Investigate the investigators! Save America! Reform the FBI now!
M.N.: Investigate the entire upper echelon of the Obama’s FBI, and consider bringing the criminal charges against all the former and current FBI officials who were involved in “Clinton emails investigation” (which was designed by the adversaries, and was used to divert the resources), and “Trump – Russia NON-INVESTIGATION” for this fundamental, historical, unprecedented failure of the American Counterintelligence which is primarily the responsibility of the FBI. The least that they can be accused of is the manifest and obvious, utter professional incompetence. The worst, no one wants to think and to talk about. They made the FBI and the American political system the laughing stock of the world. They undermined the American and the Global Security. Investigate all of them in fullest and in-depth! Saved Stories
Bill Priestap, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, will exit the agency at the end of the year, according to a new report.
Priestap, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterintelligence division, has decided to retire from the bureau, the Wall Street Journal reported.
He was involved with the investigation regarding the unauthorized email server of 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that she used while she was secretary of state and the investigation examining Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
With officials like former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe no longer at the FBI, Priestap is currently the last high-ranking official at the FBI who originally worked on both investigations.
The investigations have come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats, who have cited mismanagement issues in both. For example, Democrats have expressed frustration that the FBI shared they were conducting an investigation into Clinton prior to the election but waited until after the election to disclose they were also investigation Russian interference.
Meanwhile, Republicans fault the FBI for going easy on Clinton and not charging her with any wrongdoing and have claimed that the FBI inappropriately obtained a surveillance warrant to monitor a Trump campaign aide.
The FBI told the Journal that Priestap’s retirement was unrelated to the 2016 investigations and said he “became eligible to retire and has chosen to do so after 20 years of service.” It’s uncertain what Preistap plans to do following his retirement.
WASHINGTON—A top FBI official who helped oversee two politically … BillPriestap, who currently serves as assistant director of the Federal … shortly before Election Day after obtaining newevidence, with some saying that it …
Demoted FBI agent Peter Strzok had larger role in Clinton, Russia probes than … including a closed-door interview with FBI espionage chief Bill Priestap. … 30 of that year, Strzok emailed Priestap and another FBI colleague … Top Dem blames Trump for GM plant shutdowns, praises new truce with China …
Mueller filing: Flynn gave substantial assistance CNN Special counsel Robert Mueller told a federal court that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has given “substantial assistance” to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time. Source: CNN …
Mike Flynn Report Expected to Shed Light on Mueller Probe Wall Street Journal WASHINGTON—A new filing Tuesday is expected to detail how former Trump adviser Mike Flynn has been helping federal investigators since pleading guilty a year ago, potentially providing a window into the special counsel probe into Russian election … and more »
Nato accuses Russia of breaking nuclear missile treaty BBC News Western military alliance Nato has formally accused Russia of breaching the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned land-based nuclear missiles in Europe. Following a meeting, Nato foreign ministers issued a statement … and more »
Amazon briefly edges out Apple for most valuable company Reuters SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com (AMZN.O) briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street in intraday trade on Monday, days after Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) dethroned long-time leader Apple Inc (AAPL.O). Amazon rose by 4.7 percent at … and more »
For lovers of spy lore, the past few years have brought unprecedented glimpses behind the curtain of international espionage. In part thanks to the unpreparedness of many intelligence agencies to grasp the implications of rapidly advancing information technology and the ubiquity of social media, more than one has seen some of its most precious secrets spilled over newspaper front pages. The lates
ФСБ: Разминирование колледжа в Керчи завершено, следственные действия продолжаются Разминирование колледжа в Керчи, где погибли 19 человек, закончилось. Как пишет Russia Today, об этом 17 октября после заседания оперативного штаба сообщил представитель ФСБ Крыма. «Сейчас разминирование закончено, бомб там больше нет. В здании теперь работают криминалисты, следственный комитет, ФСБ и полиция
The firm warns that this activity could be an early indicator that the hacking group is preparing to launch more damaging attacks in the future…. and other cyber firms like FireEye and iSight have tied the attacks on Ukraine’s power grid to Russian hacking groups.
A senior official at Germany ‘s defence ministry has sparked an uproar with a tweet commemorating the death of Erwin Rommel, a favourite general of Adolf Hitler who was later involved in a plot to kill the Fuehrer. ‘Erwin Rommel, who was forced to commit suicide by the Nazis, died 74 years ago today,’ wrote Peter Tauber, a former close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel , on Twitter . The tweet unl
The May government has called for additional EU economic sanctions against Russia and brought charges against two members of Russian military intelligence after discovering traces of the Novichok nerve agent in the room they rented in London.
Property prices in London fell over the past year amid signs that Brexit uncertainty, heavier taxes on property investors and stretched affordability have hit the market in the capital. Across the UK, the cost of the average home grew by 3.4 per cent, but in the capital they fell by 0.2 per cent in the year ending in August, the Office for National Statistics said. The areas of London to have see
Беспокоитесь о Хашукджи? Предъявите Скрипаля! Страны G7 взбудоражены исчезновением оппозиционного саудовского журналиста Джамаля Хашукджи и призывают наказать всех причастных к его исчезновению. На этом фоне справедливо было бы им потребовать и от Великобритании прояснить судьбу Сергея Скрипаля и его дочери. Напомню, что обозреватель американской газеты Washington Post Джамаль Хашукджи бессле
I n June 2017, Mark Urban drove to Salisbury to meet a retired Russian spy. Urban – a BBC Newsnight journalist and author – was contemplating writing a book about east-west espionage after the end of the cold war. The spy was Sergei Skripal . He had kept a low profile in Britain since arriving in 2010 as part of an international spy swap. There were no signs he was engaged in active espionage. Ar
Автором данного контента является третья сторона. Мы не можем гарантировать наличия опций для пользователей с ограниченными возможностями. Москва. 17 октября. ИНТЕРФАКС – Премьер-министр РФ Дмитрий Медведев заявил, что не знаком ни с двумя подозреваемыми британской стороной по “делу Скрипалей”, ни с их комментариями в связи с ситуацией и не знает, действительно ли они ездили в Солсбери посмотреть
МОСКВА, 17 октября. /ТАСС/. Премьер-министр РФ Дмитрий Медведев не стал комментировать ситуацию вокруг россиян Александра Петрова и Руслана Боширова, которых Лондон подозревает в причастности к отравлению Сергея и Юлии Скрипалей. “Я не знаю. Я комментировать не буду, просто потому, что я не знаком ни с этими людьми, ни с этими комментариями в достаточной степени не знаком”, – сказал премьер-минис
В ходе визита советника президента США по национальной безопасности Джона Болтона в Москву российская сторона может поднять вопрос о дипсобственности страны в Соединенных Штатах, заявила официальный представитель МИД РФ Мария Захарова. Эта тема не снимается с повестки дня в контактах с представителями США, подчеркнула она. «Тема с повестки дня никуда не уходила, в ходе каждых контактов мы этой те
The EU announced on 15 October 2018 that it has adopted a new sanctions regime to address the use and proliferation of chemical weapons, which will enable it to impose travel bans and/or asset freezes on those involved in the development and use of chemical weapons anywhere, regardless of their nationality and location.
В задачи одного из самых засекреченных подразделений страны, Центра Специального назначения ФСБ входит проведение антитеррористических операций, в том числе и освобождению заложников. Согласно легенде учений, в здании находятся террористы и заложник, а другие бандиты охраняют его на улице. Сложность ситуации заключается в том, что спецназ не может использовать летальные гранаты. Группа спецназовц
A painful example occurred back in 2015, when the FBI first saw signs that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked by Russian military intelligence agents.
Сотрудники ФСБ проводят проверку по факту утечки личных данных подозреваемых Лондоном россиян. Скандальная история о том, что в отравлении Скрипалей виновны Петров и Боширов, получила продолжение. Речь идет о публикациях их анкет на получение загранпаспортов и данных о пересечении границы России из систем “Роспаспорт” и “Перемещение”. Силовики ищут сотрудников МВД, которые продали журналистам эт
Russian hackers accused of infecting three Eastern European companies with malware Hackers allegedly linked to Russian military intelligence are accused of infecting three energy and transport companies in Ukraine and Poland with sophisticated new malware, Reuters reports . The claims: The companies, which have not been named, were infected with a new type of malicious software called GreyEnerg
Russian hackers accused of infecting three Eastern European companies with malware Hackers allegedly linked to Russian military intelligence are accused of infecting three energy and transport companies in Ukraine and Poland with sophisticated new malware, Reuters reports .
I n June 2017, Mark Urban drove to Salisbury to meet a retired Russian spy. Urban – a BBC Newsnight journalist and author – was contemplating writing a book about east-west espionage after the end of the cold war. The spy was Sergei Skripal . He had kept a low profile in Britain since arriving in 2010 as part of an international spy swap. There were no signs he was engaged in active espionage. Ar
I n June 2017, Mark Urban drove to Salisbury to meet a retired Russian spy. Urban – a BBC Newsnight journalist and author – was contemplating writing a book about east-west espionage after the end of the cold war. The spy was Sergei Skripal . He had kept a low profile in Britain since arriving in 2010 as part of an international spy swap. There were no signs he was engaged in active espionage. Ar
I n June 2017, Mark Urban drove to Salisbury to meet a retired Russian spy…. One wonders if Skripal would have voted for Putin, given the chance Urban tells the story of Skripal’s undercover career well, much of it previously unknown and gleaned from around 10 hours of conversations with him at his Salisbury home.
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday that four military planes were ready to evacuate casualties of a blast in the Crimean port city of Kerch for medical treatment, the Interfax news agency reported.
2.13.18 – Merkel The Spider Düsseldorf carnival: Float shows Donald Trump mounted by Russian bear – Business Insider The German Intelligence behind Operations “Trump” and “9/11”. That’s another crown for you, Ole. You’ve bought the first one, I guess you really liked it. Are these crowns real or fake? – M.N. The Great Demiurge Ole The First The Real Mastermind of the Operations “Trump” and “9/
Assange has denied receiving the files from the Russian government or backing the Trump campaign, despite a growing body of evidence suggesting he received material directly from Russia’s military intelligence agency and coordinated media strategy with Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
В соцсетях оказался очень популярным пост – рассуждение об «агентах ГРУ» , опубликованный гендиректором и основателем коммуникационного агентства «Гиперион» Андреем Грачевым . Нам в «Комсомолке» мысли предпринимателя показались любопытными, с позволения автора приводим его версию происходящего. *** Если кто-то и правда верит, что Скрипалей отравили эти двое, то мои размышления вас с разочаруют. М
Сюжет вокруг отравления в Солсбери продолжает закручиваться. На прошлой неделе британский таблоид Daily Express разоблачил «очередную неудачу ГРУ», поведав о «кроте» в российском посольстве – агенте по кличке Аполлон, который якобы и сдал британской MI6 вероятных отравителей, Александра Петрова и Руслана Боширова. О чём же поведал читателям Daily Express? «Российские военные агенты», пытавшиеся у
Сюжет вокруг отравления в Солсбери продолжает закручиваться. На прошлой неделе британский таблоид Daily Express разоблачил «очередную неудачу ГРУ», поведав о «кроте» в российском посольстве – агенте по кличке Аполлон, который якобы и сдал британской MI6 вероятных отравителей, Александра Петрова и Руслана Боширова. О чём же поведал читателям Daily Express? «Российские военные агенты», пытавшиеся у
МОСКВА, 16 октября. /ТАСС/. Британская инициативная группа Bellingcat связана с западными спецслужбами. Об этом заявил глава МИД РФ Сергей Лавров в интервью телеканалу Euronews . “Bellingcat, мы знаем, ни для кого не секрет, об этом открыто пишут западные журналисты, связан со спецслужбами, через него сливают информацию, которая должна возыметь некое воздействие на общественное мнение”, – сказал
Assange has denied receiving the files from the Russian government or backing the Trump campaign, despite a growing body of evidence suggesting he received material directly from Russia’s military intelligence agency and coordinated media strategy with Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr.
EU considers sanctions against cyber attackers The announcement came following last week’s (11 October) report from the Dutch intelligence services in partnership with the UK that a range of cyberattacks was carried out by the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, on various sectors ranging from sport to transport and the 2016 US presidential election.
Сотрудники Федеральной службы безопасности прибыли в политехнический колледж Керчи, где произошёл взрыв, сообщает РИА Новости. Как отмечает RT , представители спецслужбы вывели из пострадавшего здания всех сотрудников экстренных служб. К месту трагедии также срочно направляется из Симферополя глава Крыма Сергей Аксёнов, передает КИА . Ранее стало известно, что перед взрывом неизвестный
Регистрация пользователя в сервисе РИА Клуб на сайте Ria.Ru и авторизация на других сайтах медиагруппы МИА «Россия сегодня» при помощи аккаунта или аккаунтов пользователя в социальных сетях обозначает согласие с данными правилами. Пользователь обязуется своими действиями не нарушать действующее законодательство Российской Федерации. Пользователь обязуется высказываться уважительно по отношению к
A report by researchers at Slovakia-based ESET did not attribute the hacking activity, recorded between 2015 and mid-2018, to any specific country but blamed it on a group that has been accused by Britain of having links to Russian military intelligence.
After Putin, the most trusted men in the country were Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister who has denied aspirations to office, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the clownish leader of Russia’s nationalist Liberal Democratic party.
British Spies Are Hacking Russian Military Databases, Expert Hints 17 October 2018, 09:50 | Updated: 17 October 2018, 09:54 A journalist who investigated the UK’s relationship with Russia following the Skripal poisoning believes that British spies have hacked their military databases. The two men who the British government claim are responsible for the Salisbury Novichok poisoning say they are ca
11:45 В Москве задержали подозреваемого в тройном убийстве На северо-востоке Москвы задержали молодого человека, подозреваемого в убийстве своих родителей и бабушки, сообщает телеканал «360». 11:41 Футболист сборной Украины Ярмоленко ответил на призывы прекратить давать интервью на русском языке Нападающий сборной Украины по футболу и «Вест Хэм Юнайтед» Андрей Ярмоленко ответил на призывы прекрат
Chemical weapons have been used in Syria more than 100 times since 2013, a significantly higher figure than previous official estimates, according to research by the BBC.
I n June 2017, Mark Urban drove to Salisbury to meet a retired Russian spy…. One wonders if Skripal would have voted for Putin, given the chance Urban tells the story of Skripal’s undercover career well, much of it previously unknown and gleaned from around 10 hours of conversations with him at his Salisbury home.
I n June 2017, Mark Urban drove to Salisbury to meet a retired Russian spy. Urban – a BBC Newsnight journalist and author – was contemplating writing a book about east-west espionage after the end of the cold war. The spy was Sergei Skripal . He had kept a low profile in Britain since arriving in 2010 as part of an international spy swap. There were no signs he was engaged in active espionage. Ar
defeating ISIS, preventing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons, starting a political transition in Syria, and decreasing “Iranian malign influence in Syria so that it cannot threaten the region, to include ensuring the withdrawal of Iranian-backed forces from Syria.”
The Skripal affair has been a case in point. In March, when the former Russian spy and his daughter, Yulia, were found to have been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok, the Kremlin not only vehemently denied involvement, but demanded definitive proof of the suspects’ guilt, which seemed at the time like a tall order.
В соцсетях оказался очень популярным пост – рассуждение об «агентах ГРУ» , опубликованный гендиректором и основателем коммуникационного агентства «Гиперион» Андреем Грачевым . Нам в «Комсомолке» мысли предпринимателя показались любопытными, с позволения автора приводим его версию происходящего. *** Если кто-то и правда верит, что Скрипалей отравили эти двое, то мои размышления вас с разочаруют. М
Wednesday, October 17 2018 4:42 PM EDT 2018-10-17 20:42:26 GMT Samuel Gomez Samuel Gomez SALISBURY, Md.- A man has been charged with attempted murder after attacking his coworker.
2010 – Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer jailed for spying for Britain, is released and flown to the UK as part of a swap with Russian agents caught in the United States. He settles in Salisbury. March 3, 2018 – Yulia Skripal arrives at Heathrow Airport from Russia to visit her father in England. March 4, 9.15am – Sergei Skripal’s burgundy BMW is seen in suburban Sali
The smirking Salisbury hitman wanted for poisoning Sergei Skripal has been unmasked as a decorated GRU colonel who was awarded the Russian military’s highest honour by Vladimir Putin after his service in Chechnya and Ukraine . The real identity of one of the two assassins, identified by police as Ruslan Boshirov, is reportedly Colonel Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga, 39. He was made a Hero of the
On behalf of the United Kingdom let me begin by paying tribute to an outstanding leader of this United Nations, who sadly passed away this summer. Kofi Annan was one of the great Secretaries General, a tireless campaigner for peace and progress, and a champion of human rights and human dignity – whose influence will continue to be felt around the world for years to come. Over the course of his li
This new photograph of Salisbury poisoning suspect of Anatoliy Chepiga (left) seems to match existing images of ‘Ruslan Boshirov’ – the pseudonym Chepiga used when he appeared on RT in September (right).
One of Russia ‘s top law officials has been killed in a mysterious helicopter crash, followed by claims that he had been leaking confidential information to the West, including Britain. Deputy prosecutor-general Saak Karapetyan – a former MP and long-time ally of President Vladimir Putin – died last night when his AS-350 came down in Kostroma region northeast of Moscow. His death came just hours
In a dramatic move yesterday, British and Dutch authorities named four members of Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit caught red-handed trying to infiltrate the inquiry into the Salisbury poisoning.
2010 – Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer jailed for spying for Britain, is released and flown to the UK as part of a swap with Russian agents caught in the United States. He settles in Salisbury. March 3, 2018 – Yulia Skripal arrives at Heathrow Airport from Russia to visit her father in England. March 4, 9.15am – Sergei Skripal’s burgundy BMW is seen in suburban Sali
Former workers at the Garcon Garcon bistro said he did shifts serving wine and food at the eatery to support himself during his studies. bellingcat.com A Russian agent accused of carrying out the Salisbury novichok attack previously worked as a wine waiter at a top restaurant, former friends have claimed. Last week, the assassin previously named as “Alexander Petrov” was unmasked as Alexander Mis
Poison suspects had followed spy to Czech Republic By Associated Press Published: 07:41 EDT, 10 October 2018 | Updated: 07:41 EDT, 10 October 2018 PRAGUE (AP) – The Czech public radio has reported that the two suspects in the nerve agent poisoning of a Russian ex-spy in England had already been following their victim when all three were in the Czech Republic in 2014. Citing unnamed domestic intel
Shortly after, Boshirov and Petrov appeared in an interview with pro-Kremlin TV channel RT…. An investigation carried out by investigatory websites Bellingcat and The Insider named Boshirov and Petrov as, respectively, GRU Colonel Anatoly Chepiga and military doctor Aleksandr Mishkin.
Agents’ IDs confirmed The clumsiness of the two wannabe Skripal assassins, first identified as Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksandr Petrov, appears remarkable…. Shortly after, Boshirov and Petrov appeared in an interview with pro-Kremlin TV channel RT.
Former workers at the Garcon Garcon bistro said he did shifts serving wine and food at the eatery to support himself during his studies. bellingcat.com A Russian agent accused of carrying out the Salisbury novichok attack previously worked as a wine waiter at a top restaurant, former friends have claimed. Last week, the assassin previously named as “Alexander Petrov” was unmasked as Alexander Mis
Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Замминистра обороны генерал-полковник Александр Фомин выступил перед участниками XV Международного дискуссионного клуба «Валдай» Он дал оценку ситуации в области глобальной и региональной безопасности, проинформировал о приоритетах деятельности Вооруженных Сил России, подходах к развитию международного военного сотрудничества. Hamburg-based Sept. 11 suicide pilots –
Spread the Knowledge Salisbury Poisoning – THE LATEST NEWS Боширов и Петров Страна.ua 1 “Дико круто! Это практически Петров и Боширов”. Интервью Семочко в “солсберецком” стиле взорвало соцсети Вечером 16 октября скандальный первый замруководителя Службы внешней разведки и экс-руководитель экономической контрразведки СБУ Сергей Семочко дал интервью телеканалу ZIK . В нем он ответил на претензии жур
Вечером 16 октября скандальный первый замруководителя Службы внешней разведки и экс-руководитель экономической контрразведки СБУ Сергей Семочко дал интервью телеканалу ZIK . В нем он ответил на претензии журналистов, сказав, что не имеет отношения к домам под Киевом стоимостью в миллионы долларов, а его жена является исключительно гражданкой Украины. “Все мое состояние, а также состояние лиц,
MOSCOW (Reuters) – The two suspects in the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal have nothing to do with Russian President Vladimir Putin or the government, a Kremlin spokesman was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying on Sunday. A still image taken from a video footage and released by RT international news channel on September 13, 2018, shows two Russian men with the same names, Alexande
Novichok poisonings “cause house prices in Salisbury to fall 9%” 16 October 2018 | By Joe Quirke 0 Comments The attempted murder of Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia has caused house prices in Salisbury to drop by 8.8%, according to research by loan company Cashback Remortgages. The poisoning, carried out with nerve agent Novichok, occurred in March 2018. Since then, average hou
But the Russian version of its own military strikes is amplified by bloggers like Beeley and Bartlett , who promote RT reports that push the Kremlin’s false narrative about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Пожар на арсенале в районе поселка Дружба Черниговской области начался после четырех взрывов на его территории, сообщил заместитель начальника Генерального штаба Вооруженных сил Украины Родион Тимошенко в ходе брифинга в Киеве, передает корреспондент интернет-издания “ГОРДОН” . “По данным оперативной группы Генерального штаба, которая провела опрос часовых на постах, они подтверждают факт взрыв
rks to steal information for strategic or commercial reasons, and give themselves a starting point – ‘pre-positioning’ – for a significant attack in the future.” The assessment comes less than a fortnight after Britain accused the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, of being behind a campaign of cyber attacks targeting political institutions, businesses, media and sport.
