Dead Spy Mystery

[Uli]

Everybody else following this? Death by radiation seems to be the present finding.

[moneyp]

Yeah, interesting stuff. I guess some people don't think the Cold War is quite over just yet!

[Sandi22]

When they want you dead.... but how do you get radioactive poisonings across borders? Easily it seems. Perhaps. Or did they get it in Britain from a deep cover covert operative who works in the medical field, construction, etc? Lots to learn here, if we ever do hear how, who, and why.

[Dr Dave]

This is spookily similar to the plot line in Martin Cruz Smith's "Wolves Eat Dogs" in which a Russian gangster kills a rival with radiation poisoning.

The real case is incredibly disturbing. Putin can deny responsibility all he wants--this murder, and the one of the journalist that preceded it, have given everybody The Message: Fuck with Putin and die. I think the only way we'll ever find out how it was done is by looking for the money: Somebody got paid for this, and whoever did the paying, you can be sure, has a connection to Putin.

And let us remember this murdering thug is the same guy that Bush said he could do business with. "I looked him in the eye..." What a lot of shit.

[Nim Chimpsky]

Originally Posted by Sandi22

When they want you dead.... but how do you get radioactive poisonings across borders? Easily it seems. Perhaps. Or did they get it in Britain from a deep cover covert operative who works in the medical field, construction, etc? Lots to learn here, if we ever do hear how, who, and why.

Polonium-210 is used in satellite technology and is not the kind of substance you can get from people in the medical or construction industries. It's very, very rare and only produced by a handful of labs in the world. You'd need to know some well-connected nuclear physicists to get your hands on it.

Polonium-210 is what's called an alpha emitter and in comparison with other radioactive substances is relatively safe but once ingested into the body through the stomach, or perhaps through inhalation or a wound, alpha particles are amongst the most deadly.

The Russian Parliament recently passed a law allowing the killing of enemies of the state abroad. Litvinenko was a British citizen.

[patricia]

Originally Posted by Dr Dave

And let us remember this murdering thug is the same guy that Bush said he could do business with. "I looked him in the eye..." What a lot of shit.

That's exactly what I thought when I heard that Putin was being blamed by the poisoned man, Levinyenko[sp?] as he was dying.
How ridiculous to think that President Bush could look into Putin's eyes and see his soul. What rot!

[Gordon B]

Originally Posted by patricia

That's exactly what I thought when I heard that Putin was being blamed by the poisoned man, Levinyenko[sp?] as he was dying.
How ridiculous to think that President Bush could look into Putin's eyes and see his soul. What rot!

That was ridiculous but less so than Carter's expressed shock that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, Bush realizes now that his gut feeling was 100% wrong.

Bush is an exemplary person compared to Putin.

[Gary Sisco]

"Confessed" is the right word there. According to Breszinsky (sp?), the Carter admin was *hoping* for a Vietnam-style "quagmire" for the USSR in Afghanistan and sent "signals" that they would not object if USSR invaded.

Of course, he could by lying, but the same can be said for any of them.

****************

Putin is a career KGB thug. Even The Economist is starting to wonder aloud if the "F word" should be brought back to describe his state.

Murdering a pain in the ass would be child's play for his like.

[shrugs]

speaking of spies:
Markus Wolf

Nov 16th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Markus Wolf, East German spymaster, died on November 9th, aged 83



FASCINATING to his fans, odious to his enemies, Markus Wolf embodied the dilemmas and complexities of the cold war in Europe. Seen one way, he was something of a hero: not just a professional but also a patriot and an idealist. Even his ardent communism could be excused: had not his Jewish family found refuge from the Nazis in the Soviet Union? Revealed after the collapse of communism as cultivated, charming, an accomplished cook and, to some, a heart-throb, he was utterly unlike most Soviet-block spymasters—crumpled, podgy men with thick glasses and steel teeth.

There was a whiff of glamour in the way that Mr Wolf's spies outwitted their bumbling West German rivals. As head, for 34 years, of the foreign-intelligence arm of the Stasi, East Germany's Ministry of State Security, he planted agents and recruited informers all over West Germany. Some found their way into the very departments charged with defending democracy, others into the highest reaches of the state, even the chancellery. For those who believed the West to be shamefully materialist or unduly forgiving of the Nazi past, it was tempting to admire the guile of one who so often humiliated it.

“The man without a face”, he was called. His identity was so well concealed that his Western counterparts are supposed to have secured a photograph of him only in 1978. In fact, the CIA had identified him as early as 1959, from photographs taken when he had attended the Nuremberg war-crimes trials as a young radio reporter. Still, many thought he must be the model for the elusive Karla, the fictional Soviet spymaster who ran rings round his Western adversaries in the works of John le Carré, a British novelist steeped in the world of espionage. (Mr le Carré says he was not.)

