Free Republic

SPARE ORGANSHow secret services have created parallel structures for carrying out extrajudicial sentences.How murders are carried out in the interests of the state. A secret instruction. After the death of Alexander Litvinenko in London something seemed to change in Russia. Not everyone has formulated exactly what, but everyone has felt on order of their own "gut feelings" something, which makes the insides tense in anticipation of some unknown danger. Although our state has nothing to do with this murder. So say the officials. But somehow we don't believe them. Perhaps, one of the reasons for this is we remember, how...

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on the most massive military buildups in history. Part of President Reagan's strategy for winning was to entice the Soviets into a competition it could never even hope to win. A communist economy by its very nature is ill-equipped to compete with a free-market, capitalist system whether it's foreign trade or weapons technology. And so, slowly the Soviet economy became a basket case due to the communists desire to exceed America in an enormously expensive arms race. After the Cold War, with the Soviet threat gone and with...

The relations between Russia and the Shiite's religious leadership in Lebanon started to develop in the beginning of the seventies. The spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shia community, Imam Moussa Al-Sadr, visited Moscow in 1972 and asked Soviet authorities to issue humanitarian aid to his people. At the same time cooperation between the Marxist factions of the PLO that were active in Lebanon and Soviet military intelligence – GRU, intensified greatly. Several soviet officers (speaking fluent Arabic) even visited Palestinian terrorist training camps in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon between 1972-1975. Using their connections in PLO they managed to establish...

SEOUL — Contrary to the reaction from Washington and Tokyo, experts in Seoul and Moscow believe that North Korea’s launch of Scud, Rodong and Taepodong-2 missiles was a major success both technically and politically. Meanwhile, Russia has revealed its eagerness to sell information and technology to North Korea for use in Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program. Alexei Grigoriev, deputy director of Russia’s Federal Information Technologies Agency, told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass that Moscow was interested in “establishing contacts with the Korean side and discussing future cooperation." Grigoriev cited as an example the sale of sophisticated gear to store and transport...

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin warned yesterday that the U.S.-Russian arms race is not over and called for a strengthening of his nation's nuclear and conventional forces so Moscow can better resist foreign pressure.     The remarks, in his seventh state of the nation address since taking power in 2000, follow increasingly sharp criticism of Russia's democratic and foreign policy directions from the United States, including a harsh rebuke by Vice President Dick Cheney last week in Lithuania.     "It is premature to speak of the end of the arms race," said Mr. Putin, who pointed out in the nationally televised address...

National PR-ity // Moscow drafts a plan to influence the United States The Kremlin has taken up the promotion of Russian interests in the United States head-on. The key role will be given to the Russian-U.S. Council for Business Cooperation (RUCBC) whose supervisory board will include high-ranking officials from the Russian president’s administration, ministers and prominent public figures. The Russian government asked the Finance Ministry to find sources to finance the NGO. However, it has already been suggested that big business contribute for the council’s activities. The first donation is expected to amount to $50 million. Work has in progress...

Former CIA undercover agent: KGB and GRU former intelligence operators assist Hezbollah to penetrate the US Hezbollah - the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization - has more American blood on its hands than any Islamic terrorist ring with the sole exception of al-Qaeda, The American Spectator writes. Last week FBI Director Robert Muller announced that though the FBI and Customs had caught others, Hezbollah had succeeded in smuggling some operatives across the Mexican border into the US, he said. "This was an occasion in which Hezbollah operatives were assisting others with some association with Hezbollah in coming to the United States....

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's foreign spy agency denied Saturday that Moscow gave Saddam Hussein information on U.S. troop movements and plans during the invasion of Iraq, while analysts speculated the Pentagon claim was tied to a growing rift between the West and the Kremlin. A Pentagon report Friday cited two captured Iraqi documents as saying Russia obtained information from sources "inside the American Central Command" in Qatar and passed battlefield intelligence to Saddam through the former Russian ambassador in Baghdad, Vladimir Titorenko. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service dismissed the claims. "Similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia's intelligence have been made more...

