PI Newswire

TAMPA, Fla. — A former top Russian spy who defected to the U.S. after running espionage operations from the United Nations choked to death on a piece of meat, a Florida medical examiner says.

Sergei Tretyakov, 53, also had a cancerous tumor in his colon when he died June 13, according to an autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press through a state open records request. Tretyakov’s sudden death had led to some Internet speculation that he had been killed.

Tretyakov’s defection in 2000 was one of the most prominent cases involving Russia’s intelligence agency in the past decade. Tretyakov later said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq. He was 53 when he died, according to a Social Security death record.

His widow, Helen Tretyakov, announced his death July 9, the same day the United States and Russia completed their largest spy swap since the Cold War. She told Washington, D.C., radio station WTOP then that she announced the death to prevent Russian intelligence from claiming responsibility or “flattering themselves that they punished Sergei.”

Tretyakov lived with his wife in a peach-colored home in the small, southwest Florida town of Osprey. At the time of his death, his neighbors said they knew he had been a Russian spy.

In a 2008 interview, Tretyakov said his agents helped the Russian government skim hundreds of millions of dollars from the oil-for-food program before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. He told The Associated Press he oversaw an operation that helped Hussein’s regime manipulate the price of oil sold under the program, and Russia skimmed profits.

Read more…

Mel Gibson and his ex girlfriend, 40 year old Oksana Grigorieva, have gotten international attention after audiotapes allegedly between the two have been released to the public. The tapes, which include raging profanity-laced tirades purportedly voiced by Gibson, were released by radaronline in a melodramatic day-by-day manner, custom-made for Hollywood gossip rags.

Grigorieva, who has a twelve year old son with James Bond actor Timothy Dalton, has denied that she released the audiotapes. People Magazine reported Friday that Gibson and Grigorieva had signed a contract in May guaranteeing that the conversations she taped, which allegedly took place in February, would never go public.

This past Thursday, L.A. Superior Court Judge Scott M. Gordon allowed Gibson to continue visitation with his eight month old baby daughter, including overnight visits, yet at the same time, demanded Gibson surrender any firearms that he owns. Judge Gibson is a former Santa Monica police officer and prosecutor, who served as a ‘legal specialist’ for the so-called U.N. “International Court”. This may explain his anti-gun bias. Judge Gordon wrote a book in 2003 outlining Hitler’s atrocities. He was appointed to his current Superior Court position only three months ago by soon-to-be termed out Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another notorious gun grabber and son of a Nazi officer.

Read more…

Two longtime veterans of the intelligence wars between Russia and the West say it’s inconceivable that the spies deported to Moscow Friday didn’t detect FBI surveillance years ago.

And that, they say, could explain why the FBI never produced evidence in court that the “illegals” had obtained any classified information: They stopped spying as soon as they discovered they were being watched — but stayed just busy enough to distract the FBI, potentially, from more important operations.

“If you’re under surveillance, you don’t do anything — you’re burnt,” said Victor Ostrovsky, a prominent former Mossad operative who said the lsraelis taught trainees about surveillance by studying real Russian spies at work. “You might as well pack yourself up slowly and go home.”

An American counterintelligence veteran said: “It does boggle the mind that they never allegedly picked up on any of the watchers nor learned of any of the technical ops run against them. It really is amazing.”

“If this is true, was the FBI that good or the Illegals just that bad? If they did pick up surveillance towards the end, perhaps that is what triggered the alleged plans to depart the country by some of them, which supposedly triggered the arrests. It’s purely speculation on my part, but a lot of this does not pass the smell test.”

U.S. authorities have said they were watching, bugging and breaking into the houses of at least some of the Russians for as long as a decade. Theoretically, Ostrovsky said, the spies could have aborted any attempts to recruit Americans or gather classified documents as long ago as that.

“Illegals,” sometimes called “sleepers,” are handled differently by their bosses than the spies who are pretending to be diplomats, Ostrovsky noted. They must remain undetected to be useful.

Read more…

The sudden and swift exchange of spies between two nations in the midst of a politely tense diplomatic dance – as the US and Russia have been in – is no accident, say spy novelists, ex-spies, and government officials.

“The spy is one of the most potent figures of the imagination,” says author Steve Berry, president of International Thriller Writers. “They live in a world of deep personal conflict, wrestling with betraying everyone and everything they know and love just by doing their job. And so they are a perfect figure to hang these large stories of nations in conflict on.”

