Shots heads will roll1/2/2024 ![]() The “ Fifth Service, or Operational Information Department, was established as a new FSB branch to collect intelligence on the former Soviet states and conduct “active measures” to assure they continued to gravitate around Moscow’s orbit. The KGB’s Foreign Intelligence directorate would become the less muscular SVR. Putin, while FSB director in the 1990s, structured it as such, providing what had been the KGB’s former counterintelligence directorate with a disproportionately larger share of its parent organization’s power and influence. While we toasted collaboration to fight the evils of terrorism, he depicted the local officials as “members of his team” and the territory as an extension of “greater Russia.”Īlthough the CIA’s natural official counterpart is Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, it was the Kremlin’s internal security agency, the FSB, that ran the show across the former Soviet states. The FSB chief wanted to let me know whose turf this was and how the game was played in his house. Our contact was an education for me, a Russian-speaking CIA operations officer who had worked the target beyond Russia’s borders. FSB protocol required that he bring another officer Moscow prohibited its officers from meeting alone with the CIA. He looked the part of a film noir Cold War villain, comically uncomfortable in the posh local restaurant. Putin’s outlook was made clear to me during my first meeting as the CIA’s chief of station in a former Soviet state with the local FSB chief, the “Rezident,” a general known for crushing the anti-Russian rebellion in Chechnya. His reorganization of the FSB from the KGB’s ashes should have told us precisely the direction he planned to take. Putin has relied on the FSB as his principal source of power and protection, not merely at home, but also across the former Soviet states over which he is determined to restore Russia’s dominion. Putin chose the FSB, a machine organized and conditioned to execute his autocratic vision and tell him what he wants to hear – whether or not it conforms with reality. He casts himself as the people’s champion. Putin’s rhetoric is victimization, villains and heroes. If I were one of the oligarchs or “ siloviki,” those from Russia’s intelligence services who profiteered on Putin’s kleptocracy, I’d be more than just a little worried. ![]() His call to rid Russia of “scum and traitors” as “a necessary self-purification of society” might be Putin’s theatrical unveiling of not merely a further crackdown against the Russian people, but also his version of a “cultural revolution” to bring further to heel those around him on whom he has counted to take and maintain power. Perhaps emulating Joseph Stalin, this could be the onset of a purge and Putin’s desperate ploy to provide his domestic audience with a fall guy for self-inflicted wounds. © Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via Associated Press The heads begin to roll in Russia The implications portend more suffering yet to come, but likewise opportunities to increase pressure on the Russian leader from within. Separately, Oleksiy Danilov, Ukraine’s national security council chief, claimed that several Russian generals have been fired. Colonel-General Sergei Beseda, Chief of the FSB’s “Fifth Service,” reportedly was detained along with his deputy, Anatoly Bolyuk, charged with providing flawed intelligence about Ukraine and their improper use of operational funds. European media report that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the house arrest of two senior Federal Security Service (FSB) officers.
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