It is an auspicious moment for the spy boss to make such an appeal. The Russian military, political and business elites who possess information valuable to UK intelligence are likely still rattled by drone attacks on the capital, not to mention the 24th June uprising in which it seemed Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would march on Moscow with a band of criminals and guns for hire.  

Putin has consistently striven to protect the metropolitan elites from the consequences of his invasion. He built a bomb shelter in a luxury hospital to reassure them in the wake of the Moscow drone attacks, and has recruited disproportionately in poorer provincial areas to bolster the war effort.

However, there were signs emerging even before Prigozhin launched his armed assault that Russia’s elites were perturbed by Putin’s war. In April this year, a leaked telephone conversation revealed music producer Iosif Prigozhin and energy billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov criticising Putin and his associates, complaining that the government “stole the country’s future”. 

In May 2022, diplomat Boris Bondarev publicly resigned his position as counsellor at Russia’s UN Office in Geneva in protest over the invasion, claiming that up to 30 other diplomats had also resigned from the Foreign Ministry because of similar motivations. 

The Kremlin is fully aware of the risk posed by disgruntled citizens. The British Ministry of Defence reported in March that, since the start of the war, Russia’s security services had been tightening the restrictions on foreign travel for those working in “sensitive areas” and confiscating civil servants’ passports, lest “increasingly disaffected officials” flee or defect.

Sir Richard Moore is correct that disenchanted public servants, trapped in Russia, may be open to providing intelligence as their own way of fighting the system which invaded a neighbouring country and keeps them locked in their own. However, despite Moore’s words of reassurance to potential agents that “their secrets will always be safe with us”, the price of treachery is well-known in Russia. As late as 2008, Gordievsky was the target of a poisoning attempt. By his own estimation, he remains on a Kremlin assassination list.