RUSSIA 🇷🇺 Thread: Wikileaks=FSB front, UKRAINE?, SNOWED LIED; NATO Aggression; Trump = Putins B!tch
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Dozens of Russian deaths cast suspicion on Vladimir Putin
Oren DorellUpdated 51 minutes ago
Twice-poisoned Putin critic survives to te...
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza talks about what it was like to be poisoned twice. USA TODAY
A former member of the Russian parliament is gunned down in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. A longtime Russian ambassador to the United Nations drops dead at work. A Russian-backed commander in the breakaway Ukrainian province of Donetsk is blown up in an elevator. A Russian media executive is found dead in his Washington, D.C., hotel room.
What do they have in common? They are among 38 prominent Russians who are victims of unsolved murders or suspicious deaths since the beginning of 2014, according to a list compiled by USA TODAY and British journalist Sarah Hurst, who has done research in Russia.
The list contains 10 high-profile critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, seven diplomats, six associates of Kremlin power brokers who had a falling out — often over corruption — and 13 military or political leaders involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including commanders of Russian-backed separatist forces. Two are possibly connected to a dossier alleging connections between President Trump's campaign staff and Kremlin officials that was produced by a former British spy and shared with the FBI.
Twelve were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Six were blown up. Ten died allegedly of natural causes. One died of mysterious head injuries, one reportedly slipped and hit his head in a public bath, one was hanged in his jail cell, and one died after drinking coffee. The cause of six deaths was reported as unknown.
Putin has long dealt with opponents harshly. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in March that Putin “has murdered his political opponents and rules like an authoritarian dictator.”
Yet the list of fatalities — 36 men and two women — suggests that Putin’s alleged attacks on his critics and whistle-blowers are more extensive and lethal than previously known. It also raises new concerns about contacts Putin and his lieutenants had with Trump’s campaign staff.
Trump praised Putin in March 2016 as a "strong leader," and in 2015 said “I’d get along great with” the Russian leader. On Feb 6, Trump defended Putin when Bill O’Reilly, then of Fox News, called Putin a killer. "There are a lot of killers," Trump replied. "Do you think our country is so innocent?"
The FBI and Congress are currently investigating contacts between Kremlin officials and Trump's campaign advisers, as part of its investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Leahy made his comment about Putin at a congressional hearing that featured Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political activist with personal experience of his government's efforts to silence outspoken critics.
"We’ve seen political opposition leaders and activists, whistle-blowers, anti-corruption campaigners and independent journalists lose their lives in one way or another," Kara-Murza told USA TODAY. "Sometimes these are suspicious suicides and plane crashes, really rare and horrible diseases. In many others they are straight murders."
Kara-Murza worked with former deputy prime minister and Putin opponent Boris Nemtsov before Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. Kara-Murza worked until recently with Russian anti-corruption lawyer and political candidate Alexei Navalny, who suffered eye injury Thursday after being attacked with a chemical following his release from jail for leading unsanctioned protests against the Putin government across Russia this spring.
In this photo taken on Thursday, April 27, 2017, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny poses for a photo after unknown attackers doused him with green antiseptic, outside a conference in Moscow, Russia. Navalny, who authored a documentary about the Russian prime minister's alleged corrupt wealth that was viewed more than 20 million times online, was the key force behind nationwide anti-government rallies in March. (Photo: Evgeny Feldman, AP)
“Sometimes there are near-misses," Kara-Murza testified in March before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee.
Kara-Murza said he was the victim of attempted poisonings twice: in May 2015 and this past February.
"Twice in the past two years I have experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning, both times in Moscow," he said in an interview. "Both times, symptoms came on suddenly and out of nowhere. Both times spending weeks in a coma on life support machines. Both times, doctors set my chance of survival at 5%, so I’m very fortunate to be here today. "
Read more:
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted at the hearing the dangers of winding up on the wrong side of politics in Russia. “In our system, if we make a bad decision, we might lose an election and have to work as a paid analyst on TV," he told Kara-Murza. "In your case, people die.”
