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On Friday, the FSB publicly identified an individual it claims was the Moscow station chief of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as of late 2011… a move widely-seen as a breach of protocol in the intelligence community. A man identified as an FSB official named the alleged CIA station chief in an interview with state-run television, in which he gave new details about the agency’s highly-publicised detention of alleged American spy Ryan Fogle earlier this week. In the interview, the FSB official reiterated earlier claims that his agency explicitly asked the CIA to stop trying to recruit Russian security and intelligence officers. In late 2011, he added, the FSB formally warned the CIA station chief in Moscow, whom he identified by name, “In the event that provocative efforts to recruit employees of the Russian special services continue, the FSB … would take reciprocal measures against American intelligence officers”. The officer, his face blacked out, and voice altered, said that Fogle’s brief detention this week… reportedly preceded in January by the unpublicised ouster of another American diplomat suspected of spying… was made public because the CIA continued to disregard the warning.
The Daily Telegraph reported, “A diplomat of the same name [given by the FSB official] is listed as a Counsellor in the US Embassy in Moscow in the Autumn-Winter 2012-13 edition of a directory of foreign diplomatic, media, and business offices in the city”. It wasn’t clear whether the man identified as the station chief is still in Moscow. US Embassy officials weren’t immediately available for comment. On Friday, US State Department spokesman Jen Psaki told a news conference in Washington DC that she hadn’t seen the report and referred further questions to the CIA. On Friday afternoon, the CIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
17 May 2013
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On Friday, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers and security experts told RIA-Novosti that Russia’s decision to identify a purported top American spy in the country is an “unprecedented” move in relations between Moscow and Washington with no clear indication of how the USA will react. Peter Earnest, who operated intelligence collection and covert operations in Europe and the Middle East during a 35-year career with the CIA, said, “Certainly, throughout the Cold War, and even after that, there was a practise of not naming the head of the [spy agencies] in the respective countries”. Earnest and other security experts said that the television interview in which a man identified as an FSB officer named an alleged CIA station chief in Moscow puzzled them.
In the interview with state-run television, the FSB officer explained that his agency detained purported US spy Ryan Fogle in Moscow earlier this week because a request in late 2011 to the purported station chief, whom he identified by name, to halt “provocative” CIA efforts to recruit Russian intelligence agents went unheeded. The Daily Telegraph reported, “A diplomat of the same name [given by the FSB official] is listed as a Counsellor in the US Embassy in Moscow in the Autumn-Winter 2012-13 edition of a directory of foreign diplomatic, media, and business offices in the city”. On Friday, neither the US State Department nor the CIA responded to requests for comment.
Melvin Goodman, who served as division chief and senior analyst at the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs in the 1970s and 1980s, said, “The leak of the purported spy’s name represents a serious breach in protocol. These things are usually done quietly”. He added that the release of the name was “unprecedented” in the history of American relations with Russia and the USSR. Goodman pointed up that the disclosure of a CIA operative’s name in such a fashion is typically a death knell for the agent’s career, saying, “He could stay operational clandestinely, but I don’t see how they could send him out under any cover”.
Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security services at New York University, called the naming of the alleged station chief a “definite escalation” in the wake of Fogle’s brief detention and subsequent eviction from Russia, where he served as a third secretary in the political section at the US embassy. Galeotti told RIA-Novosti, “It’s almost as if the Russians are inviting the Americans to respond, but as it is, they seem to have Washington off balance”.
Earnest and Goodman both said that without the full picture of the circumstances surrounding Fogle’s detention and the public naming of the purported station chief, it’s difficult to predict how Washington might respond. Goodman said that if Russia’s reaction was indeed precipitated by CIA operatives’ aggressive attempts to recruit Russian intelligence officers, Washington “may just decide to let it go, but without knowing what some of the operational details are, I’d hesitate to speculate on this”.