Федеральная служба безопасности (ФСБ) начала проверку из-за утечки личных данных Александра Петрова и Руслана Боширова, которых Великобритания считает сотрудниками Главного разведывательного управления (ГРУ) и обвиняет в отравлении Сергея и Юлии Скрипалей, сообщает «Росбалт» во вторник, 25 сентября, со ссылкой на информированный источник В издании отмечают, что правоохранители разыскивают человек
Решение синода Русской православной церкви (РПЦ) разорвать отношения с Вселенским патриархатом является следствием влияния на РПЦ российских властей. Такое мнение выразил 16 октября во Львовской области президент Украины Петр Порошенко, сообщает корреспондент издания “ГОРДОН” . “У нас вчера состоялось заседание так называемого Священного синода Русской православной церкви. В очередной раз они п
Регистрация пользователя в сервисе РИА Клуб на сайте Ria.Ru и авторизация на других сайтах медиагруппы МИА «Россия сегодня» при помощи аккаунта или аккаунтов пользователя в социальных сетях обозначает согласие с данными правилами. Пользователь обязуется своими действиями не нарушать действующее законодательство Российской Федерации. Пользователь обязуется высказываться уважительно по отношению к
“It’s GRU, it’s Cossacks, not Russian state, or Bolshoi” Montenegro’s Chief Special Prosecutor Milivoje Katanic says he “never accused official Russia for preparing a coup in Montenegro.”
File ties novichok suspect to Putin’s defence ministry Alexander Petrov is one of two Russians suspected of carrying out the attack in Salisbury. His passport file included a phone number for the defence ministry Alamy One of the two men suspected of carrying out the Salisbury nerve agent attack is linked to the Russian defence ministry, according to passport details published on an investigative
Российское издание работало с открытыми данными на месте, тогда как Bellingcat занимался получением информации из закрытых баз. Главный редактор российского издания The Insider Роман Доброхотов и один из группы расследователей Bellingcat Христо Грозев рассказали, как происходил процесс идентификации сотрудников ГРУ, которых Великобритания обвиняет в отравлении Сергея Скрипаля, Александра Мишкина
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Alexander Mishkin, the second man accused of involvement in the Skripal assassination plot, was likely to have been sent on the mission because he was a trained doctor capable of providing an antidote in case the novichok attack went wrong, according to security sources. Dr Mishkin, like the GRU colleague who travelled with him to Salisbury, was made a ‘Hero of the Russian Federation’ with Vladim
London Metropolitan Police UK counter terrorism police and the security services identified the third agent, and say the person visited Salisbury to prepare for the attack on Sergei Skripal before two of his colleagues arrived, The Telegraph reported on Thursday night.
Российское издание работало с открытыми данными на месте, тогда как Bellingcat занимался получением информации из закрытых баз. Главный редактор российского издания The Insider Роман Доброхотов и один из группы расследователей Bellingcat Христо Грозев рассказали, как происходил процесс идентификации сотрудников ГРУ, которых Великобритания обвиняет в отравлении Сергея Скрипаля, Александра Мишкина
МОСКВА, 16 октября. /ТАСС/. Председатель Госдумы Вячеслав Володин задался вопросом, почему британские парламентарии не обсуждают дело Скрипалей с российскими коллегами, и указал на необходимость такого диалога, если обвиняющая сторона действительно хочет разобраться в произошедшем. “Дело Скрипалей для нас является абсолютно понятным, и мы иначе как к попытке взять и назначить виновных в этом вопр
1 Salisbury Poisoning News Updates – FBI News Review: Salisbury Poisoning – LATEST: Vladimir Putin is probably behind the poisonings but at least they aren’t in the US, says Donald Trump – 5:01 PM 10/15/2018 Spread the Knowledge Salisbury Poisoning LATEST Sergei Skripal Evening Standard 1 Vladimir Putin is probably behind the poisonings but at least they aren’t in the US, says Donald Trump It’s n
Москва , 16 октября 2018 , 12:57 — REGNUM Спикер Госдумы Вячеслав Володин недоумевает, что парламентарии из Великобритании не стремятся в рамках межпарламентского диалога разобраться в ситуации с «делом Скрипаля», передает корреспондент ИА REGNUM 16 октября. «Почему вы с коллегами пытаетесь разобраться и задаетесь вопросом, почему же тогда наши коллеги-представители парламента Великобритании не
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption “Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town” – interview from 13 September 2018 The story spun by the two Russian suspects in the Salisbury poisoning was met with snorts of derision in the UK. But less predictable is the mockery that seemingly tall tale is getting back home in Russia. The appearance
Novichok poisonings “cause house prices in Salisbury to fall 9%” 16 October 2018 … By Joe Quirke 0 Comments The attempted murder of Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia has caused house prices in Salisbury to drop by 8.8%, according to research by loan company Cashback Remortgages.
The spy poisoning scandal in Salisbury has had a toxic result for local house sellers…. In comparison, across the whole of Wiltshire average prices increased by 1.7% over both three-month periods, according to the research, It also seems more Salisbury home owners are now trying to sell their properties since the poisoning that claimed two more victims, one of whom died.
Он дал оценку ситуации в области глобальной и региональной безопасности, проинформировал о приоритетах деятельности Вооруженных Сил России, подходах к развитию международного военного сотрудничества.
МОСКВА, 16 окт — РИА Новости. За полгода с начала “дела Скрипалей” Лондон так и не представил никаких доказательств причастности России, можно предположить, что их никогда не будет, заявила представитель МИД РФ Мария Захарова.
“По прошествии полугода никаких доказательств нет, есть некие фотографии Петрова и Боширова, есть некие “сливы”, которые были сделаны спецслужбами через подставные квазиСМИ. Все. А что произошло в Солсбери? Где Скрипали? Какова хронология так называемого преступления?” — заявила Захарова в интервью программе “Место встречи” на НТВ.
“Про доказательства, я так понимаю, мы никогда ничего не услышим”, — предположила она.
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Действия стран, поддержавших в этой ситуации Лондон, Захарова назвала “круговой порукой”. “Лондону обязательно нужно было вовлечь в свою орбиту как можно большее число сторонников, которые потом просто обязаны были бы, не имели другого шанса, нежели поддерживать Лондон все дальше и больше”, — считает она.
Четвертого марта в Солсбери были отравлены бывший офицер ГРУ Сергей Скрипаль и его дочь Юлия, что спровоцировало крупный международный скандал. В Лондоне заявили, что к случившемуся причастна Россия, Москва это категорически отрицает.
Россия не раз предлагала провести совместное расследование инцидента, однако Лондон проигнорировал инициативу и отказал в доступе к Скрипалям. Также МИД уличил британского премьера Терезу Мэй во лжи. Так, она утверждала, что яд изготовили в России. Однако в лаборатории Портон-Даун это опровергли.
Позднее Лондон предъявил фотографии двух “подозреваемых в отравлении Скрипалей”, утверждая, что это два офицера ГРУ – Александр Петров и Руслан Боширов. В Москве заявили, что эти имена России “ничего не говорят” и вновь призвали Британию перейти от обвинений и манипуляций к сотрудничеству.
Szijjarto claims Ukraine made no progress on the issue of the education law and failed to implement the recommendations of the Venice Commission.
REUTERS
Hungary will continue to block the NATO-Ukraine Commission at the ministerial level, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told his Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin during their talks held on the sidelines of the EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
In addition, Szijjarto said that Ukraine had failed to make any progress on the law on education and to implement the recommendations of the Venice Commission, reports Deutsche Welle.
The Hungarian Foreign Minister also expressed discontent over the recent petition to regulate the status of Ukrainian citizens with dual EU citizenship, as well as including a number of Hungarian citizens, including Szijjarto himself, in the Myrotvorets database of individuals threatening Ukraine’s national security. Read alsoUkraine, Hungary to hold consultations over distribution of Hungarian passports among Zakarpattia residents
Both officials noted that while the conflict between the two countries has not been resolved, some significant progress is seen.
“We need to find a path of how we could find a common language with Hungary. This is a difficult path,” said Pavlo Klimkin.
According to Szijjarto, he would also like to “strengthen and improve relations.”
During the meeting of Hungarian and Ukrainian foreign ministers, the two top diplomats decided to hold consular consultations on the issue of Hungarian passports issued to Ukrainian nationals in Zakarpattia and finally agreed to have the name of the office of an envoy for the development of the Transcarpathian region changed.
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Mar 17, 2016 – When President Vladimir Putin rose to power a few years later, Mr. Lesin helped him take control of Russian television and force Mr. Gusinsky …
I respectfully recommend to Mr. Mueller to interview, depose, subpoena, or to interrogate Sergei Skripal as the part of his investigation. It looks like he might be one of the main masterminds and the culprits of the Operation Trump.
I also respectfully advise that Mr. Skripal may be overtly or covertly mentally ill.
It appears that his motivations were to reunite Ukraine and Russia and to restore the USSR via the re-installation of the Yanukovich regime. His web of connections has to be explored. It appears also that he might be the main author or one of the authors of “Steel dossier”. It also looks like he signals that he might have more materials of this kind in his posession, which he intends to use to establish the “TLConnections in the right places”.
It is also quite possible that he was the main organizer and inspiration behind the capture of Crimea and the War in Donbass, which he apparently intended to offer to Russia in exchange for assistance in re-installing Yanukivich. For Russians the Donbass was not worth the global outcry and the economic blockade, so they did not make a deal. Yanukovich probably, did not want to sacrifice Donbass for his return eihther, so this plan came to naught.
“The amazing “coincidence: On March 2, 2018, Friday: Yanukovych Calls For Direct Talks Between Kyiv, Separatists. The same day March 2, 2018, the “Russian team”: “Boshirov, Petrov, Fedotov” arrive from Moscow just for 2-3 days. On March 3, Skripal’s daughter arrived. It is possible that the team brought the message directly from Yanukovych and/or others confirming that the separatist war in Donbass is over. Hypothetically, Skripal got hysterical and staged his own and his daughters’s poisoning, sending the message back: “YOU POISONED ME!”
I think that the information that could be obtained from Skripal holds the keys to many answers. I think that he has to be very carefully investigated. One of the most intriguing quiestions are his connections with the “New Abwehr”. Please see my blogs for more details.
I think that to interview Yanukovych, and the related and significant others, is also a very good idea.
In 2017, the festival’s Salisbury Greats strand focused on the work of William Golding, Terry Pratchett and John Creasey…. Dorothy L Sayers went to school in Salisbury at Godolphin and her debut novel, Whose Body?
Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko – Google Search Channel 4 News – 13 hours ago One person who’s got to know Arron Banks reasonably well is Russia’s ambassador to the UK. Alexander Yakovenko has met the Brexit backer … Sky News – 14 hours ago Alexander Yakovenko admitted relations between London and Moscow were “very low”, but continued to deny any Russian involve
В Москве не знают, жив ли пострадавший при отравлении в Солсбери экс-сотрудник ГРУ Сергей Скрипаль и где он сейчас находится, так же, как и его дочь Юлия. «Никто не видел Скрипалей с 4 марта. Нет никакой информации», — заявил в пятницу на пресс-конференции посол России в Великобритании Александр Яковенко. Как передает «Интерфакс» , посол уточнил, что обвиняемые Лондоном в отравлении Скрипал
Image courtesy of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, The Hague, Netherlands…. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is at a crossroads.
Trudeau will take it.” Deutsche Welle / Bonn, Germany UNTANGLING THE SKRIPAL POISONING CASE “The true identity of Ruslan Boshirov, a suspected perpetrator of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, is Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian colonel who has been personally honored by President Vladimir Putin…,” writes Ingo Mannteufel.
LONDON (AP) — One of the two suspects in the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy in England is a medical doctor in Russian military intelligence who was honored as a Hero of the Russian Federation by President Vladimir Putin in 2014, a group of British investigators said Tuesday. British police say two GRU agents traveling under the aliases Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Borishov used a Soviet-made ne
Prior European Operations Disclosed via @bellingcat https://t.co/FJoZL2n54r — Bellingcat (@bellingcat) September 20, 2018 Britain has named Petrov and Boshirov as suspects in an attempt to kill Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the Soviet-designed nerve agent Novichok.
More News 13 Oct 2018 | 3:52 PM Monterey, Oct 13 (UNI) Addressing the deteriorating relations between Russia and the US, Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said here that the present situation between the two countries was going through a tough time, thus negatively affecting the international peace and security. Share see more.. 13 Oct 2018 | 3:38 PM Islamabad, Oct 13 (UNI) Pakistan h
Britain is preparing to join the United States and France in launching waves of airstrikes against Syria if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons in Idlib, where three million civilians are trapped by a looming offensive.
ФСБ в Твери завершит мероприятия форума “Я – патриот” сегодня в 13:31, просмотров: 47 13 октября на площадке академического театра драмы в Твери состоится форум «Я-патриот» с участием представителей Правительства Тверской области, регионального Управления ФСБ России, силовых структур, воспитанников военно-патриотических клубов и объединений, юнармейцев, школьников. Это финальное событие «Дней обр
More News 13 Oct 2018 | 3:52 PM Monterey, Oct 13 (UNI) Addressing the deteriorating relations between Russia and the US, Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov said here that the present situation between the two countries was going through a tough time, thus negatively affecting the international peace and security. Share see more.. 13 Oct 2018 | 3:38 PM Islamabad, Oct 13 (UNI) Pakistan h
Trudeau will take it.” Deutsche Welle / Bonn, Germany UNTANGLING THE SKRIPAL POISONING CASE “The true identity of Ruslan Boshirov, a suspected perpetrator of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, is Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian colonel who has been personally honored by President Vladimir Putin…,” writes Ingo Mannteufel.
Trudeau will take it.” Deutsche Welle / Bonn, Germany UNTANGLING THE SKRIPAL POISONING CASE “The true identity of Ruslan Boshirov, a suspected perpetrator of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, is Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian colonel who has been personally honored by President Vladimir Putin…,” writes Ingo Mannteufel.
Trudeau will take it.” Deutsche Welle / Bonn, Germany Untangling the Skripal poisoning case “The true identity of Ruslan Boshirov, a suspected perpetrator of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, is Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian colonel who has been personally honored by President Vladimir Putin…,” writes Ingo Mannteufel.
Полиция обыскала цыганское трио. По 10 уголовным делам петербурженок отследили видеокамеры ТРК, как Боширова и Петрова Следствие Петербурга предъявило претензии трем дамам. Им вменяют серию карманных краж, совершенных за полгода в торгово-развлекательных центрах города. В отличии от аналогичных случаев, подозреваемых не задерживали с поличным. «Фонтанка» узнала, что даже консервативные оперативни
Trudeau will take it.” Deutsche Welle / Bonn, Germany Untangling the Skripal poisoning case “The true identity of Ruslan Boshirov, a suspected perpetrator of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, is Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian colonel who has been personally honored by President Vladimir Putin…,” writes Ingo Mannteufel.
Russia has obtained intelligence that militants are plotting provocations with the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian province of Idlib, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the OPCW, Ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin told TASS on Friday.
BRUSSELS — The United States and other Western nations leveled a torrent of new allegations against Moscow’s secretive GRU military spy agency on Thursday, accusing its agents of hacking anti-doping agencies, plane crash investigations and a chemical weapons probe as well as launching cyberattacks that rocked America’s 2016 election and crippled Ukraine in 2017.
Сотрудники управления ФСБ по Красноярскому краю установили, что житель региона разместил в бане на дачном участке своего знакомого оборудование для переработки наркотического сырья. Ингредиенты для производства синтетического наркотика амфетамина производитель заказывал через Интернет и получал по почте. Зелье сбывал оптовыми партиями в Красноярске. В бане ФСБ обнаружила более трех килограммов на
Российские власти, несмотря на все разоблачения, продолжают отрицать свою причастность к отравлению в Солсбери . Своим мнением о причастности российской власти к отравлению в Солсбери поделился один из создателей «Новичка» российский ученый Владимир Углев, передает НАРОДНА ПРАВДА со ссылкой на «Радио Свобода» . Углем принимал участие в работе по поиску, разработке и боевому применению отравляющих
Правоохранительные органы в России не будут предпринимать никаких действий в отношении Александра Петрова и Руслана Боширова, которых в Британии обвиняют в покушении на убийство бывшего агента ГРУ Сергея Скрипаля и его дочери Юлии. Об этом заявил в пятницу пресс-секретарь президента России Дмитрий Песков. По его словам, они не нарушали никаких законов на территории России и Кремлю “не известно, ч
The Russian ambassador to the UK has addressed the foreign media in a lengthy press conference, countering accusations from the UK, US and their allies that Russia has been involved in a global cyber-hacking campaign and was behind the nerve agent attack in the British city of Salisbury.
A third Russian flew in and out of the UK at the same time as the two GRU agents accused of poisoning the Skripals with novichok, raising questions about whether they had an accomplice. The man, using the alias Sergey Fedotov, 45, flew to London on March 2, the same day as military intelligence agents Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – but on a different flight, a leading Russian news agency
They’ve used commercial satellite images to track Chinese airbases; watched security operations unfold on social media in Venezuela; and pinpointed the locations of chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
A retired spy and his daughter are found slumped on a park bench in Salisbury. Someone tried to kill them. The poison is novichok , a Soviet-era nerve agent. Six months later Theresa May says the would-be assassins are officers with Russian military intelligence. They travelled to the UK as “Alexander Petrov” and “Ruslan Boshirov”. Not true, says Moscow. Last month the two men appeared on RT , th
Александр Петров и Руслан Боширов, которых Великобритания подозревает в отравлении бывшего сотрудника ГРУ Сергея Скрипаля и его дочери в Солсбери, внезапно исчезли после скандального интервью главному редактору телеканала RT Маргарите Симоньян. Телефоны мужчин отключены. Об этом сообщила сама Симоньян в интервью BBC Newsnight. По ее словам, Петров и Боширов обещали, что скинут фотографии на
Prosecutors say the Skripals came into contact with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent…. Just before midday, CCTV footage showed them in the vicinity of Sergei Skripal’s home, where they are believed to have applied Novichok to the front door.
Claims by two suspected Russian hitmen that they were in Salisbury as tourists were dismissed as “ludicrous” by a Whitehall source yesterday…. The pair claimed that they went to Wiltshire to see Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral.
Prosecutors say the Skripals came into contact with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent…. Just before midday, CCTV footage showed them in the vicinity of Sergei Skripal’s home, where they are believed to have applied Novichok to the front door.
These were Sergey Naryshkin of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service (under sanction but allowed in under a special dispensation from State Department), Igor Korobov of the GU (formerly GRU), Russia’s military intelligence agency, and Aleksandr Bortnikov of the FSB, the internal security and intelligence service.
Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent in the cathedral city of Salisbury, earlier this year…. That weekend, Britain’s extensive network of CCTV cameras recorded the men making two visits to Salisbury from London—one for a couple of hours on Saturday, and another, longer trip on Sunday, when images showed them not far from where Skripal lived, in a quiet cul-de-sac away from the city center.
Russia rejects claim on IDs of Salisbury suspects Yeni Şafak English Russia hits back at Britain over hacking, assassination claims and says relations are at ‘low levels’ NEWS.com.au Putin brands Sergei Skripal a ‘scumbag’ and a ‘traitor’ Daddyhood Full coverage
Anatoly Chepiga…. Subsequent searches of databases turned up numerous links between Chepiga and the GRU, including his photo on the wall of the military academy where he trained.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Chief of Staff John Kelly sat down with New York ’s Olivia Nuzzi to do a very normal thing: explain, over and over again, that the White House is not a circus . “ We have a very smooth-running organization even though it’s never reported that way. So the real story is that. It’s really the real st
Трепанг. Фото: пресс-группа Пограничного управления ФСБ России по Приморскому краю Нелегальный цех по переработке трепанга нашла ФСБ во Владивостоке В грязных ванных в частном доме на Русском варили и хранили «морской огурец» 12 октября, PrimaMedia. Нелегальный цех по переработке трепанга обнаружен сотрудниками Пограничного управления ФСБ России по Приморскому краю и УМВД по Владивостоку на остро
Бывший британский шпион Сергей Скрипаль , деклассированные элементы из Эймсбери – этих «важных» целей для умерщвления жутким ядом Кремлю, видимо, мало. Теперь в покушении на свою жизнь обвинила лично президента России эмигрировавшая в Британию нижегородская модель Анна Шапиро . 30-летняя блондинка, чьи страницы в соцсетях забиты полуголыми снимками, зашла вместе с мужем-англичанином Алексом Кинго
“We have finished personnel recruitment and have begun to train them,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Tuesday according to the state-owned TASS news agency.
MOSCOW ( Xinhua ) – Russia will supply the S-300 air defense system and identification, friend or foe (IFF) equipment to Syria after its Il-20 surveillance plane was mistakenly downed by Syria’s S-200 system, according to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Sergei Shoigu said as much when he hosted his Chinese counterpart Gen…. “We have agreed to hold such exercises on a regular basis,” Shoigu said in a statement.
At the time, some of the attacks were linked to Russia – but this is the first time the UK has singled out the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service…. GRU, WADA, Kremlin hackers – it’s a diabolical perfume.”
Russia’s Ambassador to London Alexander Yakovenko By Ahmet Gurhan Kartal LONDON The Bellingcat investigative website, which claims to have unmasked the true identities of two suspects in the Salisbury poisoning case, is an instrument of the British deep state and not the media, Russia’s ambassador to London said Friday.
At a press conference at the Russian embassy, Alexander Yakovenko dismissed the website’s claims that Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin are two highly-decorated officers from the Russian military intelligence agency GRU.