Rubio and other senators had called on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to meet with members of Russia’s political opposition during his April visit to Moscow, but Tillerson did not have time for a meeting, deputy spokesman Mark Toner said.
Most of the older diplomats on the list were probably victims of poor health, said Boris Silberman, a Russia analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“Knowing how diplomats live, going from one cocktail party to the next and not to the gym in between, it finally catches up to you,” Silberman said.
That could apply to Vitaly Churkin, 64, the Russian ambassador to the U.N., who died on Feb. 20 in New York of an apparent heart attack. Others, like Petr Polshikov, 56, a chief adviser to the Latin America department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, found dead with a gunshot wound in his Moscow home on Dec. 20, require further investigation, Silberman said.
“There’s almost a fever on the Russia story,” Silberman said. “Some of it is substantial. It’s almost like there’s something nefarious behind every piece of news. Sometimes there is. ... They tend to clean up their messes this way.”
Many of the recent deaths raise suspicions because a string of Putin critics have died in obvious murders years earlier. They include:
• Nemtsov, who was shot to death while walking after dinner with his girlfriend in a security zone near the Kremlin. Two Chechen suspects, one a former bodyguard to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, are on trial, but the investigation did not reveal whether anyone ordered the hit.
• Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who died in prison while investigating the alleged theft of $230 million by Russian government officials. No one was ever charged.
• Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian spy who defected, became a British citizen and was murdered in London in 2006 with radioactive polonium-210 while helping European authorities in a corruption investigation. The "state-sponsored murder" was an effort by the Russian government to send a chilling message to its critics, Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's former deputy commissioner who led the investigation, told the British Daily Mail on April 17. Two Russian suspects were identified by British authorities, but Russia refused to extradite them, and no one was charged.
• Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who exposed Russian atrocities during the war in the restive Russian republic of Chechnya. She was gunned down in her Moscow apartment stairway in 2006. Former police officer Dmitry Pavliutchenkov was convicted of ordering surveillance of the journalist but denied killing her. He was sentenced in 2012 to 11 years in prison. Five alleged accomplices were later convicted, including two who were sentenced to life in prison. Pavliutchenkov's promise to identify who ordered the hit never resulted in further charges.
Russian police officers stand next to trace of the body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader, at Red Square with the Kremlin Wall in the background in Moscow, Russia, Feb. 28, 2015. (Photo: Pavel Golovkin, AP)
Two of the recent victims, Oleg Erovinkin and Alex Oronov, have been described by Russian analysts as possibly connected to a dossier written by a former British spy about Trump and his campaign staff’s alleged collusion with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Erovinkin, 61, a general in the Russian spy agency and a close associate of a Putin confidant, was found dead in the back of his car on Dec. 26 in Moscow. The cause of death is unknown.
Oronov, 69, a Ukrainian-born businessman in New York, died under unknown circumstances around March 2, according to Andriy Artemenko, a member of Ukraine's parliament. Oronov had arranged a meeting between Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen; Trump business associate Felix Sater, and Artemenko in January about a peace plan for Ukraine that would benefit Russia. Artemenko alleged that Oronov died because of the peace-plan plot.
The list of recent deaths does not include Matthew Puncher, 46, a British polonium expert in the Litvinenko inquiry, reported to have stabbed himself to death in his home in Oxfordshire after returning from a trip to Russia last May.
Luke Harding chronicled a succession of suspected political murders in his 2016 book, A Very Expensive Poison; the Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West. Former KGB officers and defectors described Soviet-era research into poisons used to kill enemies that continued in post-Soviet Russia, Harding wrote. Some substances are so rare and leave so little trace that death can be easily mistaken for a heart attack.
Journalist Hurst, who helped compile the list of deaths, said the recent uptick appears to be a sign of the growing political pressure on Putin and his cronies. “Putin is at the top of a criminal organization (and) there are all these people who have dirt on him,” she said. “It’s not surprising he’s willing to bump people off."
Kara-Murza, who is still recovering from the alleged poisoning, said he has "absolutely no doubt this was an attempt to kill me because of my political activities in the Russian opposition for the last several years, and more specifically because of my active involvement in the campaign in support of the Magnitsky Act," which calls for U.S. sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights abuses and corruption.
