... 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.
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.
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.
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.
To be continued
A couple decades later, FBI Counterintelligence likewise believed practically everything that Shvets alleged about Russian Intelligence recruiting of Donald Trump.
To be continued
No comments:
Post a Comment