Amy Knight: da literatura russa do século XIX para o Estado policial do século XX e XXI - New York Review of Books

 Amy Knight era apenas uma apreciadora da literatura soviética, quando foi detida pela KGB. Isso lhe deu uma nova direção em suas leituras, pesquisas e livros.

Online this week

On Thursday, we published “Aleksei Navalny, Ready to Run Again in Russia,” by the historian and longtime New York Review contributor Amy Knight. She reviews the prospects for Navalny, the anti-corruption opposition politician who survived a poisoning attempt with the nerve agent Novichok, thanks to treatment in Germany, and is now planning a return to Russia to resume his mission as a thorn in the side of President Vladimir Putin.

Knight has become known as one of the West’s leading scholars of the KGB, from her first book, a study of the secret police published in 1988, through subsequent ones on Stalin’s henchman Lavrenty Beria and cold war spying, to her most recent, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (2017). Although her first love had simply been the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which made her want to learn the Russian language, the course of her future research was set while she was studying at the University of Michigan.

“A study tour of the Soviet Union with fellow students and professors in the summer of 1967—the height of the cold war—resulted in my brief arrest by the KGB, which took a dim view of our group’s consorting with their dissident students,” she told me via email this week. “After that experience, I became fascinated with the Soviet dissident movement and the efforts of the Soviet regime to suppress it.”

She pursued graduate studies at the LSE and embarked on her career as a Soviet affairs analyst at the Library of Congress, followed by teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, and Carleton universities. The dissolution of the Soviet Union is now some thirty years distant, but I was curious to know what those epochal events had meant at the time for a Sovietologist—was she ever worried about being out of a job? 

“On the contrary, the Soviet collapse created huge opportunities because we finally could visit Russia in person,” she replied. “And the Soviet archives suddenly opened up—a treasure trove of files and documents on the hitherto secret operations of the Communist Party leadership. I was able to travel to Russia and do research and interviews, including with a former KGB chief, several times in the early and mid-Nineties. This was the golden age for Western Russia experts and scholars.”

The halcyon era did not last long. By the latter part of the decade, she explained, the shutters were coming down again and her access to such sources ended.

“Once Putin became firmly entrenched in power it became risky for people like me, who were so critical of Putin, to visit Russia. The last time I was in Moscow, March 2008, I was well aware that I was being watched wherever I went to do interviews,” she said. “Shortly before I left Moscow, I became violently ill with what I assumed was food-poisoning from eating at the Marriot Hotel on Tverskaya Street. But in retrospect, I saw the incident as a warning and have not attempted to return to Moscow since then.”

There was no confusing Navalny’s illness with food-poisoning. Placed in a medical coma by Russian doctors, and then flown to Germany for specialist—and safe—treatment, he was lucky to survive. Until this moment, the opposition leader had faced repeated arrests and legal harassment on apparently spurious and politically motivated charges. Why had he now, I asked Knight, faced an assassination attempt that had the Kremlin’s fingerprints on it?

“Navalny addresses the single most important weakness of Putin’s regime: official corruption,” she explained. “The Russian people are suffering terribly economically, and the more they learn about the vast sums of money that Putin’s cronies are pocketing at their expense, the more receptive they are to Navalny’s calls for protest.”

Knight’s article this week read to me as relatively optimistic about what Navalny might still achieve once back in Russia, despite Putin’s iron control of the state security apparatus, the media, and an ersatz electoral process. Will the incoming Biden administration make much difference, I asked.

“Putin has made it clear in his public comments over the years that a strong NATO alliance is one of the greatest threats to his regime,” she said. “The most important thing for Biden in his strategy toward Russia is to repair our alliance with our European allies and act in concert with them in responding to the human rights abuses of the Kremlin. The sanctions that Navalny and his colleagues have advocated are a good example.

“I think that Russian democrats are very relieved to see that Trump will be out of the White House,” she added, “because Trump turned a blind eye to Putin’s human rights abuses.”

—Matt Seaton

 

For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.

Trump manipulado pelo KGB-FSB de Putin - Mark Mazzetti and Nicholas Fandos (NYT)

A democracia sendo tolerante com os que minam a democracia.
Um dia acabam destruindo seus fundamentos, mesmo sem potências estrangeiras
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

G.O.P.-Led Senate Panel Details Ties Between 2016 Trump Campaign and Russian Interference

A nearly 1,000-page report confirmed the special counsel’s findings at a moment when President Trump’s allies have sought to undermine that inquiry.

