Rook: A Look Back At A Vietnam Era Spy Sentenced In Philadelphia

My Crime Beat column below originally appeared in the South Philadelphia American in October of 1997:

Spy stories traditionally unfold in Berlin, Hong Kong or some other exotic locale, but a 30-year espionage drama ended right here in a Philadelphia courthouse last week when Robert Stephen Lipka was sentenced to 18 years in prison for spying for the Soviet Union.

Lipka, 51, a coin collector from Lancaster, PA, admitted to spying from 1965 to 1974, the years of the Vietnam War, while serving as a young soldier attached to the National Security Agency (NSA). (NSA HQ at Fort Meade in Maryland is seen in the below photo).

A series of FBI investigations originating in the 1960's led to Lipka's sentencing day in the federal court at 6th and Market Streets. U.S. District Judge Charles r. Weiner, a WWII Navy veteran, admonished Lipka by saying that the parents of military servicemen might feel his crimes caused their children's deaths or maiming during the Vietnam War. Weiner also imposed a fine of $10,000 to repay the $10,000 the FBI paid him during the undercover "sting" operation that ultimately netted him.

Lipka, who resembles the actor who plays the despicable character Newman on TV's Seinfeld, no doubt shares some of Newman's more unsavory characteristics. 

Lipka aided the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese while I, my brother and thousands of other soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were fighting over there. Lipka sold out his brothers-in-arms for a paltry $27,000.

Lipka's spy story began when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1963. He was assigned to NSA at Fort Meade in Maryland, a cushy headquarters job far from the combat zone. 

NSA, the super-secret organization we called "No Such Agency" when I was in the Navy, intercepts foreign electromagnetic, radio, radar and other transmissions for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Lipka's clerical job was to simply make distribution of NSA's highly classified reports. 

We now know that Lipka took it upon himself to add the Soviet Union to his mailing list.

According to the FBI, Lipka used special spy cameras to clandestinely photograph sensitive documents. He also hid classified documents inside his shirt and wrapped around his legs to slip past NSA security. Using common "tradecraft" such as a prearranged "dead drop," he passed the documents to the Komitet Gosudarstevennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB), the Soviet Committee of State security. He later retrieved payment at another prearranged site.

Lipka left the Army and NSA and moved to Lancaster in 1967 and attended college. Lipka took some "souvenirs" when he left NSA and was still meeting with the KGB as late as 1974.

It was an independent FBI investigation of a couple who lived near Philadelphia that led to FBI to Lipka. Peter Fischer, whom the FBI suspected was a KGB agent, Ingeborg Fischer, whom the FBI suspected of assisting her husband in his KGB activities, made contact with Lipka in 1968. Evidence suggests the Fischers passed NSA documents from Lipka to a Soviet citizen, Artem Shokin, who worked at the United Nations in New York. The Fischers and Shokin subsequently flew the coup and returned to Mother Russia.

An FBI undercover agent posing as an official Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye (GRU), the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff, met with Lipka several times in Lancaster and Baltimore in 1993. Lipka insisted that the undercover FBI special agent provide Lipka's code word or he would end their contact. 

The undercover agent mentioned Lipka's code word "Rook," which the FBI discovered during the Fischer investigation. Lipka, ever the greedy little spy, told the undercover agent that the Soviets had not paid him enough money. He would complain again and again about money and even wrote the undercover agent letters demanding more money.

The undercover agent mailed Lipka a copy of a book called The First Directorate, which was written by former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin. The book implicates Lipka in its detailed description of espionage committed by a "young soldier at NSA," who provided "reams of top-secret material to the KGB in the mid-1960's.

According to the FBI, an unnamed "cooperating witness" who was granted immunity told the FBI that Lipka said he took NSA documents and sold them to the KGB. Lipka told the witness he gave them to a Russian contact named "Ivan" for money. Lipka said he would contact "Ivan" and have face-to-face meetings over a chess game in a park, hence the code name "Rook."

The witness was shown the three cameras, one of which was only an inch in height. Lipka told the witness that the Russian had sent him a postcard and Lipka, accompanied by the witness, met in Maryland with the Russian.

