CIA WikiLeaks Mole a Russian or Defector?

Posted on April 20, 2017April 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

The truth is often stranger than fiction and when it does finally come out, the twists and turns to the stories are shocking. So, it has been announced that the FBI and CIA are on a full blown mole search investigation to determine who within or as a contractor to the CIA is loyal or on the payroll of a foreign rogue nation such as Russia.

Schindler at the Observer wrote and explained that the last major Soviet penetration of NSA during the Cold War was Ron Pelton, a former agency analyst who started selling secrets to the KGB in 1980. Pelton betrayed highly sensitive signals intelligence programs to Moscow and was convicted of espionage in 1986 after Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer who temporarily defected to the United States, tipped off the FBI about an NSA source selling secrets to the Kremlin.

Image result for ron pelton espionage Quazoo

So, could it be Bernie Sanders? After all, he honeymooned in Yaroslavl, Soviet Union…not modern day Russia. Anyone hear of Evgeny Buryakov who is alleged to have attempted to recruit Carter Page an early advisor to Donald Trump? Could it be John Kerry himself as part of a larger plot for Russian cooperation over Syria or Iran? It is thought that the mole is an insider or contractor, yet who could pass thumb drives or envelops via dead drops?

None of the above is real or proven, it is just suggested to think out of the box as we are only restrained by our own limits of imagination. We had never heard of Edward Snowden either right?

*** What about those ‘Shadow Brokers’? One must understand the world of espionage and how it has adjusted due to the internet and global communications with encryption.

A message from Vladimir Putin can take many forms.

It can be as heavy-handed as a pair of Russian bombers buzzing the Alaska coast, or as lethal as the public assassination of a defector on the streets of Kiev. Now Putin may be sending a message to the American government through a more subtle channel: an escalating series of U.S. intelligence leaks that last week exposed a National Security Agency operation in the Middle East and the identity of an agency official who participated.

The leaks by self-described hackers calling themselves “the Shadow Brokers” began in the final months of the Obama administration and increased in frequency and impact after the U.S. bombing of a Syrian airfield this month—a move that angered Russia. The group has not been tied to the Kremlin with anything close to the forensic certitude of last year’s election-related hacks, but security experts say the Shadow Brokers’ attacks fit the pattern established by Russia’s GRU during its election hacking. In that operation, according to U.S. intelligence findings, Russia created fictitious Internet personas to launder some of their stolen emails, including the fake whistleblowing site called DCLeaks and a notional Romanian hacker named “Guccifer 2.0.”

“I think there’s something going on between the U.S. and Russia that we’re just seeing pieces of,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at IBM Resilient. “What happens when the deep states go to war with each other and don’t tell the rest of us?”
The Shadow Brokers made their deubt in August, appearing out of nowhere to publish a set of secret hacking tools belonging to the “Equation Group”—the security industry’s name for the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations program, which penetrates foreign computers to gather intelligence. At that time, the Shadow Brokers claimed to be mercenary hackers trying to sell the NSA’s secrets to the highest bidder. But they went on to leak more files for free, seemingly timed with the public thrusts and parries between the Obama administration and the Russian government.

From the start, outside experts had little doubt that Russian intelligence was pulling the strings. “Circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility,” exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted last August. “Why did they do it? No one knows, but I suspect this is more diplomacy than intelligence, related to the escalation around the [Democratic National Committee] hack.”

The FBI started investigating, and in August agents arrested an NSA contractor named Hal Martin after discovering that Martin had been stockpiling agency secrets in his house for two decades. But even as Martin cooled his heels in federal custody, the Shadow Brokers continued to post messages and files.

Snowden and other experts speculated that the Russians obtained the code without the help of an insider. As a matter of tradecraft, intelligence agencies, including the NSA, secretly own, lease, or hack so-called staging servers on the public internet to launch attacks anonymously. By necessity, those machines are loaded up with at least some of the agency’s tools. Snowden theorized that the Russians penetrated one of those servers and collected an NSA jackpot. “NSA malware staging servers getting hacked by a rival is not new,” he wrote.
Whatever their origin, the leaks dried up on Jan. 12, when the Shadow Brokers announced their “retirement” 10 days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in. The group didn’t reemerge until this month, after the Syrian military’s deadly chemical-weapons attack in Ghouta. Reportedly moved by images of the Syrian children injured or killed in the attack, Trump responded by ordering the launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government air base—departing drastically from the will of Putin, who considers Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a strategic ally.

