Sleeper Agents - a real threat or fiction?

[Bob]

Right out of a Tom Clancy novel - Russian sleeper agents had brought weapons of mass destruction into Western countries and guard them to this day..

Ever wonder why "politics" seems to be so wishy-washy? What if enemies have a hidden card up their sleeves, having planted nasty killing weapons able to decimate cities at the bidding of their keepers?

What if biologicals are waiting to be deployed, or chemicals - the slightest amount can kill hundreds of thousands (see the thread on W-18 in the Forum), or even nuclear devices.. ?

Here is an article from 2005 that could raise a question or three:

Monday, October 17, 2005
It’s like in a game "Russian roulette": nobody knows where’s the bullet and when the gun will fire a shot. During the Cold War, the Soviet intelligence hid some WMDs in the West: biological, chemical and nuclear. There’s a lot of evidence that the weapons remain in place, guarded and maintained by Russian spies. Will terrorists use them?

MI5 have identified 32 spies of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, SVR, operating under full diplomatic cover from their London embassy in Kensington.

The spies have links to former deep-cover KGB agents who, during the Cold War, hid scores of genetically-engineered biological warfare weapons in Britain’s countryside. They were to be used in a pre-emptive strike against London and other major cities.

after a post-Cold War purge of the KGB — described by the CIa’s former director George Tenet as "pure window dressing" — the sacked KGB agents offered their detailed knowledge of Britain to the highest bidder.

an internal MI5 document for its director, Eliza Manningham Buller, states: "There is a strong probability that some of the (KGB) agents have been recruited by al Qaeda".

MI5 have identified the license-plates of all cars used by the Russian spies. Several weeks ago, a car bearing the telltale number plate for all Russian diplomatic vehicles — 248D (and three more digits) was spotted in the vicinity of RaF Lyenam in Wiltshire. The car was being driven by a middle-aged man on a road leading to Marlborough.

an MI5 source confirmed that the Security Service believes part of the mission of the Russian spies includes ensuring that the hiding places for the germ vials remain undetected.

Until recently the knowledge of the lethal germs remained so secret that not even Eliza Manningham Buller and her specialists on Russian intelligence had any inkling of their existence.

Kouzminov’s revelations Then a former KGB spymaster, alexander Kouzminov, revealed his agents had planted the vials in the Home Counties.

And he has claimed that some of the SVR spies today operating in Britain are involved in ensuring the deadly germs remain hidden.

Kouzminov was head of the KGB’s ultra-secret unit, Department 12 of Directorate S.

"Our work was biological espionage, planning and preparation of acts of biological terrorism, sabotage and biological war", he revealed.

From his home in New Zealand — close to the home of former MI5 officer Peter Wright — Kouzminov said: "Huge efforts and money was spent in our work. It would be foolish to believe our people were stood down just because Russia took part in biological weapons talks in Geneva".

In an introduction to his own book, Biological Espionage, he hopes it "will attract the attention of the intelligence services".

His claims have stunned MI5. Even top Cold War Russian defectors like Oleg Gordievsky and Vasiliy Mitrokhin had no hint of Department 12’s activities. Or that it survives to this day.

The biological germs were prepared by Russian scientists of the Soviet Union’s Bioprepart programme. Their brief had been "to produce bacteria against which Britain would have no defence".

The germs were created after the Soviet Union signed the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention. They were engineered in secret laboratories in the Ural Mountains.

From there the vials were smuggled into Britain in diplomatic bags.

Scientists at Porton Down, Britain’s biological defence establishment, fear the vials could contain plague germs and even smallpox.

"Bioprepart was actively engaged in producing weapons of that kind", confirmed Dr Ken alibek, the programme’s former director until he defected to the United States.

Kouzminov insists that in making his bombshell revelations about the way his department left a deadly collection of germs buried in the English countryside, "I do not intend to push a political line for or against any state and its policies".

But ten years after he left Department 12 to live with his wife in New Zealand, he still refuses to say if he knows where the deadly germs are hidden.

Red Mercury - a fiction or not?

Hollywood likes to make movies.

Sometimes possibly those movies are a diversion - something to take the public down a rascal rabbit hole into seemingly intense fiction, so that nobody really ever thinks that possibly the plot is based on something potentially "real" (hide it in plain sight concept..)

Red 2 gets into that it seems, possibly..

Red 2 is 2013 American action comedy film and sequel to the 2010 film Red. It was based on the limited comic book series of the same name, created by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, and published by the DC Comics imprint Homage. The film stars Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lee Byung-hun, Anthony Hopkins, and Helen Mirren, with Dean Parisot directing a screenplay by Jon and Erich Hoeber. Red 2 was released on July 19, 2013.

The Plot (at the point it is revealed "Red Mercury" is the key to the device:

Frank and Victoria meet Bailey, who is hyperactive and cannot rationally respond to their questions thanks to mind-fogging drugs the asylum had been giving him, so they take him to one of Marvin's safehouses. After the drugs begin to wear off, Bailey remembers the bomb is still in Moscow.

They travel to Moscow, and Bailey concludes he hid the bomb in the Kremlin. They break into the Kremlin, and Bailey locates the suitcase-sized bomb, which is powered by red mercury, which has no radioactive signature and causes no fallout.

As they are about to leave, Katja stops them. Frank persuades her to switch to their side. After they escape and are celebrating, Victoria, who has escaped MI6 imprisonment for failing to kill him, calls Frank from London and tells him that Bailey was locked up because he had wanted to detonate the bomb, not sell it.

Bailey quickly holds Frank at gunpoint and confirms Victoria's message, revealing that he made a deal with Horton and the Americans to give them the red mercury. He shoots Katja, making it look as if Frank killed her, and leaves with the bomb case.

