"They are not diplomats, but personnel intelligence officers": US press on expulsion of Russians - ForumDaily
The article has been automatically translated into English by Google Translate from Russian and has not been edited.
Переклад цього матеріалу українською мовою з російської було автоматично здійснено сервісом Google Translate, без подальшого редагування тексту.
Bu məqalə Google Translate servisi vasitəsi ilə avtomatik olaraq rus dilindən azərbaycan dilinə tərcümə olunmuşdur. Bundan sonra mətn redaktə edilməmişdir.

“They are not diplomats, but career intelligence officers”: US press about the expulsion of Russians

“Putin doesn’t care about Russian diplomats in the United States,” writes the channel’s “talking head” Samantha Winograd, who worked on Barack Obama’s National Security Council, on the CNN website. “He doesn’t need them in America to get information about us.” He has hacked our infrastructure, he has other agents throughout the country, and he is manipulating our information flows to influence Americans."

Photo: facebook.com/WhiteHouse

Therefore, Vinograd believes, “if he expels American diplomats from Russia and, perhaps, seizes some American property (as he did last summer in response to American sanctions), then this will most likely be for the sake of formality.”

A number of American commentators point out that, despite his reputation as a Putin fan, Donald Trump has already expelled much more Russians from the United States than his predecessor Barack Obama.

Trump’s “good relations” with Russia are fading,” is the headline of Uri Friedman’s article in the magazine. Atlantic.

The fact that this will all end, was predicted immediately after the American 2016 elections of the year by Washington expert on Russia Fiona Hill, who now works at the National Security Council with Trump.

“I think he’ll fall out with his new friend Vladimir pretty quickly,” she noted. “Russia has always been an expansionist power - always on the march, never giving anything away to anyone and never conceding anything - much like the United States... We will have a lot of friction.”

Just last Tuesday trump rang Congratulations to Putin on his victory in the elections, which in the United States are commonly called rigged. Before this, the security forces provided Trump with a cheat sheet in which “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” was written in capital letters, but he did not listen. Or I didn't read it.

Moreover, Trump did not mention a word in this conversation about poisoning In Britain, a former GRU officer, Sergey Srippal, and his daughter, Yulia.

On trump let down all the dogs, and the charges about his collusion with Russia again shone in the local firmament.

And suddenly he appoints his national security adviser to the famous hawk John Bolton, who has long been a part of Moscow, is extremely skeptical, and then expels more Russian diplomats from the US than Reagan in November 1986, when he sent 55 Soviet intelligence diplomats and set a record that lasted until Trump.

Photo: twitter / @ AmbJohnBolton

US newspapers current batch of 60 expelled diplomats are also called career intelligence officers and quote anonymous representatives of the Trump administration who complain that they were “too aggressive” in obtaining classified information.

New York Times promptly published a list of mutual expulsions over the past decades. It dates back to 1986, when Reagan expelled 55 people and Moscow, in retaliation, ordered 260 Soviet citizens to stop working at the US Embassy in Moscow - leaving Americans without cleaners and drivers.

The then-conflict began with the arrest in New York of the espionage of Soviet citizen Gennady Zakharov, who worked at the UN. In response, the KGB arrested a journalist in Moscow US News & World Report Nicholas Daniloff, who was also accused of espionage. Daniloff was released two weeks later.

In this case, the well-known Soviet biologist David Goldfarb, who was helped by a long-time friend of the Soviet Union, billionaire Armand Hammer, who took the sick old man to New York on his plane helped him.

New York Times came out with a photograph on the front page depicting Goldfarb being met at the New York airport by his son Alexander, who later - at the request of Boris Berezovsky - took fugitive FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko from Turkey to London.

The other day, the father of the latter, Walter Alexandrovich, accused Goldfarb of poisoning Litvinenko, speaking on Channel One about the case of Skrypal, whose poisoning led to the current expulsions of Russian diplomats.