The Russian government immediately condemned the U.S. response. Two days later, so did the Shadow Brokers. The group broke its months-long silence and released another tranche of NSA secrets along with a lengthy open letter to Trump protesting the Syrian missile strike. Abandoning any pretense of a profit motive, the Shadow Brokers claimed now to be disillusioned U.S. voters—“the peoples who getting you elected,” as they put in, using phrasing that holds dual meaning coming from a suspected Kremlin operation.

The Shadow Brokers have been playing hardball ever since. Their most recent release, on Friday, exposed the code for a sophisticated NSA toolkit targeting Windows machines, putting some of the agency’s capabilities, circa 2013, in the hands of every newbie hacker able to use a keyboard.

This time, the Shadow Brokers didn’t stop with code. For the first time in their short history, they also released internal NSA spreadsheets, documents, and slide decks, some bedecked with the insignia and “Top Secret” markings familiar to anyone who’s browsed the Snowden leaks.

The leak exposes in detail a 2013 NSA hacking operation called Jeep Flea Market that gained deep access to Dubai-based EastNets, a company that handles wire transfers for a number of Middle East banks, something of obvious interest to U.S. intelligence. (EastNets denies the breach.) But the Shadow Brokers exposed more than just an NSA operation. Metadata left in the files identified the full name of a 35-year-old NSA worker in San Antonio who was apparently involved in the hack. (The Daily Beast was unable to reach him for comment.)
NSA hackers don’t face the same danger as CIA officers working undercover in a foreign country, but the likelihood that Russia has begun exposing them by name, while linking them to specific operations, raises the stakes for the intelligence community. If nothing else, the San Antonio NSA worker could plausibly face criminal and civil charges in the United Arab Emirates, just as hackers working for Russian and Chinese intelligence have been indicted in the U.S.

It’s conceivable that the Shadow Brokers included the name by mistake. Groups like WikiLeaks and the journalists with the Snowden cache are accustomed to scrubbing identifying metadata from documents. But a less-experienced hand might overlook it. Schneier is doubtful. “If we’re assuming an intelligent and strategic actor, which I think we are, then you have to assume that they did that on purpose,” he said.

Nothing is certain; the Shadow Brokers are a puzzle with missing pieces. But Friday’s Shadow Brokers release obliterated one theory on the spot. The NSA would never have put classified spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides on a staging server. They could only have come from inside the NSA.

Which sets the stage for a revival of a storied Cold War intelligence ritual, with the declining agency morale that comes with it: the Russian mole hunt. “I think we’re most likely looking at someone who went rogue from within, or a contractor who had access to this information,” said Eric O’Neill, national-security strategist for Carbon Black. “Either way, we have someone in the intelligence community that’s a pretty high-placed spy.”

A former FBI surveillance specialist, in 2001 O’Neill helped bring down Robert Hannsen, a double agent in the bureau who’d been secretly spying for Russia. “The FBI must be scrambling right now,” he said. “There’s so many leaks going on: this leak, the CIA Vault7 leaks, and at the same time there’s the investigation into any administration ties to Russia, and the DNC intrusion, and all these leaks coming out of the White House. There’s only so much that the FBI’s national security agents can do.”

If Russia did have a mole inside the NSA in 2013, the most recent date of the documents, Schneier thinks it unlikely that it does now, or else the Shadow Brokers wouldn’t exist. “You only publish when it’s more useful as an embarrassment than as intelligence,” he said. “So if you have a human asset inside the NSA, you wouldn’t publish. That asset is too important.”

It’s also possible, though unprecedented in the public record, that Russia found a way into the NSA’s classified network. A competing theory focuses on the FBI’s early suspect, Hal Martin. He’s not the Shadow Brokers, but he reportedly worked in the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations program and had 50,000 gigabytes of classified material in his home. Might he himself have been hacked? Martin is charged in Maryland with 20 counts of willful retention of national defense information, but prosecutors have not made any accusation that his trove slipped into enemy hands.

