Has the West absorbed the right lessons from Ukraine’s war with Russia? For the unsettling answer, look at what’s buzzing mysteriously in the skies above Europe’s cities. Drones were spotted this month in France, loitering around a gunpowder plant and a train station where tanks are located. Others were seen recently near a Belgian military base, a port, and a nuclear power plant.
Belgium’s defense minister told the press the drones near military bases were “definitely for spying.” The provenance of other suspicious drones is less clear. Yet whatever their source, they’re a security threat. The Netherlands suspended flights in Eindhoven Saturday after a drone sighting, and similar episodes have unfolded this month at airports in Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Denmark.
It suggests there are cases of direct, indirect and other ways agencies at the federal level have been able to get information on private U.S. citizens and ondocumented immigrants they otherwise may not have been able to gather. Springfield and Eugene, Oregon have made decisions to pause their use as has Auburn, Washington and other cities in the Northwest.
Oregon U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has been an outspoken critic of the use of the surveillance cameras while some local law enforcement agencies have praised them.
Stunning new details emerged Friday on the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, with the Kremlin acknowledging for the first time that some of the Russians held in the West belonged to its security services — and the children of a Russian couple posing as spies only learned their true nationality on the flight to Moscow.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that a detained couple released in Slovenia —Artem and Anna Dultsev— were undercover intelligence officers commonly known as “illegals.” Posing as Argentine expats, they used Ljubljana as their base since 2017 to relay Moscow’s orders to other sleeper agents and were arrested on espionage charges in 2022.
Their two children joined them as they flew to Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport from Ankara, Turkey, where the mass exchange took place. The children don’t speak Russian, and only learned their parents were Russian nationals sometime on the flight, Peskov said.
They also didn’t know who President Vladimir Putin was, “asking who is it greeting them,” he added.
“That’s how illegals work, and that’s the sacrifices they make because of their dedication to their work,” Peskov said.
In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin welcomes Russian citizens released in a major prisoner swap with the West, at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport on August 1, 2024.
MIKHAIL VOSKRESENSKIY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
A total of 24 prisoners were involved in Thursday’s historic swap —and a total of 26 people, including the spy couple’s kids, changed planes on the tarmac in Ankara.
While journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva and former Marine Paul Whelan were greeted by their families and President Joe Biden in Maryland on Thursday night, Putin embraced each of the Russian returnees at the airport and promised them state awards and a “talk about your future.”
Also returning to Moscow was Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 killing of a former Chechen fighter in a Berlin park. The German judges who sentenced Krasikov called Khangoshvili’s murder an act of Russian “state terrorism,” and the incident set off a diplomatic row between Moscow and Berlin.
Peskov told reporters Friday that Krasikov is an officer of the Federal Security Service, or FSB —a fact reported in the West even as Moscow denied state involvement.
He also said Krasikov once served in the FSB’s special forces Alpha unit, along with some of Putin’s bodyguards.
“Naturally, they also greeted each other yesterday when they saw each other,” Peskov said, underscoring Putin’s determination to include Krasikov in the swap. Earlier this year, Putin stopped short of identifying Krasikov, but referenced a “patriot” imprisoned in a “U.S.-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit” who had killed Russian soldiers during fighting in the Caucasus.
The large-scale exchange comes less than two years after WNBA star Brittney Griner was traded for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was nicknamed the “Merchant of Death,” on an airport in Abu Dhabi.
Griner was arrested in 2022 at a Moscow airport when vape canisters containing cannabis oil were found in her bags. She was sentenced to nine years in prison on drug charges.
Arrested in 2008, Bout was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the U.S. for conspiring to sell weapons to people who intended to kill Americans.
Last month a career American ambassador pleaded guilty to spying for the intelligence service of Cuba. Victor Manuel Rocha served his country in positions that required the highest levels of security clearance. For 40 years, he was a covert agent. Before Ambassador Rocha was exposed, there was another prolific Cuban spy named Ana Montes, a Pentagon official, who was the lead analyst on Cuba policy. She spied for 17 years. But, Cuban spy craft isn’t just a relic of the Cold War. It’s a real and present danger to U.S. national security. It turns out, Cuba’s main export isn’t cigars or rum, it’s American secrets—which they barter and sell to America’s enemies around the world.
It was 1999 and then first lady Hillary Clinton danced with the president of Argentina at a state dinner. President Clinton also danced the tango across the White House ballroom.
There in front wearing glasses and the airs of an aristocrat… stood Victor Manuel Rocha. He was the number two diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires with an impeccable reputation as a senior statesman on Latin America. He served on the National Security Council and became the ambassador to Bolivia—seen here alongside that country’s president—all that time while having the highest top secret security clearance, with access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence.
But last December, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Rocha’s arrest. He was charged with spying for Cuba for his entire career.
Merrick Garland: This action exposes one of the highest reaching and longest lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent.
In 2022, a man claiming to be a Cuban intelligence officer contacted Rocha and asked to meet. Rocha agreed—he had no idea the man was an undercover FBI agent. Over three meetings in Miami, the FBI recorded Rocha with a hidden camera. And according to the complaint, Rocha bragged that he got away with decades of spying by memorizing the secrets he stole… Rocha told the agent, “what we have done…it’s enormous…more than a grand slam.” He called the U.S. quote “the enemy”
Cecilia Vega: What do you think is the extent of damage that he did to national security?
Brian Latell: Manuel Rocha did enormous damage to– to American security.
Brian Latell was the CIA’s top Cuba analyst at the height of the Cold War. He says in the 1980s, Rocha cold called and struck up a professional relationship. They remained friends for decades.
Cecilia Vega: You think he approached you to get information out of you, ultimately.
Brian Latell: Yes. He never got any.
Brian Latell was the CIA’s top Cuba analyst at the height of the Cold War.
60 Minutes
Cecilia Vega: Did you see any signs that he was leading a double life?
Brian Latell: None.
Cecilia Vega: None?
Brian Latell: None.
Cecilia Vega: What can you tell me about the trade craft that Cuba uses?
Brian Latell: They do it very, very well, in– mostly rudimentary fashions. The Cubans are not flying satellites anywhere in the world. Nearly all of their ability and– and success has been in the dimension of human intelligence. Their officers, their intelligence agents and officers are very, very good.
Brian Latell: They know their tradecraft. They practice it with great skill and with discipline. And when they recruit, they’re very careful about how they recruit and how they communicate.
Cecilia Vega: And what does Cuba do with the information it gets from all these spies?
Cecilia Vega: They have no scruples about sharing the information or perhaps marketing it, selling it to– to other countries, the Russians, maybe the Chinese
Brian Latell: If they collect information about U.S. intentions, policy intentions toward Moscow or Beijing or Tehran, it would be of interest to those countries.
That was this man’s job when he was a Cuban intelligence officer, decoding messages intercepted from the us. Jose Cohen defected in 1994.
Jose Cohen (English translation): Cuba shared that information with enemies of the United States, he told us. Countries like the Soviet Union for years, countries like North Korea, countries like Iran, had information about the operation of the Defense Department.
