More Russia, Russia, Russia

In the summer of 2016, a Russian news agency published a story about the death of a high-level defector who had been living in hiding in the United States. But the defector, Col. Alexander Poteyev, was, and is, alive; the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow believes the phony story was likely part of a plot to smoke him out and target him for assassination in the U.S.

Daniel Hoffman, a retired CIA officer and one of its top specialists on the Kremlin, says the Russian intelligence operation against Poteyev, which has only recently come to light, appears to be part of an increasingly aggressive pattern of activity by Vladimir Putin’s government to target Russian spies who betray their country.

“He’s interested in exacting revenge on as many of these guys as he can find,” said Hoffman in an interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery.” “There is no bridge too far for Vladimir Putin.”

Hoffman spoke to “Skullduggery” about the revelations in a new book, written by a veteran BBC journalist, Mark Urban, who spent ten hours in 2017 interviewing Sergei Skripal, the former Russian intelligence officer who was poisoned along with his daughter — allegedly by Kremlin agents — in Salisbury, England, last March. The book, “The Skripal Files: The Life and Near Death of a Russian Spy,” offers provocative new theories about the attempted murder of Skripal, suggesting that he was targeted when the Russians failed in their attempts to kill Poteyev, another Russian military intelligence spy turned double agent. It was Poteyev who had tipped off the FBI in 2010 about the existence of a ring of “sleeper agents” — known as “the illegals” because they operated without the usual diplomatic cover — who were spying on American political and business figures. (The most prominent member of the ring was Anna Chapman, a glamorous young woman who became a tabloid favorite and later a regular TV personality when she returned to Russia.)

More:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-plot-kill-defector-began-false-story-death-144133179.html