Free Republic

As the Ford Taurus slowly approached the signal site, hidden FBI agents readied for a possible arrest. For weeks they had been staking out a path in Foxstone Park in Vienna, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Their elusive quarry was a Soviet mole in the FBI, codenamed “Ramon Garcia.”  ver the course of more than two decades, “Ramon” had done incalculable damage to the United States’ security, selling Top Secret information to the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) and KGB, and to the KGB’s Russian successor agency, the FSB, and its foreign arm, the SVR. Would “Ramon” stop this time? More than...

As Alexander Litvinenko lay dying under tight police protection at London's University College hospital, he pointed an accusing finger at the man he believed responsible for ordering his assassination: Russian President Vladimir Putin. The dying man had good cause for suspecting Putin. Abundant evidence, including a radioactive trail of polonium-210, the substance used to poison him, leads right back to Putin's operatives in Moscow. In addition, the Kremlin's heavy-handed tactics to twart efforts of British police detectives sent to Russia to investigate the poisoning do little for the credibility of Putin's protestations of innocence and his pledges to do everything...

The conflict has little to do with Russia’s neo-imperialism, but a lot to do with Western reluctance to foot the bill of Soviet de-colonisation. • The “genuine democracies” created in the former Soviet Union in the wake of the so-called “colour revolutions” are failing to deliver political stability and economic prosperity. Insofar as they have failed to reduce dependence on subsidised Russian gas, they are also implicitly failing to deliver real independence. • Ukraine’s demands for continued supplies of cheap Russian/CIS gas in effect mean that Kiev is promoting the preservation of Soviet economic structures. Thus, it is implicitly promoting...