Cecilia Vega: You say Cuba may not have the weapons, Cuba may not have the arms, but they sell these secrets to the enemies of the United States?
Jose Cohen (English translation): The strongest enemies of the United States. All of that was what made me realize this is a battle between good and evil. Cuba was at the service of all the enemies of the United States.
Cecilia Vega and Jose Cohen
60 Minutes
After Jose Cohen set foot on U.S. soil he shared a vital piece of information with the FBI. That led to the investigation of more than 100 suspected Cuban agents and illegal officers and ultimately one very important spy. Cohen handed over an encryption key- like this one, used by Cuban spies to send and receive secret messages with Havana.
Three nights a week at 9 p.m. and then again at 10, a series of numbered codes was broadcast out of Havana.
The signal could be heard for most of the 1990s up the East Coast as far north as Maine. But the coded messages were only meant to be decoded by their agents—including a Pentagon analyst named Ana Montes—who lived in this quiet Washington neighborhood.
Cecilia Vega: This is where she did all of the business, all of the spy business?
Peter Lapp: Exactly. I mean, she would listen to the high frequency messages upstairs. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday nights, she would type up her messages on her computer in her bedroom, right up here. This is the area that she– lived in, camouflaged. The fact that she was committing espionage right here–
Peter Lapp is a retired FBI special agent who was on the team that led the Montes investigation.
Cecilia Vega: How’d she do it?
Peter Lapp: She went to work, memorized three things every day, went home and– all classified, and then would write them up or type them up. And then every two or three weeks, she would meet in person at lunch, broad daylight, two to three hours over lunch
Cecilia Vega: Maybe I’ve seen too many movies. When I think “spies,” I’m thinking dark of night, park bench, secret cameras, fancy gadgets. That wasn’t her.
Peter Lapp: Everyone who works for the intelligence community goes home with classified information in their head. And you can’t stop that with guards and technology. It’s just– it’s– it’s undefeatable.
Lapp wrote a book on the FBI investigation into Montes. He told us Havana doesn’t pay its spies, so Americans who spy for Cuba don’t do it for money, but rather are driven by ideology. Ambassador Rocha was recruited in the late 1970s, influenced, he now says, by the radical politics of the day. Montes was a student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the 1980s and was outspoken about her anger toward U.S. policy in Latin America when she was recruited by a Cuban intelligence officer.
Montes’ father was a U.S. Army doctor and her siblings worked for the FBI. One of her first jobs out of graduate school was as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Ana Montes
DIA
Cecilia Vega: So Ana Montes was already a full-fledged Cuban spy from the moment that she set foot inside the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Peter Lapp: She walked in fully recruited, day one. Only went to DIA for the purpose of spying for the Cubans. And when you think about the other folks that have been arrested for espionage, most start loyal. They take the oath. They intend to abide by that oath. But then something happens and they flip. And Ana’s unique in the sense that she walked in from day one, and was an insider threat, and– and only went for the purpose of spying for the Cubans.
Cecilia Vega: How does a Cuban spy walk through the doors of the DIA and get a job? She didn’t have to take a polygraph?
Peter Lapp: They did not have a polygraph program at the time.
Over the course of her career, she became such an expert that she was known in the intelligence community as the Queen of Cuba. All the while she was exposing national secrets to Havana- the FBI surveilled her for a year before her arrest as she walked to work and called her Cuban handler. By that time she had revealed the existence of a top secret satellite program used by the U.S. to spy on other countries. She also gave Havana the names of 450 American intelligence officials working on Latin American issues– including four undercover officers stationed in Cuba.
And she got away with it for 17 years– until she was arrested in 2001 at her office by FBI Special Agent Peter Lapp and his partner Stephen McCoy.
Cecilia Vega: She didn’t fit the profile of a typical spy.
Peter Lapp: No. Being a woman is incredibly unique, so it doesn’t fit that typical what we would look for in a spy, which is mostly men.
Montes pleaded guilty to espionage and in exchange for not spending the rest of her life in prison, she agreed to tell the FBI everything she had done.
Through a public records request, we obtained this footage, seen here for the first time, of Montes wearing prison stripes– speaking with FBI investigators. Citing Montes’ right to privacy, the FBI denied our request for the recorded audio of their interviews. But we obtained a declassified transcript of the first day where Montes described how deep in she was. She said:
Ana Montes (Cecilia Vega reads from transcript): Ever since I started helping the Cubans, there’s been no half-way…I don’t really know how a person does it without feeling morally bound…It’s a full commitment, mentally, physically, emotionally.
I feel that what I did was morally right. That I was faithful to principles that were right.
Montes told the agents her only regret was that she was forced to cooperate with the FBI as part of her plea deal.
Ana Montes (Cecilia Vega reads from transcript): It’s tearing me up….But if the only way I’m going to see my family again… It’s the only way.
Agent Lapp sat across from Ana Montes in the interrogation room for seven months. He said one of the most sobering moments was when she said how far she would have been willing to go for the Cubans in the week after 9/11.
Peter Lapp, a retired FBI special agent
60 Minutes
Peter Lapp: She said “if the Cubans asked me to provide them with intelligence about what we were doing in Afghanistan, I absolutely would have done that. And if men and women were killed as a result of my intelligence in Afghanistan,” she told us,”that’s the risk that they took.”
Cecilia Vega: What was the extent of the damage that she did?
Peter Lapp: I do think she’s in that tier of some of the most notorious spies in American history and I think the damage that she did was incredibly significant.
After serving 20 years in federal prison, Ana Montes was released in January 2023. She’s now living in Puerto Rico where she has family and has been celebrated by some as a hero…seen here recently receiving an award from supporters. Through a lawyer, Montes declined our request for an interview.
Last month, former ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha told a judge he was deeply sorry and pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of the Cuban government. At age 73, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and is currently cooperating with investigators. Just how many state secrets he gave to Cuba, we may never know. Nearly all the details of his spy craft remain classified.
Ana Montes has yet to publicly express any remorse.
Cecilia Vega: Do you think there are other Ana Monteses in the government right now?
Peter Lapp: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Cecilia Vega: That’s chilling.
Peter Lapp: There’s no doubt that the Cubans and the Russians and others– are still penetrating our government with individuals who are loyal to them and not to us.
Produced by Michael Rey. Associate producers, Jaime Woods and Kit Ramgopal. Broadcast associate, Katie Jahns.Edited by Joe Schanzer.
President Joe Biden on Monday issued an order blocking a Chinese-backed cryptocurrency mining firm from owning land near a Wyoming nuclear missile base, calling its proximity to the base a “national security risk.”
The order forces the divestment of property operated as a crypto mining facility near the Francis E. Warren Air Force Base. MineOne Partners Ltd., a firm partly backed by Chinese nationals, and its affiliates are also required to remove certain equipment on the site.
And with election season in full swing, both Biden and his presumptive Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, have told voters that they’ll be tough on China, the world’s second-largest economy after the United States and an emerging geopolitical rival.
The Monday divestment order was made in coordination with the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — a little-known but powerful government committee tasked with investigating corporate deals for national security concerns that holds power to force companies to change ownership structures or divest completely from the U.S.
