Yuri Shvets and FBI Counterintelligence -- Part 2

My previous post, Part 1 concluded as follows:

... I speculate that [Yuri] Shvets managed to bring his family into the USA on his own resources in early 1994. At that time, he intended to make a career as a free-lance writer. However, the rejection in his initial request for political asylum in April 1994 compelled him to reveal himself to the FBI in April 1994. Following that revelation, he was granted political asylum in May 1994, but agreed to provide all his knowledge to the FBI Counterintelligence Division.

Now in this new blog post, I will describe Shvets's information that was valuable to FBI Counterintelligence.

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About 45 pages (89-134) of of Shvets's book Washington Station is about his conversations with a fellow KGB officer named Valentin Aksilenko. When they talked in Moscow in about 1986, Aksilenko told Shvets how he had recruited a secret agent in 1979 while being stationed as a KGB officer in Washington DC. 

Valentin Aksilenko

The agent -- called "Bill" in Shvets's book -- was a Peruvian immigrant, about 40 years old, living in Washington DC. Aksilenko happened to become acquainted with Bill at a protest against US policies in El Salvador. Bill invited Aksilenko to his home and subsequently told him that he worked as a janitor cleaning the offices of some think-tanks that studied national-security issues. Bill had begun to collect various documents that he found in these offices. Bill offered to provide such documents to Aksilenko.

The garbage can turned out to have a pot of gold on the bottom. Bill began delivering material on military and strategic issues that would have been designated top priority by any intelligence service. ....

Bill generally delivered such a huge volume of documents that there was no way they could all be sent over to Moscow. Valentin selected the most interesting papers ....

As he perused Bill's material, Valentin never failed to marvel at ow lackadaisical the American system of classified record-keeping was. ...

... thanks to his effort, the KGB obtained an enormous amount of information on the following Pentagon projects:

* The MX missile, from the design stage to the shot drawings ....;

* air-, sea- and land-based cruise missiles, particularly the Tomahawk;

* the latest-generation single-warhead Midgetman missile;

* The Trident SLBM, designated for the new generation of US submarines;

* the latest strategic bomber, initially designated as a "penetrating bomber," but subsequently renamed the Stealth bomber;

* AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and NAVSTAR systems;

* anti-aircraft missile complexes;

* analytical reports on war games and staff exercises ...;

The [Soviet] intelligence analysts were amazed at the volume and quality of the material delivered by Bill. They simply could not understand how documents of that kind had ended up in the trash can. ...

To put things into proper perspective, in 1982, Bill's documents accounted for over 50 percent of the overall volume of information in that category [military-strategic information].

In the book's 45 pages about Aksilenko's collection of information from Bill, Shvets writes in much detail about how Aksilenko evaded the efforts of FBI counterintelligence to surveil Aksilenko's espionage activities.

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In his book, Shvets writes much about KGB's discovery of the treason of two officers -- Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko and Major Sergey Motorin -- which caused turmoil in the KGB during Shvets's time in the "Washington Station".

In general, Shvets knew a lot about many matters that were extremely interesting for FBI Counterintelligence. In 1994 he wanted to settle in the United States with his wife and children and was impoverished. In his situation, he surely told FBI Counterintelligence at least everything that he later wrote in his book. 

Already in 1994, FBI Counterintelligence was using Shvets's manuscript to investigate indications that various Americans were working for Russian Intelligence:

Guided by the unpublished book of a former Soviet spy, the FBI is urgently looking into whether the KGB recruited a Carter administration official to steal secrets for Moscow, law-enforcement officials have revealed.

The central accusation is that the American official, after leaving government service, worked secretly for the KGB, the Soviet counterpart to the CIA. He is said to have seduced the daughter of a CIA employee and to have pressured the employee into supplying him with tidbits of classified information, which he then passed on to Moscow.

The FBI still does not know if these events happened, and some officials are skeptical. But the FBI has taken the accusations seriously enough to have assigned several agents to investigate them, racing against the deadline of publisher Simon & Schuster.

The publisher plans to put the story, along with other tales of Cold War espionage, on bookstore shelves next month [May 1994]. ...

FBI officials are privately worried that disclosures prompted by the book might compromise their investigation, which remains far from complete. Officially, however, the FBI had nothing to say about the investigation. ...

... in February 1993, Valentin Aksilenko, a former senior KGB official who in the early 1980s helped manage North American espionage operations for the Kremlin, went to the lobby of Moscow's Radisson Hotel, a gathering place for entrepreneurs eager to cut a deal with Moscow in the post-Soviet era.

His errand: a social meeting with an American businesswoman, Brenda Lipson, who had befriended Aksilenko on one of his Washington tours when the KGB official was working under the cover of a commercial attache to the Soviet Embassy.

