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Is a Top American Diplomat a Russian Agent? John R. Schindler November 4, 2014 November 3, 2014 - Today the Ukrainian news website GORDON ran an interview with the Russian businessman and sometime politician Konstantin Borovoy. A harsh critic of Vladimir Putin — he recently said Russia’s president is “mentally unstable” while a year ago he pronounced the collapse of Putin’s corrupt dictatorship to be “inevitable” — Borovoy is something of a gadfly. A parliamentarian of independent views in the Yeltsin era, he served as an intermediary between Moscow and the rebels in the First Chechen War, and was assessed...

In one of the strongest criticisms of North Korea yet by a U.S. official, Washington's top envoy to Seoul on Wednesday labeled the communist nation a criminal regime. Alexander Vershbow even likened North Korea's counterfeiting of U.S. bills with that of actions by the late German dictator Adolf Hitler. North Korea gave no immediate response to the verbal attack. "According to an observer, North Korea is the first regime that has done that since Adolf Hitler," the U.S. ambassador said in a breakfast meeting with senior journalists in Seoul. During World War II, Nazi Germany mass-produced counterfeit British pounds...

A Look at the Next U.S. Ambassador to Korea Alexander Vershbow, who has been tentatively named the next U.S. ambassador to Korea, is a man confirmed by himself and others as a Russia expert. Vershbow was U.S. ambassador to NATO, and after the Cold War specialized in European security and weapons of mass destruction. That is why his selection as ambassador to Korea is being read as en expression of heightened interest on the part of his government in the North Korean nuclear dispute and Northeast Asian security. But Russia experts have traditionally inherited high-ranking positions in the State Department....