James Bond's Russian Counterpart Dispatched to The United States

A contract killer has been dispatched to assassinate the Russian double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman and nine other spies in the United States this spring, according to reports in Moscow. "We know who he is and where he is," a high-ranking Kremlin source told the reputable Kommersant newspaper. You can have no doubt – a Mercader has already been sent after him." Ramón Mercader was the KGB-hired Spanish communist who was sent to kill Leon Trotsky with an icepick in Mexico in 1940.

The traitor was reportedly identified as a Colonel Shcherbakov, an officer of the SVR (foreign intelligence service) who headed the S directorate of the service's US department, which controlled the ring of sleeper agents, including Chapman. Shcherbakov is thought to have fled Russia three days before the president, Dmitry Medvedev, visited Barack Obama on 24 June, when the two leaders ate hamburgers together at a diner in Virginia. "After that, the Americans, worried that we would suspect a betrayal and start pulling our agents from the US, began to arrest them," said the Kremlin source.

The agents, who had been living apparently innocent suburban lives in New York, Arlington and elsewhere, were detained by the FBI in late June and convicted of conducting long-term "deep-cover" surveillance on behalf of Russia. The 10 were later sent to Russia in exchange for the release of four men jailed there for alleged espionage on behalf of the CIA and MI6. Speaking shortly after the agents' return to Moscow, Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, said the traitor who had betrayed them had been identified. "It was the result of treason," he said, predicting a grim future for those responsible. "It always ends badly for traitors: as a rule, their end comes from drink or drugs, lying in the gutter. And for what?"

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Trucking in the U.S.A.: Where the Accent is Russian

The Russians come to trucking with some tradition — it is very much the way their huge ancestral nation, with its system of badly maintained roads, takes delivery of its necessities. Indeed, many may have come over to join relatives in the U.S. after the global financial crisis in the fall of 2008 depressed the Russian trucking industry: out of the more than 10,000 companies that operated in Russia before the crisis, only around 8,000 survived. "This did cause something of an exodus among Russian truckers," says Antonina Kamchatova, spokeswoman of ASMAP, the Russian trick drivers' association. "So anyone who could, through the help of relatives or whatever, went across the Atlantic in the last couple of years to look for work."

As with all immigrant groups trying to make it in America, there are problems to do with acculturation and, more seriously, the law. Many drivers demonstrate limited English-speaking and comprehension skills; some have trouble reading Latin script. A few that I have talked to admit that they are much more used to reading Cyrillic. To work as a trucker in the U.S., an individual must have a Commercial Driver's License, which requires that a driver "read and speak the English langauge sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records."

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Russian subs stalk Trident in echo of Cold War

A specially upgraded Russian Akula class submarine has been caught trying to record the acoustic signature made by the Vanguard submarines that carry Trident nuclear missiles, according to senior Navy officers. British submariners have also reported that they are experiencing the highest number of "contacts" with Russian submarines since 1987. If the Russians are able to obtain a recording of the unique noise of the boat's propellers it would have serious implications for Britain's nuclear deterrent. Using its sophisticated sonar, the Akula would be able to track Vanguards and potentially sink them before they could launch their Trident D4 missiles.

The Daily Telegraph has learnt that, within the past six months, a Russian Akula entered the North Atlantic and attempted to track a Vanguard. The incident has remained secret until now. It is understood that the Russians stood off Faslane, where the British nuclear force is based, and waited for a Trident-carrying boat to come out for its three-month patrol to provide the Continuous At Sea Deterrent. "The Russians have been playing games with us, the Americans and French in the North Atlantic," a senior Navy commander said.

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Hijacked Tanker Freed in 22-Minute Gunfight

Russian marines on Thursday freed a Russian oil tanker hijacked by Somali pirates a day earlier in the Arabian Sea in a 22-minute gunfight that saw one pirate killed and 10 others arrested. The 23 Russian sailors on the Moscow University tanker — who cut power to the vessel and spent the 20-hour ordeal holed up in the engine room — emerged unharmed, a Navy spokeswoman told The Moscow Times. President Dmitry Medvedev praised the marines for their quick and professional work and ordered that they be decorated with state medals. He promised that the captured pirates would be punished “under the full force of naval law,” Interfax reported.

Russian officials have not decided whether to bring the detained pirates to Moscow or hand them over for trial to an African court. The state-owned tanker was attacked about 350 nautical miles from Socotra, Yemen, in what was the first hijacking of a Russian-owned ship with a Russian crew in the pirate-infested waters off the coast of lawless Somalia. Communication with the ship ceased at 8 a.m. Wednesday Moscow time, when the captain radioed that two boats carrying gunmen had approached the ship and opened fire. The pirates had warned against any rescue attempt, saying they were holding the crew members hostage and taking the tanker to the Somali coast.

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Twittergate: Update 1

Anti-Georgia Russian hackers may have been behind yesterday's global cyber attacks on Google, Facebook and Twitter. The organised web assaults completely shut down social networking site Twitter and disrupted access to Facebook — nearly a year to the day since the outbreak of the Georgia-Russia war.

Search engine Google was also targeted but managed to fend off the "denial-of-service" attacks. Hackers used the popular technique to hijack thousands of computers and use them to send messages to a target website at the same time — causing it to crash.

And a Facebook executive revealed that a Georgian blogger called Cymxymu — who has accounts on all the websites — was the target of the attack.

Facebook boss Max Kelly said: "It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard. "We're actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can."

• "Russian Hackers Eyed in Attack on Twitter, Google and Facebook", Fox News, 8/7/09.
• "Twitter attack is a growth pang", LA Times, 8/7/09
• "Facebook 1, Twitter 0", Forbes, 8/6/09.
  

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