Faced with overwhelming evidence of the cooperating witness and the FBI undercover agent, Lipka had no choice but to plead guilty. He thought he had gotten away with espionage, but the long arm of the FBI and justice finally caught up with him. 

Note: Robert Lipka died in 2013.

You can also read my later Counterterrorism magazine interview with one of the FBI special agents involved with the Lipka investigation via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/06/before-snowden-look-back-at-nsa-spy.html 

Is Russia Paying The Taliban Bounties To Kill U.S. troops?: Until Verified, Can The United States Negotiate Counterterrorism With Putin, A Cold-Blooded KGB Killer?

Washington Times columnist Daniel N. Hoffman, a retired CIA officer, offers a column on the reports that Russia is paying a bounty on American troops in Afghanistan.

In 2018, Gen. John Nicholson, then the commander of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan, issued a stark warning about Russia’s “destabilizing activity” in Afghanistan.

Russian forces, the general charged, were conducting training exercises on the Afghan border with Tajikistan and purposely leaving some of their equipment, including night-vision goggles and small arms, behind for Taliban forces battling U.S. and coalition troops and the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.

For years, Russia has provided training and financial assistance to Taliban fighters, and in September 2019 hosted members of the Taliban for peace talks in Moscow. And now we have learned — based on tactical intelligence obtained from captured Taliban militants — that KGB operative-in-the-Kremlin Vladimir Putin may have authorized the Russian military intelligence service, known as the GRU, to pay “bounties” to Taliban fighters who kill U.S. troops.

If there is one thing I learned during the three years serving in war zones, it’s that captured fighters can be a valuable source of intelligence, but often that they seek as much to influence as to inform their captors.

The threshold for sharing so-called duty to warn intelligence, however, is understandably very low, and the U.S. intelligence community immediately disseminated the finding to U.S. and coalition forces in harm’s way — even before confirming its veracity.

But the threshold for President Trump and top policymakers is much higher, particularly when it comes to such actions as confronting Mr. Putin, expelling Russian officials or piling more sanctions on the Kremlin. U.S. analysts would need to collect far more additional intelligence to issue a judgment with a high enough level of confidence to justify action. The leak of the intelligence, which the White House and Pentagon have rightly deplored, will likely impede the effort to make a considered, proportionate response.

During this delicate trust-but-verify stage, the intelligence community might have wanted to give the president a heads-up about the findings, if only so he would not be blindsided if a coalition ally such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called to express appreciation for the warning.

Intelligence is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where some of the pieces are missing, and others come from entirely different puzzles. Presidential briefers and their bosses must decide when the contours of the jigsaw puzzle are sufficiently clear so that the president can begin considering policy options. 

Russia, remember, has invaded and occupied Georgia; was a co-conspirator in Syria’s and Iran’s attacks on civilians in Syria; poisoned former Russian military intelligence officer Sergey Skripal with a chemical nerve agent; invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea; and interfered in U.S. and European elections.

A Taliban bounty plot, then, would be completely consistent with Mr. Putin’s cloak-and-dagger approach to tactics and strategy. 

But however odious, a bounty plan would not have the throw-weight to turn the tide of the war in the Taliban’s favor.  

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/16/is-russia-paying-the-taliban-bounties-to-kill-us-t/

Betrayal In Berlin: My Washington Times 'On Crime' Column On Steve Vogel's interview With Cold War Spy George Blake

The Washington Times published my On Crime column on Steve Vogel’s interview with former Soviet spy George Blake (seen in the above photo).

Steve Vogel is the author of “Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War’s Most Audacious Espionage Operation,” which I reviewed in these pages. The book covered the dramatic story of the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service’s attempt to tap Soviet telephone lines by building a tunnel in Berlin during the Cold War.

But the bold plan was blown from the start. An SIS officer named George Blake was a Soviet spy and he informed the Soviets. To protect their valuable spy, the Soviets allowed the tunnel to be built. The West gained much intelligence before the Soviets publicly uncovered the tunnel.

The book covers many interesting people from the era, and although I despise the Soviet spy, I was most interested in George Blake. Blake lives in Russia today under the protection and public admiration of former KGB officer and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who calls him every year on his birthday.  