A 2018 law granted CFIUS the authority to review real estate transactions near sensitive sites across the U.S., including F.E. Warren Air Force Base.
MineOne purchased the land that is within one mile of the Air Force base in Cheyenne in 2022, and according to CFIUS, the purchase was not reported to the committee as required until after the panel received a public tip.
The order was vague about the specific national security concerns, with the Treasury Department saying only that there were issues with “specialized and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities” that “presented a significant national security risk.”
A representative from the firm did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who serves as the chairperson of CFIUS, said the role of the committee is “to ensure that foreign investment does not undermine our national security, particularly as it relates to transactions that present risk to sensitive U.S. military installations as well as those involving specialized equipment and technologies.”
The committee is made up of members from the State, Justice, Energy and Commerce Departments among others, which investigates national security risks from foreign investments in American firms.
CFIUS directed the sale of the property within 120 days, and that within 90 days the company remove all structures and equipment on the site.
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Washington — A former U.S. ambassador formally pleaded guilty Friday to working for Cuba’s spy service for decades and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, bringing a quick end to a case that prosecutors described as one of the longest-running betrayals of the U.S. government in history.
Victor Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, was indicted in December on charges that he spied for Cuba’s intelligence agency for more than 40 years. Rocha, who lives in Miami, originally pleaded not guilty in mid-February, then reversed course later that month.
The case’s resolution was briefly in doubt during a hearing on Friday when U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom questioned whether a plea deal Rocha struck with prosecutors was tough enough, since it lacked restitution for possible victims and did not revoke Rocha’s U.S. citizenship. Prosecutors argued that 15 years was sufficient given the 73-year-old would likely die in prison.
The plea deal was ultimately amended to include restitution for potential victims, which will be determined at a later time. Denaturalization is also possible as a civil action down the line.
Rocha’s work for Cuba
Victor Rocha appears at a hearing in federal court in Miami on Friday, April 12, 2024.
Lothar Speer
Little has been revealed about what Rocha did to help the communist regime or how he may have influenced U.S. policy while he worked for the State Department for two decades. He held high-level security clearances that gave him access to top secret information, according to the indictment, which could have made him a valuable asset to Cuba, which has long had hostile relations with the U.S.
But Rocha was not charged with espionage, and instead was accused of acting as a foreign agent, which the Justice Department refers to as “espionage lite.” Acting as a foreign agent carries a shorter prison sentence.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has described the case as “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent.”
Born in Colombia, Rocha moved to New York when he was 10 years old after his father died. His family lived with his uncle in Harlem, supported by his mother’s job in a sweatshop sewing factory and food stamps. In 1965, a scholarship to attend Taft School, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, changed the trajectory of his life, he told the school’s alumni magazine in 2004. But while there, he experienced discrimination and considered suicide after his closest friend refused to be roommates with him over the color of his skin, he said.
Investigators alleged Rocha was recruited by Cuba’s spy agency in Chile in 1973 after he graduated from Yale University. That same year, Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, was ousted in a U.S.-backed coup.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1978 and also holds degrees from Harvard and Georgetown universities. His career at the State Department began in 1981 and included various positions in Latin America. He briefly held an influential role at the White House National Security Council during the Clinton administration. His career at the State Department culminated in an ambassadorship in Bolivia from 2000 to 2002.
As the ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha warned Bolivians that electing leftist coca farmer Evo Morales, a protege of Fidel Castro, as president would jeopardize U.S. aid to the country. The intervention was credited with helping boost Morales’ standing, and he thanked Rocha for being his “best campaign chief,” the New York Times reported in 2002.
Cuba also fell under Rocha’s purview during his stint at the National Security Council and while he was posted at the U.S. mission in Havana in the 1990s. After leaving the State Department, he was an adviser to the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, whose area of responsibility includes Cuba.
His positions within the government would have given him compartmentalized access to information involving Cuba, including U.S. assessments of the Cuban regime, biographic profiles, details about covert programs run by the U.S. and diplomatic reports from across the world about the Cubans, according to John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama who once considered Rocha a mentor.
“He would have been enormously valuable to them,” Feeley told CBS News.
The State Department and the intelligence community are assessing the possible damage to national security, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters after Rocha’s arrest.
An attorney for Rocha, Jacqueline Arango, did not return a request for comment.
“The shock is complete”
This image provided by the Justice Department and contained in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint shows Victor Manuel Rocha during a meeting with a FBI undercover employee.
Department of Justice / AP
Details about how the FBI began to suspect Rocha had acted as a covert agent for Cuba are unclear, other than it received a tip before November 2022, according to court documents. In the following months, the agency surveilled Rocha as he met with an undercover FBI agent whom he believed to be a representative of Cuba’s spy agency.
On Nov. 15, 2022, the undercover agent sent the retired diplomat a WhatsApp message “from your friends in Havana,” the documents said.
“I know that you have been a great friend of ours since your time in Chile,” the undercover agent told Rocha in a subsequent phone call. The two agreed to meet in person the next day.
During their conversations over the next year, Rocha referred to the U.S. as “the enemy” and said “what we have done” was “enormous” and “more than a grand slam,” court documents said.
“My number one concern; my number one priority was … any action on the part of Washington that would — would endanger the life of — of the leadership, or the — or the revolution itself,” Rocha allegedly told the undercover agent.
The complaint also alleged that Rocha met with his Cuban handlers as recently as 2017, first flying from Miami to the Dominican Republic using his American passport, then using a Dominican passport to fly to Panama and onto Havana.
Rocha said Cuba’s spy agency had instructed him to “lead a normal life,” and he eventually created a cover story “of a right-wing person” to conceal his double life, according to the complaint.
Feeley, who worked under Rocha when he was the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic, said in recent years Rocha became an “over-the-top Donald Trump guy.” The two had kept in touch since their posting in the Dominican Republic, but when Feeley last saw Rocha in 2019, the previously apolitical Rocha had “gone down a Trump-MAGA rabbit hole,” as Feeley put it.
“It was really uncomfortable,” Feeley said, adding that he and his former colleagues never suspected it was a cover. “I’ve already been through the whole cycle of grief here. The shock is complete.”
Feeley resigned as U.S. ambassador to Panama in 2018 over policy disputes with the Trump administration.
Rocha did his job well and was generous with his mentoring, but he also had a strong ego and thought he was smarter than others, Feeley said.
On June 23, 2023, Rocha held his last meeting with the undercover FBI agent at an outdoor food court behind a church in Miami. Prosecutors said Rocha became angry when the agent asked, “Are you still with us?”
“I am pissed off,” Rocha allegedly responded, saying it’s “like questioning my manhood. … It’s like you want me to drop them … and show you if I still have testicles.”
Why did a septuagenarian who had managed to escape detection for decades and had long been retired from government service bite so easily at the FBI’s outreach?
“My feeling is that he felt irrelevant,” Feeley said. “You do something for 40 years, it gives you kind of a sense of purpose, and there’s no gold watch at the end of it.”
Caitlin Yilek is a politics reporter at cbsnews.com and is based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked for the Washington Examiner and The Hill, and was a member of the 2022 Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship with the National Press Foundation.
