WHEN RUSSIA’S ambassador Mikhail Timoshkin was summoned to Iveagh House yesterday, he will have had few illusions about the likely outcome. It was inevitable that the Cabinet would decide to expel a member of his diplomatic staff after the theft and faking by Russian intelligence of six genuine Irish passports for its US agents. And the expulsion was entirely right. The Government has a sovereign responsibility to protect the integrity of Irish passports on whose security the safety of citizens travelling abroad depends. If passports become suspect, travellers may encounter real difficulties from state authorities, not least, ironically, in those states involved in such faking. Such abuse is not acceptable behaviour from a country which aspires to a friendly relationship.
Last June the Government was convinced of evidence that Israeli secret service Mossad had provided agents with eight Irish passports for a successful Dubai assassination mission against senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh six months earlier. It then expelled an Israeli embassy security official.
The same month the FBI broke up the Russian spy network in the US, arresting 10 people in New York, Boston, New Jersey and Virginia. They were all later deported as part of a swap deal with Russia after admitting conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents. Now, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs, a Garda report “concludes that there is an entirely persuasive picture of Russian intelligence service involvement in the manufacture and use of false documents based on the acquisition of details of six genuine passports belonging to Irish citizens”. Action was required.
That Irish passports appear to have become one of the covers of choice for certain intelligence agencies is perturbing and has prompted a review of passport security. This may, among other measures, see an insistence on more rigorous interviewing of applicants. But the sophisticated identity theft in which the Russian embassy was involved is particularly difficult to deal with.
However, the incident, though serious, will be seen as an unfortunate blip in an otherwise warming relationship with Russia. In September, on an official visit, President McAleese became the first Irish president to meet a Russian counterpart in the Kremlin. She was accompanied by a 30-strong trade delegation which signed export deals worth more than €9.2 million. Exports to Russia grew by two thirds in the first half of last year. It is to be hoped that the expulsion will put an end to the matter.