Horton reneges on his deal with Bailey, intending to interrogate him until all his secrets have been tortured out of him, but Bailey escapes during air transit using a nerve gas he created, administering the antidote to both himself and Horton. Bailey then moves to the Iranian embassy in London. Before Frank can follow him, Han attacks. Reaching a standoff, Frank urges Han to join sides with him and stop the bomb. Han finally relents, and the five enact a plan to recapture Bailey and the bomb.

Frank, Marvin, Victoria, and Han, taking the active bomb case with them, give chase, but Marvin, in his attempts to disarm the bomb by cutting wires, causes the timer to speed up and count down even faster. Frank, holding the bomb case, boards the plane and confronts Bailey who releases Sarah and forcefully insists he take the bomb off the plane with her.

They rejoin Marvin, Victoria, and Han and wait for death as Han's plane takes off.

As it disappears high in the sky it explodes in an immense fireball.

Frank reveals that he had covertly placed the bomb from the case into a compartment near the plane's exit and confronted Bailey with only a closed empty case. Han angrily tells Frank that Frank owes him "$30 million for the plane and $20 million for not killing you (Frank)".

What is the history behind the "Red Mercury" allegation?

Sam Cohen, the inventor of the neutron bomb, passed to "Wprost" some vital information, which confirmed his observations and experience of many years of the monitoring of the development of the Soviet, then Russian nuclear weaponry.

Historically, the Russians had been world leaders in high-pressure technology which is very relevant to the production of "red mercury" (RM 20/20, which is a mercury antimony oxide, it’s chemical formula: Sb207Hg2), a base material for the production of cheap, miniature neutron weapons.

Red mercury is a kind of gel-like chemical compound of high density.

It can be used to detonate a very small quantity of tritium (a super-heavy hydrogen), which would explode and produce a massive pulse of deadly neutrons.

Already in February of 1992, the President of Russia, Boris Yeltzin, signed a Secret Directive No 75-RPS, allowing a state-owned enterprise, Promekologia, to fabricate and sell (also abroad) up to 10 metric tonns of RM 20/20. at the beginning of the 1990’s, on the black market, the price of one kilogram of RM 20/20 exceeded $ 400,000.

The difficulties in the obtaining of this mysterious substance caused many criminal impostures, a "trade mark" of the Russian mafia. Following 9/11, the demand for RM 20/20 and it’s price went up rapidly.

On the 24th of September, 2004, British Police arrested four persons, whom they suspected of an attempt to purchase a "radioactive material of a very high explosive power, originally made in Russia, and known as a red mercury". The four suspects were supposed to offer $ 541,000 per one kilogram [of RM 20/20], to a Saudi national (described as a sympathizer of the Islamist fundamentalists). Other persons, suspected of the trading in red mercury, had been also arrested in Italy.

In one of his interviews, the inventor of the neutron bomb described the technical properties of this unusual explosive material: "Most frightening is the relative ease by which neutron bombs can be created with a substance called red mercury.

Red mercury is a compound containing mercury that has undergone massive irradiation. When exploded, it creates tremendous heat and pressure — the same type needed to trigger a fusion device such as a mini-neutron bomb."

Cohen said that Americans had not been successful to develop a low-yield pure fusion weapon, using RM 20/20, in spite of many efforts. Meanwhile, in the former USSR, and later on in Russia, the research to produce a workable weapon had been (and still was) continued.

In 2004, Cohen confirmed to us the chemical composition and other technical parameters of RM (Red Mercury) 20/20, upon receiving a Technical Certificate, coming from one of the secret Russian laboratories. already in 1993, a Russian general, Y. Negin, claimed in public that his country had developed a low-yield nuclear weapon "in which a doubling of yield is achieved with a hundred-fold reduction of weight compared to existing weapons." Describing the weapon, an other Russian specialist, Evgeny Kerolev, added that red mercury is so potent that a "bomb the size of a grenade could blow a ship out of the sea."

Cohen remarked that the micro-neutron weapon has a dreadful potential for terrorism: it is cheap (without the use of expensive uranium or plutonium), it is almost undetectable (due to a very low level of radiation) and it is miniature (the size of a hand-granade, or a baseball).

When detonated, neutron bombs generally produce a minimal blast and thermal effect, but they produce a substantial pulse of neutron radiation which penetrates hardened shelters and causes a destructive ionizing effect when it interacts with living tissue. The neutron radiation kills all living organisms in the radius of 1/3 of a mile, destroying no buildings but killing many thousands of people.

More and more evidence supports a suspicion that Putin’s Russia focuses only on Chechen terrorists, and that the real "brain" of the world terrorist campaign, being wedged against the Free World, is the Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU.

Was Red 2, the movie just a fiction? Is the Red-Mercury-Tritium device just a fabrication? Maybe, maybe not..

[Bob]

Just to keep in perspective the TOPIC of the thread, Russian sleeper agents had brought weapons of mass destruction into Western countries and guard them to this day.. arguing for or against "red mercury-Antimony-Tritium" weapons are an aside.. The point of mentioning it was that possibly there are small devices classed as WMD's (Weapons of mass destruction), that could exist, and be maintained and / or monitored by sleeper agents, just waiting for a "GO!" message to be deployed...

As to the viability of the Mercury-Antimony-Tritium device (an isomer of Mercury-Antimony), I would not discount the power of nuclear isomers one bit..

[Bob]

In 2017 an article appeared in Business Insider:

It starts this way - (we wonder why Trump says over and over, we need to vet our "aliens" illegal or those who have immigrated)

Russia probably has more undercover 'sleeper' agents who can assassinate Western targets today than during the Cold War

• Russia's programme for placing sleeper agents in foreign countries — spies who live ordinary, mundane lives — is probably bigger now than it was in the Cold War.
• The so-called "illegals" are trained and controlled by two separate and sometimes competing Russian agencies, the mysterious "Directorate S" within the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR); and the "Main Intelligence Directorate" (GRU).
• The end of the Cold War actually made it easier for Russia to place illegals inside the UK and US.
• Russia wants its illegals to remain quiet and anonymous, developing low-level contacts on the edges of power. They don't act like James Bond.

