Death of Soviet defector Gordievsky not seen as suspicious, British police say

March 24, 2025 by 8 Comments

Oleg GordievskyBRITISH MEDIA REPORTED THE death on Saturday of Oleg Gordievsky, arguably the most significant double spy of the closing stages of the Cold War, whose disclosures informed the highest executive levels of the West. Having joined the Soviet KGB in 1963, Gordievsky became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system of rule following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.

By 1974, Gordievsky had established contact with Danish and British intelligence and was regularly providing information to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). After 1982, when Gordievsky was posted to the Soviet embassy in London, MI6 deliberately subverted his superiors at the embassy by expelling them. This effectively enabled Gordievsky to take their place and rise to the position of resident-designate of the KGB station in London.

Intelligence historians credit Gordievsky’s intelligence with having shaped the strategic thinking of British and American decision-makers in relation to the Soviet Union. Crucially, Gordievsky’s warnings to MI6 that the Kremlin was genuinely concerned about a possible nuclear attack by the West prompted British and American leaders to temper their public rhetoric against the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Some even credit Gordievsky with having helped the West avoid a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.

In 1985, while undergoing interrogation by the Soviet authorities, Gordievsky was smuggled out of Russia by British intelligence, hidden inside a car that made its way to Finnish territory. He was subsequently sentenced in absentia to death for treason against the Soviet Union. In 1991, following an agreement between British and Soviet authorities, Gordievsky’s wife and daughters were allowed to join him in England.

According to Surrey Police, officers were called to a residential address in the city of Godalming on Tuesday March 4, where they found 86-year-old Gordievsky’s body, surrounded by members of his family. Godalming is a small market town in southeastern England, located around 30 miles from London. Surrey Police noted in a statement that the investigation into Gordievsky’s death was led by counterterrorism officers. However, his death was “not being treated as suspicious”.

Gordievsky spent nearly 40 hours in a coma in 2007, from which he eventually recovered. He subsequently claimed that he had been poisoned after taking sleeping pills tainted with a lethal toxin, which had been supplied to him by a man he referred to as a “business associate” with a Russian background.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 24 March 2025 | Permalink

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Russian intelligence services intensify efforts to ‘liquidate’ defectors: report

March 4, 2024 by 3 Comments

Maksim KuzminovTHE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SERVICES have been “bolstering the[ir] architecture” aimed at stopping potential defectors and “liquidating” those who have already defected and are living in exile, according to a new report. In a leading article published on Sunday, The Wall Street Journal said that the list of “unsolved deaths” of the Kremlin’s Russian critics is “lengthening” and may have surpassed 50, according to some accounts.

Since the current phase of the invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022, Russian defectors and other critics of Russia’s ongoing war have “died in unusual circumstances on three continents”, according to the New York-based newspaper. Most deaths have occurred inside Russia, but several have occurred in countries such as India, France, and Spain. In the most recent case, Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian helicopter pilot, who defected to Ukraine in August 2023, was gunned down in Villajoyosa, Spain, last month, in what The Journal described as a “mafia-style assassination”.

The paper notes that very few of these killings or suspicious deaths can be directly attributed to the Kremlin. It adds, however, that the Russian government has ordered a redoubling of coordinated anti-defector operations by the country’s three main intelligence agencies —the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU). In their effort to prevent defections and punish defectors, these agencies have blurred their operational boundaries,  “making it more difficult to know which is responsible” for anti-defector operations, says The Journal.

Russian anti-defector operations are also increasingly involving third-country nationals —operatives who have no official connection with Russia, or with the country in which they are operating on behalf of Russian intelligence. In one recent example from last August, authorities in Britain arrested three Bulgarian citizens with spying for Russia. According to British government prosecutors, the suspects possessed forged passports and identity cards for Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Croatia, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 04 March 2024 | Permalink

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Ex-Russian spy can sue British government for revealing his identity, court rules

October 30, 2023 by 2 Comments

High Court UKA FORMER SOVIET KGB officer, who now lives in the United Kingdom under witness protection, can sue the British state for revealing his identity to Latvian authorities, which may have put his life in danger, a judge has ruled. Boris Karpichkov, 64, joined the Soviet KGB in 1984, but became a defector-in-place for Latvian intelligence in 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated.