Putin ‘decorated’ second Salisbury poisoning suspect Radio New Zealand
Outlining in detail how it identified the Salisbury suspect as Dr Mishkin, Bellingcat said it had pieced together his identity using various databases online, including telephone and car insurance records, and later obtained copies of his passport and…
Spread the Knowledge1 1Share Spread the Knowledge Novichok Signatures View image on Twitter | http://globalsecuritynews.org/ _________________________________________ bell tower – Google Search mikenova shared this story . Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks bell tower shops for blue pointe – Google Search Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinksbell tower shops for blue pointe – Google Search bell tower shops for blue pointe – Google Search bell tower shops for blue pointe – Google Search bell … Continue reading“Accidents Review: Fort Meyers | Bell Tower Shops | Blue Pointe”
Salisbury poisoning suspect was ‘awarded top military honour by Putin’ euronews
Investigative webste Bellingcat has claimed that the second suspect in the Salisbury poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal is a Russian doctor who received a top military honour from President Vladimir Putin. Read full article …
British website identifies Skripal poisoning suspect as a Russian military doctor CBC.ca
The second of two Russians who Britain blames for the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was named by investigative website Bellingcat as a military doctor for Russia’s GRU intelligence service. The website identified him as 39-year-old …
Poisoning suspects `tracked Sergei Skripal in Czech Republic in 2014´ Daily Mail
British police say the two suspects were agents from Russian military intelligence unit GRU, and that they used a Soviet-made nerve agent Novichok to poison Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4. Russia denies wrongdoing and the Czech …
Reuters: Russian website names third GRU officer involved in Salisbury poisoning Kyiv Post
Reuters: Russian website names third GRU officer involved in Salisbury poisoning. By Reuters. Published Oct. 10 at 10:25 pm. Eliot Higgins, founder of online investigation group Bellingcat, speaks to the media on College Green in London on Oct. 9…
The Prospect Podcast #54: Who was Sergei Skripal? A conversation with Mark Urban Prospect
The historian, author and BBC commentator Mark Urban discusses his new book on the former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, who was poisoned in Salisbury, along with his daughter. Who was Skripal, who tried to kill him and why? Plus, Alex Dean on politics …
Spread the Knowledge Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Police investigating third Russian suspect ‘who acted as lookout’ in Salisbury poisoning case mikenova shared this story . Counter-terrorism police are investigating a third suspect in the Salisbury nerve agent attack amid suggestions he acted as look out for two Russian military intelligence assassins. Investigators have identified a “third man” in … Continue reading“Police investigating third Russian suspect ‘who acted as lookout’ in Salisbury poisoning case – 3:19 AM 10/12/2018”
Spread the News 4 из 5 На совещании с членами Правительства. Слева направо: Первый заместитель Председателя Правительства – Министр финансов Антон Силуанов, заместитель Председателя Правительства – руководитель Аппарата Правительства Константин Чуйченко, заместители Председателя Правительства Юрий Борисов, Ольга Голодец и Дмитрий Козак, заместитель Председателя Правительства – полномочный представитель Президента в Дальневосточном федеральном округе Юрий Трутнев. Из альбома к материалу Совещание с членами Правительства 11 октября … Continue reading“Salisbury Poisoning Updates | The Crisis of the Russian (Military) Intelligence – 3:36 AM 10/12/2018”
Spread the Knowledge FBI News Review » Salisbury Poisoning News Updates Category Feed 1 Police investigating third Russian suspect ‘who acted as lookout’ in Salisbury poisoning case – 3:19 AM 10/12/2018 Counter-terrorism police are investigating a third suspect in the Salisbury nerve agent attack amid suggestions he acted as look out for two Russian military … Continue reading“Salisbury Poisoning – LATEST – 3:47 AM 10/12/2018”
Try COINTELPRO on them! Pepper-spray them from the motorcycles!
Disclaimer and Clarification for our most studious and brightest FBI investigators: this title is the literary device of irony, not a call to violence. So give your new “carpetas” the correct tags and labels, dance ethically and esthetically, keep your guns securely holstered, and do not drink too much. Are they able or willing to understand the difference? Hopefully, they kapish. They are not that dumb. Hopefully. Most importantly, address the issues.
Maryse Condé, a chronicler of the colonial experience, won the New Academy Prize in Literature. The award was created to honor a writer this year after the Swedish Academy postponed the Nobel Prize in literature. WSJ.com: World News
На совещании с членами Правительства. Слева направо: Первый заместитель Председателя Правительства – Министр финансов Антон Силуанов, заместитель Председателя Правительства – руководитель Аппарата Правительства Константин Чуйченко, заместители Председателя Правительства Юрий Борисов, Ольга Голодец и Дмитрий Козак, заместитель Председателя Правительства – полномочный представитель Президента в Дальневосточном федеральном округе Юрий Трутнев.
The Alliance had its own difficulties at that time, it should work better now, and there are very powerful forces which do not want it to be restored and functioning. And lately, Skripal and his shenanigans might have been the very significant part of these forces.
Driving the multiple wedges between the Allies was the logical Abwehr’s strategy which they pursued with the fanatical and dogged persistence, and this simple but effective strategy continues to be the same to this day.
The most recent (last 20-25 years) phenomenon of the open, cynical, self-destructive, Mafioso Oligarchic Robbery of Russia is an Abomination. Address these issues, work together on eradicating the Global Organized Crime which came to play a certain role in the modern Intelligence Operations. These “by necessity” ties corrupt the Intelligence Organisations visibly and invisibly, it seems to me. Ziz iz not the Leftist position, this is the common sense position.
The important, screaming “gaps in strategic intelligence” have been acknowledged and they are been addressed in order of importance.
In a speech at the University of Louisville, her alma mater, Haspel said the CIA is working to prioritizing closing the “strategic intelligence gaps” …
Ben Wallace, the Minister of State for Security, made the remarks on the potential threat from terrorist groups during a national security summit, when he discussed the potential threat of terrorist groups using deadly toxins to kill.
Anytime a clandestine agency is in the global headlines on a daily basis, something strange is going on. That has certainly been the case with Russia’s military intelligence agency, known by its former abbreviation, the GRU.
British intelligence identified two suspected GRU agents as the culprits in the March nerve-agent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, setting off a chain reaction of revelations about one of the men, identified as GRU Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, and his likely involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the 2015 assassination in Ankara of Chechen rebel commander Abdulvakhid Edelgiriyev.
On October 4, authorities in the Netherlands released a trove of information on an alleged GRU operation in that country aimed at hacking and disrupting international organizations including the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the Dutch investigation into the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine.
The most emblematically risible piece of evidence was a taxi receipt showing that one of the men had traveled to a Moscow airport directly from GRU headquarters.
In addition, suspected Russian agents have been busted in Norway, Estonia, Greece, and Montenegro in recent months. Off The Rails?
Writing in The Guardian on October 5, Moscow correspondent Andrew Roth called the developments “embarrassing.”
“The exposure of several consecutive European operations should raise questions about whether Russian military intelligence is being intentionally provocative or has simply gone off the rails,” Roth wrote.
Russian state-controlled and state-friendly media have widely reported official denials of any government involvement in the alleged incidents and have denounced them collectively as a new wave of “spymania.”
The Vesti nightly news report for October 5 was typical, arguing that the new accusations were both a “pretext” for imposing new, already planned sanctions against Russia and a bid to unify a fractured West on the cusp of the United Kingdom’s expected withdrawal from the European Union.
But, in other searches for explanations to the onslaught of revelations, some observers have speculated that the GRU was being undermined by another Russian security agency such as the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) or the Federal Security Service (FSB).
The GRU has benefited financially and in terms of prestige from the Kremlin’s conviction that Russia is engaged in a hybrid confrontation with the West, the argument goes, and other security agencies want a bigger piece of the action.
“I have heard many conspiracy theories along the lines that this is a struggle between the FSB and the GRU, but this is impossible,” Roman Dobrokhotov, editor of The Insider, a Russian publication that partnered with the open-source investigations group Bellingcat to publish many of the recent revelations, told Current Time TV. “It is just that people are trying to rationalize all this — they think it can’t really be so absurd. But for one thing, there is a famous maxim that you should never use a conspiracy to explain something that can be explained by incompetence. And this maxim applies to Russia even more strongly than in any other country.”
Dobrokhotov noted, for example, that his investigations had revealed recently that a GRUagent had sent money to a group in Serbia that was being used to carry out a coup in neighboring Montenegro using Western Union. And he used the address of GRUheadquarters on the delivery order.
Vladimir Frolov, a political analyst who is believed to have been a Russian intelligence agent involved in the handling of notorious FBI double agent Robert Hanssen, made a similar point for the website Republic.ru.
“Of course there have been no attempts by the Russian special services to somehow ‘undermine the GRU‘ by planting information in the media about military spies,” he wrote. “This is a popular myth. The Russian special services are in stiff competition with one another, but no one is going to settle matters by committing high treason or exposing state secrets.” ‘Military Mind-Set’
Part of the explanation for the GRU‘s lapses might lie in the nature of the organization itself. It is a large military operation that is ultimately controlled by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, one of President Vladimir Putin’s closest and reportedly politically ambitious friends, and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, who has become the public face of Russia’s doctrine of “hybrid war.”
“Because Shoigu is ambitious, he’s increasing GRU operations abroad to make the Defense Ministry a bigger player in Russian foreign policy,” Russian security analyst Andrei Soldatov told The Telegraph in September.
Mark Galeotti, a nonresident fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and an expert on Russian organized crime and the security forces, wrote in July that the GRU is emerging from a long funk that it endured under former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
“The GRU is back,” Galeotti wrote. “Its budgets are buoyant, its confidence high and its role in international operations reflect its relatively aggressive, military mind-set, where accomplishing the mission is more important than avoiding risks.”
Journalist Dobrokhotov says the GRU‘s rapidly expanding agenda may partially explain its current embarrassing lapses.
“I think it has to do with personnel issues and that there isn’t money to properly train people,” he told Current Time, which is run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. “They don’t have the proper resources. They send the same agents, who have already let the country down, out on new assignments a second time. It would seem to be pure chaos, just a mess. The whole world has learned the word ‘Novichok.’ Now it is time for foreigners to learn the word ‘bardak’ [mess]. It is the best description of what is going on.”
The agency, like the Defense Ministry as a whole, clearly seems to be having trouble coming to grips with the sheer amount of information publicly available on the Internet. In 2014, when the Kremlin was denying all involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, researchers at Bellingcat and elsewhere had no difficulty finding photographs on social media posted by Russian soldiers and boasting of their activities in Ukraine.
Using open sources, Bellingcat has been able to put together a narrative about the shooting down of the MH17 passenger jet in July 2014 that runs circles around the various, often contradictory theories put forward by the Russian Defense Ministry itself. Tip Of The Iceberg?
Other observers, though, are not so sure the incompetence theory explains the situation entirely. In recent years, the Kremlin has seemingly perfected the tactic of throwing out masses of theories and purported evidence and salacious stories as a way of confusing the information space and diverting attention.
As late as October 1, for instance, the mass daily tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, probably Russia’s most broadly influential newspaper, published an interview with an anonymous “university instructor” who supposedly knows the alleged GRU agent in the Skripal case who is known as “Aleksandr Petrov.”
Petrov, the unidentified source said, is a Kremlin-connected businessman who provides high-ranking officials with “miracle supplements” that are not available in Russia.
Still other commentators have been reminded of the common practice of the Soviet-era KGB of sending intimidating signals to targets. Russian rights activist and former Soviet dissident Viktor Davidoff posted on Facebook that he left Moscow four years ago after returning home one day and finding bits of wire and melted solder on the floor of his apartment.
“Someone was installing eavesdropping equipment and was doing it dirty [intentionally],” he wrote.
In this context, the Kremlin could see the exposure of its overseas efforts not as weakness, but as evidence of its multipronged activity. The tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
New York Times London correspondent Ellen Barry touched on this idea in an October 5 post on Twitter.
“Lots of talk today about GRU incompetence, but it’s equally true that they’ve been getting away with an indefinite number of similar operations for an indefinite period *without* getting caught,” Barry wrote.
Current Time TV correspondent Yegor Maksimov contributed to this report
That has certainly been the case with Russia’s military intelligence agency, known by its former abbreviation, the GRU…. British intelligence identified two suspected GRU agents as the culprits in the March nerve-agent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, setting off a chain reaction of revelations about one of the men, identified as GRU Colonel Anatoly Chepiga, and his likely involvement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the 2015 assassination in Ankara of Chechen rebel commander Abdulvakhid Edelgiriyev.
BEIRUT, LEBANON (2:40 P.M) – The Russian Reconciliation Center issued a statement on Wednesday blaming western states for terrorist groups obtaining chemical weapons in Syria.
пятница, 12 октября, 2018, 15:13 Мир В Великобритании ведут расследование в отношении третьего подозреваемого по делу Скрипаля, – СМИ Контртеррористическое подразделение полиции Лондона проводит расследование в отношении третьего подозреваемого по инциденту в Солсбери, и рассматривает, можно ли выдвинуть против него обвинения. Об этом сообщает Интерфакс-Украина , ссылаясь на газету «Дейли телегра
Russia has been accused of acting like a “pariah state” by the Defence Secretary after allegations intelligence officers from the Kremlin tried to hack the Foreign Office and the international body investigating the Salisbury nerve agent attack. Dutch authorities disclosed on Thursday how – with the help of UK intelligence – they thwarted an attempted cyber attack on the headquarters of the Organ
In a speech at the University of Louisville, her alma mater, Haspel said the CIA is working to prioritizing closing the “strategic intelligence gaps” …
Ben Wallace, the Minister of State for Security, made the remarks on the potential threat from terrorist groups during a national security summit, when he discussed the potential threat of terrorist groups using deadly toxins to kill. He told the meeting:
“As I speak, terrorists continue to explore new ways to kill us on our streets. Chemical and biological weapons are marching in closer. They have developed and worked on a better arsenal, and we have to be prepared that might come to our streets here.
“Be under no doubt the threat is real. Our open, liberal and free societies are easy prey to those that fear little and care even less.”
Wallace said the security services were undergoing a “gargantuan” struggle to prevent such attacks taking place, reportsThe Times.
His comments come months after the chaotic government response to a state-sponsored chemical weapons attack in Salisbury, England, in March. Men believed to be officers of the Russian GRU military intelligence bureau used the Cold War-era nerve agent Novichok in an assassination attempt against a Russian defector and his daughter.
Although the agents were not successful in killing the pair, the Novichok agent they used hospitalised a police officer and contaminated several sites in the city.
The response by the British government, police, and public health bodies to the failed attack saw a number of shortcomings, including residents in Salisbury being advised by Public Health England (PHE) that there was no risk to the public despite photographs circulating in the national media of soldiers wearing full hazardous material suits and breathing masks decontaminating the area.
UK Security Minister Ben Wallace / AFP Images
Other areas in Salisbury were only quarantined days later, and it took over a week for government advice for locals who may have been exposed to the deadly agent to wash their clothes and shoes to be issued. Regardless, PHE maintained the risk to the public was minimal.
Despite the reassurances from the government, the decontamination effort was discovered to have been a failure when one man was subsequently killed by Novichok, four months after the initial attack. Charlie Rowley found a discarded bottle of the nerve agent, disguised as a perfume bottle, which the police investigation and army decontamination mission had failed to remove.
Rowley gave the bottle as a gift to his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess, who was killed by the chemical. Rowley was also hospitalised but survived.
The failure to properly contain the Salisbury attack, despite it being a targeted assassination attempt against two individuals, may raise questions over the ability of Britain’s security services to protect the public against a mass-casualty attack using chemical or biological weapons.
A risk matrix maintained by security agencies and the Cabinet Office suggests the chances of a terrorist group being able to weaponise Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear (CBRN) materials remains low, and less sophisticated attacks which are easier to plan but harder for police to intercept remain more likely.
Nevertheless, there have been a number of high-profile attempts, both successful and foiled, and Wallace’s comments signal a change in attitude towards the capabilities of terror groups by the British government. Among those attacks most present in the minds of counter-terror operatives is the successful chemical nerve agent attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995.
A religious cult released liquid sarin onto trains on three lines, which was able to evaporate and come into contact with over 1,000 passengers. Ultimately, there were 12 fatalities. Agence France Pressreportedthe terror-inducing scene of the attack, which it said left a “psychological scar” on the nation of Japan, and described as:
Images from the time show soldiers sprinting up escalators and stairs, carrying unconscious victims slumped on their backs.
Hundreds of ambulances screamed through the streets and helicopters landed on busy roads to evacuate the injured to some 90 hospitals.
Passers-by and medics administered life-saving heart massages on pavements as others stood by, their eyes streaming with tears, either from grief or the effects of the toxin.
Others lay on the ground shaking violently but there were not enough people to attend to them immediately.
Responding to Ben Wallace’s comments on potential chemical weapon attacks, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer Neil Basu said:
“These things have been used on the battlefield, and what’s used on the battlefield will eventually be adapted to be used on domestic soil… I think he [Mr Wallace] is as concerned as I am that these are the kind of threats that we’ve got to take seriously and we’ve got to make sure that we have the right preparations to counter that threat, should it appear.” Oliver JJ Lane is the editor of Breitbart London — Follow him on Twitter and Facebook
Ben Wallace was appointed Minister of State for Security at the Home Office on 17 July 2016. He was elected the Conservative MP for Wyre and Preston North in May 2010.
Special counsel Robert Mueller achieved a major victory for his Trump-Russia investigation on Wednesday when a California man investigated by his office pleaded guilty to a felony identity fraud charge and was sentenced to six months in prison and six months of home confinement.
28-year-old Richard Pinedo admitted in February that he unknowingly sold stolen bank accounts to Russian internet trolls, who in turn used that information to purchase internet advertisements with the plan of disrupting America’s political discourse during the 2016 presidential election, according to Politico. In his statement to the court, Pinedo accepted “full responsibility” for what he did and asked for leniency on the basis of his cooperation with Mueller’s investigation and the fact that he has received threats since his involvement in the Russian meddling became public.
“Never did it cross my mind that the services I was providing would be used in crimes at the highest level,” Pinedo told U. S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in a statement. He claimed that his life had been turned “upside down” and argued that he was worried about his physical well-being because “every knock on the door comes with anxiety about who it may be.”
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Pinedo may have actually received the leniency that he sought from the court, as Politico reported:
While Friedrich’s sentence was the longest Mueller has obtained, it was on the low end of the sentencing guideline recommendations. Still, Pinedo’s attorney had asked that his client get no prison time. Mueller’s prosecutors let the judge factor in other cases of similar caliber and didn’t recommend any specific sentence.
“This is a very difficult case,” Friedrich said as she ticked through how Pinedo had “opened the door” for Russian actors to upend an American presidential election and made between $40,000 to $95,000 on the transactions from 2014 to 2017.
She also considered Pinedo’s immediate admission of guilt when FBI agents came to his home and the grand jury testimony delivered to help Mueller’s investigation in Washington, D.C.
“I can tell you are genuinely remorseful for your actions,” Friedrich said.
This was the second major win for Mueller since the start of the month. Last week, convicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with Mueller’s team as part of his cooperation agreement. Although a source close to Manafort said after the initial plea hearing that “the cooperation agreement does not involve the Trump campaign. … there was no collusion with Russia,” the agreement itself required Manafort to “cooperate fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly with the Government and other law enforcement authorities identified by the Government in any and all matters to which the Government deems the cooperation relevant.”
President Donald Trump has denounced the Manafort investigation from its inception, characterizing it as a “witch hunt” against his administration that had no factual merit. He has persisted in making this claim despite the convictions and guilty pleas of many people connected to his campaign including George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and Manafort himself.
Internet research is the practice of using Internet information, especially free information on the World Wide Web, or Internet-based resources (like Internet discussion forum) in research. Internet researchhas had a profound impact on the way ideas are formed and knowledge is created.
A man identified as Alexander Petrov at Gatwick airport in England on March 2. Investigative group Bellingcat reported Monday that he is actually Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for the Russian military intelligence unit known as GRU. (Metropolitan Police/AP) One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy — the black-hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries — does something dumb and gets caught.
A man identified as Alexander Petrov at Gatwick airport in England on March 2. Investigative group Bellingcat reported Monday that he is actually Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for the Russian military intelligence unit known as GRU. (Metropolitan Police/AP)
One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy — the black-hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries — does something dumb and gets caught. That’s essentially what’s been happening recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet spy agency, the GRU.
A man identified as Alexander Petrov at Gatwick airport in England on March 2. Investigative group Bellingcat reported Monday that he is actually Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for the Russian military intelligence unit known as GRU. (Metropolitan Police/AP) One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy — the black-hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries — does something dumb and gets caught.
A man identified as Alexander Petrov at Gatwick airport in England on March 2. Investigative group Bellingcat reported Monday that he is actually Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for the Russian military intelligence unit known as GRU. (Metropolitan Police/AP)
One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy — the black-hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries — does something dumb and gets caught. That’s essentially what’s been happening recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet spy agency, the GRU.
What’s fascinating about the GRU revelations is that they seem to reflect an aggressive pushback after several years in which Putin (chiefly through the GRU) launched recklessly aggressive covert actions against the West. The West is retaliating (at least in part) with public information that blows GRU covers and operating methods and, frankly, makes them look clumsy and incompetent.
These disclosures are the latest in a string of disasters for the GRU, a military spy service known for its panache and daring. Now, we should add sloppiness to that list of operational trademarks. The GRU’s spycraft occasionally looks closer to TV’s Maxwell Smart than John le Carre’s vaunted fictional spymaster, Karla.
The latest exposé of the GRU’s not-so-secret tradecraft came Tuesday, when a British investigative group shredded a layer of the lies surrounding Russia’s attempt to poisonformer agent Sergei Skripal in March. It was the equivalent of the tough guy in the trench coat getting caught with his undershorts around his ankles.
Bellingcat, as the group calls itself, presented photographic evidence showing that a suspect in the Skripal attack, who the Russians had claimed was a tourist named Petrov who worked in the sports nutrition business, is really a GRU doctor named Alexander Mishkin. Last month, Bellingcat had exposed another suspect, whose cover identity was Ruslan Boshirov, as GRU Col. Anatoliy Chepiga.
The most detailed exposures of GRU tradecraft came in a Justice Department indictmentthat was unsealed Oct. 4, in tandem with supporting statements from Britain and the Netherlands. The indictment, which named seven GRU officers, included details about Russian spy operations that could have been collected only by the CIA and National Security Agency and its foreign partners. (Three of the Russians had also been named in July’s indictment of 12 GRU officers for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.)
Last week’s indictment is a treasure trove for spy mavens. One GRU hacking operation sought to sabotage the World Anti-Doping Agency’s effort to punish Russia for systematically drugging its Olympic athletes; a second, chilling GRU hack stole information from Westinghouse about advanced U.S. nuclear-reactor technology. A third targeted two investigations of the Novichok nerve agent used in the Skripal hit, one by an international chemical weapons group in The Hague and another by a chemical laboratory in Switzerland. These were brazen operations, but they were also messy.
The dry pages of the indictment reveal tradecraft secrets that could animate a half-dozen spy novels. The GRU operatives used spoof websites to “spearphish” victims into revealing login information (creating a “westinqhousenuclear.com” site, with the misspelled “q,” for example). They made payments in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. (Weren’t those supposed to be untraceable?) They used malware tools with names such as “Gamefish,” “Chopstick” and “X-tunnel.” They dumped their hacked information by sending direct messages on Twitter to 116 reporters and exchanging emails with 70 journalists.
