Free Republic

New details of Moscow's intelligence work in Cuba were disclosed by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to Britain in 1992. ...Russian KGB officer Nikolai Leonov became "firm friends," with Mr. Castro's younger brother Raul in Prague in 1953 and then worked together with Fidel from 1956 and after he took power in 1959. The book, the second volume of what is known as the Mitrokhin archive, also reveals how Moscow sought to indirectly defeat the United States during the Cold War through large-scale "disinformation" and influence operations in the developing world. "The KGB really believed they could...

UNITED NATIONS -- Iraq wants the United Nations to lift all sanctions and stop using the country's oil revenue to pay compensation to victims of the 1991 Gulf War and the salaries of U.N. weapons inspectors, Iraq's U.N. ambassador said Tuesday. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie called sanctions "anachronistic and inappropriate" and said it's time for the Security Council to recognize that Iraq is a "much more internationally friendly" country that wants to be at peace with its neighbors. No longer needed, he said, was the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which was responsible for dismantling Iraqi programs to build chemical...

VIETNAM ALLUSION TK: Monday I dwelled a bit on one of John Kerry's many yet-to-be-exploited-but-blindingly-obvious vulnerabilities: his vote on the 1991 Gulf war. I noted in that post that the vote could be potentially devastating to Kerry, not so much because it portrays him as soft on national security, but because it makes him look like he takes whichever side of whatever issue happens to be most politically advantageous. (Or, as Mickey Kaus would have it, whichever side he thinks is most politically advantageous, however wrong he turns out to be.) Turns out I was giving Kerry too much credit....