Espionage, ‘Influencers,’ and Mothers of the Resistance
My latest report in Byline Supplement investigates the rash of Russian spy arrests in Europe and how US agencies are leaving citizens open to pro-Kremlin influence. Plus, a tribute to brave mothers
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For eight years, I have worked side by side with some of the bravest women in the world. Many are mothers who understand that ignoring the global fascist creep will not make it disappear — it’s people who do that.
I’ve been a frontline fighter since September 17, 2016, when I pressed send on my first anti-Trump blog, warning people of his corruption, which I had investigated for a decade.
To be honest, it does not get easier. I am used to the grind of it, but I’m not here to sell hopium. If you’re looking for rainbows and unicorns or ostriches with head in sand, it ain’t me babe. We have some grim months ahead of us.
It’s important to anticipate more staged horror events by Putin’s regime in the months leading up to November. Each staged crisis will come with preloaded and well-funded disinformation campaigns. Recognize them as attempts to turn the US away from democracy and toward fascism.
The stakes are the post-World War Two liberal world order, and an earth that badly needs us to give a shit about global warming with more than hand-wringing articles in July.
I believe in action and do my best to take it daily. I am so very inspired by the courage of people in Georgia, and will have live reporting from Tbilisi this week.
And if you missed it, we had some amazing reporting from Ukraine last week. A reminder to join us to meet Kyiv-based reporter Paul Niland on Tuesday:
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I have had to explain to many people in my life, I am going to war and will be focused on my investigative reporting.
My key focus will be to pump out as much useful information between now and November in the hopes I can cut through the onslaught of tankie bullshit. My words won’t reach the 35% we’ve already lost, but I hope to stop the bleeding of those being psyopped away from their own democracy. At the very least, I will do my best to hold the line. Any vote against Biden in November is a vote for Putin, and I’m not sure people quite understand that.
Thank you to everyone fighting the good fight — moms, dads, pet parents, humanists — collectively, we are making a difference.
Spies vs Lobbyists
At 3:45 am, up reading Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands and wishing Stalin could come back from the dead so we could kill him twice, my latest report in Byline Supplement was published. No better present on Mother’s Day — aside from the love of my children and love of my mother — than to make the front page of Byline.
Here is an excerpt:
As Europe Gets Tough with Russian Spies, Pro-Kremlin 'Influencers' Are Operating in Plain Sight in the US
Heidi Siegmund Cuda investigates how a system of 'legalized bribery' is allowing a network of pro-Kremlin lobbyists to operate unchecked by the US authorities
When is it espionage, that is the question?
Europe seems to be answering.
In April, two alleged Russian spies were arrested in Germany, accused of scouting US military facilities for sabotage, according to German authorities. The Russian-German nationals are accused of working to undermine the military support provided to Ukraine by Germany.
Last week, an officer with ties to the far-right AfD party in Germany went on trial in Dusseldorf, charged with espionage on behalf of Russia.
In the UK, a sixth person was arrested in February charged with being part of a Russian spy ring operating in the UK. The arrests began last year, and all are Bulgarian nationals accused of “conspiring to collect information intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy”.
Prosecutors in the Netherlands outed a Russian spy, Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, who applied for an internship at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to steal intelligence under a fake identity, according to reports. He had previously posed as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, in order to gather intelligence in the lead up to the full-scale invasion of Russia’s war in Ukraine. He is now in Brazil in prison on a drug conviction.
Both the Polish internal security agency (ABW) and that of the Czech Republic carried out joint searches into alleged Russian espionage in recent weeks.
"Actions aimed at organising pro-Russian initiatives and media campaigns in EU countries have been documented," ABW said in a statement.
"We have uncovered a pro-Russian network that was developing an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe," Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala wrote on X/Twitter.
Among those sanctioned are pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuck and a website determined to be a pro-Russian influence operation.
Last year, Poland charged 16 foreigners with espionage after shutting down a Russian spy ring accused of sabotage and propaganda operations.
