Tag: ussr

How MI6 backed ‘right-wing religious fanatics’ in Afghanistan

In 1980, journalist John Fullerton sat down for lunch in London with members of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. The spooks asked the restless reporter to name five cities where he would like to work. He scrawled the answers unhesitatingly on a paper napkin.

“The top one was Peshawar in Pakistan,” he told Declassified, explaining his desire to move near the turbulent Afghan border. “The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan but I couldn’t find ways to be a freelancer out there. There were no journalists covering it. Everyone had left Kabul. So I wanted to cover the war and that’s how SIS employed me.”

He had been on good terms with SIS for many years already, after a chance encounter with Nicholas Elliott, one of the agency’s high fliers. Elliott, who famously confronted the KGB double agent Kim Philby, had just retired as an SIS director when he spotted an article by Fullerton exposing a power struggle between the police and military in apartheid South Africa.

Fullerton grew up in Cape Town, rising to night news editor on the Cape Times before migrating back to the UK, the country of his birth. After checking he was not a mole for the apartheid regime’s Bureau of State Security, British intelligence eventually took him on as a “contract labourer”, a cheaper option than a permanent SIS officer position.

“They employed quite a lot of these contract labourers, many from military backgrounds,” Fullerton commented. “SIS had gone through a period of retrenchment in the 1970s and early 80s and it had shrunk. From having three fully staffed stations in Latin America it went to having none.”

This all changed under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received informal advice on espionage from Elliott. “She took a great interest in foreign affairs and intelligence and she tried to beef it all up,” Fullerton remarked, adding that her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was eager to get “scenes of Afghans fighting communists onto television screens.”

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UFO intel documents stolen out of Russia reveal decade-long probes into alien encounters, abductions

Landmark UFO documents smuggled out of Russia 30 years ago — and just publicly revealed — show the Soviets investigated thousands of reports of extraterrestrial craft and encounters with aliens.

Legendary reporter George Knapp, 73, quietly released on Jan. 16 documents he smuggled out of Russia in 1993 under the nose of the KGB after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

The translated documents reveal the shocking extent to which the USSR and the post-Soviet Russian Federation probed the persistent phenomenon — despite the communist government officially deeming UFOs a concoction of war-mongering “American imperialists” in 1953.

The USSR commissioned several studies of UFOs beginning with the “Network-AN” program in 1979, continuing with “Galaxy-MD” from 1981-1985, “Pluton 7” in 1989 and 1990, and the continuing “Thread 3” program.

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Official CIA documents reported that a UFO turned a Soviet infantry unit to stone

UFO hype reached a fever pitch in 2025, as President Donald Trump’s order to declassify and release military and intelligence documents related to UFOs began to flood the internet. One document in particular received some extraordinary attention, relaying the story of a Soviet Red Army infantry unit that was attacked not only by a UFO, but by its alien crew.

A story reprinted in the Ukrainian newspaper Ternopil Vechirny (meaning “Ternopil Evening”) alleged that the American intelligence community received a 250-page file from the KGB’s archive after the fall of the Soviet Union. That file was said to contain documentary evidence (including photos) of an attack on a Soviet infantry unit in Siberia.

The KGB documents supposedly report that the unit was conducting a regular training exercise, when a “quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer appeared above” them. For reasons that no one really knows, one of the soldiers suddenly fired a surface-to-air missile at the craft. The UFO crash landed “not far away” and “five short humanoids with large heads and large black eyes” emerged from the downed vessel.

The file says that two surviving Red Army soldiers reported that the aliens “merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape.” The shape began to buzz and hiss, then turned a brilliant white, growing bigger and bigger before it exploded in a bright white light. Instantly, 23 soldiers had been turned into “stone poles.” The two soldiers had been standing behind trees, which they believed helped them survive.

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CIA tried to recruit Winston Churchill – Telegraph

The CIA tried to recruit British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill to spread propaganda broadcasts on the agency-backed Radio Liberty in the 1950s, in an effort to undermine the Soviet Union, The Telegraph has reported.