As Snowden demonstrated when he walked out of the NSA with a thumb drive of secrets, it’s comparatively easy now to steal and smuggle classified information. But O’Neill says the FBI’s counterintelligence mission is easier too, because of the rampant audit trails and server logs in classified networks.

“It’s much easier getting the secrets out now, but on the flip side, it’s also easier for law enforcement and the FBI to track down who had access to the data,” he says. “I like to think this mole hunt is going to be a little easier than it was in the past.”

Until then, expect the Shadow Brokers to stick around. In their Friday dump, they hinted at more revelations this week: “Who knows what we having next time?”

*** WASHINGTON — Forget about spies. It’s rogue insiders that cause heartburn at U.S. intelligence agencies these days.

Few spy cases have broken in the past decade and a half. In contrast, a proliferation of U.S. intelligence and military insiders have gone rogue and spilled secrets to journalists or WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group.

The leaks are as damaging as any major spy case, perhaps more so. And they have underscored the ease of stealing secrets in the modern age, sometimes with a single stroke of a keyboard.

Since early March, WikiLeaks has published part of a trove of documents purportedly created by cyber units of the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks continues to upload the documents and hacking tools, dubbed Vault 7, to the internet for all to see.

For its part, a mysterious group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers has re-emerged and dumped a large catalog of stolen National Security Agency hacking tools on the internet, including evidence the agency had penetrated Middle Eastern banking networks.

“In the past, we’ve lost secrets to foreign adversaries,” retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the NSA, said in an interview. “Now we’ve got the self-motivated insider that is our most important counterintelligence challenge.”

Hayden cited the cases of Army Pfc. Chelsea Manning, convicted in 2013 for releasing three-quarters of a million classified or sensitive military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. He also mentioned Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who shook public opinion with his disclosures to journalists in 2013 about U.S. surveillance practices. Hayden added the Vault 7 disclosures last month, which others presume were stolen by a contract employee at the CIA. Read more here.

North Korea’s Weapons Program Includes More Countries

Posted on March 20, 2017March 20, 2017 by Denise Simon

We can go back to 1968 when North Korea hijacked our naval intelligence ship USS Pueblo as a reminder for the basis on how to address North Korea today.

Image result for uss puelbo

Then as today, Russia collaborated with North Korea as does Iran. North Korea dispatched 2 MiG fighter jets along with several attack submarines in the capture of the Pueblo. At the time was also the Vietnam war of which Russia provided unmeasured military support to North Vietnam and did not want to add another theater of conflict with the United States, as noted by the Blue House raid. noted by the In fact, China cannot be overlooked either for many reasons.

Newly placed U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is traveling the region meeting with Asian leaders on the matter of stopping North Korea. The question is how far and wide are these talks with regard to additional countries cooperation with North Korea.

As for Iran and North Korea, The Telegraph reported the following:

The Shahab-3 is a modified version of North Korea’s Nodong missile which itself is based on the old Soviet-made Scud.

The Nodong, which Iran secretly acquired from North Korea in the mid-1990s, is designed to carry a conventional warhead. But Iranian engineers have been working for several years to adapt the Shahab-3 to carry nuclear weapons.

“This is a major breakthrough for the Iranians,” said a senior US official. “They have been trying to do this for years and now they have succeeded. It is a very disturbing development.”

The Shahab 3 has a range of 800 miles, enabling it to hit a wide range of targets throughout the Middle East – including Israel.

Image result for north korea high thrust engine UPI

Further in 2015, Forbes reported collaboration between Iran and North Korea where the exchange of engineers and scientists between the two countries is common:

North Korea and Iran are believed to be exchanging critical stuff – North Korean experts and workers remaining in place while Iran sends observers to check out intermittent North Korean missile launches and see what North Korea is doing about staging a fourth underground nuclear explosion.

The nuclear exchange revolves around North Korea’s program for developing warheads with highly enriched uranium – with centrifuges and centrifuge technology in part acquired from Iran. At the same time, North Korea is able to assist Iran in miniaturizing warheads to fit on missiles – a goal the North has long been pursuing – and also can supply uranium and other metals mined in its remote mountain regions.

“North Korea continues to supply technology, components, and even raw materials for Iran’s HEU weaponization program,” says Bruce Bechtol, author of numerous books and studies on North Korea’s military and political ambitions. Moreover, he says, “They are even helping Iran to pursue a second track by helping them to build a plutonium reactor.”