He then allegedly spied on Latvia for one of the KGB’s successor agencies, the Federal Security Service, before switching sides again and spying on Russia for the Latvians. He also claims to have spied on Russia for French and American intelligence. In 1998, carrying two suitcases filled with top-secret Russian government documents, and using forged passports, he arrived with his family in Britain, where he has lived ever since. Shortly after he was granted asylum, the British government issued Karpichkov with a new identity to protect him from the Russian security services. In 2018, Karpichkov claimed that, despite the British government’s efforts to protect him, Russian intelligence had tried to kill him three times since 2006.

Since Karpichkov’s relocation to the United Kingdom, Latvian authorities have twice attempted to have him extradited there. A High Court judge rejected the first extradition request, ruling that Karpichkov’s life would be in danger if he were to be handed over to Latvia. But in 2018 the Latvian authorities issued a follow-up request for Karpichkov’s extradition. At that time the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA), which manages the UK Protected Persons Service, shared information about Karpichkov’s protected identity with the Latvians. A judge later quashed that extradition request too, warning that the former KGB intelligence officer had “an abundance of dangerous enemies in both Latvia and Russia”.

Karpichkov claims that the information that the NCA shared with the Latvians during the extradition negotiations, resulted in him receiving death threats from his enemies abroad. The NCA claims it was under a European Arrest Warrant legislation mandate to disclose Karpichkov’s protected identity to the Latvian authorities. On Friday, however, a High Court judge ruled that Karpichkov had the right to sue the NCA for unlawfully disclosing Karpichkov’s details in violation of data protection rules. This means Karpichkov is now entitled to file a lawsuit against the British government for allegedly misusing his private information.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 30 October 2023 | Permalink

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Can one ever truly leave the Russian intelligence services? It depends, says expert

June 27, 2022 by 2 Comments

Kremlin, RussiaRUSSIANS ARE AWARE OF the phrase “there is no such thing as a former chekist”. The term “chekist” dates from the Bolshevik-era All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (VChK, pronounced “cheka”), which was formed in 1917 as the first Soviet-era state security agency. By the 1940s, intelligence posts had come to be seen as life-long relationships between chekists and the Soviet government, which continued even after one’s retirement. In the words of Joseph Stalin, “[a] chekist has only two paths: toward promotion or to prison”. Is that still the case? It depends on who you ask, says Dr. Kevin Riehle, a 30-year counterintelligence veteran with the United States government, who now teaches at the University of Mississippi’s Center for Intelligence and Security Studies.

Riehle, author of Soviet Defectors: Revelations of Renegade Intelligence Officers, 1924-1954 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), discusses this topic in an article published earlier this month in The International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. The article, entitled “Post-KGB Lives: Is There Such a Thing as a Former Chekist?”, examines this concept with reference to three Russian intelligence agencies, all of which trace their origins to the Soviet-era Cheka —namely the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Federal Protective Service (FSO).

The author explains that the history of chekist organizations is replete with examples of officers, especially those with military backgrounds, who “received post-separation jobs with no apparent obligation to continue cooperation with the [intelligence] service[s]”. However, since the rise of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency, the Kremlin has imposed tight restrictions on the post-retirement activities of former intelligence personnel. As of 2019, such former personnel are not permitted to leave Russia for any reason for five years following their retirement. There is another category of Putin-era intelligence retirees, who enter careers in business or politics. Many of them maintain their intelligence contacts and “continue to fulfil service requirements” while displaying a sense of pride for their government service. This often results in business or political advantages, notes Riehle. Read more of this post

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Taiwan files charges against couple identified by Chinese defector as alleged spies

April 9, 2021 by 1 Comment

Wang Liqiang

AUTHORITIES IN TAIWAN HAVE filed money-laundering charges against a Chinese couple, who were identified as spies by a man who defected to Australia in 2019, claiming to be a Chinese intelligence operative. Wang “William” Liqiang, 28, from China’s eastern Fujian province, defected to Australia in October of 2019, while visiting his wife and newborn son in Sydney. He and his family are currently believed to be living under the protection of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO).