THE career of President Vladimir Putin of Russia was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers. A new study of an economics thesis written by Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text. Putin was labelled a plagiarist yesterday after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the Russian president’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University...

WASHINGTON - The Russian government had sources inside the American military command as it planned and executed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to Iraqi documents released as part of a Pentagon report. The Russians passed information to Saddam Hussein on U.S. troop movements and plans during the opening days of the war, according to the report Friday. The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam...

EVER since Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, shot the late Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 in St Peter’s Square in Rome, investigators have tried to solve one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries: did Agca act alone or was he obeying communist orders? This week an Italian parliamentary commission will officially conclude that Agca was part of a huge conspiracy masterminded by the GRU, the Soviet military secret service, on the orders of the politburo and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist party. The findings are already being considered by a Rome prosecutor who may...

VENEZUELAN military officers have started classes in unconventional warfare to repel an invasion left-wing President Hugo Chavez warns Washington is planning. Snipers draped in foliage and civilian reservists armed with knives, catapults and handguns crawled out of a hidden tunnel in a mock demonstration as an instructor lectured officers on resistance tactics. Captains joined lieutenants straining behind a cordon to see another soldier camouflaged inside tree perch as he fired a bow and peppered a uniformed dummy target with arrows. "If no one comes, then that's fine, we can continue as the free and sovereign country we are, but we...

U.S. Report Says Russia Is Not a Reliable Partner By George Gedda The Associated Press WASHINGTON -- Russia's emergence as an increasingly authoritarian state could impair U.S.-Russian ability to cooperate on key international security issues, according to an analysis by a major U.S. foreign policy organization released on Sunday. Continuation of Russia's drift away from democratic norms under President Vladimir Putin "will make it harder for the two sides to find common ground and harder to cooperate even when they do," said the report, which was issued by the Council on Foreign Relations. It warned that some critical problems cannot...

When Nikita Khrushchev died in 1971, I was still a girl, but I remember him well. We used to visit him on the weekends on his farm at Petrovo Dalnee, about 30 miles outside of Moscow. I would work with him among the tomatoes or beehives. Although to me he was my kindly old great-grandfather, my family assured me that he was a great man, a world leader, a liberator -- someone I should be proud of.

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them. "The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

Date: Feb 5, 2006 3:08 PM From: Kenneth T. Tellis kenttellis@gmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: The time for Russia to act in defense of its own interests As long as the Russian nation sits back and accepts the world situation as a fait accompli Russia is doomed to medocrity ... but Russia can and must put its own interests before all. Perhaps the Russian families who lost their sons, fathers and youth in Afghanistan, might do well to remember who created that situation for them. It was the US that spent millions of dollars in a proxy war, fought by US-armed,...

Putin Touts Russia's Missile CapabilitiesPutin Boasts That Russia's Missiles Can Penetrate Any Missile Defense System, News Agencies Report By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV Associated Press Writer The Associated Press MOSCOW Jan 31, 2006 — President Vladimir Putin boasted Tuesday that Russia has missiles capable of penetrating any missile defense system, Russian news reports said. "Russia … has tested missile systems that no one in the world has," the ITAR-Tass, Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies quoted him as saying at a news conference. "These missile systems don't represent a response to a missile defense system, but they are immune to that. They...

MOSCOW. Jan 20 (Interfax) - The Russian delegation to the January session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will strongly oppose any attempt to equate Communism to Nazism, Head of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachyov said. "This is unacceptable, we are not ready to uphold any attempt to compare these ideologies as branches of totalitarianism," Kosachyov said at a Friday press conference in Moscow devoted to the upcoming on January 23 PACE winter session in Strasbourg at which a resolution condemning...

An e-mail is bouncing around the Internet with photographs of alleged Bolivarian gunmen in an area of Caracas that appears to be 23 de Enero. Many appear to be teenagers, they are wearing Bolivarian t-shirts with Che Guevara's face super-imposed on Venezuela's national colors, and they are armed with Glock 9mm semi-automatic handguns. According to Pensamiento Militar Venezolano 2005, a strategic and tactical military defense document drafted under the direction of President Hugo Chávez, the core mission of these armed youths is to turn Caracas into a kill zone where escualidos will be hunted down systematically if the Chávez regime...

