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anonymous

Moscow's Espionage Addiction - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...moscows-espionage-addiction

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Russia is generally freer now than it was under communism, but its spy-chiefs are, if anything, even more entrenched. No longer is it the government that is running the spies. The spies are running the government.
  • The effect, less commonly observed, is that post-communist Russia has emerged, not as a police state, but as a secret-police state—something of a novelty in international relations, and with its own characteristics.
  • The secret-police state, as best we can judge from the Russian prototype, is a much more evasive beast. The people who run it prefer to spend their time away from the public eye. They take minimal interest or pleasure in the traditional business of government, such as providing public services. They care little for public or private morality. Their method is to monopolize power, not so much by crushing rivals, as by preventing potential rivals from gaining any traction in the first place—which requires, naturally enough, an extensive domestic spying apparatus capable of infiltrating all social and economic structures.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It follows from this that the only really useful type of diplomacy is espionage, getting at the hidden story. The rest of diplomacy is either useless protocol or useful cover.
  • This was a serious piece of espionage, however comical some of the trappings.
  • America’s way of ending the affair has been exemplary. By arresting the spies, it has demonstrated the efficacy of the FBI and humiliated Russia’s intelligence services, at little or no diplomatic cost.
  • Another criticism of the swap might be that, if America lets these Russian spies off so lightly, then Russia will only be the more emboldened to send new spies in their place. Which is true—but Russia is going to send more anyway.
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 10
     
    "Russia is generally freer now than it was under communism, but its spy-chiefs are, if anything, even more entrenched. No longer is it the government that is running the spies. The spies are running the government." By Robert Cottrell at The New York Review of Books on July 12, 2010.
anonymous

The U.S. gave Russia 10 spies in exchange for four prisoners. Was that a good deal? - 0 views

www.slate.com/2259935

geopolitics russian spies

shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Two airplanes met on a tarmac in Vienna on Friday morning to swap the 10 Russians who pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy in the United States for four men accused by Moscow of spying for the West. Ten spies for four—is that a fair trade for the U.S.?
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 10
     
    "Two airplanes met on a tarmac in Vienna on Friday morning to swap the 10 Russians who pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy in the United States for four men accused by Moscow of spying for the West. Ten spies for four-is that a fair trade for the U.S.?" By Christopher Beam at Slate Magazine on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

How the Russian Spies Hid Secret Messages in Public, Online Pictures - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ages-in-public-online-pictures

shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 10 - Cached
  • This week, the FBI arrested 11 alleged Russian spies living in New Jersey. How did they catch them? By digging through their photos.
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 10
     
    "This week, the FBI arrested 11 alleged Russian spies living in New Jersey. How did they catch them? By digging through their photos." By Joseph Calamia at 80beats (Discover Magazine) on July 1, 2010.
anonymous

The Russian Swagger is Back - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20101202_russian_swagger_back

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 10 - Cached
  • A timeline helps to understand the statements surrounding the case, and broader U.S.-Russian relations.
  • The 10 intelligence officers, working secretly in the United States, were arrested almost simultaneously on June 28 in a major FBI operation. A quick spy swap was orchestrated by July 9; the spies were returned to Moscow.
  • a handful of these agents had been tracked for years in ongoing counterintelligence investigations, so something important triggered the sudden arrests.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we suspect the leak occurred for one of three reasons:
  • Officials within or overseen by the U.S. Department of Defense wanted to counteract Putin’s claims of the spies’ relative innocence; second, U.S. counterintelligence investigators could be using the leak to “shake the trees” and watch for unusual communications traffic or activities by possible suspects; and this could be another move as Washington combats Russia’s push to spread its side of the story, that it is back on the world stage as a counterbalance to the United States.
  • Putin’s entire interview on Larry King was meant to remind the U.S. public that Russia still has many capabilities to challenge the United States. He spoke of the vast nuclear arsenal, regional alliances and — of course — spies. This was directed at a U.S. audience.
  • Putin identified the reality that every country “operates a foreign intelligence network.” U.S.-Russian intelligence and counterintelligence activities have changed little in decades, and no doubt is back in public view.
  • anonymous on 03 Dec 10
     