That assessment supports the view of analysts that Iran is counting on North Korean expertise in constructing a reactor that produces warheads with plutonium. The reactor would be a more powerful version of the aging five-megawatt “experimental” reactor with which the North has built perhaps a dozen warheads at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, including three that it’s tested underground — in October 2006, May 2009 and February 2013, two years ago this month.

Then comes China, where the entire North Korea internet platform used by North Korea is hosted by China. Beyond managing cyber systems for North Korea, China is also collaborating with North Korea on nuclear weapons at key production sites producing lithium for thermonuclear and boosted fission research and development.

Sanctions have been placed on North Korea due to violations of UN resolutions due to the weapons of mass destruction operations which does include missiles and the nuclear program. However, North Korea has not been affected with regard to the research/development and production due to out of country front operations where China and Malaysia are involved.

Forbes also reported:

Although the UN resolutions have highly restricted North Korea’s access to the financial system on paper, the report suggests that these sanctions have not affected the ability of North Korean networks such as Pan Systems Pyongyang to finance its operations, asserting that the network maintains bank accounts in China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Middle East. By conducting financial transactions under the names of its affiliates such as Pan Systems Singapore, the company has been able to maintain sufficient financial access to the international financial system that it was able to transfer funds to a supply chain of more than twenty companies in China, and has also used front companies to conduct transactions via Hong Kong-registered companies that were cleared through U.S. correspondent banks in New York. The Panel of Experts report also provides details on the interception in the Suez Canal of the Cambodian-flagged and North Korean-crew piloted Jie Shun in what it categorizes as the “largest interdicted ammunition consignment in DPRK sanctions history,” superseding the 2013 interdiction of the North Korean flagged Chong Chon Gang ship that was loaded with vintage Cuban munitions and airplane parts. The interdiction of the Jie Shun by Egypt revealed a cargo from North Korea through the Suez Canal containing 30,000 PG-7 rocket propelled grenades (RPG) and related sub-components shipped in wooden crates concealed under 2,300 tons of limonite (iron ore). The Jie Shun evaded detection by cutting off GPS during most of its journey, with the exception of transit through heavily trafficked straits and ports. The shipment from Haeju in North Korea to an undisclosed Middle Eastern destination were falsely labeled as “assembly parts for an underwater pump,” and the bill of lading showed the address of the “Dalian Haoda Petroleum Chemical Company, Ltd.”

Rex Tillerson stated that ‘strategic patience’ has run out with regard to North Korea and all options remain on the table including preemptive strikes. North Korea has launched 46 missiles since 2011 and the most recent launch was to test a super high thrust rocket steering engine which was designed by Russian blueprints and engineers.

Tillerson at the DMZ lexpress.fr

The addition of a four-chamber steering engine further points toward a design rooted in Soviet missile technology as RD-250 and its descendants – when used on the R-36 missile and Tsiklon-2/3 orbital launchers – were coupled with a four-chamber RD-68M steering engine.

Photo: KCNA

This engine adaptation in all likelihood uses Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine and Nitrogen Tetroxide propellants – a more powerful combination in terms of specific impulse compared to the Nitric Acid / UDMH propellant used by North Korea’s Unha booster

September 2016 Test Setup vs- March 2017 Test Setup – Images: KCTV/KCNA

Maritime Traffic, Pirates, Smuggling and Dark Beacons

Posted on March 14, 2017March 14, 2017 by Denise Simon

Maritime traffic is hardly considered a top priority and it should be. For illicit activities on the high seas, there is major intelligence value when it comes to smuggling and pirates.

— Israeli navy veteran Ami Daniel points at his computer screen and explains why the ship he was tracking should have been stopped and searched. It sailed near the Libyan port of Tobruk and waited four days more than a mile off the coast without ever docking, then moved west to Misrata, which it had never visited before.

Next came Greece, where it waited another four days offshore.

Whatever was on the ship — possibly drugs, weapons or people — likely eventually made its way to Europe’s shores, he said.

At a time of deep concern over migrant smuggling, Daniel said his company Windward has the ability to pick up such suspicious maritime behavior that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Ninety percent of the world’s trade is via the oceans, and ports simply cannot check even a fraction of all the containers. For that reason, they try to narrow it down with watch lists of ships.

