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The thing about both this and the Havana Syndrome piece is that they obviously come from intelligence, meaning that someone in (probably the UK/US) government sent them this dossier and told them to publish it; otherwise these journalists would never have most of the information in the piece like when random Russian intelligence figures happened to enter or leave certain countries, precise meeting times, even references to historic CCTV footage that would have been collected for counterintelligence purposes. An implicit but unstated part of the story is that UK and US intelligence probably knew how compromised the Austrian security service was but used it to try to figure out what the Russians were doing; the problem was that the Russians were also aware that they knew and had so thoroughly compromised the Austrians that they were still actually able to get away with a lot under the nose of counterintelligence.
The Austrians have finally charged their ex-intelligence chief based in evidence they announce is from MI5 last week. The suggestion is that the guy, Ott, was Marsalek’s contact after he had been temporarily forced out of Orthodox priesthood and asked to be the handler for a Bulgarian-Russian spy ring in suburban England which British police busted a few months ago. But yes, it should be very clear that this is a specific side to the story.
If so, then the dossier was originally assembled, vetted, edited, approved, and ultimately released as a political op. The most significant thing that can be reliably concluded from the story is (further) evidence that western intelligence agencies carry out such political-narrative ops on their own citizens. I am surprised at the willingness to accept the story at close to face value, given all that we've learned in recent years.
Yeah yeah you can’t believe anything the government says etc etc. This is a trite, banal, useless, pointless, infantile, irrelevant and altogether worthless criticism. It says nothing and means nothing. Yes, I think the broad outline of events as described in the article is true. There is little reason to believe otherwise. Likewise, there are truths discussed in the Russian and Chinese state press. In this case, this has to do with a longstanding and very real series of events that have been unfolding for many years, mostly in public view. The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.
Not at all. We know this is an intelligence op, therefore it should not be trusted. That does not apply to everything. But now I'm surprised that you don't agree? Do you trust the narratives ("...unfolding over several years...") surrounding Trump as a Russian asset?
No, Trump was never a Russian asset, although a half-hearted attempt was made via Manafort. The IC largely ridiculed the Steele dossier even at the time, at least people I know who are part of it did.
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And if they are deliberate leaks, that makes me even less willing to take on trust that all the story says is exactly as it happened.
I think it’s pretty likely things mostly happened as described, it’s just that the entire other side of the story is missing. US intelligence likely engages in a lot of similarly underhand action with our geopolitical foes, for example, which these guys or Bellingcat aren’t going to expose.
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It does strike me as a push against the frame of the gaslighting Overton window that Western media continues to present Grozev/Bellingcat as an independent journalistic outfit rather than the intelligence agency mouthpiece that it obviously is. It would be one thing if they acknowledged the suspicions but argued against it, but there seems to be a universal consensus that to treat them as anything other than brave and resourceful citizen journalists, who happen to have a particular knack for uncovering dastardly schemes by America's geopolitical opponents using Google search and tea leaves, would just be giving air to enemy conspiracy theories.
Well, I suppose there are degrees of control. Obviously Bellingcat is very tightly integrated with Western intelligence and almost all its sources are from there, but that’s the nature of intelligence reporting; your source is either your intelligence agents or theirs, nobody is ‘neutral’ in that world. The agencies use it kind of like the associated press, it’s a source for the stories printed by various other mainstream outlets. But again, I don’t think anyone in that space would dispute that it’s essentially an outlet for what the CIA / MI6 etc are willing to disclose.
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