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Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

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Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#361

Post by xarope »

adhamsalama wrote: post #182
DrFalkyn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't any over the top than the original. It mostly just followed The BBC production almost to the letter, except with US spin. Until Season 4?. Whenever the re-election campaign started. Joel Kinnaman, while a great actor (loved him in Altered Carbon) was a massive miscast as a plausible candidate for the GOP. Mostly due to youth. And the last season was a Game of Thrones-level utter disaster.

This is the first time I see a fellow Altered Carbon fan in the wild.

let's make it three then. Read the books, enjoyed the series(s). Want a unicorn backpack to carry around, but don't think I can carry it off (pun intended) the way Joel did.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#362

Post by gmerc »

Christo, Michael and Bellingcat have done more to make Europe safe than most intelligence services on the continent.

In fact many of those have shown to be compromised by the Russians from the right extremism side - Maassen in Germany, The Wirecard dude in Austria, etc.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#363

Post by lolinder »

martinky24 wrote: post #329
withinboredom wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spies often work for free, based on their ideologies. Agents, on the other hand, usually get paid whatever their normal pay is (aka, rank), plus danger pay and per-diem, where applicable.

> Spies often work for free Do you have a reputable source for that?

I think the distinction they're drawing is that "spies" are often just people who hand over information to foreign states because that's where their sympathies lie, whereas "agents" are employees of an intelligence agency.

That said, I don't think I've actually seen this distinction made before, and I'd love to hear citations for all the assertions that OP so confidently makes.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#364

Post by jojobas »

gmerc wrote: post #362

Christo, Michael and Bellingcat have done more to make Europe safe than most intelligence services on the continent. In fact many of those have shown to be compromised by the Russians from the right extremism side - Maassen in Germany, The Wirecard dude in Austria, etc.

It's not much safer now that a bunch of disposable Russians have been exposed.

Russian businessmen moved to the EU and the US by the thousand per year. We won't know who of them are "businessmen" and nobody is even pretending to check.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#365

Post by jojobas »

BWStearns wrote: post #75
surfingdino wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All major intelligence agencies have them. Why GRU would be any different?

GRU is nominally military intelligence and SVR inherited the KGB illegals program. These programs are really hard and have a ton of overhead supporting a relatively small number of actual officers. Having duplicate capabilities for it is a waste. Especially in this case where they're used for active crimes/violence. The GRU has never been shy about just going and murdering people on a tourist visa[0], why bother with…

GRU has always had its own illegals program, at least from the 1930s.

They were not concerned with the same tasks as KGB/SVR, targeting military technology and the militaries themselves rather than political/security espionage , so they did away with much smaller networks and humbler resources.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#366

Post by jojobas »

lobochrome wrote: post #338
cryptonector wrote: post #203

> Travel and border crossing data, recently made available thanks to an avalanche of terabytes leaked from Russian government databases, showed that Elena Šapošnikova is in possession of a secret Russian passport. Critically, her nine-digit passport number is part of a numerical range reserved exclusively for members of Unit 29155, differing from those of her colleagues only by its last two digits. Šapošnikova’s is 6…

While I agree with your general point, thinking about the passport numbers for a bit makes it plausible: - You would have to reserve some numbers that can't be assigned to regular citizens. - If you make those "random" - you need to store them in a database that can be checked against when issuing numbers to regular citizens. - You wouldn't want such a database to exist. - If you remove a whole "block," it's much sim…

The reasons to have a separate range don't seem to be compelling. I'd hazard a guess no other secret service ever did that kind of blunder.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#367

Post by vundercind »

ramses0 wrote: post #358
vundercind wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riverdale is that thing you hate but made the primary characteristic of the show . Especially past season 1. They’ll set up what feels like a season finale in most episodes, then instead of resolving it in the next, quickly toss it aside or even just ignore it. It’s not good, and I would not recommend it at all, but it’s maybe the weirdest show I’ve seen. I remain unsure whether the writers were aware they were writi…

Lost would like to have a word. I rented the 6-season DVD set to watch while recovering from an injury and the ONLY good thing about that show was that the first time through you had to wait a week between episodes. Watching without the cliffhanger/socializing "what's next" discussion, and seeing them discard 87.3% of all plot points with reckless abandon made me hate the show after watching 2-3 seasons.

Riverdale features a character whose (incest-having? Probably.) brother is murdered, who becomes a leader of a bow-wielding vigilante club of women (this is not the only vigilante club in the show, mind you), whose grandmother becomes inhabited by the undying spirit of an ancient witch (also this character is herself a witch), whose family estate was built on a mine full of ghosts and also the mine contains lots of palladium which her Russian spy parents try to use to build a bomb (oh also she kills her dad and burns the mansion down early in the show but it’s fine, they just rebuild it and also there are alternate universe shenanigans), who gains fire-based superpowers and destroys a comet, who keeps her dead taxidermied brother around in a shrine-room (when he’s not alive again for whatever reason)… and that’s like 20% of the insane shit that happens with that character who is not even a main character. There are characters with way weirder sets of events in their biography. Also she’s in high school and a cheerleader, because why not? I think maybe she saves one of her lovers from the afterlife, too.

It’s nuts. If that sounds awesome, I assure you, it’s not, nothing ever matters in that show. Fascination at its commitment to a particular way of being terrible, and a little bit of joy from trying to describe the show to people who haven’t seen it (often they think I’m making stuff up) is what got me through.

I get that Lost is a show with a lot of problems, but this is a show dedicated to having a lot of problems. It’s swinging for the fences of having-problems. It’s astonishing. It’s… an achievement? It’s terrible. It’s the inverse of a miracle that it exists.

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#368

Post by yieldcrv »

wcunning wrote: post #246
immibis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole reason Swiss has a banking reputation is that it didn't do KYC. At all.

Up until the war on terror and the US no longer accepting that excuse. They do extensive KYC now.

for US citizens

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#369

Post by yieldcrv »

cryptonector wrote: post #203

> Travel and border crossing data, recently made available thanks to an avalanche of terabytes leaked from Russian government databases, showed that Elena Šapošnikova is in possession of a secret Russian passport. Critically, her nine-digit passport number is part of a numerical range reserved exclusively for members of Unit 29155, differing from those of her colleagues only by its last two digits. Šapošnikova’s is 6…

regarding passport and visa concerns:

no schengen exit stamp for EU citizens, that particular airline/route doesn't check for destination visa

I don't personally think this is top-tier spy stuff like this article is making it out to be, its spelled out for any 2nd passport collector on all those golden visa or perpetual traveller websites and literature

Re: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

#370

Post by jbm »

martinky24 wrote: post #329
withinboredom wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spies often work for free, based on their ideologies. Agents, on the other hand, usually get paid whatever their normal pay is (aka, rank), plus danger pay and per-diem, where applicable.

> Spies often work for free Do you have a reputable source for that?

Surprisingly, I read a book that had information about the pay for spies, albeit in the Mossad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Way_of_Deception

Interesting book about how the Israelis infiltrated Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and the rivalries between the Mossad and other internal organizations in the 80s.

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