Image

By Mark Mazzetti and Nicholas Fandos

• Aug. 18, 2020The New York Tines, Updated 10:34 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary.

The report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s stunning election nearly four years ago.

Like the investigation led the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report for the first time identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

Democrats highlighted those ties in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

Democrats also laid out a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”

The assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.

The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son — have “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”

The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

Since the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, Attorney General William P. Barr and numerous Republican senators have tried to discredit the special counsel’s work — dismissing the investigation into the 2016 election as “Russiagate.”

Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process that has continued unabated.

The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal F.B.I. notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened blockbuster hearings in 2017 and 2018, but much of its work took place in a secure office suite out of public view.

Portions of the report containing classified or other sensitive information were blacked out.

The Intelligence Committee released four previous volumes on its findings over the past year. The first focused on election security and Russia’s attempts to test American election infrastructure, and included policy recommendations to blunt future attacks. The second provided a detailed picture of Russia’s use of social media to sow political divisions in the United States.

Lawmakers then produced a study of the response by the Obama administration and Congress in the highly partisan run-up to the 2016 election. Most recently, they found that a 2017 intelligence community assessment, assigning blame to Russia and outlining its goals to undercut American democracy, had been untainted by politics and was fundamentally sound despite attacks on it by Mr. Trump’s allies.

The committee focused its work on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It did not investigate attempts by Mr. Trump to hinder the work of federal investigators.

The report arrived in a fraught political moment, particularly for Republican senators on the panel who signed off on it and thus may find themselves at odds with Mr. Trump and other influential figures in their party. Since Mr. Mueller finished his work, Republicans close to Mr. Trump have sought to recast the president as the victimof politically motivated national security officials in the Obama administration.

The Justice Department’s independent inspector general has found that law enforcement officials had sufficient basis to open the Russia investigation and acted without political bias.

But two other Senate panels, the Judiciary and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, are conducting investigations premised on picking apart aspects of the special counsel’s inquiry. And though they have not disputed Russia’s interference, they have decidedly turned the party’s focus away from the actions of a hostile foreign power toward the workings of the investigation it spawned, arguing that Mr. Mueller should never have been appointed and that the F.B.I. should have dropped any inquiry involving the Trump campaign long before he was.

The Justice Department is doing a similar post-mortem. Mr. Barr told a congressional committee last month that he was determined “to get to the bottom of the grave abuses involved in the bogus ‘Russiagate’ scandal.” He has appointed a criminal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to review the investigation and the actions of intelligence and law enforcement officials trying in 2016 to understand the Kremlin’s interference and possible links to Trump associates.

Much of the Intelligence Committee investigation was overseen by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, but he temporarily stepped aside as the chairman of the panel in May because of a federal investigation into a rush of stock sales he made before the coronavirus pandemic began rattling the United States. As they watched a similar House investigation over Russian interference splinter under partisan bickering and Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Mueller, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner worked steadily to ensure they could come to an authoritative bipartisan conclusion. Mr. Burr voted to endorse the final conclusions.

The findings are expected to broadly echo Mr. Mueller’s report on Russian election interference released publicly in April 2019.

That report documented attempts by Moscow to undermine confidence in the electoral process and sway the election toward Mr. Trump by hacking and dumping Democratic emails and engaging in sophisticated manipulation campaigns using social media.

After years of work, Mr. Mueller found dozens of contacts between Trump associates and Russian-connected actors, evidence that the Trump campaign welcomed the Kremlin’s attempts to sabotage the election and “expected it would benefit electorally” from the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails.

Como capturar um espiao toupeira - Book review (WSJ)

How to catch a mole
Christina Shelton
The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2012
 

Aldrich Ames, a Central Intelligence Agency officer for close to three decades, was arrested in February 1994 for espionage. Ames had used his position at the CIA's Directorate of Operations to pass information to Moscow, compromising Soviet sources working for the agency. For his treason, Ames was convicted and received a life sentence without parole.
 
Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, longtime veterans of the CIA's clandestine service, were at the forefront of a small group assigned the mission, in early 1991, to expose the traitor in their midst. Ms. Grimes and Ms. Vertefeuille dedicate their revealing book about the Ames affair to GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) Gen. Dmitriy Polyakov and others who risked their lives only to be sold out by Ames.

The authors present themselves as advocates for their heroes, whose stories they felt deserved to be told. This is especially the case with Gen. Polyakov, whom they considered the "Crown Jewel." He provided outstanding positive intelligence for over two decades (1962-85). In the early 1960s, he even helped expose four American servicemen who were spying for the GRU. Polyakov was first compromised by FBI Special Agent Robert Hanssen in 1979 and subsequently recalled from duty. But it was after Ames also identified him in 1985 as a spy for the U.S. that he was executed.

The first half of "Circle of Treason" focuses on the sources Ames exposed. He was responsible for the execution of at least 10 Soviet intelligence officials and the imprisonment of others. The authors provide intriguing insights into the background and tradecraft of a number of productive operations the CIA ran against the GRU and KGB from the 1960s through the 1980s. They also show how, when operations went wrong or were compromised by traitors, sources paid with their lives.

Take the case of Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer who, from 1978 to 1985, passed a great deal of information on Soviet missiles, radars and other military systems. "Tolkachev produced hundreds of rolls of film," the authors write. "It sometimes changed the direction of our own research and development and, by doing so, saved the U.S. government billions of dollars." Money was of course an important motivating factor for Tolkachev, but, the authors note, so was anti-communism: "If he had not had a security clearance, he would have been active as a dissident." Tolkachev's heroism was answered with execution in 1986 after another CIA traitor, Edward Lee Howard, gave him up to the KGB. "In the unlikely event that the KGB had any unanswered questions after Howard's reporting," the authors write, "Ames would have been in a position to fill the gaps."

Enlarge Image

Circle of Treason

By Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille
(Naval Institute Press, 228 pages, $29.95)

Then there was the problem of defectors deliberately sent by Moscow to provide false or misleading information to the West. Yuri Nosenko, for example, defected in 1964 on the heels of Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had warned that any defections after his would be false and designed by the KGB to mislead the West about Golitsyn's information. The authors use such cases to draw attention to a decades-long CIA bureaucratic controversy. On one side were those, like longtime counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who favored the so-called "Monster Plot" theory, holding that most defectors were in fact controlled by the KGB. On the other side were those, including the authors, who generally discounted the possibility of such penetrations. They believed that Moscow wouldn't trust Soviet intelligence officers with knowledge of state secrets to come under the control of a foreign service. It is a debate that will likely remain unsettled until the KGB archives are fully opened.

The second half of the book describes actions that the agency took when the agency's Soviet operations started hemorrhaging after June 1985. The CIA had to determine if there was a mole inside the organization, if a communications penetration existed, or if KGB operations were being designed to mislead the agency about its source losses. To catch the mole, the agency team drew up a shortlist of potential traitors based on access to information. The spy-hunters then "followed the money" and found that Ames and his second wife, Rosario, were living well beyond their known incomes. The team also compared the dates of Ames's official visits with Soviet embassy personnel against the dates of large deposits in his bank account. There was a direct correlation. (The financial forensic methods pioneered by the team that caught Ames are still in use today.)

The authors note that the hunt for this traitor, one of their former co-workers, took nine years—far longer than planned—due to bureaucratic roadblocks and shifting priorities. But they give little consideration to the CIA's internal resistance to the idea that one of the agency's own could be culpable.

The book also comes up short when analyzing the problem of defectors dispatched and controlled by the Soviets. The authors' insistence on the idea that false defections were almost nonexistent doesn't square with the Soviet proclivity for deception and disinformation. As the authors concede, for example, KGB officer Aleksandr Zhomov, who attempted to defect in 1988, was actually sent "to deceive us" on the subject of the 1985 losses. The author's theory also fails to account for the many unsolved anomalies, contradictions and coincidences surrounding specific defector cases.

Even so, "Circle of Treason" has the advantage of being written by two intelligence professionals, not by academics or journalists, and thus is an authoritative account of the Soviet sources that were providing the U.S. with invaluable information during the Cold War until Ames betrayed them. Because classified material on operational cases was going to be made public, the CIA took over three years to approve the book's publication. The authors note that 90% of the disputes were resolved in their favor.

