Free Republic

During the first Cold War, American and British spies would sometimes place coded messages in newspaper classified ads to communicate with each other. And according to new reports in the New York Times and The Intercept, the National Security Agency (NSA) has updated the tactic, using its public Twitter account to send secret messages to at least one Russian spy.... According to the reports, the unnamed Russian met with US spies in person in Germany, and the NSA sometimes communicated with the Russian spy by sending roughly a dozen coded messages from the NSA’s Twitter account. The one important question.......

Sarah Ashton-Crillo has been suspended from duties as Ukrainian military spokesperson pending an investigation, following comments by the transgender former US soldier threatening to "hunt down" critics of the US’ involvement in the Ukraine war.

Robert Hanssen was one of the most damaging spies in the history of the FBI. The former US agent, who has died in prison, leaked top secrets to Moscow for nearly 20 years - betrayals that the agency says cost lives. It took 300 agents to finally bring him down. Two of them who played a central part tell us how they did it. In December 2000, FBI agent Richard Garcia had a curious visit from a colleague overseeing the Russia desk. "He asked, 'Do you know a guy named Robert Hanssen?'" Mr Garcia recalled. "I said, 'No'." The official...

Tara Reade, a former Senate aide who accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault, announced Tuesday she defected to Russia. The shocking confession was made during a Russian state press conference, where Reade was sitting next to alleged Kremlin spy—and pal—Maria Butina. Reade told the pro-Putin press the “very difficult” decision to move came after the realization that she no longer feels safe in Biden's America. “I'm still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik. “I feel very surrounded by protection and safety. And I just really so appreciate Maria [Butina] and...

A vast trove of Jeffrey Epstein's private calendars and emails are being revealed today by DailyMail.com. The hundreds of pages in the files give an unprecedented insight into the late pedophile's extraordinary network of power and influence. Among the revelations is that Epstein appeared to know personal details about the marriage of Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda – while magician David Blaine had numerous dinners with the financier.

Jack Parsons via Wikimedia Commons John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons’s life seems too improbable to be believed. But it’s all there in the biographies, Sex and Rockets and Strange Angel (the basis of a TV series of the same name), among other places, including a streaming series based on Strange Angel. Born in 1914, Parsons died in 1952 while working on an explosive special effect for a movie in his home laboratory. The explosion has been called an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, depending on the source. An obituary in the Pasadena Independent described Parsons as “a down-to-earth explosives...

A Russian spy at the British embassy in Berlin was caught by a sting operation, the OId Bailey has heard. Briton David Ballantyne Smith, 58, was working as a security guard when he passed secret information to Russian authorities. The court heard how two fake Russian operatives working undercover helped lead to his arrest in August 2021. Prosecutors claim Smith held strong anti-UK views and was paid for information. ... Items seized from his flat included travel documents and sheets of blank embassy headed paper. Photographs taken at that address showed a Russian Federation flag, a Soviet military hat, a...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.” That disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens,...

The Army’s first openly transgender officer was indicted this week on charges of trying to give American service members medical information to the Russian government. A federal grand jury in Baltimore indicted the officer, Maj. Jamie Lee Henry, and Henry's wife, Anna Gabrielan, who is a Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist, on counts of conspiracy and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information (IIHI), court documents show. According to court documents, Henry and Gabrielan were approached by an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian diplomat. Gabrielan asked the agent if she was from the Russian Embassy, and the agent said she...

The US Army’s first transgender officer has been indicted for attempting to pass medical information to the Russians in a bid to aid Vladamir Putin’s campaign in Ukraine.A grand jury came to the conclusion that Jamie Lee Henry, who is a Major in the Army and transgender, and his wife Anna Gabrielian (confused yet?) committed conspiracy and illegally disclosed “individually identifiable health information.” The indictment was unsealed on Thursday after the two were arrested.Breaking 911 provides some further details.BREAKING: First openly trans Army officer charged in plot to give U.S. military medical info to Russians to help in war against...