Mr Wolf was, if anything, even more glamorous in defeat. Spurning American offers of a deal if he would tell all, he sought political asylum in Russia. When that was denied, he returned, and eloquently defended himself against charges of treason. “Victors' justice”, he called his trials; like Western spies, he was doing a dirty but necessary job, and his sins were “those of every other intelligence agency”.
The brutal reality

Yet there was nothing glamorous about the communist German state of 1949-89. Mr Wolf claimed that his subtle spycraft was a world away from the regrettable mistakes made by his Stasi colleagues in charge of internal repression and fostering terrorism abroad. After retiring—for mysterious reasons—from the Stasi in 1986, he published a book, “Troika”, which criticised Stalinism. Later he said he hoped that Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms would save a system nobly based on the “combination of socialism and freedom”.

He did admit that East Germany had proved a “sad reality”, but in truth it was far worse than that. The regime he served was a squalid dictatorship that jailed those who challenged it and shot those who tried to escape. Its secret police exploited the smallest weakness of anyone who might be useful or threatening. Husbands were coerced into spying on their wives, parents on their children. Mr Wolf's spies played a full part in a huge security system modelled closely on the Soviet Union's, and using identical tricks.

Though cleared, on appeal, of his 1993 conviction for treason, Mr Wolf was given a two-year suspended sentence in 1997 for his part in the abduction and torture of a German woman who had worked for the Americans in West Berlin. Those may be the methods of the war on terror now, but they were not part of the West's arsenal then, in a struggle won mainly by the potency of ideas, not by force or fear.

Mr Wolf said his most successful tactic was the use of sex: his “Romeo” agents seduced and suborned the lonely spinster secretaries of West German officialdom. The practice worked brilliantly, if you were prepared to overlook the attendant tragedies, such as the death of the hapless Leonore Heinz, who killed herself when she found that her husband had married her not for love but to steal secrets from the foreign ministry, where she worked.

It was all clever stuff, but Mr Wolf's chief target was an easy one. Every East German had the right to West German citizenship. That made it simple to plant sleepers, such as Günter Guillaume, an agent sent to West Germany in 1956, who ended up as a senior aide to the chancellor, Willy Brandt. He produced startling news—not just of Brandt's womanising, but also, paradoxically, that the Social Democratic chancellor genuinely accepted the post-war division of Europe, including the sovereignty of East Germany.

That may have usefully calmed Soviet nerves. But the East Germans' carelessness was their star's downfall: they sent him a coded message congratulating him on the birth of his son. When that was cracked, he was caught. Brandt resigned, and his policy of detente with the East—Ostpolitik—stalled. Mr Wolf admitted that this had been a blunder. Like other people, he said, he sometimes felt remorse.

Maybe he did. Other communists, though, were much quicker to see not just the practical failures but the bankruptcy of the entire creed. Mr Wolf's mild penitence fell far short of convincing contrition.

[Sandi22]

Who were the government people who ended up dead? One stuffed in a barrel at a lake, during the Reagan/Bush years. All of this was here in our country around or during the time of Iran Contra, etc? Our own covert operators?

I have a book on it somewhere, The Evil Empire is the name of it. It is about all phases of drug deals, political intrigue, and the people involved from spying, drug dealing, from Burma to the U.S., along with everyday dealers, to the kids who built the largest Marijuana business in the US, (who ended up living in San Pedro, in a house which friends of mine had lived in earlier, they were hiding from organized crime and the DEA), to the drugs deals in Central America, etc. Read that and then read Lousiania King Fish, all about the people suspected in JFK's and Bobby Kennedy's deaths. Bobby dumping known mob bosses in the Jungles of Central America to fend for themselves. Two page turners, and what a convoluted mess it all was. Hard to put down either book, and in ways, these two books mesh together. Government collusion is all too evident in too many things.

[Alastair]

Originally Posted by shrugs

speaking of spies:
Markus Wolf

Nov 16th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Markus Wolf, East German spymaster, died on November 9th, aged 83

Apparently, the reason the Stasi was so successful is that they staffed it to Soviet levels, expecting Soviet levels of sloth and inefficiency. However, your average German works a lot harder than your average Soviet...or so the stereotype goes.

[Gary Sisco]

Yeah, maybe, if you ignore the Stalin period and its immediate successors, when Russian cops worked hard enough to kill millions and enslave millions of others in the gulag.

The Stalinists has already killed millions before there ever was a Stasi.

[Alastair]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

Yeah, maybe, if you ignore the Stalin period and its immediate successors, when Russian cops worked hard enough to kill millions and enslave millions of others in the gulag.

The Stalinists has already killed millions before there ever was a Stasi.

I'm talking about their surveillance tactics.

[Gary Sisco]

Could be. There'd be very stiff competition and no way to determine the victor, given the nature of the thing itself.

I knew a Latvian woman of war age who told me that she prefered the Nazis to the Stalinists (having lived under both) because with the Nazis, if you kept your mouth shut and went to work and home again, there was a reasonable expectation that you'd be ok. Under the Stalinists, she said even if you kept to a private life and kept your mouth shut, there might still come the sound of your door being kicked in and your husband being dragged into the street, forever, as happened to enough households. Enough so that there wasn't a way to rationally escape repression.