When conflict broke out on the Ukraine-Russia border, Madeira says, one of the first things that happened was senior Ukrainian security experts began to die. In June 2017, Colonel Maksym Shapoval, a Ukrainian military intelligence officer, was blown up in his car.

The most recent attempted killing, of a far-right politician, was in October 2017.

Fourteen people are suspect to have been killed in Britain by Russian spies since 2003, according to BuzzFeed.

"They identify experts for assassination … confusion is half the battle." Their targets were "senior military and counter-intelligence officers," Madeira says. "Those people were very carefully targeted for assassination."

Assassinations work because "at the very least it's disruptive and demoralising … at best it's years of knowledge and contacts - that's all gone," Madeira says.

"The media underestimated considerably just how much of a continuous element this represents from a Russian point of view."

In written evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee, Madeira — a Russia expert — described the resources Russia commands in its efforts to subdue British, European and American influence.

Most of his evidence focused on the fact that Russia's intelligence services vastly outnumber their counterparts in the UK. But he also included this tidbit about Russia's "Main Intelligence Directorate," the GRU, and its "illegals" operation, which places spies in Britain and the US where they live seemingly ordinary lives, until called upon by Moscow:

"GRU has long deployed 'illegals'. These hand-picked, deep-cover intelligence officers live abroad under assumed 'legends': carefully constructed false foreign identities and life stories (over decades in some cases), allowing 'illegals' to blend in."

"... Nowadays, UK CI and CE [counterintelligence and counterespionage] resources are much diminished, while former Warsaw Pact nationals can easily travel across NATO. This is a particular problem if an intelligence officer/asset uses 'natural cover' (i.e. their own identity, sometimes called 'non-official cover' or NOC).

A banker or travel agent may be just that - or they may also be intelligence officers or assets (the latter willing or coerced). Having few(er) or no traceable links to a hostile intelligence service, NOCs are far more difficult to detect, monitor and counter.

This is why they are so valued."

ref: https://www.businessinsider.com/ille...agents-2017-12

[avid]

Bob! Praying to anything my soil-seiving for ground elder root extermination will not proliferate a global cataclysm. Toxic perfume bottles, now sneaky vials buried in innocent folks’ gardens... aaarrgghhh! Probably only in Home Counties, ie not ‘Up North’?
Hopefully, the ‘Sleepers’ have been so sleepy they never wake up

[Bob]

BBC did a short article in 2017, detailing the "sleeper maker" who could train in his organization a well embedded, sleeper who would activate on command:

Uri Drozdov once said it could take up to seven years to train an "illegal", the Soviet spies planted abroad under false or assumed identities, sometimes for decades.

As former chief of the KGB intelligence agency's Directorate S, which managed the illegals programme, Drozdov knew more than most about what it took to prepare someone for the task.

He had to train Soviet agents to talk, think and act, even subconsciously, like the regular American, Brit, German or Frenchman they would become from the moment they touched down on foreign soil.

KGB agents in the US and elsewhere would wander around cemeteries in search of children who had died that would have been a similar age as recruits being trained. It was a useful way to steal a real identity in a pre-internet age.

A detailed "legend", or biography, would be devised, and a birth certificate printed. Churches would be paid off to erase the death record.

It was expensive, painstaking work. Some would-be illegals were trained for years, but ultimately judged unsafe to deploy.

Speaking Russian in one's sleep was grounds for a promising recruit to be dismissed.

'There should be no contact'
Drozdov died on 21 June at 91 years of age. It was the end of the life of a man who spent decades in the upper echelons of the KGB and carved out a legendary reputation from his time heading one of the most secretive and infamous programmes in Soviet intelligence.

Unlike "legal" spies, who were posted abroad under diplomatic or other official cover, illegals were on their own - working normal jobs, living in suburbs and operating without the diplomatic immunity enjoyed by other agents should they be caught.

Have you got what it takes to be a spy?

The KGB spy who lived the American dream:

In a 2010 interview, Drozdov described a pair of illegals - a man and a woman - deployed to the US via West Germany and posing as a couple.

"When I worked in New York, I would sometimes come around their house. I would drive past, look up at their windows," he told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper.

But he didn't go inside - the risks being too great for such face-to-face meetings. There should be "no contact with illegals", he said. "None."

Information gathered by these "deep cover" agents was funneled back to handlers through clandestine means - including dead-drops, by radio, or covert meetings abroad.

Announcing Drozdov's death, the cause of which was not specified, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, described him as "a true Russian officer, a decent man, a wise commander".

But much remains unknown about his life and operations he was part of, the details hidden in Russian security archives.

Bridge of Spies
Drozdov was "a legend" in the KGB First Chief Directorate, and still is considered as such in the SVR, says Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and an expert on Russian security affairs.

His father was in the Bolshevik worker militias known as the Red Guards and he served in the Second World War as an artilleryman.

Graduating from the Military Institute for Languages, a key finishing school for Soviet spies, Drozdov joined the KGB in 1956.

Rudolf Abel, the most famous illegal, was arrested in New York in 1957 and later famously exchanged with the USSR in return for the captured US pilot Gary Powers on a Berlin bridge in 1962.

Yuri Drozdov, then a young KGB agent based in East Germany, helped organise the swap, the subject of Steven Spielberg's 2016 thriller Bridge of Spies.

ref: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40367736

[Bob]

A short video, about 8 minutes, on Yuri Drozdov, head of Department "S", the illegals infiltrating the West..

