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26 May, 11 tweets, 3 min read
NEW: So you know how Lukashenko blamed the Ryanair diversion to Minsk on a Hamas bomb threat? Well, we got the email "Hamas" sent to airports. The problem? The timestamp shows it was sent 24 minutes *after* Belarus told the pilot a bomb was on board. newlinesmag.com/reportage/luka…
Joint story with the Dossier Center and @thedailybeast. Oh, and I guess the KGB!
Also amusing is the name the "Hamas" operative used: Ahmed Yurlanov. Yurlanov is a Russian, Bulgarian, Azeri and... Jewish surname. woords.su/full-name/russ…
At this rate...
Note, too, these idiots didn't even send the email to Vilnius Airport, as they did to Minsk, but to State Enterprise Lithuanian Airports, the company that handles three different airports: Vilnius, Kaunas, and Palanga.
Dossier's version up too now (in Russian): dossier.center/bel-hamas/
I started on this at around noon today and I'm still laughing about an airliner bomb threat subject line being "Allahu Akbar."
😂
Buddy, have I got news for you.
Spiegel now with the story: spiegel.de/ausland/belaru…

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More from @michaeldweiss

Michael Weiss Profile picture
23 May
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:
Read 53 tweets
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

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