Fluent in Russian, she established her own business, East-West Services Associates, in 1992 and began a series of business trips to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was she who sought Aksilenko, Lipson said in an interview last week.

Talking there in the crowded lobby in a scene that might have come straight from the John Le Carré spy novel The Russia House, Aksilenko confided that he had been a spy and that he was "so glad to be out of intelligence."

As they were about to part, he dropped his bombshell: He asked her help in publishing a novel "written by a friend." The friend was Shvets.

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Shvets is a very intelligent, credible and admirable person who knew much that was very valuable to FBI Counterintelligence. That is the main concept that I am trying to communicate here. In 1994, FBI Counterintelligence believed practically everything that Shvets said about Russian Intelligence.

A couple decades later, FBI Counterintelligence likewise believed practically everything that Shvets alleged about Russian Intelligence recruiting of Donald Trump.

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To be continued

The NYT Special Section About the January 6 Event

On August 15, The New York Times published a special section about the riot that took place at the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. I read that section yesterday, and I now have a much better understanding of that riot. 

Therefore, I no longer think that the Ashli Babbitt incident was staged to some extent. 

Maybe you can read that section in a library. Online versions are here and here, but you might have to jump through some hoops to view them.

Some Answers to My Questions about the Babbitt Incident

This post follows up My Questions About the Ashli Babbitt Incident.

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When and by whom was the furniture barricade constructed?

On April 14, 2021, the United States District Attorney's Office of the District of Columbia published an article titled Department of Justice Closes Investigation into the Death of Ashli Babbitt (called below "the investigation article"). That article includes the following passage (emphasis added):

... Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP  [US Capitol Police]was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob.

I interpret this passage to mean that USCP officers constructed the barrier after a decision had been made to evacuate Members from the Chamber. In other words, the barrier had not been constructed during, say, the preceding night or morning. I would like my interpretation to be confirmed. 

I would like to know also whether similar barriers were constructed at other of the multiple doorways.

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Why was the SWAT team not stationed in front of the portal?

Why did the four officials leave the portal?

Why didn't the SWAT team stop the attack on the portal?

The investigation article continues (emphasis added):

Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate.

As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor. A USCP emergency response team, which had begun making its way into the hallway to try and subdue the mob, administered aid to Ms. Babbitt, who was transported to Washington Hospital Center, where she succumbed to her injuries.

What I called the SWAT team was actually called a USCP emergency response team.

I interpret this passage to mean that a decision was made that the USCP officers positioned at the door were not able to stop the attack on the doors and so they were told to evacuate because a USCP emergency response team was coming to subdue the mob.

While that team was advancing, Babbitt was shot, and so the team stopped to deal with her.

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Why didn't the gunman come out into the empty corridor ?

This question remains unanswered. I think the (USCP?) officer should have come out into the corridor and confronted the protesters face-to-face. Furthermore, he should have fired a warning shot.

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Why did so little blood come out of Babbitt's neck wound?

An anonymous commenter wrote under a previous post:

... [Babbitt was a] very small woman, wearing a rather thick backpack that covered her back, it is possible the shot was not through-and-through (the bullet lodged against a bone) or that the bullet exited into her backpack. The blood we saw streamed from her front. She had on a winter jacket, so that could have kept down any spatter from the front. ...

That explanation is plausible. Perhaps the bullet and most of the blood ended up in the backpack.

I remain puzzled by the assertion that the bullet entered Babbitt's left shoulder, because I do not see a wound there. Look for yourself on the Wooz News video beginning at 19:36.

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What is the legal status of Rufio and Yellow?

Why was Babbitt carried downstairs?

Why was Babbitt wearing a back-brace?

These questions remain unanswered.

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When was Babbitt obviously dead?

I don't make a big deal out of this question. The guy who claims he saw an effort to resuscitate Babbitt an hour after the shooting might simply be mistaken. Perhaps the person he saw was some other person who had been injured.

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I now am largely satisfied that the Ashli Babbitt incident was not staged.

However, I remain very skeptical about our government leaders, especially in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Quite a lot of such leaders believed and still believe that Donald Trump is a secret agent of Russian Intelligence. Therefore, those leaders have felt morally justified to use dirty tricks to ruin Trump and to ruin also his associates and supporters.

Such a dirty-tricks operation was Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation, which was led and staffed largely by Trump-hating FBI officials. That particular operation's real purpose was to lure President Trump into an obstruction-of-justice situation that would enable Congress to impeach and remove Trump from his elected position.

Mueller's operation failed, but malicious and devious efforts efforts to ruin Trump and his supporters have continued to the very end of his Presidency and to the present day. In this situation, many citizens think it's quite plausible that FBI officials collaborated with other Trump-hating government officials to stage the Babbitt incident.