Word: kgb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Alexander Litvinenko didn't mince words. On Oct. 19, at a public meeting in London, he introduced himself as a former Russian kgb officer, and proceeded to accuse President Vladimir Putin of sanctioning the murder two weeks earlier of a crusading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. Litvinenko, who fell out with his erstwhile employers after claiming they had ordered him to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and high Russian official of the Yeltsin years, now exiled, had met Politkovskaya on several occasions. At one of their last meetings, he said, she had told him about threats she'd been receiving...
...other grievances. They include allegations of torture by the police, pressure on journalists, and what opponents see as an erosion of Russia's democratic institutions. The ranks of the new dissidents are swelled by unlikely recruits - men such as Alexei Kondaurov, who, as a major-general of the kgb's Fifth Main Directorate, was responsible for crushing ideological subversion in Soviet days. Kondaurov is now a member of the Duma's Communist Party faction, and campaigns tirelessly on behalf of his friend and former employer, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once headed Yukos, Russia's biggest private oil company. Khodorkovsky is currently...
Litvinenko, for one, was unafraid to speak out. A former lieutenant colonel in the Russian federal security service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, Litvinenko gained notoriety in the 1990s for claiming to have refused a Kremlin order to assassinate the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He had long accused Putin of backtracking on democracy and, in a 2001 book he co-wrote, went so far as to allege that Russian security services organized apartment-block bombings in 1999 that stoked support for a resurgence of the war in Chechnya. He had most recently made public statements tying the Kremlin...
...Although the Canadian counter-intelligence service claims Hampel was an agent for the SVR, successor to the cold-war-era KGB, Canadian security experts say part of Hampel's espionage "legend" - the false identity and public trail he allegedly established through nefarious means - does not entirely match the old KGB modus operandi. KGB agents would be reluctant to use the records of an existing citizen for the foundation of a spy's fabricated life...
...though it is equally critically-acclaimed. His 1988 film “23” received a Special Mention at the Locarno Film Festival, and picked up several German Film Awards to boot. The film, about a the attempts of a West German computer hacker to connect with the KGB in East Berlin and to decipher a global conspiracy, will screen on Tuesday, Nov. 21, at 9 p.m. Those who prefer Schmid’s nuanced earlier films to one-trick outings like “Reqiuem” should take heart. In his latest project, “Sturm...