V. Vetrov lived in France for five years, beginning in 1965 when posted there as a Line X officer working for the KGB's 'Directorate T', which specialized in obtaining information about advanced science and technology from western countries. While there he befriended Jacques Prévost, an engineer working with Thomson-CSF. At the end of 1980, he contacted Prévost, by then working in Russia, who operated as a liaison to the French DST and offered his services to the West.[4]etrolived in France for five years, beginning in 1965 when posted there as a Line X officer working for the KGB's 'Directorate T', which specialized in obtaining information about advanced science and technology from western countries. While there he befriended Jacques Prévost, an engineer working with Thomson-CSF. At the end of 1980, he contacted Prévost, by then working in Russia, who operated as a liaison to the French DST and offered his services to the West.[4]
Between the spring of 1981 and early 1982 Vetrov gave the DST almost 4,000 secret documents, including the complete official list of 250 Line X officers stationed under legal cover in embassies around the world and a breakdown of the Soviet espionage effort to obtain scientific, industrial and technical information from the West. Members of the GRU, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and several other bodies all took part in such efforts. Vetrov also provided summaries on the goals, achievements, and unfilled objectives of the program. He identified nearly 100 leads to sources in 16 countries.
This information received by DST allowed France to expel 47 KGB agents from France on April 5, 1983.[3] Arrests were also made, including Pierre Bourdiol, which was considered a faux pas in the espionage community, as it was considered a violation of protocol to burn?? one's own recruit.[3]
In February 1982, after heavy drinking caused by a cooling-off period imposed by the French, who were fearful of his discovery through too much contact, Vetrov stabbed his mistress during an argument in his car (she survived).[3][5] When a man knocked on the car window, Vetrov thought his spying had been discovered, so he stabbed and killed the man. He happened to be an auxiliary policeman, likely looking for a bribe from what he thought were two people having sex in a highway median.[3] Vetrov was arrested, tried and sentenced to 12 years in jail in the fall of 1982.
While in jail Vetrov carelessly revealed in letters that he had been involved in "something big" before going to jail. Subsequent to that, portions of the list of Line X agents (in Vetrov's handwriting) were given to partner nations (resulting in further expulsions), one of whom had a mole which passed that portion back to the KGB, which was the "smoking gun" required to confirm their suspicions.[3] The KGB eventually discovered that he was a double agent. As part of his confession, Vetrov wrote a blistering denunciation of the Soviet system, "The Confession of a Traitor". News of his subsequent execution reached France in March 1985.
The information which Vetrov provided enabled the western countries to expel nearly 150 Soviet technology spies around the world, including the 47 mentioned above, most of whom were from Line X. This caused the collapse of the Soviet's information program at a time when it was particularly crucial. The U.S. created a massive operation to provide the Soviets with faulty data and sabotaged parts for certain technologies, as a consequence of the Farewell Dossier. Vetrov was also responsible for exposing the spy Dieter Gerhardt, a senior officer in the South African Navy who had been spying for the Soviets for 20 years.[6] Vetrov also provided information hinting at a Polish coup d'état (eventually found to be that by Wojciech Jaruzelski,[3] and alleging a link between the Soviet Union and the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vetrov
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12-19-1992 In the first sign of disputes between Yeltsin, who favors radical economic reform, and his new prime minister, the more conservative Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, the Russian president said that “fighting” had begun over Cabinet posts and Chernomyrdin was trying to remove too many young reformist ministers. “So the boss must return and restore order there,” he said.
A presidential spokesman assured reporters that “nothing extraordinary has happened” but said the president had decided to forgo a planned visit to Shenzhen, the special economic zone in southern China, because he was needed at home and had already fulfilled all the goals of his visit to China.
On Friday Russia and China signed 24 agreements ranging from pledges of mutual troop reductions to joint nuclear energy projects and expanded economic ties meant to generate billions of dollars in trade.
“For the former Soviet Union, China was a potential enemy,” Yeltsin said. “But today for Russia it is no longer a potential enemy.” In Kremlin halls these days it’s all about China—and whether or not Moscow can convince Beijing to form an alliance against the West. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-12-19-mn-2112-story.html
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12-30-1998 MOSCOW — Vladimir Galkin, a white-haired, chain-smoking former KGB spy, stepped off an airplane at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Oct. 29, 1996--and right into a nasty little diplomatic crisis…Galkin was finally released after Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin personally complained to Vice President Al Gore. He is now safely back in Moscow, running a small business that sells eavesdropping and security equipment. Now in his first interview with an American newspaper since his return Galkin describes exactly how and why the FBI came after him--and reveals what the Bureau offered him in return.
