#6226
[Second Issue of the Day]
#4
Leading spy says foreign intelligence targeting Russia
ITAR-TASS
Moscow, 6 May, correspondent Boris Kipkeyev: Many foreign secret services view Russia as "a priority in their endeavours", deputy Federal Security Service [FSB] director Col-Gen Oleg Syromolotov told ITAR-TASS in an interview. This explains why they have started operating against us in a more aggressive, more conspiratorial and more sophisticated way, he said.
Syromolotov, who is head of the FSB's Counterintelligence Department [DKR], was speaking on the eve of the 80th anniversary of Russian counterintelligence which is marked 6 May. [omitted: known history.]
Syromolotov said that 14 foreign agents had been caught red-handed by DKR personnel in the past two years, and that ten of those foreign agents were staff members of foreign intelligence agencies. In the same two-year period, some 260 staff members of foreign secret services were "identified and put under watch", and espionage and sabotage activities by over 40 of them were thwarted. In addition, Russian counterintelligence managed to neutralize the activities of a further hundred agents employed by foreign secret services, including six Russians.
Syromolotov forecasts a sharp rise in the near future in the threat of an information war being unleashed by foreign secret services against electronic communication and management systems, and also against strategic databases on the territory of Russia. In 2001 alone, more than 40 criminal cases were initiated involving crimes in the sphere of computer information.
Speaking about DKR involvement in the counterterrorism operation in the North Caucasus, he said that FSB operations groups, and antiterrorist and counterintelligence subunits were constantly working in Chechnya. They are searching for the leaders of rebel gangs and for people involved in acts of terrorism.
"Cases have been discovered where Chechen extremists were supported by people working for the intelligence services of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and Pakistan", he said.
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