HIS job was to lure Scottish nationalists to Moscow. And he failed. It is fully seven years since Aleksandr Ionov tried to meddle in our politics.

The leader of a Kremlin-backed group called the Anti-Globalisation Movement back in 2015 told this newspaper he was in talks to bring the SNP to a summit of separatists.

His plan was to put Yessers in a room with the supporters of independence for Texas and California – and the leaders of the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, chunks of eastern Ukraine occupied by Putinist proxies.

Hey, there is nothing politicians like more than hobnobbing with foreign leaders. And this is certainly true of Scottish nationalists, who crave international attention. Think of Nicola Sturgeon posing for snaps with Joe Biden and others are COP26.

But can you imagine anyone serious in the SNP wanting to chum up with Putin’s little helpers in the Donbas? Me neither.

READ MORE: Full story on Aleksandr Ionov

Mr Ionov hosted his summit, more than one in fact. Scots, unsurprisingly, were no-shows.

There were Yessers, but from California where a tiny band of independence supporters have pinched the logo and even font of their Scottish counterparts.

American authorities, as we reported last week, have indicted Mr Ionov and named him as acting for the FSB, a successor agency of the KGB.

This was the most compelling evidence yet that people trying to run influence operations in Scotland were connected to the secret police.

This effort was a big deal. So is the fact it failed.

But this was hardly a James Bond caper.

Mr Ionov and his colleagues did not need secret squirrel skills to discover Scottish nationalists thought their boss, Vladimir Putin, was toxic. They should have – would have – figured that out if they had subscribed to a decent Scottish newspaper. (Future spooks and meddlers, I’d recommend The Herald.)

The attempt to woo independence supporters came after the SNP took flak when their former leader, Alex Salmond, said made some platitudinous but ill-considered remarks about Putin. His words did not go down well. A communications lesson was learnt.

The current Kremlin regime – eager for opportunities for whataboutery over Donbas and Crimea – really did try to use Scotland. And it had some limited success. Before Mr Ionov’s efforts, Russian state media kickstarted a conspiracy theory about the independence referendum being rigged, conveniently after its own dubious plebiscite in occupied Crimea. Several “useful idiots” ending up praising Kremlin propaganda efforts, even buying some of its often sloppily constructed narrative on Ukraine, Syria and the suppression of opposition in Russia itself.

Later Mr Salmond – always seen as weak on foreign policy, even by his own colleagues – signed up to do a TV show on the main Putin mouthpiece, RT. And, of course, the same channel more routinely featured George Galloway, perhaps Scotland’s most fervent pro-UK voice.

Both Mr Salmond and Mr Galloway fronted not just RT shows, but micro-parties. Both flopped at last year’s Holyrood elections. Around the same time Putin media outlet Sputnik pulled out of Scotland, calling the country “hostile”.

Mainstream Scottish nationalists and unionists will predictably declare that all of this was inevitable, that the current Kremlin regime could not expect to find many friends here.

SNP MP Stewart McDonald, for example, responded to last week’s revelations of Mr Ionov’s alleged state security links, by saying this country’s door would always be closed to imperialists.

He has a point. Mr McDonald’s own party has been pretty robustly anti-Putin. As have most of its allies and opponents, and most of the general public, easily duped conspiracy theorists aside.

But would it really have been that hard to find an idiot – a useful one or an actual one – to parade at a separatist summit? Would it be that difficult to identity propaganda narratives that work for real, live Scots, rather than internet parodies. Maybe not.

But here is the thing: it takes a bit of effort to learn enough about a country to be able to meddle in its politics.

A fairly significant number of Scots, including those who fancy themselves ‘in the know”, keep being wrong about Russia. So why would we assume Russians, even their intelligence agencies, would be right about Scotland?

I think Russia experienced a failure of open-source intelligence in Scotland, a small but not un-important corner of Europe. This has not been unusual.

There has been a lot of talk about Putin and his cronies misjudging Ukraine, and its ability, and will, to defend itself. Smarter people than me will no doubt investigate how the Kremlin, FSB and other agencies screwed up. It is not like Russia is short of smart people. So how did this come about?

Did spies just end up telling their bosses what they wanted to hear? That has happened in Russia before. Richard Sorge – the Soviet agent in Japan who tipped off the Kremlin about Nazi Germany’s planned invasion – was ignored because his story did not suit Joe Stalin’s take. The result? The Soviet Union was poorly prepared for war. Millions died.

The popular image of Putin as some kind of spy mastermind has never stood up to much scrutiny. Me? I think authoritarian regimes can be good at collecting info but bad at processing it.

That is no reason to be complacent. Scotland still has hyper-partisan wedge-issue politics ripe for exploitation by bad actors, including foreign ones.

Mr Ionov, meanwhile, has denied he works for the FSB. The Americans he got to Moscow are, he says, the victims of an FBI witch-hunt.

He tried in Scotland. And he failed. Both of these things are important. Are we ready to have an honest, non-partisan conversation about why?