A controversial US wiretap program days from expiration cleared a major hurdle on its way to being reauthorized.
After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community’s spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years.
Legislation extending the program—controversial for being abused by the government—passed in the House in a 273–147 vote. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.
Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the “compelled assistance” of US communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
The House bill also dramatically expands the statutory definition for communication service providers, something FISA experts, including Marc Zwillinger—one of the few people to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—have publicly warned against.
“Anti-reformers not only are refusing common-sense reforms to FISA, they’re pushing for a major expansion of warrantless spying on Americans,” US senator Ron Wyden tells WIRED. “Their amendment would force your cable guy to be a government spy and assist in monitoring Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
The FBI’s track record of abusing the program kicked off a rare détente last fall between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans—both bothered equally by the FBI’s targeting of activists, journalists, and a sitting member of Congress. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House members voted down an amendment earlier in the day that would’ve imposed new warrant requirements on federal agencies accessing Americans’ 702 data.
“Many members who tanked this vote have long histories of voting for this specific privacy protection,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the civil-liberties-focused nonprofit Demand Progress, “including former speaker Pelosi, Representative Lieu, and Representative Neguse.”
The warrant amendment was passed earlier this year by the House Judiciary Committee, whose long-held jurisdiction over FISA has been challenged by friends of the intelligence community. Analysis by the Brennan Center this week found that 80 percent of the base text of the FISA reauthorization bill had been authored by intelligence committee members.
“Three million Americans’ data was searched in this database of information,” says Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee. “The FBI wasn’t even following its own rules when they conducted those searches. That’s why we need a warrant.”
Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, campaigned alongside top spy agency officials for months to defeat the warrant amendment, arguing they’d cost the bureau precious time and impede national security investigations. The communications are legally collected and already in the government’s possession, Turner argued; no further approval should be required to inspect them.
Washington — President Biden pledged Friday to “continue working every day” to secure the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich from Russian detention, as the American journalist’s time imprisoned in Russia hit the one-year mark.
“We will continue to denounce and impose costs for Russia’s appalling attempts to use Americans as bargaining chips,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released Friday that also mentioned the case of Paul Whelan, another U.S. citizen who has been held in Russia since 2018.
Gershkovich — whom the U.S. State Department deemed “wrongfully detained” soon after his arrest — is still awaiting a trial on espionage charges that the White House, his family and his employer all insist are fabricated, but which could still see him sentenced to decades in prison.
The U.S.-born son of Soviet emigres covered Russia for six years, as the Kremlin made independent, on-the-ground reporting increasingly dangerous and illegal.
Journalist Evan Gershkovich, arrested on espionage charges, stands inside a defendants’ cage before a hearing to consider an appeal on his arrest at the Moscow City Court in Moscow, April 18, 2023.
NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty
His arrest in March 2023 on charges of spying — the first such charge against a Western journalist since the Soviet era — showed that the Kremlin was prepared to go further than ever before in what President Vladimir Putin has called a “hybrid war” with the West.
The Journal and the U.S. government dismiss the espionage allegations as a false pretext to keep Gershkovich locked up, likely to use him as a bargaining chip in a future prisoner exchange deal.
Putin said last month that he would like to see Gershkovich released as part of a prisoner swap, but the Biden administration has said Moscow rejected the most recent exchange offer presented to it.
The 32-year-old, who has been remanded in custody until at least the end of June, faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
The Gershkovich family said in a letter published by the Wall Street Journal on Friday that they would pursue their campaign for his release.
“We never anticipated this situation happening to our son and brother, let alone a full year with no certainty or clear path forward,” they said. “But despite this long battle, we are still standing strong.”
Gershkovich reported extensively on how ordinary Russians experienced the Ukraine conflict, speaking to the families of dead soldiers and Putin critics. Breaking stories and getting people to talk was becoming increasingly hard, Gershkovich told friends before his arrest.
But as long as it was not impossible, he saw a reason to be there.
“He knew for some stories he was followed around and people he talked to would be pressured not to talk to him,” Guardian correspondent Pjotr Sauer, a close friend, told AFP. “But he was accredited by the foreign ministry. I don’t think any of us could see the Russians going as far as charging him with this fake espionage.”
Speaking to CBS News’ Leslie Stahl last week, the reporter’s sister Danielle said the family back in the U.S. was still worried, despite Gershkovich’s repeated assurances to them of his accreditation, which he thought would keep him safe, as it always had.
But as Stahl reported, what used to be unprecedented in Russia has become almost routine under Putin. Gershkovich is only the most recent American to inadvertently become a pawn on Putin’s geopolitical chessboard against the West.
Whelan, a U.S. Marine veteran, has been jailed in Russia for five years. Russian-American ballerina Ksenia Karelina was arrested in January, accused of treason for helping Ukraine. And basketball star Brittney Griner, imprisoned for nine months on drug charges, was finally freed in an exchange for a notorious arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.”
London — A judge in London on Thursday threw out a lawsuit by former U.S. President Donald Trump accusing a former British spy of making “shocking and scandalous claims” that were false and harmed his reputation. Judge Karen Steyn said there were “no compelling reasons” to let the case Trump filed against Orbis Business go to trial.
The company was founded by Christopher Steele, who created a dossier in 2016 that contained rumors and uncorroborated allegations that caused a political storm just before Trump’s inauguration.
Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who set up Orbis Business Intelligence and compiled a dossier on Donald Trump, is seen in London, March 7, 2017.
Victoria Jones/PA via AP
Steele, who once ran the Russia desk for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, was paid by Democrats to compile research that included salacious allegations that Russians could potentially use to blackmail Trump.
CBS News correspondent Imtiaz Tyab said the court was told during a hearing in late 2023 that Trump was bringing his case over two memos in the dossier, which claimed he had taken part in “sex parties” in St. Petersburg, Russia, and engaged in “golden showers” with prostitutes in Moscow.
Trump called the dossier “fake news” and a political witch hunt, and in his legal filings he accused Steele of making false claims and sought unspecified damages from Orbis for allegedly violating British data protection laws.
Orbis always maintained that it was not responsible for the publication of the dossier, which was leaked to a U.S. media outlet, and it sought the case’s dismissal. It argued that neither the company nor Steele had approved or been aware of the leak of the document. It also said the case had been filed too late.
In 2022, the U.S. Federal Election Commission fined former candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign $8,000, and the Democratic National Committee $105,000, for obscuring their funding of the dossier. The campaign had mislabeled Steele’s work as “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting” in campaign filings, the FEC concluded.
The bipartisan election commission dismissed a complaint against Steele himself.
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Parliament on Monday opened an internal probe into Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka after an independent Russian investigative newspaper, the Insider, reported she had been working as an agent for the Russian secret services for years.
She was one of just 13 MEPs who in March 2022 voted against a resolution condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which caused her to be expelled from the Greens/EFA group. Ždanoka now sits as a non-attached MEP.
“We are convinced that Ždanoka is not an isolated case,” the three Latvian MEPs wrote, citing concerns over suspicious “public interventions, voting record[s], organised events, as well as covert activities.”
