Sergei Beseda, one of the heads of the Fifth Service of the FSB, who gathers political intelligence on Ukraine and cultivates the pro-Kremlin opposition in Kyiv. The general was sent to the infamous Lefortovo prison in Moscow, which has had a horrible reputation since the Stalin purges — innumerable victims have been murdered in the...
Tag: intelligence
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Western Intelligence Services Differ on Whether Putin Will Invade Ukraine
In one camp, officials in Washington, London and within Ukraine’s national security establishment are convinced that a Russian strike is imminent. But Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is not persuaded that the intelligence Western nations have shown him backs up their dire assessments. Somewhere in the middle, U.S. allies including France, Germany and Norway think Russia...
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The Spies Who Hated Us: A Veteran Reporter Dishes on the British Secret State
Richard Norton Taylor is a veteran intelligence reporter for The Guardianwho has spent decades reporting on MI6, the British intelligence service. and he’s got plenty of good stories to show for it. Here’s one. An MI6 officer had told him, he says, that the reason why some MI6 people were against the invasion of Iraq...
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Afghanistan Is Only the Latest US War to Be Driven by Deceit and Delusion
From military analyst Gordon Adams: An initial mission intended to remove the Taliban and close the al-Qaida training camps succeeded, though Osama bin Laden slipped away for another 10 years. But hubris kept the U.S. from stopping there.The mission expanded: create a modern democracy, a modern society and, above all, a modern military in...
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Why We Lost in Afghanistan
Via CounterPunch.org, a veteran Washington military analyst Winslow Wheeler breaks it down. The Afghan government’s war effort was riddled with corruption at every level of the society, but mostly at the top. It was fueled by American plane loads of cash and bottomless economic handouts (with too little oversight too late — very informing but...