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23 May, 53 tweets, 12 min read
Belarusian KGB hijacked a plane headed to Vilnius with a fake bomb threat to arrest a journalist wanted by Lukashenko. Extraordinary. rferl.org/amp/belarus-ra…
More details on what happened inside the aircraft:
We still don't have a sense for who else was on Protasevich's plane, but my guess is an Athens-Vilnius flight was carrying quite a lot of EU passport holders, all of whom were also put in mortal peril by this state hijacking.
Citizens of NATO member-states, too. "Collective security" looking more a platitude than a reality.
And now that information on who else was on board the plane, still grounded (held hostage, really) in Minsk:
And now the Russian state media reaction: a "beautiful move."
First EU response I've seen. "Inadmissable," as though this were evidence introduced in court. And please let the passengers carry on their way. (Protasevich faces the death penalty in Belarus.)
"Unacceptable" now, too. And inadmissible. Carlos the Jackal must be sat in prison thinking he never had it so good.
KGB operatives boarded in Athens, not exactly a bulwark of European counterintelligence. In 2014, the GRU's psychological warfare Unit 54777 hosted a security conference there via a cut-out "think tank." Image
A year later, Greece's future defense minister was in Moscow for a round table on Greece's election. His co-panelist was an officer from Unit 54777. Image
Source for both: valisluureamet.ee/pdf/raport/202…
"Very concerned." "Inadmissible." "Unacceptable."
“Great news for everyone” except for Raman Protasevich, the journalist whose kidnapping was the point of this hijacking and who is still in KGB custody and facing the death penalty.
EU officials could have said nothing and simply worked quietly behind the scenes to have the plane minus Protasevich released, then proclaimed the entire thing a tragedy and a crime once the plane was out of Belarusian airspace. Instead, the above.
Tomorrow I expect Miloš Zeman to suggest the plane was actually diverted to Prague by BIS. I mean, at this point, why the hell not?
From a former candidate for Belarus’ presidency who was arrested and tortured by Lukashenko’s KGB:
Poland’s Foreign Minister:
Ireland’s:
Latvia’s:
Note that last August Lithuania was one of the loudest defenders of Belarusian democrats being violently suppressed by Lukashenko. Especially former FM @LinkeviciusL. That this flight was destined for Vilnius must have been an added sadistic joy for Luka.
Imagine experiencing this on a commercial flight from Greece to Lithuania in the 21st century. Just try to imagine it.
Echoing sentiments of Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Better than her first tweet, which wasn’t very hard to accomplish.
This one was inevitable. Image
This is like a reimagined CAPTAIN PHILLIPS in which Tom Hanks's character is asleep for everything except the end.
So far the funniest one:
A predictable (and predictably idiotic) scheme. The first is designed to distract you from a state hijacking of a commercial airliner while the second is designed to convince you it was justified.
The Azov allegation was surfaced in... an oped.
Pretty much.
*Chef's kiss*:
Russia certainly looking like an accomplice after the fact. All that faux concern for being granted access to the Skripals and here is one of their citizens detained in a foreign (allied) country and the response is: “Meh. Keep her.”
Jim’s very mordant and worth following in general:

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More from @michaeldweiss

Michael Weiss Profile picture
26 Apr
So far my favorite example of a bitter internal U.S. intelligence dispute manifesting itself in a very flawed (to say the least) public perception crisis of what was really taking place. Below, the Special National Intelligence Estimate, Sep. 1962:
The one person in the Kennedy administration who believed the Soviets were sending offensive missiles to Cuba was CIA Director John McCone. The problem -- or problems?
1. McCone was on his honeymoon in Paris at the time, not in Washington. His order for daily U-2 overflights in Cuba was overruled by Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. His suggested SNIE raising the alarm was similarly ignored for the above.
Read 11 tweets
Michael Weiss Profile picture
20 Apr
The only person who emailed us today about this was... Paul McKeigue. No one claiming to represent the “Berlin Group 21” did so. So now I would like to know why the “Berlin Group 21” claims they contacted us directly when someone who denies having anything to do with them did.
And we incorporated McKeigue’s denial into our article. He had declined to comment in advance of publication.
And note the “Berlin Group 21” correctly states that a request was addressed to the “journalists”. Indeed, McKeigue emailed both @JettGoldsmith and myself at our personal email accounts. How would the “Berlin Group 21” know that?
Read 10 tweets
Michael Weiss Profile picture
20 Apr
NEW: A group of British academics and bloggers sowing disinformation about Syria's use of chemical weapons have coordinated their efforts with four different Russian diplomatic missions around the world, emails show: thedailybeast.com/syria-chemical…
A number of stunning revelations in a three-month correspondence between one of the academics and "Ivan," someone he believed was a Russian spy.

"Ivan" was in reality @CIJAOnline, an NGO collecting evidence of war crimes in Syria, conducting a sting operation.
Professor Paul McKeigue, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, mapped out his cohort's entire network of disinformation peddlers and their liaisons: Russian officials in The Hague, New York, London and Geneva.
Read 16 tweets
Michael Weiss Profile picture
19 Apr
This piece by @TomRtweets is the best anatomy I've seen as to the ongoing dispute between CIA and NSA on the now much scrutinized GRU "bounties" story. And it's conveniently short: washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/inside…
Note that there was no climb-down from the original leaked allegations, as reported correctly in the NYT that NSA had a lower level of confidence in this intelligence than did CIA. ("Moderate" confidence means pretty good, in laymen's terms.)
The fact that this intelligence made it into the President's Daily Brief (Trump's) also suggested it wasn't quite the nothing-burger it's since been portrayed as in the press. Ditto making it into the WH statement on sanctions:
Read 16 tweets
Michael Weiss Profile picture
17 Apr
I'm going to watch this tomorrow, but I still can't figure why they had to invent a CIA case officer for Rachel Brosnahan to play. She'd have been perfect as Janet Chisholm, who (to my mind) played a more daring role than Wynne in this op. spytalk.co/p/spytalk-at-t…
You've essentially got MI6's answer to the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in this character.
There was initially almost no suspicion about Penkovsky, whose cover gig was to meet trade delegations, gallivanting around Moscow with Wynne. Janet, meanwhile, had to do brush-passes in broad daylight, in a Moscow park, with -- checks notes -- three small children and a pram.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Weiss Profile picture
17 Apr
So in 2014 the GRU blew up Czech military ammunition destined, via a Bulgarian arms dealer, for Ukraine. Then it twice tried to murder the Bulgarian with a nerve agent, first in Sofia, then on the Bulgarian coast. The puzzle pieces finally fall into place.
Emilian Gebrev had all sorts of other theories as to why the Russians wanted him dead—his arms dealing to Georgia and Ukraine, he believed, was too small-stakes to qualify.
An excellent thread on this breaking news.
Read 16 tweets

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