diplomatic missions abroad, which usually starts as they assess for possible surveillance on the way to work; tails will make the rest of the day more complicated. He makes a brief, tantalizing mention of “ubiquitous technical surveillance,” which uses digital traces to identify anomalous behavior and makes old-style spying far harder.

Describing the Russians’ workday, Wiswesser unleashes mockery. From their recruitment (hazing is rife) to retirement, Russian spies have to deal with endemic abuse, corruption, and favoritism. Drunkenness and adultery are rampant. Their professional priorities are fiddling their expense accounts, fabricating sources, and dressing up media articles as secret intelligence. (Does that happen in other countries’ spy services too? Wiswesser’s lips are sealed, although other CIA veterans paint a picture of tiresome penny-pinching and bureaucratic backstabbing.)

When they do have time for their real jobs, Russian spies are mostly not very good, Wiswesser asserts. He is scathing about the dozen or so “illegals” rounded up in the United States in 2010, exemplified by Anna Chapman. Media coverage after her arrest focused on her glamorous lifestyle. A young woman! A redhead! In a miniskirt! Dating! The real story was that she was amateurish: unable to work her secret communications channel, falling for an FBI entrapment stunt, and then making a panicky phone call on an open line to her father, himself a spymaster. Chapman and her counterparts were a world away from the dedicated sleeper agents of the Soviet era, like Rudolf Abel, depicted in the Hollywood thriller Bridge of Spies. Their successors were greedy, careless, and unproductive. FBI surveillance of their activities over many years revealed repeated rebukes from spymasters in Moscow, which they seem to have blithely ignored.

In one of the many vignettes in the book, Wiswesser describes how a U.S. spycatcher makes an astonishing blunder by phoning the illegals he is supposed to be watching, mistaking their home number for a secure government line. He even identifies himself—at which point the Russian says “wrong number” and hangs up. Any properly trained undercover spy would immediately abort their mission and hurry home. But these Russians do nothing: Apparently, they enjoyed living in the United States, however pointless and risky their mission.

For all the time and money lavished on them, Wiswesser says, Russian spies abroad are for the most part “indifferent” and “incompetent.” Indeed, the whole story of the post-1991 spy wars, he argues, is increasingly of success for NATO countries and their allies, and setbacks for Russia. The most effective Russian penetration of Western spy services involved people such as Aldrich Ames (a senior CIA officer unmasked in 1994) and Robert Hanssen (who headed the FBI’s Russia counter-intelligence team until his arrest in 2001), both products of the Soviet espionage heyday of the 1980s. Few of their successors are as effective.

In which case, why do we care? Chiefly, Wiswesser says, because Russia continues to regard the United States the “main enemy” (a term coined in Soviet days) and has the resources to give practical effect to that hostility. It retains formidable capabilities: the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and a conventional military that, at least for now, can menace Europe. It devotes so many resources to intelligence that at least some of its efforts will bear fruit.

In 1995, Russia recruited an Estonian, Herman Simm, who would become his country’s top official dealing with defense secrets, giving the Kremlin insights into regional defense plans (or the lack thereof) and NATO’s inner workings. The German payments firm Wirecard, run by a fugitive presumed Russian agent named Jan Marsalek, not only involved colossal financial fraud, but also gained priceless access to the data of its customers, including government agencies. One of the many plots linked to Marsalek nearly led to the toppling of the Austrian intelligence agency. The undercover Russian spies who conducted a nerve agent attack in the British city of Salisbury in 2018 failed to kill their target, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, but endangered dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent civilians.

Illegals may live long-term in foreign countries not just to spy but to do other tasks, such as passive observation. One such spy unmasked in Germany (a story not covered in Wiswesser’s book but told to me by an intelligence officer from another country) had the undemanding, and presumably rather dull, task of monitoring a Bavarian auto factory for any signs of a switch to military production. Or the mission may be “spotting”: identifying individuals whose vulnerabilities (money worries, loneliness, misbehavior) make them susceptible to recruitment by other, specialist intelligence officers. Russia’s military intelligence service—the GRU—posts illegals abroad whose sole task is to conduct sabotage in the event of war. Nobody should be complacent about agents of a hostile foreign power moving undetectably through the West’s midst.

Another reason for concern is that the RIS are a key part of Russia’s unconventional “gray zone” arsenal, involving cyberattacks, sabotage, disinformation, and other capabilities that are all exercised below the threshold of all-out war. Wiswesser highlights the attempts ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to sow distrust in the U.S. political system, including spreading hoax stories that voting machines were vulnerable to hacking. Another successful Russian operation was to feed the frenzy, exploiting divisions in U.S. society on issues of race, religion, and political outlook. Most of these operations were conducted over the internet from outside the United States.

On the ground, the big worry is the use of proxies. Russian sabotage operations in Europe now typically involve not career intelligence officers, but casual hires—“disposable” agents in spy terms—paid in cash or cryptocurrency via cut-outs. They may have no idea who is tasking them to burn something down or beat someone up, or why. European security agencies last year arrested dozens of such agents. Many more will take their place. Nobody should be complacent about that either.

Like most Russia-watchers, Wiswesser admires its language and culture. But he does not sentimentalize his adversary. The dedication to the book mentions his Lithuanian wife, Diana, whose family “suffered firsthand the effects of Russian imperialism.” That outlook is in commendable contrast to some of his former CIA colleagues, who in recent years have focused over-tightly on Kremlinology (the twists and turns of Russian high-level politics) and Moscow’s relations with the West, while neglecting the threat Russia posed to its neighbors. In retrospect, the real story of post-1991 Russia was not the tussle between supposed reformers and hardliners but its revanchism. This was all too visible to countries of the former Soviet empire, but their warnings were ignored by know-it-alls in the big Western countries.

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Wiswesser does not mention this Western failure explicitly, and, overall, he treads lightly on the failings of his former employer. The modern CIA, he laments, encourages generalists, not specialists. A deep knowledge of language and culture, and of the other side’s tradecraft, is increasingly missing. More broadly, the failure to counter Russian aggression (against Ukraine) and mischief (everywhere else) firmly fuels the Kremlin’s confidence to carry out more of both. He could also have cited the Trump administration’s overt contempt for the moral high ground, and its effect on U.S. prestige and alliances.

Yet Russia’s descent into thuggery and thievery is corrosive too. Wiswesser’s main message is that Russia and its agents are essentially a soft target. His message to his former colleagues, to their counterparts in other countries, and to their political masters, is to take more risks and try harder. That will not just make us safer, he argues. It will hasten the collapse of Russia’s ruling kleptocracy, and—eventually—the country’s return to the civilized world.