“The Greens/EFA group must bear a degree of responsibility for long-term cooperation, financial support, and informational exchange with Ždanoka from July 2004 till March 2022,” the group added.
The Latvian Socialists did not sign the MEPs’ letter — and there are no Latvian Greens in Parliament after Ždanoka’s expulsion from the group.
The Greens/EFA group released a statement Tuesday saying it was “deeply concerned” about the allegations and asked for Ždanoka to be banned from Parliament for the duration of the probe.
Beijing — China’s spy agency said Monday the head of a foreign consultancy had been found to be spying for Britain’s MI6 intelligence service. The Ministry of State Security said in a post on China’s WeChat social media platform that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, used a foreign national with the surname Huang to establish an “intelligence cooperation relationship.”
Huang, who headed a foreign consulting agency, “entered China several times under instructions to use their public profile as a cover to collect China-related intelligence for Britain… and seek other personnel whom MI6 could turn,” the MSS said in the post.
The statement did not provide further details of Huang’s identity or employer, or describe their current condition or whereabouts.
Huang allegedly passed 17 pieces of intelligence, including confidential state secrets, to MI6 before he was identified, according to the MSS. The ministry also claimed he had received “professional intelligence training” in Britain and had used “specialist spying equipment” to send communications.
The MSS said an investigation had “promptly discovered criminal evidence that Huang was engaged in espionage activities, and took criminal coercive measures in accordance with the law.”
Britain’s embassy in Beijing directed an AFP request to comment to the Foreign Office in London, which did not immediately respond.
China’s foreign ministry declined to provide further comment when asked about the case at a regular press briefing.
Espionage allegations impact Western business in China
China and Britain have traded barbs in recent months over allegations of espionage and its resulting impact on national security. Britain’s government has warned that Chinese spies are increasingly targeting officials — allegations that Beijing has denied.
A researcher at the British parliament was arrested last year under the Official Secrets Act and subsequently denied spying for Beijing.
China, which has a broad definition of state secrets, has publicized several other alleged spying cases in recent months.
In May, authorities sentenced 78-year-old American citizen John Shing-wan Leung to life in prison for espionage, though Beijing has not provided substantial details of his case.
In October, the MSS published the story of another alleged spy, surnamed Hou, who was accused of sending several classified documents to the U.S.
An image from video aired on China’s state-run CCTV network shows authorities carrying out an investigation at the Shanghai office of international consulting firm Capvision Partners, May 9, 2023.
Reuters/CCTV
China also conducted raids last year on a string of big-name consulting, research and due diligence firms. Last May, China said it had raided the offices of U.S. consultancy firm Capvision in order to safeguard its “national security and development interests.”
Beijing also questioned staff at the Shanghai branch of another American consultancy, Bain, in April, and authorities detained workers and shuttered a Beijing office belonging to U.S.-based due diligence firm Mintz Group in March.
The U.S. government and its chambers of commerce warned that the raids damage investor confidence and the operations of foreign businesses in China.
James Zimmerman, a business lawyer who works in Beijing, told CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer in June that the raids had spooked foreign businesses.
“Everything’s a threat, you know,” Zimmerman said. “Unfortunately, in that kind of environment it’s very difficult to operate — when everything is viewed as a national security matter… it looks as if…. anything you do could be considered to be spying.”
Zimmerman told CBS News then that some business leaders were beginning to “rewrite their strategic plans just because of the tension” between China and the West, noting that the increase in scrutiny from Chinese authorities “makes it politically very risky for them.”
LONDON — The U.K. already has some of the most far-reaching surveillance laws in the democratic world. Now it’s rushing to beef them up even further — and tech firms are spooked.
Britain’s government wants to build on its landmark Investigatory Powers Act, a controversial piece of legislation dubbed the “snooper’s charter” by critics when introduced back in 2016.
That law — introduced in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass state surveillance — attempted to introduce more accountability into the U.K. intelligence agencies’ sprawling snooping regime by formalizing wide-ranging powers to intercept emails, texts, web history and more.
Now new legislation is triggering a fresh outcry among both industry execs and privacy campaigners — who say it could hobble efforts to protect user privacy.
Industry body TechUK has written to Home Secretary James Cleverly airing its complaints. The group’s letter warns that the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill threatens technological innovation; undermines the sovereignty of other nations; and could unleash dire consequences if it sets off a domino effect overseas.
Tech companies are most concerned by a change that would allow the Home Office to issue notices preventing them from making technical updates that might impede information-sharing with U.K. intelligence agencies.
TechUK argues that, combined with pre-existing powers, the changes would “grant a de facto power to indefinitely veto companies from making changes to their products and services offered in the U.K.”
“Using this power, the government could prevent the implementation of new end-to-end encryption, or stop developers from patching vulnerabilities in code that the government or their partners would like to exploit,” Meredith Whittaker, president of secure messaging app Signal, told POLITICO when the bill was first unveiled.
The Home Office, Britain’s interior ministry, remains adamant it’s a technical and procedural set of tweaks. Home Office Minister Andrew Sharpe said at the bill’s committee stage in the House of Lords that the law was “not going to … ban end-to-end encryption or introduce a veto power for the secretary of state … contrary to what some are incorrectly speculating.”
“We have always been clear that we support technological innovation and private and secure communications technologies, including end-to-end encryption,” a government spokesperson said. “But this cannot come at a cost to public safety, and it is critical that decisions are taken by those with democratic accountability.”
Encryption threat
Despite the protestations of industry and campaigners, the British government is whisking the bill through parliament at breakneck speed — risking the ire of lawmakers.
Ministers have so far blocked efforts’ to refine the bill in the House of Lords, the U.K.’s upper chamber. But there are more opportunities to contest the legislation coming and industry is already making appeals to MPs in the hopes of paring it back in the House of Commons.
Some companies including Apple have threatened to pull their services from the UK if asked to undermine encryption under Britain’s laws | Feline Lim/Getty Images
“We stress the critical need for adequate time to thoroughly discuss these changes, highlighting that rigorous scrutiny is essential given the international precedent they will set and their very serious impacts,” the TechUK letter states.
The backdrop to the row is the fraught debate on encryption that unfolded during the passage of the earlier Online Safety Act, which companies and campaigners argued could compel companies to break encryption in the name of online safety.
The bill ultimately said that the government can call for the implementation of this technology when it’s “technically feasible” and simultaneously preserves privacy.
Apple, WhatsApp and Signal have threatened to pull their services from the U.K. if asked to undermine encryption under U.K. laws.
Since the Online Safety Act passed in November, Meta announced that it had begun its rollout of end-to-end encryption on its Messenger service.
In response, Cleverly issued a statement saying he was “disappointed” that the company had gone ahead with the move despite repeated government warnings that it would make identifying child abusers on the platform more difficult.
Critics see a pincer movement. “Taken together, it appears that the Online Safety Bill’s Clause 122 is intended to undermine existing encryption, while the updates to the IPA are intended to block further rollouts of encryption,” said Whittaker.
Beyond encryption
In addition to the notice regime, rights campaigners are worried that the bill allows for the more permissive use of bulk data where there are “low or no” expectations of privacy, for wide-ranging purposes including training AI models.