In a 17-page sworn statement filed shortly after his defection, Wang reportedly gave details of his work as an undercover intelligence officer for Chinese military intelligence. He is also said to have shared the identities of senior Chinese intelligence officers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to have explained how they carry out espionage operations on behalf of Beijing. Some media reports claimed that Mr. Wang had shared details about deep-cover Chinese intelligence networks in Australia. Wang also claimed that he worked for a Hong Kong-based company called China Innovation Investment Limited (CIIL), which was in reality a front company set up to provide proprietary cover for Chinese spies like himself.

The Chinese government responded to Wang’s allegations by publicly calling him a “fraud” and claiming that his Chinese passport and Hong Kong identity papers were forgeries. Meanwhile, CIIL filed legal action against Wang for libel and spreading malicious falsehoods. But that did not stop Taiwanese authorities from arresting CIIL’s directors, Xiang Xin and Gong Qing, on November 24, 2019. The directors, a married couple, were about to board an international flight at Taiwan’s Taoyuan Airport, when they were detained by members of the country’s Investigation Bureau. Following their detention, they were barred from leaving the country until further notice.

Under Taiwanese law, authorities in the island country had until April 14 of this year to file charges against the couple, or allow them to leave the country. On Thursday, the Office of the Taipei District Prosecutor announced that money laundering charges had been filed against the two CIIL directors. According to the indictment, the couple used nearly $26 million that they allegedly acquired illicitly from China, in order to purchase three luxury apartments in Taipei’s affluent Xinyi district. Additionally, the Prosecutor’s office said the two Chinese citizens continue to be under investigation for potentially violating Taiwan’s National Security Act.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 09 April 2021 | Permalink

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American spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard gives rare interview to Israeli newspaper

March 23, 2021 by Leave a comment

Jonathan Pollard

JONATHAN POLLARD, AN AMERICAN who spied on his country for Israel in the 1980s, and is now free after spending 30 years in prison, has given a rare interview to Israel Hayom, Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper. Pollard, who is now 66, is a former intelligence analyst for the United States Navy. He was released from an American prison in 2015, after serving a lengthy sentence for selling US government secrets to Israel. Throughout Pollard’s time in prison, the government of Israel lobbied for his release, but failed to have Pollard freed prior to serving the entirety of his sentence. Initially barred from leaving the United States, the former spy was eventually allowed to relocate to Israel by the administration of US President Donald Trump. He and his wife arrived in Israel in December, where they received a hero’s welcome.

A few snippets from Pollard’s interview with Israel Hayom were published on Monday. The paper said that the full interview, edited for brevity, will be published on Friday. In his comments, Pollard defends his decision to share US government secrets with Israel as a “duty” that he says he felt compelled to carry out, claiming: “I know I crossed a line, but I had no choice”. He adds that Washington was “stabbing Israel in the back” by refusing to share intelligence about Arab militaries, which included “serious” threats to the security of the Jewish state.

Pollard claims that he secretly managed to warn his Israeli recruiter, Aviem Sella, who did not have diplomatic immunity in the United States, and who was able to escape arrest in the US. Sella was pardoned by the Trump administration late last year. But Pollard also criticizes the decision of the Israelis to not give him protection at their embassy in Washington, DC, where Pollard tried to claim asylum as he was being followed by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The former spy also describes his life in Israel as “wonderful” and says he can tell the Israeli people see him as “someone [who] was willing to sacrifice his life for them”.

Israel Hayom, which interviewed Pollard, was founded by the Sheldon Adelson, an American casino magnate who was a major financial backer of Donald Trump until his death in January of this year. Adelson was also a major supporter of Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Associated Press notes that Adelson sent his private plane fly Pollard and his wife to Israel in December, after the former spy was permitted to leave American soil by the Trump administration.

Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 23 March 2021 | Permalink

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Ion Pacepa, Cold War’s highest-ranking Soviet Bloc defector, dies of COVID-19

February 17, 2021 by 5 Comments

Ion Mihai PacepaION MIHAI PACEPA, WHO defected to the West as acting head of the Romanian intelligence service, making him the Cold War’s highest-ranking defector from the Soviet Bloc , has reportedly died in the United States of COVID-19. There has been no official announcement of Pacepa’s passing. However, a number of American and Romanian news outlets have reported his death in the past week, noting that he passed away on February 14. He reportedly died in hospital at “an undisclosed location”, having lived under protection from the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Resettlement Operations Center since his defection in 1978. He was 92.

Pacepa was born in Bucharest in 1928. He joined the Securitate, Romania’s secret police and intelligence service, in 1951, having earlier graduated with a degree in engineering from the Bucharest Polytechnic Institute. From his initial post in the Securitate’s Counter-Sabotage Directorate —a domestic assignment— Pacepa was moved to its Foreign Intelligence Directorate in 1955. He gradually reached the rank of station chief, serving in Frankfurt, West Germany. By the early 1970s Pacepa had reached the equivalent rank of a two-star general, and served as advisor to the Romanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu on matters of industrial and technological innovation. In 1978 he was appointed assistant secretary of the Ministry of the Interior and acting director of the Securitate.

But in July of that year, Pacepa defected to the United States while on assignment in Bonn, West Germany. He simply presented himself to the United States embassy there and was soon granted political asylum by Washington. Since that time, he lived under an assumed identity in a series of undisclosed locations in the United States. He reportedly had to change his living arrangements and assume new identities at least twice after his defection, in order to escape Romanian assassination squads who had been tasked with killing him. Among Pacepa’s aspiring assassins was Carlos the Jackal, who had allegedly been promised $1 million by Ceauşescu in return for killing the high-ranking defector.

Pacepa authored several books since his defection, with this first one, Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, being the most notable. Translated from the original English into Romanian, the book was used by the prosecutors that argued in favor of the death penalty for Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena. Both were executed by firing squad in December 1989.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 17 February 2021 | Permalink

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North Korean diplomat, related to top regime official, defected to South, say sources

January 25, 2021 by Leave a comment

Kuwait CityA NORTH KOREAN ACTING ambassador, who is believed to be the son of one of the most senior officials of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), reportedly defected with his family to South Korea, according to sources. Two South Korean news outlets, the Yonhap News Agency and the Maeil Business Newspaper, reported the alleged defection on Monday. They both cited sources in the South Korean government.

The alleged defector is Ryu Hyun-Woo, who was serving as acting charge d’affaires at the North Korean embassy in Kuwait City, Kuwait. He assumed his post in October 2017, when the Kuwaiti government expelled the North Korean ambassador from the country. The expulsion was ordered in response to a nuclear test conducted by Pyongyang in September of that year, which was in violation of a United Nations Security Council resolution barring the communist state from carrying out nuclear activities.

The government in Pyongyang attributes major significance to its embassy in Kuwait City, since it constitutes its sole diplomatic presence in the Gulf region. Personnel who serve at the embassy are carefully vetted and come from some the most loyal families in the inner circle of the WPK. However, it appears that Ryu, who headed the embassy after October 2017, defected with his wife and children in September 2019. The family reportedly flew to South Korea, where they requested asylum upon arrival. According to the Maeil Business Newspaper, Ryu said he defected in order “to provide his children with a better future”.

According to the South Korean reports, Ryu is the son-in-law of Jon Il-Chun, who formerly directed the Central Committee Bureau 39 —or Office 39— of the WPK. This is the agency tasked by the North Korean regime with securing highly-sought-after hard foreign currency for use by the ruling family and their closest aides. It has been described as the operational nerve center of the North Korean government. If the reports of Ryu’s defection are correct, they would mark a major incident of disloyalty to the regime by a member of the innermost circle of the ruling elite.

