New in SpyWeek: Perfidy at Home and Abroad
The FBI-MagaWorld Smirnov meltdown, a Chinese Snowden, Putin's space bomb, hostage diplomacy, McGonigal's compromise, other espionage arrests and more
Welcome to SpyWeek, our new weekly newsletter, where we look at news from the intersection of intelligence, foreign policy, and military operations.
Hostage Diplomacy: A 33-year-old ballerina and spa manager from Los Angeles who gave $51.80 to a Ukrainian charity has been arrested by Russia’s FSB intelligence service on charges of treason. The FSB said Ksenia Karelina, a dual citizen of the United States and Russia, was involved in “providing financial assistance to a foreign state in activities directed against Russia’s security.”
Karelina, a dual US-Russia citizen, was charged with treason on the same day that Tucker Carlson conducted a notoriously oleaginous interview with Vladimir Putin, according to a Telegram post by First Department, a collective of lawyers dealing with cases of alleged treason and espionage in Russia. Karelina is charged with sending money to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based non-profit group, the lawyers’ collective added.
White House spokesman John Kirby urged all U.S. citizens in Russia to leave immediately.
Karelina was taken into custody in Yekaterinburg, the same city where Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested last March on charges of espionage that he and the newspaper deny. Putin told Carlson that it might be possible to free Gershkovich in exchange for a Russian jailed abroad, Reuters reported. One possible swap: Vadim Krasikov, a Russian serving a life sentence in a German prison for murdering an exiled Chechen-Georgian dissident in a Berlin park in 2019.
Useful Idiots: The Republicans’ star witness against President Joe Biden and his son Hunter turned out to be not just a liar but an agent of Russian intelligence. That’s according to an explosive court filing in the case of Alexander Smirnov, the longtime FBI informant who’s accused of making up the allegations that the Bidens took bribes from Ukrainian businessmen. And it may have big implications for the 2024 elections.
For months, GOP leaders in Congress, Fox News, and others have uncritically repeated and endorsed the lies Smirnov peddled about a $10 million bribery scheme involving the president and his son and made them into an article of faith for the MAGA right. FBI Director Christopher Wray was nearly held in contempt last year by a House committee demanding an internal report known as an FD-1023 (“the form our special agents use to record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources,” as Wray described it) that reported the claims—baseless, as it turned out—Smirnov made in 2020 about the Biden bribery scheme. And Fox News and MAGA world are refusing to walk back the lies.
The 28-page filing by Special Counsel David Weiss went deep into the lies Russian intelligence fed to Smirnov. After his arrest on Feb. 14, Smirnov “admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about” Hunter Biden. The “story,” which Smirnov relayed to the FBI back in September, involved a claim that Hunter Biden’s cell phone calls may have been secretly recorded at a hotel in Kyiv used by Russian intelligence operatives to gather “kompromat” on targets. (Fact is that Hunter Biden has never been to Ukraine, prosecutors wrote.) And Smirnov’s not done. “He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November,” Weiss wrote. The special counsel is prosecuting Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges.
The FBI once described the 43-year-old Smirnov as “highly credible” and paid him “six figures.”
The dual US-Israeli citizen has been an FBI informant since 2010 and was unusually close to his handler in the Seattle Field Office. Now, the Justice Department is burning him to the ground. Its court filing details Smirnov’s contacts with people like Russian Official 1, described by the informant as "an operative of a Russian intelligence service” who “controls groups that are engaged in overseas assassination efforts.” There are summaries of Smirnov’s reports of parties on megayachts involving Russian Official 1 and Smirnov’s unsuccessful efforts to recruit a Russian consular official by threatening to expose him as a spy for an unspecified entity.
All this may never have come to light had GOP members of Congress not threatened to hold the FBI director in contempt over Smirnov’s internal source reports, a move that was not well received in the J. Edgar Hoover building. A month later, as the conservative media trumpeted the made-up allegations in the “bribe file” Congress had forced Wray to hand over, the FBI quietly asked the special counsel’s office to investigate the informant who had produced it. An investigation by a grand jury in Delaware determined in the late summer/early fall of 2023 that Smirnov had been lying, prosecutors said.