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA-funded radio station targeted the Soviet Union with propaganda broadcasts, while its sister organization, Radio Free Europe, focused on Moscow’s allies. Both were covertly controlled and funded by the US intelligence agency until 1972 and merged into RFE/RL four years later.

In 1958, Radio Liberty’s controllers suggested riding the wave of “revisionism” gripping the Soviet Union at the time, and taking advantage of emerging ideological divisions within Marxism-Leninism to undermine the government, The Telegraph wrote on Saturday, citing declassified CIA documents.

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Declassified: MI6 Support For Nazi ‘Forest Brothers’

September 22nd marked “Resistance Fighting Day”. It was on this date in 1944 anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Estonia declared war on the Soviet Union’s ‘occupation’ of their state. Parallel paramilitary factions rapidly formed in neighbouring Latvia and Lithuania. For over a decade, these violent factions – popularly known as the Forest Brothers – waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities. They remain venerated in the region and beyond today as courageous freedom fighters, immortalised by commemorative monuments, street names and statues throughout the Baltic states.

In reality, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Forest Brothers were Holocaust perpetrators and Nazi collaborators. In many cases, militants joined the movement due to fear of prosecution and punishment for their activities during World War II. While waging their anti-Soviet crusade, the Brothers also murdered thousands of innocent civilians, including many children. However, critical scrutiny of the Forest Brothers’ genocidal legacy is criminalised throughout the Baltics. Academics, journalists and lawyers have been jailed for exposing the truth.

The same legislation moreover prohibits any public discussion of how the Jewish populations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were slaughtered in their virtual totality, largely before the Wehrmacht arrived in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa. Western powers are aggressively complicit in this historical coverup. In July 2017, NATO produced a slick propaganda film heroising the Forest Brothers. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits routinely whitewash Baltic Nazi collaboration, on the risible basis local populations simply sought to resist Communist rule.

There is another core component of the Forest Brothers’ history their advocates at home and abroad are keen to conceal. Namely, the Baltic Nazi guerrilla war was covertly supported financially, materially and practically by MI6. Britain’s foreign spying agency assisted their attempted insurrection by supplying explosives and weapons, infiltrating and exfiltrating agents, and sponsoring assassinations and sabotage attacks. Yet, MI6 records documenting this dark alliance are unforthcoming. Evidence of London’s cloak-and-dagger assistance to the Forest Brothers is provided largely by declassified CIA files.

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Putin compares ideology of modern West to USSR

Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a parallel between the Soviet Union and the present-day US and EU, accusing them of imposing their own political systems on other countries.

Speaking at a plenary session of the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, the president suggested that political systems which force their own values on others don’t last.

“The Soviet Union once erred by imposing its system. Then, the United States has taken up that baton. The EU has also distinguished itself,” Putin said.

“A nation that respects its own tradition, as a rule, does not encroach on the traditions of others,” the Russian president concluded.

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Declassified: CIA’s Covert Ukraine Invasion Plan

On August 7th, US polling giant Gallup published the remarkable results of a survey of Ukrainians. Public support for Kiev “fighting until victory” has plummeted to a record low “across all segments” of the population, “regardless of region or demographic group.” In a “nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022,” 69% of citizens “favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.” Just 24% wish to keep fighting.  However, vanishingly few believe the proxy war will end anytime soon.

The reasons for Ukrainian pessimism on this point are unstated, but an obvious explanation is the intransigence of President Volodymyr Zelensky, encouraged by his overseas backers – Britain in particular. London’s reverie of breaking up Russia into readily-exploitable chunks dates back centuries, and became turbocharged in the wake of the February 2014 Maidan coup. In July that year, a precise blueprint for the current proxy conflict was published by the Institute for Statecraft, a NATO/MI6 cutout founded by veteran British military intelligence apparatchik Chris Donnelly.