I contacted Steve Vogel (seen in the above photo) and asked him about his interview with George Blake.

“My dad was a case officer with the CIA, and I was born in Berlin in 1960,” Mr. Vogel said. “Too late for the tunnel, but in time for the Berlin Wall, which my dad said was put up to keep me out.”

He said he was back in Berlin in 1989 as a reporter and saw the fall of the Berlin Wall. He covered many Cold War spy stories, including the trial of East German Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf.

Steve Vogel said his father died in 1986 and hearing stories from his father’s retired CIA friends, he thought this was a good time to write a story about Cold War Berlin.

“When I started the book, I was focusing on the tunnel, but it’s hard not to get sucked into the George Blake story. He was a fascinating figure, one of the great espionage stories of the 20th century,” Mr. Vogel said.

You can read the rest of the column below or via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/18/steve-vogels-interview-with-cold-war-spy-george-bl/ 

You can also read my Washington Times review of Betrayal in Berlin via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2020/01/cold-war-spying-in-spy-capitol-of-world.html 

Cold War Spying In The Spy Capitol Of The World: My Washington Times Review Of 'Betrayal In Berlin'

The Washington Times ran published my review of Betrayal in Berlin:

As a teenager in the 1960s, I was a devoted reader of spy thrillers by Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Donald Hamilton, John le Carre and others. The spy thrillers led me to read about the Cold War and true espionage stories. 

Later, while serving in the U.S. Navy in Scotland in the mid-1970s, I went on leave and visited Berlin. As a student of espionage, I was drawn to Berlin, as the German city was the spy capital of the world at the time. I visited the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and the bars where criminals and spies gathered to drink, eat and swap secrets.

Steve Vogel’s “Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the Cold War’s Most Audacious Espionage Operation” took me back to Berlin, although the historical events of this story take place in 1955-56.

Mr. Vogel opens his book with what was known in intelligence lore as “Black Friday,” when the Soviets changed their cryptographic systems in 1948.

Since 1943, Mr. Vogel explains, the U.S. had been intercepting and decrypting secret Soviet radio communications, which gave American officials a comprehensive understanding of the Soviet military and intelligence agencies.

The U.S. Army Security Agency was producing valuable intelligence in a program call VENONA. VENONA exposed Soviet spies such as Klaus Fuchs, who gave up atomic secrets to the Soviets, and Donald Maclean, the first of the British Cambridge spy ring to be suspected. But then the Soviets stopped using UHF radio and began to communicate with Moscow via landlines.

American investigators believed it was a routine systems upgrade, but they later learned that VENONA had been betrayed by two Soviet spies. One was William Weisland, a Russian linguist working for the Army Security Agency. The second spy was Harold “Kim” Philby, a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officer who was the liaison to the CIA and FBI in Washington.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/24/book-review-betrayal-in-berlin/ 

My Washington Times Review of Ben Macintyre's 'The Spy And The Traitor'

The Washington Times published my review of Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.

John le Carre, the author of the classic spy thrillers “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” called Ben Macintyre’s book “The best true spy story I have ever read.”

Now out in paperback, Mr. Macintyre’s “The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War” is the true story of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB colonel who spied for the British and later defected to the United Kingdom in 1985.

“Oleg Gordievsky was born into the KGB: Shaped by it, loved by it, twisted, damaged, and very nearly destroyed by it. The Soviet spy service was in his heart and in his blood. His father worked for the intelligence service all his life, and wore his KGB uniform every day, including weekends. The Gordievskys lived amid the spy fraternity in a designated apartment block, ate special food reserved for officers, and spent their free time socializing with other spy families. Gordievsky was a child of the KGB,” Mr. Macintyre writes in the beginning of the book.

The author notes that the KGB — the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnnosti, or Committee for State Security — was the most complex and far-reaching intelligence agency ever created. The KGB had the role of both foreign and domestic intelligence gathering, as well as internal security enforcement and state police. The KGB controlled every aspect of life in the Soviet Union.

Gordievsky moved up the chain in the KGB to become the “rezident,” the senior KGB intelligence officer in London, working out of the Soviet embassy. For more than 10 years he was also working as a double agent for the British.       