In 1994, CIA personnel officer Aldrich Ames, who was the most productive Soviet spy of the postwar period, was arrested. Russian diplomat Alexander Lysenko was expelled from the United States, whom the Americans described as a high-ranking official of the SVR and suspected that he oversaw Ames.

Although Ames caused enormous harm to the United States, and several American agents issued to them earlier were shot, Washington, during its rapprochement with Yeltsin Moscow, limited itself to simply expelling Lysenko. The Americans even kindly offered Moscow to withdraw the diplomat itself.

In March 2001, 50 Russian diplomats were expelled from the United States in connection with the arrest of FBI counterintelligence officer Robert Hanssen, who had been working for Moscow for more than 15 years. In response, several American diplomats were expelled from Russia.

Anna Chapman.
Photo: Wikipedia

In 2010, a Russian spy organization of 10 people was exposed in the US. They were sent to Moscow after they confessed to the criminal conspiracy. In exchange, Russia released four prisoners, three of whom, including Sergey Skripal, were convicted for treason.

In 2013, an employee of the US embassy Ryan Vogl was sent from Russia, arrested with two wigs of different colors, a map of Moscow, 130 thousands of dollars in cash and a letter asking to pay up to a million per year for long-term cooperation.

In June, 2016, two Russian diplomats were expelled from the United States after a Moscow policeman beat an American diplomat. Russia stated that the American was a CIA under diplomatic cover and refused to produce a document at the entrance to the US embassy. Washington interpreted the incident as part of a campaign against its diplomats in Russia.

 

December 2016 from the USA were expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the intervention of Moscow in the American elections. Moscow then refrained from returning expulsions at the request of Trump’s close assistant Michael Flynn, who called on Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak to wait until the new administration arrived at the White House.

The Russian response to this expulsion and economic sanctions followed in July 2017, when the Americans were ordered to reduce their staff in Russia by as many 755 people.

Explaining his congratulations to Putin, Trump said that good relations with Russia were not in his personal interests, but in America's interests, since Russia "can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming arms race."

Speaking on Monday with reporters, representatives of his administration took a completely different tone. As Friedman summarizes in Atlantic, they complained that the Kremlin denied responsibility for the poisoning of the Skripals and intrigues against American friends, and also committed “destabilizing and aggressive actions in the United States and around the world.”

According to these representatives, hiding behind diplomatic immunity, Russian agents are actively conducting intelligence operations and subversive activities in the countries where they work. Trump, they said, sincerely wants to improve relations with Russia, but Moscow not only does not help to solve the problems mentioned by the president, but also works in these conflicts against the interests of America.

For example, Trump is trying to isolate Iran and North Korea, and the Kremlin is offering them help. Instead of fighting the extremist Islamic State group banned in Russia, Moscow is focused on supporting Syrian President Assad. It is violating international norms by forcefully redrawing Ukraine's borders, and is developing new nuclear weapons that will penetrate American defenses.

Counting on Russia to help the United States resolve these conflicts is like hoping that a rival soccer team will score goals against itself, Friedman writes.

Photo: facebook.com/WhiteHouse

It so happened that Trump had already sent more Russian diplomats than Obama, he sums up, and also closed the Russian consulates in San Francisco, and now in Seattle.

Having lost its San Francisco facility, Russia has lost most of its intelligence capabilities on the US West Coast, and the closure of the consulate in Seattle will make it difficult to gather information about the US atomic submarines base there and the factories of the corporation. Boeingwhich is the second largest military contractor of the country.

Monday newspaper Seattle Times sent its correspondents to the Russian consulate, located on the 25-th floor of the building on University Street. They found a little more than a dozen visitors there, most of whom had already been turned away from the gate, although the US government gave the Russians time to pack up until April 2.

Among them was Luda Reeve from San Diego, who took time off from work and came to Seattle in the hope of renewing her Russian passport.

“I don’t think it was a surprise to them,” she said, nodding toward consular officials. “But it was a surprise for the people who flew here.”

The Seattle Consulate General served Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Washington, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

With its closure, Russia has three consulates left - in the US capital, New York and Houston.