For the past few years, the CIA, NSA and FBI have watched as hackers and whistleblowers (perhaps with a helping hand from Moscow) revealed the agencies’ hacking techniques. For U.S. intelligence officials, revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
The most astonishing disclosure came from the Dutch, who caught four GRU officers red-handed in The Hague as they were hacking the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. As Dutch intelligence officers intervened, “the conspirators abandoned their equipment,” including a backpack and other gear that revealed techniques and a string of other operations, according to the indictment. The Dutch even found a taxi receipt showing that a member of the team had left the rear entrance of the GRU headquarters in Moscow and headed to the airport.
The implicit message in all of this: If you hit us, one of the ways we will retaliate is by exposing your operatives, sources and methods. There are other reprisals underway, but these public disclosures undermine the GRU’s operational capabilities. And they must make the Russian spy service wonder: What else do the Americans and their allies know? If agent A is blown, then what about his colleagues B, C and D?
The CIA and its foreign allies don’t normally like to divulge secrets like these, because they reveal how much they know about their adversary. The revelations are a public warning to Putin: Knock it off; you’re more vulnerable than you think. Read more from David Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
The organization was investigating the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter — believed to have been carried out by GRU operatives — in the United Kingdom using the chemical agent Novichok.
RALPH NOYES AND Bonnie Adkins stand in front of the 1933 friendship quilt recently given to the Salisbury Church and hanging in the church’s narthex…. Photo courtesy Salisbury Church SALISBURY — The Salisbury Church is holding a rummage sale on Friday and Saturday, Oct.
A mystery third man, using the alias Sergey Fedotov, reportedly landed in London on March 2 – the same day as ‘Alexander Petrov’ and ‘Ruslan Boshirov ‘…. These men are wanted over the attempted hit on the Skripals in Salisbury Timeline of movements of Russian nationals Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov who are suspected of conspiracy to murder Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Wiltshire The 45-year-old was on a different inbound flight, but left on on the same plane as the GRU agents on March 4, according to an analysis of passenger lists by Fontanka news agency.
Internet research is the practice of using Internet information, especially free information on the World Wide Web, or Internet-based resources (like Internet discussion forum) in research. Internet researchhas had a profound impact on the way ideas are formed and knowledge is created.
M.N.: Are we indeed witnessing the great historical “merger and acquisition” in information, mass media, propaganda, and intelligence services?! That would be the major New Abwehr’s coup!
Michael Novakhov 10.7.18 P.S. Well, maybe our glorious Eyewitnesses should be promoted to the Very Special Eyewitnesses In Charge. Maybe, the things will get a little better after this major re-conceptualization.
The Kremlin’s For Kavanaugh: Russian State Media Backs Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee
Putin’s media minions are echoing Trump to defend his Supreme Court nominee from the evils of #MeToo. Or maybe he’s echoing them. Some minds think alike.
However, this intimate ‘in’ to Skripal’s life apparently wasn’t sufficient, and …. yourself to what extent that restricted discussions of Christopher Steele. … GPS ‘dodgy dossier‘ on Donald Trump, “who lived close to Skripal and is …
The Gray Lady has put some fresh spin on the Skripal saga, with the paper … to reports that Skripal had a business relationship with Christoper Steele, the ex-British spy responsible for compiling the infamous Trump dossier, …
Mar 6, 2018 – But experts think Skripal’s sudden illness is unrelated to his connection to Steele, who penned the explosive dossier on US President Donald …
Russian Sanctions, Novichok and the Steele Dossier – Liberty Nation
Aug 12, 2018 – If there is any possibility that the Skripal poisonings are connected to the Steele dossier, it would be in the Trump administration’s interest to …
Poisoned Russian Spy Linked to Trump-Russia Dossier Author …
Mar 8, 2018 – Sergei Skripal and his daughter were attacked with a nerve agent … Spy Linked to Trump-Russia Dossier Author Christopher Steele Through …
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Mar 16, 2018 – Ex-MI6 agent was personally linked with Skripal’s betrayal of Putin’s … Skripal and the Trump Russia Dossier – Christopher Steele Returns.
Security analysts say police are investigating links between critically ill Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and Christopher Steele, the British former spy who compiled an explosive dossier on US President Donald Trump.
The diplomatic relationship between Britain and Russia has nosedived over the suspected daylight poisoning of Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, southern England, on Monday (AEDT).
But Mr Trump could be drawn into the chilling episode if Mr Skripal is linked to Mr Steele’s 2015 dossier, which detailed alleged collusion between Mr Trump and Russia.
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British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson warned that England could even pull out of the soccer World Cup to be hosted by Russia in June if it is confirmed that the Skripals were poisoned by Kremlin-backed associates.
Counter-terrorism police took command of the investigation yesterday amid fears the victims — who were fighting for their lives in hospital — may have been poisoned by a nerve agent. Tests have been conducted for substances including sarin gas and VZ, the chemical nerve agent used to kill Kim Jong-nam, the brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, at Kuala Lumpur airport.
Police are looking at the security footage to identify a blonde woman with a red bag, who was initially thought to be Yulia Skripal.
Anthony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, told The Telegraph: “What we know is that Steele was our man in Russia, that he was extremely good. We know that what MI6 does is gain intelligence from human agents. You put all these things together, it is clear that either directly or indirectly Sergei Skripal would have been known to Christopher Steele.’’
Mr Steele was in Moscow in the early 1990s when Mr Skripal was passing information to MI6.
He was the chief of the Russia desk in 2006 when he headed the investigation into the fatal poisoning of Russian informer Alexander Litvinenko in a Mayfair hotel. A British inquiry found his killing was probably sanctioned by the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Mr Steele left the agency just before the 2010 spy swap resulted in Mr Skripal and three others being taken to Britain in return for 10 US-based Russian spies.
“If it is the case that Christopher Steele produced a dossier on Trump that is authentic and accurate, as we believe it to be — its accuracy has not been seriously undermined — then anybody who feels that Trump was humiliated and dissed by an MI6 officer may feel that getting at one of his agents is justified,” Professor Glees said. “That could be the Russian security services.”
Mr Skripal, a former army intelligence colonel, had feared for his life since his wife and son had died within five years, due to cancer and liver issues, reports said. His daughter has criticised Mr Putin on social media.
Mr Johnson told parliament that if the Putin regime were behind the poisoning “we will have to have a serious conversation about our relationship with Russia” .
“It will be difficult to see how UK representation at the World Cup can go ahead in the normal way,” he said. “I say to governments around the world that no attempt to take innocent life on UK soil will go either unsanctioned or unpunished.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the comments as words of “savagery”. The Russian embassy in London said the Foreign Secretary spoke as if the investigation was already over and Russia was found responsible. “Looks like the script of yet another anti-Russian campaign has been already written,” the statement said.
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Jacquelin Magnay is the European Correspondent for The Australian, based in London and covering all manner of big stories across political, business, Royals and security issues. She is a George Munster and Walk…
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Александр Потеев родился в 1952 году в Белоруссии в семье Героя Советского Союза Николая Потеева, получившего это звание во время Великой Отечественной войны. Потеев-младший окончил Высшие курсы КГБ в Минске, после чего был переведен в Москву. В 1980-х он служил в Афганистане и работал в управлении внешней разведки КГБ СССР. В 1990-х несколько лет провел за границей (в том числе в США) под видом сотрудника российского МИД. В 2000 году Александр Потеев был назначен заместителем начальника одного из отделов управления «С» Службы внешней разведки (СВР); его подразделение курировало деятельность российских агентов-нелегалов в США.
В 2010 году там арестовали десять российских шпионов (наибольшую известность среди них приобрела Анна Чапман). Американские власти обвинили их в сборе разведданных в пользу России и обменяли на четырех осужденных за шпионаж граждан России, среди которых был бывший сотрудник ГРУ . Российские СМИ писали, что Чапман и остальных сдал Александр Потеев — он незадолго до их ареста уехал в отпуск в Белоруссию, а оттуда через Украину и Германию сбежал в США. В 2011 году Потеева заочно признали виновным в измене и дезертирстве, приговорили к 25 годам тюремного заключения, лишили всех званий и наград. Суд над ним прошел в закрытом режиме.
Александр Потеев (третий слева) в составе спецназа КГБ СССР «Зенит», Кабул, июль 1979 года
Wikimedia Commons
В 2016-м «Интерфакс» со ссылкой на источники сообщил, что Потеев умер в США. Агентство не уточнило подробности его смерти, предположив, что новость о ней может быть «дезинформацией, направленной на то, чтобы о предателе просто забыли». Официально смерть Потеева тогда никто не подтвердил. Журналист Би-би-си Марк Урбан заявил в своей книге «Файлы Скрипаля», что на самом деле Потеев жив, а информацию о его смерти распространила российская разведка, надеясь, что перебежчик свяжется с , чтобы опровергнуть ее. Также Би-би-си утверждает, что в 2014 году российские спецслужбы пытались убить Потеева.
Теперь доказательства того, что Потеев не умер, нашли журналисты Buzzfeed. Они утверждают, что обнаружили их еще в прошлом году, но решили не распространять по просьбе ЦРУ; там опасались, что опровержение смерти Потеева поставит под угрозу его безопасность. Но после того, как российского офицера назвали живым на Би-би-си, Buzzfeed тоже опубликовал свои данные.
Журналисты издания утверждают, что нашли имя Александра Потеева в публичных базах данных. В США живет только один человек с таким именем и фамилией; его дата рождения совпала с предполагаемой датой рождения двойного агента, а второе имя, Nick, перекликалось с его отчеством — Николаевич. Имя Потеева появилось в базах данных в октябре 2010 года, то есть через три месяца после «шпионского скандала». В течение следующих шести лет он мог жить в штатах Массачусетс, Аризона и Вирджиния. Начиная с 2016 года информации о Потееве стало значительно больше. В частности, журналисты Buzzfeed узнали, что в январе 2016-го Потеев получил штраф за превышение скорости, в октябре — лицензию на ловлю рыбы, а в ноябре проголосовал (на каких выборах, издание не уточняет).
Когда Buzzfeed собирал информацию про Потеева, тот, согласно открытой информации, жил уже во Флориде. Чтобы проверить, является ли человек, чьи данные они обнаружили, бывшим полковником СВР, журналисты попытались встретиться с ним. В первый раз консьерж, работающий в доме Потеева, отказался пропустить их, заявив, что «Алекс» всегда сам встречает гостей в холле. Во второй раз другой консьерж разрешил репортерам подняться в квартиру Потеева. Дверь им открыла пожилая женщина. На вопрос, можно ли поговорить с Александром Потеевым, она спросила, кто хочет его видеть; узнав, что это журналисты, женщина закрыла дверь со словами: «Нет, нет, нет». Во время последней попытки консьерж позвонил в квартиру Потеева, после чего передал, что «Алекс» не хочет разговаривать с Buzzfeed.
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LONDON — Art collectors were left stunned on Friday evening when a Banksy painting appeared to self-destruct just moments after it was sold at an auction, in a prank apparently orchestrated by the elusive street artist.
The spray-painted canvas “Girl With Balloon” slid through a shredder embedded in the frame, emerging out the bottom in strips as the final hammer signaled an end to the evening, according to international auction house Sotheby’s. It had sold for $1.4 million, matching a record for the artist first set in 2008.
Banksy posted an image of the scene from the auction house on his Instagram account with the caption “Going, going, gone…”
The photo appears to have been first tweeted by an attendee at the auction who said an alarm sounded just as the frame began to shred the canvas.
Banksy, who has never disclosed his full identity, began his career spray-painting buildings in Bristol, England and has become one of the world’s best-known artists.
Known for his controversial work, from criticizing anti-migrant attitudes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, he also has a penchant for elaborate pranks.
“It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” said Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s senior director and head of contemporary art.
“He is arguably the greatest British street artist, and tonight we saw a little piece of Banksy genius,” he said immediately after the incident, according to The Art Newspaper. He added he was “not in on the ruse.”
“Girl With Balloon,” which depicts a small child reaching up toward a heart-shaped red balloon, was originally stenciled on a wall in east London and has been endlessly reproduced, becoming one of Banksy’s best-known images.
It’s unclear what will happen to the famous painting now that it’s been turned to thin strips.
Sotheby’s said it was the first time in auction history that such a thing had happened.
“We have not experienced this situation in the past where a painting spontaneously shredded, upon achieving a record for the artist,” Branczik said. “We are busily figuring out what this means in an auction context.”
The auction house said it was “in discussion about next steps” with the buyer. Some art-market watchers have suggested the work could be worth even more in its shredded state.
Another Banksy painting, Happy Choppers, sold at a Sotheby’s auction in New York on the same day. The unscathed work of art fetched $735,000.
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Волна разоблачений агентов российских спецслужб все никак не кончится. Вчера выяснилось, что еще в апреле из Нидерландов депортировали четырех россиян с дипломатическими паспортами, которые пытались взломать компьютеры Организации по запрещению химического оружия в Гааге – в то самое время, когда эта организация расследовала применение “Новичка” в Солсбери. У одного из этих россиян, Алексея Моренца, нашли при себе квитанцию на такси в Шереметьево от воинской части, связанной с ГРУ. После публикации этих данных издание The Insider установило паспортные данные еще 305 сотрудников ГРУ – именно столько в базе ГИБДД нашлось граждан, чьи автомобили приписаны к адресу той же военной части, которую на Западе обвиняли в самых скандальных хакерских атаках последних лет. Злорадных комментариев в Сети по этому поводу хоть отбавляй.
Илья Красильщик разведчик, поехавший на дело в другую страну с квитком на такси, где указан маршрут гру—аэропорт шереметьево, не выходит из головы. надо написать кому-нибудь серию детективов про русского разведчика-идиота. сюжет должен быть блуждающим, развязка неожиданной, необъяснимой и максимально бессмысленной Андрей Десницкий Ничто не выдавало Штирлица, кроме ушанки со звездой, валенок, автомата ППШ, ордена Красного знамени на груди и волочащегося парашюта за плечами.
Рассказывайте о высоком их профессионализме, рассказывайте… Владимир Милов Всепоглощающая коррупция, которую Путин насадил в России, наконец ударила по нему бумерангом: продажные сотрудники ГИБДД, торгующие базами данных, сдали всю активную сеть международных операций ГРУ, которую готовили много лет Андрей Мальгин А помните, когда начиналась эта тема “русских хакеров”, Путин с довольной улыбочкой говорил: Государство у нас такими вещами не занимается, но мы не можем уследить за отдельными патриотически настроенными гражданами? Думал, государство не попадется. А оно опять попалось. Почему не могли не засыпаться госхакеры? Потому что руководство России поверило в то, что может на равных конкурировать в высокотехнологичных областях с передовыми странами. Всё та же попытка прыгнуть выше головы. “Наши партнеры”, увы, временно расслабились, но отныне любые попытки гадить в цифровом пространстве будут пресекаться. Просто в силу непреодолимого технологического отставания России. И еще немаловажная деталь. Всё то, что удавалось раздобыть хакерам из ГРУ, кто немедленно выкладывал для публичного ознакомления? Правильно: товарищ Джулиан Ассанж. Важнейшее звено в кремлевской цепочке провокаций. Рыклин Александр А по-моему, это хорошо, что у нас не разведка, а сборище ушлепков, котрые палятся по три раза в день… Илья Вайцман ВСЕ российские спецслужбы нужно вычищать под корень, по причине полнейшей деградации. Безотносительно к политике. С улицы прохожих набрать – будет лучше. Со всех т.з.
Продолжаются и рассуждения по поводу того, кто “сливает” журналистам информацию, которую можно без труда найти в открытых источниках. Эль Мюрид Откровенно говоря, массовость проколов, которые сопровождают деятельность военной разведки России, начинает вызывать вопросы. Сомнений в том, что ее уровень сегодня находится крайне низко, нет – деградация страны неизбежно ведет к распаду всех ее составных частей, и спецслужб это касается не в меньшей степени. Но такие массовые провалы без чьей-то дружеской помощи и поддержки, скорее всего, невозможны. Роман Попков «Грушников ловят и чморят с таким размахом и с таким фантастическим успехом, будто их ловит и чморит соседняя организация» – пишет Сергей Леонидович Доренко, намекая, как я понимаю, на гебушку. Как будто это эфесбешники регистрировали доблестных военных разведчиков по Хорошевским шоссе и улицам Народного ополчения, выписывали им паспорта с одинаковыми номерами, и прочую оперативную содомию творили. А потом подсовывали Сергею Каневу и Роме Доброхотову диски с базами ментовских даных. Но на самом деле, ФСБ во всем этом позоре с ГРУ тоже должно нести ответственность. Я напомню, что именно ФСБ отвечает за контрразведывательное обеспечение всех Вооруженных сил, в том числе ГРУ. И вся эта содомия с паспортами, регистрациями, шпилями и геями – это крах и ФСБ тоже. Валерий Соловей Вчера рассказывал студентам, что лучше всего объясняет политику «бритва Хэнлона»: не приписывайте злому умыслу то, для объяснения чего достаточно человеческой глупости. Я ещё добавляю к этому – и жадности. Послушал сегодня очередные «шпионские новости». Глупость и жадность.
Полученных данных между тем вполне достаточно для того, чтобы сделать выводы об интересах российских властей. Максим Трудолюбов Общее во всех шпионских эпизодах – попытки исправить прошлые провалы или ответить на обвинения. Список целей: WADA, легкоатлетическая федерация, спортивный арбитраж, [малайзийский] центр расследований по сбитому “Боингу”, Организация по запрещению химоружия. Российские спецслужбы были брошены исправлять положение, латать дыры и мстить за неудачи российского политического руководства – со сбитым самолетом, с организованным применением допинга в спорте, с химической атакой в другой стране.
Кремль вовсе не равнодушен к обвинениям в допинге и применении химоружия и он над ними не смеется, как МИД говорит на брифингах. Отвечать на эти обвинения Кремль отправляет своих агентов, при том что не очень ясно, как они могут повлиять на решения спортивных федераций или ОЗХО.
Китайские спецслужбы не вылезают из американских корпораций и университетов – по крайней мере, это следует из новостей. А список приоритетов российской политики вот: WADA, легкоатлетическая федерация, спортивный арбитраж, [малайзийский] центр расследований по сбитому “Боингу”, Организация по запрещению химоружия Леонид Волков Как, наверное, и многие, я держу в ленте какое-то количество идейных путинистов из числа лично знакомых мне и неглупых людей. Мало ли почему человек полюбил и не может разлюбить власть: работа в каких-то госструктурах — или просто такой метод психологической самозащиты от реальности; ложно понимаемый патриотизм — или иррациональный страх перед «революцией». Всякое бывает. Как-то они для себя все справились и с Боингом MH-17 (некоторые — перебирая, вслед за российскими властями, одну нелепую версию за другой; некоторые — приняв позицию, что «дело слишком мутное, правда в том, что мы никогда не узнаем правды» — что, конечно, и было целью коллективного Киселева-Лаврова, городивших десятки версий, лишь бы сбить кого-то с толку), как-то в основном справились и со Скрипалями, не сдавая своих позиций. Человек умеет рационализировать неприятное, подгоняя его под свою картину мира и не давая ей разрушиться, это важный механизм самозащиты. А вот с ГРУшниками не справился никто. Никто не поверил в интервью «Петрова» и «Боширова», никто не поверил Путину, и все понимают, какой провал — вот эти все базы с Хорошевского шоссе, идущие подряд номера паспортов и квитанции такси. Что дело тут не в «шпиономании Запада» — а в самом большом провале, видимо, за всю историю спецслужб во всем мире. И мои провластные френды (еще раз повторю: речь не про ботов и не про пропагандистов на зарплате, а про живых людей, в основном из сферы IT, которым в какой-то момент стало удобнее жить с идеей «Путин в целом все делает правильно, а перегибы на местах — ну а где их не бывает) вздыхают угрюмо: «ну как же так, как же не стыдно так облажаться». И вот я с нетерпением жду следующего шага, когда им надо будет сложить 2+2. Потому что ведь ГРУшники не просто так провалились. Они провалились, пытаясь вмешаться в расследование по Боингу и в расследование по Скрипалям. Это же все равно, что явка с повинной. Так что будет очень интересно наблюдать за этой частью ленты.
Даже если считать, что спецслужбы “просто делали свою работу”, сложно не прийти к выводу, что эту работу им кто-то поручил, – и еще сложнее понять, почему она оказалась именно такой. Владимир Фролов (платный раздел Republic)
То, что было показано, – не более чем рабочие издержки чрезвычайно рискованных, но эффективных операций, достигших основных целей (дискредитация WADA, постановка под сомнение экспертизы ОЗХО по «Новичку» через предание огласке «выгодно интерпретированного» отчета химической лаборатории в швейцарском Шпице (куда перехваченные голландцами «хакеры» не доехали, но, видимо, доехали «другие», ибо этот доклад опубличил 16 апреля не кто иной, как глава МИД РФ Сергей Лавров, а швейцарцам пришлось потом эту информацию опровергать). Если вынести за скобки моральную сторону вопроса, то можно признать, что ГРУ во всех этих эпизодах действовало дерзко, хотя и несколько прямолинейно, и, судя по всему, выполняло поставленные боевые задачи. Анализ вероятных дипломатических последствий этих действий не входит в компетенцию разведки, это прерогатива высоких инстанций. Российские спецслужбы не действуют по своей инициативе (в таких серьезных вопросах), это популярный миф. Они выполняют приказы. <…> Основные вопросы во всей этой истории должны быть не к ГРУ, а к тем, кто ставил задачи. Так ли уж нужно задействовать спецслужбы, чтобы сначала подменять мочу в пробирках WADA, а потом взламывать базы данных этой малозначительной конторы, чтобы показать миру, какие таблетки пьет Серена Уильямс? Так ли уж нужно было проводить операции влияния («активные мероприятия» по-старому) на основе документов, полученных средствами кибершпионажа? Может быть, сначала стоит подумать о внешнеполитических последствиях и поручить конкурирующему разведведомству и МИДу их просчитать? И где-то все же надо останавливаться. Постоянно жить внутри сплошного «активного мероприятия» страна не может. Это вредно для психики. Алексей Венедиктов Некоторое недоумение вызывает нынешняя истерика с кибератаками разведслужб России.
