Organised cime and cyber security authority Misha Glenny joined us at NMP Live for an insight into his career as a journalist, learning criminal techniques and the makings of McMafia.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Misha Glenny
Can you share how you gained your knowledge of organised crime and how your career in journalism begun
Well I started actually before I became a journalist because I was involved with clandestine organisations, smuggling stuff across the Iron Curtain into dissident groups. So, I learnt criminal techniques at a fairly early stage of my career.
I was supporting people like Solidarity in Poland, the Free Trade Union, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Human Rights Organisations who all wanted to see their democratic rights in Eastern Europe re-established. And I became so involved in that I thought well ‘what would be the best thing to do?’ The best thing to do would be to be a journalist so I could talk to everyone legitimately, both people in power and the dissidents.
So, I set myself up in Vienna and was a stringer for the Guardian and the New Scientist; the latter was an interesting combination because I knew very little about science, but New Scientist knew nothing about Eastern Europe, so it was quite a happy marriage really. I worked for them for about three years and then aged 29, I applied for, not expecting to get but got the BBC Central Europe correspondent job.
Now getting a correspondence job like that, where you’re responsible for an entire area before the age of 30 and also 10 months before the biggest foreign story to hit the world since the Second World War, which was the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the collapse of.the Soviet Union and everything, this was just a dream. And it meant for the next three or four years I was working 24/7, covering all the revolutions, but at the same time, one of my specialist areas, because I'm a specialist in the politics of various East European countries, I speak the local languages, one of the areas that I knew very well was Yugoslavia.
I knew that things were about to get very bad in Yugoslavia; in fact I was known as a Cassandra in the BBC, they referred to me as Misha Gloomy because I would say ‘there's a war coming here, you better watch out’ and they’d say ‘don’t be so ridiculous, there's not a war coming in Europe.’
And then it all blows up and then everything I say they believe to be the God's honest truth; so, I go from being a sort of lunatic, as far as they're concerned, to being this extraordinary seer who understands everything. Neither were true of course.
So that really made my mark and when I was working in Yugoslavia, I observed close hand how organised crime, the new upcoming politicians, economic oligarchs had seized many of the state assets and turned them into their own private business. They were creating these extraordinary empires out of the ashes of communism and this was the start of McMafia realising that after the fall of communism there were some very, very powerfully dark forces at work in the world. I felt to pursue that I had to leave the BBC, because if you're with the BBC you're always doing daily news and you don't have time to do proper research and instead I got a book contract, went around the world and wrote McMafia.
Everything since then has been about books and I try and look at original subjects and whether it's organised crime or cyber-crime. I've also written a book about Brazil about the leader of a big drugs clan in Brazil and I went and lived in a favela, a slum in Rio for that, even though I was already in my 50s and that wasn't fun. The point is that unless you go in situ, unless you get to know the people, get to know what's really going on, you cannot understand these extraordinary undercurrents of crime, corruption, malfeasance, which have a huge impact on our lives.
How has organised crime changed in the last decade?
Organised crime is, I would say more powerful than it was ten years ago, but I would say it also faces more challenges.
Notably, there is a sustained campaign around the world through a very big coalition of law enforcement officers, NGOs, lawyers, civil servants who have highlighted the issue of crime and corruption and we are seeing changes in legislation around the world which is designed to try and reduce this. But while organised crime faces those challenges, it also has picked up some important new techniques and advantages.
So, what the really big issue is, is that until about five years ago, traditional organised crime, mafia based, and cyber-crime based on the internet, existed in parallel, they very rarely interacted with each other and you had different types of people working there. The reason for this was quite simple; if you want to be involved in traditional mafia style organised crime, you need to have a capacity to wield and deploy decisive violence.
And cyber-crime is revolutionary because you don't need a baseball bat for it, you can be in Kazakhstan and attacking someone in LA and cashing out in Dubai. So those two things attracted very different types of people; you have the thick net mob style working in traditional organised crime and then you have the sort of geeky, mischievous people working in cyber-crime.
But, as you saw the emergence of digital natives in organised crime, so you saw the leadership's come through who understood cyber and understood the benefits of it, you started to see this extraordinary crossover, this fusion which I and other specialists refer to as the digitalisation of organised crime.
It's really fascinating to watch because traditional organised crime, mafia style people are now using digital tools in every aspect of their work and what has happened to cyber criminals is that they have learnt from traditional organised crime how to organise themselves better. So, they're much more focused groups with people responsible for malware deployment, people responsible for harvesting the money, people responsible for sending out the threats in ransomware and things like that.