Ms. Shelton served for three decades as a Soviet analyst in various intelligence agencies, including as a chief of the Soviet Branch, Counterintelligence Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the author of "Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason" (Threshold Editions, 2012).

A Grande Estrategia do Brasil: uai!, existe uma? Não sabia...

Este texto meu, escrito sem grandes pretensões e sobretudo sem qualquer preparação, parece que despertou o interesse de muitos, pelo que vi no registro dos posts mais acessados.
Vai ver são os arapongas da CIA e daquela coisa que sucedeu o KGB (sem na verdade substituí-lo) que são dirigidos ao meu blog por poderosíssimos instrumentos de busca, que mapeiam e detectam tudo o que existe de relevante, perigoso, hum... estratégico, no mundo, e que acabam caindo num blog modesto, e num post mais modesto ainda, que visava apenas o meu divertimento pessoal, sem qualquer grande pretensão acadêmica, científica, estratégica, justamente.

Calma, calma, pessoal, eu não queria assustar ninguém, nem atrair indevidamente a atenção de tão formidáveis instrumentos e agências de inteligência (supondo-se que exista alguma atrás dos Googles desses arapongas das grandes potências), eu só estava tentando colocar em ordem meu cérebro confuso, e não queria atrair a atenção de vocês indevidamente. Por favor, não vasculhem minhas contas bancárias na Suíça, minha correspondência doméstica, meus recados de compras, e meus deveres não terminados. Prometo não postar mais nada com títulos tão grandiloquentes assim e doravante só vou dar receita de bolo, sem essas de ficar invocando a geopolítica, a mudança do poder mundial, a alteração do eixo das relações de força no mundo, o combate ao imperialismo e essas coisas que só os companheiros são capazes de fazer...
Eu sou só um brincalhão...
Em todo caso, posto novamente aqui o post indigitado para não dar mais trabalho de busca aos interessados.
Prometo que ainda escrevo algo sério em torno disso...
O que vai abaixo é de quase um ano atrás, jour par jour...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Reflexões ao Léu, 6: A Grande Estratégia do Brasil - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Reflexões ao Léu, 6: A Grande Estratégia do Brasil
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

O Brasil possui uma estratégia, grande ou pequena? Talvez, embora nem sempre se perceba. Os militares talvez tenham pensado em alguma, e ela sempre envolve grandes meios, para defender as grandes causas: a soberania, a integridade territorial, a preservação da paz e da segurança no território nacional e no seu entorno imediato. Enfim, todas aquelas coisas que motivam os militares. Os diplomatas, também, talvez tenham escrito algo em torno disso, e ela sempre envolve o desenvolvimento nacional num ambiente de paz e cooperação com os vizinhos e parceiros da sociedade internacional, no pleno respeito dos compromissos internacionais e da defesa dos princípios e valores constitucionais, que por acaso se coadunam com a Carta da ONU. Mas eles também acham que está na hora de “democratizar” o sistema internacional, que ainda preserva traços do imediato pós-Segunda Guerra, ampliando o Conselho de Segurança da ONU, reformando as principais organizações econômicas multilaterais e ampliando as possibilidades de participação dos países em desenvolvimento nas instâncias decisórias mundiais; enfim, todo aquele discurso que vocês conhecem bem.
Tudo isso é sabido, e repassado a cada vez, nas conferências nacionais de estudos estratégicos, em grandes encontros diplomáticos, nos discursos protocolares dos líderes nacionais. Até parece que possuímos de fato uma grande estratégia, embora nem sempre isso seja percebido por todos os atores que dela participam, consciente ou inconscientemente. Aparentemente, ela seria feita dos seguintes elementos: manutenção de um ambiente de paz e cooperação no continente sul-americano e seu ambiente adjacente, num quadro de desenvolvimento econômico e social com oportunidades equivalentes para todos os vizinhos, visando a construção de um grande espaço econômico integrado, de coordenação e cooperação política, num ambiente democrático, engajado coletivamente na defesa dos direitos humanos e na promoção da prosperidade conjunta dos povos que ocupam esse espaço.
Muito bem, mas esses são objetivos genéricos, até meritórios e desejáveis, que precisam ser implementados de alguma forma, ou seja, promovidos por meio de iniciativas e medidas ativas, o que envolve inclusive a remoção dos obstáculos que se opõem à consecução desses grandes objetivos. É aqui que entra, de verdade, a grande estratégia, quando se tem de adequar os meios aos objetivos, não simplesmente na definição de metas genéricas. A estratégia é que permite se dizer como, e sob quais condições, o povo do país e suas lideranças vão mobilizar os recursos disponíveis, as ferramentas adequadas e os fatores contingentes – dos quais, os mais importantes são os agentes humanos – por meio dos quais será possível alcançar os grandes objetivos e afastar as ameaças que se lhes antepõem. Uma verdadeira estratégia diz o que deve ser feito, na parte ativa, e também, de maneira não simplesmente reativa, como devemos agir para que forças contrárias dificultem o atingimento das metas nacionais.