Во-первых, во всех странах существуют разведки, задача которых исследование и кража информации. Есть ли наивные люди, которые предполагают, что британская, американская или нидерландская разведки не занимаются этим в России?
Во-вторых, если бы шпионы/разведчики («их» шпионы и «наши» разведчики) этим бы не занимались, их надо было бы выгнать без выходного пособия – за что им зарплаты платить из наших налогов?
В-третьих, кибератаки – это лишь инструмент для добывания информации. Раньше копировали почту дипкурьеров, переснимали на минифотопленку секретные документы, теперь это делают с помощью «дронов» — на удаленном расстоянии – ну и какая разница?
В-четвертых, ни для кого ни секрет, что часть шпионов/разведчиков всегда работала под дипломатическим прикрытием – ну поймали, ну выдворили.
Но вот в чем принципиальная разница – одно дело красть, другое дело – уничтожать данные, менять что-то или покушаться на жизнь. Это уже не разведка в классическом виде – это диверсия.
Допускаю, что именно диверсия – попытка уничтожить Скрипаля, вмешательство в выборы с целью изменения результата, вмешательство в деятельность химической лаборатории и было основанием для этой жесткой публичной позиции стран НАТО.
Все-таки ДИВЕРСИЯ и РАЗВЕДКА – это разные опции.
Тогда понятно Игорь Федюкин На вопрос об успешности или неуспешности стоило бы взглянуть иначе: у нас нет никаких оснований считать, что таким образом начали действовать только последние два года. Гораздо вероятнее обратное: что с такими паспортами и такими легендами ездили все последние 15 лет, и успешно хакали и убивали что и кого им было нужно. Крайне странных смертей русских или околорусских в Лондоне было выше крыши. И ничего им за это не было – не связывались, не расследовали. Иными словами, скорее всего весь тот стиль работы, который сейчас нам кажется комическим, он вплоть до прошлого года был вполне успешным, в рамках нормы, другого и не требовалось.
Вслед за разоблачениями США, Нидерланды и Канада официально обвинили российскую военную разведку в проведении кибератак по всему миру, и многие обеспокоены возможными последствиями этих заявлений. Александр Коляндр Мне кажется, сегодня впервые на уровне министра страны Россию назвали pariah state.
Сегодняшние события мне видятся серьезнее, чем кажется на первый взгляд. Александр Ивахник Так получается, что ГРУ становится еще одним брендом России в мире, наряду со спутником, Гагариным и Большим театром. Но если старые бренды олицетворяли позитив – научно-технический или творческий, то новый несет с собой неопределенную опасность и разрушение. Москва может сколько угодно твердить о шпиономании, русофобии и паранойе, но предъявленные миру фотографии и паспорта грушников, московский чек на такси от здания ГРУ до Шереметьева и хакерское оборудование в багажнике арендованного «Ситроена» невозможно списать на больное воображение. России придется с этим жить и готовиться к новым санкциям.
Правда, вице-президент США Пенс тут же обвинил и Китай во вмешательстве в американские демократические процедуры, по сравнению с которым действия России «бледнеют». Остается надеяться, что внимание Штатов будет всё больше переноситься на китайских товарищей. Но с Европой Москве надо все-таки поаккуратнее и попрофессиональнее. Как говорил Жванецкий, тщательнее надо, ребята.
Реакция российских государственных телеканалов и официальных лиц сюрпризом ни для кого не стала.
Артем Рондарев Мне кажется, российским информационным порталам можно уже делать макрос «В МИД России назвали заявления <британских, американских, голландских, подставить нужное> <дипломатов, полицейских, членов верховного суда, подставить нужное> «фантазиями». Чтобы он автоматом клеился после каждого информационного сообщения, а редактор только пару слов вставлял сообразно моменту. Потому что, судя по всему, скоро каждая новость, даже о погоде, будет требовать этой фразы, так что лучше заранее, чтобы не напрягаться. Ну и фоток удивленной Марии Захаровой нарезать на год вперед не помешает ггг.
The trees were blazing with autumn; red and gold and auburn leaves littered the ground like a many-hued carpet that crackled and rustled as they hiked along.
— Ben Bova, Return to Mars, 1999
Prior to the 16th century, auburn would not have been an ideal word to describe an autumn color. It derives ultimately from the Latin word albus, meaning “white,” and originally designated a yellowish or brownish white color.
However, by the 16th century, the word’s meaning shifted to goldish and reddish shades of brown. It seems variant spellings of the word, such as abrune, abroun, and abrown, that resembled Middle English brun, meaning “brown,” brought on the color change.
Владимир Путин поздравил всех российских учителей с Днём учителя.
09:40
В поздравлении, в частности, говорится:
«Нелёгкий, но благородный и востребованный труд учителя и наставника во все времена пользовался в нашей стране особым почётом. Именно от вас, вашей мудрости, терпения, самоотдачи во многом зависит личностное и профессиональное становление подрастающего поколения, активная общественная и жизненная позиция юных граждан.
Государство и впредь будет делать всё для повышения статуса учителя, укрепления социальных гарантий тех, кто трудится в сфере образования – ключевой для будущего России».
The coordinated witch-hunts do not solve the problems, the coordinated communications do. The pervasive, constantly present, the distinguishing, the defining, the hallmark feature of the recent operations is this “ham-handedness”. – M.N. – 6:08 AM 10/6/2018 “The ham-handed attempted break-in — involving hacking equipment in the trunk of a car and a trail of physical and virtual clues — was the most stunning operation revealed Thursday. It was so obvious, in fact, that it almost looked like the Russians didn’t care about getting caught… What Dutch authorities found seemed to be the work of an amateur. A taxi receipt in the pocket of one of the agents showed he had hired a cab to take him from a street next to GRU headquarters to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. A laptop found with the team appeared to tie them to other alleged GRU hacks.” M.N.: This “ham-handedness”, the deliberate, demonstrative sloppiness, as if it were the invitation to be discovered, is the pervasive, constantly present, the distinguishing, the defining, the hallmark feature of ALL recent operations, including, very much so, the Operation Trump. This feature has to be addressed and investigated thoroughly, it might contain one of the main clues. It might indicate the possible set-up or the number of other explanations, which have to be explored. The “Russianness”, the Russian ethnic origins and the history of the service in the military or the GRU of the implied, suspected operators does not mean at all that they work for the GRU presently, or that their acts were authorised, approved, or specifically planned by the GRU. Importantly, they might have been selected by the third party (which I call the New Abwehr, under its leader, the Demiurge), and specifically for these traits: “Russianness” and the history of the GRU service. These suspects might be the completely unwitting semi-professional actors acting as the cover for the true designers. GRU is the very sophisticated and experienced, highly professional intelligence service, just like her counterparts, and they have their own professional ways of doing things without being ostentatious, also just like the others. However, everything is possible, and the version of the “face value”, “what you see is what you get” is legitimate and has to be investigated first of all, despite the lack of the credibility factor. My respectful recommendation to Gen. Gerasimov and Gen. Korobov is to try to reach out to their colleagues and to discuss these issues frankly and openly, in their broad range and in all the possible depth. The similar respectful recommendation to their colleagues, Gen. Dunford and Gen. Ashley, is to have these discussions and to try to make them productive. GRU is often compared with CIA, although nominally its counterpart is DIA. These interventions have to be approved on the highest levels, of course. By the way, I think that the non-travel sanctions specifically against Korobov and the others in this circle, who are not involved in commercial activities, are counterproductive and should be waved or cancelled. People need to travel, to meet, and to talk; and the present crisis is the result of the insufficient communications, not their abundance. Technically, it is also easier to keep track of them when they travel freely rather than clandestinely, which they do anyway. The coordinated witch-hunts do not solve the problems, the coordinated communications do. “Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia said in a statement that the U.S. is taking a “dangerous path” by “deliberately inciting tensions in relations between the nuclear powers,” adding that Washington’s European allies should also think about it.” Mr. Ryabkov, stop your nuclear dingle-dangle. You sound more like a fire-setter than a firefighter or diplomat. Do not threaten the others yourself, you sound excessively defensive. Try to comprehend, to truly understand the situation, and to find the ways of resolving it on the basis of this understanding. The delusional-grandiose attempts on Mr. Skripal’s part to influence the personnel policies of the GRU; as his revenge (if they exist), should also be considered as a factor, although, obviously, it will be left without any consequences. Mr. Skripal himself appears to be the highly intriguing, mysterious, complex person who might also contain many hidden clues. Michael Novakhov 10.6.18
Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks
LONDON — The West unleashed an onslaught of new evidence and indictments Thursday accusing Russian military spies of hacking so widespread that it seemed to target anyone, anywhere who investigates Moscow’s involvement in an array of criminal activities — including doping, poisoning and the downing of a plane.
Russia defiantly denied the charges, neither humbled nor embarrassed by the exceptional revelations on one of the most high-tension days in East-West relations in years. Moscow lashed back with allegations that the Pentagon runs a clandestine U.S. biological weapons program involving toxic mosquitoes, ticks and more.
The nucleus of Thursday’s drama was Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, increasingly the embodiment of Russian meddling abroad.
In the last 24 hours: U.S. authorities charged seven officers from the GRU with hacking international agencies; British and Australian authorities accused the GRU of a devastating 2017 cyberattack on Ukraine, the email leaks that rocked the U.S. 2016 election and other damaging hacks; And Dutch officials alleged that GRU agents tried and failed to hack into the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
The ham-handed attempted break-in — involving hacking equipment in the trunk of a car and a trail of physical and virtual clues — was the most stunning operation revealed Thursday. It was so obvious, in fact, that it almost looked like the Russians didn’t care about getting caught.
“Basically, the Russians got caught with their equipment, people who were doing it, and they have got to pay the piper. They are going to have to be held to account,” U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in Brussels, where he was meeting with NATO allies.
Mattis said the West has “a wide variety of responses” available.
Britain’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Peter Wilson, said the GRU would no longer be allowed to act with impunity.
Calling Russia a “pariah state,” British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson said: “Where Russia acts in an indiscriminate and reckless way, where they have done in terms of these cyberattacks, we will be exposing them.”
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov of Russia said in a statement that the U.S. is taking a “dangerous path” by “deliberately inciting tensions in relations between the nuclear powers,” adding that Washington’s European allies should also think about it.
While the accusations expose how much damage Russia can do in foreign lands, through remote hacking and on-site infiltration — they also expose how little Western countries can do to stop it.
Russia is already under EU and U.S. sanctions, and dozens of GRU agents and alleged Russian trolls have already been indicted by the U.S but will likely never be handed over to face American justice.
Still, to the Western public, Thursday may have been a pivotal day, with accusations so extensive, and the chorus of condemnation so loud, that it left little doubt of massive Russian wrongdoing. A wealth of surveillance footage released by Western intelligence agencies was quickly and overwhelmingly confirmed by independent reporting.
The litany of accusations of GRU malfeasance began overnight, when British and Australian authorities accused the Russian agency of being behind the catastrophic 2017 cyberattack in Ukraine. The malicious software outbreak knocked out ATMs, gas stations, pharmacies and hospitals and, according to a secret White House assessment recently cited by Wired, caused $10 billion in damage worldwide.
The British and Australians also linked the GRU to other hacks, including the Democratic Party email leaks and online cyber propaganda that sowed havoc before Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election.
Later Thursday, Dutch defense officials released photos and a timeline of GRU agents’ botched attempt to break into the chemical weapons watchdog using Wi-Fi hacking equipment hidden in a car parked outside a nearby Marriott Hotel. The OPCW was investigating a nerve agent attack on a former GRU spy, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury, England, that Britain has blamed on the Russian government. Moscow vehemently denies involvement.
Photographs released by the Dutch Ministry of Defense showed a trunk loaded with a computer, battery, a bulky white transformer and a hidden antenna; officials said the equipment was operational when Dutch counterintelligence interrupted the operation.
What Dutch authorities found seemed to be the work of an amateur. A taxi receipt in the pocket of one of the agents showed he had hired a cab to take him from a street next to GRU headquarters to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. A laptop found with the team appeared to tie them to other alleged GRU hacks.
The men were expelled instead of arrested, because they were traveling on diplomatic passports.
The Dutch also accused the GRU of trying to hack investigators examining the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine that killed all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led team says it has strong evidence the missile that brought the plane down came from a Russia-based military unit. Russia has denied the charge.
Later Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department charged seven GRU officers — including the four caught in The Hague — in an international hacking rampage that targeted more than 250 athletes, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company, a Swiss chemical laboratory and the OPCW.
The indictment said the GRU targets had publicly supported a ban on Russian athletes in international sports competitions and because they had condemned what they called a state-sponsored doping program by Russia.
U.S. prosecutors said the Russians also targeted a Pennsylvania-based nuclear energy company and the OPCW.
The seven were identified as: Aleksei Morenets, 41; Evgenii Serebriakov, 37; Ivan Yermakov, 32; Artem Malyshev, 30; and Dmitriy Badin, 27; who were each assigned to Military Unit 26165, and Oleg Sotnikov, 46, and Alexey Minin, 46, who were also GRU officers.
The U.S. indictment says the hacking was often conducted remotely. If that wasn’t successful, the hackers would conduct “on-site” or “close access” hacking operations, with trained GRU members traveling with sophisticated equipment to target their victims through Wi-Fi networks.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the Canadian anti-doping agency were all identified by the U.S. indictment against the Russians.
WADA said the alleged hackers “sought to violate athletes’ rights by exposing personal and private data — often then modifying them — and ultimately undermine the work of WADA and its partners in the protection of clean sport.”
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. anti-doping agency and a prominent critic of Russian athletes’ drug use, says “a system that was abusing its own athletes with an institutionalized doping program has now been indicted for perpetrating cyberattacks on innocent athletes from around the world.”
Russia denied everything.
Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russian parliament, said the accusations were fake and intended to “delegitimize” a resurgent Russia. The West has picked up the GRU as “a modern analogue of the KGB which served as a bugaboo for people in the West during the Cold War,” he said.
Russia countered with accusations of their own: The Defense Ministry unveiled complex allegations that the U.S. has a clandestine biological weapons lab in the country of Georgia as part of a network of labs on the edges of Russia and China that flout international rules.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon called the accusations “an invention” and “obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts.”
The Associated Press, meanwhile, independently corroborated information that matches details for two of the alleged Russian agents named by the Dutch authorities.
An online car registration database in Russia showed that Aleksei Morenets, whose full name and date of birth are the same as one of the expelled Russians, sold his car in 2004, listing the Moscow address where the Defense Ministry’s Military University is based.
Alexey Minin, another Russian whose full name and date of birth match the Dutch details, had several cars, including an Alfa Romeo, that were registered and sold at the address where the Defense Ministry’s GRU school is located. In some of the filings, Minin listed the official military unit number of the GRU school as his home address.
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Balsamo reported from Washington and Casert from Brussels. Raphael Satter in London, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed.
M.N.: This is indeed the hypothetical connection between the “PETRONAS” (Petrov Boshirov PERSONAS) – the Salisbury Poisoning, and the Blackberry – Abedin’s device – Clinton’s emails – Anthony Weiner sexting affair – Democratic Party hack – US Elections 2016 Interference:
This means that the Salisbury Poisoning and the US Elections 2016 Interference might be the parts of the same large operation designed by the Demiurge, the New Abwehr, which uses the ostensibly GRU related groups as its covers. It might be the mixed or the purely the GRU groups but I strongly doubt it: the overall benefits of the Operation Dusseldorf Karnival are in the German and certainly not in Russian interests.
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“Two suspects in the poison Poisoninging of an ex-Russian spy were briefly detained in the Netherlands earlier this year, according to research by Bellingcat, an investigative group.
Bellingcat quoted an unnamed security official saying that Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were detained in the Netherlands earlier this year and released without being charged.” “Dutch expelled Russians over alleged novichok lab hacking plot
Two men were arrested over alleged plan to infiltrate lab where Salisbury nerve agent was analysed…
The Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection said in June that the Spiez laboratory had been targeted by hackers said to be from the Russian government-affiliated group Sandworm. It is not clear whether the expulsion of the two spies from the Netherlands was linked.” M.N.: It is the same hacking group, “Sandform – APT28 – Fancy Bear, etc., etc.”. “It was involved in the operation to hack and release damaging information on the Democratic Party during the 2016 US presidential election, and has engineered a number of computer network disruptions in Ukraine”. Is it also resposible for hacking Clinton’s emails, and for downloading emails to Abedin’s computer? “The Justice Department said the “VPNFilter” botnet was set up by a hacking group variously called APT28, Pawn Storm, Sandworm, Fancy Bear and the Sofacy Group.”
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US disrupts Russian botnet of 500,000 hacked routers
May 24, 2018 by Paul Handley
US Justice Department seizes “VPNFilter” botnet set up by a hacking group variously called APT28, Pawn Storm, Sandworm, Fancy Bear and the Sofacy Group
The US Justice Department said Wednesday that it had seized an internet domain that directed a dangerous botnet of a half-million infected home and office network routers, controlled by hackers believed tied to Russian intelligence.
The move was aimed at breaking up an operation deeply embedded in small and medium-sized computer networks that could allow the hackers to take control of computers as well as easily steal data.
The Justice Department said the “VPNFilter” botnet was set up by a hacking group variously called APT28, Pawn Storm, Sandworm, Fancy Bear and the Sofacy Group.
The group is blamed for cyber attacks on numerous governments, key infrastructure industries like power grids, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and other bodies.
US intelligence agencies also say it was involved in the operation to hack and release damaging information on the Democratic Party during the 2016 US presidential election, and has engineered a number of computer network disruptions in Ukraine.
“According to cybersecurity researchers, the Sofacy Group is a cyber-espionage group believed to have originated from Russia,” the Department of Justice said in a court filing.
“Likely operating since 2007, the group is known to typically target government, military, security organizations, and other targets of intelligence value, through a variety of means,” it said.
The Justice filing did not say who was behind Sofacy Group, but US intelligence has in the past linked it to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, and numerous private computer security groups have made the same connection.
This is one of the “bio-centric principles” of Abwehr, as I call them. It probably is derived from the common maritime observations: “Smart Seagull drops crab on the fly to break it”: the higher you lift them the harder they fall, and then some smart seagulls will enjoy their fresh crab meat salad for lunch. M.N. Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks
The Treaty of Versailles (French: Traité de Versailles) was the most important of the peace treaties that brought World War Ito an end. The Treaty ended the state of war between Germanyand the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919 in Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand which directly led to World War I. The other Central Powers on the German side of World War I signed separate treaties.[6] Although the armistice, signed on 11 November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty was registered by the Secretariat of the League of Nations on 21 October 1919.
Berlin may be toying with the idea of embracing its nuclear ambitions, but doing so would jeopardize the delicate balance of power in Europe, writes a security policy expert.
Published on
As in a game of chess, there are geopolitical moves through which a country can – unwittingly – checkmate itself. Opening a debate on German nuclear weapons would be such a move. Yet this is exactly what some Germans have recently proposed. Supporters of a nuclear-armed Germany contend that NATO’s nuclear umbrella has lost all credibility because of statements made by US President Donald Trump.
There are at least three good reasons why considering a nuclear option would be foolhardy for Germany. For starters, Germany has repeatedly renounced it, first in 1969 by signing (and later ratifying) the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and then in 1990 by signing the so-called Two Plus Four Treaty, which paved the way for German reunification.
Casting doubt on these commitments would severely damage Germany’s reputation and reliability worldwide. Germany would call into question the credibility of NATO’s nuclear deterrence, and thus the alliance itself, along with the entire nuclear non-proliferation regime.
It is worth noting that since its creation in 1949, NATO has been one of the world’s most successful instruments of proliferation prevention. Not a single NATO member state – apart from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – has found it necessary to acquire nuclear weapons of its own.
Risk of domino effect
If Germany were now to break out of its non-nuclear power status, what would keep Turkey or Poland, for instance, from following suit? Germany as a gravedigger of the international non-proliferation regime – who could want that?
Second, a German nuclear bomb would damage the strategic environment in Europe – to Germany’s disadvantage. Russia would interpret German steps toward a nuclear arsenal as a direct threat to its own national security and would likely adopt military countermeasures. That, in turn, would make it even harder to pursue the vision of a pan-European order of peace and security, a core foreign-policy goal of all German governments since that of Konrad Adenauer. Moreover, a German nuclear ambition might jeopardize the delicate balance of power in Europe – including between Germany and France, for example – with incalculable consequences for the long-term cohesion of the European Union.
Finally, it is not hard to predict that the pursuit of nuclear weapons would draw significant public opposition, especially given that such a move would be a complete about-face for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which, just a few years ago, moved to phase out nuclear energyaltogether. It is difficult to imagine a greater fiasco for German foreign and security policy than proposing a nuclear strategy and then failing to obtain parliamentary approval.
Sensible alternatives
There are smarter long-term ways to bolster Europe’s nuclear defense than introducing a German bomb. For example, France might be willing to consider playing an extended nuclear-deterrence role, along with the roles of the US and the United Kingdom within NATO. While this would require a fundamental reorientation and Europeanization of France’s nuclear strategy, Germany and other European partners could offer financial contributions to such an initiative, in the context of a future European defense union with a nuclear component. But these are, at best, long-term options.
In short, no matter what Trump says, Germany will remain dependent on the US nuclear umbrella for the foreseeable future.
The best way to maintain NATO’s credibility and be taken seriously by the US is to work seriously toward the alliance’s 2%-of-GDP target for defense spending and to invest more heavily in conventional military capabilities. not to satisfy US demands, but to protect our own security and defense interests. But this is not simply about spending more; it is about spending more intelligently, particularly by pooling and sharing capabilities, and by systematic joint procurement with France and other European partners, including through the recently established EU Defense Fund.
None of this will work if Germany will not start defining military strategy, security, and defense as top political priorities. Only then will the Bundestag be able to give the Bundeswehr – often referred to as a “parliamentary army” – what it needs to do its job. The alternative – considering the development of nuclear weapons – would be a game-losing move. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018. www.project-syndicate.org
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In 1958 Charles De Gaulle became President of France, and Germany and Italy were excluded from the weapons project. … The United States provides about 60 tactical B61 nuclear bombs for use by Germanyunder a NATO nuclear weapons sharing agreement.