Lib Dem peer Christopher Fox argued in the House of Lords that this “creates an essentially new and essentially undefined category of information” which marks “a departure from existing privacy law,” notably the Data Protection Act.
Director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, also has issues with the newly invented category. With CCTV footage or social media posts for example, people may not have an expectation of privacy, “[but] that’s not the point, the point is that that data taken together and processed in a certain way, can be incredibly intrusive.”
Big Brother Watch is also concerned about how the bill deals with internet connection records — i.e. web logs for individuals for the last 12 months. These can currently be obtained by agencies when specific criteria is known, like the person of interest’s identity. Changes to the bill would broaden this for the purpose of “target discovery,” which Big Brother Watch characterizes as “generalized surveillance.”
Members of the House of Lords are also worried about the bill’s proposal to expand the number of people who can sanction spying on parliamentarians themselves. Right now, this requires the PM’s sign-off, but under the bill, the PM would be able to designate deputies for when he is not “available.” The change was inspired by the period in which former PM Boris Johnson was incapacitated with COVID-19.
The bill will return to the House of Lords on January 23, before heading to the House of Commons to be debated by MPs | Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
“The purpose of this bill is to give the intelligence agencies a bit of extra agility at the margins, where the existing Rolls Royce regime is proving a bit clunky and bureaucratic,” argues David Anderson, crossbench peer and author of a review that served as a blueprint for the bill. “If you start throwing in too many safeguards, you will negate that purpose, and you will not solve the problem that bill is addressing.”
Anderson proposed the changes relating to spying on MPs and peers are necessary “if the prime minister has got COVID, or if they’re in a foreign country where they have no access to secure communications.”
This could even apply in cases where there’s a conflict of interest because spies want to snoop on the PM’s relatives or the PM himself, he added.
Amendments proposed by peers at the committee stage were uniformly rejected by the government.
The bill will return to the House of Lords for the next stage of the legislative process on January 23, before heading to the House of Commons to be debated by MPs.
“Our overarching concern is that the significance of the proposed changes to the notices regime are presented by the Home Office as minor adjustments and as such are being downplayed,” reads the TechUK letter.
“What we’re seeing across these different bills is a continual edging further towards … turning private tech companies into arms of a surveillance state,” says Carlo.
Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, was arrested in Florida and is accused of spending decades spying for Cuba. Manuel Bojorquez reports.
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Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, was arrested in Florida and is accused of spending decades spying for Cuba. Manuel Bojorquez reports.
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The independent journalists who combed through the Twitter Files and Facebook Files – which shined a bright light on the federal government’s infiltration of the social media giants to stifle free speech – are at it again. This time, the revelations published by Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi attempt to fill in critical blanks in their previous shocking discoveries.
Those blind spots were the concrete connections between the federal government and a concerted effort to shut down free speech through censorship strategies built off of existing defense frameworks created for the military. These frameworks initially sold as a tool to go after “bad actors,” such as your garden variety terrorists, allegedly were used to go after a new kind of “bad actor” – regular garden variety citizens.
The information provided by an unnamed whistleblower is alarming. It shows just how entitled the left-wing zealots who have taken over the United States government have come to be, and how much they believe in their own greatness and superiority.
As usual, this jaw-dropping story didn’t get the mainstream media coverage it deserved, so without further ado, let’s dive into what the three journalists found and what it means for democracy.
THE CTIL FILES #1
Many people insist that governments aren’t involved in censorship, but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. pic.twitter.com/tqgSQjPIuT
In what they dubbed the CTIL Files #1, Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Taibbi laid out information they received from a whistleblower that shows the beginning foundation of a federal government effort to formalize censorship activities. CTIL stands for the “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League.
CTIL, which mainstream media outlets have tried to sell as merely a group of volunteer “do-gooders” working in their private unofficial capacities to try to better the information landscape, was predominantly created by US and UK military and intelligence contractors as far back as 2018. One of the various activities employed by the CTIL included tracking and reporting “disfavored content” on social media.
This disfavored content included anti-lockdown sentiments during the COVID pandemic, including references to “all jobs are essential,” “we won’t stay home,” and “open America now.” On its own, tracking and reporting data may not seem all that nefarious, but when taken into account that this tracking and reporting was done by military and intelligence contractors, whether on their own time or not – things get scary.
Additionally, when considering the intended goal of CTIL, it’s clear that just as the three intrepid journalists diligently investigating this phenomenon have indicated, a “Censorship Industrial Complex” was in the works, if not fully operational today.
US Dept. of Homeland Security officials insist they didn’t demand censorship, but they did. And now, newly released emails suggest they demanded the censorship of whole “narratives,” just like CTIL’s military contractors did, and thus interfered in the 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/AnFZu6RhQm
The unnamed whistleblower who provided the treasure trove of information claims to have been recruited to CTIL through monthly cyber-security meetings held at the Department of Homeland Security.
The goal of CTIL, according to the whistleblower, was to:
“…become part of the federal government. In our weekly meetings, they made clear that they were building these organizations within the federal government, and if you built the first iteration, we could secure a job for you.”
This accusation goes firmly against the narrative that this group was merely a collection of private citizens volunteering time to passively track “misinformation” and report their findings in an unofficial capacity. Digging deeper into the documents and information obtained by the whistleblower, the construction of the tools used by CTIL shows how connected the federal government was to this group.
14. “MAKE LIBERTY GREAT AGAIN… PROBABLY NOT OUR CURRENT TARGET” CTIL analysts were often unable or unwilling to distinguish legitimate speech – like opposing lockdowns – from “disinformation.” In this incident report, #openamericanow and “Make Liberty Great Again” are suspect pic.twitter.com/9ylqCQJeft
CTIL created what they described as a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy titled Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT). The creation of AMITT was made possible by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by a significant defense and intelligence contractor called MITRE.
It’s damning enough to discover how closely connected defense and intelligence officials and offices were ingrained with this “league.” Still, it’s only made worse when one dives into a report they wrote.
In the “Misinfosec” report, they wrote on the results of Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump:
“A study of the antecedents to these events lead us to the realization that there’s something off kilter with our information landscape.”
The report goes on to state:
“The usual useful idiots…are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions.”
They punctuate their concern with the following:
“…now it’s our brains that are being hacked.”
3. “YOUR SPY DISGUISE…LOCK YOUR SHIT DOWN.” CTI League trainings instructed members on creating phony identities to infiltrate groups “like Boogaloo” pic.twitter.com/JFN5P4Kacm
It’s essential to focus on these individuals’ wording in this report. This group of individuals honestly don’t believe what they were doing and, more than likely, are still currently doing, is wrong.
They believe that the US and UK citizens didn’t (can’t) make decisions of their own but were duped into voting for Donald Trump and Brexit, that they don’t know better and need mechanisms like CTIL to make the right decisions.
In the same report, they wrote:
“For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state. Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means.”
To break that down into simpler terms, this report’s writers lament that companies like Twitter now X dared to allow everyday citizens access to a platform where they could freely exchange information, ideas, and thoughts not approved by the government. This brings us to the reason the government and left-wing elites hate Elon Musk.