In this Nov. 30, 2009, photo, Nataliya Magnitskaya, mother of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in jail, holds a photo of her son as she speaks during an interview with the AP in Moscow. (Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko, AP)
He plans to push for similar laws in other Western countries, and to return to Russia to continue his activism when he is physically stronger.
Since many of the suspicious deaths are related to government corruption or those who exposed it, Kara-Murza urged Congress to block Russians who stole their nation’s wealth from investing in the United States.
"This is not only about money," he said in his Senate testimony. “Much more importantly it is about the message that the U.S. sends to Russia.”
Dozens of Russian deaths cast suspicion on Vladimir Putin
Oren DorellUpdated 51 minutes ago
Twice-poisoned Putin critic survives to te...
Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza talks about what it was like to be poisoned twice. USA TODAY
A former member of the Russian parliament is gunned down in broad daylight in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. A longtime Russian ambassador to the United Nations drops dead at work. A Russian-backed commander in the breakaway Ukrainian province of Donetsk is blown up in an elevator. A Russian media executive is found dead in his Washington, D.C., hotel room.
What do they have in common? They are among 38 prominent Russians who are victims of unsolved murders or suspicious deaths since the beginning of 2014, according to a list compiled by USA TODAY and British journalist Sarah Hurst, who has done research in Russia.
The list contains 10 high-profile critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin, seven diplomats, six associates of Kremlin power brokers who had a falling out — often over corruption — and 13 military or political leaders involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, including commanders of Russian-backed separatist forces. Two are possibly connected to a dossier alleging connections between President Trump's campaign staff and Kremlin officials that was produced by a former British spy and shared with the FBI.
Twelve were shot, stabbed or beaten to death. Six were blown up. Ten died allegedly of natural causes. One died of mysterious head injuries, one reportedly slipped and hit his head in a public bath, one was hanged in his jail cell, and one died after drinking coffee. The cause of six deaths was reported as unknown.
Putin has long dealt with opponents harshly. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said in March that Putin “has murdered his political opponents and rules like an authoritarian dictator.”
Yet the list of fatalities — 36 men and two women — suggests that Putin’s alleged attacks on his critics and whistle-blowers are more extensive and lethal than previously known. It also raises new concerns about contacts Putin and his lieutenants had with Trump’s campaign staff.
Trump praised Putin in March 2016 as a "strong leader," and in 2015 said “I’d get along great with” the Russian leader. On Feb 6, Trump defended Putin when Bill O’Reilly, then of Fox News, called Putin a killer. "There are a lot of killers," Trump replied. "Do you think our country is so innocent?"
The FBI and Congress are currently investigating contacts between Kremlin officials and Trump's campaign advisers, as part of its investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Leahy made his comment about Putin at a congressional hearing that featured Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political activist with personal experience of his government's efforts to silence outspoken critics.
"We’ve seen political opposition leaders and activists, whistle-blowers, anti-corruption campaigners and independent journalists lose their lives in one way or another," Kara-Murza told USA TODAY. "Sometimes these are suspicious suicides and plane crashes, really rare and horrible diseases. In many others they are straight murders."
Kara-Murza worked with former deputy prime minister and Putin opponent Boris Nemtsov before Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow in 2015. Kara-Murza worked until recently with Russian anti-corruption lawyer and political candidate Alexei Navalny, who suffered eye injury Thursday after being attacked with a chemical following his release from jail for leading unsanctioned protests against the Putin government across Russia this spring.
In this photo taken on Thursday, April 27, 2017, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny poses for a photo after unknown attackers doused him with green antiseptic, outside a conference in Moscow, Russia. Navalny, who authored a documentary about the Russian prime minister's alleged corrupt wealth that was viewed more than 20 million times online, was the key force behind nationwide anti-government rallies in March. (Photo: Evgeny Feldman, AP)
“Sometimes there are near-misses," Kara-Murza testified in March before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee.
Kara-Murza said he was the victim of attempted poisonings twice: in May 2015 and this past February.