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHVkIu9pGvw

[avid]

Sorry, I’m not subscribing at the moment... but awaiting more info about this channel.

[Bob]

And from the former KGB chief officer himself, Mr. Putin has a message to those whom he feels so deeply are the key to his efforts in the West.. (in Russian with subtitles in English about 1 min 20 seconds)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=PJ7QvW2y8XA

1996, he was called to Moscow to work in the Kremlin under Russia's first democratically elected president Boris Yeltsin, who in 1998 made little-known Putin head of the KGB's successor, the FSB.

[Bob]

Russia is not the only one using "sleeper agents" - China most certainly prides itself in its ability to infiltrate the West

from: https://freebeacon.com/national-secu...ence-officers/

China has reportedly embedded at least 25,000 or so intelligence operatives into the West.

Besides sabotaging servers, motherboards and possibly chips and CPU's China really likes human assets.

Beijing's spy networks in the United States include up to 25,000 Chinese intelligence officers and more than 15,000 recruited agents who have stepped up offensive spying activities since 2012, according to a Chinese dissident with close ties to Beijing's military and intelligence establishment.

Guo Wengui, a billionaire businessman who broke with the regime several months ago, said in an interview that he has close ties to the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the civilian intelligence service, and the military spy service of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

"I know the Chinese spy system very, very well," Guo said, speaking through an interpreter, in his first American interview. "I have information about very minute details about how it operates."

Guo said he learned about Chinese spy activities from Ma Jian, a former MSS vice minister, and Ji Shengde, former PLA military intelligence chief.

Ma was director of MSS's No. 8 Bureau, in charge of counterintelligence against foreign targets—including diplomats, businessmen, and reporters—until he was swept up in a Beijing power struggle in December 2015. He was expelled from the Communist Party and imprisoned in January.

Guo said Ma was imprisoned because he had uncovered details of corruption by China's highest-ranking anti-corruption official, Wang Qishan.

Ma said in a video made public by the Chinese government several weeks ago that he worked with Guo in assisting Chinese national security.

Regarding, Ji, the military spy chief, Guo said he had close ties to him and turned down requests from Ji to work as a smuggler for 2PLA, as the military spy agency was known.

Are the democrats so Lilly-white and beyond reproach? Hardly. Bill Clinton's presidential re-election campaign received funding from China (apparently the dems trying to say Russian's interfered with Trump's election dwarf's the backing by China for Clinton):

Ji was implicated in the 1990s scandal involving Chinese funding of Bill Clinton's presidential re-election campaign. In China, he was given a suspended death sentence by a military court in 2000 on charges of bribery and illegal fundraising.

Ji lives in China and his wife currently resides in Los Angeles, and Guo said he paid money to Ji for 25 years as part of China's use of businesses to support intelligence activities.

"I know Ma Jian had been working state security system for over 30 years," he said. "And he was responsible for sending out spies as well as for counter espionage, also vis a vis the U.S. So, Ma Jian knows everything about the United States."

Guo is a Chinese real estate investor who fled China in 2015. He currently resides in New York City and since January has become a target of a major Chinese government campaign to silence him.

In May, two senior Chinese security officials traveled to the United States as part of a bid to pressure Guo into keeping silent, and not disclosing secrets about corruption among senior Chinese officials, as well as details of the intelligence activities.

The two officials, Sun Lijun, vice minister of the Public Security Ministry, and an aide, Liu Yanpang, also tried to convince Trump administration officials to forcibly repatriate Guo back to China amid claims of corruption.

Liu was arrested by the FBI for violating visa rules and his cell phone and laptop computer were confiscated before the Chinese official was allowed to leave the United States.

The Chinese officials, during meetings in Washington and New York and by phone, threatened Guo, his family, and business associates and said that if he remained silent, the government would release assets of Guo's that are frozen in China worth an estimated $17 billion.

Over the past several months Guo, who also uses the name Miles Kwok, began posting lengthy videos on Twitter and YouTube disclosing what he knows about Chinese corruption and intelligence activities.

One of the more explosive disclosures during an interview involve Wang, current head of the Chinese government's anti-corruption campaign and a member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee, the collective dictatorship that rules China.

According to Guo, Wang secretly invested in California real estate since the late 1980s and has turned $30 million in purchases of 111 properties into an estimated $2 to $3 billion today.

Guo says he plans to detail Wang’s U.S. investments in a video to be published next week. The residences include homes and apartments in Washington and Bethesda in the east, and in California in Los Angeles, San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, San Carlos, and San Francisco. The video also shows a series of mansions owned by Wang family members in Saratoga, Calif. In total the residences cost $12 million and are worth some $30 million today.

Wang, according to Guo, is the official who took over as the top leader overseeing China's financial sector from Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, who stepped down in 2003.

One neighborhood in California of 14 houses owned by Wang or his relatives has been fitted with special underground silos that are used to store jewelry and documents, Guo said.

"If the FBI could go in there and get those documents, then they can negotiate with the Chinese government," he said.

Guo said he plans to disclose additional details of alleged corruption by four other Chinese leaders, including Meng Jianzhu, a member of the Politburo but not the Standing Committee, and He Guoqiang, a retired official who was in charge of police and the courts.

"In the future I will report on another two current sitting members of the Politburo Standing Committee, as well as two previous members of the Standing Committee," he said.

Regarding a report in the journal Foreign Affairs that the businessman represents a leadership faction in Beijing, Guo denied the report. He said he began speaking out as part of long-planned effort to bring democratic reform to China.

"What I want to do is change the whole system. That's what I want," he said.

Guo said Chinese police killed his brother and in 1989, when China called out troops to put down unarmed pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, he was jailed for 22 months.

