-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Spy vs. Spy The Spy Who Runs Russia Stealing Western technology through East Germany. DRESDEN, Germany - First of two parts In a gray villa at No. 4 Angelikastrasse, perched on a hill overlooking the Elbe River, a young major in the Soviet secret police spent the last half of the 1980s recruiting people to spy on the West. Vladimir Putin looked for East Germans who had a plausible reason to travel abroad, such as professors, journalists, scientists and technicians, for whom there were acceptable ''legends,'' or cover stories. The legend was often a business trip, during which the agents could covertly link up with other spies permanently stationed in the West. According to German intelligence specialists who described the task of Mr. Putin, now acting president of Russia, the goal was to steal Western technology or NATO secrets. A newly revealed document shows that Mr. Putin was trying to recruit agents to be trained in ''wireless communications.'' But what purpose such training would serve is not clear. To this day, Mr. Putin defends the Soviet-era intelligence service. In recent comments to a writers' group in Moscow, he even seemed to excuse its role in Stalin's brutal purges, saying it would be ''insincere'' for him to assail the agency where he had worked for so many years. Fiercely patriotic, Mr. Putin once said he would not read a book by a defector because ''I don't read books by people who have betrayed the motherland.'' Such is the professional background of the man who emerged unexpectedly at the end of December to take over from President Boris Yeltsin. As acting president, Mr. Putin is the clear favorite to win the March 26 elections for a four-year presidential term. A review of his career shows that Mr. Putin previously thrived in closed worlds, first as an intelligence operative and later in municipal government in St. Petersburg. Until he was picked in August by President Yeltsin to become prime minister, Mr. Putin had never been a public figure. He spent 17 years as a mid-level agent in the KGB's foreign intelligence service, rising only to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Later, as an aide to a prickly and controversial mayor of St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city and Mr. Putin's home town, he made a point of staying in the background. Yet Mr. Putin's career also suggests that he witnessed firsthand the momentous finale of the Cold War. From the front line in East Germany, Mr. Putin saw how the centrally planned economies of the East staggered to disintegration. In St. Petersburg, he had a taste of the ragged path of Russia's early transition to a free-market, democratic system. What Mr. Putin has taken from these experiences is not entirely clear. He has embraced the conviction that ''there is no alternative'' to market democracy, and soberly acknowledged Russia's economic weaknesses. But he also has expressed enthusiasm for reasserting the role of a strong state. He has said the Russian economy had been ''criminalized,'' but so far only hinted that he would tackle the powerful tycoons who lord over it. Mr. Putin has vowed that Russia will not revert to totalitarianism, but he has not demonstrated much skill in working with Russia's fledgling competitive political system. Mr. Putin has never campaigned for office and he told an interviewer two years ago that he found political campaigns distasteful. ''One has to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill,'' he said. ''So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or be deliberately lying.'' Mr. Putin, an only son, was born in Leningrad, now back under its original name of St. Petersburg, to a factory foreman and his wife in 1952, the year before Stalin's death. He entered the Leningrad University School of Law in 1970. Valeri Musin, then a university lecturer, said the Law School was mainly a training ground for the KGB, the regular police and the bureaucracy. Mr. Putin later recalled that the KGB had targeted him for recruitment even before he graduated in 1975. ''You know, I even wanted it,'' he said of joining the KGB. ''I was driven by high motives. I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best for society.'' After a few years spying on foreigners in Leningrad, Mr. Putin was summoned to Moscow in the early 1980s to attend the elite foreign intelligence training institute, and then was assigned to East Germany. He arrived in Dresden at the age of 32, when East Germany was a major focus of Moscow's attention. The German Democratic Republic was a base for 380,000 Soviet troops, tanks, aircraft and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Berlin was a constant source of Cold War tensions and intrigue. At the time, several thousand KGB officers reported to a headquarters at Karlshorst, outside Berlin. Soviet military intelligence also was stationed in East Germany. But the biggest intelligence operation was the East German secret police, the Stasi, who monitored hundreds of thousands of citizens and kept millions of documents on file. The broad Stasi network was often used by the KGB and the unevaluated intelligence material was sent directly to Moscow. The East German dictatorship, headed in those years by Erich Honecker, remained steadfastly rigid even as the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was beginning to experiment with political and economic reforms at home. In Dresden, the KGB outpost at No. 4 Angelikastrasse