Free Republic

This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates. MOSCOW — A deadly shooting erupted near the fortresslike headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service in central Moscow on Thursday evening, the security agency said in a statement that also reported several people had been wounded. Russian news reports said up to three people had been killed. “An unknown person opened fire near building #12 on the Bolshaya Lubyanka street,” the security service statement said, according to the Interfax news agency. “Some people were injured.” The statement also said that the assailant had been “neutralized” and was being identified....

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler explained Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" why he rejected requests from Republican members of his committee for a day of hearings with their own witnesses. "The list of witnesses [that] they asked me to call, I said no to because they are irrelevant," Nadler said. "They can appeal to the full committee if they wish and we’ll have a vote on that. But like any trial judge, you keep the witnesses to the relevancy... Adam Schiff, they wanted, is not a relevant witness. He didn't witness anything." House Judiciary Republicans asked for...

Is the New York Times "airbrushing" history again? It would seem so. On Saturday, November 22, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko presided over a commemoration in Kiev of the 75th anniversary of the famine genocide of 1932-1933 that took the lives of 7-10 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "murder by hunger"), it is one of the greatest mass murders in history, and one of the cruelest ... The New York Times prides itself on being the national "newspaper of record" and still carries its longtime motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" in the upper left-hand corner...

Vanity , Quillith, just a vanity

How do you quit the KGB without getting "eliminated"? Jack Barsky tells the real-life spy story of how he came to America as a Soviet sleeper agent for the KGB, but started enjoying his new life in America so much he dangerously chose to leave his old life behind.

Since Obama has raised the alarm about alleged Russian espionage activity, it’s appropriate to shine a spotlight on his own administration’s connections to Soviet-era spy rings and terrorist networks. Obama and two of his key advisors, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, were raised by families with members who are known either to have been in contact with Soviet agents or to have belonged to the Communist Party (CP) at a time when the CP was controlled by the Soviet Union. Associates of Obama’s campaign team and Jarrett’s family interacted with agents linked to the famous pair of spy rings known...

A short video showing scenes of the spiritual revival in Russia along with some footage from the Communist era.

In terms of scandals, the sordid saga of Jeffrey Epstein has it all. Mysterious gaudy fortunes. Jet-setting debauchery. Lots of pretty girls—including very young girls. Sex and more sex, not necessarily legal or consensual. Add a battalion of VIPs, including billionaires, A-list celebrities, royalty and no less than two American presidents. The only thing missing was espionage… and it’s not missing anymore.

The hedge fund founded and, until recently, run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer was involved in a deal to sell a stake in a Russian oil company to a Russian oligarch who is the target of U.S. sanctions. Farallon Capital Management sold a part of its stake in Russian firm Geotech Oil Services to the Volga Group, a Luxembourg-based investment firm owned by Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko, in 2010. Four years later, in April 2014, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it would target Timchenko, Volga, and a number of companies associated with them, in a round of sanctions aimed...

Pope Francis, starting back in 2014, instituted Islamic prayers to the moon god allah in the Vatican. In 2018, he told a photographer that he was ‘the Devil’ then walked away laughing about it. In 2019, he called for all Catholic schools to begin teaching about Islam, and he signed a ‘Universal Brotherhood’ concordat with Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb after kissing him on the mouth. Did I say Pope Francis was the False Prophet? Hmm, now that I think about it, he sounds more like Antichrist. FROM LEO HOHMANN: The Vatican has released the preparatory document for its upcoming Pan-Amazonian Synod...

I just finished watching the amazing HBO miniseries "Chernobyl." It's one of the finest series ever produced. The biggest takeaway is how socialists and communists lie. It's in their DNA. They lie about everything. And those lies are often so absurd they get themselves in trouble. When it came to Chernobyl, the Soviet communist propaganda machine lied about everything. Officials denied there was any problem in the first place. Then they denied it was a complete meltdown. They denied nearby towns had to be evacuated. They denied the KGB knew there was a potential problem long before it happened but...

