The US' Botched Recruitment Of A Russian Diplomat Risks Worsening Bilateral Ties

There’s an unspoken rule that intel agencies aren’t supposed to implicitly threaten foreign diplomats’ children to coerce them into becoming informants.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova published an article in the Russian business daily Vedomosti on Monday about the curious case of a Russian diplomat in the US. An unknown employee of the State Department informed them during a call that their son, who was born in the US, “has been granted US citizenship without his consent by virtue of being born on American soil…Be on notice that your child is our citizen with all the ensuing consequences, and you cannot renounce this!”

Zakharova reminded readers that the children of foreign diplomats don’t have birthright citizenship privileges in the US. She then drew attention to how this incident contradicts Trump 2.0’s immigration policy, speculating that the Democrats are once again trying to subvert it for Russophobic reasons. She also expressed concern that “The arbitrary granting of US citizenship to such children potentially provides Washington with a lever for improper pressure on our personnel”. That’s likely the main motive.

As far as is publicly known, the incident that Zakharova described only happened with one Russian diplomat thus far, but it’s reasonable that she’s worried that “The deep state in the United States has created a new problem to exert pressure on Russian diplomats…Now the State Department – or those behind the façade of American diplomacy – have begun to extend US citizenship to children of Russian consular staff born under American jurisdiction”. This could indeed become a trend if it’s not stopped.

Therein lies the purpose of her article in Vedomosti, which was swiftly reported on by TASS, thus raising the chances that the foreign media which monitor this news agency of record draw attention to it as well. It’s imperative that Trump 2.0 orders an investigation into what happened for several reasons. First, the grounds upon which the State Department granted citizenship to the son of that Russian diplomat are illegal, and the incident itself also scandalously discredits Trump 2.0’s immigration policy.

The second reason is that this is a sloppy recruitment operation which was doomed to fail from the get-go. The very fact that it was attempted reflects poorly on the Intelligence Community. Whoever was responsible for authorizing this is clearly incompetent and must be held to account. And finally, the precedent established by implicitly threatening a Russian diplomat’s child to coerce them into becoming an informant violates an unspoken rule, thus putting the children of US diplomats in Russia at risk.

Instead of implicitly threatening them in order to give DC a dose of its own medicine, which risks sparking an uncontrollable intelligence escalation spiral that could easily worsen (superficially) improved relations under Trump 2.0, Zakharova decided to publish an article about this. It can therefore be seen as a last-ditch attempt to get the US to address this issue after it refused to do so through the discreet channels that Russia presumably relied on to inform the appropriate individuals of what just happened.

If Trump 2.0 still ignores Zakharova’s article, then it can’t be ruled out that Russian intelligence will soon retaliate in some way that involves the children of US diplomats, which would be spun by US media as “unprovoked” and “immoral” even though it would be a tit-for-tat response. This insight draws attention to the additional purpose of her article, namely to warn the US and the global public at large of what might soon happen, including a potentially rapid deterioration of ties with the US in that event.