Inside The KGB Playbook To Recruit Americans

Michael Weiss at the Daily Beast offers a piece on the old KGB manual used to recruiet Americans during the Cold War.

In studying Americans, our Residency in Italy identified a number of places visited by Americans working in target installations of interest to our Intelligence Service. It was possible to determine that Americans in Rome systematically frequent the same bars, restaurants, and places of recreation. Americans feel almost at home in these places: they drink a great deal, are very free in their conduct and frequently sing. American women, especially the wives of Americans who are away on temporary assignments, drink and have relations with other men.”

There is something almost reassuring in this observation, taken as it is from an old KGB manual on recruiting American agents both inside and outside the United States. 

Quite apart from the unintentional comedy of seeing reproduced such a dime-store psychoanalytic stereotype of the boorish and loud bourgeois abroad—whose repressed housewife of course keeps a secret rendezvous with the decanter and the swarthy Mediterranean neighbor—we have in the current age of Cold War 2.0 a helpful reminder that it used to be difficult for Russian spies to envision the lives of others. 

Today, operatives dispatched by Moscow Center are as likely to wear Breguet timepieces, keep offshore accounts, and educate their children at elite Swiss boarding schools as they are to travel by yacht or private jet to cultivate and run bureaucrats, military brass, CEOs, and real estate moguls in Davos, Chicago, and New York. 

But it wasn’t always so. There was a time, not too long ago, when operatives of the KGB were still servants of the state rather than masters of it.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/07/inside-the-kgb-playbook-to-recruit-americans.html

Good Question: Why Is The U.S. Releasing Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard?

Michael Weiss at the Daily Beast asks why the notorious convicted spy and oddball is being released from prison.

“It is difficult for me, even in the so-called ‘year of the spy,’ to conceive of a greater harm to the national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”

Thus spake U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1986 in a still largely classified declaration, more or less sealing the life sentence handed down to Jonathan Pollard, a former analyst at the U.S. Navy’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center who over a 17-month period in the mid-1980s passed along enough classified intelligence to Israel to fill, by his own admission, a 6x6x10-foot room.

After decades of trying in vain to get out of jail, Pollard will be released on November 20 after serving 29 years in a federal prison. The timing, coming so soon after the U.S. helped ink an arms control agreement with Iran, has raised eyebrows not least because anonymous U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal last week that the Obama administration was planning to release Pollard as a salve to Israel to try and convince the Jewish state to tone down or abandon its fierce criticism of the Iran deal.

The administration has repeatedly denied that any such quid pro quo arrangement was being brokered and insisted that Pollard’s fate was entirely up to an independent parole board. “I haven’t even had a conversation about it,” Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters Tuesday.

However, while it’s true that Pollard was in any event due for a mandatory parole hearing this year under the terms of his sentence, the Journal scoop proved uncannily prescient.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/29/why-is-the-u-s-releasing-israeli-spy-jonathan-pollard.html

You can also read an earlier post on Pollard via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/07/convicted-spy-jonathan-pollard-could-be.html

Note: The above photo of Jonathan Pollard was released by the U.S. Navy.