ANALYSIS – From Russia with love – during the Cold War, everyone knew that traveling to the totalitarian Soviet Union entailed risks, even if you were an accredited diplomat.
There was the ubiquitous surveillance and tracking and the occasional harassment or detention.
There was also the ever-present risk of a ‘honey trap' using attractive women to get secrets from willing Americans. But those were the old days. (RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene's Outburst Angers GOP Leaders – Was She Right?)
Well, welcome to the new Russia. And the new ‘Moscow Rules.'
Today, a clandestine counterintelligence unit of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) covertly tracks high-profile foreigners, especially Americans in the country, and, when needed, ensnares and detains them for political leverage.
Just like before. Or worse. Often the Americans are held for years in harsh conditions. (RELATED: Biden Trades Russian Arms Dealer For Woke Female Basketball Player – Leaves Male US Marine To Rot)
That virtually unknown unit, the Department for Counterintelligence Operations, or DKRO, led to the arrest of Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich, reports the paper.
Its first section, DKRO-1, tracks Americans and Canadians.
According to Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security analyst who has spent years studying the unit: “They are the crème-de-la-crème of the FSB.”
In one of his final articles before his arrest, Gershkovich, citing a former Russian intelligence officer and a defense ministry source, reported that the Ukraine invasion was mainly planned by the FSB rather than the military. (RELATED: Russia's FSB Arrests Wall Street Journal Moscow Reporter For ‘Spying')
Based on U.S. and other Western diplomats, intelligence officers and ex-Russian operatives, the paper explained, DKRO-1 also helped detain two other Americans in Russia, former Marines Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed.
The paper reported: “The secretive group is believed by these officials to be responsible for a string of strange incidents that blurred the lines between spy craft and harassment, including the mysterious death of a U.S. diplomat's dog, the trailing of an ambassador's young children and flat tires on embassy vehicles.”
While highly secretive, the CIA is all too familiar with them.
The Journal quotes Dan Hoffman, a former Central Intelligence Agency Moscow chief of station (COS) about DKRO.
He said: “They've been doing this a long time. They know us extremely well. They do their job extremely well, they're ruthless about doing their job, and they're not constrained by any resources. (RELATED: NHL Star Brags About Connections To Foreign Regime – Threatens To Have Cops Killed)
Their primary goal is often to take hostages under a fig leaf of justification to then trade them for Russians imprisoned in the U.S.
The paper adds:
On March 29, DKRO officers led an operation, hailed by the FSB as a success, that made Gershkovich, 31 years old, the first American reporter held on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War, according to current and former officials and intelligence officers in the U.S. and its closest allies, as well as a former Russian intelligence officer familiar with the situation.
… DKRO also led the operation to arrest Whelan, in what U.S. officials, the former Marine's lawyers and his family have said was an entrapment ploy involving a thumb-drive. The U.S. also considers him wrongfully detained.
But recently, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the DKRO's methods have gotten increasingly aggressive in their overt harassment of Americans, including high-ranking diplomats.
The WSJ continues:
U.S. officials blame DKRO for cutting the power to the residence of current U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy the night after her first meeting with Russian officials in January, and for trailing an embassy official's car with a low-flying helicopter. U.S. diplomats routinely come home to find bookcases shifted around and jewelry missing, for which they have blamed DKRO officers.
More recently, a Russian drone followed a diplomat's wife as she drove back to the embassy, unaware that the roof of her car had been defaced with tape in the shape of the letter Z, a Russian pro-war symbol. U.S. officials say they believe the group was behind that. U.S. officials strongly believe that the Russian police posted around Washington's embassy in Moscow are DKRO officers in disguise.
Under the revised ‘Moscow Rules' security protocols, U.S. Embassy staff have been told to avoid anyone trying to hand them anything; it could be a DKRO officer trying to entrap them as a spy caught carrying classified materials.
This is what appears to have been the case with Whelan.
U.S. Marines assigned to the Moscow embassy or former Marines simply visiting Russia are especially prized catches and particularly vulnerable to FSB targeting.
This is one big reason I haven't traveled there.
Reed, the former Marine arrested in 2019 after a drunken fight in Moscow, said: “They clearly wanted to assess if I was anyone with valuable intel.”
He added: “Knowing I was a Marine was enough to decide to use me as a hostage.”
Reed was swapped in April 2022 for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot sentenced in 2011 to 20 years for smuggling cocaine into the U.S.
Putin is directly involved in overseeing the more high-profile operations of the new DKRO and has been for a while. (RELATED: Like The FBI, Politicized DHS Running ‘Shady' (Likely Illegal) Domestic Intelligence Program)
Created in 1998, the unit first tracked the vast influx of American investors, reporters and visitors during that thaw in relations.
Putin briefly served as director of the (FSB) under President Boris Yeltsin before being appointed prime minister in August 1999.
After the resignation of Yeltsin, Putin became acting president and, less than four months later, was ‘elected' outright to his first term as president.
The rest is history. And history repeats itself.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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There’s a solution, don’t go to Russia.
Good idea. Why would anyone that didn’t have to go there, actually just want to go? It’s like stepping back in time to the not so good old days.