Aug 17, 2018 – Many commenters are tempted by the prospect of Germany buying a share, so to speak, of the British or French nuclear forces to create a …
Jun 23, 2018 – Before the World War II France, like Britain and Germany, led the … France Has Lots of Nuclear Weapons (That Could Kill Millions of People) …
Character assassination is a deliberate and sustained process that destroys the credibility and reputation of a person, institution, organization, social group, or nation.[1] Agents of character assassinations employ a mix of open and covert methods to achieve their goals, such as raising false accusations, planting and fostering rumours, and manipulating information.
Character assassination is an attempt to tarnish a person’s reputation. It may involve exaggeration, misleading half-truths, or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person. It is a form of defamation and can be a form of ad hominem argument.
For living individuals targeted by character assassination attempts, this may result in being rejected by their community, family, or members of their living or work environment. Such acts are often difficult to reverse or rectify, and the process is likened to a literal assassination of a human life. The damage sustained can last a lifetime or, for historical figures, for many centuries after their death.
The phrase “character assassination” became popular from around 1930.[2] One of the first mentions of the phrasing in literature is dated 1950 in the collection of essays by Jerome Davis.[3]
In practice, character assassination may involve doublespeak, spreading of rumours, innuendo or deliberate misinformation on topics relating to the subject’s morals, integrity, and reputation. It may involve spinning information that is technically true, but that is presented in a misleading manner or is presented without the necessary context. For example, it might be said that a person refused to pay any income tax during a specific year, without saying that no tax was actually owed due to the person having no income that year, or that a person was sacked from a firm, even though he may have been made redundant through no fault of his own, rather than being terminated for cause.
Others define character assassination as the deliberate destruction of an individual’s reputation, which does not include social groups or institutions. It is important to distinguish between character attacks and character assassination. Character attacks are assaults aimed at a particular individual—as opposed to attacks aimed at certain groups, movements, or nationalities, such as happen in the construction of enemy images.[4] If they succeed in destroying their victim’s reputation, we speak of successful attacks and character assassination. However, attacks can also fail.
Three features of character attacks are important to understand.[4] First, their intention: character attacks are by definition deliberate. Second, the public nature of the attacks: private insults do not lead to reputation damage. And third, the importance of the public perception of the attacks, which means that the truth of allegations is irrelevant.
According to Thomas, character assassination is an intentional attempt, usually by a narcissist and/or his or her codependents, to influence the portrayal or reputation of someone in such a way as to cause others to develop an extremely negative or unappealing perception of him or her. It typically involves deliberate exaggeration or manipulation of facts, the spreading of rumours and deliberate misinformation to present an untrue picture of the targeted person, and unwarranted and excessive criticism.[5]
The authors of the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work describe a five phase model of how a typical workplace psychopath climbs to and maintains power. In phase four (confrontation), the psychopath will use techniques of character assassination to maintain their agenda.[6]
In politics, character assassination is a form of negative campaigning. Opposition research is the practice of collecting information on someone that can be used to discredit them. A smear campaign is the use of falsehoods or distortions. Scandalmongering can be used to associate a person with a negative event in a false or exaggerated way.
Perhaps the most common form of character assassination is the spread of allegations that a candidate is a liar. Other common themes may include allegations that the candidate is a bad or unpopular member of his family, has a bad relationship with his spouse or children or is not respected by his colleagues. Another theme claims that the person routinely engages in disturbing, socially unacceptable behavior, such as sexual deviancy. The person may also be portrayed as holding beliefs widely considered despicable within society, such as supporting racism or other forms of bigotry.
Charging an opponent with character assassination may have political benefits. In the hearings for Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States, supporters claimed that both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were victims of character assassination.[7]
The International Society for the Study of Character Assassination (ISSCA) specialises in the academic study and research of how character attacks and assassinations have been executed in both history and during contemporary times.[8]
Character attacks come in three categories. The first is attacks between equals. These often happen in democracies, especially during elections. The second is top-down attacks, or authoritarian regimes cracking down on individuals.[4] Examples include:
Luther slandered by the Catholic Church during the Reformation
The effect of a character assassination driven by an individual is not equal to that of a state-driven campaign. The state-sponsored destruction of reputations, fostered by political propaganda and cultural mechanisms, can have more far-reaching consequences. One of the earliest signs of a society’s compliance to loosening the reins on the perpetration of crimes (and even massacres) with total impunity is when a government favors or directly encourages a campaign aimed at destroying the dignity and reputation of its adversaries, and the public accepts its allegations without question. The mobilisation toward ruining the reputation of adversaries is the prelude to the mobilisation of violence in order to annihilate them. Generally, official dehumanisation has preceded the physical assault of the victims.[1]
The International Society for the Study of Character Assassination[edit]
In July 2011, scholars from nine countries gathered at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, to debate “the art of smear and defamation in history and today”.[9] They formed a group to study character assassination throughout the ages. The group included historians, political scientists, and political psychologists.[10]
Aug 26, 2018 – Cron is a tool that allows you to execute something on a schedule. This is typically done using the cron syntax. We allow you to execute a …
Most Americans have not heard the name Benalla, and if they have, they haven’t a clue why it should concern them. How could they? The White House is a region of spacetime exerting such a strong pull on our attention that no one can escape; a scandal in France that sounds inscrutable and insignificant will not be the exception to the rule, even if it is neither.
The manifest content of this scandal, as thus far reported in the highbrow press, is indeed a scandal. But as French scandals go, it is a tremblor on the French Presidential Scandal scale. The latent content is what matters—and it matters because of the larger geopolitical context.
France will soon be the only nuclear power in the European Union. The U.S. commitment to Article V of the NATO treaty is widely in doubt. Macron’s lucky streak has allowed some in Europe to envision the germ of a solution to the massive security and economic dilemmas it confronts: an intimate Franco-German economic and security entente, one that would use Germany’s wealth and France’s military to forge a stable, liberal, and democratic power center at the heart of Europe.
Given this context, it is hard to understand why the French would allow themselves to become consumed by a scandal that on its face is a scandal, yes, but no earth-shattering one. Nonetheless, Macron’s popularity has plummeted. Since Le Monde broke the story on July 18, he has tumbled in the polls by some ten percentage points, leaving a number of observers reaching for elaborate explanations: “The Benalla Affair,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker, “is not about Alexandre Benalla. It is about the French President, and the brash, self-confident manner with which he has blasted through his first year in office.” The story runs the “Culture Desk” section, which is usually reserved for “conversations about movies, television, theatre, music, and other cultural events.”
Not about Benalla? Perhaps it is true that had Macron not been so brash and self-confident, no one in France would have found the news that his intimate friend and adviser likes to dress up like one of the Village People and beat the snot out of anyone in his path especially notable. But this seems a tortured explanation.
The affair takes place against a restive backdrop. On May Day 2018, a year after Macron’s election and half a century after May ’68, the unions took to the street to protest Macron’s economic reforms. These included loosening France’s growth-strangling labor regulations, so rigid that desperate companies with an incompetent employee were known to hire a second one without firing the incompetent one, for it would be so expensive, time-consuming, and bureaucratically arduous to get rid the incompetent that it was easier to keep him on the payroll.
In September last year, Macron pushed through a package of labor law reforms, then turned his attention to the debt-ridden state railways.His proposal to end the guarantee of jobs for life—not, note, for those already employed, but for new recruits—prompted crippling, rolling strikes meant to galvanize France with the rejuvenating spirit of ’68. In reality the strikes just irritated the hell out of us, so much so that, for once, people on the street told me, “I’ve had it with these spoiled little shits. Just fire them all.”
You may remember “May Day in Paris Marred by Violence” headlines, accompanied by the clichéd stock photo of a burning car in Paris. The malefactors were the Black Bloc, a kin to Antifa. Some 1,200 Black Bloc thugs infiltrated an otherwise peaceful march of leftists and trade unionists and went wilding, throwing Molotov Cocktails, smashing windows, torching cars, ransacking shops, brandishing Soviet flags (seriously), tearing up pavement stones, and desecrating the holy symbol of capitalism (a McDonald’s). This happened near the Gare d’Austerlitz, in central southeast Paris. The news made it sound more dramatic than it was: I live about ten blocks away but had no idea it was happening until I received e-mails from concerned Americans telling me to flee for my life.
That evening, another scrap broke out at the Place de la Contrescarpe, which guidebooks describe as “a small, intimate, and pleasantly shaded square, lined by lively cafés, one of the most attractive in Paris.” The cops were in a crappy mood after dealing with 1,200 ravening anarchists, and another passel of drunken reds was the last thing they wanted to see. But with one notable exception, the cops were perfectly professional, if, obviously, not a bit in the mood. Here is the video, recorded on May 1, that started it all.1 Look for the cop in the helmet who’s not like the others. He’s incompetent. He’s untrained. He’s neither in control of himself nor the suspect. He smashes him in the head in a way no professional ever would. You could give someone a concussion or brain damage that way. You could even hurt your hand. The video was released immediately, but only became a national scandal when the public learned that the cop in question was not a cop. He was 26-year-old Alexandre Benalla, a swarthy young man from the other side of the tracks, impersonating a police officer.
And who exactly is Benalla? On July 18, Le Monde identified him, triggering the firestorm. He is a man who has had seemingly unlimited access to the President of the Republic of France. But he shouldn’t have.
Other amateur videos of the May 1 incident have since surfaced. By now everyone in France has seen Benalla mashing his fist into a protestor and stomping on his stomach; they have watched him wrestle to the ground and drag off an unarmed woman; they have seen him flee the scene. We have seen the assault from every angle, in slow motion, captioned, illustrated with arrows and diagrams, or playing on a loop, in the background, as excited television presenters narrate the blow-by-blow.
We have since learned, too, that Benalla was granted gifts and favors exceedingly unsuited to his official role. And what was that role? It changes by the day, but in press accounts he has been described variously as “bodyguard,” “the President’s close collaborator,” “deputy chief of staff,” “assistant director of the cabinet of the President of the Republic,” “top aide,” and “adviser to the President.” One thing is perfectly clear: Nothing could keep them apart. France has seen photo after photo of Macron and Benalla skiing together in the Pyrénées and cycling in matching pastels at the seaside. Benalla had the keys to the presidential couple’s home. He was installed in a sumptuous apartment on the Quai Branly with a certain historic significance—it once housed President Mitterrand’s illegitimate family—and paid a salary grossly disproportionate to his role, whatever it was. He was given an official vehicle, with flashing lights and sirens, which perhaps a bodyguard might need, yes, but why then was he also given a chauffeur? He had no training as a bodyguard, but under Macron’s employ, in what Libérationtermed “the fastest promotion in French military history,” this retired former grunt in the gendarmerie became a five-bar lieutenant colonel with “expert” status. He had free range of the National Assembly, a diplomatic passport, and a security clearance.
This would all have escaped widespread notice if the far Left had not tipped off Le Monde. Note, though, that someone had to know Benalla was not who he appeared to be to grasp that the video would cripple President Emmanuel Macron’s presidency.
Benalla’s nickname was “Rambo.” His intimates say he has hot blood, or sang chaud, the opposite of the quality usually ascribed to heroic Frenchmen—sangfroid. He was granted a license to carry, even though his earlier applications had repeatedly been denied by the Interior Ministry; police officers considered his dossier “dubious.” Sources tell journalists that the Elysée would have had to intervene directly to overrule that judgement.
He had been offering his services as a bodyguard to Socialist Party luminaries since 2008, but in 2012, only days into a new job as Arnaud Montebourg’s chauffeur, he was fired “with utmost force, for severe misconduct,” as Montebourg told Le Monde. “He caused a car accident, in my presence, and sought to flee the scene.” In 2015, a woman filed a complaint with the police accusing Benalla of “willingly and violently” assaulting her so seriously that she couldn’t work for more than eight days. In March 2016, shortly before Benalla entered Macron’s employ, these charges were dismissed. Unusually, no legal explanation for the verdict was offered.
Directly before the 2017 election, hackers broke into Macron’s campaign and dumped a massive trove of documents onto the internet. No one paid them much mind, assuming the Russians had mingled with the real documents so many fake and scurrilous ones that none could be trusted. The documents about Benalla, however, appear to have been real: They note his fondness for riot shields and non-lethal weapons. It does seem he had quite the collection: When he wanted to play policeman, he had all the gear—the helmet, the armband, the walkie-talkie. But how could he have assumed he would get away with that in the era of the smartphone? Impersonating a police officer is, needless to say, illegal as hell. Clearly, he felt he was immune—and indeed, members of police unions have since testified under oath that Benalla “terrified” them, that he felt free to curse and threaten with impunity high-ranking officers of the police and gendarmerie.
The police had their reasons. In this video, shot in March 2017 and published by Public Sénat the day after after Le Monde identified Benalla as the rogue cop, we see Benalla manhandling a journalist, then stealing his badge. The incident was “so serious and so incomprehensible,” Public Sénat reported, “that the director of the channel sent a letter to then-candidate Macron’s team, noting that there was no threat whatsoever to the candidate and protesting this arbitrary interference with the press in in its normal duties.” It was a warning, Public Sénat wrote, “that should have been heeded, and should have prevented Benalla from following Macron into the Elysée Palace.”
We learned from sworn testimony before the French parliament that the President and the Interior Ministry had been aware of the incident as soon as it happened. Neither alerted the public prosecutor, as required by law, nor did they do so until the story was on the front page of every newspaper in France. Instead, they suspended Benalla without salary for 15 days, but for a “technical reason” he received his salary anyway and immediately reappeared, accompanying the President as if he had not been suspended at all. They knew Benalla had done something psychopathic on May Day, but not one of the people officially responsible for ensuring the security of the President insisted that his access to him be cut off.
The cover-up has been clumsier than the crime. After the story broke, no one could get the alibi straight. Neither Interior Minister Gérard Collomb nor the Paris Prefect of Police Michel Delpuech were willing to take the fall; both pointed the finger at Macron. On July 23, Delpuech contradicted the Elysée’s declarations that the police had authorized Benalla to attend the demonstration.
All of this is scandalous, yes. The corruption, the favoritism, and the carelessness with state security warrant stern condemnation. But none of it merits the unrelenting fever it has generated in France. It does not warrant the obsession, and it can be described no other way.
Why? As French scandals go, writes Arthur Goldhammer, “nothing here rises to the level of past presidential misdeeds.” He recalls the barbouzes of de Gaulle’s Service d’Action Civique, the Greenpeace Affair, Mitterrand’s private eavesdroppers. “These were affairs of state. Benalla is a choirboy by comparison.”
Benalla has since been indicted for assault, impersonating a police officer, gang violence, interference in public service, illegally wearing a police badge, and conspiracy to abuse police surveillance footage. The three high-ranking police officers who allegedly gave Benalla the footage of the incident have been indicted for misappropriating the images and violating professional secrecy. The judiciary is conducting an investigation into “cronyism.” Five have so far been indicted. The National Police and the Inspector General are conducting simultaneous administrative investigations.
Macron has taken responsibility. The buck stops with him, he says. He has assured us that Benalla was never given the nuclear codes. He has assured us, too, that Benalla has never been his lover. So that, at least, is settled.
So why, then, isn’t it settled? Why did the leaked video first force Macron into hiding—he went silent for days, completely aberrant for the normally voluble Jupiter—and why, when at last he emerged, did he stand before the flashing lightbulbs and say, “Benalla has never been my lover?” Any competent brand manager would tell you those are not the words to utter if you aim never to associate in the public mind the words “Macron,” “Benalla,” and “lover.”
Because, of course, everyone suspects Benalla is his lover. It takes quite a conspiracy theory to account for this any other way, doesn’t it? But that is not the heart of the matter. France isn’t anti-homosexual in the Russian manner. Marine Le Pen, for example, surrounds herself with gay advisers and insists that, far from being homophobic, her animosity to Islamic immigration stems from her homophilia. Homosexuality in France is now at best mildly transgressive. Few would have thought the worse of Macron had he come out of the closet. His taste for men was rumored before the election, and since nearly everyone had heard about it, not much of a secret.
Macron might have been better off saying, “Yes, he’s my lover, and it’s none of your business.” That’s an answer France might have understood. It is the reflex response here to any question about a public figure’s private life. An American (in all innocence, presumably) once asked Quora whether Macron was gay, and was taken to the woodshed by his French interlocutors. “I am not politically in favor of Macron, but this question is inappropriate. To say the least,” remarked one.
Unfortunately, this obvious retort was unavailable to him, because Macron had spent months of his campaign saying, “Yes, she’s my wife, and it’s none of your business.” In his 2016 memoir, the candidate described his “love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself.” But this love that dared not speak its name was to Brigitte, whom he met when he was a 15-year-old student at a Jesuit high school. She was 25 years his senior, married, and a mother of three. She divorced her husband when Macron turned 18. When Macron began his political career, in 2007, they married, and Macron became a grandfather of seven before his 40th birthday.
Their relationship has mostly struck the French as weird or romantic, but none of their business. Rumors that Brigitte was Macron’s beard were stilled by good manners, discretion, and respect for the beauty of their love story, the will to believe in their love story—especially among middle-aged women with a taste for le fruit vert. When the far Right—and Russia—had the bad taste to cast aspersions on the authenticity of their marriage, Macron won the round by calling such intimations odious: “Saying that it is not possible for a man to live with an older woman without being anything other than a homosexual or a hidden gigolo is misogynous. And it’s also homophobic.”
Were it not for this, Macron could have said, “Yes, he’s my lover, and that is none of your business.” It would have been met, probably, with a great round of public applause for his bravery. But precisely because he had so vigorously denounced anyone who suggested such a thing as a homophobe or a misogynist, the get-out-of-jail-free card was unavailable to him when he possibly needed it most.
Still, his presumptive hypocrisy is not the heart of this matter either. No one in France cared that Mitterrand had two families, or that Hollande had three mistresses. A touch of hypocrisy would have been easily understood. He’s a politician, after all.
So what is this really about? As is often the case in French theater, the action is onstage, but the meaning is offstage.2 The first clue is in the political correctness Macron deftly wielded as a weapon on the campaign trail. This scandal is political correctness in action, and it displays political correctness for what we all know it to be: a sinister system of internal constraints that serves simultaneously to highlight and to hide forbidden thoughts. It also serves as a signal of class status: It is the vernacular of the aspiring upper-middle classes, and deploying it is a sign of class anxiety. The aristocracy sees no need for it. We speak plainly, but only to each other.
Thus it is impossible for the French middle class to articulate, or even consciously to identify, the truly transgressive element of this drama. None can say plainly that yes, France was ready for a President who married his high school drama teacher; France was ready for a closeted gay President, if that’s in fact what he was, or even an openly gay President. But no, France was not ready for a closeted gay President with a taste for S&M.3 That is the heart of the scandal. Benalla is a sadist. Homosexuality is tolerated, but Benalla is different. He is not, for one thing, obviously homosexual. He has a long history of heterosexual liaisons. Perhaps he is an intermittent homosexual, but that is not particularly interesting these days, either. What is interesting, because it is something else entirely, is that Benalla obviously enjoys inflicting pain, and in his elevated disposition in the Macron era, he has been out of control. Thus the reaction to this scandal in France owes much to the hidden image of Macron as a willing victim of Benalla’s baton. There cannot be two sadists in a sado-masochistic affair. If Benalla and Macron were lovers, and Benalla is the dominant half of a sado-masochistic couple, where does that leave Macron? It leaves him where no one wishes to see a French President.
But this is only one thread in a complicated weave. The French press has gone out of its way to affirm that Benalla is French; he was born here; he is one of our own. This is not just political correctness: It is so. This is an important part of France’s conception of itself, made manifest in the law.4 And it is not so. The forbidden thought—and the obvious one—is that Benalla is not a French name. Benalla was born in France, but he is from a French-Moroccan family. He is part of the great wave of post-colonial immigration from the Maghreb.
For Macron to have gotten himself involved in this sort of debauchery smells of Rassenschande. There is to this affair a distinct air of racial defilement. No one wishes in the least to say this, but it is true anyway. If Benalla is an intermittent homosexual and not entirely French by blood—ah, that word does have a way of returning, doesn’t it—the fact that he is also a sadist means he has been showing the clubbing end of the baton to Macron, and in doing this, screwing over France.
Screwing over France in whose name, one might ask, if only because the question is always pertinent. Four or five million French Maghrebis—that is one answer. Go to any suburb around Paris or Marseilles and ask the locals whether they appreciate the fact that someone named Benalla is busy kicking the shit out of the President of the Republic, and, unbidden they would say they enjoy it very much. It is about time that someone did so. This has little to do with Islam and nothing to do with terrorism, it is a matter of redressing an old, old feeling of humiliation.
If in doubt, take a walk through my neighborhood. Try asking, at random, “What do you make of this Benalla business?” The responses are entirely predictable along class and ethnic lines. The waiter in the bobo café will say, “Lovers? Why, that hadn’t occurred to me. Or to anyone I know. What a strange thought.” But go exactly ten meters down the street and talk to the Maghrebi garbage collectors: All smirks and chortles. Their Ivoirian comrades? They’ve honestly got no idea what you’re talking about. Then try a high-ranking civil servant (in strictest confidence and utmost discretion, bien sûr—and only after you’ve established your aristocratic bona fides)—oh yes, the rumors get lewder. I would hardly be surprised if in the upper echelons of the Palace the word now involves Brigitte and a horse.
But in screwing over France by screwing over Macron, Benalla has made a symbolic concord with another constituency altogether: the police. Now, it is a simple and observable fact that no trivial number of police are, by psychological type, sadistic. This is hardly to impugn the police. Every polity needs its protective thugs; no society can long do without them. As it happens, Benalla loved the police. He wished to be one of them, and if not one of them, one of them in spirit. (This type is well known in the United States, too. Think Steven Seagal.) Even though no one in France is so stupid as to wish the police to disappear, the police are widely despised for their gratuitous brutality, their clan loyalty, and their flagrant dishonesty. The socio-economic class they represent lies between the edges of the working and lower-middle class. As they are despised, so they despise their betters: The attorneys, whom they loathe; the clever criminals, whom they sometimes admire; the politicians; and the press. In a country with fascist tendencies, they would represent a barely controlled Freikorps, a clan expressing their resentment in violence, first because violence does very well in expressing something, and second because violence has a latent psychosexual aspect. It is relieving to go beat people up.
