The Shadow Knows

On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong-nam, the older half-brother of the dictator of North Korea Kim Jong Un, was assassinated at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. He had been living abroad since his exile from North Korea in 2003. At approximately 9:00 a.m., two women splashed Kim Jong-nam with the VX nerve agent. He died about 15 to 20 minutes later while being transported to the hospital. Four North Korean suspects, later confirmed as spies, left the airport shortly after the assassination and reached Pyongyang without being arrested.

A group of American-born Koreans, known as Cheollima Civil Defense, has a history of helping North Koreans defect all over the world. To protect North Koreans assigned to that nation’s embassies around the world from retaliating against family or even the defectors themselves, Cheollima operatives have, for example, feigned a Madrid embassy kidnapping as a necessary ruse against North Koren retaliation. These US citizens face criminal charges. Spanish authorities only have proof of a failed kidnapping.

Among numerous other documented Russian extra-territorial assassinations, Alexander Litvinenko a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and its predecessor, the KGB, until he left the service and fled to the UK, where he criticized the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In exile, Litvinenko worked with British intelligence, sharing information about the Russian mafia in Europe and its connections with the Russian government. On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned and later hospitalized in London. He died 3 weeks later, becoming the first known victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome.

In October of 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist and US resident, was killed by agents of the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Khashoggi was ambushed and strangled by a 15-member squad of Saudi operatives. His body was dismembered and disposed of in some way that was never publicly revealed. All these reports can be found on Wikipedia if you want more details, but governmental, extra-territorial assassinations have been a way of life, death if you will, for millennia. And yes, the US hardly has clean hands.

What may be more recent, however, is the number of “branch offices” inside Western nations (including very much the United States and Canada) of very “unofficial” foreign governmental tracking, intimidation and assassination bureaus following their current and former citizens (no longer citizens or residents of their native country) with even dirtier hands. China, North Korea and Russia in particular. Hidden away in ethnic neighborhoods, these “offices” are often brazened in their efforts. Extraterritorial assassinations have ramped up considerably in recent years.

Extraterritorial efforts at punishing individuals who have deeply angered their countries of origin is bad enough, the tsunami of election manipulation (mis- and disinformation) deployed to create friendly Western leaders to step aside is terrifying to boot, but the extent of such operations is unprecedented. You may have read how Putin and his cronies have stated very clearly that NATO’s support of Ukraine is a de facto declaration of war against Russia. What you may not know is how Russia has begun to mount efforts to threaten and sabotage Western facilities, governmental and private, in retaliation. Could these skirmishes and attacks become the trigger for an all-out war?

The May 12th The Economist (“Russia is ramping up sabotage across Europe”) explains that Moscow believes it is already fighting a shadow war with NATO: “The fire that broke out in the Diehl Metall factory in the Lichterfelde suburb of Berlin on May 3rd was not in itself suspicious. The facility, a metals plant, stored sulphuric acid and copper cyanide, two chemicals that can combine dangerously when ignited. Accidents happen. What raised eyebrows was the fact that Diehl’s parent company makes the IRIS-T [a medium range infrared homing air-to-air missile] defence system which Ukraine is using to parry Russian missiles…

“In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent. Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency [updated version of the Soviet-era KGB, from which Putin himself graduated]. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted. The men are accused of aiding the Wagner Group, a mercenary group that has been active in Ukraine and is now under the GRU’s control. On May 8th Britain announced that in response to ‘malign activity’ it was, among other steps, expelling Russia’s defence attaché, an ‘undeclared’ GRU officer…

“A number of Baltic states have also accused Russian intelligence services of recruiting middlemen to attack property and deface monuments. In February Estonia said it had arrested ten people and broken up a plot to attack the cars of the country’s interior minister and the editor of a news website. Latvia’s security service said it had detained an Estonian-Russian citizen who had poured paint on a memorial to Latvian soldiers who fought the Red Army in the second world war. In March an ally of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in Russian custody in February, was attacked with a hammer in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.

“None of this is new. In 2011 the GRU blew up an ammunition depot in Lovnidol in Bulgaria. It followed that up with two explosions at the Vrbetice arms depot in the Czech Republic in October and December 2014, where ammunition bound for Ukraine was being held. All these incidents were tied to members of Unit 29155, the GRU’s sabotage-and-assassination squad. Other unexplained explosions occurred at Bulgarian arms factories in 2015, 2020 and 2022. But European officials believe that the GRU has been given a fresh mandate and funding for what Russia calls ‘active measures’. On May 2nd NATO published a statement describing these incidents as ‘part of an intensifying campaign of activities’ including sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns, and other hybrid operations.

”Russian cyber operations have also grown bolder. A report published by Google’s Mandiant cybersecurity division in April noted that ‘hacktivist’ groups with loose ties to the GRU had made credible boasts of manipulating the control systems for water utilities in America and Poland, and what the hackers thought was a hydroelectric facility in France. The GRU had previously conducted sophisticated cyber-attacks on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure both before and after the full-scale invasion of 2022. That it was willing to threaten—if not yet disrupt—the same infrastructure in Europe suggests a new level of recklessness.” As sitting members of Congress downplay such activities, even seeming to admire and support such malign regimes, I wonder what it means to be an American under a Constitution meant for the land of the free and the home of the brace.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the words we all heard in the motion picture, Poltergeist, “they’re here…”