Free Republic

Russian officials are reportedly destroying the records of gulag prisoners under a secret order passed in 2014, Russian media have reported. An estimated 3-12 million victims of Soviet repression were imprisoned in the gulag network of prisons and forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Registration records kept by the Museum of the History of the Gulag, now threatened with destruction, include the permanent records of those killed, as well as archival files detailing those who survived the gulag and when they were released. A 2014 inter-agency order labeled “for internal use” instructs files to be destroyed once the...

The 11 arrests so far are the tip of iceberg. Many more to follow, many in South Florida.” “The “South American country” where Vicky Pelaez picked up her payments from Russia’s SVR was Venezuela.” “Russia’s SVR, Castro’s DGI (Directorio General de Inteligencia) and Chavez’ SEBIN, (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia) are all linked. They all share agents and information. Castro-Cubans run Chavez’ intelligence agency practically lock, stock and barrel.” “Vicky Pelaez was frequent traveler to Cuba where she met with Castro’s DGI. Pictures exist of those meetings.”

As a senior archivist for the KGB’s foreign-intelligence directorate, Vasili Mitrokhin had access to a treasure trove of information. He unveiled those secrets after defecting to Britain in 1992. One such secret concerned the “active measures” — the lies – the KGB had used against the West during the Cold War. In the 1980s, for example, the KGB spread a couple of particularly pernicious rumors. It claimed the United States had manufactured the AIDS virus and that rich Americans were murdering children in the Third World for organ-harvesting purposes. Framed by faux science and ideologically screened “experts,” and harnessing anti-American...

A female Russian agent got "close enough" to a sitting U.S. cabinet member that the FBI felt they had to swoop in and arrest the lot -- but it wasn't the famous femme fatale Anna Chapman, federal officials said today. .................................................... But Figliuzzi never named the Russian agent in question, even if the BBC ran images of Chapman -- as well as shots of a look-a-like -- during the interview, and now the FBI says he wasn't talking about her at all. Instead, Justice Department officials told ABC News Figliuzzi was referring to another of the arrested spies, Cynthia Murphy.

Obama in the city for Clinton ally’s fundraiser By Emily Smith President Obama is coming to Manhattan Tuesday for yet another fund-raiser, hosted by longtime Hillary Clinton friend and bundler Alan Patricof. While the president is flying in on Air Force One for the intimate “fireside chat” at Patricof’s home in front of just 26 people at the $32,400 per ticket event, private equity and venture capital pioneer Patricof has made it clear the fund-raiser is not to bolster Obama, but to boost the Democratic National Committee ahead of a possible Clinton presidential run.

Top Russian spy defects after betraying U.S. ring By Thomas Grove Thomas Grove 21 mins ago MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of Russia's deep cover U.S. spying operations has betrayed the network and defected, a Russian paper said on Thursday, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War. The newspaper, Kommersant, named the man as Colonel Shcherbakov, and said he was responsible for unmasking a Russian spy ring in the United States in June whose arrests humiliated Moscow and clouded a "reset" in ties with Washington. The betrayal would make Shcherbakov...

Sexy Russian spy Anna Chapman's boss was working for us. The head of Russia's spy operations in America defected just before he betrayed Chapman and her nine fellow sleeper agents last summer -- and the Kremlin has ordered a hit team to kill him as revenge, according to a bombshell report yesterday. Senior officials in Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's government said the double agent -- identified only as "Colonel Shcherbakov" -- was a devastating blow to Russia's SVR intelligence agency and touched off a probe.

A new report released in the Kremlin today by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is stating that the reason(s) for President Obama’s “mysterious and unscheduled” return to the White House this weekend is due the United States facing an “apocalyptic attack” from an estimated 3,000 “Ebola Martyrs” who are already in America and warned are “ready to strike”. According to this report, SVR intelligence analysts became aware of the attack planned by these “Ebola Martyrs” against the US from their “monitoring” of a Islamic State (IS) [also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the...

The FBI rounded up a network of deep-cover Russian spies last year after the group came close to placing an agent near a Cabinet official in the Obama administration, a senior FBI counterspy said Monday as the bureau released once-secret documents on the case. ...U.S. officials said it was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Figliuzzi said in an interview that the FBI decided to end its more than 10-year-long counterspy investigation of the network because of concerns that the spies were “getting very close to their objective.” “These 10 Russian officers were sent to the U.S. on a...