In response to the Donbass civil war, Statecraft advocated targeting Moscow with a variety of “anti-subversive measures”. This included “economic boycott, breach of diplomatic relations,” as well as “propaganda and counter-propaganda, pressure on neutrals.” The objective was to produce “armed conflict of the old-fashioned sort” with Russia, which “Britain and the West could win.” While we are now witnessing in real-time the brutal unravelling of Donnelly’s monstrous plot, Anglo-American designs of using Ukraine as a beachhead for all-out war with Moscow date back far further.

In August 1957, the CIA secretly drew up elaborate plans for an invasion of Ukraine by US special forces. It was hoped neighbourhood anti-Communist agitators would be mobilized as footsoldiers to assist in the effort. A detailed 200-page report, Resistance Factors and Special Forces Areas, set out demographic, economic, geographical, historical and political factors throughout the then-Soviet Socialist Republic that could facilitate, or impede, Washington’s quest to ignite local insurrection, and in turn the USSR’s ultimate collapse.

The mission was forecast to be a delicate and difficult balancing act, as much of Ukraine’s population held “few grievances” against Russians or Communist rule, which could be exploited to foment an armed uprising. Just as problematically, “the long history of union between Russia and Ukraine, which stretches in an almost unbroken line from 1654 to the present day,” resulted in “many Ukrainians” having “adopted the Russian way of life”. Problematically, there was thus a pronounced lack of “resistance to Soviet rule” among the population.

The “great influence” of Russian culture over Ukrainians, “many influential positions” in local government being held “by Russians or Ukrainians sympathetic to [Communist] rule, and “relative similarity” of their “languages, customs, and backgrounds”, meant there were “fewer points of conflict between the Ukrainians and Russians” than in Warsaw Pact nations. Throughout those satellite states, the CIA had to varying success already recruited clandestine networks of “freedom fighters” as anti-Communist Fifth Columnists. Yet, the Agency remained keen to identify potential “resistance” actors in Ukraine:

“Some Ukrainians are apparently only slightly aware of the differences which set them apart from Russians and feel little national antagonism. Nevertheless, important grievances exist, and among other Ukrainians there is opposition to Soviet authority which often has assumed a nationalist form. Under favorable conditions, these people might be expected to assist American Special Forces in fighting against the regime.”

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Bombshell: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Says Russia Agreed to Release KGB Files on Lee Harvey Oswald — Claims CIA Destroyed Evidence Handed Over at JFK’s Funeral

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who led the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, told Joe Rogan that the Russian government has agreed to release long-secret KGB intelligence files on Lee Harvey Oswald, documents she claims the CIA destroyed after receiving them at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral.

During her appearance, Luna detailed how she and two fellow members of Congress recently met with the Russian ambassador, the first such meeting on this subject since 1990, as part of her ongoing push to uncover the truth about JFK’s assassination.

According to Luna, the KGB conducted its own independent investigation into Oswald and handed the findings to U.S. officials in 1963, only for them to vanish under suspicious circumstances.

The Florida congresswoman went on to drop another bombshell that JFK was pursuing peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union, including a joint mission to the moon, at a time when factions inside America’s intelligence community wanted war in Cuba and confrontation with Russia.

“We never got those documents, and it’s my belief that the CIA actually destroyed that information and evidence because it would have confirmed what the KGB,” Luna told Joe Rogan.

“And mind you, at the time, JFK was actually in talks with the President of Russia, and his perspective was that he actually wanted to do a joint mission between the U.S. government and the Russian government to the moon. And there were aspects and divisions within the intelligence community—you obviously saw the Cold War was happening—they wanted war in Cuba, they wanted war with Russia.”

“So, for them to be able to say that Kennedy, who was not a Communist, was a Communist sympathizer, and “How dare he talk to these dirty Communists?”—I mean, that in itself would have given them any ammunition to turn a blind eye, or at least not fully figure out who assassinated Kennedy.”