We have questions. Special Counsel David Weiss has had Smirnov’s FD-1023 since 2020. What was he doing with it all that time? As to Smirnov, how long has this six-figure FBI informant been making things up? “What kind of dipshit sources [does] the FBI run?” former senior CIA ops officer and Russia hand John Sipher snarked on X.
Smirnov’s lawyer called the charges of lying to the FBI politically motivated. “They do not involve espionage or theft and are, thus, not serious," argued attorney David Chesnoff. A magistrate judge in Las Vegas seemed to agree and freed Smirnov Tuesday on a personal recognizance bond—despite DOJ warnings that he could flee to Israel, or worse, his friends in Russian intelligence could easily smuggle him out of the United States. In an odd turn two days later, Smirnov was re-arrested in his lawyer’s office and will have another detention hearing Monday before a judge in Los Angeles.
The Final Frontier: U.S. intelligence officials rushed to conduct a series of classified briefings for European and Asian allies in the wake of revelations about an anti-satellite nuclear weapon under development in Russia. American intelligence officials reportedly told allies that Russia could deploy a nuclear weapon “or a mock warhead” into space as early as this year, according to news reports. The White House and congressional leaders said that Russia’s plans don’t pose a direct or immediate threat to human lives, but even a Hiroshima-sized blast in space could threaten the constellation of commercial satellites that underpin global communications, financial transactions, the global positioning system, international shipping, trucking and agriculture, remote sensing, weather forecasting, and much more. “It would literally send us back into the dark ages,” said Rep. Michael Waltz, R-Fla., who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.
Could and would are the operative words here because U.S. intelligence officials reportedly have “low confidence” about whether Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, plans to launch a nuke into space. (For what it’s worth, Putin said he is “categorically against” it.) U.S. intelligence concluded that Russia tested such a system in early 2022, but it took time to figure out that it was a practice run for a space-based nuke. If Putin does launch a nuclear weapon into orbit, there’s no disagreement about its function. The weapon would “lurk as a time bomb in low orbit, a reminder from Mr. Putin that if he was pressed too hard with sanctions, or military opposition to his ambitions in Ukraine or beyond, he could destroy economies without targeting humans on earth,” The New York Times reported. Such a nuclear coercion strategy has so far ensured the survival of the Kim family in North Korea.
Can anything stop Putin from turning space into the next battlefield? The Wall Street Journal reported that top U.S. national security and intelligence officials warned Russia not to deploy a space-based nuclear weapon after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, forced the issue into the open last week. One back channel involved CIA Director William Burns and Sergei Naryshkin, who heads the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Another involved National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign-policy adviser. There were conflicting reports, however, about the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach to Russia. Politico reported that nascent U.S. diplomatic efforts to dissuade Russia were derailed by Turner’s disclosure last week.
It may be up to Chinese President Xi Jingping to talk Russia out of it. China privately took credit for getting Putin to back off his threats to nuke Ukraine after Xi delivered a face-to-face warning in March 2022, according to The Financial Times. (The Kremlin denied that, too.) Xi’s own space ambitions, however, may be a factor here. China is “deploying its own capabilities that can target GPS and other vital space-based systems,” a senior Pentagon official warned last month. But few good options remain. “Relying on our greatest adversary to deliver messages to Moscow is not a great practice, but in this case, if the reporting is true, China would have a vested interest in delivering the message,” Rep. Waltz said.
A Chinese Snowden? SpyTalk’s Matthew Brazil scooped U.S. national dailies with his report about a “bombshell leak,” revealing why and how China’s national police have been involved in state espionage and sabotage operations around the globe. An enormous cache of leaked documents from I-Soon, a Chinese state-linked hacking group, shows that the Ministry of Public Security, Beijing’s premier law enforcement agency, is attempting large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies, and infrastructure. The documents, posted online, included Bruneian, Turkish, and Thai diplomatic traffic—”possibly indicating successful Chinese decryption of their coded messages,” Brazil wrote. Malaysia was revealed to be a major target. Other targets included the UK Home Office, Justice Ministry, Treasury, the Education Ministry, the Brexit Department, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the National Crime Agency. Overnight Thursday, Brazil wrote in a follow-up, the Microsoft-owned GitHub server took down the cache, citing a violation of its “acceptable use policies.”