But with turbulence in northern Africa and the collapse of Libya, smuggling networks have taken advantage of the situation while also becoming more sophisticated, Silvia Ciotti, head of the EuroCrime research body, explained.

And with the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees across the seas, resources in Europe have been stretched threadbare.

The same smugglers taking desperate migrants and refugees into Europe also take contraband goods, Ciotti said.

“One day it is drugs. One day it is weapons. They do not care,” she said. If a ship’s activities are unusual — turning off its radar or visiting an at-risk port — it will be flagged. More here for ToI.

The company is Windward, a rather new company that did get an interesting investor, former CIA director, General David Petraeus.

Using what it calls activity-based intelligence, Windward, a five-year-old maritime data and analytics firm here, probes beyond the ship-tracking services available on today’s market to validate identities of ocean-going vessels.

It compares their patterns of behavior and past associations with other ships —even where they loaded or didn’t load in specific ports of call.

“Nobody knows who’s the real owner of 75 percent of the world’s vessels,” said Daniel. “The reason is, for business reasons, they are registered under various flags of convenience by a lawyer who has one share and nobody knows who’s on top of him.

“So the tools of looking at data bases or registries are great in theory, but not in practice.”

The same holds true, company executives here say, for the Automated Information System (AIS), satellite-supported tracking system initiated in recent years by the US Coast Guard and now required by ocean-going vessels and passenger ships. Specific findings from the report showed an increase in GPS manipulation of 59 percent over the past two years; that 55 percent of ships misreport their actual port of call for the majority of their voyage; that large cargo ships shut off AIS transmissions 24 percent longer than others; and that 19 percent of the ships that “go dark” are repeat offenders.

To illustrate this point, Windward conducted an analysis specifically for Defense News, in which the company employed “reverse engineering” of a known arms smuggling incident to highlight similarly suspicious behavior by a ship that managed to evade detection by law enforcement authorities.

Its baseline case was the Haddad, a 39-year-old, Bolivian-flagged cargo vessel that embarked from Iskenderun, Turkey, in early September. It was ultimately seized by Greek authorities south of Crete with a cache of some 5,000 shotguns and a half million rounds of undocumented ammunition.

Using the route plied by the 66-meter Haddad, which sailed along the Turkish coast en route to Libya before being stopped, Windward came up with a similar profile of another ship which, for a variety of legal and proprietary reasons, it preferred to call Vessel X.

Like the Haddad, Vessel X was more than 30 years old and around the same size, about 75 meters. It left the same Turkish port on Aug. 19 — less than a month prior to Haddad — bearing a flag of convenience, this one from the South Pacific island of Vanuatu.

A day later, Vessel X stopped in an area near the Turkish shore where there was no other port in the area or any other reason to stop at that location, company analysts found. More here from DefenseNews.

Meanwhile, pirating is back in the news.

Somali pirates just hijacked a commercial ship for the first time in five years

WaPo: In 2010 and 2011, groups of armed Somali men were hijacking merchant vessels off Somalia’s coast at an almost daily pace. Thousands of hostages of myriad nationalities were taken, and billions of dollars were lost on ransoms, damages and delayed shipments.

The crisis was so severe that a naval task force with more than two dozen vessels from European Union countries, the United States, China, Russia, India and Japan banded together to restore order to one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. They largely succeeded. In 2015, there were 17 pirate attacks near Somalia, down from 151 in 2011. Many of those attacks were on smaller fishing boats from nearby countries, mostly by disgruntled Somali fishermen, but not commercial ships.

Until Tuesday.

Somali officials acknowledged that the Aris 13, an oil tanker, had been escorted to the Somali coast by at least eight and perhaps as many as dozens of armed men on two small skiffs. Reports from organizations that monitor piracy could not conclusively identify which flag the ship was flying or where it was owned, but Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that eight of its nationals were on board as crew. The ship was on its way south to Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.

The attack originated in the Puntland region, which is semiautonomous. “The vessel’s captain reported to the company they were approached by two skiffs and that one of them could see armed personnel on board,” an unidentified Middle East-based official told the Associated Press. “The ship changed course quite soon after that report and is now anchored.”