Sweden and Norway have also arrested Russians accused of spying since 2022, and intelligence agents in Greece reported the owner of a knitting shop in Athens is an alleged Russian spy. In addition, Czech Intelligence just outed a husband and wife in Greece as GRU spies, who aided in bombings and poisonings across Europe for Unit 29155, Russia’s assasination and sabotage squad. And a Latvian member of the European Parliament spent decades secretly working for Russia, according to a report by The Insider, based on leaked emails.
Both Ukraine and Estonia have ejected leaders of pro-Russian churches from their countries in recent weeks.
But in America, espionage activities appear to occur in plain sight.
“The United States historically has been really bad at dealing with actual treason,” geopolitical analyst Michael Mackay told me in a recent interview.
To his point, although Kremlin-friendly Donald Trump has been indicted on 31 charges under the Espionage Act, he remains the presumptive GOP candidate for president. Despite being on trial in New York, he is auditioning VPs at his Florida beach hotel as if rebooting The Apprentice.
Disgraced former national security advisor to Trump, Michael Flynn — convicted of lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians — is currently on a national tour to promote his auto-hagiography. Recall, the retired Lieutenant General Flynn was paid $45,000 by Russian state propaganda outlet RT to participate in a Putin gala in December 2015, and was paid by Turkey while working on the Trump campaign. Flynn was paid $500,000 to represent Turkey’s interests while advising Trump, filing papers that he worked as a foreign agent retroactively.
“I cannot recall any time in our nation's history when the President selected as his National Security Advisor someone who violated the Constitution by accepting tens of thousands of dollars from an agent of a global adversary that attacked our democracy," wrote Rep. Elijah Cummings in March 2017. “I also cannot recall a time when the President and his top advisers seemed so disinterested in the truth about that individual's work on behalf of foreign nations — whether due to willful ignorance or knowing indifference."
The line between lobbyist and espionage seems kind of blurry and that’s likely because so much money passes through so many hands in what amounts to “legalized bribery”...
Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, an ex-con who was the first Trump insider to be prosecuted in the Special Counsel investigation into Trump-Russia, has been tapped to work on Trump’s 2024 campaign.
The amount of money Manafort earned working as a lobbyist for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine, tens of millions of dollars, surely makes him a foreign asset, particularly when investigators in the West noted his former boss Viktor Yanukovych and his party’s ties to organized crime. Election fraud, a poisoned leader, an opposition leader locked up — all part of the legacy of Manafort’s time in pre-Euromaidan Ukraine.
Recall, it was revealed in the Special Counsel report that Manafort wanted to use the Trump campaign to get “whole” with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who he owed millions of dollars to. While working for free for Trump, it was also revealed he offered to share internal polling data with Russian national Konstantin Kilimnik, who is wanted by the FBI.
And speaking of the FBI, an FBI officer also worked for Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of Vladimir Putin.
Charles McGonigal led the counterintelligence division of the FBI’s New York field office from 2016 through 2018, during the era of headlines such as this from the New York Times just days before the 2016 presidential election:
Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia
He’s now been sentenced to four years in prison for working for a Russian oligarch under US sanctions — not exactly espionage.
But doesn’t the above all sound kind of spy adjacent, spy-ee, at the very least, spy curious?
With Elon Musk, Carlson, Flynn, Jones and congressional GOP members of the House and Senate such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator JD Vance all acting like Kremlin mouthpieces, those who raise questions of treason and espionage get drowned out by the free speech defense.
“The problem is this dynamic tension around the First Amendment, freedom of speech,” author and radio host Thom Hartmann told Byline Supplement. “It’s advocacy versus espionage, and we need more investigative journalism. The First Amendment is worth fighting for, but it makes us vulnerable to paid operations and operatives who exploit it in the absence of a strong and free independent press.”
As Italian geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra told Byline Supplement when asked why the US is having foreign agent woes and treason troubles: “You can catch a spy, but then you have to admit that there may be people internally, domestically, helping them and that’s political suicide.”
To read the full report, please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement and help support a small, global team of investigative reporters. If you are unable to do so at this time, feel free to reach out to me directly at bettedangerous/gmail to request the report.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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