"Twice in the past two years I have experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning, both times in Moscow," he said in an interview. "Both times, symptoms came on suddenly and out of nowhere. Both times spending weeks in a coma on life support machines. Both times, doctors set my chance of survival at 5%, so I’m very fortunate to be here today. "
Read more:
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted at the hearing the dangers of winding up on the wrong side of politics in Russia. “In our system, if we make a bad decision, we might lose an election and have to work as a paid analyst on TV," he told Kara-Murza. "In your case, people die.”
Rubio and other senators had called on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to meet with members of Russia’s political opposition during his April visit to Moscow, but Tillerson did not have time for a meeting, deputy spokesman Mark Toner said.
Most of the older diplomats on the list were probably victims of poor health, said Boris Silberman, a Russia analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
“Knowing how diplomats live, going from one cocktail party to the next and not to the gym in between, it finally catches up to you,” Silberman said.
That could apply to Vitaly Churkin, 64, the Russian ambassador to the U.N., who died on Feb. 20 in New York of an apparent heart attack. Others, like Petr Polshikov, 56, a chief adviser to the Latin America department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, found dead with a gunshot wound in his Moscow home on Dec. 20, require further investigation, Silberman said.
“There’s almost a fever on the Russia story,” Silberman said. “Some of it is substantial. It’s almost like there’s something nefarious behind every piece of news. Sometimes there is. ... They tend to clean up their messes this way.”
Many of the recent deaths raise suspicions because a string of Putin critics have died in obvious murders years earlier. They include:
• Nemtsov, who was shot to death while walking after dinner with his girlfriend in a security zone near the Kremlin. Two Chechen suspects, one a former bodyguard to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, are on trial, but the investigation did not reveal whether anyone ordered the hit.
• Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who died in prison while investigating the alleged theft of $230 million by Russian government officials. No one was ever charged.
• Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian spy who defected, became a British citizen and was murdered in London in 2006 with radioactive polonium-210 while helping European authorities in a corruption investigation. The "state-sponsored murder" was an effort by the Russian government to send a chilling message to its critics, Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's former deputy commissioner who led the investigation, told the British Daily Mail on April 17. Two Russian suspects were identified by British authorities, but Russia refused to extradite them, and no one was charged.
• Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who exposed Russian atrocities during the war in the restive Russian republic of Chechnya. She was gunned down in her Moscow apartment stairway in 2006. Former police officer Dmitry Pavliutchenkov was convicted of ordering surveillance of the journalist but denied killing her. He was sentenced in 2012 to 11 years in prison. Five alleged accomplices were later convicted, including two who were sentenced to life in prison. Pavliutchenkov's promise to identify who ordered the hit never resulted in further charges.
Russian police officers stand next to trace of the body of Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and opposition leader, at Red Square with the Kremlin Wall in the background in Moscow, Russia, Feb. 28, 2015. (Photo: Pavel Golovkin, AP)
Two of the recent victims, Oleg Erovinkin and Alex Oronov, have been described by Russian analysts as possibly connected to a dossier written by a former British spy about Trump and his campaign staff’s alleged collusion with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Erovinkin, 61, a general in the Russian spy agency and a close associate of a Putin confidant, was found dead in the back of his car on Dec. 26 in Moscow. The cause of death is unknown.
Oronov, 69, a Ukrainian-born businessman in New York, died under unknown circumstances around March 2, according to Andriy Artemenko, a member of Ukraine's parliament. Oronov had arranged a meeting between Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen; Trump business associate Felix Sater, and Artemenko in January about a peace plan for Ukraine that would benefit Russia. Artemenko alleged that Oronov died because of the peace-plan plot.
The list of recent deaths does not include Matthew Puncher, 46, a British polonium expert in the Litvinenko inquiry, reported to have stabbed himself to death in his home in Oxfordshire after returning from a trip to Russia last May.
Luke Harding chronicled a succession of suspected political murders in his 2016 book, A Very Expensive Poison; the Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West. Former KGB officers and defectors described Soviet-era research into poisons used to kill enemies that continued in post-Soviet Russia, Harding wrote. Some substances are so rare and leave so little trace that death can be easily mistaken for a heart attack.
