Seventy Illegals
Christo Grozev is a Bulgarian investigative journalist and a highly accomplished analyst of Russian spying activities. Some of his best known work was with the online news outlet Bellingcat, which has emphasized uncovering the illegal and illicit activities of state and non-state bad actors (to use the diplo-speak jargon that resembles theater review). Grozev and Bellingcat use open-source intelligence gathering (OSINT) to track down their targets and their activities.
In a recent online video interview, Grozev explained to Simon Ostrovsky at The Insider how Moscow set up and trained a batch of at least 70 spies to perpetrate murders and acts of sabotage internationally. The clandestine Unit 29155 of the Russian intelligence services has (or had) a department within it that trained spies and gave them fake identities for insertion into countries that Vladimir Putin felt most threatened Russian power and influence.
Grozev’s description of what he found is as fascinating as it is instructive. For example, the Russian state and Russian rule of law are so pitifully weak that their own domestic hackers will and can uncover anyone and anything if the price is right—even their own top-secret spying efforts. Grozev and his team thus managed to find the identity of 70 of these spies who were trained for use as illegals. “Illegals” in the espionage context refers to spies whose missions in foreign countries are under deep cover, often by stealing the identities of the specific country’s deceased citizens. Their assigned tasks are also extremely aggressive and hostile, needless to say also fundamentally criminal in nature, including murder, sabotage, theft of state secrets, and subversive social engineering. Their activities could easily be construed as acts of war.
The work of these 70 illegals has included high profile assassinations like the Skripal murders in the UK, and sabotage of NATO facilities in Bulgaria over the years. More recently they were involved in attempts to assassinate arms suppliers to Ukraine and to murder the Ukrainian president Zelinsky during the initial massive Russian assault on that country in 2022.
The unfortunate fact is that these illegals were active for a decade murdering people and sabotaging infrastructure in Western countries, and Western intelligence services remained completely in the dark to what was going on. These were hostile acts that deserved firm diplomatic push-back, at the very least, along with publicity to make Western citizens aware of specific Russian malevolent behavior.
The interview is eye-opening altogether, and is only unfortunate in having come to light after the chances of thwarting Moscow’s hostile actions have long since passed.
This blog has no particular recommendations based on this news, other than that we should be more aware of the types of activities hostile foreign powers are engaged in, often on our very own soil. While you don’t want to become paranoid about such things, you also don’t want to become so naive that you mistake an aggressive hostile power as somehow well-meaning and misunderstood.
Oh, I forgot to mention, if my dad was still alive, it would be his 89TH Birthday today.
Always sad on this day, miss him so much
Morning everyone...
Still pretty chilly here, supposed to have some snow and more concerning freezing rain overnight, that I hope doesn't extend to morning when I have to go to work...warning is until 12pm Tuesday...then it is supposed to warm up to th e mid to upper 40's possibly as high as 50 and stay there for several days at least
I am swamped at work again, and have to get back to it...Have an awesome day!