Edward Lucas - Deception

23 Russia is now a participant in the Wassenaar Arrangement, which restricts the export of sensitive equipment to so-called rogue states. http://www.wassenaar.org/guidelines/

24 This is an archaic bit of legislation dating from 1974 intended to put pressure on the Soviet Union to allow Jewish would-be émigrés to leave the country freely. It is routinely waived by the Senate, but remains an irritant. See http://www.cfr.org/trade/jackson-vanik-amendment/p18844

25 Discussion of this case is difficult for legal reasons. For some years Mr Deripaska, an aluminium tycoon, has had difficulty gaining an American visa because of what officials described as ‘concerns about his business practices and associates’. The FBI is believed to have an audio recording in which he discusses some business difficulties and a planned solution in robust terms. He recently received a visa in exchange for a lengthy interview with officials from the criminal-justice system who sought his help in areas of interest to the US government. Nothing concrete resulted. See ‘FBI Lets Barred Tycoon Visit US’ by Evan Perez and Gregory White, Wall St Journal 30 October 2009 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125685578903317087.htmland also Mr Deripaska’s response http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125687000832717809.html

26 http://valdaiclub.com/gives a flavour of the lavish nature of this event.

27 Other papers which have swallowed this include European Voice (published by the Economist ), where I write a weekly column; Le Figaro (France); the Economic Times and the Times of India (India); Duma (Bulgaria); Folha de São Paulo (Brazil); la Repubblica (Italy); Clarín (Argentina); El País (Spain); Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Geopolitika (Serbia). http://russianow.washingtonpost.com/about/and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/russianow/

28 On 8 September 2007 it printed a commentary claiming that the Katyń massacre of Polish officers in 1940 was not the work of the Soviet secret police, but of the Nazis. The original article is available here http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t147/apamyatnykh/GAZETA1s.jpg?t=1191101536. See also http://katynfiles.com/content/pamyatnykh-sabov-strygin-shved.html

29 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipGjIs3ovIc

30 Such as complaining about the language and citizenship laws in Estonia and Latvia: see for example ‘Latvia and Estonia discriminate against non-citizens’ by Yevgeny Kryshkin, The Voice of Russia , 26 February 2010 http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/2/26/4852056.html. Both countries have substantial, though declining, populations of Soviet-era migrants who have so far declined to learn the national languages or take the test that would entitle them to citizenship. Estonia’s non-citizen population dropped below the symbolically important 100,00 mark in April 2011; in Latvia the Russian-speaking population is better integrated socially but more active politically (partly as a result of Latvian state weakness, and partly because of Russian state interference).

31 See http://www.siac.tribunals.gov.uk/Documents/zatuliveter_substantive_29Nov11.pdf

1 ‘Russian Spy Has Defected to Canada’ by Jim Bronskill and Mike Trickey, National Post, 9 March 2001. Not available online directly but copied at http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/intelforum/2001-March/04354.html

2 Snapshots of the site are available at http://www.domaintools.com/research/screenshot-history/for subscribers, or via the Wayback internet archive.

3 AIA listed its contributors as follows: Michel Elbaz – general coordinator; Allister Maunk – administrator and editor; Can Karpat – Turkish and Balkan section; Simon Araloff – European section; Anders Asmus – regional and international politics of Baltic states; Pavel Simonov – Russian section; Ulugbek Djuraev – Central-Asian section; Asim Oku – Turkish section; Sami Rosen – Israeli section; Alexander Petrov – webmaster.

4 One oddity was that on 13 May 2009 the privacy-protection had slipped. The registrant’s email was now listed, with an Israeli postal address: m_falkov@yahoo.com. Ha-Ela 16, Bene Ayish 79845. Whoever had been so keen to protect the site’s identity was now either careless or carefree.

5 ‘WikiLeaks cable: Russian leadership viewed Lieberman as “one of its own”: Message from US embassy to State Department shows FM was treated as an “old friend” during a 2009 visit to Moscow’ by Barak Ravid, Haaretz, 29 November 2010 http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/wikileaks-cable-russian-leadership-viewed-lieberman-as-one-of-its-own-1.327694

6 ‘Intelligence war breaks out in Israel’s Foreign Ministry’ by Joseph Fitsanakis, 20 July 2009. http://intelligencenews.wordpress.com/2009/7/20/1-188/

7 According to the German security service http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/download/SHOW/vsbericht_2009.pdfp. 331 (in German).

8 A prominent semi-retired officer, Anton Surikov, died mysteriously in late 2009. In his last interview with a Western journalist a few weeks earlier, he said that Russia was run by ‘bandits from St Petersburg’. They, he said, were trying to push the country towards an authoritarian, Chinese-style model of political and economic development. The GRU director Valentin Korabelnikov retired in 2009 to avoid sacking, amid semi-public disagreement with his bosses over Russia’s military reforms. ‘Last Cake with a Russian Agent’ by Ben Judah, Standpoint, January/February 2010 http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2580/full

9 Viewable at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFnsqivNW6A

10 ‘ Polska broń w slużbie gruziń skiej armii’ (‘Polish weapons in the service of the Georgian Army’) by Michael Majewski and Pawel Reszka; Dziennik, Warsaw, 10 August 2008. http://wiadomosci.dziennik.pl/polityka/artykuly/156916,polska-bron-w-sluzbie-gruzinskiej-armii.html

11 An excellent account of the conflict is A Little War That Shook The World by the late Ron Asmus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Another is The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia by Svante Cornell and Frederick Starr (eds.) (M. E. Sharpe, 2009).

12 Georgia’s South Ossetia Conflict: Make Haste Slowly , Crisis Group Europe Report No. 183, 7 June 2007, p. 16 http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/europe/183_georgia_s_south_ossetia_conflict_make_haste_slowly.ashx

13 My source for this is a Georgian government non-paper and interviews with senior Georgian and Western officials. See also ‘Tbilisi Says Evidence Links Russian Officer to Blasts’, Civil Georgia , 8 December 2010. http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=22940and ‘Georgia accuses Russia of bombings, warns on talks’ by Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters, 7 June 2011 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/6/7/georgia-russia-talks-idUSLDE75622520110607

1 They may have some self-defence training and will often be excellent drivers. Those who have joined after a previous career in the military, particularly in special forces, are different; so are the dodgy characters often recruited as auxiliaries. For gossipy details of CIA training, see Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy by Lindsay Moran (Putnam, 2005).

2 Search warrant for 35b Trowbridge St, Cambridge MA. http://www.thebostonchannel.com/download/2010/715/24272005.pdf

3 See (in Swedish) http://www.forsvarsmakten.se/hkv/Must/and Sveriges hemligaste rum (Sweden’s most secret room) by Emelie Asplund and Ewa Stenberg, Dagens Nyheter, 3 October 2005 http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sveriges-hemligaste-rum. Next-door Finland is even lower-profile. It has a domestic security agency (SuPo), which is part of the police, and a military intelligence agency. Any capability for foreign human intelligence is admirably hidden.