"I've prepared all that time until now," he said. "I want to change the Chinese government. Absolutely, the Chinese government is the mafia."

Guo said that Chinese intelligence operations in the United States sharply increased after the 2012 Communist Party Congress that brought current leader Xi Jinping to power.

"Before 2012, cumulatively China had around 10,000 to 20,000 agents working in the United States," he said. "These agents had been sent to work in the United States over a 50 year period of time, and they were working in a defensive mode."

According to the businessman, defensive intelligence was mainly focused on learning about the United States. The operations then shifted in 2012 to "offensive" spying, he said.

"By offensive [operations], I mean to be ready to destroy the U.S. in ways they can," Guo said.

China's budget for intelligence gathering before 2012 was around $600 million annually.

Around 2012, a decision was made by Chinese leaders to dispatch another 5,000 spies to the United States.

"Some of them were sent as students, some as businessmen, and some as immigrants, but all together, 5,000," Guo said.

"In addition to that, they developed between 15,000 to 18,000 other spies, and these are not directly sent but these are developed within the United States."

The recruited agents are not limited to Asians and Chinese-Americans but include all ethnic groups, including Hispanics, Blacks, and Caucasians.

"And now the budget is between $3 billion to $4 billion annually, and this is information up to one month ago," he said.

Guo said American counterintelligence agencies face several problems, mainly a lack of knowledge about Chinese intelligence agencies.

"You don't know which organizations in China are responsible for sending these spies, how they are managed, and to what purpose," he said. "And the U.S. adopts a very legalistic perspective to look at the question of spying. Yet, for China their methods are not what the United States understands."

"These spies, when they come to the United States, they could sleep around, they could put poison in your glass of wine to kill you; completely unscrupulous," he said.

FBI spokesman Matthew Bertron declined to comment. A Chinese Embassy spokesman did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Chinese intelligence officers sent to the United States are controlled by the MSS by keeping all their family members and relatives hostage.

China's intelligence targets included several strategic areas of the United States.

"The first is to obtain military weapons-related technology. This is priority No. 1," Guo said.

Second, Chinese intelligence is engaged in "buying" senior U.S. officials personally, and a third objective is buying family members of American political or business elites " with a view to getting intelligence and to make big business deals in China's favor," he said.

A fourth priority is penetrating the American internet system and critical infrastructure by implanting malicious software.

"And they have successfully penetrated all the major defense weapons suppliers of the U.S. government," Guo said, adding that "the scale of their operations is mind boggling."

Guo said Ma, the MSS vice minister, told him that a major shift by the Chinese was expanding the scope of agent recruitment from Asians to mainstream ethnic groups.

"This is where the biggest danger lies," he said. "It's clear the situation is getting more and more dangerous now. The United States has the best weapons in its arsenal, such as laser weapons, etc.

Yet, the Chinese spy system has penetrated into the bloodstream of American defense establishment with their viruses and everything else."

"The United States is bleeding and is unaware that sooner or later the United States will run out of blood," Guo said.

Also, the United States is overly reliant on technical spying while China has an asymmetrical advantage in using its tens of thousands of human spies.

China also is working to subvert the United States by working together with rogue regimes, such as those in North Korea and Iran.

"So in a fight between rogues and a gentleman, the rogues will always win," he said, "because the gentlemen fight a civilized war. The rogues do not fight a civilized war."

Guo said he first visited the United States in 1983 when he was 13 and made numerous visits since then.

"I love my nation. I love my country, but I hate the Communist Party," he said.

Guo has not defected to the United States and holds several foreign passports. His information could provide a windfall of data for the U.S. government policymakers and intelligence analysts.

For example, on North Korea, Guo said he frequently visited North Korea and has known every member of the ruling Kim Jong Un family.

"All the trade conducted between North Korea and China has been conducted by the relatives of the ruling families," he said, noting that the U.S. insistence in relying on the Chinese government to deal with North Korea is "madness."

In Hong Kong, the MSS dispatched an additional 3,000 intelligence officers to the former British colony after the May 2013 incident involving former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong after stealing some 1.7 million secret agency documents.

The MSS agents were dispatched by Ma Jian after the spy service learned the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong was hosting some 2,600 American agents.

"The office they work for is the Hong Kong Security Department," Guo said, noting that before that time "it was more hit and miss approach" to spying.

"They upped that until now they have 10,000 agents operating in Hong Kong alone."

Guo said Americans need to understand that China is not ruled by a normal government.

"You should look at it as a mafia-like organization," he said.

Second, to understand China, Americans need to study the relatives of the ruling elite in China.

"Once you get to know the interests of these powerful individuals and also the family members, then you get to understand how the regime operates," he said.

Guo hopes the United States will wake up to the threat posed by China's communist system and its plans to subvert the U.S.-led international order.

"If this relationship is not managed well, I think the whole of humanity will confront major problems," he said. "The current approach adopted by the American ruling elite is tantamount to suicide."

Guo warned of the dangers of a world dominated by the current anti-democratic Chinese system.

"If we do not have the United States exercising some kind of control over the world system, the world will turn into a place where men eat men," he said.

Michelle Van Cleave, former national counterintelligence executive during the George W. Bush administration, said China has been preparing for a major escalation of espionage and influence operations against the Untied States.

"Remember their cyber theft of some 22 million personnel files from the Office of Personnel Management?" she said. "The Chinese now have a detailed roster of most if not all American contractors and government employees who have access to classified information, plus a roster of their friends, colleagues, or coworkers who may be useful conduits or potential assets in their own right."

Van Cleave said the OPM data likely will be used by Chinese intelligence to coerce, blackmail, or recruit new sources for an already extensive espionage infrastructure.