As Mr. Macintyre points out in his outstanding book, Gordievsky became disillusioned with Soviet communism while posted in Copenhagen. The Soviet police state paled in comparison to the freedom of the West. His disillusionment became total after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and he decided to spy for the British.  

His intelligence was so valuable that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan were given briefings on Gordievsky’s insights into the KGB and Soviet political leadership. The CIA was not told who the Brit spy was, so they launched an investigation to learn who the valuable British asset was. 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/30/book-review-spy-and-traitor/ 

Ben Macintyre: The Toxic Cloud Of Lies Over Chernobyl

I’m watching the HBO series Chernobyl, a well-made dramatization of the horrific Soviet nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.   

The Australian published Ben Macintyre’s London Times column on the Soviet lies and cover-up of the Chernobyl disaster.

A few days after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, The Washington Post received a sensational leak from an unknown source: a letter from the US Information Agency to a Republican senator, advising him to exaggerate the number of casualties from the explosion at the nuclear plant in Ukraine.

The Information Agency had been established by Eisenhower to influence public opinion abroad. The senator, David Durenberger, was chairman of the select committee on intelligence. The leaked letter proved that the US was attempting, in the words of its author, to “make the Chernobyl disaster into an effective propaganda campaign” by falsely asserting the accident had already claimed up to 3,000 victims. It was a shocking attempt to embarrass the Soviet Union, mislead the public and make political mileage out of terrible human tragedy.

Except the letter was a KGB forgery. This was a calculated attempt by Moscow to plant fake news and make western anxiety over the nuclear disaster appear artificially inflated as part of a cynical Cold War ploy on the part of America. “Service A” of the KGB, the Soviet intelligence unit specializing in the deception technique known as desinformatsiya (disinformation), had obtained the letterhead of the USIA and then written a fake text underneath with a bogus signature. The Post spotted the ruse and killed the story before it could run.

The forged letter was just one element in the vast toxic cloud of falsehood, half-truths and censorship that spread from the Soviet Union in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. The gripping HBO-Sky series Chernobyl follows the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe, reflecting the best and worst of human nature, but its central theme is the official degradation of truth and what happens when the state deliberately and systematically deceives its citizens. Soviet Russia responded to the horror of Chernobyl by trying to contain the story inside a concrete casing of lies.

Chernobyl helped to destroy the Soviet Union but the techniques of desinformatsiya have been inherited and refined by the modern Russian state, while fake news, and false allegations of fake news, have poisoned modern politics.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/the-toxic-cloud-of-lies-over-chernobyl/news-story/849470db363b8053badfa144fefd7082 

The Skripal Files: The Life And Near Death Of A Russian Spy

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a review in the Washington Times of Mark Urban’s The Skripal Files. 

Speaking to reporters in December 2010, Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that his spy agencies had assassination squads that targeted defectors. But he voiced an ominous warning. “Whatever thirty pieces of silver those people may have gotten, they will stick in their throat.”

Despite his shortcomings as a decent human, give Mr. Putin credit: He carries out his threats. Any person unfortunate enough to cross him is a step removed from the grave.

The civilized world was shocked in March when a defected Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, were stricken with a mysterious poison in the quiet British town of Salisbury. They were in critical condition for weeks but survived. Scientific tests identified the poison involved as Novichok, developed by Russia for germ warfare. It had been smeared on the door knob of the Skripal home.

The attack matched earlier Russian murder operations, notably the poisoning death of defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

Mr. Skripal, a onetime Red Army airborne colonel, had shifted to the GRU, the military’s intelligence arm. Disillusioned with the Communist regime, he tried to resign, but was refused. (As Mr. Putin himself once said, “There is no such thing as an ex-KGB man.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/21/book-review-the-skripal-files-by-mark-urban/  

What ‘The Americans’ Got Wrong (And Right) About Cold War Espionage

My wife and I watched and enjoyed the final episode of the TV series The Americans the other night. We’ve watched the espionage series since the beginning.

As a writer who covers espionage, I’ve interviewed CIA officers, American military intelligence officers, FBI counterintelligence agents, and British, Israeli and Russian intelligence officers over the years. I could spot where the show's producers and writers fictionalized real events from the Cold War. Other than there being far too much sex and violence, the TV show was fairly accurate.

