RIA Novosti reports the Federal Security Service said Tuesday it has exposed 27 foreign intelligence officers and 89 Russian agents this year. "Of this number, one career intelligence officer and eight agents were caught red-handed," FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev said. "Twenty-one foreign nationals involved in intelligence operations were deported from Russia."
Read more...
In its Friday's special report, The Economist wonders "what a poisoned Russian agent tells us about the way that Russia is governed". Its article offers a broad range of theories of who was responsible for Litvinenko's death but the main point remains that at the end of the day, the 'who' may not be as important. What is important, however, is that the case actually caused the controversy it did and put Vladimir Putin's Russia under microscope.
As seems to be the case, Litvinenko was nothing like the Russian KGB superagent turned human rights advocate as he was portrayed in Western press. "He was not really a spy, as he has been described, but worked for domestic units of the FSB, one of the KGB's post-Soviet successors. He has been labelled a defector; but few people took the information he brought out of Russia when he fled to Britain seriously." However, his death marked a drastic turn in how Russia is viewed. The war in Chechnya, the contract murders in Moscow and the consolidation of power in the hands of the siloviki is one issue. The fact that the perception exists that the Russian state actually could reach out and assassinate a British citizen in London (regardless whether it actually was the case) is another issue. But the two cannot be viewed in vacuum. Litvinenko's murder was the proverbial last drop that caused the bucket to overflow. All of the sudden, the situation in Russia cannot be ignored any longer. Putin's shortcomings that were conveniently pushed aside when we wanted Russian oil and natural gas and when we wanted to be part of Moscow's stock and real estate market boom are suddenly exposed as never before.
Reuters reports: President Vladimir Putin has never hidden his KGB spy past and over three-quarters of Russia's political elite have tell-tale signs of a background in the security services or military, a new study says.
"Our research has shown that ... 78 percent of the Russian elite have signs of being siloviki," Olga Kryshtanovskaya, who has studied the Russian elite since 1989, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Read more...
The Washington Post reports: Russia's intertwined political and business elites are increasingly populated with former intelligence agents who have personally proved themselves to Vladimir Putin. At the same time, Putin has spearheaded the regrouping and strengthening of the country's security services, which had splintered into a host of agencies after the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991. In recent years, the Federal Security Service has emerged as one of Russia's most powerful and secretive forces, with an increasingly international mission. Putin headed the agency in the 1990s.
Read more...
According to The New York Times, the German authorities announced Sunday that they had begun a criminal investigation of a Russian businessman after finding traces of polonium 210 around Hamburg that date back to Oct. 28 — four days before he met in London Alexander Litvinenko. It has added to suspicions that the case is connected to the shadowy world of agents and businessmen, defectors, spies and exiles let loose by the dissolution of the K.G.B., and still entwined with successor agencies.
The man the Germans have put at the center of scrutiny is Dmitri V. Kovtun, a 41-year-old Russian who was a student in the 1980s at the Supreme Soviet Higher Military Command School, where many students went on to serve in the K.G.B. He has been in a Moscow hospital since Dec. 7, suffering from exposure to polonium. There are conflicting reports about his health; Interfax, the Russian news agency, reported he was in critical condition, but his lawyer later disputed that.
Read more…
The investigation into the death of a Russian dissident in London heats up and sheds an ugly light on Vladimir Putin's rule - The Time Magazine published a seven-page article on December 10, examining the multiple facets of the Litvinenko affair.
Read more...
Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy murdered in London, was sent a series of letters warning him of a plot to kill him, The Sunday Telegraph reveals. In the letters, passed exclusively to The Telegraph, Mikhail Trepashkin, a former state security agent jailed in 2003 after trying to expose corruption, warned Litvinenko that his life and those of his wife and children were in danger from Russian hit men. Read more...
In the Sunday edition of the New York Times, Scott Shane, reflects on the increasing influence of the KGB and its return to long abolished deadly practices.
For decades, any K.G.B. officer who defected was automatically tried and sentenced to death, and officers overseas were expected to carry out the sentences. In the late 1960s, when Yuri Andropov became K.G.B. chief, the practice faded. Now the practice may be back and playing out in a world where former K.G.B. officers, with murky continuing relations with the successor agency, are found in many countries. Michael McFaul, a Russia specialist at Stanford University, said that whoever killed Mr. Litvinenko chose the gruesome murder weapon to deter others who would openly break with the F.S.B. and the regime. “The message is: Be afraid. Be very afraid,” he said. Read more...
This interview is not exactly hot off the press but it offers some interesting insights into the murky world of Russian intelligence. Foreign Policy published an interview with Yevgenia Albats is professor of political science at the Moscow-based state university, The Higher School of Economics, in wake of the Litvinenko poisoning. The answer to the question on everyone's mind: Who is the FSB? Who controls them? What is the danger coming from them? is that nobody knows. What seems to be apparent, though, is that we are not dealing with the KGB anymore when its goals were clearly defined by the Soviet ideology and which was working more or less directly in the interest of the Soviet state.
