American Arrested In Russia On Spy Charges, Faces Up To 20 Years Jail

[Swordsmyth]

Following China's 'reactions' to the detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, and the ongoing (and escalating) tensions between Washington and Moscow over Crimea among other things, The Guardian reports (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/31/russia-detains-american-in-moscow-suspected-of-spying) that Russia has detained a US citizen in Moscow accused of spying.

According to a statement from the FSB security service (Russia's domestic agency), the American was detained on Friday “while carrying out an act of espionage” and a criminal case has been opened.

"The investigation department of the Federal Security Service of Russia initiated a criminal case against a US citizen under article 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The investigation is underway," the statement continued.
Article 276 is espionage.
The statement identified the American in Russian, using a name that appeared to translate as Paul Whelan. No other details were immediately available.

More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-31/russia-detains-us-citizen-accused-spying-faces-10-20-years-jail

[RonZeplin]

Could be the ghost of Senator McCain.

https://hw.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/3-30-17-mccain-russia.jpg

[Swordsmyth]

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday said that the US wants immediate access to a former Marine who was arrested in Russia in December on espionage charges, and that "if the detention is not appropriate we will demand his immediate return," reports AP (https://apnews.com/21cea22f80bb46d6a52f64d696d44c88).
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/685AnPgS.jpg

Paul Whelan, who is head of global security for a Michigan-based auto parts supplier, was arrested on Friday. In announcing the arrest three days later, the Russian Federal Security Service said he was caught “during an espionage operation,” but it gave no details.
Whelan, 48, was in Moscow to attend a wedding when he suddenly disappeared, his brother David Whelan said Tuesday.
Pompeo, speaking in Brazil, said the U.S. is “hopeful within the next hours we’ll get consular access to see him and get a chance to learn more.” -AP (https://apnews.com/21cea22f80bb46d6a52f64d696d44c88)
Pompeo said that the United States has "made clear to the Russians our expectation that we will learn more about the charges and come to understand what it is he’s been accused of and if the detention is not appropriate we will demand his immediate return."
Paul Whelan's brother David Whelan said in a New Year's Day Twitter post, "We are deeply concerned for his safety and well-being. His innocence is undoubted and we trust that his rights will be respected."

My brother was detained by the Russian government on Friday as an alleged spy. While the law library + info focus will remain, you may see an increase in off-message topics until we get him safely home. pic.twitter.com/2HIF1UmS1b (https://t.co/2HIF1UmS1b)
— David Whelan (@davidpwhelan) January 1, 2019 (https://twitter.com/davidpwhelan/status/1080067463323226112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) David said in an interview that his brother had traveled to Russia several times in the past, so when a former Marine was planning a Moscow wedding to a Russian woman, David was asked to help out. The morning he was arrested, David had taken a group of wedding guests on a tour of various Kremlin museums.


More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-02/us-demands-access-former-marine-held-spying-charges-moscow

[AZJoe]

Pompeo is not demanding that Whelan be treated with the same level of due process Washington dishes out - humiliate him in the press with admittedly false sexual allegations, place him in solitary confinement while threatening him with life in prison until he confesses to not registering as a "foreign agent" and then declaring that as proof he was a spy (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?529712-The-Disgrace-of-Maria-Butina-s-Prosecution).

[AZJoe]

According to BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-46756996)and The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/03/ex-us-marine-accused-of-spying-in-russia-is-british-citizen), the Canadian born former US marine Paul Whelan is also a British citizen.

[Swordsmyth]

American Paul Whelan, arrested in Moscow and accused of espionage, has in addition to his American passport one from Britain, Canada (https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/canada) and Ireland, Whelan’s brother said Friday.
“As for his international connections, our family spans continents, and Paul’s four passports reflect his birth (Canada), parents (Britain), grandparents (Ireland) and choice (United States),” David Whelan wrote in an Op-Ed (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-am-paul-whelans-brother-he-is-not-a-spy/2019/01/04/56b62514-1046-11e9-84fc-d58c33d6c8c7_story.html?utm_term=.acff0450c9cb) in The Washington Post.
In the Op-Ed Whelan called on President Donald Trump (https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/donald-trump) and lawmakers to “pressure Russia (https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/russia-nation) for [Paul Whelan’s] immediate release.”


The revelation of Whelan’s passports issued by multiple Western nations further complicates an already complex situation for the 48-year-old. Whelan was arrested by Russian security services on Dec. 28, according to a Dec. 31 statement from the FSB, successor to the KGB. The FSB said Whelan was caught engaging in espionage activity, and unverified Russian news reports further alleged he had for years been involved in spying and was arrested in his hotel room in Moscow with a secret list of Russian government personnel.

Whelan is employed as head of security at the international auto parts firm BorgWarner based in Michigan, a spokesperson for the company said. Military records show he served as a Marine from 1994 to 2008 when he received a bad conduct discharge for attempted larceny and other charges. Whelan was found guilty of stealing more than $10,000 while deployed to Al Asad Base in Iraq and, around the same time, bounced nearly $6,000 worth of checks, according to military records.