Every generation in history has put forth its own version of the vital information-gathering agent for popular consumption, he adds. “James Bond was the perfect cold warrior, but that genre pretty much died in 1990 and 1991 when the Soviet Union fell.” Since then, he adds, “We’ve all been developing the international thriller.”

When spies become news, there is often a disparity between real-life espionage and the images spun by popular film and fiction.

“Hollywood pushes and exaggerates all the things that make a spy compelling,” says Mr. Berry. All the tools of the trade, from the cool gadgets to the personal ability to live a double life with charm and ease, make for great stories and form our expectations.

Spies can come in handy when things go wrong behind the doors of international relations, says Michael Diaz, an assistant state attorney in the Clinton administration.

Read more…

Just days after the F.B.I.’s sensational dismantling of a Russian spy ring, the American and Russian authorities on Wednesday were negotiating an exchange of some or all of the 10 accused agents for prisoners held in Russia, including a scientist convicted of spying for the United States.

Though American officials were close-mouthed, they confirmed the talks and there were signs that a swap might be completed quickly. The family of the imprisoned scientist, Igor V. Sutyagin, said he had been moved to Moscow and told that he would be flown to Vienna for release as early as Thursday. A lawyer for Anna Chapman, one of the suspected agents for Russia in New York, said he had spoken with American prosecutors and Russian officials about an equally speedy resolution.

“I feel our discussions will probably be resolved by tomorrow one way or another,” said the lawyer, Robert M. Baum. Another defense lawyer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was possible that many of the 10 defendants, or all of them, would plead guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, when they are to appear for arraignment. (An 11th defendant fled after being released on bail in Cyprus.)

But no deal was announced, and it remained unclear whether the two sides had reached a final agreement and which Russian prisoners, in addition to Mr. Sutyagin, might be part of an exchange. A senior American diplomat, William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, met on Wednesday with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergei I. Kislyak, but State Department officials would say only that the spy case was discussed.

Read more…

Some notable past spy swaps involving the United States and the former Soviet Union:

_Feb. 10, 1962: Francis Gary Powers and Rudolf Ivanovich Abel are released from their prison terms for espionage and are exchanged secretly at the border between West Berlin and East Germany. Powers was the pilot of the U.S. U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane shot down May 1, 1960 near Sverdlovsk in the central USSR. Abel was reputed to be the director of a Soviet spy network in the U.S. at the time of his arrest, June 21, 1957 in New York.

_Oct 11, 1963: The State Department announced that two accused Soviet agents held by the U.S. had been exchanged for two Americans convicted and imprisoned on espionage charges. The Americans freed by the exchange are Marvin William Makinen, 24, an Ashburnham, Mass., student arrested in Kiev in 1961 while touring, and the Rev. Walter M. Ciszek, of Shenandoah, Pa., a Jesuit missionary arrested in the USSR in 1941. The freed Russians were Ivan D. Egorov, former UN Secretariat personnel officer, and his wife Alexsandra.

_April 22, 1964: Greville Maynard Wynne, a British businessman jailed in 1963 on charges of spying for Britain and the U.S., was exchanged for Konon Trofimovich Molody, a Russian army officer imprisoned by the British in 1961 for masterminding a spy ring that obtained valuable information about British submarines. The exchange took place at Heerstrasse on the West Berlin-East German border.

_April 30, 1978: A three-way prisoner exchange among the U.S., East Germany and Mozambique was completed. Miron Marcus, an Israeli citizen held since September 1976, was released on the Mozambique-Swaziland border. The U.S. released Robert G. Thompson, a former Air Force intelligence clerk convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets. East Germany released Alan Van Norman of Windom, Minn., who had been arrested in East Germany while trying to smuggle a German doctor, his wife and son to the West.

Read more…

By now, you’ve no doubt heard of the Russian spy ring that was recently busted in the US, and you’ve also probably heard that they apparently weren’t very bright. The complaint filed in their case documents a litany of unprofessionalism and carelessness, from leaving written passwords out in the open to asking a federal agent posing as a fellow spy to troubleshoot a laptop without even bothering to check back with HQ to see if the “spy” was legit.

But as incompetent as these spies were, they were bright enough to at least partially outwit the large-scale e-mail snooping efforts of the NSA’s backbone taps and multibillion-dollar datacenters. How? By using steganography to encode secret text messages in image files, which they then placed on websites.

After searching one spy’s apartment, law enforcement agents found a computer and made a copy of its hard drive for later analysis. On the hard drive they found an address book containing website links, which the agents visited and downloaded images from.

The complaint notes that “these images appear wholly unremarkable to the naked eye. But these images (and others) have been analyzed using the Steganography Program. As a result of this analysis, some of the images have been revealed as containing readable text files.”