Not that sex wasn't employed during the Cold War. Markus Wolf of the East German Stasi, who used sex frequently with “honey traps,” said, “Sex and espionage certainly go together – that’s an old tradition.”  

As for violence, yes, American intelligence officers were killed in Vietnam, the Middle East and elsewhere, but the KGB, the FBI and the CIA did not murder each other, as both sides feared the repercussions.

Lee Ferran at realclearlife.com offers a piece on a sort of  “after action report” on The Americans.   

Just hours before the final episode of FX’s hit Cold War-era espionage drama The Americans aired and threw #NatSecTwitter into convulsions Wednesday night, the stars of the show appeared on stage at UCLA alongside real-life ex-CIA undercover officers to talk tradecraft and what separates fact from fiction.

For the uninitiated, The Americans is set in the 1980s and follows two Soviet intelligence officers living secretly as a married couple with kids in Washington, D.C. as part of the KGB’s infamous “illegals” program. The show was one of the most tense dramas on television and gave off a particularly grounded feel.

Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, respectively) never drove invisible cars or made clever quips after dispatching a nameless enemy. But they did struggle with the moral ambiguity of their work as they manipulated and destroyed the lives of relatively innocent people and, occasionally, murdered others who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was a somber portrayal of a secret, gruesome world, aided a great deal by the experience of show creator Joe Weisberg, himself a former CIA officer.

But that doesn’t mean The Americans got everything right. At Wednesday’s event at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations, former CIA officers and Cold Warriors Martha Peterson and Mark Kelton joined Weisberg, Russell, Rhys and Costa Ronin, who plays a Russian embassy official in the show, to set the record straight.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.realclearlife.com/politics/the-americans-got-wrong-right-cold-war-espionage/ 

From Russia With Love: My Washington Times Piece on Russian Assassins

The Washington Times published my piece on Russian assassins.

In Ian Fleming’s 1957 thriller “From Russia With Love,” his finest novel in my view, a psychopath assassin named Donovan “Red” Grant is sent by Soviet intelligence to the West to kill British operative James Bond.

The late Mr. Fleming, a naval intelligence officer during WWII and a journalist who covered espionage cases both before and after the war, acknowledged that his thriller plots were fantastic, but yet, he added, that they were often based on the real world of intelligence. He said that on occasion a news story would “lift a corner of the veil” and reveal the real world of spies, assassins and commandos.

For example, Mr. Fleming noted the case of Russian assassin Capt. Nikoly Khokhlov, who was ordered to murder a Russian dissident in Germany in 1954. Khokhlov was equipped with an electrically operated gun fitted with a silencer and concealed in a gold cigarette case. The gun fired bullets tipped in cyanide, which were designed to lead a pathologist to rule the cause of death to be heart failure.

While today the United Kingdom, the U.S. and other Western nations condemn Russia for the attempted murder of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, the brazen poisoning and attempted murder of him and his daughter in the United Kingdom was by no means the first of its kind.

The Russians in the bad old days of the Soviet Union sent forth a good number of assassins to the West to murder Soviet “enemies of the state.” The Russian government under Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, appears to be carrying on the old tradition.

“It has long been known that the Soviet state security service (currently the KGB) resorts to abduction and murder to combat what are considered to be actual or potential threats to the Soviet regime,” stated a 1964 CIA report that was declassified in 1993.

 “These techniques, frequently designated as ‘executive action’ and known within the KGB as ‘liquid affairs’ (Mokryye Dela), can be and are employed abroad as well as within the borders of the USSR. They have been used against Soviet citizens, Soviet emigres, and even foreign nationals. A list of those who have fallen victim to such action over the years would be a very long one and would include even the co-founder of the Soviet state, Leon Trotsky. Several well-known Soviet assassination operations which have occurred since the rise of Khrushchev attest to the fact that the present leadership of the USSR still employs this method of dealing with its enemies.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/3/how-russias-long-history-of-assassinations-can-gui/

Note: The top photo is of Vladimir Putin. The next photo shows an array of poison guns used by Russian assassins. The third photo is of Ian Fleming. The last photo is the cover of a paperback copy of Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love novel after the release of the film based on Fleming's novel, starring Sean Connery as James Bond. 

