Category Archives: FBI

New Chiquita Papers, Bankrolled Terror in Columbia

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Washington, D.C., April 24, 2017 – Ten years ago, Chiquita Brands International became the first U.S.-based corporation convicted of violating a U.S. law against funding an international terrorist group—the paramilitary United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). But punishment for the crime was reserved only for the corporate entity, while the names of the individual company officials who engineered the payments have since remained hidden behind a wall of impunity.

As Colombian authorities now prepare to prosecute business executives for funding groups responsible for major atrocities during Colombia’s decades-old conflict, a new set of Chiquita Papers, made possible through the National Security Archive’s FOIA lawsuit, has for the first time made it possible to know the identities and understand the roles of the individual Chiquita executives who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia.

Today’s posting features the first in a series of articles published jointly by the National Security Archive and Verdad Abierta highlighting new revelations from the Chiquita Papers, identifying the people behind the payments, and examining how the Papers can help to clarify lingering questions about the case.

* * *

The New Chiquita Papers: Secret Testimony and Internal Records Identify Banana Executives who Bankrolled Terror in Colombia

 

In the last few years of the 1990s, Chiquita Brands International, the U.S.-based fruit company, fell under a cloud of suspicion. An exposé in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the company’s hometown paper, revealed some of the banana giant’s dirtiest secrets—among them: the messy fallout from bribes paid to Colombian customs agents by officials at Banadex, Chiquita’s wholly-owned Colombian subsidiary.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the U.S. financial crimes watchdog—was also looking into the bribery allegations. The agency subpoenaed thousands of Chiquita’s internal records and soon made a startling discovery. Tucked away in the same accounts where Chiquita concealed the bribes were millions of dollars in additional payments to a rogues’ gallery of armed groups, including leftist insurgents, right-wing paramilitaries, notorious army brigades, and the controversial, but government-approved, “Convivir” militias.

SEC Testimony of Robert Kistinger, January 6, 2000, p. 87.

With these documents in hand, the SEC deposed seven Chiquita executives, each of whom played a different role in administering the so-called “sensitive payments.” In secret testimony on January 6, 2000 Robert F. Kistinger, head of Chiquita’s Banana Group based in Cincinnati, Ohio, told the SEC he had direct knowledge about many of the payments to armed groups, especially when they began in the late 1980s, but claimed that he had become less and less involved with the specifics over time. In his view, the amounts of money paid to the groups—hundreds of thousands of dollars per year—were simply not large enough to affect the company’s bottom line.

Kistinger, who is a named defendant in a massive civil litigation case pending against former Chiquita executives in U.S. federal court, and a likely target of future investigations in Colombia, said it was “not realistic” to halt Chiquita’s Colombia operations over such insignificant amounts of money. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it doesn’t hit the scorecard.”

“We’re not going to stop doing business in Colombia, because, you know, we’re going to have to spend an extra $25,000. That’s not realistic. Right?”

In 2013, Chiquita brought a rarely-seen “reverse” Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the SEC in an effort to block the agency from releasing transcripts of these depositions (and thousands of additional documents) to the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based in Washington, D.C. Two years later, a federal appeals court panel rejected Chiquita’s claim, clearing the way for the release of more than 9,000 pages of the company’s most sensitive internal records.

It’s easy to see why the company would want to keep them under wraps. The secret, sworn statements from the SEC probe are the de facto oral history of Chiquita’s ties to terrorist groups in Colombia—a unique and damning firsthand account of how one multinational corporation developed and routinized a system of secret transactions with actors on all sides of the conflict in order to maintain normal business operations—even thrive—in one of the most conflictive regions of the world, all the while treating the payments as little more than the “cost of doing business in Colombia.”[1]

Chiquita auditor’s notes, ca. 1997.

This article is the first in a series from the National Security Archive and Verdad Abierta, the award-winning Colombian news website, highlighting new revelations from the Chiquita Papers, identifying the people behind the payments, and examining how the Papers can help to clarify lingering questions about the case. What was behind Chiquita’s decision to wind down payments to guerrillas and increase payments to their right-wing rivals? Exactly how much money did Chiquita pay to the various armed groups? What was the role of the Colombian security forces in encouraging the tilt toward paramilitaries? Did Chiquita knowingly fund specific acts of violence? And at what point did employees and executives with knowledge of the payments understand that the company was dealing with paramilitary death squads and not a government-sponsored militia group?

* * *

The new set of Chiquita Papers has for the first time made it possible to know the identities and understand the roles played by individual Chiquita executives like Kistinger who approved and oversaw years of payments to groups responsible for countless human rights violations in Colombia. These records are of particular importance now that Colombian authorities have signaled that they are prepared to prosecute business executives for funding groups that committed war crimes and other atrocities during the conflict.