Journalist Hurst, who helped compile the list of deaths, said the recent uptick appears to be a sign of the growing political pressure on Putin and his cronies. “Putin is at the top of a criminal organization (and) there are all these people who have dirt on him,” she said. “It’s not surprising he’s willing to bump people off."
Kara-Murza, who is still recovering from the alleged poisoning, said he has "absolutely no doubt this was an attempt to kill me because of my political activities in the Russian opposition for the last several years, and more specifically because of my active involvement in the campaign in support of the Magnitsky Act," which calls for U.S. sanctions on Russian officials involved in human rights abuses and corruption.
In this Nov. 30, 2009, photo, Nataliya Magnitskaya, mother of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in jail, holds a photo of her son as she speaks during an interview with the AP in Moscow. (Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko, AP)
He plans to push for similar laws in other Western countries, and to return to Russia to continue his activism when he is physically stronger.
Since many of the suspicious deaths are related to government corruption or those who exposed it, Kara-Murza urged Congress to block Russians who stole their nation’s wealth from investing in the United States.
"This is not only about money," he said in his Senate testimony. “Much more importantly it is about the message that the U.S. sends to Russia.”
ill
Superstar
Russia targets influencers' social streams
Misha Japordize / AP
In the new issue of TIME, Massimo Calabresi breaks down Russia's social media war on America:
- "Russia created a fake Facebook account to spread stories on hot-button political issues like refugee resettlement to targeted reporters they believed were susceptible to influence."
- "Moscow's agents bought ads on Facebook to target specific populations with propaganda."
- Senior intelligence official on how Russian agents apply new social media operations on key members of Congress and aides: "The Russians started using it on the Hill with staffers to see who is more susceptible."
- Senior intelligence official on how Russia used algorithmic techniques to target social-media accounts of particular reporters and "influencers" during the election: "It's not necessarily the journal or the newspaper or the TV show. It's the specific reporter that they find who might be a little bit slanted towards believing things, and they'll hit him" with a flood of fake news stories.
Putin’s Central European Spy Base
Why does the Kremlin have so many spies in the Czech Republic?
By John R. Schindler • 05/18/17 10:45am
Why does the Kremlin have so many spies in the Czech Republic?
PRAGUE—The capital of the Czech Republic is indisputably one of the loveliest cities in Europe. Having avoided major bombing or combat in the Second World War, unlike most cities in the region, Prague remains a Baroque jewel, a stunning example of effective and charming urban planning in the late Habsburg Empire. It’s no wonder that tourists flock here from all corners of the globe. As do spies, many of them Russian.
Since the mid-1990s, the Czech Republic has been something of a playground for Russian spies—and most of them are in Prague. It’s not difficult to see why they’re here. As a member of both NATO and the European Union, the country is a tempting target for the Kremlin. Prague is a great place to live and work, there’s a pro-Russian element of the population (even after the Soviet 1968 invasion there inexplicably are still Czech Russophiles), there’s a lot of Russian business going on in the country, and Kremlin operatives gained a solid foothold here just after the Cold War, when it was easy.
Wisely, Prague after 1989 disbanded the Communist-era secret police and created entirely new intelligence structures, free of KGB influence. However, this fresh start meant that it took several years for neophyte Czech spies to learn their craft, and by the time they did in the mid-1990s, the Russians had put down impressive clandestine roots. As a result, Czech counterspies have played catch-up for the last two decades and never have been able to fully cope with the vast extent of Kremlin espionage and subversion in their country.
The numbers tell the tale. The Security Information Service (BIS in Czech) tracks Russian diplomats in the country closely, and there are an awful lot of them—140 or so at any time. Almost 90 percent of them are at the Russian embassy in Prague, with the rest divided between consulates in Brno (the capital of the Moravia region) and Karlovy Vary (a spa town in western Bohemia that’s coincidentally a top destination for Russian mafiosi).
That’s a staggering number of diplomats to send to a country of only 10 million, and Russia’s diplomatic mission is vastly bigger than any other in the Czech Republic. As the 2015 BIS annual report noted tactfully, “Russian intelligence services were the most active foreign intelligence services in the Czech Republic…The Russian Embassy has much more employees than Embassies of other states (including the US and China).” To compare, there are roughly 70 State Department employees assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Prague.