    "As the world mulls Thursday's naming of Russia as the 2018 World Cup host, as well as the Wednesday CNN interview with Russian Premier Vladimir Putin and the U.S. response, we should not overlook two new claims about the case of 10 Russian spies arrested in the United States in June. Answering a question from American high-profile interviewer Larry King, Putin said the "deep-cover agents" did not damage U.S. interests and would only have been activated in a crisis. Before the interview aired, The Washington Times journalist Bill Gertz published a report sourced to a retired intelligence official that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was undergoing a counterintelligence investigation linked to Russians who were charged with acting as undeclared agents of a foreign country. In the murky world of state espionage, both countries are playing games of deception. " At StratFor on December 3, 2010.
anonymous

Russian Spies and Strategic Intelligence - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ies_and_strategic_intelligence

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The way the media has reported on the issue falls into three groups: That the Cold War is back, That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable, And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort.
  • First, it needs to know what other nations are capable of doing.
  • Second, the nation needs to know what other nations intend to do.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The more powerful a nation is, the more important it is to understand what it is doing.
  • Knowing what the United States will do, and shifting policy based on that, can save countries from difficulties and even disaster.
  • What they excelled at, however, was placing undetectable operatives in key positions. Soviet talent scouts would range around left-wing meetings to discover potential recruits. These would be young people with impeccable backgrounds and only limited contact with the left. They would be recruited based on ideology, and less often via money, sex or blackmail. They would never again be in contact with communists or fellow travelers.
  • Recruiting people who were not yet agents, creating psychological and material bonds over long years of management and allowing them to mature into senior intelligence or ministry officials allowed ample time for testing loyalty and positioning. The Soviets not only got more reliable information this way but also the ability to influence the other country’s decision-making.
  • There were four phases: Identifying likely candidates, Evaluating and recruiting them, Placing them and managing their rise in the organization, And exploiting them.
  • It is difficult to know what the Russian team was up to in the United States from news reports, but there are two things we know about the Russians: They are not stupid, and they are extremely patient.
  • If we were to guess — and we are guessing — this was a team of talent scouts.
  • One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings.
  • We would guess that Anna Chapman was brought in as part of the recruitment phase of talent scouting.
  • Each of the phases of the operatives’ tasks required a tremendous amount of time, patience and, above all, cover. The operatives had to blend in (in this case, they didn’t do so well enough).
  • Were the Americans to try the same thing, they would have to convince people to spend years learning Russian to near-native perfection and then to spend 20-30 years of their lives in Russia. Some would be willing to do so, but not nearly as many as there are Russians prepared to spend that amount of time in the United States or Western Europe.
  • The United States has substituted technical intelligence for this process. Thus, the most important U.S. intelligence-collection agency is not the CIA; it is the National Security Agency (NSA).
  • In many ways, this provides better and faster intelligence than the placement of agents, except that this does not provide influence.
  • it assumes that what senior (and other) individuals say, write or even think reveals the most important things about the country in question.
  • The fall of the Shah of Iran and the collapse of the Soviet empire were events of towering importance for the United States.
  • Either of those scenarios would not have made any difference to how events played out. This is because, in the end, the respective senior leadership didn’t know how events were going to play out. Partly this is because they were in denial, but mostly this is because they didn’t have the facts and they didn’t interpret the facts they did have properly. At these critical turning points in history, the most thorough penetration using either American or Russian techniques would have failed to provide warning of the change ahead.
  • The people being spied on and penetrated simply didn’t understand their own capabilities — i.e., the reality on the ground in their respective countries — and therefore their intentions about what to do were irrelevant and actually misleading.
  • if we regard anticipating systemic changes as one of the most important categories of intelligence, then these are cases where the targets of intelligence may well know the least and know it last.
  • We started with three classes of intelligence: capabilities, intentions and what will actually happen.
  • The first is an objective measure that can sometimes be seen directly but more frequently is obtained through data held by someone in the target country. The most important issue is not what this data says but how accurate it is.
  • For example, George W. Bush did not intend to get bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq. What he intended and what happened were two different things because his view of American and Iraqi capabilities were not tied to reality.
  • But in the end, the most important question to ask is whether the most highly placed source has any clue as to what is going to happen.
  • Knowledge of what is being thought is essential. But gaming out how the objective and impersonal forces will interact and play out it is the most important thing of all.
  • The events of the past few weeks show intelligence doing the necessary work of recruiting and rescuing agents. The measure of all of this activity is not whether one has penetrated the other side, but in the end, whether your intelligence organization knew what was going to happen and told you regardless of what well-placed sources believed. Sometimes sources are indispensable. Sometimes they are misleading. And sometimes they are the way an intelligence organization justifies being wrong.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 10
       
