Russia

Over the weekend, two Russian military aircraft carrying General Vasily Tonkoshkurov along with over 100 Russian troops landed in Caracas, Venezuela. Did the US know Putin was planning this? What will America’s response be? Who knows, because the American media isn’t asking. What might well become the most explosive situation since the Cuban missile crisis has gone almost totally ignored on the homepages of our major news sites. Rather than inquire what will be done about Russian troops in Venezuela, the media focuses its myopic gaze on the only Russia story they seem capable of seeing: what role Russia may have played in our 2016 presidential election.

‘This is not the Cold War redux; it is even worse than the Cold War.’ That’s how Nicolas Roche, of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the current climate around nuclear weapons. Roche spoke at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, a veritable Woodstock for the nuclear policy community (organizers insisted on referring to the shindig as ‘#NUKEFEST’), which convened for two days in Washington, DC. Despite the party-like atmosphere at ‘Nuke Fest’, despondency pervaded the gathering. North Korea received substantial attention at the conference, while Iran and South Asia were relatively neglected. The dominant topic of conversation, and predominant reason for despair, was the US-Russia relationship.

To the grand, art nouveau Café Louvre in Prague, once one of Franz Kafka’s favorite haunts in the Czech capital. Cockburn is here to meet another – very different – Czech figure of historical importance: Karl Koecher, the only KGB agent known to have infiltrated the CIA. He is relevant again because of a strange story claiming that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, visited a New York sex club called Plato’s Retreat. Koecher went there too, when he was a Soviet spy. Is it possible that the Kremlin has kompromat – compromising material – on Bolton, dating from the 1970s and 1980s?

If only President Richard Nixon could go to China, per the hoary Beltway cliché, perhaps only yours truly could write this column. Longer than just about anybody, I’ve warned the public about the threat to Western democracy posed by Vladimir Putin’s aggressive spies and weaponized lies. As a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, I was combating Russian propaganda, what they call Active Measures, two decades ago. When the NSA contractor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow in June 2013, I called him out as the Kremlin agent he is — as the Kremlin subsequently admitted — which won me few friends among the great and the good.

To much fanfare and glee last week, federal prosecutors announced a plea deal had been secured for Maria Butina, the mystery woman who populated DC conservative circles for a short period around the 2016 election. The popular interpretation of her travails, circulated with gusto in the press since her arrest in July, was that Butina – an attractive young woman, and, most damningly, a Russian national – had used her sexual prowess to trick gullible middle-aged Republican men into granting her access. She did this, or so the story went, at the behest of her menacing benefactors as part of the sprawling Kremlin campaign to ‘interfere’ in American politics.

Last week the public was informed of the indictment of a Russian citizen, ‘Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44’, for conspiring to defraud the United States. What had she done wrong? According to FBI Special Agent, David Holt, whose girlish signature appears on the official ‘Criminal Complaint’ submitted to a District Court in Virginia, she had served, since 2014, as an accountant to a firm in St Petersburg that had attempted to influence the American electorate by posting discourteous opinions about US politicians and officials online.

I like to think I’m a journalist like any other. But I work at the RT London office. That’s the Russian state-funded news channel. Four days a week, I’m a straight up news reporter. But, once a week, I do an even more sinister job. On Wednesdays, I ascend an extra couple of floors to a different ‘zone’ within the RT London compound, where I join a stealthy, covert team of online propagandists. There, in the lair of online information warfare, (six sad looking desks and quite a bit of mundane office banter) we record a short, and (we hope) funny and often expletive-laden video on a topic of entirely our choosing, satirizing the sorry state of the world.

Like a reckless gambler whose roulette system has worked in the past, Vladimir Putin can’t resist trying to hack US elections. He’s at it once again, in the midterms, one source close to the intelligence community tells Cockburn. ‘The GRU [Russian military intelligence] is up to its usual tricks in the midterms but the NSA [the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic spying] knows and is mitigating.’ Our source says it’s the ‘usual Russian Intelligence playbook’ familiar from the presidential election: propaganda on social media with ‘some GRU active SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection, also known as hacking, in the mix’.