"Cyber and human espionage go hand in hand—and the Chinese excel at both," she said. "We urgently need a better understanding of what they are doing and how they are doing it—and a strategy to stop them—because China’s intelligence operations in the U.S. are poised to get much worse."

Former FBI counterspy I.C. Smith said the large number of MSS officers could be a reasonable estimate if the figure includes Chinese who work informally for the service such as students, permanent resident aliens, visitors, and others.

"China is no friend of ours and is never going to be a responsible member of the world community as long as the CCP is in power," Smith said.

"It's a reprehensible, morally and criminally corrupt police state run by a powerful elite whose every waking hour is to figure out how to capitalize on their positions and remain in power," he said.

Make no mistake China is not the friend of the West.

[5th]

But it's all just a game. there is no East and West, Us and Them. Just a global scare mongering to keep us afraid and in need of protection by the Military Industrial Complex. Ooh, Sleeper Agents! We'd better pay more taxes to protect us...

The Cold War has been milking us for 70 years so why should I start worrying about that now?

Focus on higher vibration things.

[Bob]

Did a keyword search on "it is all a game" :
https://dianaiannarone.com/2014/08/2...f-a-sociopath/ UNDERSTANDING to SEE what is, not try to bury it with high-gloss "paint"

Seeing the truth is what awakens us from delusion. To poo-poo or lessen TRUTH is how one is lead down the path of not paying attention.

To Wake Up, we must step out of the delusion we have been told to believe, and acknowledge the real truth that is in front of us, rather than believe what we see in the veil that was calculatedly designed to hide that truth from view. This need to Wake Up is first in our individual worlds and then in the world at large.

I am grateful for the awareness that seems to be spreading, while simultaneously devastated by the evil we must now see, that by careful orchestration was always there, but but beyond our grasp of acceptance. So in a way, we need to be grateful for the constant exposure of evil that is being shown to us everywhere…for it means evil is no longer operating under the cover of darkness; as it has for so long.

Seeing the truth is what awakens us from delusion.

This seemed relevant today. In alignment with this deception on the scale of our individual worlds, below a chapter from:

Me and My Shadow-Move from Fear and Control to Love and Freedom

The Disguise

How do these destructive relationships happen? Sometimes when you meet a person, there is some powerful attraction that you can’t quite explain. Even if you don’t feel an immediate attraction, their persistence often triggers a feeling of being deeply loved. You begin to feel like the most important person in the world, or at least in their world. You begin to believe you will be the person who will finally love them the way they have longed to be loved. The person they have longed for but could never find. Then, they tell you about their broken lives…broken until you came along of course. They often play the victim and express to you how they want to be a better person, they need you. You feel badly for their circumstances and want to rescue them. You give all you have to save them while never looking to see that you are being manipulated…played. You never even consider that for the other person it is more of a chess game then a loving encounter. You believe you are on the threshold of the most unimaginable love. This may be nothing more than a delusion.

While asleep, we see their actions as a reflection of their suffering instead of an effort to manipulate us. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between suffering and manipulation. In our wholeness, Awake, we will more clearly know. It is as if a part of your being that was shut down can now see.

The hardest part for me was to consider that someone could actually be intentionally trying to harm me, that malice was the core of these repeated relationships, not love. Again, I was blind to the concept of evil. Those individuals who claimed to love me were actually trying to harm me by controlling me. We were playing a calculated chess game that I never even realized we were playing. Game after game, I lost. Their prize was simple; control over me.

Once I was awake, I could recognize their acts as evil. However even as I was on the road to awakening, I was slowly accumulating more awareness that perhaps what I was experiencing, was not what I was worthy of. As I changed my view of what I saw, the dynamics of the relationships radically changed. It was not until I was Awake, that I was clearly aware of the game. As I saw things differently, I acted differently. Over time, the marionette strings were cut, one by one. Once they were all cut, I was finally the driving force in my life.

In order to awaken, I began to observe the behaviors and words of others.

When you are asleep, when you disown part of yourself, you are prey. In the wild a predator has to observe and study the pattern of their prey. They study so they know how to best capture their target. We make their job even easier by telling them everything in the depths of our soul. We write their script for them. But remember, the prey can observe as well.

from the article: observe the behaviors and words of others. By their words one will know them.

[Bob]

What about Australia? Are there sleeper agents there?

The art of influence: how China's spies operate in Australia

from: https://www.smh.com.au/public-servic...03-gzxs06.html

December 2017 -

Intelligence activity by foreign nations is probably at an all-time high in Australia. Most of the time it is low-profile; the main effort is hacking public and private electronic systems, and phishing for data.

The collected data is used in various ways: to gain an understanding of national security systems and capabilities; to further the collector's strategic, political and economic interests; and to pressure people of interest.

The most active foreign intelligence actor in Australia is China.

The espionage of China's Ministry of State Security is directed mainly at preserving and enhancing China's national security by collecting commercial, technological and military data, and identifying zero-day cyber-attack vulnerabilities.

"Students" are closely monitored in Australia

The 1.3 million ethnic-Chinese Australian community is also subject to monitoring. This has been the case at least since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, when about 2000 students died (by our intelligence estimate), after which prime minister Bob Hawke allowed 42,000 Chinese students to stay in Australia.

Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin, who defected in Sydney in 2005, said China had more than 1000 agents operating in Australia. Their main activity is collecting unclassified data of interest that is not in the public domain – such as scientific papers, and commercial and government documents.

How infiltration is done by the Chinese spies

Another Chinese ploy is to gain visitor access and to seek briefings and research samples from naive Australian companies by dangling lucrative contracts. The contracts never eventuate because the items end up being reverse-engineered in China.