The Army’s first openly transgender officer was indicted Thursday on charges of trying to provide American soldiers’ medical information to the Russian government. A federal grand jury in Baltimore indicted Jamie Lee Henry and his wife, Anna Gabrielian, on charges of conspiracy and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information. According to prosecutors, the couple met last month with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian diplomat and offered medical information from Fort Bragg, the home of the military’s elite Delta Force. Gabrielian, an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the undercover agent during an Aug. 17 meeting that...

Joe Biden wrote to his son Hunter and others close to him using the pseudonym “Peter Henderson” – a fictional Soviet Union-era spy in several Tom Clancy novels who infiltrated the US government, emails show. The messages contained on Hunter’s abandoned laptop appear to indicate the then-VP started using the fictitious mole’s moniker in October 2016 while forwarding a YouTube video to his son Hunter, brother Jim, daughter-in-law Hallie, as well as his sister and longtime political strategist Valerie Biden Owens. Biden sent the message using an email address with a username of “67stingray” — a clear reference to his...

A Danish soldier who volunteered to fight alongside the Ukrainian armed forces has made unverified claims that Ukrainian soldiers have been executing Russian prisoners of war. The Dane, who uses the pseudonym Jonas, has alleged that Ukrainian soldiers have killed Russian prisoners of war during the war, saying: “I have heard of one successful prisoner exchange, and that’s it,” and adding: “People are being killed.” Said to be a marksman, Jonas travelled to Ukraine to volunteer to fight alongside the Ukrainian armed forces and told state-owned Danish broadcaster TV2 he has also killed Russian soldiers — but never any captured...

Seven Labour lawmakers quit on Monday over leader Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to Brexit and a row over anti-Semitism, saying Britain’s main opposition party had been “hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left”. In a direct challenge to Corbyn, the seven centrist MPs said they were courting others from across parliament to join their group, saying “enough is enough” in keeping silent over their doubts about the Labour leader’s fitness for office. United by a desire for a second referendum on Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, now that the likely terms of the divorce are known, they...

There is every reason to believe that Butina is in prison because a lawyer by the name of Veselnitskaya is at large. These two Russians are not connected by their Russian origin or their suspicious (and suspiciously successful) activities in America. They are connected because of the inexplicable desire of the Obama administration to see both of them on American soil. ... It looks as though both Veselnitskaya and Butina worked not for Russian intelligence, but rather for American intelligence, which, under Obama's leadership, organized full-scale surveillance of his political opposition during the 2016 election campaign. Of course, they were...

US counter-intelligence investigators discovered a suspected Russian spy had been working undetected in the heart of the American embassy in Moscow for more than a decade, the Guardian has learned. The Russian national had been hired by the US Secret Service and is understood to have had access to the agency’s intranet and email systems, which gave her a potential window into highly confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice-president. The woman had been working for the Secret Service for years before she came under suspicion in 2016 during a routine security sweep conducted by two investigators...

A federal indictment was filed against alleged Russian spy Marina Butina this past week. She is accused of conspiring to “advance the interests of the Russian Federation.” Butina has ties to a high-level Russian official connected to Putin.

Desperate Trump-haters, searching for something – anything! – to show that the Trump administration is in bed with Vladimir Putin seized on the news a week ago that a young Russian named Maria Butina had been indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), or, in the words of the DOJ, for "conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General." Here at last was a face – and a red-headed female one, to boot – to attach to the charges of treason being thrown around by the likes...

A 29-year-old Russian woman accused of working as a covert spy while in the U.S. on a student visa remains behind bars.photoButina is a suspected covert Russian spy. She is a Russian national who was in the U.S. on a student visa, enrolled at American University in Washington, D.C. She received her graduate degree from the university in May.She's known for her pro-gun activism and founded a Russian gun rights group in Moscow.The 29-year-old grew up in a modest apartment building in the Siberian city of Barnaul, closer to the Mongolian and Kazakh borders than Moscow.She developed an interest in...