Last October it was reported that Jo Song-gil, North Korea’s ambassador to Italy, who disappeared without trace in 2018, was believed to have resettled in South Korea. If true, that would make him the most senior official to defect from North Korea in over 20 years, and it would make Ryu the second most senior official to defect during that time.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 25 January 2021 | Permalink

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George Blake, arguably the most prolific Soviet spy of the Cold War, dies at 98

December 28, 2020 by 3 Comments

George BlakeGEORGE BLAKE, A DUTCH-born British intelligence officer, whose espionage for the Soviet Union gained him notoriety in the West and hero status in Moscow, has died aged 98. His death was announced on Saturday by the state-owned Russian news agency RIA Novosti. It was later corroborated by a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), who said Blake “had a genuine love for our country”.

Blake was nearly 18 when German troops entered his native Holland, prompting him to join the local anti-Nazi resistance forces. A British subject thanks to his Egyptian Jewish father, who had acquired British citizenship by fighting in British uniform during World War I, Blake eventually made his way to London via neutral Spain and Gibraltar. Within two years, he had been recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, and by war’s end he was working in its Dutch Section.

Named after King George by his fiercely pro-British and royalist father, Blake drew no suspicion by his MI6 colleagues. He was hard-working and came across as a strict Calvinist, with strong religious leanings. But his view of the Soviet Union began to change at Cambridge University, where he had been sent by MI6 to learn Russian language and history. In 1950, while he was serving under official cover at the British embassy in Seoul, Korea, he was captured and detained for three years by North Korean forces. His ideological defection to communism appears to have taken place during his capture, during which he was given access to English-language Marxist literature and had long discussions with Soviet political instructors.

By 1953, when he was released by his captors and returned to a hero’s welcome in London, Blake was a committed communist. Less than a month following his release, he made contact with Nikolai Rodin (codename SERGEI) who was the KGB’s station chief in London. He began to spy for the Soviet Union, and did so for eight years, including during his stint as an MI6 case officer in Berlin. During that time, he is believed to have betrayed information that led to the detection of over 500 Western intelligence officers and assets operating behind the Iron Curtain, with as many as 44 of those losing their lives as a result. His career as a double spy ended in 1960, when he was betrayed by Polish defector Michael Goleniewski. Goleniewski’s debriefing by the United States Central Intelligence Agency helped Britain identify two Soviet moles inside its intelligence establishment, one of whom was Blake.

In 1960, after pleading guilty to espionage, Blake began serving a 42-year prison sentence in Britain’s Wormwood Scrubs maximum security prison complex. But in 1966 he was able to escape with the help of a group of Irish republican prisoners, and made contact with Soviet intelligence. He was eventually smuggled into East Germany and from there to Russia. Once there, he joined the KGB and served as a consultant and instructor until his retirement in the early 1990s. He learned to speak Russian fluently, married a Russian wife (his British wife having divorced him once he was convicted of espionage) and had a son.

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement on Sunday, praising Blake’s espionage “in the cause of peace”, while the SVR described him as a model intelligence officer. A report published by RIA Novosti on Sunday said that the Moscow city council was considering a proposal to rename a street in the Russian capital after Blake.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 28 December 2020 | Permalink

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Mossad helped Syrian intelligence official flee to Austria, despite alleged crimes

December 2, 2020 by Leave a comment

BVT AustriaA SYRIAN INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL, who was denied political asylum in France due to claims he committed serious war crimes, received protection from Austria with assistance from Israel, according to a report. This was revealed on Sunday by British newspaper The Telegraph, which said it had been given the information by “a judicial source”.

The Syrian official in question is Khaled al-Halabi, a former Brigadier General in the Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate (MID). He served as head of the MID in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa amidst the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011. But in 2013, as the civil war became fiercer, al-Halabi defected from Syria and took his family to France, where applied for political asylum.