When the Twitter Files first dropped after Elon Musk freed the blue bird, the billionaire told Tucker Carlson:
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind.”
For a time, it blew the public’s mind as well. However, the mainstream media and the political elites that control their puppet strings banked on the public’s collective ability to lose interest in things they believe don’t affect them.
However, what happens on Twitter and now subsequently X drives mainstream media’s discourse. Simply put, it is the most powerful social media platform. When Twitter was under the watchful and influential thumb of federal and intelligence community entities, the platform was used to stifle conservative voices and drive left-wing narratives.
Now that X no longer has this leash, it is an open forum letting loose divergent viewpoints and elevating the citizenry through independent journalism.
“X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people. We’re a platform that allows people to make their own decisions.”
Make no mistake: the Censorship Industrial Complex does not want you to make your own decisions, because they believe you are incapable of making the right decisions. They don’t want information independence because they believe information independence is dangerous and that they are the only ones who can safely construct and distribute the right information.
It’s time to pay attention to the details because the devil resides in the obscurity of minutiae, hoping we don’t see him until it is too late.
Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust. The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”
The flight data recorder of a large U.S. Navy plane that overshot a runway and ended up in the water near Honolulu this week has been recovered as the military continues to plan for the aircraft’s removal.
The surveillance plane flying in rainy weather overshot a runway Monday at a military base in Hawaii and splashed into Kaneohe Bay, but all nine aboard were uninjured, authorities said.
The Navy’s Aircraft Mishap Board is investigating on scene at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, trying to determine the cause of the accident and any contributing factors, the Navy said Friday in a statement. Marine Corps Base Hawaii is about 10 miles from Honolulu on Oahu. The base houses about 9,300 military personnel and 5,100 family members. It’s one of several key military installations on Oahu.
Sailors from a mobile diving and salvage unit retrieved the data recorder Thursday and conducted a hydrographic survey to assess the P-8A plane’s structural integrity. The recorder contains data on flight parameters such as altitude, airspeed, and other important information.
Aircraft expert Peter Forman told Hawaii News Now the runway at the base is shorter, and bad weather and winds may also have played a part.
The survey also assessed the coral and marine environment around the plane, which will aid them in minimizing impact during its removal, the Navy said.
Kaneohe Bay residents have expressed concerns about possible coral reef damage and other potential harm from fuel or other chemicals in the area, which is about 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) from an ancient fishing point.
The Navy said it has put primary and secondary containment booms around the airplane, along with other absorbent materials. Specially trained personnel are monitoring the area 24 hours a day.
The P-8A is often used to hunt for submarines and for reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. It is manufactured by Boeing and shares many parts with the 737 commercial jet.
The plane belongs to the Skinny Dragons of Patrol Squadron 4, stationed at Whidbey Island in Washington state. Patrol squadrons were once based at Kaneohe Bay but now deploy to Hawaii on a rotating basis.
Another crew from Washington state, the VP-40 Fighting Marlins, arrived Thursday to assume homeland defense coverage, the Navy said.
Dmitry Muratov, one of Russia’s best-known journalists, has been added to the country’s list of foreign agents, less than two years after the Kremlin praised the principled reporting that saw him awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
Muratov, the former editor of now-shuttered liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was included in an update Friday evening to the Russian Ministry of Justice’s register of journalists, politicians and activists that Moscow claims are acting on behalf of hostile states.
The designation of foreign agent, which has been repeatedly used on critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin and opponents of his war in Ukraine, means that Muratov will have to adhere to strict rules on political activity. It also bars him from engaging in public life. Any mention of him in Russian media or social networks must reference his status.
According to Human Rights Watch, “in Russia, the term foreign agent is tantamount [to] spy or traitor,” and has been used “to smear and punish independent voices.”
The decision to accuse Muratov of being under undue influence from abroad flies in the face of the Russian state’s own previous assessment of his journalism. After Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov offered his congratulations and said the long-time editor “consistently works according to his own values, is committed to those values, is talented, and is brave.”
Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Filipino-American reporter Maria Ressa for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Since the start of its increasingly catastrophic war in Ukraine, Russia has all but eliminated the country’s independent media outlets, imposing harsh penalties for those considered to be “discrediting the Russian armed forces.”
Many Russian journalists have been forced to move abroad to continue their work. Muratov’s Novaya Gazeta was forced to cease operations in Russia in April 2022, weeks after the start of the war and has since been forcibly closed by the state, though it has continued to publish online.
Moscow has also detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since March 29 on espionage charges, for which no evidence has been presented. U.S. President Joe Biden has branded the arrest, the first of an accredited correspondent on spying allegations since the end of the Cold War, “totally illegal.”
In August, POLITICO reporter Eva Hartog was expelled from Russia after she was refused an extension to her visa.
Earlier this week, the Nobel Foundation faced criticism from both Swedish and Ukrainian politicians after it decided to invite Russian ambassadors to attend this year’s awards ceremony.
On the 55th anniversary of the Prague Spring, the head of Britain’s secret intelligence service sat down with POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy — a journalist with deep experience reporting from behind the Iron Curtain — to talk about Russia, Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, China and AI in spycraft.
In the rare exclusive interview, Richard Moore issued a thinly-veiled recruitment call to Russians who’ve become disillusioned with their leadership while assessing that President Vladimir Putin was “under pressure” internally after a mutiny by mercenaries exposed his weakness.
“Join hands with us — our door is always open,” Moore — known as “C” inside the agency — said in a speech at a POLITICO event hosted by the British embassy in Prague.
The MI6 chief, who rose to lead the agency in 2020 after a career in diplomacy, repeatedly referred to Prague’s history as a center of resistance against Russian dominance as a parallel to current times. While the city’s students led an uprising against Soviet occupiers that was brutally repressed by Russian tanks, the Czech Republic — long known as a playground for spies — is now a member of NATO and the EU, as well as a robust supporter of Ukraine.
“When we were thinking about me coming here, it seemed a very good place to speak about Ukraine in particular. The parallels are so strong, aren’t they?” he said. “This is the last European country to see Russian tanks rolling across its border and that is where Ukraine finds itself.”
Moore offered an upbeat assessment of the battlefield situation in Ukraine, noting that Kyiv’s forces had taken back more ground in the past month than the Russians had done in a year. And he issued a warning to African leaders who are relying on Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner PMC mercenary army, to keep them in power.
“If Russian mercenaries can betray Putin, who else might they betray?” he said in the speech, the only public one he plans to give this year.
Moore’s remarks come as MI6 is increasing its public outreach efforts. Founded under another name before World War I, MI6 — Britain’s equivalent to the U.S.’s CIA, whereas MI5 is more like the FBI — operated for many years completely out of public view. The British government only officially acknowledged its existence in 1994.
During those years in the shadows, a rich lore developed around the spy agency and its cadre of secret agents — thanks in large part to authors such as Graham Greene and John Le Carré, and the iconic James Bond 007 character invented by Ian Fleming.
