Luke Harding, The Guardian's Moscow correspondent booted out by the Kremlin in 2007, tells of bizarre break-ins of his family's flat that could only have been conducted by Russian security agents. In a January interview by NPR, the reporter summarized his experience with security agency gang stalkers, recapitulating passages from his book, A Very Expensive Poison, the Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West (Vintage 2016).
NPR interview
http://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511786803/journalist-russias-interference-is-an-assault-on-the-western-liberal-order
The newsman learned from the British embassy that such clandestine harassment is very familiar to British and American diplomatic employees, and was quietly tolerated by diplomats. Harding had evidently been targeted for news reports that challenged the Russian version of events in the nuclear poisoning in London of a Russian-born British citizen who was harshly critical of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB operative who is now Russia's authoritarian head man.
Smile! You're on spy video!
Not only was Harding told of probable listening devices, he got another shock when gang stalkers implied that they were viewing his bedroom marital relations. Of course, intelligence agencies -- in particular Russian security -- are known for setting up rooms with hidden video cameras for watching the unwary. It is only one more step to videograph the activities of supposed adversaries in their private quarters.
(See interview excerpts below.)
Newsman harassed on Snowden story
Harding also experienced Western -- probably British -- security agency hazing as he attempted to write his book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (Vintage 2014),
that related what he knew of the Snowden affair. Harding tells of watching newly minted sentences being erased from his laptop as he typed. The hazing didn't cease, he said, until high-level officials in the British government were made aware of what was going on.
In 2006, William Boyd told Guardian readers of how British spies in America had published a pamphlet on "gang stalker" methods against Americans deemed to be pro-Nazi before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor hurtled America into the world war.
The gang stalking of Americans was dreamed up by BSC, or British Security Coordination, according to the book A Man Called Intrepid which describes the exploits of William Stephenson, who ran Winston Churchill's intelligence arm in the Western Hemisphere from offices in Rockefeller Center.
Boyd column
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/aug/19/military.secondworldwar
A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero whose Spy Network Changed the Course of History (Lyons Press 1976) came in for some tough criticism from some ex-spooks. It was written by William Stevenson, who styled himself a protege of the spymaster, and seemed to reflect Stephenson's point of view.
According to Boyd's account taken from Intrepid:
Brits gang-stalked antiwar Americans
BSC invented a game called "Vik," described as "a fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy." Printed booklets described up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathizers.
Players of Vik were encouraged to ring up their targets at all hours of the night and hang up.
Dead rats could be put in water tanks, air could be let out of car tires, anonymous deliveries could be made to the target's house, and so on.
And, BSC was adept at meddling in U.S. politics and media, planting all sorts of news reports and polls that were meant to counteract the prevailing public sentiment of staying out of the war, the book says. It is not clear how successful the meddling was, but BSC had a number of contacts within the U.S. press.
Fake news was fine with BSC. For example, in 1941 a sham astrologer working for Stephenson made dire predictions about Hitler and his allies, which were widely published in the United States.
Stephenson had the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller, who became a top American spook for Latin America after America entered the war. Whether Roosevelt, who was seeking a reason to bring America into the war, knew of BSC's harassment of "pro-Nazi" American citizens is not known.
"Delusional paranoid schizophrenic" is a common brushoff for those who claim clandestine harassment. Yet, what if the person who makes such claims poses a political threat to some powerful group or other? It's bothersome that numerous psychiatrists assume such claims automatically qualify a person for the diagnosis of mental illness, without having bothered to check whether there could well be a political motive for "gang stalking" by spooks.
True, many with such beliefs are delusional paranoids. But as we are taught in elementary logic, many does not imply all.
The fact that I have not here cited gang harassment of Americans by U.S. intelligence does not mean that such bedevilment doesn't occur. The fact that the CIA prefers not to acknowledge that Russian spooks use this technique is, let us say, noteworthy. [Since this was written, American officials have accused Cuba of permitting covert audio-weapon attacks on U.S. diplomats.]
We had a series of break-ins at our flat, where these agents would come in, obviously when we were away, and they would leave clues that any idiot could find. You didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes; it was completely obvious that they cut the central heating when it was -20 [degrees], that they deleted my screensaver showing my wife and kids.
And most chillingly, we came back ... to discover the window next to my 6-year-old son's bed, which we always double-locked, because it was a huge drop to the courtyard below, had been bust open and propped open next to the bed. And it was a sort of chilling sign, if you like, that if you carry on writing the stuff you're writing about, your son might just fall out the window.
And I took advice from the British embassy in Moscow; they told me that this kind of harassment, psychological harassment, really, was meted out to British diplomats, to American diplomats as well, to their Russian staff, and that our apartment was now bugged and there was not much we could do about it.
Perverts plant a book
On Russian surveillance tactics, one thing puts me in mind of Donald Trump. There's a whole conversation about what he did or didn't do in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013 — about whether there was sexual activity going on or not. But one thing I can tell you is that the FSB really are obsessed with sex, because I came home after one break-in, and I discovered a sex manual left by the side of my bed, the marital bed.
Next to all of the middle-class novels that your listeners have in English, there was this bloody sex manual, and the FSB ... had bookmarked it to page 181, and it was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
I opened this thing and I'm thinking, "What are they trying to tell me? Is there a frequency issue or some other kind of technical problem they've observed on their video?" And the page was on orgasms, how to have a better orgasm, and of course we kind of wave this thing around at dinner parties and we laughed at it, but actually it wasn't so funny. It showed that the KGB has a dark sense of humor. But they were basically saying, "We're watching you."
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