Joseph C. Goulden: How Russians Meddled In The 1938 Election

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden (seen in the below photo), a noted authority on intelligence matters, offers a piece in the Washington Times on how the Russians have a history of meddling in U.S. politics.

Did Russia meddle in the 2016 presidential election?

President Donald Trump emphatically says “no.” But the hierarchy of the U. S. intelligence community is equally firm in saying “yes.” With three probes in progress — two by Congress, another by an independent counsel — an answer perhaps will eventually be found.

But such Moscow meddling would not be without precedent Documents from the archives of the Russian spy agency NKVD — later the KGB — detail a communist attempt in 1938 to unseat U.S. Rep. Howard W. Smith, who represented the 8th Congressional District in Northern Virginia.

Mr. Smith was one of many conservative congressmen who opposed President Roosevelt’s New Deal measures. As a result, the White House targeted them for replacement by reliable liberals.

But Moscow went against Mr. Smith for another reason. He wrote the so-called “Smith Act,” which made it a crime to advocate overthrow of the government by violent means, or to be a member of any group advocating such actions. The primary targets of Mr. Smith and other sponsors were worrisome to Nazi-oriented groups as war loomed in Europe.

But the Communist Party, USA, (CPUSA) was also on their minds. Hence Moscow’s alarm. (More than 100 CPUSA members would be convicted before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the act. But the party was decimated.)

As their candidate against Mr. Smith in the Democratic primary, the NKVD station in New York chose William Dodd, Jr., son of the U. S. ambassador in Berlin. NKVD files show that journalist I.F. Stone did the recruiting. Mr. Dodd was a sometime-journalist who wrote for several Communist publications, although he would always deny CPUSA membership.

At the insistence of the New York station, Moscow gave Mr. Dodd $1,500 — equivalent to $26,000 today. A receipt was obtained, which meant Mr. Dodd was now in Russia’s hands.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/17/russian-meddling-in-elections-goes-back-decades/

  

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine interview with Joseph C. Goulden via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2012/05/q-with-joseph-c-goulden-author-of.html 

Putin And Political Murder: Orders To Kill

Veteran journalist and author Joseph Goulden offers a review in the Washington Times of Amy Knight’s Orders To Kill.

A report that has circulated in world intelligence circles for years has finally surfaced publicly in a book by an author who The New York Times has called “the West’s foremost scholar” on the KGB — that Russian strongman (and former KGB officer) Vladimir Putin is a pedophile with a preference for young boys.

The allegation is contained “Orders to Kill,” Amy Knight’s book, which is a richly detailed account of the murders of multiple Putin foes over the years, including one brazen assassination of a would-be “reformer” literally in the shadow of the Kremlin. Although evidence strongly points to President Putin as responsible for many of the killings, “Putin is never seen holding a smoking gun,” as Ms. Knight writes.

One of the murders she analyzes is the death (by polonium poisoning) of Alexander Litvinenko, one-time fellow KGB officer and friend of Mr. Putin. The two had a falling out when Litvinenko gave Mr. Putin a scathing report on corruption within the government and the FSB (successor agency to the KGB). He was also appalled by Mr. Putin’s harsh conduct against dissidents in Chechnya.

For self-preservation, Litvinenko fled to London, where he became close to another Putin enemy, Boris Berezovsky. He also became an asset of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence service.

Litvinenko died an agonizing death in 2006 after someone slipped polonium into his cup of tea in a London cafe. (One source of the rare drug is a KGB lab.)

According to Ms. Knight’s account, Litvinenko “sealed his fate” with a 2006 article in the Chechen Press in which he described a “bizarre incident” outside the Kremlin. Mr. Putin chatted with a group of tourists, “then went over to a small boy, lifted up his T-shirt, and kissed him on the stomach.”

Litvinenko wrote that “nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing.” As Ms. Knight writes, Litvinenko “went on to explain that Mr. Putin had been known by KGB insiders to have been a pedophile and that there were secret tapes he destroyed once became head of the FSB showing him having sex with underage boys.”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/15/book-review-orders-to-kill-by-amy-knight/ 

Even in Death, The Spy Kim Philby Serves The Kremlin’s Purposes

Andrew Higgins at the New York Times offers a piece on how Russia is honoring the British Cold War spy and traitor Kim Philby.