The internal threat also extends to disaffected or bribable Australian employees and contractors. The better a target organisation's cyber-security, the more likely that pressure will be placed on insiders to provide remote login information and so on. Traditional levers include sex, cash, benefits or exploiting disenchantment.

Like other intelligence organisations, China's also work towards having well-placed sleeper agents in key positions. The most common method China uses to influence our political process is via "agents of influence". Some of these agents are dual citizens of China and Australia. Their aim is to bribe current and past politicians to support China's interests, sometimes to the detriment of Australia's.

The bribes can take many forms: payment of debts, subsidised travel to China, political donations and even paying substantial amounts of money for "soft consultancies" or minimal support for other issues. Leading politicians and power brokers from both our main parties have, in the past, been prepared to accept China's largesse; some more blatantly than others.

[Bob]

Is Canada immune to sleeper agents and spies? Apparently not so much..

material is from an article at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/defec...anada-1.557085

Defectors are saying that there's at least 1000 (Chinese) spies in Canada, deeply embedded..

Immigrants appear to be key.

The defectors have said that the spying network extends to countries with large Chinese immigrant populations, including the U.S. and Canada. Hao said he'd worked in a group in the Chinese Public Security Bureau known as the 610 office, a special unit created in 1999 to monitor and disrupt the activities of the Falun Gong overseas.

The central 610 Office has traditionally been headed by a high-ranking member of the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, and it frequently directs other state and party organs in the anti-Falun Gong campaign.

It is closely associated with the powerful Political and Legislative Affairs Committee of the Communist Party of China. Local 610 Offices are also established at provincial, district, municipal and neighborhood levels.

Former CSIS agent Michel Juneau-Katsuya, finds them credible. During the mid-1990s, Juneau-Katsuya oversaw the CSIS Asian-Pacific desk.

He says if Canadian intelligence agencies weren't preoccupied with Islamist terrorists these days they would realize the greatest threat to Canadian security comes from China.

Particularly in the theft of scientific and commercial data.

"We estimated at CSIS that we were losing $1 billion a month, $12 billion a year, due to industrial espionage," he said.

The number 1000 is apparently grossly underestimated. (that number appears to be talked about when "Chinese 'spies'" allegedly 'reveal' something..)

From: https://raysemko.com/2011/12/02/chin...or-sexpionage/ TACTICS - sex..

A current security conference in Canada had been discussing defending against espionage. Attendees and speakers were from the government and private sector.

McAdam, a former Canadian diplomat, also said that:

“Virtually all” hotels in China are rigged with microphones and video cameras and many brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlours are owned by Triads that co-operate with Chinese intelligence services. The aim is to catch unwary Westerners in “honey pot traps.”

Mr. McAdam said men of influence are often targeted and face trumped up charges of rape or attempted rape and are forced to co-operate or face jail time. “They want to capture people in shameful activities – alleging sex with minors is a common method used,” he said.

The targets of Chinese intelligence?

“Public servants and politicians are the main targets but the Chinese are also after the technology and military sector, so they target engineers, business people and scientists, too. “People say they won’t fall for it, but they do. Executives with a heavy travel schedule turn up in Shanghai or Beijing jet-lagged and find themselves in need of affection. People succumb.”

McAdam said that the intel services have plenty of time to plan a targeting/recruitment operation from the time you submit your visa application.

They begin by using social media to get to know you and may approach you first there.

McAdam also said that Chinese industrial/economic espionage costs Canadian companies $1 Billion per month.

Other speakers included a defector from the PRC’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). He talked about the case of a Canadian Member of Parliament who had been sending flirty/fawning emails to a female reporter with the Chinese Xinhua news agency. She would be expected to cultivate the relationship, collect information and provide it to the MSS.

“In general, this should be normal. I mean, MSS or other Chinese organizations with intelligence [duties] should do this as normal,” he said.

Li said politicians are always one of the first targets for agencies. “Especially senior politicians like him.” Intelligence agents often use being a reporter as a cover, he said, though not all overseas Chinese reporters are intelligence agents. Such agents gather secret intelligence in open ways, a method that works better than working through secret channels, said Li. Getting into an affair to gather intel is business as usual, he added.

[petra]

I really don't feel sleeper agents are a hoax. That's entirely plausible to me because I understand (somewhat) how repressed memories work. Also the rise in mass shootings + suicides really hit a nerve with me. It seems as if something just sets them off like some kind of bomb, and it's just very suspicious.

Same thing regarding WMD, totally plausible. If it doesn't exist (yet), it could easily exist, and that's my point. A hoax like this could turn into truth very quickly, in theory.

[Bob]

Any key Democrats believing that there are indeed sleeper cells or embedded agents in the US and France just waiting to be activated (triggered into action) ?

In January, 2015, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat and her party’s ranking member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, flatly stated that she believes terrorist cells are hiding in Europe and the U.S., waiting to be activated and carry out attacks similar to the ones that claimed 17 lives in France last week.

It was said, she thinks terrorist sleeper cells are in the U.S. — a claim sure to spark even greater fears of a strike on the homeland as the White House launches new efforts to confront growing Islamist extremism around the globe.

April 2018

Iranian-backed militants are operating across the United States mostly unfettered, raising concerns in Congress and among regional experts that these "sleeper cell" agents are poised to launch a large-scale attack on the American homeland, according to testimony before lawmakers.

Iranian agents tied to the terror group Hezbollah have already been discovered in the United States plotting attacks, giving rise to fears that Tehran could order a strike inside America should tensions between the Trump administration and Islamic Republic reach a boiling point.

Intelligence officials and former White House officials confirmed to Congress on Tuesday that such an attack is not only plausible, but relatively easy for Iran to carry out at a time when the Trump administration is considering abandoning the landmark nuclear deal and reapplying sanctions on Tehran.