McGonigal Blackmailed?: Federal prosecutors handling the case of a former senior FBI counterintelligence agent dropped a bombshell that got buried in the welter of other bad news. Charles McGonigal, the former top counterintelligence official for the FBI's New York office, may have been compromised, prosecutors say. McGonigal was sentenced on February 16 to more than two years in prison for concealing at least $225,000 in cash he received from a former Albanian intelligence officer. “Although the defendant has taken responsibility for his conduct, the acts he took to advance [the former Albanian intelligence officer]’s interests while still employed by the FBI suggest he was compromised, and that post-FBI employment was not his only motivation,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. McGonigal was previously sentenced in New York to more than four years in prison for his illegal work for the sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska. (He will serve both sentences concurrently.)
From September 2016 until his retirement in 2018, McGonigal held what a judge in New York called “one of the highest-ranking, most important intelligence positions in the country.” Some of the most secret of secrets—the names of spies, double agents, and the sources and methods the United States used to gather intelligence—crossed his desk. Prosecutors say the FBI had to undertake “substantial” reviews of “numerous” investigations to determine whether those investigations were compromised during McGonigal’s tenure at the bureau. And it appears that the review is not yet complete. “The defendant worked on some of the most sensitive and significant matters handled by the FBI,” prosecutors wrote. “His lack of credibility, as revealed by his conduct underlying his offense of conviction, could jeopardize them all.”
Pocket Litter
A Navy sailor is facing espionage and other criminal charges over allegations that he delivered classified information to an unidentified foreign contact in 2022 and 2023. Chief Fire Controlman Bryce Pedicini is the first sailor to be charged with espionage in at least five years. (Navy Times)
A boss in the Yakuza, the Japanese organized crime group, was indicted in federal court in Manhattan on charges of smuggling nuclear materials. Takeshi Ebisawa allegedly smuggled samples of yellowcake uranium and weapons-grade plutonium out of Burma in 2021 and showed them to an undercover DEA agent in Thailand. (DOJ). Ebisawa and three co-conspirators were “fully expecting that Iran would use it for nuclear weapons,” a DEA spokesperson said.
Guantanamo prosecutors told relatives of victims of the 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, that the U.S. government made a plea deal with two Malaysian prisoners to try to “cleanse” the case of evidence obtained through CIA torture. (NYTimes)
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is deepening its ties with U.S. intelligence and military agencies, winning a $1.8 billion classified contract in 2021 and expanding a secretive company satellite program called Starshield for national security customers. (WSJ)
The Kingdom of Jordan is denying that Tower 22, the secret U.S. base on the Syria-Iraq-Jordan border that was attacked by an Iranian drone on Feb. 7, even exists. “We all know that there are American forces stationed in Jordan, but it’s unspoken knowledge, which is why the Jordanian government went on a propaganda campaign to deny the station existed there, even after the U.S. said they were hit in Jordan,” a local told the Stimson Center in a report this week.
Remember the phony invasion force Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower famously assembled under George Patton in Britain to fool the Nazis on where the D-Day landings would take place? That was just a start. The U.S. Army's top-secret 23rd Headquarters Special Troops unit will receive the Congressional Gold Medal for its life-saving battlefield deception during World War II. The 23rd used inflatable tanks, trucks, and artillery pieces; bogus radio traffic; 500-pound loudspeakers blasting recordings of divisions on the move; and other means of fakery to confuse the Nazis. (Military.com)
Osama bin Laden’s hard drive was the “craziest” CIA document ever declassified, according to users on the social media site Reddit. The CIA’s idea for a demonic Osama bin Laden action figure took the Number Two ranking. In the number three spot, according to Reddit users, was “Acoustic Kitty,” a 1960s scheme to surgically implant cats with listening devices. (Reddit)
Speaking of spy animals, India has released a pigeon that authorities in Mumbai had suspected of spying for China. The bird flew the coop after eight months in the slammer. (CNN)
Not sure where to make a statement, but as a former CI special agent in Vietnam (the old CIC in the Army) I do favor a very strong CI effort to see who is doing what in the current Russian / USA interface. I do accept that we may know some Russian agents in the USA and do not arrest them to protect our sources in Russia. However, if it goes as high as I suspect, we must clean house. If it is not so bad, we ought to clear some names and get over a 50's sort of hysteria. "I have a list of enemy agents in the State Department." I vote for a calmer approach. But do remember an honest investigation can clear the air. This is a job for the FBI. They are very good at CI.