Russia

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.

A Russian ship has just rammed a Ukrainian vessel, opened fire on it and captured its sailors. Ukraine has called it an act of war, and legally it may be right. But more than this the act reveals the nature of the true Russia. At this year’s Helsinki summit, some were aghast at how subservient Donald Trump appeared to be toward Vladimir Putin. His behaviour was seen as treasonous and supposedly pointed to the power Russia now wields. For the alt-right, Putin is seen as a model – a “strongman” who is making his country great again. Meanwhile, the Democrats see an all-powerful Russia behind everything. And there is a similar narrative about Russian meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum. All of this could not be further from the truth.

At the last minute, the Russian police general everyone had assumed was a shoo-in to become the next head of Interpol was defeated by the acting head, South Korean Kim Jong-yang. It’s good news for the international police cooperation organisation, for the West and, arguably, for justice – but it’s not the end of the story. The presumed front-runner, major general Alexander Prokopchuk – formerly the head of Russia's Interpol bureau – has been accused of supervising the systematic attempt to apparently use the agency to persecute the Kremlin's political enemies. Nonetheless, until the eleventh hour, everyone saw Prokopchuk as the heir apparent. Moscow certainly seems to have thought so.

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.