It wasn’t the first time that the name of an alleged CIA station chief was publicly disclosed in recent years. In 2010 and early 2011, American officials accused Pakistani authorities of leaking the name of two CIA station chiefs in Islamabad to the country’s news media within five months. However, Earnest, the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, noted that Washington’s relationship with Pakistan is considerably different than its relationship with Russia is, adding that there’s no formal protocol dictating how countries should respond in these cases. “It’s very situational, and the fact that you and I and the public don’t know what occasioned the takedown of Fogle means we don’t know what the signal [from Russia] was. That makes it doubly-hard to know the signal of this latest development is. It sort of deepens the mystery”.
Goodman, who spent 24 years as a CIA analyst specialising in Soviet affairs, said the spy spat surprised him given public overtures from both countries in recent weeks indicating they were interested in cooperating on the investigation of last month’s Boston Marathon bombings and ending the civil war in Syria, saying, “This past week suggests that something else is going on”.
18 May 2013 (MSK)
Carl Schreck
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130517/181209758/Russia-Outs-Alleged-Moscow-CIA-Station-Chief.html
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130518/181212155/Unprecedented-CIA-Moscow-Chief-Leak-Puzzles-Ex-Spies.html
Brezhnev Pips Lenin as Russia’s Favourite 20th Century Ruler
Tags: Boris Yeltsin, Iosif Stalin, Josef Stalin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Levada Centre, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nicholas II of Russia, Nikolai II, Opinion poll, political commentary, politics, Public opinion, Russia, Russian, Russian history, Soviet, Soviet Union, Stalin, USSR, Vladimir Lenin
THIS is what the people want… any questions?
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In an opinion poll released on Wednesday, Russians viewed Leonid Brezhnev as the most positive of all Soviet and Russian leaders in the 20th century, but Vladimir Lenin and Iosif Stalin were close behind. 56 percent of respondents in the Levada Centre survey viewed Brezhnev (who ruled the USSR in 1964-82) positively. Often mocked in jokes for his increasingly-visible senility at the end of his life, people still respect Brezhnev for maintaining stability and increasing living standards among millions of ordinary Soviet citizens during his time in office as General Secretary of the Communist Party. 55 percent of respondents saw Lenin, (who led the Bolsheviks into power in 1917) positively. Stalin, whose almost-three-decade rule saw many of his fellow countrymen perish in GULag labour camps, was judged to have been a positive influence by 50 percent of respondents. Just 21 percent of respondents viewed Perestroika-era leader Mikhail Gorbachyov’s rule positively, whilst only 22 percent were positive about Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president. 48 percent of respondents saw Tsar Nikolai Aleksandrovich, deposed and executed by the Bolsheviks, as a positive influence. Levada carried out the poll on 19-22 April, with 1,600 respondents from all over Russia.
22 May 2013
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130522/181291682/Brezhnev-Pips-Lenin-as-Russias-Favorite-20th-Century-Ruler.html
Editor’s Note:
This confirms something that I’ve suspected for quite some time. Amongst ordinary folk, there’s much regard for both Tsarist and Communist rulers, as they see them as respectful of the common people. Neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachyov got positive reviews, as the people see them as bum-kissers of the pseudo-intellectual pro-Westerners who hold ordinary Russians in contempt and of greedy Free Market buccaneers who raped the working class. Let’s keep it simple… the people who voted for Lyonyo, voted for Koba, Ilyich, and Good Tsar Nikolai, too. They didn’t vote for Gorbachyov and Yeltsin. The people want a Red Tsar… not the Free Market… not the oligarchs… not the pro-Westerners… not the White Liberal Phonies of February (remember, had not Kerensky imprisoned the tsar, he might have survived… the righties are silent about that)… not the Nazi collaborators who fled to the West (and who sold themselves into the service of Western intel agencies against the Orthosphere). That pisses off the likes of Victor Potapov (which led to his vile, revolting, and hypocritical tantrum on the ROCOR official website… after all, he’s a well-known Langley operative). Will he leave the canonical Church if Russia continues to move leftward? Do stay tuned… this show ain’t over yet, kids…
BMD