MI6 has modernized its image and now operates out of a gleaming headquarters on the banks of the Thames in London. But Moore said he embraces the mythology surrounding his office — including by writing in green ink, in keeping with a century-old tradition.
Between comments about the global spy game, Moore flashed his playful cufflinks — which were in the shape of Marmite jars and bore the words “love” and “hate” on either wrist. Ever the diplomat, Moore explained to the international audience that Marmite was a condiment made from yeast extract that has a “very strong taste” and is either adored or detested, even in Britain. Take that, James Bond!
Here are seven takeaways from Moore’s POLITICO interview in Prague.
1. Ukraine’s ‘hard grind’
With Russia’s invasion almost 18 months old, Kyiv’s Western allies are paying close attention to the progress of a counteroffensive that started earlier this summer. Ukrainian commanders have underscored challenges on the battlefield, as deeply-entrenched Russian troops have strewn the front with many thousands of mines that are slowing Ukraine’s advance.
Kyiv’s progress, which is taking place without strong air support, has led to criticism that Ukraine is advancing too slowly. But Moore struck a positive note.
“Well it’s a hard grind and, you know, Ukrainian officials and military don’t shy away from that. And the Russians have had a chance to put in defense[s] which are very tough to overcome,” he said.
“But I do return to the point that Ukrainian commanders in rather stark contrast to their Russian counterparts want to preserve the lives of their troops and therefore move with due caution. They have still recovered more territory in a month than the Russians managed to achieve in a year.”
2. Don’t ‘humiliate’ Putin
Since the start of the war, some Western leaders — most notably French President Emmanuel Macron — have voiced concern about the risk of “humiliating” Putin. Moore seemed to agree, saying the West’s aim was not to embarrass Russia or Putin himself.
“No one wants to humiliate Putin, still less does anyone want to humiliate the great nation of Russia,” he said. “But the route for them is very clear: Pull all your troops out.”
He added: “Most conflicts end in some kind of negotiation. It is for Ukraine to define the terms of peace, not us. Our job is to try and put them in the strongest possible position to negotiate from, from a position of strength, and that’s what we’re intent on doing.”
3. Russian leader ‘under pressure’
Nearly 1.5 years into Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine and a month after Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny, Moore said it was impossible to determine what was going through Putin’s mind. But he did offer a severe assessment of his position inside the Russian power structure.
“He is clearly under pressure. You don’t have a group of mercenaries advance up the motorway toward Rostov and get to within 125 kilometers of Moscow unless you have not quite predicted that was going to happen,” he said.
“I think he probably feels under some pressure. Prigozhin was his creature, utterly created by Putin, and yet he turned on him,” Moore added. “He really didn’t fight back against Prigozhin. He cut a deal to save his skin using the good offices of the leader of Belarus.”
4. Calling all Russian defectors
Moore issued an open invitation to Russians who feel disillusioned by their leader and the bloodshed in Ukraine, urging them to get in touch with British security services.
“I invite them to do what others have already done in the past 18 months and join hands with us,” he said in his prepared remarks. During his interview, he added: “The truth is that people continue to come to us, Anne, and of course in doing so they take risk. But we look after the people who come and work with us, and of course, our successes are never known.”
5. China’s ‘huge’ capabilities
Despite the intense focus on Russia, the spy chief underscored that Britain’s chief concern on the world stage today is China, which he described as unavoidable.
“We now devote more resources to China than any other mission.” This reflects “China’s importance in the world” and the “crucial need” to understand the capabilities of the Chinese government, he said.
On China’s intelligence operations in the West, Moore said: “Like everything else with China you have to look at its scale.” China’s capabilities are “huge and they deploy overseas in large numbers,” he added.
6. Spying in the age of AI
With the rise of artificial intelligence, some critics have argued that AI will make human agents irrelevant. Moore pushed back strongly against that point, arguing that human intelligence remained crucial to do what “machines cannot do,” while underscoring that MI6 was “experimenting like mad” with AI.
“If AI is taken in a direction which is beyond international coordination and developed for evil intent, that is highly dangerous. As we can tell already with the possibilities of generative AI, this will have to be handled with real care,” he said.
7. Turmoil in Iran over drones
Moore dropped a tantalizing clue about discord inside Iran’s secretive regime. While Iran has been a key supporter of Putin’s invasion, providing drones that have terrorized Ukrainian troops and cities, the MI6 boss said that the provision of drones was prompting arguments among Iran’s leaders.
“Iran’s decision to supply Russia with the suicide drones that mete out random destruction to Ukraine’s cities has provoked internal quarrels at the highest level of the regime in Tehran,” he said in prepared remarks. “Iran has chosen presumably to earn cash as well as probably to receive some military know-how in return for their support for the Russians.”
The Biden administration confirmed Saturday that China has been operating a spy base in Cuba — just one hundred miles from the shores of Florida. This comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that China tentatively agreed to pay Cuba billions of dollars to set up an electronic eavesdropping facility. Gordon Lubold, White House and national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, joins CBS News to discuss what we know about the base.
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The risks of doing business in China are increasing for foreign companies. The offices of Capvision, a consulting firm with offices in New York and Shanghai, and two American firms have been raided in recent weeks as Chinese authorities exercise their power under a new security law.
Police showed up out of the blue in early May at the Chinese offices of Capvision, searched the premises and questioned employees.
Earlier this spring, U.S. firms Bain & Company and the Mintz Group also had their Chinese offices raided. Five of Mintz’s Chinese employees were detained.
All three companies did business gathering information on Chinese companies for U.S. investors.
An image from video aired on China’s state-run CCTV network shows authorities carrying out an investigation at the Shanghai office of international consulting firm Capvision Partners, May 9, 2023.
Reuters/CCTV
After the Capvision raid, Chinese state TV even aired a special report alleging, without presenting any hard evidence, that the company had lured Chinese citizens to spill state secrets.
Capvision kept its response to the raid low-key, saying on social media that it would “review its practices,” with direction from China’s security authorities.
But James Zimmerman, a business lawyer who works in Beijing, told CBS News the raids have spooked foreign businesses.
“Everything’s a threat, you know,” Zimmerman said. “Unfortunately, in that kind of environment it’s very difficult to operate — when everything is viewed as a national security matter and… it looks as if…. anything you do could be considered to be spying.”
The billionaire boss of Twitter and Tesla, Elon Musk, was lionized when he visited China last week. He had a meeting with China’s top vice premier and got a rapturous welcome from employees at his Tesla facility in Shanghai.
He and other big players in China, including the bosses of American giants like Apple and Starbucks, may be untouchable, but smaller businesses are worried.
“A lot of folks are starting to, you know, rewrite their strategic plans just because of the tension,” said Zimmerman, noting that the increasing crackdown by Chinese authorities “makes it politically very risky for them.”
Paradoxically, China recently launched a campaign to attract new business from overseas. But many investors have cold feet. A new counterespionage law is due to take effect on July 1, and they worry it may be used as a political weapon to punish certain firms by redefining legitimate due diligence as spying.
Elizabeth Palmer has been a CBS News correspondent since August 2000. She has been based in London since late 2003, after having been based in Moscow (2000-03). Palmer reports primarily for the “CBS Evening News.”