These, then, are the first clues to the concealed drama of this affair. Macron has allowed himself to be used both by the Maghreb community and by the police in order to relieve them of their frustrations and resentments. To the French who can sense things happening, but not think about them or forthrightly discuss them, this is bound to provoke a shiver of discontent. Many in France dislike the Maghreb population because they fear, with some reason, that their allegiance is not to France at all—at least not yet. Many dislike the police because the police are not likable (nor should they be). The last thing they wish is for these groups to have their way with the President, and so with France. But this would seem to be what happened. One wonders how many French commentators and writers fully understand the meaning of the Ernst Röhm scandal in Germany? At some level, they all do. And at some level, this is a far deeper source of anxiety, for Röhm was Hitler’s Benalla.
Here is the another clue: The French delight in devouring the powerful and executing monarchs, even when it is not in their interest, and this to a degree unexcelled in any other Western country. They will re-enact the spectacle of destroying the monarchy every time in preference to asking whether it is the right moment to do that.
And a last clue: French libel laws are no joke, and any journalist who says in plain language what everyone is thinking will get his ass sued off. Thus all of this is happening between the lines. Look for the double-entendres. Such an event could be described in many ways in both French and English: the May Day scandal, the Benalla scandal, or even Benalla-gate—in both languages. The press has landed firmly on l’affaire Macron-Benalla, which in both languages means what you think it does.
Another one: “Might this be compared,” journalists are asking one other, entirely straight-faced, on television, “to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior?” No, actually. The aptly codenamed Opération Satanique—more often known as the Greenpeace scandal—took place in 1985, years before the word “Rainbow” would evoke anything but a polychromatic optical illusion. The Rainbow Warrior was the flagship of Greenpeace’s fleet, en route to protest a French nuclear test in the Tuamotu Archipelago, when the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) bombed and sunk her in the Port of Auckland, killing a photographer on board. The New Zealand police captured two operatives and charged them with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. Mitterrand managed to survive by denying everything, vowing to get to the heart of it, whitewashing all the evidence, accusing MI6 of sinking the ship to discredit France, forcing his Defense Minister to take the fall, sacking the head of the DGSE, and launching a trade war against New Zealand’s sheep. In the end, France was forced to confess, apologize, and pay massive reparations, and to this day, the French must ritually apologize for it every time they set foot in the antipodes.
Now that was a scandal.
This is far less—on the face of it—than Opération Satanique, but far more unspeakable in its subtext. The result is something delicious in its clever malice but horrifying to watch. As Bernard-Henri Lévy rightly put it, the press, like piranhas, have run clips of Benalla smashing protesters in a loop while simultaneously making “grotesque speculations about the private life of the presidential couple.” Photos of Macron and Benalla staring into each other’s eyes have been on the front page of every newspaper and magazine in every news kiosk in Paris for weeks. You can’t miss the billboard-sized advertisements for magazines like Le Point and Le Parisien, with headlines like, “A Too-special Advisor,” illustrated everywhere by those photos.
For the subtler, there are the French public intellectuals who have gone savagely intellectual on Macron’s sorry ass. Michel Onfray, a self-declared hedonist, atheist, and anarchist, has been especially vicious. He begins with an apt observation: A republican believes himself at the service of the state; a monarch holds the state to be at his service; and “in a monarchical republic such as ours, the president of the Republic is at less risk of republicanism than becoming a monarch.” But this risk, he argues, was overlooked by the naïfs who brought Macron to power. They thought “a man crowned while yet in his thirties (le trentenaire couronné) could wrench destiny5 in the other direction, oblivious to the qualities required to resist the monarchical temptation: a temperament of iron, a character of steel, and above all an impeccable moral compass,” none of which, he adds, were in evidence in Macron to begin with, and without which French Presidents inevitably “come to view the world through the eyes of their retinue of fawning courtiers.” Thus it is clear that Benalla was “the King’s favorite,”
for we can no longer count the photos in which we see Monsieur Benalla in the closest physical proximity to Emmanuel Macron—in official situations, of course, but just as often in private ones . . . by his side in the chairlift on the ski slopes, in the cocoon of the family residence at Le Touquet, bicycling . . .
Onfray proceeds to work himself into a regicidal frenzy, but rather than shouting, “Off with his head!” he launches into a glorious paragraph that serves the same function:
It is no longer General de Gaulle’s Pléiades displayed ostentatiously on the desktop in the official photo with a large reinforcement of spokesmen to explain what they signify, but the Memoires of Saint-Simon, which relates in detail the mud in which these self-indulgent regimes wallowed. But I digress: The young man who would be president had also chosen for his office Gide and his Nathanaël, for whom he had been taught a passion, and Stendhal, whose doctrine of egotism is a school of narcissism, self-pleasuring, and happiness without others, or against, or in spite of himself. . . . Side-by-side, the author of Memoirs of War and the author of Corydon. Understand if you can. For my part, I have understood.
Have you understood? Of course you have.
Onfray says the obvious because he can do so in a dialect that places him above those who mark their status by means of political correctness. Just slightly below in class stature—but still publicly intellectual—are those who cannot discuss it at all, for it would be—what, exactly? Never mind, we just know better. Thus, otherwise perceptive intellectuals have insisted earnestly that this non-scandal has become such a scandal only because the press is bored—“It’s the dog days of summer and the World Cup is over, what else is the media going to do,” they shrug. “Especially at a time when half the French population has little to do but sit in the sun addle-brained, read the hysterical papers, and gossip.”
This is a threat to sane French politics in a tumultuous time. But it is also much more dangerous.
The nether reaches of French society, from which Macron’s most dangerous political enemies come, can and will continue to insinuate every one of these unspeakable thoughts, skirting the very limits of outright libel. It is an unfair fight: Were Macron’s allies to do the same, they would lose by definition.
Macron represents a class well described here by Pascale Emmanuel Gobry, one loathed by the have-nots. This means Macron must deliver the goods quickly or he’ll end up like Louis XVI. He has probably been taking the right economic measures, but the results have yet to oblige him: The latest growth figures are below the hoped-for 2 percent, and unemployment is again edging up. This makes him vulnerable—and thus these “grotesque speculations about the private life of the presidential couple” will matter, whether or not people think they should.
Macron’s political crucifixion would be fine, amusing even to those with a malicious sense of humor, were there an alternative to Macron. But there is not. France’s traditional political parties have been destroyed. The radical-Right Rassemblement national (formerly the National Front) and the radical-Left La France Insoumise have seized upon this affair in the hope of destroying Macron and the centrist coalition he cobbled together from the ruins of France’s traditional parties.6This is the horseshoe in action. Those profiting from Macron’s humiliation represent the worst of France—on the one hand its reactionary neo-Vichy wing; on the other, its stupid and vainglorious communists.
What’s more: Europe and the United States need Macron as much as France needs him. The timing of this affaire is rotten for France, rotten for Europe and the West, and just rotten, period. Why? Because Europe’s fate is now in the hands of Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, and both pairs of hands are growing weaker. Franco-German cooperation is Europe’s only and perhaps last hope. Otherwise, it’s only too easy to see what will happen with the Americans out, the Russians in, and vile bodies such as Salvini, Orbàn, and Corbyn gaining ground and closing in.
Germany’s willingness to cooperate fully with France depends upon its belief that France has—mirabile dictu—achieved fiscal responsibility. Macron’s success is essential to convincing German taxpayers that France can get its own house in order. Thus far, under Macron, it has been doing that. Ridding France of its absurd labor laws, taking on the unions—and winning—have been significant achievements. Macron’s victory over the cheminots was reminiscent of Thatcher’s victory over Scargill. No French President has been able to do that before.
Only Macron has a hope of getting Germany to do what it must do to redress the damage caused by the premature introduction of the euro: Activate the June 19 Meseberg Declaration. Only Macron can keep Germany securely anchored in a multinational Europe. If he succeeds, he will be an important historic figure. If he fails, an endless succession of unimaginable nightmares are now imaginable, the cascade of potential triggers countless: right-wing populism on the Continent and left-wing populism in Britain; the end of the European Union with the mothballing of NATO; the re-nationalization of European economies after a trade war; the re-militarization of European foreign policies.
Fanciful? No. Germany is now in all seriousness privately debating its need for an independent nuclear deterrent. At least one public indication has appeared. More likely is something like the Treaty of Rapallo redux, toward which Germany is already headed. It is hard to know which is worse, but clearly either will transform German domestic politics in ways with no roadmap or happy precedent. We need a strong and popular Macron right now, one who can prove France will be a reliable economic and security partner to Germany, not a country lashed to the mast by the President’s bodyguard. Macron has survived two censure motions, but the damage is done. The next group of lunatic strikers will not fold as easily as the cheminots.
The speculations about Macron private tastes are inappropriate. To say the least. But Onfray is correct to say that France has an ancient monarchical reflex, and it has been looking over and over again at photos of the Roi de Jupiter staring moistly into Benalla’s eyes. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it.
The scandal is a sinister omen. It is a sign of a lucky streak coming to an end. And this we cannot afford, for Macron is France’s best hope of entering the 21st century—and Europe’s best hope of not returning to the 20th.
1. The YouTube user who uploaded the video mislabeled the date as 01/04/2018. 2. Think of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. 3. One may argue perhaps that France should not have been quite so ready for that. Perhaps taboos against molesting your students, betraying your husband, and breaking up your family exist for good reasons. But that is a different question. 4. I write here about the significance of the French conception of citizenship. 5. He uses the idiom “tordre le bâton,” literally “twist the stick.” Meaningless in English, but a play on words in French, for as in English, a bâton may refer to a police baton (the scandal was exposed precisely because Benalla was too enthralled with them), and the word is richer still: Beyond being a metonym for authority, it is also a symbol of dignity in governance and, of course, a vulgar synonym for what Rabelais called “Le membre viril.” 6. Laurent Wauquiez is desperately trying to rehabilitate Les Républicains, but doing so by imitating the National Front, a fatal mistake, for if voters decide that’s what they want, they will vote for the echtitem, not him. I have no idea what happened to Le Parti socialiste. Last I heard it was putting its hopes in a Belgian.
Name Ruper: Rupor (loudspeaker), to report, raport, rapport… Keith Murdoch (the Daddy):“merde”, excuse the Canaris’ love for the telling names as signatures which became quite an elegant tradition for Abwehr. I wonder how much Canaris paid him for that article. More likely, it was quite a long term operation.
The roots of the present “Crisis Of Intelligence” are in the WW1.
Apr 24, 2015 – At the end of a hazardous trip to Gallipoli in late 1915, a young Australian journalist named Keith Murdoch – father of Rupert – decided he would …
After the failure of the August Offensive, the Gallipoli campaign drifted. Ottoman success began to affect public opinion in Britain, with criticism of Hamilton’s performance being smuggled out by Keith Murdoch, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and other reporters.[165] Stopford and other dissident officers also contributed to the air of gloom and the possibility of evacuation was raised on 11 October 1915. Hamilton resisted the suggestion, fearing the damage to British prestige but was sacked shortly afterwards and replaced by Lieutenant General Sir Charles Monro.[166]
On 27 October 1914, two formerly German warships, now the Ottoman Yavûz Sultân Selîm and Midilli, still under German officers, conducted the Black Sea Raid, in which they bombarded the Russian port of Odessa and sank several ships.[16] In early November the various powers declared war. Turkey opened the Caucasus Campaign against Russia. The British briefly bombarded forts in Gallipoli, began the Mesopotamian Campaign, and studied the possibility of forcing the Dardanelles.
• Gallipoli: Historical debate rages over the century-old mystery of over Allies’ landing • Gallipoli landings: Statue to honour first soldier ashore despite debate
Adopting a conversational tone, he famously told the prime minister that the Gallipoli campaign was “undoubtedly one of the most terrible chapters in our history”. Anzac Cove soon after the beach landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula
“Your fears have been justified,” Murdoch wrote. “This unfortunate expedition has never been given a chance.”
Having met with the Gallipoli correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of The Daily Telegraph, Murdoch agreed that the only way to reveal the truth about the campaign was to flout the military censors. Initially, he tried to smuggle an uncensored letter by Ashmead-Bartlett to Herbert Henry Asquith, the British Prime Minister, but the document was intercepted in Marseilles. Keith Murdoch
Instead, Murdoch proceeded to London and decided to write his own account, penning his letter to the Australian prime minister from the offices of The Times. The letter was subsequently read by Asquith, who had it printed as a cabinet document; Hamilton was dismissed weeks later and the evacuation proceeded shortly afterwards.
In his letter, Murdoch gave high praise to the gallantry of the Australian troops and made it clear that he believed the disastrous effort to attack the peninsula was due to the “ghastly bungling” of the British commanders.
“Undoubtedly the essential and first step to restore the morale of the shaken forces is to recall [Hamilton] and his Chief of Staff [Lieutenant General Sir W. P. Braithwaite], a man more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha [the Turkish war minister],” he wrote.
“It is not for me to judge Hamilton, but it is plain that when an Army has completely lost faith in its General, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done…. Our men have found it impossible to form a high opinion of the British K[itchener] men and territorials. They are merely a lot of child-like youths.”
After the war, Murdoch went on to buy an Adelaide newspaper and proceeded to build an Australian news stable which his son Rupert has transformed into a global media empire.
In 1970, Rupert Murdoch donated his father’s letter to the National Library of Australia and it was placed on a UNESCO heritage register earlier this year.
Historians believe Murdoch’s letter was unashamedly partisan but played a significant part in hastening the Gallipoli evacuation. The campaign led to the deaths of more than 44,000 allied soldiers and almost 87,000 Ottoman troops before the allies evacuated in December 1915 and January 1916.
Carl Bridge, an Australian history expert at King’s College London, said the letter was highly coloured and gratuitously omitted the achievements of the regular British soldiers at Gallipoli but “contained irrefutable evidence about the plummeting morale of the Australians”.
“Murdoch, perhaps the most distinguished journalist of his generation, was sent there as Fisher’s ‘eyes and ears’ and his incendiary report found its mark in the governing seat of empire,” Professor Bridge wrote in the The Australian, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia.
“Murdoch’s letter, along with a report from the South Australia-born Maurice Hankey, the British cabinet secretary, who visited Gallipoli at the same time, and other evidence, was instrumental in the British cabinet’s decision [to evacuate].”
Michael McKernan, an Australian historian and writer, said Murdoch took considerable risks during his visit, including going as far as Quinn’s Post, the most advanced Anzac post.
“He was a brave man,” Dr McKernan told The Telegraph.
“He was shocked and appalled by the sickness he saw and by the conditions the men were living in. He came away deeply pessimistic and aware that there were no prospect of success. The letter was the first time there was an honest representation of the way the Gallipoli campaign was being conducted.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, The Gallipoli Letter has been an enduring source of pride for the Murdoch family.
Murdoch’s grandson Lachlan, co-chairman of News Corp, delivered a speech last year in which he drew on the letter to protest proposed national security laws which tighten controls over journalists.
“Officially, my grandfather was to report on problems with postal services to Australian troops but Fisher wanted all the facts about the campaign, honestly and unfiltered,” he said.
“Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli letter was Australia’s boldest declaration that our nation had a right to know the truth… And like Keith Murdoch, we must have the courage to act when those freedoms are threatened.”
Wilhelm Canaris was born in Aplerbeck, near Dortmund, on 1st January, 1887. Mark M. Boatner III has argued: “Canaris grew up in a wealthy, cultured, happy Westphalian family of right-wing but liberal Protestants.” A member of a wealthy family, Canaris entered the German Navy in 1905 and by 1911 reached the rank of lieutenant.
On the outbreak of the First World War Canaris was on the Dresden that took part in the Battle of the Falklands. Forced to land on Juan Fernandez Island, 400 miles from Chile, he was in an internment camp until escaping in August, 1915. He made “a daring two-week horseback ride through the Andes, helped by local Germans in eluding pursuit by Chilean police”.
Masquerading as “Reed Rosas”, the son of a Chilean father and British mother, he managed to reach Buenos Aires where he caught a Dutch ship bound for Rotterdam. He arrived back in Germany on 4th October 1915. Canaris was then sent to join the intelligence service for U-boat operations in the Mediterranean and for the next year he worked as an undercover agent in Italy and Spain before becoming a commander of a U-boat in 1917.
After the armistice in 1918 Canaris joined the Freikorps and took part in the Kapp Putsch. Later he was involved in secretly building submarines for the German Navy. He resumed his naval career and became increasingly involved with military intelligence. During this period he got to know Reinhard Heydrich. In 1931 Canaris was promoted to captain and in 1932 took command of the Schlesien. Two years later he replaced Erich Raeder as head of German military intelligence, the Abwehr. Joachim Fest has pointed out: “Those who knew Canaris found him an enigmatic, inscrutable personality, who always maintained a certain distance from people as well as from his duties.” When the Nazi Party took power Admiral Canaris had to work with Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and the SS Intelligence Service. Canaris, who had a deep hatred of communism, persuaded Adolf Hitler to support the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. According to his biographer, Mark M. Boatner III: “As an ardent nationalist and righest with an almost pathological aversion to communism, Canaris sincerely approved of Nazism initially.” In 1938 he became head of the foreign branch of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the High Command of the armed forces.
Canaris was opposed to Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. On the outbreak of the Second World War on 1st September, 1939, Hans Gisevius asked Canaris: “So what do you think now?” Canaris replied: “This means the end of Germany.” He also disapproved of Hitler’s methods. On hearing that Hitler wanted him to arrange the deaths of former French prime minister Paul Reynaud and General Maxime Weygandhe suddenly erupted in an angry denunciation of “these gangster methods of Hitler and his henchmen.”
It has been pointed out that during the war Canaris had a close relationship with Hans Oster, the head of the Military Intelligence Office’s central division, who turned it into a centre of activity for opponents of the regime. At the same time Canaris was meeting regularly with his most dangerous adversary, Reinhard Heydrich for morning horseback rides in Berlin’s Tiergarten. However, as Alan Bullock has pointed out: “The Abwehr provided admirable cover and unique facilities for a conspiracy.”
During the war Canaris gradually became disillusioned with Hitler and began leaking information to Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler and others plotting against the regime. Louis L. Snyder has argued: “Canaris gradually became an opponent of National Socialism and of Hitler’s policies. He joined the Resistance movement but was always against any attempt to assassinate Hitler…. According to a subordinate, General Edwin Lahausen, Canaris had human qualities that placed him far above the usual military bureaucrat. He hated violence and was confused and uncomfortable in his double role.” Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was working for British intelligence during the Second World War, claimed that: “Late in 1942 my office had come to certain conclusions – which time proved to be correct – about the struggle between the Nazi Party and the German General Staff, as it was being fought out in the field of secret intelligence. The German Secret Service (the Abwehr) and its leader. Admiral Canaris, were suspected by the Party not only of inefficiency but of disloyalty, and attempts were being made by Himmler to oust the Admiral and to take over his whole organization.” Trevor-Roper also revealed that Canaris “was making repeated journeys to Spain and indicated a willingness to treat with us.”
In early 1944 a group of anti-Nazis that included Canaris, Friedrich Olbricht, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Werner von Haeften, Claus von Stauffenberg, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Carl Goerdeler, Julius Leber, Ulrich Hassell, Hans Oster, Peter von Wartenburg, Hans Dohnanyi, Erwin Rommel, Hans Oster, Franz Halder, Hans Gisevius, Fabian Schlabrendorff, Ludwig Beck and Erwin von Witzleben met to discuss what action they should take. Initially the group was divided over the issue of Hitler. Gisevius and a small group of predominantly younger conspirators felt that he should be killed immediately. Canaris, Witzleben, Beck, Rommel and most of the other conspirators believed that Hitler should be arrested and put on trial. By using the legal system to expose the crimes of the regime, they hoped to avoid making a martyr of Hitler. Oster and Dohnanyi argued that after Hitler was arrested he should be brought before a panel of physicians chaired by Dohnanyi’s father-in-law, the psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, and declared mentally ill.
On 20th July, 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg attended a conference with Hitler on 20th July, 1944. It was decided to drop plans to kill Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler at the same time as Hitler. Alan Bullock later explained: “He (Stauffenberg) brought his papers with him in a brief-case in which he had concealed the bomb fitted with a device for exploding it ten minutes after the mechanism had been started. The conference was already proceeding with a report on the East Front when Keitel took Stauffenberg in and presented him to Hitler. Twenty-four men were grouped round a large, heavy oak table on which were spread out a number of maps. Neither Himmler nor Goring was present. The Fuhrer himself was standing towards the middle of one of the long sides of the table, constantly leaning over the table to look at the maps, with Keitel and Jodl on his left. Stauffenberg took up a place near Hitler on his right, next to a Colonel Brandt. He placed his brief-case under the table, having started the fuse before he came in, and then left the room unobtrusively on the excuse of a telephone call to Berlin. He had been gone only a minute or two when, at 12.42 p.m., a loud explosion shattered the room, blowing out the walls and the roof, and setting fire to the debris which crashed down on those inside.” Joachim Fest, the author of Plotting Hitler’s Death (1997) has pointed out: “Suddenly, as witnesses later recounted, a deafening crack shattered the midday quiet, and a bluish-yellow flame rocketed skyward… A dark plume of smoke rose and hung in the air over the wreckage of the briefing barracks. Shards of glass, wood, and fiberboard swirled about, and scorched pieces of paper and insulation rained down… When the bomb exploded, twenty-four people were in the conference room. All were hurled to the ground, some with their hair in flames.” The bomb killed four men in the hut: General Rudolf Schmundt, General Günther Korten, Colonel Heinz Brandt and stenographer Heinz Berger. Hitler’s right arm was badly injured but he survived what became known as the July Plot.
The plan was for Ludwig Beck, Erwin von Witzleben and Erich Fromm to take control of the German Army. This idea was abandoned when it became known that Adolf Hitler had survived the assassination attempt. In an attempt to protect himself, Fromm organized the execution of Stauffenberg along with three other conspirators, Friedrich Olbricht and Werner von Haeften, in the courtyard of the War Ministry. It was later reported the Stauffenberg died shouting “Long live free Germany”.
According to Traudl Junge Hitler selected Hermann Fegelein to investigate the conspiracy: “Fegelein had been detailed to investigate the assassination attempt and track down the guilty men. He was personally indignant to think of anyone wanting to blow up such a splendid fellow as himself. I think he thought that was more criminal than any plan to get rid of Hitler, and he flung himself into the investigation with the zeal of his desire for revenge. Finally it became obvious even to Hitler that the resistance movement had spread more widely in the army than he had supposed. Distinguished names of men holding high rank were mentioned. He raged and shouted and said a great deal about traitors and scoundrels.” It is claimed that Fegelein often showed around the photographs of the hanged men who had been executed as a result of this failed assassination attempt.”