Two years later, al-Halabi was notified by the French authorities that his application for political asylum had been denied, due to serious concerns that he had been involved in criminal acts against opponents of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. However, soon after being notified that his application for asylum had been rejected, al-Halabi mysteriously disappeared from France, and was never seen there again.

According to The Telegraph, while waiting for a decision from the French authorities in regards to his application for asylum, al-Halabi was negotiating with the Israeli external intelligence agency, the Mossad. The Israeli spy agency allegedly whisked al-Halabi away from France and took him to nearby Austria. Once there, al-Halabi went into the custody of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism (BVT), Austria’s primary intelligence agency.

In December of 2015, al-Halabi was granted asylum in Austria, and today he is believed to live in Vienna, in a four-bedroom apartment provided to him by the Austrian government. The decision by the Austrian government to give the former Syrian spy official asylum made headlines in Austria in October, causing significant controversy. This is because at least one lawsuit has been filed against al-Halabi for his alleged participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Syrian Civil War, according to The Telegraph.

But the alleged involvement of the Mossad in al-Halabi’s case was not known until last Sunday. If true, the Mossad’s role in this case could signify that al-Halabi had established a relationship with the Israeli spy agency prior to his defection from Syria in 2013. According to the Austrian press, al-Halabi denies that he was involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 02 December 2020 | Permalink

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News you may have missed #911

July 19, 2020 by Leave a comment

Hamas• Analysis: The outstanding issue of the Libyan intelligence services. The post of Chief of the Libyan Intelligence Service of Tripoli’s Government of National Accord (GNA) is still vacant. Therefore, this is an optimal situation for the Head of Tripoli’s government, who is currently pro tempore Director of the GNA agencies, while the struggle for the next Intelligence Service director is intensifying.

• Hamas admits one of its number spied for Israel before defecting. Hamas deputy leader Moussa Abu Marzouk has confirmed Arabic media reports that Hamas commander Mohammad Abu Ajwa collaborated with and subsequently defected to Israel. The defection was first reported by Al-Arabiya, which said that Israel’s Mossad spy agency had recently facilitated the escape of senior commander Mohammad Abu Ajwa. According to Al-Arabiya, Abu Ajwa had previously led Hamas’s naval special forces.

• Russia used US intelligence to target dissidents in Europe. Russia routinely exploited a US policy of increased information sharing to target Chechen dissidents, according to three law-enforcement and intelligence officials in Europe. The practice emerged after the Trump administration backed a policy of sharing more secret information with Russia, in hope of strengthening relations.

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US arrests Mexican man for spying for Russia in mystery case involving informant

February 20, 2020 by 2 Comments

FBI MiamiThe United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a Mexican man, who is accused of spying in the city of Miami on behalf of the Russian government. Local media reports suggest that the target of the man’s spying was a Russian defector who gave American authorities information about Russian espionage activities on US soil.

In a news release issued on Tuesday, the US Department of Justice identified the man as Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes, a Mexican citizen residing in Singapore. The statement said that Fuentes was arrested on Monday and was charged with “conspiracy” and “acting within the United States on behalf of a foreign government”.

According to the statement, Fuentes was recruited in April of 2019 by an unnamed Russian government official. His first assignment was to rent an apartment in Miami-Dade County using fake identification. One he carried out the assignment, Fuentes allegedly traveled to Russia, where he briefed his handler. He was then asked to return to Miami and drive to an apartment complex, where he was to observe a vehicle belonging to an individual that the Department of Justice statement describes as a “US government source”. Fuentes was tasked with providing his Russian handler with the vehicle’s license plate number.

Having been given a detailed physical description of the vehicle by his Russian handler, Fuentes drove to the apartment complex in Miami, but was stopped at the entrance to the complex by a security guard. While Fuentes was speaking with the security guard, Fuentes’ wife allegedly exited the car and took a photograph of the vehicle in question. According to the FBI, she later shared the photograph with Fuentes’ Russian handler on the mobile phone application WhatsApp. The photograph was discovered by US Customs and Border Protection agents on the smartphone of Fuentes’ wife on Sunday, as the pair tried to board a flight to Mexico City.

