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When distress reports reached U.S. Intelligence in Langley and the Pentagon that the American ambassador to Benghazi and dozens of his diplomatic personnel were under terrorist attack in Libya on Sept. 11 2012, CIA and Defense Department officials scrambled an immediate response. Officials moved quickly to assemble a counter-terrorism team of professionals to dispatch to Benghazi. That little-known but elite squad, known as the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), is in fact the government’s sole inter-agency, on call and short notice team trained to respond to any terror-related incident in the world. But not this time. Not in Benghazi. FEST...

Dear Judge Sullivan: I am submitting my letter directly since Mike Flynn’s attorney has refused to submit it as well as letters submitted by other individuals.

WASHINGTON - Jewish-American Robert Levinson was not included in a prisoner exchange with Iran that came as the UN nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal and the West rolled back sanctions. Iran on Saturday released five Americans it was holding in its prisons or in detention, four of them as part of a prison swap which included the release of Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post journalist detained on espionage charges since 2014. The exchange comes on "implementation day" of the sanctions relief for nuclear restrictions deal Iran concluded last year with the United States and five other...

A tape apparently recorded by murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was poisoned has revealed he was digging up links between Vladimir Putin and one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. A Telegraph investigation uncovered the audio recording, in which the dissident claims from beyond the grave that Russia’s president had a “good relationship” with Semion Mogilevich - a Ukrainian crime boss who was on the FBI's most wanted list and whom Mr Litvinenko believed was selling weapons to al-Qaeda. The apparent recording of Mr Litvinenko is published for the first time ahead of a public inquiry...

Nearly two dozen defendants were arraigned last Friday in a Manhattan federal court for their alleged roles in a gambling ring for the fabulous people but missing from the crowd was reputed Russian mobster Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov who remains a fugitive as reported by Richard Behar for Forbes: "The feds call him a 'major figure in international Eurasian Organized Crime' who has been involved in 'drug distribution, illegal arms sales and trafficking in stolen vehicles.' In the current gambling case, he's accused of using his status as a thief-in-law (or vory v zakone) -- a select group of the highest-level criminals...

Temperatures were approaching freezing last November when a stern Vladimir Putin delivered a trademark tirade at a business forum in Berlin's venerably posh Hotel Adlon, steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Captains of industry sat stony faced as the Russian prime minister, reminding them Germany was phasing out nuclear power, said they had nowhere to turn but Russia, which was already supplying 40 percent of the country's demand for natural gas from its vast deposits. Otherwise, "how will you heat your houses?" he mocked. "Even for firewood, you'd have to go to Siberia." The immediate object of Putin's ire was a...

...Litvinenko "was giving Scaramella lots of information about Russian and criminal infiltrations in Italy, but most of it was very difficult to verify and crosscheck. It was a little bit out on a limb." In the old days, Litvinenko had been familiar with criminal clans in Russia, now he was making risky approaches to the Italian mafia. Scaramella believed if they could get inside this network, they would be able to leverage much more damaging intelligence about Italian politicians. They spread their net wider. The Litvinenko dossier lists a dizzying roll call of names investigated by the pair, among them...

Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister who is keen to clean up the murky natural gas trade between her country, Russia and central Asia, on Monday said Moscow’s arrest of a reputed crime boss was a sign that the days were numbered for ”corrupt” intermediaries. Ms Tymoshenko was referring to the arrest of the 61-year old mobster Semyon Mogilevich, who has alleged links to Swiss-registered RosUkrEnergo, a company half owned by Gazprom and 50 per cent controlled by two Ukrainian businessmen. ”We don’t need any shadowy intermediaries,” Ms Tymoshenko told reporters in Brussels while on her first foreign visit after...

A month ago, at the residence of Austrian Ambassador Martin Vukovich, Gazprom head Alexei Miller gave European Union ambassadors a dressing down over Britain’s reluctance to allow Gazprom to buy into Centrica, the Britain’s largest gas supplier. Miller stated outright that Gazprom’s strategy in Europe was to control the distribution network market. “Europeans have to accept this,” Miller said. And then, he threatened to sell gas to China if Europe didn’t toe the line. Last Thursday, at a meeting in Sochi with EU leaders, President Vladimir Putin softened the stance significantly, saying that the Russian and EU positions on major...

Dmytro Firtash, the Ukrainian businessman named as a major shareholder in RosUkrEnergo, emerged from the shadows last week as he pledged transparency for the multibillion-dollar gas trader in a string of first-time interviews with Western newspapers. In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Austria's Kurier newspaper published Friday, Firtash told of his rise to the top of the Turkmen-Ukrainian gas trade. From small beginnings in 1990s barter deals, he graduated to owning 90 percent of Centragas, the Vienna-registered vehicle that owns half of RosUkrEnergo, the monopoly gas trader for Ukraine, Firtash said. It was unclear Tuesday...

Gazprom's Izvestia newspaper announced with a flourish Wednesday that two Ukrainian businessmen, Dmytro Firtash and Ivan Fursin, were the beneficiaries behind the mysterious other half of RosUkrEnergo. Citing what it said were excerpts of a PricewaterhouseCoopers audit of the secretive gas trader, the newspaper named the men in a front-page article written in a sarcastic, anti-American tone that attempted to link them to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. The audit named Firtash and Fursin as the owners of Centragas, a company that owns the 50 percent of RosUkrEnergo not owned by Gazprom. Centragas is held by Austria's Raiffeisen Bank for beneficiaries...

U.S. officials say Russia has been using its control of Soviet-era pipelines to squeeze Central Asian sellers of natural gas while setting up corrupt trading intermediaries whose only apparent purpose is to milk huge profits. Alarmed by a recent price dispute between Russia and Ukraine that disrupted vital gas supplies to Europe, the Bush administration raised doubts about Russia's fitness to chair the Group of Eight leading industrialized countries, beginning with a finance ministers' meeting in Moscow this week. ... U.S. officials noted a huge gap between what Russia pays to import gas from Central Asia and what it charges...

MOSCOW/KIEV, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Europe may have breathed a collective sigh of relief after Russia and Ukraine signed a long-term gas supply deal, averting a possible repetition of the New Year supply cutbacks that unnerved the continent. But after a closer look at the complex pact signed on Wednesday, outsiders may yet have cause for concern about the region's energy security, especially after Ukraine's ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko launched a legal challenge to stop the deal. The accord uses as middleman a little-known Swiss-based joint venture called RosUkrEnergo, owned half by Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom (GAZPPE.RTS: Quote, Profile, Research) and...

Substantial sums of hard currency provided to Saddam Hussein from the sale of Iraqi oil allowed under United Nations sanctions have been laundered through banks around the world by a Russian Mafiya boss described in an MI5 report as "one of the world's top criminals." Despite that, Israel continues to allow Semyon Yukovich Mogilevich to travel openly on one of its passports. Even more remarkable, the MI5 description was reinforced by an investigation by Mossad. Its report concluded that Mogilevich is a "major criminal - but has taken great care to commit no crime against Israel." His supply of arms...