More at: https://www.yahoo.com/gma/accused-american-spy-russia-4-passports-165711741--abc-news-topstories.html

[Swordsmyth]

The media has a new bit of speculation that fits neatly into the flagging Russiagate narrative. It concerns Paul Whelan, a high school graduate Marine Corps dishonorable discharge, who is currently working in corporate security for a Michigan-based auto parts manufacturer. Whelan, who lives alone, is self-taught in Russian and has engaged in tourist travel to the country a number of times. He was reportedly arrested late last month in Moscow while ostensibly attending a friend’s wedding and charged with espionage. Forty-eight year-old Whelan is clearly an odd duck and is notable for having four passports (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/us/politics/paul-whelan-spy-citizenship.html) – Great Britain, Ireland, Canada and that of the United States.
https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/or-42047.jpg
Press coverage of the incident has nearly unanimously decided that the spying charge against Whelan is phony and that he is being held as bait to arrange for an exchange with Maria Butina, who is in jail in Virginia after being charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government and engaging in conspiracy. The media and the usual pundits base their conclusion on absolutely no evidence whatsoever apart from their conviction that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bad man who would do almost anything to irritate the United States and overthrow its system of government. Oddly, the press watchdogs fail to note how the current federal government is doing a damned fine job destroying itself without any assistance from the Kremlin. If Putin really wanted to damage the US, he would be best advised to leave it alone and let Congress and the White House do the heavy lifting for him.
Unlike the mainstream media, I rather expect that the charges against Whelan could be more-or-less correct, though not in the way the press has framed the story, which is that Whelan is such a flawed character that he could not possibly meet the requirements to be working for any sophisticated spy organization. The New York Times in its coverage of the story interviewed (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/europe/us-spy-suspect-whelan-russia.htmlhttps:/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/europe/us-spy-suspect-whelan-russia.html?fbclid=IwAR1XEA4e00sLKTfYVKgytOH0lu88A 8-vfP_SSiLFpGvOtNlOJ0am-YqHTbs) several former CIA officers who had served in Russia, but asked the wrong questions. The reporter wanted to know if Whelan could possibly be an employee of US intelligence. The ex-Agency officers replied “no” because of his criminal record while a Marine and other oddities in his career, which included some marginal involvement with low-level law enforcement.
The former spooks were correct to state that Whelan would not pass the security hurdles for employment as a staff officer, but there is also a whole other level of possible engagement with the Agency, DIA or JSOC – cooperating as one of the sources which intelligence organizations recruit and run to collect information.
The flawed but nevertheless useful Whelan would be a perfect target for recruitment as an intelligence source, referred to in the business as “agents.”
Unusually for a foreigner, Whelan has a social media account on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, which is quite likely how he came to the attention of CIA or the Pentagon. And The New York Times, interestingly, describes his friends (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/europe/us-spy-suspect-whelan-russia.htmlhttps:/www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/europe/us-spy-suspect-whelan-russia.html?fbclid=IwAR1XEA4e00sLKTfYVKgytOH0lu88A 8-vfP_SSiLFpGvOtNlOJ0am-YqHTbs) on the site as “men with some sort of connection to academies run by the Russian Navy, the Defense Ministry or the Civil Aviation Authority.” That alone would be enough to generate considerable interest in American intelligence circles as sources with that kind of access are hard to find.
And the details of Whelan’s arrest, if true, are completely consistent with how a low- to mid-level source might be run and used by a US government case officer. According to Russian accounts published in Rosbalt, a news agency close to the Kremlin, an unidentified intelligence source (https://www.rosbalt.ru/moscow/2019/01/03/1756367.html) revealed that Whelan was trying to recruit a Russian citizen to obtain classified information regarding employees at various government agencies when he was caught in flagrante. He was arrested five minutes later in what was clearly a sting operation after having received a USB stick that included a list of all of the employees that he apparently had requested.
It may turn out that Paul Whelan is completely innocent and is merely a pawn in a tit-for-tat chess game being played by Washington and Moscow. If so, it is to be hoped that he will be proven innocent and released, but no one should rule out his having been recruited and exploited by a US government agency. Spying is not a game. It is a dangerous business, with serious consequences for those who are caught.


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-12/paul-whelan-spy


He is also a twin and they like to recruit twins because they can be used to double for eachother to create alibis etc.
He was probably recruited in the service and his "record" was manufactured as a reason for him to leave and work as a "civilian".