Like many intelligence officers of his generation, Galkin was swept out of the KGB after it was dismantled in the wake of the failed 1991 coup by Communist hard-liners. But before his retirement in 1992 Galkin had served as a senior officer in the First Directorate’s “Line X,” tasked with stealing scientific and technical secrets from the West. Galkin’s job was to handle spies inside Western laboratories and research facilities who could give Moscow the latest technology that the United States and its allies had to offer.
It was high-class spying, dealing only with well-educated traitors, and Galkin, with a background in nuclear physics, was good at it. During his 17-year career he rose to KGB colonel and ultimately became the senior manager of one of Line X’s biggest espionage operations: its penetration of France’s nuclear weapon program.
…Otchenko and another Line X officer, Vladimir Konopolev, who defected to the United States in 1991, also fingered Galkin for his involvement in the KGB’s effort to penetrate the American “Star Wars” anti-missile program.
In 1990 and 1991 Galkin had tried to recruit spies inside Data General Corp., a defense contractor in Massachusetts involved in the program. Galkin had met four times in Cyprus with Subrahmanyam Kota, a naturalized U.S. citizen from India and a software engineer who formerly worked for Data General. Tipped off by the defectors to the Data General spy ring, the FBI secretly launched a sting operation, with FBI agents posing as Russian intelligence officers in an effort to persuade Galkin’s old contacts to hand over U.S. secrets.
It took years, but the Justice Department finally was able to arrest Kota and Aluru Prasad, an Indian national, on espionage-related charges. But without Galkin the prosecution stumbled in its efforts to prove a conspiracy.
Galkin made it easy for the FBI; he honestly identified himself as a former intelligence officer on his visa application in keeping with an unwritten agreement between the CIA and Russian intelligence not to go after retired case officers.
Once Galkin was in custody the FBI presented him with an ultimatum: cooperate or face up to 30 years in jail for espionage. If he cooperated, however, he would be released to live in the United States. “They needed proof to charge this other guy, and wanted me to cooperate,” says Galkin. “They offered to let me go and live in the U.S. They said, you know Konopolev [the KGB defector] is living well with a lot of money, and you can too.”
But Galkin refused….After holding Galkin for 17 days the Justice Department gave in, and all charges against him were dropped. When he was finally released his FBI handlers offered him an apology--and an FBI coffee mug as a souvenir. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-dec-30-mn-3514-story.html
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1999. Putin promoted Sergey Ivanov, Secretary of the Security Council, who is an ex-KGB officer and close friend and Nikolay Patrushev, FSB Director, who knew Putin
in the Leningrad KGB.1 Putin also quietly replaced fourteen presidential representatives in the regions with former security officers. https://fas.org/irp/ops/ci/docs/ci4/ch2.pdf
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These security agreements reflect a common Chinese and Russian desire to manage instability in the volatile neighboring region of Central Asia.7 At their December 1999 encounter, Jiang told Yeltsin, “China is ready to cooperate with Russia and make use of the meeting mechanism between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and the links with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, in order to promote stability in Central Asia.”8 Both governments fear ethnic separatism in their border territories, emanating in part from Islamic fundamentalist movements in Central Asia. Russian authorities dread the pros- pect of continued instability in the northern Caucasus, especially Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan. China’s leaders worry about separatist agitation in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where deadly uprisings have occurred since the 1980s. Of the ten million non-Han Chinese in Xinjiang, eight million are Turkic and have ethnic and religious links to neighboring Turkic popula- tions in Central Asia.9 From Beijing’s perspective, the security agreements also facilitated the favorable revision of its borders with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.10 …
The institutional manifestation of these shared Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia initially was the so-called “Shanghai Five,” a loose grouping of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. On 26 April 1996, the five governments signed in Shanghai a treaty on military confidence-building measures that imposed restrictions on military deployments and activity within a hundred-kilometer (sixty-two-mile) demilitarization zone along their mutual frontiers. On 15 June 2001, these governments, along with Uzbekistan—a
country that had not participated in the original Shanghai Five, which initially focused on border security, because it does not adjoin China—formally established the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).11 (Both India and especially Pakistan also have expressed interest in joining.)12 -p. 41 ofhttps://www.hudson.org/content/researchattachments/attachment/411/china_russia_weitz.pdf
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Russia’s obsession with a potential alliance with China was already obvious at the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual gathering of Russia’s biggest foreign policy minds, in 2017.