There is mounting evidence that Iran poses "a direct threat to the homeland," according to Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and chair of its subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence.

A chief concern is "Iranian support for Hezbollah, which is active in the Middle East, Latin America, and here in the U.S., where Hezbollah operatives have been arrested for activities conducted in our own country," King said, referring the recent arrest of two individuals plotting terror attacks in New York City and Michigan.

"Both individuals received significant weapons training from Hezbollah," King said. "It is clear Hezbollah has the will and capability."

After more than a decade of receiving intelligence briefs, King said he has concluded that "Hezbollah is probably the most experienced and professional terrorist organization in the world," even more so than ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Asked if Iran could use Hezbollah to conduct strikes on the United States, a panel of experts including intelligence officials and former White House insiders responded in the affirmative.

"They are as good or better at explosive devices than ISIS, they are better at assassinations and developing assassination cells," said Michael Pregent, a former intelligence officer who worked to counter Iranian influence in the region. "They're better at targeting, better at looking at things," and they can outsource attacks to Hezbollah.

[Flash]

Very interesting thread Bob, really.

I had an encounter with a Chinese student which was as follows:

I was just divorcing, right in it and had no money to feed my daughter. So I decided to rent the basement. A Chinese student came, he was coming from a semester in Toronto and was now studying in a university in Montreal. This is about 16 years ago.

The first two weeks I had him in a room in the house, the basement not being ready. He would eat with us, my daughter was very young and I was training her not to burp at the table, well, guess, the Chinese wanting to be polite would burp his whole being after each meal. How do you explain a 5 years old she can't, but he can??? lol

So he went to live in the basement for about 8 months (destroyed my carpet and furniture), to move later on downtown. But he would not want to give me his new adress. When someone is not open, despite not having done anything legally wrong, I am suspicious. So I managed to convince him he would not have the cable again, the cable company would refuse him, if I could not tell them where he had moved (which was not true). So he gave me his new adress.

About 2 months after his move, someone knocks my door. A white guy, presenting himself as a collection agent, coming to pick up my furniture for debts unpaid by the Chinese guy living in my house. He never presented any ID.

I truly did not want to have any trouble, and told him to wait, I had his new adds, he was not living in my home anymore, and gave the address.

I had the very clear feeling that the guy was not from a collection agency but rather from a police-security government agency.

Also, The Chinese had told me while living in my basement that he wanted to become and English teacher, but that his family refused and forced him to study microbiology, which he did not fancy that much.

My understanding at the time was that in fact, the Chinese government needed microbiologists and being talented, they had forced him into microbiology. Later on, after the 'collection agent' visit, I became pretty sure that the Chinese was under surveillance. I have no idea what access to which labs he had.

Yet, my imagination might just be quite fertile in this case.

---------------------------------------------------

Prior to that, when living with my husband, I was aware the universities in MOntreal were having research exchanges with China for quite a few projects, Chinese buying Canadian equipement as well for their industries. I was aware because of my husband professional specialty.

So yes, Chinese have been going around taking anything they could all along from our countries.

I also remember being in trade shows where everybody would stand up in front of their booth as soon as groups of Chinese wouldd show up (when I was working for the telecom industry), because of industrial spying. Or stories about Chinese dipping the tip of their ties in chemical solutions presented during trade shows, to reverse ingeneer once back in China.

I also know for financial trading, how the windows are built to avoid spying from other firms or countries, and how the walls are builtaround trading rooms to avoid destruction by angry trading guys when they lose a fortune, or which mouse is the best to avoid destruction as well lol.

this is all true and much more present than we can ever imagine.

[Franny]

How many children in China speak English? Apparently, quite a few and the numbers are growing every day.

Something I noticed while looking at the indeed.com job posting website.

No matter which city/state I looked up there were postings from online education companies that were hiring people to teach Chinese children English online. As I recall there are about 5 companies and they all post all over including with tracking pixels so the ads continue to pop up everywhere. Each company would have repeated postings everywhere I looked, they seem to have a huge push for English language training beyond what we have seen in years past.

It's interesting to speculate just why China needs thousands, even millions of English speakers for the near future.

[petra]

Posted by latte (here)
It's interesting to speculate just why China needs thousands, even millions of English speakers for the near future.

It is. My cousin's teaching English in Korea and there's some serious demand, so it's not just China.
I thought I'd see what Google said about it, and this Chinese person's answer on Quora really made me laugh: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-Chinese...earn-English-1

[Franny]

I have known about the desire or educational/business requirement of people in many places in the world to speak English. Teaching English as a second language (TESL) is much in demand and there are several schools in the US that do that. Graduates go to many countries especially, Korea, Japan and China where they teach primary school children through adults.

But the demand can be high in many other countries particularly in some Asian and South and Central American countries and a few scattered others. You can even advertise on sites such as Craigslist and set up Skype sessions with a new student wanting to practice spoken English in many countries.

What I have not seen until recently is the heavy demand for teaching Chinese primary school children. Perhaps it's because state school instruction in China is of poor quality and well off parents pay for the classes. Or, perhaps the state sponsors the online schools. Basic TESL instruction is for adults and kids in primary and secondary schools. This may be different, I don't know, but it did catch my attention because it seems so pervasive - although it could be my perception.

A fun update. I was watching a video with Joe Rogan here in the Here and Now thread and the ad that popped up was:
https://www.vipkidteachers.com/

[Angels1981]

https://www.rt.com/uk/320062-mi6-recruit-women-mumsnet/

~I hope you don't mind me adding, but that link above I was in school once a few years now and they were showing us how the Mi blahs were recruiting women from mumsnet to potential spies.
So when you were mentioning about sleeper spies, these mums you could be out shopping and they are mundane everyday people. It would not surprise me if Teens or young kids are used too. Anything to stop others from trust.