Ten years ago, Chiquita became the first major multinational corporation convicted of “engaging in transactions with a specially-designated global terrorist.” In a March 2007 sentencing agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Chiquita admitted transferring some $1.7 million[2] to the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) from September 10, 2001, when the group was first named on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list, through June 2004, when the payments ceased.

Even after outside attorneys warned in February 2003 that it “[m]ust stop payments” to the outlaw paramilitary organization, Chiquita continued to pay the AUC for another 16 months. Until that point, Chiquita’s strategy, set forth by senior executives in Cincinnati, was to “just let them sue us, come after us.”[3]

The AUC was a loose federation of rightist militants and drug traffickers responsible for a terrible legacy of violent acts in Colombia going back to the 1980s. Chiquita began to pay the AUC sometime in 1996-1997, just as the group launched a nationwide campaign of assassinations and massacres aimed at unionists, political activists, public officials and other perceived guerrilla supporters, often working with the collaboration or complicity of Colombian security forces. Over the next several years, the AUC dramatically increased its numbers and firepower, raised its political profile, infiltrated Colombian institutions, drove thousands of Colombians from their homes, and for the first time challenged guerrilla groups for control of strategic areas around the country.

Chiquita agreed to pay a relatively modest $25 million fine as part of its deal with the DOJ, but not a single company executive has ever been held responsible for bankrolling the AUC’s wave of terror. Nor have any Chiquita officials faced justice for millions more in outlays to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), and practically every other violent actor in the region.

Efforts to hold individual Chiquita executives accountable for financing the groups are complicated by a deliberate decision on the part of the U.S. Justice Department to withhold the names of the people behind the payments scheme. At the September 2007 sentencing hearing in the terror payments case, U.S. government attorneys specifically argued against the public identification of the Chiquita officials “to protect the reputational and privacy interests of uncharged individuals.”

Instead, the Factual Proffer memorializing the plea agreement revolves around ten anonymous “Relevant Persons” identified only as “Individual A” through “Individual J.” The public version of a 2009 report by Chiquita’s Special Litigation Committee (SLC) likewise omits the names of most of the individuals identified in the report, replacing them with anonyms like “Chiquita Employee #2,” “Banadex Employee #1,” and “Chiquita lawyer.”

In 2011, the Archive published its first Chiquita Papers, posting, revealing, among other things, that the company appeared to have engaged in quid pro quos with guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia, contrary to the Factual Proffer’s finding that Chiquita had not derived any benefit from the payments.

The original Chiquita Papers revealed the company had engaged in quid pro quos with guerilla and paramilitary forces in Colombia

The first Chiquita Papers collection offered some important new revelations, but lacked a coherent contextual narrative. There were few indications as to who had written the documents, and it was nearly impossible to say for sure how the named individuals related to one another. Handwritten notes, auditing records, legal memos, and accounting schedules—among thousands of pages of internal records released under FOIA by the DOJ—offered tantalizing clues, but few concrete conclusions could be drawn from them.

The key that unlocks many of the mysteries of the Chiquita Papers is the secret testimony given by Kistinger and six other Chiquita officials during the SEC’s expansive bribery investigation. Through a relatively simple, if laborious, process of cross-referencing among the three sources, it is possible to identify almost all of the individuals whose names were scrubbed from the Factual Proffer, the SLC Report, and the SEC testimony—effectively stripping away the redactions that have shielded Chiquita personnel from scrutiny and that have helped guarantee impunity for individuals linked to the payments.

CIA WikiLeaks Mole a Russian or Defector?

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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.

 

 

 

Jeff Sessions/FBI and MS-13

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Four members of the violent, foreign MS-13 gang were convicted on federal racketeering charges, some of which involved murder.

Miguel Zelaya, 20-years-old, Luis Ordonez-Vega, 36-years-old, Jorge Sosa, 24-years-old and William Gavidia, 23-years-old, were all convicted on a count of conspiracy to commit racketeering, according to the Charlotte Observer:

Zelaya, who also goes by “Most Wanted” and “Ne Ne” is a member of MS-13’s “Coronados Little Cycos Salvatrucha” clique. On Dec. 18, 2013, he shot and killed Jose Orlando Ibarra, an associate of The Latin Kings, a rival gang, the release said.

Ordonez-Vega, also known as “Big Boy,” is a member of the Brentwood Locos Salvatrucha” clique, according to the news release. On June 6, 2013, Ordonez-Vega shot and killed Noel Navarro Hernandez in a strip mall parking lot in Charlotte, believing the victim was a member of a rival gang.

Sosa, who goes by “Koki” and “Loco” is a member of the “Charlotte Locotes Salvatrucha” clique. Prosecutors say he’s been involved in multiple gang-related crimes. In Feb. 2008, he flashed MS-13 gang signs at a rival gang member’s mother and pointed a gun at her while they were stopped in traffic. In June, 2013, he was involved in a gang-related shooting where he and another person followed victims in a neighborhood in Charlotte and opened fire with a high-caliber rifle, the release said.