So that is all in a state of flux at the moment and of course it's putting tremendous strain on law enforcement agencies.
Is it a coincidence that McMafia sounds like a restaurant chain?
McMafia does sound like a famous restaurant chain and that's because it is. Basically, McDonald's and the prefix Mac at the time signified globalised phenomenon. I was actually hoping that McDonald's might sue me when the title came out but unfortunately, they’d just tried to sue the Oxford English Dictionary who included the phrase McJob in their latest edition and the OED won and so, it was agreed by a court of law that the prefix Mac means a general globalised phenomenon which involves sort of rather grim products.
So McMafia was meant to identify how organised crime was spreading around the world, but it also came out of the franchise system that in particular the Chechen mafia in Moscow used. They were one of the two most feared mafias in Moscow, the Chechen mafia, and in Moscow most of them came from Chechnya in the South, in the Caucasus.
But then they found what they could do is they could franchise out their name because the word words Chechen mafia struck fear into the hearts of most people. There was a group in Yekaterinburg, way to the east, who said they were all Slavs, they weren't Chechens, they said ‘we'd like to call ourselves the Chechen mafia because it looks so good’ and the Chechen mafia said ‘ok you can but you have to pay us a, a monthly tribute and b, you have to uphold the standards of the Chechen mafia’ which are particularly brutal and violent and the Yekaterinburg said ‘fine we'll do that.’
So, you saw the Chechen name being franchised all over Russia, so I thought well actually that's good because that's the same model as McDonalds as well.
Where did you get the idea to write McMafia?
I came to write McMafia because I was working in Yugoslavia and I saw how the brutal killings, particularly the Special Forces, were carried out by people who were basically involved in organised crime. They were linked to some of the political forces and some of the economic forces. And then I discovered that a whole bunch of Serbian organised crime groups were cooperating with Croatian organised crime groups at the same time as being at war with them.
So I was observing how this worked and I realised that what they were doing is you were getting cocaine coming in from South America, you were getting heroin coming in from Afghanistan, you were getting women coming in from the former Soviet Union all into Yugoslavia. You would get getting untaxed cigarettes being flown from the factory gates in the United States or in the United Kingdom to somewhere like Uzbekistan and then into Montenegro and then smuggled into Italy and up to London. Gordon Brown lost billions and billions of pounds in tax revenue from cigarettes at this time.
So Yugoslavia was being used as a huge distribution hub for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world into the European Union which was by now the largest and most lucrative consumer market in history, with a lot of people who liked to smoke untaxed cigarettes, sleep with women who have been trafficked or snort cocaine.
I realised what you were seeing was the emergence of a very efficient international business chain supplying all manner of illicit goods and services into these huge consumer markets of the EU, the US, Japan, but also some of the Middle East as well, mainly the Emirates, Israel, Saudi as well even.
So that was what I sort of identified as the heart of McMafia, along with what was happening in the banking world because all of a sudden banks were being liberated from regulations, particularly in the UK and in the U.S.. London and New York were in a race to the bottom in terms of low regulations and this basically was just a free-for-all for people who wanted to launder money.
So you've got the coincidence of these two things, collapse of the Soviet Union, huge lawless zone from Slovenia to the Chinese border and the ability to launder huge sums of money through London, through New York, wherever it was and it was an entirely new form of criminal organisation and very successful.
Did you ever think McMafia would make it to TV or film?
It's really interesting. If you write a non-fiction book about something interesting like organised crime, the chances of it ever making it to TV or film are so negligible that you don't actually think about it. The book was actually optioned in fact by Working Title, who didn't make it in the end, before it was published. It was sent out to them beforehand, they optioned it straight away and it sat there for about five years almost being made, almost being made. This is something you get used to, the television and film, what a capricious industry that is. When I realised that actually it was a possibility that it was going to be made, you have a non-fiction book being translated by the writer and the director, who I was constantly consulting; they have to come up with a gripping story.
They first of all get that story, which in our case is the story of an Anglo Russian family, the father, a former organised crime boss in Moscow who’s had to flee Putin's Russia and the son who's maybe English, maybe Russian, he doesn't know what his identity is, he has a confused identity. And around that we were all concerned that we hung some of the real stories from McMafia, some of the more terrible ones in fact, but they were asking me every step of the way how we sustain the authenticity.