The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet oversees anti-piracy efforts along Somalia’s coast. Concerns about piracy’s reemergence in the region have been growing in concurrence with greater exploitation of Somalia’s waters by foreigners engaged in illegal fishing. Deprived of a livelihood, some Somali fishermen have turned back to hijacking to get by.

Salad Nur, described as a “local elder” by the Associated Press, said that the men involved in Tuesday’s hijacking had been searching for a commercial vessel for days on the open water. “Foreign fishermen destroyed their livelihoods and deprived them of proper fishing,” Nur said.

Piracy is also on the rise on the other side of Africa. Armed groups based along Nigeria’s coast have made that region the most dangerous for seafarers. That coast is also a major oil shipping route. Now that oil prices have dropped, pirates there have taken to kidnapping crew members for ransom rather than siphoning off oil, as the abductions have proved more lucrative.

Presidential Daily Briefing for Trump on Russia

Posted on February 16, 2017February 16, 2017 by Denise Simon

There are rumors flying that the intelligence agencies are holding back on key items that would otherwise be included in the PDB’s, especially items regarding Russia. Okay, we cannot know for sure that is true or not. In fact there are denials this is accurate. While countless media outlets are reporting that some ‘higher-ups’ in some intel agencies are in a war with President Trump, it is all because he is in a war with them. Sheesh….while all this is going on, other allied world leaders are watching all this and are feeling quite uneasy over intelligence collaboration and most especially where all this leads.

Image result for russian spy ship norfolk, virginia

Some one needs to restore order and confidence here and do it fast. At issue is Russia and Iran.

The Russian spy ship doing an ‘in-your-face’ Atlantic coast water adventure and is presently just outside of Norfolk, Virginia and headed back to the Cuba region.
Meanwhile, the new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson is in Germany meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.
Another item is General Dunford is in Azerbaijan, meeting with Russian Chief of General Staff of the Armed Forces, Gerasimov.
Qassem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Qods Force is in Moscow. Soleimani has a U.S. and U.N. travel ban and sanctions on him such that he is not allowed to travel. Hah…
Ciaran Martin, head of GCHQ’s new National Cyber Security Centre states that Russia is escalating the rate of hacks against the UK. The United States, Canada, Australia and the UK are the four countries of record that make up GCHQ.
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work met with Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Pavlo Klimkin at the Pentagon regarding discussion over the recent escalation of violence by combined Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.
Because of Russian aggression and the lasting threat to the Baltic States, General Mattis has ordered U.S. troops deploy in Bulgaria.
Russian troops attacked Ukrainian positions 139 times using heavy armor in all sectors in Donbas in the past 48 hours.

9. Russia tells White House it will not return Crimea to Ukraine.

10. Russia has secretly deployed a new cruise missile that American officials say violates a landmark arms control treaty, posing a major test for President Trump as his administration is facing a crisis over its ties to Moscow. The missile (Kalibr) is a SSC-8. It is a nuclear capable missile first tested in 2008. While this launch was ground based, it can also be launched from a submarine and is capable of holding 1000 lbs of conventional explosives or a nuclear warhead. There are variants to this weapon, there is also the Iskander and the 9M728. Nonetheless, it is a violation of the INF Treaty.

Lastly and a very good thing, while Vladimir Putin is calling for full intelligence cooperation with the United States, General Mattis has not, no….not ready. Further, Mattis said that Russia needs to prove itself….tic tic tic…

11. Soldiers, tanks and M88 recovery vehicles from the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment’s “Fighting Eagles” recently arrived at the airbase in Romania in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve. So far, more than 350 U.S. soldiers have arrived this month with another 150 set to arrive before the end of February.

So, should there be some normalizing of relations between the White House and the Kremlin? Nah….has not worked out so well when it comes to Iran or Cuba…

Russian Aggression, Testing U.S. Navy, Rattling the WH?

Posted on February 14, 2017February 14, 2017 by Denise Simon

After President Obama expelled Russian diplomats, shuttered two Russian compounds and added more sanctions on Russia, there was no immediate response from the Kremlin. Or was there a response we are just learning about? Seems Moscow at the orders of Vladimir Putin did decided to reply and did so aggressively.

On the heels of North Korea launching a missile capable of having a nuclear weapon tip while the Prime Minister of Japan was visiting the United States, seems was an opportune time for Russia to additionally do much the same with these two other provocative actions. Nothing from the Pentagon just yet either.