Luna also revealed that the Russian government has now agreed to make its JFK investigation public for the first time this fall, something the U.S. Congressional Task Force failed to secure in the 1990s.

The files reportedly contain a psychological profile of Oswald compiled during his time in Russia, describing him as mentally unstable, incapable with firearms, and hardly fitting the profile of a lone mastermind assassin.

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ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 80: Truman’s ‘Human Sacrifice’ to Subdue Moscow

Sumiteru Taniguchi was one of the “lucky” ones. He lived a long and productive life. He married and fathered two healthy children who gave him four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He had a long career in Japan’s postal and telegraph services. As a leader in Japan’s anti-nuclear movement, he addressed thousands of audiences and hundreds of thousands of people. He traveled to at least 23 countries. The organizations in which he played a prominent role were nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of the more than 250,000 who lived in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, were not so lucky. Tens of thousands were killed instantly by the plutonium core atomic bomb the U.S. dropped that day from the B29 Bockscar, captained by Major Charles Sweeney.

The bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” exploded with a force equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT and wiped out an area that covered three square miles, shattering windows eleven miles away. Some 74,000 were dead by the end of the year. The death toll reached 140,000 by 1950. Included among the victims were thousands of Korean slave laborers, who toiled in Japanese mines, fields, and factories. Since then, atomic bomb-related injuries and illnesses have claimed thousands more victims and caused immense suffering to many of the survivors.

The scene of death and destruction defied description. Corpses, many of which had been charred by the blast, lay everywhere. Susan Southard, in her groundbreaking book Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, describes the scene that U.S. occupation troops encountered when they landed on September 23, 1945: “The Urakami Valley had vanished from existence, corpses were burning on cremation pyres, skulls and bones were piled on the ground, and people were walking through the ruins with beleaguered and empty expressions.”

Among the troops was Keith Lynch, a sailor from Nebraska. Lynch wrote to his parents that he had just seen

“a sight I hope my children, if I am so fortunate, will never have to see, hear of, or ever think of. It was horrible and when you get to thinking, unbelieveable….Such a thing as I saw yesterday cannot be described in words. You have to see it and I hope no one ever has to see such a thing again.”

The death toll was even higher and the destruction greater in Hiroshima, which the U.S. had obliterated three days earlier with a uranium core atomic bomb. There, some 200,000 were dead by 1950. The Nagasaki bomb was more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima, but damage was limited by the fact that the bomb missed its target and that the mountains surrounding Nagasaki, which is located in a valley, contained the blast. However, in Urakami Valley, where the bomb landed, nearly 70 percent of the population perished.

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Meet Russia’s real-life ‘Americans’ — spies hiding in plain sight

Ann Foley, a part-time real estate agent, lived a middle-class, all-American lifestyle with her husband, Don, and their two sons, in Cambridge, Mass., home of many of America’s most prestigious universities and think tanks.

But the likeable, friendly couple had a very secret life.

Ann was, in fact, Elena Vavilova, a deep-cover spy trained by the secret Russian intelligence agency, the notorious KGB. Don, her seemingly pleasant husband, was actually Andrei Bezrukov, also a KGB agent.

In June 2010, the couple, both illegals in the US, was arrested by the FBI.

In New York City, meanwhile, Anna Chapman also worked in real estate, but lived a far different lifestyle than Ann Foley. Voluptuous and flame-haired, Chapman had a reputation for flirting with her potential property  clients — the Big Apple’s men of power and wealth.

But the two women, Foley and Chapman, did have one commonality.

Chapman, too, was a secret Russian agent here to spy on America.

In 2010, she was arrested with nine other Russian spies, with authorities breaking up one of the largest intelligence networks in the US since the end of the Cold War.

It took decades for the FBI to unravel Russia’s most secret spy program. Now author Shaun Walker, in “The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West” (Knopf), has written a riveting and revelatory history of the Soviet Union’s spy program that asks the reader — do you really know who your neighbors are?

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