Ex-navy chief: Israel has defenses against Russian missile coveted by Hezbollah

Vice-Admiral (res.) Marom told the Post the West does not know very much about the Yakhont.

Israel has defenses in place against the supersonic Russian- made Yakhont anti-ship missile, ex-navy chief Vice-Admiral (res.) Eliezer Marom told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, days after The Wall Street Journal reported that Hezbollah has been smuggling the weapon to Lebanon in pieces to evade Israeli strikes.

Describing the Yakhont as the most advanced missile of its kind in the world, Marom said the West does not know very much about the weapon, which flies at low altitude “right over the sea,” reaching speeds of between Mach 2 and Mach 3 (up to three times the speed of sound).

With most other missiles in the Yakhont’s group achieving subsonic speed at most, the Yakhont represents a new type of threat, giving the navy between half and a third of the time to respond compared to other threats, Marom said.

“Israel has answers for these missiles, and these are being developed all of the time,” Marom, who completed his term as navy chief in 2011, added. “The more advanced the missile is, the less percentage of defenses available. This is a big challenge to the navy.

Additionally, with a range of 300 kilometers, it can reach every location on the Israeli coast.”

Should Hezbollah come to possess an operational arsenal of Yakhont missiles, it would be able to target Israeli gas drilling rigs in the Mediterranean, civilian shipping, and ports.

While regimes like Syria can be deterred with threats of force if they try to smuggle the missile, Hezbollah is largely immune to such pressure, Marom said.

“Hezbollah might say, ‘attack Lebanon, go ahead.’ It doesn’t bother them so much. This is the difficulty of dealing with a non-state actor,” he said.

Noting that Israel has publicly warned it would intervene if strategic weapons were sent to Lebanon, Marom compared Israel’s attempts at stopping Hezbollah’s ongoing smuggling efforts and the arms flow from Syria to Lebanon to police pursuing criminals.

The ability to militarily stop such smuggling “depends on pinpoint intelligence, and the ability to carry out pinpoint attacks,” Marom said. “There are serious difficulties in this kind of option. In addition to intelligence and military capabilities, it needs a government decision.

I’m no longer among decision makers, but my assumption is that in some cases, a decision was taken not to intervene, even if intelligence was received,” he said.

Diplomacy represents an additional route available to Israel to pressure those involved in smuggling, though this channel seems to have failed, the former navy chief said.

In August last year, unnamed US officials leaked information on alleged Israel Air Force air strikes in Syria, telling The New York Times that a July 5 strike on a Syrian warehouse near Latakia targeted Yakhont missiles, and that the strike failed to destroy all of the missiles.

What's going on in Russia is likely not all it appears to be. The Russians are masters of deception.
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Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security agent fighting for his life in a UK hospital after allegedly being poisoned, has been a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin since before he became president in 2000.

Mr Litvinenko is thought to have been close to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another opponent of the Kremlin who was shot dead last month, and said recently he was investigating her murder. It was after being handed documents apparently relating to the case that he was taken ill more than two weeks ago.

But he is perhaps best known for a book in which he alleges that agents co-ordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people. He now appears to have fallen victim to the kind of plots which he wrote about.

Arrest
Mr Litvinenko, 43, first became a security agent under the Soviet-era KGB, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in its later incarnations.

He is reported to have fallen out with Vladimir Putin, then head of the security service, in the late 1990s, after failing in attempts to crack down on corruption within the organisation. In 1998, he first came to prominence by exposing an alleged plot to assassinate the then powerful tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who himself now lives in self-imposed exile in the UK. He was subsequently arrested on charges of abusing his office and spent nine months in a remand centre before being acquitted.

In 1999 he wrote Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, in which he accused the current Russian security service, the FSB, of carrying out several apartment house bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people. The attacks, which Moscow blamed on Chechen rebels, helped swing public opinion behind Russia's second war in the breakaway republic.

Petrol bombs
Complaining of persecution, in 2000 Mr Litvinenko fled to the UK where he sought, and was granted, asylum. But after settling in an unnamed London suburb, the former spy continued to behave as if on the run, constantly changing his contact details. The Times newspaper reported that over the summer someone tried to push a pram loaded with petrol bombs at his front door. Appearing alongside high-profile opponents of President Putin, he has continued to make allegations about his former bosses. Perhaps most notably, he alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB in Dagestan in the years before 9/11.

http://www.russianlondon.ru/uknews/news/32117/
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Blowing up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror
by Alexander Litvinenko, Yuri Felshtinsky, Geoffrey Andrews and Co (Translator)

Synopsis: Blowing Up Russia contains the allegations of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko against his former spymasters in Moscow which led to his being murdered in London in November 2006. In the book he and historian Yuri Felshtinsky detail how since 1999 the Russian secret service has been hatching a plot to return to the terror that was the hallmark of the KGB. Vividly written and based on Litvinenko's 20 years of insider knowledge of Russian spy campaigns, Blowing Up Russia describes how the successor of the KGB fabricated terrorist attacks and launched a war. Writing about Litvinenko, the surviving co-author recounts how the banning of the book in Russia led to three earlier deaths.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Blowing-up-Russia/Alexander-Litvinenko/e/9781594032011
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From a 2007 article titled Putin's Russia...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts — in Russia and the West — have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..." (continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia
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Just something to consider, given who and what is running the government in Russia. Unlike us, they are absolutely capable of this sort of thing.

It's about way more than just Putin picking up some spare cash. Russia, under him, has eyes on returning to the glory of the days of the old Soviet Union. He actually thinks the so-called "collapse" of the Soviet empire was the worst thing that happened in the 20th Century. Or, in other words, the mass murdering Soviet system was the BEST thing that happened in the 20th Century. The communist Soviet Union was responsible for about 3 times as many murders as Germany under Hitler.

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
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"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor as much as the late British lord protector, a 'cunning fellow' who "played a very ambiguous role in Britain’s history."

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html

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