The US Department of Justice news release does not identify Fuentes’ alleged espionage target. But an article in The Miami Herald claims that the target is an FBI informant who has provided the Bureau’s counterintelligence division with critical information about Russian espionage operations in the Miami area. Fuentes is scheduled to appear in court for a pretrial detention hearing this coming Friday. His arraignment has been scheduled for March 3. The press release does not explain why Fuentes’ wife was not arrested.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 20 February 2020 | Permalink

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Russian security services honor members of the Cambridge spy ring with plaque

December 23, 2019 by Leave a comment

Guy BurgessThe intelligence service of Russia has openly honored two British members of the so-called Cambridge Five spy ring, who caused great controversy during the Cold War by defecting to Moscow. The intelligence services of the Soviet Union recruited five Enlishmen, H.A.R. ‘Kim’ Philby, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, as well as an unnamed fifth person, to spy for them in the 1930s. All five were recruited while they were promising young students at Britain’s elite Cambridge University, and entered the diplomatic and security services in order to supply Moscow with classified information about Britain and its allies.

In 1951, shortly before they were detained by British authorities on suspicion of espionage, Burgess and Maclean defected to the Soviet Union. They both lived there under new identities and, according to official histories, as staunch supporters of Soviet communism. Some biographers, however, have suggested that the two Englishmen grew disillusioned with communism while living in the Soviet Union, and were never truly trusted by the authorities Moscow. When they died, however, in 1963 (Burgess) and 1983 (Maclean), the Soviet intelligence services celebrated them as heroes.

On Friday, the Soviet state recognized the two defectors in an official ceremony in the Siberian city of Samara, where they lived for a number of years, until the authorities relocated them to Moscow. Kuibyshev, as the city was known during Soviet times, was technically a vast classified facility where much of the research for the country’s space program took place. While in Kuibyshev, Burgess and Maclean stayed at a Soviet intelligence ‘safe house’, where they were debriefed and frequently interrogated, until their handlers were convinced that they were indeed genuine defectors.

At Friday’s ceremony, officials unveiled a memorial plaque at the entrance to the building where Burgess and Maclean lived. According to the Reuters news agency, the plaque reads: “In this building, from 1952-1955, lived Soviet intelligence officers, members of the ‘Cambridge Five’, Guy Francis Burgess and Donald Maclean”. On the same day, a letter written by Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), one of the institutional descendants of the Soviet-era KGB, appeared online. In the letter, Naryshkin said that Burgess and Maclean had made “a significant contribution to the victory over fascism [during World War II], the protection of [the USSR’s] strategic interests, and ensuring the safety” of the Soviet Union and Russia.

Last year, Russian officials named a busy intersection in Moscow after Harold Adrian Russell Philby. Known as ‘Kim’ to his friends, Philby was a leading member of the Cambridge spies. He followed Burgess and Maclean to the USSR in 1963, where he defected after a long career with the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 22 December 2019 | Permalink

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Victor Sheymov, among Cold War’s most important KGB defectors, dies at 73

December 10, 2019 by Leave a comment

Victor SheymovVictor Ivanovich Sheymov, who is often referred to as one of the most important intelligence defectors of the Cold War, has reportedly died in the American state of Virginia. He was one of the most senior officials in the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (KGB) to ever defect to the West, and revealed important KGB secrets to the United States.

Sheymov was born in 1946 to a family of elite Soviet scientists. His father was an engineer and his mother a doctor specializing in cardiology. A gifted mathematician and student-athlete, Sheymov was recruited into the KGB almost as soon as he graduated from the elite Bauman Moscow State Technical University, where he majored in engineering. By his early 30s, Sheymov had risen to the rank of major under the KGB’s Eighth Chief Directorate, which handled secret communications systems. He oversaw a large unit that monitored the flow of information between the KGB’s headquarters and the agency’s operatives around the world. In later years, Sheymov was assigned code-breaking and counter-espionage tasks, and oversaw the preparation of daily classified briefings for the Politburo —the Communist Party’s highest policy-making body.

