Sixty-seventh edition of the N&O column / Spooks newsletter

(Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 22:09:59 +0100)

Intelligence news

N.Korea / USA

A naturalized American citizen, John Jongwong Yai, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to three felony charges for acting as an agent for North Korea, reports CNN.com. Between 1997 and 2000, Yai obtained classified U.S. information for North Korea and recruited other agents to meet with North Korean officials abroad. In August 2000, Yai’s wife, Susan, returned to the U.S. after meeting with a North Korean official in the Czech Republic and Vienna, Austria. U.S. officials said fax and e-mail communications between Yai and his North Korean contacts were written in code to conceal content.

(Source: American Foreign Policy Council)

Russia

Intelligence is traditionally the most powerful and sensitive sector of Russian government. It took a president as firm in the saddle as Vladimir Putin, 47, to dare tame the tiger.

Just before leaving for Camp David for his September 26-27 visit with President George W. Bush, Putin named Army General Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces, as overlord of all Russian intelligence services – according to an exclusive report from Moscow by DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military and intelligence sources. For the first time since the tsars sat on the Kremlin throne, one man headed Russia’s armed forces and its sprawling intelligence-security empire, making Kvashnin the strongest man in Russia after Putin.

At the age of 57, Russia’s top general stands at the helm of the SVR-Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (the Russian equivalent of the US CIA), the FSB-Federal Security Service (the Russian FBI) and the FAPSI -The Federal Agency for Government, Communication and Information. FAPSI is the Russian version of the US National Security Agency, but unlike the NSA, which collects intelligence only outside the United States, FAPSI handles electronic surveillance and monitoring and the gathering of trade and financial information both at home and overseas. As chief of staff of the military, Kvashnin is also boss of the GRU, or Russian military intelligence.

(Source: DEBKA)