CARACAS - Venezuela will receive the first of 100,000 Russian-made assault rifles starting next month in a deal struck earlier this year. Russia will deliver 30,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and three helicopters to Venezuela by year's end, Russian and Venezuelan officials said during talks Thursday. The first 15,000 rifles will arrive Dec. 15, with an identical shipment to follow on Dec. 30, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov said. They will be the first weapons under a deal for 100,000 Russian-made Kalashnikov AK-103 and AK-104 rifles signed in May by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's government. The remaining 70,000 rifles will...

Oct 27, 2005 Russia has quietly worked to forge a quasi-alliance of that to rival the US-led NATO, between current and future nuclear powers of Pakistan, China and Iran. This alignment is specifically geared toward confronting the US in a hotly contested market for geopolitical status in the middle east and to dictate economic trends concerning natural resources in the region. Decision by the IAEA to refer Iran to the UN Security Council has also put Russia in a difficult position between choosing its long-term economic ties with the EU and US or short-term ones with Iran. As the world...

Whittaker Chambers: Man of Courage and Faith by Lee Edwards, Ph.D.Executive Memorandum #735 April 2, 2001 The wave of publicity about Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI agent who became a master spy for the Russians, brings to mind a far different man--Whittaker Chambers, a veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.'s words, "the most important American defector from Communism." This April marks the 100th anniversary of Chambers' birth. In August 1948, Chambers, an editor at Time, identified Alger Hiss, a golden boy of the liberal establishment, as a fellow member of his underground Communist cell in...

CHECHEN REALITY: GRU VS. FSB By ROUSTAM KALIYEV (CHIHARRO)(1) Chechnya has entered a new phase of confrontation. Even official Russian spokesmen have acknowledged that, since August, there has been an intensification of fighting in the republic. According to some accounts, every day five Russian soldiers are killed and an equal number wounded as a result of the various attacks carried out by Chechens. The office of Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the president's spokesman, and representatives of the General Staff who are charged officially with informing the public about the progress of the war, prefer not to comment on Russian losses, and in...

Russia’s Spetsnaz and Terrorism By: Ryan Mauro tdcanalyst@optonline.net Some have ridiculed WorldThreats.com for accusing elements of the Russian government, military and security services of sponsoring terrorism. There is no doubt that the Soviet Union played a tremendous role in the expansion and evolution of terrorism including radical Islam, and that the people that did this still hold key positions in Russia. People can accept the fact that there are “anti-Bush” cliques inside the CIA and State Department, and the fact that there are “pro-Bin Laden” cliques in the Pakistani military ISI. Yet, for some strange reason, they cannot accept the...

WorldThreats.com Monthly Analysis: December 2003 Compiled By: Ryan Mauro tdcanalyst@optonline.net Over the course of December, there were many developments that shook the world. From the capture of Saddam Hussein to the apparent change of heart by Muammar Qadhafi of Libya, it is now becoming apparent that the War on Terrorism is taking new shape. This new periodic analysis will discuss the developments of each period of time in the title, and try to tie things in together. War on Terrorism Despite the obvious success in the War on Terror, we remain on high alert. Understandably, the Bush Administration is not...

RUSSIA SPIED ON BLAIR FOR SADDAM... // Top secret documents obtained by the Sunday Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders... MORE...

War in Iraq - situation at An-Nasiriya (update) March 24, 2003 March 24, 2003, 0800hrs MSK (GMT +3), Moscow - As of morning (MSK, GMT +3) March 24 the situation in Iraq can be characterized as quiet on all fronts. Attacking coalition forces have settled into positional warfare, they are exhausted, lost the attacking momentum and are in urgent need for fuel, ammunition, repairs and reinforcements. The Iraqis are also busy regrouping their forces, reinforcing the combat units and setting up new defense lines. Exceptionally heavy fighting continued for two days and nights near An-Nasiriya. Both warring sides employed large...