I think with McMafia we got a show that was unusually gritty, unusually honest. Even though it was dealing with people who were very, very rich, we also went into areas of poverty and you saw the wheels of the economy and society and the crime and family tensions all crunching together and I think it was hugely successful.
From a personal point of view, I got treated like minor royalty on the set, I even got a chair which very few people do. The actors thought I was God; James Norton would listen very carefully to what I was saying. James Norton for heaven’s sake. So, I loved it, what can I say!
What is the threat from cyber-crime to our critical national infrastructure?
Wow cyber on the critical national infrastructure; this is a big, this is a very important and very, very disturbing subject.
What you have seen is from a standing start really; in the space of about 15 years you have seen this huge battle breakout in cyber space between nation-states and the big players remain Russia, China and the United States although the United Kingdom, France and Germany are also very important players. But then you have extremely influential minor characters like Israel and Iran and Saudi Arabia and then India, Brazil, they're all coming up at the same time and they are operating in the most powerful, the most contested technology in the history of communications and unlike all other communication methods, it's unregulated and not only that, it's weaponised.
So, this is really dangerous. The Russians and the Chinese have sleeper viruses all over our infrastructure, we have sleeper viruses all over their infrastructure, things can go very wrong very quickly. And if you look at the attack on the NHS, which was largely arbitrary, what's fascinating is, we look at the NHS aspect of it, that's the health service, in Germany it hit the railways, Deutsche Bahn, in Spain it hit Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, in China it hit the banking system and in Russia, where the thing originated from in the first place, it hit the Ministry of Interior. So, what that means is this one really rather poor piece of ransomware, WannaCry brought down aspects of the critical national infrastructure in some of the major cyber powers in the world.
What worries us now is the fact that it's getting easier and easier to create this technology, so it's not just the big players, who refuse to agree on a global way of regulating this, but smaller and smaller players actually have a shot at creating attacks on the critical national infrastructure. In the United Kingdom things like GCHQ, the national cyber security centre, and other organisations are working overtime, but the infrastructure itself is in private sector hands, so you have a real problem of defence.
Now this, particularly if you're involved in business, is basically your primary issue - to make sure that you have a proper regime of digital hygiene that's not just technological, but that means that all of your employees understand what their role is in that digital hygiene regime.
You have to be really careful about disgruntled insiders, you have to be really careful about supply chain and things like that; this is your biggest issue.
Are you approached by businesses to advise on crime and security?
Yes, I am in a variety of ways. Sometimes I get approached by private intelligence agencies, risk management companies who ask me about what is going on in Bulgaria, what is going on in Serbia or wherever it is and I'll outline to them what the political situation is and what the economic prospects are and the risks through things like corruption.
More frequently these days, I'm brought in by boards to discuss issues around cyber security, So you you've had an extraordinary growth of risk consultancies and private intelligence agencies around the world but particularly in the UK and the United States and they will have their own specialists on Eastern Europe and things like that. But, for example, Statoil recently asked me to come in and give them a briefing on the security situation in Brazil, because I've worked in in Brazil, and that was a very, very fruitful conversation that we had. But, mainly I get asked in to explain to people about cyber security, what they should be doing, what they're doing wrong, what they're doing right and whether I can talk to their employees because it's frequently the employees who don't understand what their role is in in a secure cyber regime. And because I focus on communication in my presentations, it goes down pretty well.
What can an audience expect from your after dinner speech?
I tend to talk about, I call it my life in organised crime and it's basically a humorous look at the things that I've come across or stumbled across. And there's one gag, for example, which I tell in a variety of contexts, which is actually true, and that was about when the first computer virus went around the world and it was called the ‘I Love You’ virus. People would get very excited because you received the ‘I Love You’ virus which is an email saying I love you from somebody who you knew and it was often the case that it was somebody who you'd always secretly fancied, but never being able to tell, so when you get that email saying ‘I love you’ and it's from that good friend who you've always fancied, you can't help but reply and click on the link and then you're finished.
This actually happened in real life, the first person I received it from was my ex-wife and she harboured all sorts of emotions towards me but love was not amongst them, so as soon as I saw that email I thought there’s something strange going on here, so I spared myself a very nasty infection. So, when you were a foreign correspondent you come across ludicrous situations the whole time and so it's a sort of string of anecdotes but told in a way which has a story about how my life came to be what it is.
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