How Often Did Francis Mention Communism? Not Once During his final day in Romania, Pope Francis beatified in Blaj seven Greek-Catholic bishops (picture) murdered by the Romanian Communists (1947-1989). Marco Tosatti noticed that during the liturgy Francis succeeded in pronouncing the word “Communism” not even once. According to Francis the seven gave their lives to oppose an "illiberal ideological system." In reality they died because they resisted Communist plans to integrate the Greek Catholic Church into the Orthodox. #newsQcjviqjxrb

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...

There is no evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a master at the board game called "chess", but he is a grand master at a real life version of the game. In 2016. he began an operation to discredit the American system of elections. He took advantage of the basic stupidity of many American politicians and journalists to create the delusion that he had colluded with Donald Trump to affect the presidential election. Putin was a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB, the highly effective Soviet Secret Police. If the Russians had been trying to elect Trump, any Russian contact...

Why did Steele, with all of his experience, miss this obvious disinformation campaign in 2016? Christopher Steele is known to be an extremely left-wing mind, and he quite aggressively tried to help his transatlantic ideological soulmate, Hillary Clinton, to win the presidential election. ... Why did Steele, well acquainted with the methods of Russian intelligence, allow the GRU to fool him this time? Steele had a sincere desire to believe that everything the "reliable Russian sources" had thrown at him was right. ... Oddly enough, Skripal's poisoning was triggered not by the actions of the Trump administration, but by the...

Anya Fedotova is a 31-year-old Russian photo editor. She works in GUM, a state department store on the Red Square in Moscow. Every day she goes to work in what was once a prime example of democratized enterprise—an attempt to boost Communism through consumerism. On her way to the office, she passes by grandparents pointing out Soviet-era toys, accessories and tableware to their grandchildren, showing them what life was like back in the USSR. “It’s one of the centres of Soviet-era nostalgia,” she tells me. “Entire families come here to enjoy the atmosphere and eat Soviet ice-cream.” In a recent...

Freedom's Enemies: A collaborator of the Rosenbergs admits his previously unknown Soviet espionage more than 60 years after the fact. It's just the latest revelation that the anti-communists of that era were right. The "innocent victims" of the Red Scare were once legion — like suave U.S. envoy Alger Hiss, who doubled as a Soviet spy chief, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave Moscow A-bomb plans. The latest debunking of this myth is Rosenberg fellow spy Morton Sobell, who finally admitted it in 2008. But in a December interview with Ronald Radosh and Steven Usdin, Sobell, 93, added that...

Perhaps the only thing that outrages Russian defenders of Stalin more than the obvious parallels between his regime and Hitler’s is any reference to the alliance the two dictators formed in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, one that opened the way to war in Europe and lasted until Hitler turned on his former ally in June 1941. But now there may be something even more offensive to such defenders of Stalin and his system: the discovery of documents which confirm that the NKVD cooperated closely with the Gestapo well before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed and that may have paved...

On the morning of November 17th, 1962, FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. took on “all the trappings of a military command post,” according to historian William Breuer. The previous night an intelligence puzzle had finally come together. The resulting picture staggered the FBI men. And these had served at their posts during WWII and the height of the Cold War. They’d seen plenty. Now they had mere days to foil a crime against their nation to rival Hideki Tojo’s.At the time (pre-Mueller! And pre-Comey!), the FBI relied heavily on “HUMINT” (Human Intelligence.) So they’d expertly penetrated the plot, identified the ringleaders...

Volume 7, No. 3 - September 2003 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE COLD WAR'S LONGEST COVER-UP: HOW AND WHY THE USSR INSTIGATED THE 1967 WAR By Isabella Ginor The Soviet warning to Egypt about supposed Israeli troop concentrations on the Syrian border in May 1967 has long been considered a blunder that precipitated a war which the USSR neither desired nor expected. New evidence from Soviet and other Warsaw Pact documents, as well as memoirs of contemporary actors, contradicts this accepted theory. The author demonstrates that this warning was deliberate disinformation, part of a plan approved at the highest level of Soviet leadership...