Free Republic

On this date in 1987, a once-promising American intelligence asset was executed with a single gunshot to the head in Moscow — his treachery exposed by two of the most infamous Soviet moles in U.S. intelligence history. A Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB posted to the Soviets’ official Washington, D.C. offices in 1980, Martynov had turned in 1982 and begun funneling intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the cryptonym “Gentile”. Truth be told, he was a mediocre source, but he was a younger officer with the chance to grow into a more important asset in the years ahead. Fate...

The newly revealed exploits of spies who operated in underground tunnels The CIA dug a tunnel under the Kremlin and installed a hi-tech bugging system to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's most senior figures, according to the former US intelligence officer who executed the plan. The device was put in by a US agent who had to wear a protective suit and was guided by satellite and sonar images of Moscow's underground. The bugging formed part of audacious operations to rescue a key defector, a KGB officer with responsibility for eavesdropping, and to alert Boris Yeltsin to the attempted coup...

From Wikipedia: Robert Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB which detailed U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. counterintelligence program.[3] He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the United States, some of whom were executed for their betrayal. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy in Washington. After Ames' arrest in 1994, some of these...

Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government. Said an intelligence officer: “I know what's best for foreign policy and national security… And I'm going to act on that.” Some of us might applaud this man, including a few of my fellow Democrats. In their minds, this is a case of Mr. Smith Goes to Langley to do battle against a corrupt President Trump. One small problem. The intelligence officer quoted above was actually Aldrich Ames,...

During the 1980s with no end of the Cold War in sight, the CIA became alarmed at the number of Soviet spies working for the U.S. who were being arrested and executed. The U.S. network of informants within the USSR was rapidly being dismantled, severely damaging American intelligence gathering capabilities. It became apparent that the CIA had a mole who was compromising their efforts. Based on the book Circle of Treason by former CIA agent Sandy Grimes, the ABC series The Assets dramatizes the events and investigation leading to the arrest of traitor Aldrich Ames. The show is a grim...

Why is this man still in jail? Why was this man forced to spend seven years in solitary? Why is still confined, languishing, festering in jail for a total of twenty five years? Solitary confinement is the most barbaric of punishments. Few people can withstand this form of torture without becoming very ill, both physically and mentally. Am I talking about the Soviet Gulag? Or about some hell-hole in Afghanistan or Iran? Last year, The New Yorker ran a piece about solitary confinement. The article concludes that this punishment amounts to torture, that it can even induce “acute psychosis with...

President Clinton ordered a warrantless physical search of Aldrich Ames's residence in 1993, but Congress bolstered FISA by updating it to further assist Clinton instead of accusing his administration of illegal searches. Video

AN ALLEGED attempt to kill a former Russian spy who defected to Britain was being investigated by police last night. Oleg Gordievsky was admitted to a hospital in Guildford after falling ill in November last year. And yesterday he claimed he had been poisoned with the highly toxic metal thallium in a botched assassination attempt. Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence during the 1980s, claims he was targeted by a Russian assassin who visited him at his safe house in Surrey. The 69-year-old was unconscious for 34 hours after falling ill last year and...

The 'dumb blonde' who excelled as a spy Helena Smith Sunday October 30, 2005 The Observer Long before Valerie Plame became America's most famous spy, she learnt Greek and moved to Athens. It was 1990, her first foreign posting and not long after graduation from Penn State University - and recruitment to the CIA - nearly everything she dreamed of. Ambitious, blonde and beautiful, Plame, then 27, took to the job with alacrity. With 'State Department Cover' at Athens' US embassy, the secrets of her trade were easy to conceal. Greece, under the unpredictable governance of Andreas Papandreou, a former...

The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 6 for refusing to reveal anonymous sources to a Bush administration special prosecutor is the latest ricochet of the political conniving and bullying that thrust the country into a war and a costly occupation in Iraq. A federal appeals court has ruled that Miller and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper are obligated to testify to a grand jury about conversations they had with anonymous sources. Shielding the confidentiality of journalistic sources is a time-honored practice, held in the same regard — at least until now — as confidentiality between...

I'll get the C-SPAN link in a moment.