Canaris and Hans Oster were among the many arrested. During the investigation Fegelein discovered Osler’s three-page study on how the coup d’état was to be conducted. On 6th February 1945, with the Red Army now in Germany, the conspirators were moved to concentration camps where they were in less danger of being killed by bombs or liberated by advancing enemy troops. Oster was taken to Flossenburg Concentration Camp.
On 4th April 1945 they discovered Canaris’s secret diaries. This information was used in the trial of Oster, Canaris, Hans Dohnanyi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ludwig Gehre and Karl Sack. Oster appeared first and having abandoned hope, admitted everything. Canaris also confessed and the others followed. That evening the court pronounced the death sentence on all the men. That evening Canaris tapped out a final message to the prisoner in the next cell, a Danish secret service officer: “My days are done. Was not a traitor.”
Wilhelm Canaris was executed at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on 9th April, 1945.
AS THE Jewish New Year, which is a time for reflection and introspection approaches, Yossi Cohen is very busy. Exactly on the second most holy Jewish holiday – which this year falls on September 10 – he will celebrate his 57th birthday. The elegant and charming head of the Mossad is preoccupied not only with supervising his agency’s operations around the globe but also with promoting his image and public relations.
More than all his predecessors who rarely met the media, Cohen hosts, from time to time, senior Israeli and foreign journalists and commentators.
Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t shy away from cameras when he is seen in public places. Not that he reveals great secrets, but with his beaming smile, he gives the impression of openness.
Usually the meetings with journalists are held one on one, but sometimes in small groups. The meetings take place in his elegant office at Mossad headquarters on the hill overlooking Glilot junction, north of Tel Aviv.
Through the back door of the building, his assistant takes the visitor by the elevator up to his office on the second floor. First, the guest is seated on a leather sofa in the anteroom, which is filled with books or other gifts given to Mossad directors by their counterparts, including gifts from Arab and other Middle Eastern or Muslim countries, which don’t have official relations with Israel.
These gifts are a silent testimony to the widespread outreach of Israel’s foreign espionage service, which maintains official but clandestine liaison with around 150 spy agencies from all continents. In that sense, the Mossad before Cohen and under his leadership serves as a second, unofficial Foreign Ministry.
In one corner of the anteroom stands a gilded wand with the names, in Hebrew, of the past 10 directors written on metal plates.
When Cohen ends his term, the 11th metal plate with his name will be added.
Their terms are neither limited by law (unlike the CIA, there is no law regulating the Mossad) nor by a time limitation. With one exception, Mossad heads have served an average of six years. Cohen has been in office less than three years.
Four former Mossad chiefs have died.
Six – Zvi Zamir, Nahum Admoni, Shabtai Shavit, Danny Yatom, Ephraim Halevy and Tamir Pardo – are still among us, alive and kicking. They don’t hesitate to express their views on security and strategic issues, and their concerns how and where the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the country.
In that sense, Cohen is also an exception.
While most of the former directors can be identified as holding center and left of center outlooks, Cohen is a pragmatic right-winger and an admirer of Netanyahu. This makes him also the most politicized Mossad director ever.
As a serving director Cohen cannot speak his mind in public but he finds ways to do so in cabinet sessions, in appearances before sub-committees of the Knesset (the parliament) and in his off-the-record meetings with journalists and other guests.
Cohen is a very talented and skillful intelligence officer, who rose through the ranks of the organization.
He was born in Jerusalem to a modern-Orthodox religious family. His father, Leo, was a seventh-generation Israeli and a veteran of the pre-state Irgun (Etzel) underground led by Menachem Begin. After Israel gained its independence, Leo joined Bank Mizrahi, the only religious bank in the country, then owned by the National Religious Party and now by private shareholders. His mother was a teacher.
He went to a yeshiva (religious school) and after his military service at the young age of 21, he was accepted to the Mossad’s cadet school. He was the first cadet to wear a skullcap, which eventually he had to take off during his operational terms abroad so as not to be identified as a Jew and Israeli. Since then he no longer covers his head but he has remained an observant Jew, keeps tradition and tries to attend synagogue on Shabbat and most Jewish holidays.
He graduated from the cadet academy as a case officer (in Hebrew, the professional term is k’tzin isuf – a collection officer) in charge of locating, approaching and running agents. For most of his career he was in the same department code-named “Tsomet” (Junction), which is in charge of handling agents. Speaking English, French and Arabic, he excelled in this profession and was sent numerous times to Western Europe, where he served in the early 1990s.
From 2008 to 2010, he was appointed by then-Mossad chief Meir Dagan to be in charge as a special project manager of tackling the Iranian nuclear program, whose ultimate aim was to produce nuclear weapons.
During that time, according to foreign reports, the Mossad recruited more agents, assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotaged shipments of materials and equipment, and planted malwares and viruses, which damaged Iran’s computers operating the uranium enrichment centrifuges. No doubt that in this capacity, Cohen learned a great deal from Dagan, the master spy, and honed his operational skills. Indeed, Iran’s program was slowed down but it was international pressure and economic sanctions that forced Iran to negotiate and sign a nuclear deal in 2015 with six world powers.
Like Netanyahu, he supported the decision by the Trump administration to walk away from the deal and renew sanctions against Iran.
After Dagan completed his eight-year term, Cohen was appointed in 2011 as a deputy director under Tamir Pardo, the new Mossad director. There was no love lost between the two, and after two years, Cohen left the agency temporarily to become Netanyahu’s National Security Adviser. Whispering in Netanyahu’s ear, being close to him, was very helpful in paving the path for his current job. But it wasn’t sufficient. Cohen, who knows how to charm acquaintances and to identify power brokers, realized that Sara, on her husband’s decisions, holds the key to the door of the Mossad chief.
Cohen, who is married with four children (one of his sons has cerebral palsy), found the way to gain Sara’s trust. His main influence, though, is due to his proximity and access to the prime minister, who is his immediate superior. The position and responsibility of the head of Israel’s foreign espionage agency are an excellent vantage point from which to influence military and diplomatic developments in four major fields vital to Israel’s national interests: gathering intelligence, and executing special tasks, including assassinations, and sabotaging Israel’s enemies and their installations; providing the government with early warnings of impending wars and terrorist plots; and serving as a special secret envoy of the prime minister to Arab leaders, such as the king of Jordan, whose countries have full diplomatic relations with Israel, or with those who don’t wish to be seen in public with Israeli leaders but are ready to meet the Mossad head clandestinely. These may include, according to foreign reports, officials from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.
Another important task is to maintain the special relations between Israel’s intelligence community and its counterparts around the world, especially the CIA. Cohen frequently travels to Washington to meet with his CIA counterpart and other national security officials. In these meetings, he exchanges intelligence data, analysis and sometimes even plans joint operations.
One such trip occurred last March when Cohen traveled with a flash drive to share the data on it with the CIA. It contained the complete central archive of Iran’s military nuclear power.
After two years of gathering intelligence, planning, preparations, surveillance and drills, Mossad operatives disguised with real and bogus identities, passports and cover stories broke in, after midnight on January 31, to a warehouse in a dreary suburb of Tehran. This was Iran’s nuclear treasure: data, drawings, blueprints, plans and timetables on how to produce nuclear weapons and warheads. According to foreign reports, the Mossad warriors knew beforehand what safes contained the most important folders and discs. They worked for two hours, while their comrades protected the premises from the outside. The safes were burned with torches, and after they found their bounty, the agents loaded it onto trucks and drove, most probably, to a neighboring country.
During the entire nerve-racking operation, Cohen and his top echelon watched online images broadcast by cameras. No doubt it was a brilliant and most daring operation showing the Mossad’s capabilities. Yet it didn’t bring the “smoking gun.” The expectation and hopes were to find the evidence to show that Iran was continuing with its military program. Such proof wasn’t found and the huge archive only confirmed and substantiated Iran’s work on the bomb until the nuclear deal was signed.
Cohen was disappointed, but he still believes that Iran is secretly plotting to renew its nuclear military work. Thus Iran is still high on his and the Mossad’s agenda.
Under Dagan and Pardo, the Mossad has grown from a relatively small spy agency into one of the biggest in the world. The Glilot complex is huge, with new buildings to house the 6,500 men and women directly employed under Cohen, in addition to at least another 1,000 subcontractors. From time to time, in special and really dangerous operations and in order not to endanger Israelis, the Mossad has also used well-trained and prepared foreign mercenaries.
This expansion has resulted in the Mossad becoming less of a human-based spy organization than it used to be, increasingly focused more on technology and cyber. When it comes to cyber, Israel, in general, and the Mossad, in particular, are on the cutting edge, with state-of-the-art equipment.
Cohen is not sitting on his laurels after stealing the Iranian nuclear archive. He wants also to walk in the footsteps of Dagan and leave his legacy as a director who is eliminating enemies more than any of his predecessors. Already, according to foreign reports, Mossad gunmen have killed at least four scientists working to improve the military capabilities of Hamas and Syria. Probably, there were more killings, which never made the headlines.
But Cohen also knows that his influential status and power as the director of the Mossad lie in his accumulation of destructive capabilities.
His judgment or lack thereof and his mistakes can cause embarrassment to the prime minister and damage Israel’s security interests and its foreign relations.
Thus, he fears his luck may sooner or later run out. This is the reason that he is talking about ending his term in January 2020, after just four years. But if the prime minister asks him to continue his service – and most probably Netanyahu will – it will be difficult for Cohen to say no.
Whatever he decides, Cohen may eventually enter politics. But before that, he will have to endure a three-year cooling-off period as dictated by the law. It is most likely that during this period, he will go into business to improve his and his family’s bank account.
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John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced out Dulles following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian—mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency—faced a steep learning curve.
After JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson kept McCone in place at the CIA, and the CIA director became an important witness before the Warren Commission, the panel Johnson created to investigate Kennedy’s murder. McCone pledged full cooperation with the commission, which was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and testified that the CIA had no evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was part of any conspiracy, foreign or domestic. In its final report, the commission came to agree with McCone’s depiction of Oswald, a former Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist, as a delusional lone wolf.
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But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions. Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.
While raising no question about the essential findings of the Warren Commission, including that Oswald was the gunman in Dallas, the 2013 report is important because it comes close to an official CIA acknowledgement—half a century after the fact—of impropriety in the agency’s dealings with the commission. The coverup by McCone and others may have been “benign,” in the report’s words, but it was a cover-up nonetheless, denying information to the commission that might have prompted a more aggressive investigation of Oswald’s potential Cuba ties.
Initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments, Robarge’s report was originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. The article, drawn from a still-classified 2005 biography of McCone written by Robarge, was declassified quietly last fall and is now available on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security Archive. In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination. (Articles in the CIA magazine are routinely declassified without fanfare after internal review.)
Robarge’s articlesays that McCone, quickly convinced after the assassination that Oswald had acted alone and that there was no foreign conspiracy involving Cuba or the Soviet Union, directed the agency to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission. This portrait of McCone suggests that he was much more hands-on in the CIA’s dealings with the commission—and in the agency’s post-assassination scrutiny of Oswald’s past—than had previously been known. The report quotes another senior CIA official, who heard McCone say that he intended to “handle the whole (commission) business myself, directly.”
The report offers no conclusion about McCone’s motivations, including why he would go to lengths to cover-up CIA activities that mostly predated his time at the agency. But it suggests that the Johnson White House might have directed McCone to hide the information. McCone “shared the administration’s interest in avoiding disclosures about covert actions that would circumstantially implicate [the] CIA in conspiracy theories and possibly lead to calls for a tough US response against the perpetrators of the assassination,” the article reads. “If the commission did not know to ask about covert operations about Cuba, he was not going to give them any suggestions about where to look.”
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In an interview, David Slawson, who was the Warren Commission’s chief staff investigator in searching for evidence of a foreign conspiracy, said he was not surprised to learn that McCone had personally withheld so much information from the investigation in 1964, especially about the Castro plots.
“I always assumed McCone must have known, because I always believed that loyalty and discipline in the CIA made any large-scale operation without the consent of the director impossible,” says Slawson, now 84 and a retired University of Southern California law professor. He says he regrets that it had taken so long for the spy agency to acknowledge that McCone and others had seriously misled the commission. After half a century, Slawson says, “The world loses interest, because the assassination becomes just a matter of history to more and more people.”
The report identifies other tantalizing information that McCone did not reveal to the commission, including evidence that the CIA might somehow have been in communication with Oswald before 1963 and that the spy agency had secretly monitored Oswald’s mail after he attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959. The CIA mail-opening program, which was later determined to have been blatantly illegal, had the code name HTLINGUAL. “It would be surprising if the DCI [director of central intelligence] were not told about the program” after the Kennedy assassination, the report reads. “If not, his subordinates deceived him. If he did know about HTLINGUAL reporting on Oswald, he was not being forthright with the commission—presumably to protect an operation that was highly compartmented and, if disclosed, sure to arouse much controversy.”
In the 1970s, when congressional investigations exposed the Castro plots, members of the Warren Commission and its staff expressed outrage that they had been denied the information in 1964. Had they known about the plots, they said, the commission would have been much more aggressive in trying to determine whether JFK’s murder was an act of retaliation by Castro or his supporters. Weeks before the assassination, Oswald traveled to Mexico City and met there with spies for the Cuban and Soviet governments—a trip that CIA and FBI officials have long acknowledged was never adequately investigated. (Even so, Warren Commission staffers remain convinced today that Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas, a view shared by ballistics experts who have studied the evidence.)
In congressional testimony in 1978, after public disclosures about the Castro plots, McCone claimed that he could not have shared information about the plots with the Warren Commission in 1964 because he was ignorant of the plots at the time. Other CIA officials “withheld the information from me,” he said. “I have never been satisfied as to why they withheld the information.” But the 2013 report concluded that “McCone’s testimony was neither frank nor accurate,” since it was later determined with certainty that he had been informed about the CIA-Mafia plots nine months before his appearance before the Warren Commission.
Robarge suggests the CIA is responsible for some of the harsh criticism commonly leveled at the Warren Commission for large gaps in its investigation of the president’s murder, including its failure to identify Oswald’s motive in the assassination and to pursue evidence that might have tied Oswald to accomplices outside the United States. For decades, opinion polls have shown that most Americans reject the commission’s findings and believe Oswald did not act alone. Four of the seven commissioners were members of Congress, and they spent the rest of their political careers badgered by accusations that they had been part of a coverup.
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“The decision of McCone and Agency leaders in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA’s anti-Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the credibility of the commission than anything else that happened while it was conducting its investigation,” the report reads. “In that sense—and in that sense alone—McCone may be regarded as a ‘co-conspirator’ in the JFK assassination ‘cover-up.’”
If there was, indeed, a CIA “cover-up,” a member of the Warren Commission was apparently in on it: Allen Dulles, McCone’s predecessor, who ran the CIA when the spy agency hatched the plots to kill Castro. “McCone does not appear to have any explicit, special understanding with Allen Dulles,” the 2013 report says. Still, McCone could “rest assured that his predecessor would keep a dutiful watch over Agency equities and work to keep the commission from pursuing provocative lines of investigation, such as lethal anti-Castro covert actions.” (Johnson appointed Dulles to the commission at the recommendation of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.)
The 2013 report also draws attention to the contacts between McCone and Robert Kennedy in the days after the assassination. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, the attorney general was asked by his brother, the president, to direct the administration’s secret war against Castro, and Robert Kennedy’s friends and family acknowledged years later that he never stopped fearing that Castro was behind his brother’s death. “McCone had frequent contact with Robert Kennedy during the painful days after the assassination,” the report says. “Their communication appears to have been verbal, informal and, evidently in McCone’s estimation, highly personal; no memoranda or transcripts exist or are known to have been made.”
“Because Robert Kennedy had overseen the Agency’s anti-Castro covert actions—including some of the assassination plans—his dealings with McCone about his brother’s murder had a special gravity,” the report continues. “Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro? Had the administration’s obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized sociopath to murder John Kennedy?”
The declassification of the bulk of the 2013 McCone report might suggest a new openness by the CIA in trying to resolve the lingering mysteries about the Kennedy assassination. At the same time, there are 15 places in the public version of the report where the CIA has deleted sensitive information—sometimes individual names, sometimes whole sentences. It is an acknowledgement, it seems, that there are still secrets about the Kennedy assassination hidden in the agency’s files.
Philip Shenon, a former Washington and foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is author, most recently, of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination.
Botham Shem Jean was identified as the 26-year-old businessman who was shot and killed by a female Dallas police officer who authorities say accidentally went into Jean’s apartment, thinking it was her own.
The cop wasn’t in her apartment; she was in his, and she had no reason to be there, police acknowledged in a statement. She then shot him, authorities say. Botham Shem Jean was only 26-years-old. He was originally from the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia, and, according to their Facebook comments and tributes, he was the pride of his family, a young man who came to America to study accounting and for whom great things were expected.
On LinkedIn, Botham Jean described himself as an “aspiring young professional” who was “engaged in developing a career built upon integrity, dedication and relationships, leveraging useful technologies to gain an understanding of and add value in a range industries, striving towards leadership in my career, my community and society.” He was working in Dallas as a risk assurance associate for PricewaterhouseCoopers, according to his LinkedIn page. In college, he was president of a Young Leaders group.
A former classmate who attended college with Jean in Arkansas, Landis Tindell, told Heavy in an email that he was a “great leader on our campus.” Tindell explained, “He was a campus leader. Very active in leading worship and campus student government. I don’t think there was a student on campus who didn’t know Botham. He was always friendly, always smiling, and just all around a great person.”
Here’s what you need to know:
1. Police Say the Police Officer Was in Full Uniform & Had Just Finished Her Shift When She Mistakenly Entered Jean’s Apartment
Although the female officer has not yet been identified, police did lay out some of the details relating to what happened. “On September 6, 2018 at about 9:59 p.m., an off duty Dallas Police officer called police dispatch and said she was involved in a shooting at the apartments located at 1210 S. Lamar,” they wrote.
“Preliminary information suggests that the officer arrived home in full uniform after working a full shift. The officer reported to the responding officers that she entered the victim’s apartment believing that it was her own. At some point, the officer fired her weapon striking the victim. Responding officers administered aid to the victim, a 26-year-old male, at the scene. The victim was then transported to the hospital and pronounced deceased. Next of kin notification has not been made at this time.”
Jean was identified by the Dallas Morning News, not police, as the victim. The Morning News asked the police whether the officer mistakenly thought Jean was an intruder – in Jean’s own apartment.
“I won’t go into that information right now,” Dallas police spokesman Sgt. Warren Mitchell said to the newspaper. “I mean, we have not interviewed her, and like I said this is just a preliminary statement. We still have a lot to do in this investigation. … This is all we can give you at this time.”
2. Botham Shem Jean’s Relatives Mourned Him in Tributes With His Uncle Calling It ‘the Worst Day of My Life Thus Far’
Botham Shem Jean’s uncle Earl Jean, who is a coach from St. Lucia, posted a photo tribute to his deceased nephew on Facebook.
“My heart goes with you my boy…never thought this day would come ,wanted to be there for you always my boy …how can this nasty world take you away from me ….this is the worst day of my life thus far….uncle loves you so much …there goes Mr.botham shem Jean….iam lost for words…part of me has left !Gone with the Angel’s ….lord keep me sane,” wrote a heartbroken Earl Jean.
Jean’s family members repeatedly expressed pride in him on Facebook. On a photo of Jean wearing a suit and tie, another relative wrote, “This is my work of art – dedicated, committed, hard-working, intelligent – Vote Botham for President!”
3. Botham Shem Jean Studied ‘Accountancy’ at a University & Was From Saint Lucia
On Facebook, Botham Shem Jean wrote that he had studied “accountancy” at Harding University. He also studied at Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, went to St. Mary’s College, and was from Castries, Saint Lucia. At St. Mary’s, Jean studied accounting and mathematics, and was the Young Leaders president and on the debate teams and in the choir.
He Facebook page said that he lived in Searcy, Arkansas, not Dallas, Texas, but it’s not clear whether it was just not updated yet. He wrote in 2013, “I miss St. Lucian food I really want a breadfruit, dasheen, greenfig and saltfish now.”
The posts from Arkansas, which are a couple years old, include updates from Jean that say things like this, “8 hours of accounting…coming right up.” Harding University is a private college in Searcy, so it appears Jean was there to study accounting several years ago. A former classmate confirmed this in an email to Heavy, writing, “I went to Harding with Botham. I can confirm he graduated from there and was living in Dallas. A great leader on our campus and will be missed.”
His page also says he worked for a company named Harris Paints. More recently, according to his LinkedIn page, Botham Shem Jean was working for a company in Dallas, Texas called PwC as a “title risk assurance experienced associate.” He had held the position since July 2016, his page says, but had worked for the company since 2015. PwC is the major consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
4. Many Facebook Photos Show Jean in Suit & Tie & His Uncle Wrote That ‘the World Is at Your Door’
Jean’s photos on Facebook show a professional and generally smiling young man. His uncle Earl commented on his thread three years ago that the future looked very bright for Jean.
“Good looking and intelligent young Jean….the world is at your door…But everything in Gods timing. ..always proud of you!!” wrote Earl Jean.
On Twitter, Jean’s cover photo reads “Resist.” His tweets are private. “IzaLucian ?? — Can do anything, Can’t do everything,” his profile reads.
His mother, who still lives in St. Lucia, wrote, “Looking good my son!” Other comment threads similarly filled with flattery. “Look up Man in the dictionary and this photo will be next to it,” wrote one friend. “Presidential photo,” wrote one.
“This boy is and WILL ALWAYS BE a STAR!!!” wrote a woman named Desi Charles.
5. The Police Officer Is on Administrative Leave
According to the Dallas police statement, the officer “was not injured and will be placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.”
“The Dallas Police Department is conducting a joint investigation with the District Attorney’s Office. This investigation is ongoing and we will release additional details as they become available and it is appropriate to do so,” police wrote.
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I really want a breadfruit, dasheen, greenfig and saltfish now.”
