We need to keep a closer eye on saboteurs in our midst

Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.

It was devious, the campaign German authorities uncovered in early February.

First, it was one car, then another, then a few more; eventually the tally came to hundreds. They were sabotaged by four men, supposedly in support of the country’s Green Party. As it turns out, though, these men weren’t green activists at all — the real instigator of the serial sabotage was Russia.

This is far from the only case of geopolitically linked harm we’ve seen in recent months. And it’s time European countries, as well as companies, started keeping a much closer eye on potential saboteurs in our midst.

In total, the perpetrators in Germany sabotaged 270 cars parked on city streets, spraying insulation foam into the cars’ exhaust pipes, rendering them immobile. To complete their anti-car campaign, the perpetrators stuck posters on the cars, with the command: “Be more green!” alongside the image of Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck.

It looked like the work of overzealous climate activists trying to drum up support for Habeck’s Greens ahead of Germany’s national elections on Feb. 23. But alert police officers outside Berlin solved the mysterious case when they spotted a group of men driving suspiciously. And the men — a German, a Romanian, a Serb and a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina — turned out to be guns for hire. One of them even told the police they’d been contracted by a Russian who paid them €100 per sabotaged car, plus an advance of several thousand euros.

Although German investigators haven’t been able to prove the sabotage was instigated by the Kremlin — and may never find such proof — it’s important to remember that it would be in Russia’s interest to discredit the staunchly pro-Ukraine Greens.

But the car campaign is far from the only case of geopolitically motivated harm we’ve seen recently: Incendiary parcels intended for airliners have turned up at DHL’s logistics hub in Leipzig. Unknown perpetrators have tried to break into water plants in Finland and Sweden. There have been suspicious fires at shopping centers and warehouses in various European countries. Unidentified drones have been keeping watch of defense manufacturing plants. Undersea cables have been malfunctioning at galloping rate in the Baltic Sea, Taiwanese waters and elsewhere. There was even a Russia-linked plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall.

Individuals trying to harm our countries are, in fact, stalking our streets every day. They can strike anywhere, against any target, and they use tools of their choosing. Retired Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal’s would-be assassins used the state-controlled nerve agent Novichok; the exhaust pipe saboteurs in Germany used insulation foam. You get the idea: Anything can be a weapon, from the sophisticated to the rudimentary.

And these perpetrators are almost never agents of the state. The ships suspected of cutting cables in the Baltic Sea, for instance, are regular merchant vessels; their crews aren’t employees of a hostile government. What’s more, the forceful response from Western governments to the Skripal poisoning and the Ukraine war — which has since included the expulsion of nearly 1,000 Russian diplomats, most of them spies — has resulted in more freelancers carrying out hostile Russian activity.

“The more eye-catching shift this year has been Russian state actors turning to proxies for their dirty work, including private intelligence operatives and criminals from both the U.K. and third countries,” MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum warned last October. And these freelance arrangements will only increase.

It’s a chilling reality, knowing that an army of helpers roams our streets on behalf of hostile states. It means we must try even harder to protect ourselves. We must keep a closer eye on what’s going on around us, on potentially harmful developments, on individuals who have no legitimate reason to be walking our streets.

And “we” isn’t just MI5 and similar government agencies — it’s everyone.

For example, while defense contractors have every right to hope the government will keep them safe, the police and secret services don’t have the capacity to monitor every location all the time, especially since any company — defense contractor or not — is a potential target. The simple fact that Russia and some other hostile countries have decided to use nonmilitary means (so-called hybrid or grey-zone aggression) to harm Western nations means that trying to detect threats as early as possible is now in the best interest of companies too.

Granted, since these would-be saboteurs aren’t employees of hostile governments, it’s hard to identify their intentions. And being on constant look-out for threats could stoke paranoia. But in today’s environment, not doing so is naïve.

As citizens we need to be aware of our surroundings. Last November, Taiwan’s coast guard launched a “people power” initiative, encouraging citizens to report suspicious behavior in nearby waters. It follows a similar initiative launched by Sweden four years ago.

Companies, meanwhile, have a duty to their employees and shareholders to protect themselves to the largest extent possible. Indeed, shareholders may come to expect annual reports to contain information about the measures a company has taken to monitor threats. And stating that such threat detection is the authorities’ job won’t do much to convince worried shareholders.

In “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” the eminent philosopher Karl Popper brilliantly describes the dangers extremist ideologies pose to our open societies. And while we may soon see more such dangers return to Western nations, today we already have enemies, with various motivations, operating within our borders, seeking to harm us. It’s in all our interest to help stop them.