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Since 2006, when he initiated his SpyWar against NATO and the EU, Vladimir Putin has gradually increased the numbers of Kremlin spies operating abroad. Now, cadres of Russian spies in NATO countries are bigger than even in the worst days of the Cold War, and Prague has more than perhaps anywhere else in the West. In Western countries, at least one-third of Russian diplomats are really spies serving under official cover. However, according to BIS, the percentage in the Czech Republic is more like two-thirds. Therefore, nearly a hundred Russian spies are working in the country as what the Kremlin calls Legals, employed with either Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) or military intelligence (GRU).
These numbers do not include Russian spies visiting the Czech Republic as tourists and businesspeople—and it’s not difficult to hide spies among the roughly three million Russians who visit the country annually. Then there are Illegals, Russian spies operating without benefit of any official cover, usually masquerading as non-Russians. Both SVR and GRU employ Illegals in the West, including in the United States, and while their numbers are small, they can prove all but impossible for counterspies to detect. A Czech security official frankly admitted to me that, although BIS does a decent job of tracking SVR and GRU Legals in the country, “We really don’t have a firm guess how many Illegals there might be—although we would very much like to know, of course.”
Russian spies in the Czech Republic are doing what they do in all Western countries. Recruiting agents inside the host country’s government, especially its security structures. Trying to influence Czech media and public perceptions of Russia. Disseminating cash to politicians and parties that Moscow deems friendly or potentially so. Spreading propaganda and disinformation against NATO and the EU. They’re doing more of this in Prague than in, say, Berlin or Paris because there are so many Kremlin spies here.
Distressingly for many Czechs, one of the politicians who has a distinct soft spot for Putin is the country’s president, Miloš Zeman. A former Communist, Zeman doesn’t hide his pro-Russian sympathies, which have gotten the attention of both the EU and NATO, while just this week during a meeting with Putin, Zeman and his Russian counterpart “joked” about “liquidating journalists.” Since anti-Kremlin journalists have been murdered in significant numbers in Putin’s Russia, there’s nothing funny about this to anybody who enjoys having a free press.
That said, it should be noted that the Czech president really has very little executive power, unlike in the United States. Virtually all political power is vested in the prime minister, while the president’s role is largely symbolic. Nevertheless, Zeman’s views aren’t helpful for Czechs who want less, not more, Russian influence in their country.
There are other political obstacles to getting a handle on Russian espionage here. The customary option to deal with spies posing as diplomats who glaringly exceed their official remit is to declare them persona non grata—termed PNG in the spy trade—and boot them from the country. However, Prague must be careful since there are only about 65 Czech diplomats serving in Russia—far lower than the number of SVR and GRU Legals operating in the Czech Republic. Since Russia generally retaliates by expelling diplomats in tit-for-tat fashion, declaring a substantial number of Russia’s spies here PNG means that Prague soon would have nobody left to staff their diplomatic missions in Russia.
Nevertheless, in recent years as Russian espionage operations in the country have grown increasingly aggressive, BIS has demanded action and the government has sometimes followed suit. Every few years, Prague expels a few Russian spies who were acting excessively aggressive in their espionage. Most recently, a little over two years ago, three Russian “diplomats” were declared PNG when BIS demanded that action be taken against Moscow.
BIS is a competent and professional spy service which unfortunately is overwhelmed by the vast scope of Russian spy-games in their country. Neither do they always have the strong political backing they need to do their job. Here Kremlin influence-buying among Czech politicians plays an unfortunate role.
However, there are encouraging signs, too. American intelligence considers BIS and other Czech security agencies to be dependable partners, and our Intelligence Community was pleased last October when Prague arrested a Russian hackersuspected of involvement in the cyber-theft of Democratic emails in 2016. Yevgeniy Nikulin was taken into custody with the help of the FBI and American intelligence. Only by working together closely can Western intelligence hope to stem the rising tide of Russian espionage and subversion against all our countries – a fact which Czech spies know only too well.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books and is on Twitter at @20committee.