[Swordsmyth]

The lawyer for a former U.S. marine accused of spying by Russia said on Tuesday that his client had been misled before his arrest and believed that a thumb drive handed to him in a hotel room had contained holiday snaps rather than secret information.Russia's Federal Security Service detained Paul Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, in a Moscow hotel room on Dec. 28.
Whelan appeared in a Moscow court on Tuesday, where a judge rejected releasing him on bail. If found guilty of espionage, he could be imprisoned for up to 20 years.
Whelan, who denies the charges, was detained after receiving a thumb drive containing a list of all the employees of a secret Russian state agency, the Russian online news portal Rosbalt.ru reported this month.
Rosbalt cited a Russian intelligence source it did not identify as saying that Whelan had been spying for 10 years, using the internet to identify targets from whom he could obtain information, and that the list he was caught with had long been of interest to U.S. spies.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to support that version of events, later telling reporters Whelan had been "caught red-handed" carrying out "specific illegal actions" in his hotel room.
But Vladimir Zherebenkov, Whelan's lawyer, said on Tuesday that his client had accepted the information unknowingly.
"Paul was actually meant to receive information from an individual that was not classified," Zherebenkov told reporters.
"These were cultural things, a trip to a cathedral, Paul's holiday ... photographs. But as it turned out, it (the thumb drive) contained classified information."
The lawyer said Whelan had not been able to see what was on the thumb drive because he had been detained before he had a chance to do so.
His twin brother David Whelan, who lives in Canada, in a statement said his family was disappointed Paul had been denied bail. The family have said he was in Moscow to attend a wedding.
"We are certain that he was entrapped and is not guilty of espionage," David Whelan's statement said.


More at: https://news.yahoo.com/russian-court-rules-keep-suspected-u-spy-whelan-101202911.html

[AZJoe]

5G, Huawei and Us — The U.S. Hates Competition (https://tomluongo.me/2019/01/19/5g-huawei-and-us-the-u-s-hates-competition/) - TOM LUONGO (https://tomluongo.me/author/tfl1728/)

The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that could significantly restrict Chinese state-owned telecom companies from operating in the U.S. over national security concerns, according to people familiar with the matter. …

As always with statements in stories planted in major U.S. media houses like these what isn’t said is more important than what is said.

There are two major bones of contention with Huawei from the U.S. government’s perspective. First is that Huawei is way ahead of everyone else in 5G technology. They have the only end-to-end technology stack in the industry. Turnkey 5G networks from antennas and chips to the power stations needed to operate them. Simply peruse their website (http://carrier.huawei.com/en/spotlight/5g-is-now) …

All across the “Five Eyes” countries we have seen announcement after announcement of their banning Huawei 5G equipment from their networks. This is as much economic protectionism (https://tomluongo.me/2018/12/06/mr-tariff-ups-the-ante-on-china/)as it is about ‘national security.’

But, the real issue here is that, in very short order, Huawei has become a global leader in 5G infrastructure technology which the U.S. is falling behind on. And now with this arrest [Huawei CFO Weng Wanzhou] Trump is betting that he can scare everyone else into not buying their superior products through the ruinous application of sanctions policies.

The West has been systematically cutting Huawei out of the global 5G rollout because of ‘security’ concerns. More like profit concerns. It is, simply, typical protectionism by Mr. Tariff himself. … And since he’s not a deep thinker, all he cares about are first-order effects and how he can sell it on his Twitter feed to his now brain-dead base who believes all of this ‘China hacked muh everything’ narrative we’re being inundated with all of a sudden. …

The real issue is … that Huawei categorically refuses to install NSA backdoors into their hardware (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/25/huawei_responds_to_spying_allegations/)to allow unfettered intelligence access to the data that crosses their networks. …

The US National Security Agency’s ‘Tailored Access Operations’ unit broke into Huawei’s corporate servers (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/31/nsa_weapons_catalogue_promises_pwnage_at_the_speed _of_light/), and by 2010 was reading corporate email and examining the source code used in Huawei’s products. “We currently have good access and so much data that we don’t know what to do with it,” boasted one NSA briefing. The slides also disclose the NSA intended to plant its own backdoors in Huawei firmware. …

the China hawks in the Trump administration are willing to derail a much-needed technology rollout in order to maintain complete control over data flow which four years ago was beyond their ability to process. John Bolton is willing to start WWIII over a couple of pipe bombs thrown at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, for pity’s sake. Is is so far-fetched to believe he doesn’t want us to have 5G data access without the security blanket of spying on anyone he wants at any time?

Never forget that when they are presenting you with one bogeyman it is to distract you from the real one — them. … We know that the NSA has access to any information it wants …

The national security angle is simply about Huawei refusing the U.S. repeatedly on granting backdoor access to our information. It reveals both an insecurity and an insanity that grips every society in the late stages of Imperialism. As the competitive edge is lost the threat of competition fuels paranoia and the need to control everything.

But it is this need for control and the diverting of an ever-increasing proportion of the country’s resources to it that drives further loss of competitive edge. … capital isn’t going into innovation, it’s going into defending your moats …

Banning Huawei’s 5G network technology will ensure the communications gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world …

Bandwidth so wide it means peer-to-peer networks so fast we won’t need sites like YouTube or Periscope to do citizen journalism. Deplatforming will become harder and harder. Decentralized data storage on blockchains which they can’t hack … that’s what truly scares these people. What happens when the net itself becomes so decentralized they won’t be able to pick up a phone and take you offline?

As always, regulators and generals like John Bolton are fighting the last war. … those people always lose.