All of the gang members are either immigrants or the children of immigrants in the U.S. and they are also facing state charges for their crimes.

“Today’s guilty verdicts underscore that even though gang membership may in some ways ‘protect’ gangsters from outsiders, it certainly won’t protect them from the vast reach of the US. Attorney’s Office and our law enforcement partners,” U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina Jill Westmoreland Rose said in a statement.

The MS-13 gang members were four of 37 who were charged with racketeering after an investigation into the criminal activity by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Thirty of the other gang members charged with racketeering are either awaiting sentencing or have pleaded guilty to the charges.

According to the U.S. District Attorney, Ordonez-Vega and Zelaya were convicted on charges to murder in aid of racketeering. Those charges are connected to two separate murders. Meanwhile, Sosa was convicted for attempted murder in the aid of racketeering.

***

Image result for ms-13  InSightCrime

In 2015 the U.S. Treasury Department froze the assets of three members of the gang who were funneling funds back to higher-ups in El Salvador from prison. These actions were an attempt “disrupt” MS-13’s financial network by cutting off profits from illegal activities in the United States, the Treasury Department said. In 2012 the Obama administration designated MS-13 a transnational crime organization and implemented sanctions against six members in 2013.

While the U.S. government attempts to target MS-13’s earnings, targeting its culture is proving more difficult. The fierce loyalty among members is unique, Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, told FOX Business.

“They’re very cohesive and often directed by imprisoned bosses in El Salvador to recruit and expand in American communities. That tends to mean there’s an aggressive internal enforcement mechanism which equates to internal discipline involving physical violence and murder for disrespect or betrayal,” he said.

The FBI in El Salvador Because of MS-13:

CNN Reported Dossier Basis for Trump Surveillance, But…

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The FBI last year used a dossier of allegations of Russian ties to Donald Trump’s campaign as part of the justification to win approval to secretly monitor a Trump associate, according to US officials briefed on the investigation.

The dossier has also been cited by FBI Director James Comey in some of his briefings to members of Congress in recent weeks, as one of the sources of information the bureau has used to bolster its investigation, according to US officials briefed on the probe.
This includes approval from the secret court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to monitor the communications of Carter Page, two of the officials said. Last year, Page was identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser on national security. More here from CNN.
Okay, so everyone remains angry with James Comey right? Okay, well hold on….this could get complicated. We cant dismiss the notion that Obama and Susan Rice had a valid reason for their surveillance
actions, at least some as the below case was provided to the White House.
Enter Evigeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev.
Image result for evgeniy mikhailovich bogachev

U.S. v Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev et al by Brian Ries on Scribd

Bogachev was a case from 2014 investigated by CrowdStrike and then later offered help to the FBI office in Omaha and later the FBI office in Pittsburgh finally after countless months, ran a global cyber operation and succeeded in stopping international bank thefts in the millions of dollars. Many Russian immigrants located in Brighton Beach were recruited to be mules going to domestic banks, opening accounts and later withdrawing funds, cleaning all traces of the stolen millions. It should be noted that CrowdStrike was the same firm the Hillary campaign hired to investigate intrusions.

Image result for evgeniy mikhailovich bogachev

Now it gets even more interesting.

The matter of Bogachev with his named operation of ‘Business Club’ and his global cyber operatives hacking with sophisticated bots, malware and remote servers came to the attention of the Russian Federation. They liked what the Bogachev Zeus operation had the ability to do. So, top Kremlin officials allowed the operation to continue without prosecution if they would work to gather intelligence on the global reaction to Putin annexing Crimea and moving in on Ukraine.

All of this came to the attention also of U.S. based private cyber professional where they studied the code, the IP addresses, the servers, the patterns, names and other common cyber traits. The DNC hack attributions are a dovetail to the ‘Business Club’ operation due to style, coding, networks, language and server locations.

In 2015, the Obama State Department issued sanctions and a $3 million dollar bounty on Bogachev who operated with the alias of ‘Slavik’. Russia of course is not only not cooperating but refuses to admit any such action was real and the evidence is not vetted. This is a usual response by top Russian officials.

An estimated $100 million was stolen via cyber operations by Slavik and computers infected with various versions of Zeus still exist while the FBI was able to seized all those known to their sting operation.

The FBI described the cyber sting operation as hand to hand combat with Bogachev and his operation on the Zeus case was deemed successful. It is unknown at this time who and where is he still operating. The summary of this operation was taken from the full article published by ‘Wired’ under the title ‘The Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker’

Late last year, the DHS released a joint statement which read in part:

This activity by Russian intelligence services is part of a decade-long campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. Government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing, campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations; theft of information from these organizations; and the recent public release of some of this stolen information.  In other countries, Russian intelligence services have also undertaken damaging and disruptive cyber-attacks, including on critical infrastructure, in some cases masquerading as third parties or hiding behind false online personas designed to cause victim to misattribute the source of the attack.  The Joint Analysis Report provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government.