Only in the state of Washington, where Seattle is located, according to the 2016 census of the year, live 88 thousands of Russians.

The Kitsap naval base, where 8 nuclear submarines are deployed, is located in Bangor, 35 km from the center of Seattle. According to the liberal edition Bulletin of Atomic Scientists10 years ago more than a quarter of the 9962 US nuclear warheads were concentrated in Bangor.

Since then, their total number has declined somewhat.

Since Bangor was considered the largest repository of nuclear ammunition in the United States, if not all over the world, pacifist actions were regularly held at the gates of the base there.

In addition to the submarine base, the corporation’s factories were the most important objects of Russian espionage in the vicinity of Seattle Boeing, which signed a number of large contracts with Russia, primarily for the supply of titanium for passenger aircraft.

Photo

Boeing makes under Seattle flying tankers KS-46, reconnaissance aircraft AWACS and anti-submarine aircraft P-8.

It is believed that about 100 Russian intelligence officers were working in the United States “under a diplomatic roof.” Expelling 60 of them will create temporary difficulties, but, as Joshua Yaffa writes in the magazine The New Yorker, in itself, “this is not a great loss for the Kremlin.” Such expulsions, according to the author, have long turned into a kind of formal ritual and are rather symbolic.

More important is the fact that Washington and half of the EU countries announced the expulsions as a joint political decision. According to the author, “over the past years, the Kremlin’s most important goal has been to split alliances and weaken Western institutions” in the hope that Moscow will be able to fragment the EU and NATO, or at least portray them as helpless and worthless entities.

That is why the Kremlin welcomed Brexit and initially rejoiced at the rise of Trump, who was hostile to precisely those Western communities that Moscow was encroaching on.

It was not clear that Britain would be able to win the collective support of the EU it is leaving and the Trump administration, which is “suffering from capriciousness and isolationism” and led by a supposed admirer of Putin.

The fact that many members of the EU and the US supported Britain, says that the West is still more united than Moscow hoped.

On the other hand, Jaffa stipulates that almost half of the EU has refrained from expelling Russians. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has said, for example, that his country wants to “build bridges between East and West.”

Obviously, the long-term efforts of Moscow have borne some fruit, and she will continue to pull this thread, since she now knows where the seams lie, the author writes.

The second circumstance that the latest expulsions point to is the paradoxical situation that Trump, on the one hand, continues to speak favorably about Putin, and on the other hand, takes measures that, one might say, are more hostile to Putin than all Obama’s.

Jaffa mentions, for example, sending anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, which she never received from Obama.

“There is an opinion from Moscow that Trump was forced to issue the order to expel the Russians by pressure from the American establishment. Well, what else do you tell them to say now? - asks the author. “It’s not like they had any backup plan.”

Recall, the former GRU officer Sergey Skripal and his daughter Julia were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury March 4. They were taken to the hospital in critical condition, they are still in a coma, doctors estimate their condition as consistently severe. The police found that they were poisoned nerve agent. About 20 people were poisoned, including the policeman who first visited the scene and the house of Skripal. On the fact of poisoning a case of attempted murder.

In Russia, Skripal was convicted in 2006 for spying for British intelligence. In 2010, he was exchanged for Russian intelligence agents uncovered in the United States.

After investigating, Britain came to the conclusion that the nerve agent of the new generation of the group called “Rookie” was used for poisoning. Since no country other than Russia had access to this substance, London declared that Russia was most likely responsible for the attempt. Prime Minister Teresa May ultimately demanded an explanation from Moscow.

The authorities rejected the suspicion of involvement in the crime and refused to respond to the ultimatum, demanding to provide official information about the case.

In response to this Britain announces expulsion of Russian diplomats from 23which, according to London, are working for Russian intelligence.

Meanwhile, the Russian embassy in the United States is polling Twitter: which US consulate to close in Russia. Read and watch how people vote on this.

Read also on ForumDaily:

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US Ambassador to Russia: After the expulsion of diplomats in America, there will be fewer Russian spies

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