Of course the cultural exchange programs offer great opportunities / events to contact or mine intelligence assets … a universal understanding of risks. With a wonderful smile, I remember Anna Chapman calling on Booman Tribune… it took me a few minutes to analyse she was up to no good.
○ Red Menace: Ex-Spy Anna Chapman, From Russia Unloved
The shadowy Russian émigré touting Trump | FT Investigations – Nov. 1, 2016 |
US election raises ghosts of cold war-era spy gamesWhen Sergei Millian was appointed head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce in the US in 2006, the young former Soviet émigré came to typify Russia’s new projection of soft power.
Friends approved when he posted a photograph on Facebook in 2014 of himself with Donald Trump and Jorge Perez, the billionaire owner of the Related Group, a Miami real-estate developer, at the races. Then this year, Mr Millian, now 36, began speaking of how Russia-US relations would improve under the presidency of Mr Trump, with whose organisation he said he had worked as a real-estate broker and maintained ties. “I can assure you he is very positive and friendly,” he told the Russian state news agency, Ria Novosti, in January.
…
For Konstantin Borovoi, a former Russian MP and businessman who was president of Russia’s first commodities exchange [accused of accepting bribes in the era of Yeltsin – Oui], the chamber’s type of operations hark back to cold war practices. In Soviet times, the American Trade Chamber was “the official representative office of the secret services”, said Mr Borovoi, who is also an expert on the KGB. “These institutions have been revived and developed,” he said. “The chamber of commerce institutions are the visible part of the agent network . . . Russia has spent huge amounts of money on this.”○ ‘Russian Ross Perot’ could be Moscow’s first Jewish mayor | JTA – 1993 |
Mr Millian came on to the FBI’s radar after he participated in a 2011 trip to Moscow for 50 US businessmen and offered to organise further trips. The FBI pulled in the US participants to ask them whether Russian intelligence tried to recruit them during the all-expenses paid trip, three attendees told the Financial Times. One of them said the FBI told him they suspected that some of the people who organised the trips were spies.
The FBI is investigating whether the U.S.-based director of a Russian government-run cultural exchange program was clandestinely recruiting Americans as possible intelligence assets, according to law enforcement officials.
FBI agents have been interviewing Americans who participated in the Rossotrudnichestvo exchange program run by Yury Zaytsev, who also heads the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Washington. For the past 12 years, the program has paid for about 130 Americans to visit Russia.
FBI spokeswoman Amy Thoreson declined to comment on whether there was an investigation or to discuss the bureau’s role. A woman who answered the phone at the cultural center said that neither Zaytsev nor the center would comment.
The center, at Phelps Place in the Kalorama neighborhood of northwest Washington, offers language lessons and cultural programs, according to its Web site.
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington denied that the cultural center was involved in the recruitment of spies.
“All such `scaring information’ very much resembles Cold War era,” the spokesman, Yevgeniy Khorishko, said in an e-mail. He added that such allegations were being leveled only to “distort and to blacken activities of the Russian Cultural Center.”
The FBI investigation of Zaytsev was first reported by Mother Jones magazine on its Web site.
Spies, spyware and hacking … what’s new?
○ Creeping Failure: How We Broke the Internet and What We Can Do to Fix It (2008)
Neo-McCarthyism and the US Media | The Nation | by James Carden - May 19, 2015
The crusade to ban Russia policy critics…
In early November 2014, The Interpreter published a piece by former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler with the headline “Is a Top American Diplomat a Russian Agent?” Recycling a story that had appeared on a Ukrainian news site, Schindler repeated the claim by Putin critic Konstantin Borovoy [writer for The Interpreter!! – Oui] that the Kremlin has “agents of influence” within the NATO hierarchy.According to Borovoy, an unnamed ex-US ambassador to Russia had “established an unprecedented intimacy with former top officials of the KGB and the current leaders of the Russian FSB.” This intimacy, Borovoy claimed, “was one reason for his leaving Russia.” Schindler wasted little time letting readers know that he believes the unnamed ambassador is NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander “Sandy” Vershbow, who served as ambassador to Russia from 2001 to 2005.
This diary was initiated after an exchange with Marie3 about “new revelations” … Sergei Millian the person behind the false allegations in the IC dossier reported by former MI6 top spy Steele and his Business Intelligence for Hire.
Continued below the fold …
“Sergei Millian” the Interpreter
Khodorkovsky’s propaganda site, anti-Russian the Interpreter Magazine, about Sergei Millian ..
○ How Russian State Media Covers the US Elections: From Bias to Disinformation
Seems to me he is a boastdul entrepreneur, a one-man corporation … smearing him as a witness to events that didn’t happen.
- The Interpreter Magazine is a “special project” of the Institute of Modern Russia. By “Modern Russia,” its creators mean, Russia as imagined by Wall Street and London. The “institute” is run by disgraced Russian billionaire oligarch, convicted criminal, and long-time Western proxy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, his son, and Washington lobbyists. It includes contributors such as Catherine A. Fitzpatrick who literally worked for the US State Department’s propaganda arm, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
I had written about the Maidan coup d’état in February/March 2014 and registered the link of propaganda with The Interpreter …
○ Ukraine Partners Chesno (Honestly) – USAID
More about Millian and his ties to the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce and his owb group:
- Sergio Millian Siarhei Kukuts serves as President of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce since May, 2006.
Mr. Millian currently is the owner of Millian Group, Inc., Interchallenge Translations, Interpreting, and Localization, and distributes the bilingual quarterly business magazine “Russian American Business” and the monthly RACC Newsletter. Mr. Millian is a licensed real estate broker and is actively working in the residential and commercial national and international real estate. He specializes in representing foreign investors in the USA as well as working with American investors interested in investments opportunities in the former USSR countries. He speaks five foreign languages fluently: English, Russian, Belarusian, Italian, and Spanish.
○ Meet The Man Who Is Spinning For Donald Trump In Russia | The Daily Beast – Sept. 2016 |
The claims in Steele’s dossier (former MI6) were based on reliable sources in the intelligence community … read anti-Russian organizations in the Ukraine and Lithuania. Blaming a pro-Trump figure is just a deflection to deceive.
Previous diaries on topic of “Dodgy Dossier” …
○ Fusion GPS linked to UAE Sheikh and Rubio Donor
○ ‘Sir’ Andrew Wood as spy chief in Moscow
○ British Intelligence Delivers Another ‘Dodgy Dossier’