MOSCOW — Bereft of friends in Western capitals since its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia is celebrating the memory of the British K.G.B. spy Kim Philby, a stalwart supporter who stood by it through thick and thin – and spent the last 25 years of his life in Moscow, often drunk and miserable but still loyal.

Mr. Philby, a notorious double-agent who defected to Moscow in 1963 and died there in 1988, was recently honored with a portrait in a Russian state art gallery and is celebrated in a soon-to-be broadcast film on state television.

The adulation has now reached a new level with the opening of an exhibition in Moscow on the life and work of the best-known of the so-called Cambridge Five Soviet spies in Britain. It portrays Mr. Philby as an unwavering Russian patriot, and it includes the first public display of some of the more than 900 secret British documents he passed on to the K.G.B., the Soviet-era spy agency.

The burst of tributes to Mr. Philby reinforces an escalating campaign by the Kremlin to burnish the image of the K.G.B., the former employer of President Vladimir V. Putin and many of his senior officials, and to make loyalty to the state the bedrock of Russia’s resurgence as a great power.

Portraying Russia’s secret police officers as selfless public servants rather than lawless goons, however, has sometimes been an uphill struggle. Their public image took a big hit this week when Russian media reported that a Mercedes car driven by an officer in the Federal Security Service, the successor to the domestic branch of the K.G.B., had rammed a traffic police officer at high speed in central Moscow and killed him.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/world/europe/russia-kim-philby-spy-defector.html 

You can also read a review of Ben Macintyre's outstanding book on Kim Philby via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/03/a-spy-among-friends-kim-philby-and.html 

No One Ever Truly Retires From Russian Intelligence

Retired Lt Colonel Ralph Peters, who served a U.S. Army intelligence officer, offers his take in his column at the New York Post on the so-called “retired” Russian intelligence officer who attended a meeting with President Trump’s son 

Of all the creatures rumored to roam the earth, we can be certain that three do not exist: unicorns, fire-breathing dragons and “former” Russian intelligence agents. Moscow’s security services are like the mob: Once you’re in, you’re in for life. Whether the “former” spy or hit man is doing billion-dollar deals through Cypriot banks or running a tanning parlor in Murmansk, when the capo di capo calls, the game’s back on.

We can’t take the measure of Russians by applying American rules. Here, when you leave an intelligence agency, you leave your access and duties completely behind you (unless you go to work for a Beltway Bandit, in which case there’s a record of your employment). When I retired from US Army Military Intelligence, I was “read off” and could not be tapped for classified work any longer, unless I were formally rehired and processed for a renewed security clearance.

We also have robust firewalls between intelligence agencies, the rest of government, the private sector, the media, NGOs and so forth. In Russia, there are no firewalls. You can be a businessman, a propagandist, a human-rights lawyer (I love that one) and a spy simultaneously. You can be a billionaire cruising the Greek islands on your mega-yacht, but if Putin’s dogsbody rings your cell with a task, vacation’s over.

Russia is, in the end, Putin Incorporated.

But when we know that a Russian has formally worked as a “former counterintelligence agent” — as we learned Friday about an additional person present at the now-famous meeting last year between Trump family members and Russians promising dirt on Mrs. Clinton — we can mentally drop that word “former.”

And to claim that a meeting with the Russian equivalent of a mob lawyer and a “former” Russian counterintelligence officer is business-as-usual for any American political campaign is utterly untrue.

(Yes, the Clintons have had more ugly connections than there are rats in Manhattan. But shabby as they are, the Clintons never sought campaign collusion with Russian intelligence agents. The Clintons prefer being bought over being fooled.)

There are no good guys on this political landscape. But as we go forward, let’s remember who the real bad guys are: the Russians. Not the Ukrainians, who are fighting for democracy and survival while under attack by Putin. Not journalists, who are doing their work as foreseen by the First Amendment. And certainly not the special counsel, who embodies our core belief in justice for all.