A great deal of analysis and forensic information related to Russian government activity has been published by a wide range of security companies.  The U.S. Government can confirm that the Russian government, including Russia’s civilian and military intelligence services, conducted many of the activities generally described by a number of these security companies.  The Joint Analysis Report recognizes the excellent work undertaken by security companies and private sector network owners and operators, and provides new indicators of compromise and malicious infrastructure identified during the course of investigations and incident response.  The U.S. Government seeks to arm network defenders with the tools they need to identify,, detect and disrupt Russian malicious cyber activity that is targeting our country’s and our allies’ networks.

 

Another Journalist Dead After beatings, Russia

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Nicholas Andrushchenko dead after beatings.

 CBS writes the he covered human rights issues and crime.

In this photo taken on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016, prominent Russian journalist Nikolai Andrushchenko poses in St. Petersburg, Russia.

AP

 

Those opposed to Putin or expose the Kremlin/FSB seem to have shorter lives.

Going back a few years to a major case of poisoning. With assassinations, Russian spies and rumours of the Kremlin’s dark influence back in the news, this documentary tells – for the first time – the inside story of the murder of a British citizen on British soil using the world’s deadliest poison, and of an international manhunt that led to the steps of the Kremlin. Alexander Litvinenko was killed in London with the radioactive poison polonium 210 in November 2006. The Scotland Yard detectives who led the murder investigation have never spoken publicly about it before. Together with the doctors who fought to save Litvinienko’s life – reveal the political and diplomatic obstacle course they faced in investigating the murder and tell how their quarries left a toxic trail through the heart of London.

Then there was the case of Mikhail Lesin, 59, found dead in a Dupont Circle hotel room. He was a former aide to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.               Image result for mikhail lesin

***

Russia suspicious deaths list updated today with a journalist who died after being attacked. Putin critics highlighted in yellow.

The Kremlin Is Reportedly Planning a Major Mudslinging Campaign Against Putin’s Biggest Critic

Image: Alexey Navalny / Instagram, edited by Kevin Rothrock

The Kremlin has finally decided to take on Alexey Navalny, four sources tell the independent television station Dozhd. According to two of the sources (identified only as “individuals close to the Kremlin”), the campaign against Russia’s opposition leader will start sometime soon.

Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Sergey Kirienko, has reversed the Kremlin’s longheld position that Navalny poses no genuine threat to the regime, according to a source who regularly meets with Kirienko. The administration’s concern is reportedly that Navalny could mar Putin’s likely re-election next March, when the Kremlin is counting on a “beautiful victory,” with high turnout and without the need for open repression against the political opposition.

According to Dozhd’s report, a special team from Putin’s domestic policy crew has set up a war room somewhere outside the Kremlin to generate material designed to discredit Navalny. Dozhd says Alexander Kharichev and Andrei Yarin — two of Putin’s top domestic policy officials — will oversee the mudslinging effort.

“They’re filming videos, making viral clips, and designing little video games to discredit Navalny. They’re fighting him like he’s Hitler,” a source told Dozhd.

Political analysts told Dozhd that the public can expect the campaign against Navalny to resemble the character assassination of former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, whose race for a seat in the State Duma derailed last year, after Russian network television aired hidden-camera footage of him cheating on his wife, which also precipitated a collapse of Russia’s democratic opposition alliance.

Online, where Navalny enjoys his greatest support and popularity, Russians are already mocking the news that the Kremlin is working on “videogames” to discredit the country’s most visible anti-corruption activist. “I can’t wait for the release of the videogame that will discredit Alexey Navalny,” Perm-based artist Anton Semakin tweeted sarcastically. “After the protests against corruption, the Kremlin has decided to crack down on Navalny, not on corruption,” the Russian comedian “Bob Farber” joked.

According to Dozhd’s sources, it was last month’s nationwide anti-corruption protests, spearheaded almost single-handedly by Navalny, that provoked the Kremlin’s new response. While the crowds may have represented only an infinitesimal sliver of the Russian population, Navalny’s anti-corruption efforts have undeniably coalesced into a larger movement. See RuNet Echo’s March 28 report on “Russia’s Youngster Uprising.”

And there’s statistical evidence that supports Navalny’s rising political profile: In early April, the Levada Center polling agency recorded a 10-percent drop in Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s approval ratings after Navalny released a bombshell investigation accusing Medvedev of widescale corruption.

Packaged in a sleek and entertaining video presentation, Navalny’s allegations have attracted more than 19 million views on YouTube.