Nesse sentido, se o grande objetivo brasileiro – que integra nesta concepção sua “grande estratégia” – é a consolidação de um espaço econômico democrático e de cooperação econômica no continente, devemos reconhecer que avançamos muito pouco nos últimos anos. A despeito da retórica governamental, não se pode dizer, atualmente, que a integração e a democracia progrediram tremendamente na última década. Ao contrário, olhando objetivamente, esses dois componentes até recuaram em várias partes, e não se sabe bem o que o Brasil fez para promovê-los ativamente. O presidente anterior foi visto abraçado com vários ditadores ou candidatos a tal, esqueceu-se de defender a liberdade de expressão, os valores democráticos e os direitos humanos onde eles foram, e continuam sendo, mais ameaçados, quando não vêm sendo extirpados ou já desapareceram por completo. A integração que realmente conta, a econômica e comercial, cedeu espaço a uma ilusória integração política e social que até pode ter rendido muitas viagens de burocratas e políticos, mas não parece ter ampliado mercados e consolidado a abertura econômica recíproca.

Desse ponto de vista, o Brasil parece ter falhado em sua grande estratégia, se é verdade que ele realmente possui uma. Se não possui, está na hora de pensar em elaborar a sua. Passada a retórica grandiloquente – contra-produtiva, aliás – da liderança e da união exclusiva e excludente, contra supostas ameaças imperiais, pode-se passar a trabalhar realisticamente na implementação da grande estratégia delineada sumariamente linhas acima. A julgar pelos primeiros passos, parece que começamos a retificar equívocos do passado recente e a enveredar por um caminho mais adequado e mais conforme as nossas velhas tradições diplomáticas.

Brasília, 9 de fevereiro de 2011

Uma carreira de futuro interrompida: espiao da KGB...

Bem, não teria sido muito destoante de outros casos na Grã-Bretanha, cujos intelectuais e funcionários de Estado sempre fizeram excelentes espiões para o KGB soviético...

ASSÉDIO SOVIÉTICO

Cameron diz que KGB tentou recrutá-lo na década de 1980

Presidente russo brincou dizendo que 'Cameron teria sido um bom agente da KGB'

Opinião e Notícioa, 13/09/2011

Em visita à Rússia, o primeiro-ministro britânico, David Cameron, disse que a KGB, serviço secreto da antiga União Soviética, tentou recrutá-lo para suas fileiras em 1985 durante uma viagem que fez ao país comunista.

“Dois russos que falavam inglês muito bem me deram comida e me perguntaram sobre a vida na Inglaterra e o que eu pensava sobre política. Na volta, contei o que aconteceu ao meu tutor na universidade e ele me perguntou se tinha sido uma entrevista. Se foi uma entrevista, parece que não consegui o posto”, disse Cameron durante uma conferência na faculdade de Relações Internacionais da Universidade de Moscou.

Medvedev: ‘Teria sido um bom agente da KGB’

Perguntado por um jornalista britânico sobre as possíveis tentativas da KGB de recrutar Cameron, o presidente da Rússia, Dmitri Medvedev, disse:

“Tenho certeza de que Cameron teria sido um bom agente da KGB. Mas nunca teria chegado a ser primeiro-ministro do Reino Unido”.

Terra - Premiê britânico afirma que KGB tentou recrutá-lo em 1985