Russian jets in ‘unsafe’ encounters with destroyer: U.S. official

U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Porter sails in the Bosphorus, on its way to the Mediterranean Sea, in Istanbul, Turkey, February 11, 2017. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

Reuters: Multiple Russian military aircraft came close to a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Black Sea on Feb. 10, incidents considered “unsafe and unprofessional,” a U.S. official said on Tuesday.

There were three separate incidents involving Russian aircraft and the USS Porter, Captain Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for U.S. European Command, said. One involved two Russian Su-24 jets, another a separate Su-24, and the third involved a larger IL-38.

“USS Porter queried all aircraft and received no response,” Hernandez said.

“Such incidents are concerning because they can result in accident or miscalculation,” he added.

The incidents involving the Su-24 were considered to be unsafe and unprofessional by the commanding officer of the Porter because of their high speed and low altitude, while the IL-38 flew at an unusually low altitude, Hernandez said.

Another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the closest incident that day involved the lone SU-24, which came within 200 yards of the Porter at an altitude of 300 feet (91 meters).

This is not the first time interactions have taken place between Russian jets and U.S. ships. In April 2016 two Russian warplanes flew simulated attack passes near a U.S. guided missile destroyer in the Baltic Sea. The flights by the warplanes were so close they created wake in the water.

***

Russia sends spy ship near US coast, deploys banned missiles at home, officials say

FNC: A Russian spy ship was spotted patrolling off the East Coast of the United States on Tuesday morning, the first such instance during the Trump administration — and the same day it was learned the Kremlin had secretly deployed controversial cruise missiles inside Russia and buzzed a U.S. Navy destroyer, U.S. officials told Fox News.

The Russian ship was in international waters, 70 miles off the coast of Delaware and heading north at 10 knots, according to one official. The U.S. territory line is 12 nautical miles.

It was not immediately clear where the ship is headed.

Later Tuesday, a U.S. official confirmed to Fox News that Russia had deployed ground-launched cruise missiles to two locations inside the country in December. The New York Times first reported that the Obama administration had previously seen the missiles — then in a testing phase — as a violation of a 1987 treaty between the U.S. and Russia that banned ground-launched intermediate-range missiles.

But Russia has pressed ahead with its program, apparently testing a Trump administration which has sought better ties with Moscow — but is also fresh off the loss of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned Monday night in the wake of a scandal surrounding his communications with Russia.

The ship, the SSV-175 Viktor Leonov, last sailed near the U.S. in April 2015, an official said. It was also seen in Havana in January 2015.

The Russian spy ship is also armed with surface-to-air missiles.

“It’s not a huge concern, but we are keeping our eyes on it,” one official said.

This action by the Russian military follows recent missile test launches by Iran and North Korea.

In the past, Russian spy ships have loitered off the coast of Kings Bay, Ga., home to a U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarine base. During the Cold War, Russian intelligence gathering ships routinely parked off U.S. submarine bases along the East Coast

In September 2015, another Russian spy ship was spotted near the U.S. outside the submarine base in Kings Bay.

Outside of U.S. intelligence gathering satellites monitoring the Russian spy ship’s voyage north, there are several airborne platforms along the East Coast that could be used by the U.S. military to monitor the Russian ship, according to one official.

Currently there are four U.S. Navy warships in the Atlantic off the coast of Norfolk participating in normal training, but none have been tasked with shadowing the Russian spy ship.

There are no U.S. Navy aircraft carriers nearby. The USS Eisenhower, an aircraft carrier, is currently off the coast of Florida doing carrier qualifications, with young pilots making their first landings. Ike does not currently have strike aircraft. More here from FNC.

***

This Russian ship presently off the coast of Delaware began in Cuba and is expected to continue heading north to the New London, CT area and will turn around heading south again. It is know as a Vishnya class ship (AGI, Auxiliary, General Intelligence) and the ships are armed with two AK-630 close-in weapon systems and SA-N-8 SAM launchers. These ships are large, purpose built ships designed for signal and communications intelligence electronic information gathering via an extensive array of sensors.^[3] The data could be transmitted to shore via satellite link antennas housed in two large radomes. The Russian Navy operates seven of these ships.