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has formed an inter-departmental commission headed by the country''s Interior Minister to combat home-grown extremism in the backdrop of Norway-like massacre. According to the Kremlin, the commission will develop measures to prevent manifestations of extremism and remove those conditions which fuel it. The commission will also include 16 heads of other ministries and agencies - from the Federal Security Service (FSB), Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to the ministries of Culture and mass communications. The Russian social networking site vKontakte, the home grown copy of Facebook, had to shut its services for some time after it was...

According to Russian experts, the domestic FSB security service is trying to subsume the SVR foreign intelligence service in order to recreate a latter day KGB in all but name. Supporters of the plan are seeking to capitalise on the SVR's worst post-Soviet failure, the deportation of ten of its sleeper agents from the United States this summer, arguing that the debacle proved that the SVR had lost its way, it is claimed. Pavel Felgenhauer, an intelligence agencies expert, said: "The mass collapse, arrest and subsequent deportation of ten Russian illegal agents from the USA has become a pretext for...

Just when you thought that bumbling Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale had retired for good, the FBI uncovers an 11-person, deep-cover Russian spy ring stretching from Boston to Washington. But while the would-be cloak-and-dagger cabal didn't seem to provide much intelligence booty to their handlers at the Russian SVR (the new KGB) over the past two decades, the spy bust does unearth some troubling issues: 1. The Russian government -- rife with former security officials from the Soviet period, including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin -- still sees us as an important target and competitor, no matter how often Team Obama...

They couldn’t have been spies, look what she did with the hydrangeas.—Jessie Gugig, age 15 Substituting high tech communications for the now passé Venona cables, the operatives managed to gain access to a government employee working in a nuclear program. Experts are astonished by the length and depth of the penetration. Why the surprise? The combination of our lax immigration enforcement combined with decades of indifference to the threat from Russian operatives makes this sort of thing a certainty. Putin’s people didn’t abandon their goals of conquering the United States—his hydrangea growers just got better at fitting in.

<p>WASHINGTON — Ten Russian intelligence officers have been arrested for allegedly serving as illegal agents of the Russian government in the United States, the Justice Department announced Monday.</p>

SNIPPET: "Frontpage Interview's guest today is Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, a former KGB agent who became one of the KGB’s harshest critics. He is the author of seven books about the KGB and Japan. His new book is KGB/FSB's New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent." SNIPPET: "My work in Tokyo as a spy from 1980-85, was very successful. I was covered as a correspondent of the Soviet TASS Agency. But it was not a cover for me. It was my actual job, because I am a born author. My KGB colleagues in Tokyo called me, with a grin, “An author covered...

ECHOES OF the Cold War have returned to Nato headquarters in Brussels after an Estonian general was unmasked as a “sleeper” spy who passed top secret alliance information to Moscow. Herman Simm (61), a retired official in Estonia’s defence ministry, has been arrested along with his wife on suspicion that they were recruited by KGB officers before the collapse of the Soviet Union. After Estonia’s independence in 1991, state prosecutors believe Mr Simm made contact with the KGB’s successor foreign intelligence agency, the SVR. The former police chief was the perfectly placed mole: between 1995 and 2006 he helped set...

In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan's foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts.

The relations between Russia and the Shiite's religious leadership in Lebanon started to develop in the beginning of the seventies. The spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. At the same time cooperation between the Marxist factions of the PLO that were active in Lebanon and Soviet military intelligence – GRU, intensified greatly. Several soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon between 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish...

Five members of a Russian-Armenian organized crime ring have been indicted for allegedly bilking Medicare of more than $20 million... The group operated medical clinics and laboratories in Los Angeles, Glendale and Pasadena that paid marketers for patient referrals and billed Medicare for tests that were unnecessary or were not done, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Searby wrote in court papers. Charged with conspiracy, health care fraud, Medicare kickbacks, making false statements to Medicare and money laundering. ...between 1997 and 2005.

Former CIA undercover agent: KGB and GRU former intelligence operators assist Hezbollah to penetrate the US Hezbollah - the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization - has more American blood on its hands than any Islamic terrorist ring with the sole exception of al-Qaeda, The American Spectator writes. Last week FBI Director Robert Muller announced that though the FBI and Customs had caught others, Hezbollah had succeeded in smuggling some operatives across the Mexican border into the US, he said. "This was an occasion in which Hezbollah operatives were assisting others with some association with Hezbollah in coming to the United States....