But in the 1970s Sheymov grew disillusioned with Soviet politics, and began to feel slighted by the infighting and incompetence inside the KGB. While visiting Poland on KGB business, he volunteered his services to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by walking into the US embassy in Warsaw. The CIA eventually gave him the cryptonym CKUTOPIA and, after verifying his senior status inside the KGB, exfiltrated him to the United States along with his wife and 5-year-old daughter. His was the first known instance of a successful CIA exfiltration of a defector from Soviet territory.

After spending several months being debriefed and polygraphed at a CIA safe house, Sheymov and his family were given new identities and US citizenship. But the defector decided to emerge from hiding in 1990, as the USSR was dissolving. In his book about his espionage work and defection, titled Tower of Secrets, Sheymov said he informed the CIA about the KGB’s unsuccessful plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and about the successful operation to assassinate Afghan President Hafizullah Amin in 1979. His insights were also instrumental in the decision of the US State Department to demolish the US embassy in Moscow, due to fears about the presence of listening devices planted inside the building’s walls by Soviet builders. The building was eventually replaced with another structure built by vetted American workers.

Sheymov was awarded the US Intelligence Medal and lived the rest of his life in America, where he headed a computer security company. He died on October 18 in Vienna, Virginia, but his death was not publicly reported until this week. Sheymov’s wife told reporters that he died from health complications arising from chronic pulmonary disease.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 10 December 2019 | Permalink

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As Australia launches probe, skeptics cast doubts on Chinese defector’s spy claims

November 27, 2019 by 1 Comment

Wang LiqiangAs the Australian government has launched an official investigation into the claims made by a self-styled Chinese intelligence defector, some skeptics have begun to cast doubts about his revelations. The claims of Wang “William” Liqiang have dominated news headlines in Australia for over a week. The 26-year-old from China’s eastern Fujian province reportedly defected to Australia in October, while visiting his wife and newborn son in Sydney. He is currently reported to be in a safe house belonging to the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO).

The Australian spy agency confirmed last week that Mr. Wang had provided a 17-page sworn statement, in which he detailed his work as an undercover intelligence officer for Chinese military intelligence. He is also said to have shared the identities of senior Chinese intelligence officers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to have explained how they plan to carry out espionage operations on behalf of Bejing. Some media reports claimed that Mr. Wang had shared details about deep-cover Chinese intelligence networks in Australia. The Australian government said on Tuesday that an official investigation had been launched into Mr. Wang’s claims.

But some skeptics in Australia and elsewhere have begun to raise doubts about the Chinese defector’s claims, suggesting that he has given little —if any information— that is genuinely new. Some argue that Mr. Wang is much too young to have been entrusted with senior-level responsibilities in the intelligence agency of a country that rarely promotes twenty-somethings in high-ranking positions. Additionally, Mr. Wang appears to have no military background —he claims to have been recruited while studying fine art— which is not typical of a Chinese military intelligence operative.

Furthermore, Mr. Wang episode interviewers from Australian television’s 60 Minutes program that he began feeling tormented by moral dilemmas when his staff officers supplied him with a fake passport bearing a different name, in preparation for an operation in Taiwan. However, by his own admission, Mr. Wang had been supplied with fake passports for previous operations, so it is not clear why he lost his nerve at the time he did. In fact, case officers usually covet the opportunity to go undercover and feel a sense of exhilaration when they receive fake identification documents for an undercover mission.

Is Mr. Wang not sharing the entire background to his decision to defect to Australia? Or could he be deliberately amplifying his role in Chinese intelligence, in an effort to appear useful to the Australian government and thus secure political protection by Canberra? In the words of Alex Joske, an analyst at the  International Cyber Policy Centre of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the details in some of Mr. Wang’s claims mean that “government investigations should uncover the facts eventually. But we don’t know the full story and we probably never will”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 26 September 2019 | Permalink

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