RT: @l33tdawg Made a thing ... https://l33tdawg.github.io/meshticulum #meshcore #reticulum #meshticulum #lora #sage
thaddeus e. grugq
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RT: @Shtuni Was #Hanning’s massive espionage scandal foreseeable? As more details emerge, it increasingly appears the warning signs were already present, and that the matter could have been handled earlier and more discreetly to limit the damage to the #BND and #Germany from this deeply embarrassing ordeal.
- The reported accusations that he shared stolen sensitive information with Azerbaijan and China may not be the whole story. A former agent also accused him of being a Russian spy.
- On 17 August, Hanning sent his successor, BND chief Martin Jäger, an angry three-page letter demanding answers to 11 questions.
- He had learned that the BND had passed investigators a dossier containing that former agent’s accusation, without first consulting him. Jäger did not reply.
- Beyond the apparent recruitment of his own former chief of staff to steal and sell state secrets to him, Hanning’s financial difficulties, ties to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, involvement in the Christina Block kidnapping case, and entitled attitude — from demanding answers from the BND to asking Chancellor Olaf Scholz to intervene with the Latvian prime minister — reveal a pattern of questionable decisions and business choices, as well as an inflated sense of his own importance.
- What else will come to light next? Who else may have been accessing German intelligence, and possibly Five Eyes material? At this point, the possibilities remain uncomfortably wide open.
- But Hanning is far from a unique case.
- In May 2023, the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Control Committee (PKGr), which oversees the intelligence services, publicly warned that former officials with security-relevant knowledge who later consult in the same field risk putting skills and knowledge at the disposal of authoritarian regimes or criminal groups, and that conflicts of interest could harm German security interests.
- The immediate trigger was former Bundeswehr personnel training fighter pilots in China, but similar concerns about ex-intelligence officials’ dubious business ties — far-right circles, Russia, China — had been raised repeatedly to the Chancellery and the Interior Ministry. Nothing was done.
- Rules for retired officials are even looser: they only have to notify.
- In Hanning’s case, the judgment looks particularly questionable. Manfred Dankesreiter, his chief of staff at the BND, had even been officially cleared to work on the side for his former boss while still inside the service.
- So many red flags were ignored, and so many questions remain unanswered.
- Excellent reporting by @derspiegel and @welt on the case. For those who can’t read German, today's English interview with @FideliusSchmid is highly recommended. See the link below. -
RT: @spycraft101 GRU Major Anatoly Filatov stands in a workshop inside the gulag in July 1989, where he served 15 years for spying for the CIA.
Filatov was stationed in Algiers in 1973. According to some sources he was offered a ride by an attractive woman while walking in the city. The two spent time together and Filatov was then confronted by a man named Kane who showed him compromising photos with the woman. Filatov was trapped and subsequently recruited. He was given the cryptonym GTBLIP.
Filatov handed over information on GRU personnel and operations in Algiers and elsewhere. He was paid in Soviet rubles and gold coins, and the CIA maintained a bank account for him in the US into which he was paid $800 USD monthly.
After he returned to Moscow in 1976, his handlers became a husband-and-wife team, Vincent and Becky Crockett. The following year, Filatov was caught in the act of recovering a disguised dead drop and was immediately arrested. The drop was an oil-stained pipe segment which the Crocketts tossed from their moving vehicle towards an embankment just after turning a corner, out of view of any surveillance officers following them – or so they thought.
Vincent and Becky were arrested moments later by pursuing counterintelligence officers and briefly detained. The couple were quickly declared persona non grata and removed from Russia.
It’s not clear how Filatov’s espionage was discovered, but the CIA suffered catastrophic setbacks in 1977, including the loss of Aleksandr Ogorodnik (cryptonym CKTRIGON), a fire inside the embassy on August 26th, and nonstop KGB technical collection on the embassy in Moscow. There was also a rumored slip-of-the-tongue by Deputy National Security Advisor David L. Aaron at a party which may have unmasked Filatov.
Filatov was sentenced to death in 1978, but overtures by President Carter led the Soviets to change his sentence to 15 years’ imprisonment in the Perm 35 gulag, located in the Ural Mountains near the city of Perm. Only a few dozen prisoners were held there, including several convicted spies. Due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, all prisoners were released by February 1992.