At their next meeting late last year the idea seemed to move from the speculative to something Russia wants to realize. And soon. https://www.politico.eu/blogs/the-coming-wars/2019/02/russia-china-alliance-rule-the-world/
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In late July the government said most detainees had been released from the indoctrination camps built to eliminate what it described as the threat of Islamic radicalism and antigovernment sentiment among the overwhelmingly Muslim population of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region in China’s northwest.
But reporters from The New York Times found, over seven days of traveling through the region, that the vast network of detention camps erected by the government of China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, continues to operate and even expand.
These camps, large and small, remain swaddled in heavy security and secrecy, despite the Chinese government’s new pledge of transparency. There are five major ones around Hotan, a city in southern Xinjiang… .Recent satellite images showed that a new detention facility has risen in the desert across the road from his former camp, surrounded by high walls and telltale watchtowers.
Efforts by Times reporters to approach the camps, factories and other religious sites were repeatedly blocked by plainclothes security officials — often giving outlandish explanations. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/world/asia/china-xinjiang-muslim-detention.html?module=inline
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The five men in the photo are among up to 1.5 million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas and held in political “re-education camps” across the XUAR since April 2017.
The five men are medical equipment entrepreneur Mamtimin, restaurant and bakery proprietor Aziz Haji Shangtang, religious teacher and jade merchant Eli Ahun Qarim, woodworker Abdulla Haret, and driver Abduleziz Haji.
Mamtimin studied business management at the Shanghai University of Medicine and Health Sciences and graduated in 2012. He attended a Chinese high school in China and was good at computers and web design.
A former classmate of Mamatimin named Nurmement, who now lives in Turkey, said he last saw his classmate in Hotan in 2012. At the time, Mamtimin was establishing his own company to sell medical equipment. “Mamtimin was two years ahead of me in the university,” he said.
Nurmement told RFA he is not sure why Mamtimin was sent to the camp but described him as “an independent thinker and actor.”
According to a man from Lop county who is now living in exile, Aziz Haji is an entrepreneur whose house was located behind the big mosque in the Lop county bazaar. He used to run a restaurant on the banks of Yoronqash River. “He used to run a restaurant, so he was given the nick name, Shangtang. Later he opened a bakery shop. Business was very good, so he decided to expand it by building a bakery, which was completed when I was there,” said the man, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals against his family. “I think the reason he was arrested is that he performed a Haj pilgrimage (to Mecca in Saudi Arabia) in 2002, and they have arrested everyone who travelled abroad,” said the man.
An acquaintance of Eli Ahun Qarim described the 50-something native of Lop county’s Igerchi village as a religious student with “a profound understanding of religion” who had earlier been detained for one year for teaching religion.bb“We did jade business together around 2007-8. Prior to that, he was learning religion in Hotan,” said the acquaintance told RFA. “He used to preach among us, just several of us. All of us were impressed with his religious understanding. He had a relatively good life. He was married and with a child. I think he was detained because of his religious knowledge,” the man added.
Woodworker Abdulla Haret is around 45 years old and the father of three sons who had never left Hotan, according to his former neighbor. “He fixes doors and windows. He’s a very humble and credible person who is eager to do charitable works,” the neighbor said, adding that Haret was a caretaker at the local Shipang mosque. “The reason for his detention is probably because of his work at the mosque. He’s a man of faith and good character. He has never had any arguments or problems with other people,” the neighbor told RFA.
Abdulaziz was a 50-something driver at the Lop Labor Insurance Bureau before his detention. He had earlier been a driver for driver at the Lop County Radio-TV station, an official from the bureau said. Married with children, Abdulaziz was expelled from work and now attending “education."
RFA made multiple phone calls to police to inquire about the men and their reasons for being detain in the camps, but most officers refused to discuss the cases. “I am unable to tell you anything, we were told not to accept interviews from outside. You can make your enquiries to the Public Security Bureau,” said one police officer. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/camp-photo-04262019171258.html
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