Intelligence historian calls on MI6 to declassify Lumumba files
April 4, 2013 3 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
An historian whose book on British intelligence prompted the claim of Britain’s complicity in the 1961 assassination Patrice Lumumba has called for MI6 to declassify its secret files on the late Congolese Prime Minister. Calder Walton is a Cambridge University-educated intelligence historian whose first book, Empire of Secrets, examines the activities of British intelligence in the last days of the British Empire. A review of the book, published by Bernard Porter in The London Review of Books in March, prompted a claim that London had organized the assassination of the iconic pan-Africanist activist, who in 1960 had become Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister. Many believe that the United States had a hand in Lumumba’s assassination, which was aimed at preventing him from establishing close relations between uranium-rich Congo and the Soviet Union. But British Labour politician and Life peer Lord Lea of Crondall said in a letter published in response to the review of Walton’s book that Lumumba had been killed with the help of MI6, Britain’s primary external intelligence service. He claimed he had been told so by the late Baroness Park of Monmouth, who at the time of Lumumba’s death headed the Leopoldville station of MI6. In his book, Walton, who until 2009 served as research assistant for Professor Christopher Andrew’s authorized official history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, says it is unclear who organized Lumumba’s assassination. He argues that “at present, we do not know […] whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba […] ever amounted to anything”. But speaking to The London Times on Wednesday, the historian and author urged MI6 to declassify its internal archives on the Congolese leader. Read more of this post
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Russian intelligence planned to assassinate SVR defector living in the United States
June 21, 2023 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
According to Dr. Walton, Russian intelligence targeted Aleksandr Poteyev, who served as Deputy Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) from 2000 until 2010. Poteyev was reportedly in charge of the SVR’s Directorate “S”, which oversees the work of illegals —a term that refers to SVR operations officers who work in without official cover around the world. It is believed that Poteyev began working for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1999, as an agent-in-place.
By 2010, when he openly defected to the United States, Poteyev had provided the CIA with information that led to the high-profile arrest of 10 Russian illegals by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Some believe that the SVR defector was also responsible for the arrests of Russian spies in Germany and Holland. In 2011, a Russian court tried Poteyev in absentia and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. Poteyev remains at large and is believed to be living in the United States under the protection of the CIA’s National Resettlement Operations Center.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that it had independently confirmed Dr. Walton’s claims, with the help of “three former senior American officials who spoke” to the paper “on the condition of anonymity”. According to The Times, a 2016 report by the Moscow-based Interfax news agency, which claimed that Poteyev had died in the United States, was part of a deliberate disinformation operation by the SVR, which was aimed at enticing the defector to emerge from his hideout.
When that attempt failed, the SVR allegedly recruited a Mexican scientist who lived in Singapore, Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, to travel to Miami, Florida, in 2020, in order to locate Poteyev. But Fuentes attracted the attention of the authorities while driving around in Miami and was subsequently detained by US Customs and Border Protection agents as he was trying to board a flight to Mexico City. Fuentes then provided details of his mission to the FBI. The Bureau eventually determined that the goal of the SVR had been to assassinate Poteyev.
According to The New York Times, the realization that the SVR had planned to carry out an assassination operation on American soil “spiraled into a tit-for-tat retaliation by the United States and Russia”, which included cascading sanctions and diplomatic expulsions on both sides. The paper reports that, in April 2021, the White House ordered the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats from the United States, including the SVR’s chief of station, who had two years left on his Washington, DC, tour. The Kremlin responded by expelling an equal number of American diplomats from Russia, including the CIA station chief in Moscow.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 21 June 2023 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Aleksandr Poteyev, Alexander Poteyev, assassinations, book news and reviews, Calder Walton, CIA, CIA National Resettlement Operations Center, FBI, Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, Hector Fuentes, Miami (Florida), News, Russia, SVR (Russia), United States