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

Did Putin eliminate Dolan as well?

[Sandi22]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Wozniak

Did Putin eliminate Dolan as well?

He left well before Turkey day, a long holiday for him it seems. He's probably stuffed on turkey and all the trimmings, and can't get out of his chair, or it could be he's sitting in the stands somewhere enjoying a game. Wonder if he was threatened with his life if he even walked by a computer?

[Jeffrey Wozniak]

His profile says he's banned.

This makes, what? The 12th time?

[Sandi22]

Banned? Why at this late date? He isn't saying anything insulting or rank that he hasn't said all along, not since I came here, nothing was that upsetting, or was it? Maybe I missed something??? Did someone turn on him? I've noticed this with some fellows on other sites, they like to give, but they can't take.

[jesus marion joseph]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Wozniak

His profile says he's banned.

This makes, what? The 12th time?

He was, in fact, banned. He tells my clandestine sources that he's not coming back.

"Vee haff vays off makink you come back..."

[Sandi22]

Other that the rank talk surrounding Naomi, I don't get it, he didn't say or do anything different from his usual talk during the time I've been here.

12 times you say?

Frankly I think he kept it interesting if not agitated and stewin. He usually knew exactly what he was talking about. He didn't talk off the top of his head, nor did he seem the least bit bigoted. He was the often talked about cliche, he's an equal opportunity abuser. He hasn't done anything that any of us can't handle or enjoy, ha! Just my thoughts from the little I've seen around here.

[Dr Dave]

Scott is exemplary compared to Putin.

[Paul B]

Did some namby-pamby do-gooder complain to Lois about him? If so, that's pathetic. There's absolutely no reason for Mr. Dolan to be banned from this board. Lois gives free rein to a guy who physically assaults those who disagree with him, yet tosses Dolan? That says something.

[Nefertiti]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey Wozniak

His profile says he's banned.

The word "banned" is in custom user title, that he can fill out himself.

http://jazzcornertalk.com/speakeasy/member.php?u=3471

http://jazzcornertalk.com/speakeasy/...do=editprofile

[jesus marion joseph]

Originally Posted by Paul B

Did some namby-pamby do-gooder complain to Lois about him? If so, that's pathetic. There's absolutely no reason for Mr. Dolan to be banned from this board. Lois gives free rein to a guy who physically assaults those who disagree with him, yet tosses Dolan? That says something.

I'm not sure how much "time out" he got from Lois, or what the exact terms of his suspension were, but apparently he and Lois had a dust up, and he has stated that he won't be back. Don't make the assumption that Lois has placed him on some sort of permanent ban, because I'm not sure that's the case.

FWIW, I suggested to him that he reconsider. I've met him and his family, and they're likeable folks, to say the least. I also think that he has made some worthwhile contributions to the overall discussion here, although I recognize that he has occasionally been set off by various interactions. Happens to the best of us, if you stick around here long enough. Lord knows there's plenty I've posted over the last eight or nine years that I've been here and on the old JCS that would cause me to cringe if I read it now.

Besides, that's one less voice on the various "car" threads, dammit!

[claude]

Here's a thread where the details of Scott's transgressions were discussed.

[Gary Sisco]

The CP successfully penetrated high state offices in more places than West Germany. The UK and US also had party agents in high places (the latter claim isn't redbaiting or McCarthyism but the result of since-public party documents in Russia gone over by historians, of which there are more all the time).

I'm not at all sure the Stasi had a more thoroughgoing domestic surveillance/spying/informing operation than did the Nazis, however. Many tens of thousands of Germans were ratted to the Party, even by family members and children, never mind neighbors. It reached a point where noone could trust anyone, friends included. Every conceivable grouping was Nazified including the most innocuous, such as birdwatchers. It was a model of the totalizing aspect of totalitarianism, where the society itself becomes totally statified, with nothing remaining of "civil society" (a term that was created by third-way, dissident, activists in the old East Bloc and has since been taken over by others).

It'd be a tough competition, to choose the most totaled of the various choices.

[LennyH]

I haven't noticed Scott posting over at Organissimo either, which he was doing fairly regularly before the meltdown.

I think I saw most of the posts in the exchange between Scott and Daniel. It got a bit rowdy and Daniel felt insulted but I didn't see anything ban-worthy. I may have missed the tail end, though.

[Alastair]

Originally Posted by Gary Sisco

I'm not at all sure the Stasi had a more thoroughgoing domestic surveillance/spying/informing operation than did the Nazis, however.

I didn't say this: I said that the Stasi was more efficient in the area you mention than the Soviets were. I picked it up here

FWIW, the writer considers the Stasi better than the Nazis at surveillance too.

[Nim Chimpsky]

Originally Posted by Alastair

I didn't say this: I said that the Stasi was more efficient in the area you mention than the Soviets were. I picked it up here

FWIW, the writer considers the Stasi better than the Nazis at surveillance too.

I think you could argue that the NKVD were the most efficient by cutting out the need for surveillance. Chances are a dead body's going to be pretty much where you left it.