      This feels like that old saying, amateurs study tactics but experts study logistics. Perhaps that's the angle on this spying stuff that we haven't taken because we subconsciously imagine the crap of popular culture where knowledge should be.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 10
       
      It certainly makes my thoughts here (http://longgame.org/2010/07/spies-like-them/) feel pretty damned quaint.
  • There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    Some amount of spying is the cost of doing business for any power. By George Friedman at StratFor on July 13, 2010.
anonymous

Russian swapped for spies is in England, brother says - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...russian.spy.england

russian geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 10 - Cached
  • A Russian scientist who was part of a swap for 10 Russian spies caught in the United States is now in England, his brother told CNN Sunday.
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 10
     
    By CNN Wire Staff on July 11, 2010
anonymous

Arrests of alleged spies draws attention to long obscure field of steganography - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010063003108_pf.html

geopolitics russian spies

shared by anonymous on 11 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Jul 10
     
    "Applying special software, the government says, they coaxed words from the innocuous imagery, a text file. Moscow was calling." By David Montgomery at The Washington Post on June 30, 2010.
anonymous

Faux Spies and Mother Russia - 0 views

www.worldaffairsjournal.org/...Faux_Spies_and_Mother_Russia_

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 10 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Oleg Kalugin, the onetime KGB head of operations in the United States, thinks the story "is a sign of the decadence of the Russian intelligence services." So, is that the real story here--the degree to which corruption, favoritism, and nepotism pervades Russian society?
  • anonymous on 10 Jul 10
     
    "Oleg Kalugin, the onetime KGB head of operations in the United States, thinks the story "is a sign of the decadence of the Russian intelligence services." So, is that the real story here--the degree to which corruption, favoritism, and nepotism pervades Russian society?" By James S. Denton at World Affairs on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

The Spies Were No Joke - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...the_spies_were_no_joke

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 22 Jul 10 - Cached
  • the West would do well to pay attention to just how closely the methods and intentions of Russia's current intelligence agency, the SVR, replicate those of Soviet-era intelligence agencies.
  • the Russian spy ring wasn't an aberration, but a reflection of precisely the way that Putin wants his intelligence agencies to operate.
  • Ultimately, the use of illegals is as much a sign of desperation as of malicious intent. Perhaps the SVR is proud of upholding these traditions, but the U.S. intelligence services should be forgiven for not feeling envious.
  • anonymous on 22 Jul 10
     
    "Anna Chapman and Co. may have seemed silly, but they were actually carrying out Putin's master plan: re-creating the KGB." By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan at Foreign Policy on July 22, 2010.
anonymous

Amiri and the Role of Intelligence in Geopolitical Struggles - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ligence_geopolitical_struggles

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The saga of the missing Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared from Saudi Arabia last year while on pilgrimage to Mecca reached a critical stage Tuesday.
  • By mid-morning on the United States’ East Coast, Washington had issued its official response: Amiri came to the United States on his own accord and now wanted to leave. It’s significant that this is the first time the U.S. government acknowledged that the Iranian scientist was in the United States. These dramatic developments come in the wake of multiple YouTube videos featuring a man or men claiming to be Amiri and who made contradictory statements, including that he was happily studying in the United States.
  • The exact circumstances that brought Amiri to the United States are critical in comprehending the nature of his involvement with American officials. But those details are unlikely to be made public by either side. And without details, this story offers more questions than answers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Another alternative emerges, one much more sinister and complicated — though not beyond the pale. Amiri could be a double agent planted by the Iranians to gain information about U.S. intelligence operations.
  • This seems an incredible explanation and assumes he managed to outsmart his American intelligence handlers. But it is not unthinkable, given what happened with Iraqi Shiite leader Ahmed Chalabi, who for years worked with multiple U.S. government agencies while working for Iranian intelligence.
  • This story — like the recent case of the Russian spies caught in the United States — does however underscore the role of intelligence, especially human intelligence operations, in shaping geopolitical struggles.
  • anonymous on 14 Jul 10
     
    "The saga of the missing Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared from Saudi Arabia last year while on pilgrimage to Mecca reached a critical stage Tuesday." By StratFor on July 14, 2010.
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