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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   25095 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.

What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.

Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.

It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.

A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.

I don't have much to add, other than some fun excerpts from the first article for those who won't read the whole thing

Three years later, a British former undercover cop, who now works as a private investigator and goes by Jon, was hired to work for a client who had set up temporary residency at the Dorchester hotel, in London. The client was well built, with close-cropped hair and an even stubble. He was of Libyan background, but had grown up in France, spoke flawless English, and tipped the hotel staff with high-denomination notes. “He wanted countersurveillance on himself when he was in the U.K., to make sure that no one was following him,” Jon told me.

Jon doesn’t like the term “private investigator,” because he thinks it diminishes the scope of what he does. On an average day, he collects the travel histories and police files of five to ten targets, through contacts in the public sector. They don’t know his full name—they just know not to ask questions, and that they will be paid in cash. His clients include businesses, government agencies, and billionaires, and his duties range from spying on philandering spouses to helping international criminal gangs insure that a stolen passport can be used to get a murderer across a border. “There’s a lot that is very questionable that I can do, that I have done,” he said. “In the police, you have to have morals—or you’re meant to. That’s the whole point of being a police officer. And then you come out into the private sector and—let’s be honest—it really doesn’t matter.” For almost four hours, he spoke candidly, on the condition that I neither publish his full name nor describe him physically.

...

In the following months, the attacks on short sellers grew increasingly personal, and even violent. Fahmi Quadir was punched in the head by a masked man with brass knuckles while walking her poodle on the Upper West Side; she was knocked unconscious, and the assailant, who stole nothing, was never found.

It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months, all his leveraged bets were liquidated, with losses into the tens of millions of pounds. “My name was tarnished. Banks were now shutting me off, overnight,” Gold recalled. “My wife left me.”

If I read all that on some random substack, I wouldn't think twice about disbelieving and ignoring it.

Speaking of disbelieving, the authors of the second article are the same as the authors of the havana syndrome piece from last week, one I was as skeptical of as some others here. I'm genuinely not sure if / how much I should discount the content of the second article as a result - the Havana article does lay out its evidence in a way that makes the faulty inferences clear, while this new article directly states the main points, idk.

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.

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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