Spies, Lies and Realpolitik

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File this under “Worthwhile :canada: Initiatives” if you like, but the Foreign Interference Commission gets underway today.

That would be a commission to find out about it, not facilitate it. The latter needs no help, (at least if my neighbourhood is any indication). Besides looking into the usual suspects ( :ru: :iran: :cn: ) the commission has a mandate to

… examine and assess the capacity of relevant federal departments, agencies, institutional structures and governance processes to permit the Government of Canada to detect, deter and counter any form of foreign interference directly or indirectly targeting Canada’s democratic processes.

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Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer Viktor Labin has set up shop in Brussels, home to the European Commission and NATO headquarters. From his office in a nondescript seven-story building on the outskirts of the Belgian capital, Labin supplies Russian arms manufacturers with European-made coordinate-measuring machines, a high-tech machine tool critical in the production of the Kremlin’s hypersonic Kinzhal missile. The sanctions-busting operation has become a family business. Labin’s younger son runs the Moscow-based middleman that delivers his father’s shipments to end users in Russia, while his elder son pitches in by organizing pro-Kremlin protests across Europe. Despite the Labin family’s unabashed efforts to aid the Russian military-industrial complex, none of them has been placed on the European Union’s sanctions list.

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image

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Every time there’s a new unmasking of a Russian spy I’m amazed at how shitty their tradecraft is. It’s a wonder they get anything done

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The enemy within: How Russia’s GRU agents blend in with human rights activists, journalists, and filmmakers

An investigation by The Insider has revealed the identities of several Kremlin agents living and working under false identities inside Russia itself. All of those identified thus far are members of GRU Unit 29155, the Russian military intelligence group best known for its role in the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England in 2018. Although The Insider previously disclosed that Unit 29155 officers had used their state-sanctioned assumed identities to make multiple other trips abroad, including to place explosives at Bulgarian and Czech military facilities, the activities of their alter egos inside Russia itself had remained a black box — until now. Below, The Insider presents the biographies of three such “domestic illegals.”

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Convenient.

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For whom?

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Sweden.

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I think you have to be a little bit immature to be amused by things like this.

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Includes a short history of monitoring telegraph cables in WW I.

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