The steganography program used to decode the images was also on one of the hard drives copied in the search; it was this hard drive which was password protected, and which the agents were able to unlock because the 27-character password was written down on a piece of paper and left lying out in the open on a desk. Clearly, the spies would have been better off with a much shorter password that could have been memorized versus a too-long one that they had to write down and keep nearby.

Read more…

The roll-up of an alleged Russian spy ring and other recent cases serve as a reminder that despite warmer U.S. relations with erstwhile Cold War enemies and the heightened demands of fighting terrorism, counterintelligence remains indispensable to national security.

Apart from the arrest of 10 suspects, U.S. investigators believe Moscow still has multiple spies in the U.S., according to people familiar with the investigation. Indeed, current and former intelligence officials say spying by Russia, China and others has grown since the 2001 terror attacks in part because rivals saw U.S. attention diverted.

“This case is a wake up call to the public and the national-security leadership that old threats are still with us,” said Michelle Van Cleave, who served as the national counterintelligence executive from 2003-06.

Ms. Van Cleave said that over the past five years, counterintelligence budgets and personnel have been cut and spy-chasing capabilities have been diminished within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies. Meanwhile, U.S. adversaries have expanded espionage operations against the U.S., she said.

The latest arrests show the U.S. still faces threats from sources other than terrorists and that spy services shouldn’t focus on terrorism to the exclusion of traditional threats, said Margaret Henoch, a former senior Central Intelligence Agency officer who concentrated on Russian targets and counterintelligence.

Read more…

The alleged Russian spy ring is a pleasant summer distraction (Anna Chapman — call your agent!) and a wonderful opportunity to use the phrase femme fatale. But if you want to ponder a 21st-century intelligence puzzle this July 4 weekend, turn your attention to cyber-espionage — where our adversaries can steal in a few seconds what it took an old-fashioned spy network years to collect.

First, though, let’s think about what the Russian “illegals” were up to in their suburban spy nests. U.S. intelligence officials think it’s partly that the Russians just love running illegal networks. This has been part of their tradecraft since the 1920s, and it enabled many of their most brilliant operations, from Rudolf Abel to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The FBI finds it hard to break its cultural habits, and so does Russia’s intelligence service, the SVR.

This illegal network must have been a special kick for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In his days as a KGB officer, he is said to have specialized in running support networks for illegal agents in Europe, and the operation must have made for a superb briefing in the Kremlin: “Comrade leader, we have a (whisper) network in America awaiting your instructions.”

My guess is that the Russians wanted this network for contingencies. Suppose their “legal” spies were expelled from the United States or subject to airtight surveillance? The illegals could operate as a kind of “stay-behind” network to handle dead drops, cash transfers and agent meetings.

Read more…

Everyone is having fun this week speculating on all aspects of the alleged Russian spy ring busted in the US on Monday. How were they initially detected? Are they just a decoy to hide the real spies? Why did the US go public now? Has anyone got any more pictures of Anna Chapman for the front pages?

From what little we do know though – ie the content of the FBI’s criminal complaints – it’s apparent the group’s technology tradecraft was not as sharp as you might expect from deep cover spies.

Here we present their two most glaring infosec failings.

Return of the MAC

Anna Chapman and her UN-based Russian government handler allegedly held ten meetings around Manhattan between January and June. They would not make overt contact but would exchange data over an ad hoc Wi-Fi network.

Chapman and the offical made things easy for their watchers, however, by using the same laptops with the same MAC addresses every time. It meant the FBI could tell whenever the pair were in contact simply by following them and using an off-the shelf Wi-Fi network analyser package to match the two MAC addresses.

Read more…

A Russian internet host reportedly popular with gangs who stole online bank logins has been taken offline.

The PROXIEZ-NET service had previously advertised itself as immune to attempts to shut it down.

Miko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said the development was “very nice”.

He warned that those who used the host for malicious purposes will almost certainly “already be switching to a different service.”

Crimeware

Mr Hypponen said that PROXIEZ “have been known to be involved in various nasty businesses”.

“We’ve noticed them in connection with Zeus, a toolkit written and sold by a Russian software engineer, which enables people to do keylogging to grab PayPal, eBay and online banking passwords,” he said.

According to Mr Hypponen, the Zeus software itself is not illegal, but can be used for malicious purposes.

He said that PROXIEZ has been used as a host for the keylogging software, as well as a means of collecting “and maintaining keylogged information” through what are known as botnets.

Read more…