was located directly across the street from the city's main Stasi headquarters. The Stasi poked into every aspect of life. There is little information about Mr. Putin's specific tasks in Dresden, but specialists and documents point to several assignments, including recruiting and preparing a-gents. The work likely involved Robotron, a Dresden-based electronics conglomerate that was the Soviet bloc's largest mainframe computer maker and a microchip research center. At the time, a major KGB effort was under way to steal Western technology. The presence of Robotron may have provided Mr. Putin with ''legends'' for sending technicians to the West, or for recruiting Westerners who came to East Germany from such large electronics companies as Siemens or IBM. Mr. Putin may also have been interested in military electronics and intelligence about NATO from informers. The KGB was known to the Stasi as ''the friends,'' and it relied on the Stasi for support. For years, the Stasi prepared fake passports and driver's licenses for ''the friends'' to create cover stories for agents. Tens of thousands of people in East Germany were ''registered,'' or marked in the secret files of the Stasi, as being ''of interest'' to the KGB. According to the German specialist, some were marked because the KGB was searching for people with plausible cover stories for trips abroad. ''You needed a guy with a background that looked good, a professor who had to go to an international conference or had to do business in the West,'' he said. ''You needed such a legend.'' Mr. Putin also turned to the Stasi for help with routine logistics, such as obtaining a telephone - they were strictly controlled - and apartments. He was formally assigned to run a Soviet-German ''friendship house'' in Leipzig and he carried out those duties. But this assignment was apparently his own ''cover story'' as a reason to be abroad. Intelligence specialists and political scientists said Mr. Putin may have had a political assignment to make contact with East Germans who were sympathetic to Mr. Gorbachev, such as the Dresden party leader, Hans Modrow, in case the Honecker regime collapsed. Mr. Putin's work with the Stasi won him a bronze medal in November 1987 from the East German security service, but the reasons for the award are unknown. It was described by one source as the next level up from the lowest basic award for service. International Herald Tribune, January 31, 2000 The Puzzle Palace NSA Down for Four Days Oh, dear. All those Echelon messages unread. >From Monday evening through early Friday morning last week, the main computers of the National Security Agency failed, causing an unprecedented blackout of information at Fort Meade, where signals intelligence intercepted around the world is processed, officials said last night. As a result, NSA analytical reports from Fort Meade that turn intercepted foreign telephone, cable and radio messages into meaningful data for the government were halted for four days, a senior intelligence official said. "Other NSA analysis kept flowing from other parts of the world," he added, "but this was not a trivial failure." The computer shutdown, which was first reported yesterday by ABC News, was caused by a "system overload," one source said, and was not the result of a Y2K problem, sabotage or hackers invading the system. Another official, who described it as a "software anomaly," put knowledge of the cause more cautiously. "As of now," he said, "there is no evidence other than this was a system stressed to meet day-to-day operational pressures." Most of the data that were not processed were stored, and that backlog is now being worked on to see what may have been missed, according to intelligence sources. "There was a significant loss of processing, but collection continued unaffected," the senior intelligence official said. "We may have lost timeliness, but we have not lost intelligence." Almost immediately after a signals intelligence officer Monday night saw that the system had crashed, he turned to other parts of the NSA worldwide system to pick up the processing responsibility, officials said. To keep current on key early warning issues during the NSA failure, sources said the U.S. intelligence community turned to other NSA electronic intercept assets in the hands of the CIA and the military. In addition, NSA regularly exchanges information with allied intelligence organizations. Early Friday morning, after calling in various contractors and having personnel work around the clock, fixes had "brought the operation back to operational stability," the senior official said. As of yesterday, processing had largely been restored to 90 percent to 95 percent of operational capability, the senior official said. To bring the system back up to that level, NSA spent nearly $1.5 million adding new equipment to build up the "backbone" of the system, making fixes and having personnel work thousands of hours of overtime. NSA has been sharply criticized by congressional intelligence committees over the years for failing to modernize quickly enough as telecommunications capabilities have accelerated with new technologies. Two years ago, the House intelligence committee marginally increased the allocation for intelligence services, particularly in areas where technological advances or lack of emphasis had weakened U.S. capabilities. The Washington Post, January 30, 2000 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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