The bad guys are the Russians, who have tried, with unprecedented audacity, immense resources and breathtaking cynicism, to subvert the fundamental tool of our self-government, our elections.

And a Russian spy once means a Russian spy forever.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2017/07/14/no-one-ever-truly-retires-from-russian-intelligence/ 

Note: The top photo is of Putin as a KGB officer. The middle photo is of Ralph Peters and the last photo is of Putin today.

Frederick Forsyth's Wry Russian Spy Story

I'm a huge admirer of British thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, and, so it seems, the Russian spooks are as well.

In Frederick Forsyth's column in the British newspaper the Express, he wrote the below:

Forgive an old codger a wry story... two weeks ago Russia’s President Vladimir Putin visited a huge office block at a place called Yazenevo outside Moscow.

This is the home of the SVR, the Russian spy service, formerly the First Chief Directorate of the old KGB, broken up by Mikhail Gorbachev 25 years ago. He was there to present an award to the outgoing director, welcome in the new one and make a stunning announcement: he intends to re-create the KGB.

He was speaking in the seventh-floor library and on TV. Clearly visible over his shoulder was the entire collection of the novels of this writer – in order of publication and in English.

Nice to know what the Russian spooks read. I have been informed they got a few ideas over the years. 

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/frederick-forsyth/726126/trade-war-negative-effects-brexit-theresa-may-brussels-iraq-putin-ed-balls-Met-forecast 

True Believer: Stalin's Last Spy

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of Kati Marton's True Believer: Stalin's Last Spy.

Of all the American nitwits who spied for Joseph Stalin’s Soviet dictatorship, none perhaps behaved with more die-hard stupidity than State Department officer Noel Field.

Born into a prominent Quaker family, Field spent his boyhood in Europe. While at Harvard, his Quaker idealism, coupled with a loathing for capitalism, morphed into admiration for communism. Bent upon “reforming America,” he joined State’s Western European Division in 1926 and achieved a reputation for brilliance — and also for unconcealed leftism.

His sordid story is grippingly related by Kati Marton, whose parents, Hungarian journalists, covered various show trials that resulted in Field and other “traitors to the cause” being jailed. She also gained access to Field family papers and those of persons brought down with him.

In a New Deal Washington teeming with communists and sympathizers, Field proved to be a prime prospect for Soviet intelligence recruiters. A legendary KGB recruiter known as “J. Peters” easily hooked Field. “An ideal target,” Kati Marton terms him. “Who would ever believe a well-mannered young man with deep New England roots and immaculate appearances such as Noel Field could betray his country?”

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/sep/20/book-review-true-believer-stalins-last-american-sp/

The Russian Spy Run By Dumb And Dumber

Katie Zavadski at the Daily Beast offers a piece on convicted Russian spy Zhenya Buryakov.

Zhenya Buryakov lived a quiet Bronx existence with his wife and two children in Riverdale, an affluent neighborhood, working at a state-owned bank by day. He moved there, his wife would later say, because he wanted his children to speak perfect English, and two nuns next door would even pet-sit the family’s bird.

But by night, Buryakov met with his handlers at SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, and passed along information his bosses in Moscow hoped to use against his host country.

That bucolic life was interrupted when Buryakov was arrested by the FBI in January 2015, and charged with being an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Unlike his handlers, whose sloppy conversations may have led to his arrest, Buryakov was only allowed to be in the United States as an employee of a foreign firm. A year later, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 months in prison, in a case that garnered relatively little attention coming on the heels of the 10 Russian “illegals” arrested in 2010.

But Buryakov’s arrest and sentencing serves as a firm reminder that despite the end of the Cold War, covert Russian espionage in the U.S. is prevalent and ongoing.

“Russia never gave up espionage against the West, and the United States remains the prime target of Russian intelligence,” former KGB spy Oleg Kalugin told The Daily Beast. Kalugin, now 81, served as a general in the KGB, but was found guilty in absentia of spying for the West by a Russian court in 2002.  

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/05/the-russian-spy-run-by-dumb-and-dumber.html

You can also read the U.S. Justice Department's release on Buryakov via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/01/attorney-general-manhattan-us-attorney.html