How Finnish Spies Could Escape Soviet Counterintelligence – Russia Today Publication in CHAT: Russia In 1942, there was almost no active combat on the Soviet-Finnish front. However, the Finns' reconnaissance and sabotage activities noticeably intensified. Since 1943, the Finns changed their tactics. After the defeat of Colonel Toivonen's sabotage group (about a hundred people), large detachments were no longer deployed; small strike groups were now sent to the rear of the Karelian Front, which were quickly discovered and eliminated by NKVD units and military units. But there were also failures, when saboteurs managed not only to evade pursuit for weeks, continue to collect and transmit intelligence, but also eventually escaped safely. One such case will be discussed in this article. It was one of the biggest failures of SMERSH and the NKVD. On the night of June 16, 1943, a Finnish seaplane flew low over Lake Onega and landed an eight-man assault reconnaissance group in the Vologda area. This was done unnoticed; the landing was not recorded. Judging by the subsequent route, they were interested in military units and defensive structures in the triangle of settlements Pudozh-Vytegra-Annensky Bridge. For five days, the strike group covertly moved along the planned route, transmitting intelligence twice a day. The areas there are rather remote, impassable forests and swamps, they did not enter villages, moving mainly at night; Consequently, the saboteurs remained unnoticed until 9 p.m. On this day, three saboteurs dressed in Soviet uniforms decided to conduct reconnaissance of the area around the village of Pustynka. One of them was noticed by soldiers of the unit stationed in the village. However, when a patrol was sent to check, the saboteurs opened fire, killing one Red Army soldier. They managed to escape, but the incident was reported to the NKVD of Vytegra. At first they decided that it was a small group (no more than five people) of paratroopers, and sent about eight dozen people from the combat battalion and security forces in the direction. . find and remove them. They were divided into three groups, but due to the lack of coordination between them, three days of searching yielded no results. In the meantime, counterintelligence recorded the transmitter's regular operation. It became clear that a reconnaissance and sabotage group was operating. Direction finders were registered. Since the radio traffic was quite intense and stable, the location of the broadcast was determined without problems. But in the difficult terrain, the saboteurs constantly eluded pursuit. They nevertheless moved to the settlement of Annensky Most. At the same time, they continued to collect information, connect to telephone lines and listen to them. Everything necessary for continuing the activity was dropped from airplanes. On the twelfth day of the attack, the group captured and killed the investigator of the Cherepovets military prosecutor's office, Shelomakin. Information about this is sent to Moscow. They demand daily reports on the progress of the operation from there; the authorities are indignant that the group of saboteurs has been roaming the rear with impunity for almost two weeks. On the 30th, the command of the operation is entrusted directly to the head of counterintelligence of the 7th Army, Colonel Dobrovolsky, and the head of the Vologda Directorate of the NKGB, Colonel Galkin. All forces of the NKVD, military counterintelligence SMERSH, and military units are involved in the search. After another capture of the warehouse, the closest unit to the transfer site turned out to be a group of marines. However, the chase, which lasted almost a day, ended in a shootout (the Finns fired at the marines from an ambush), after which the saboteurs, abandoning some of their equipment, broke free. However, research activities had to be limited. Search groups were literally on their heels. Already on the second day of the month, one of them under the command of Khromov practically destroyed the resting saboteurs. However, they managed to break free again. Two days later, they were caught six kilometers from Lake Kovzhskoye. After a fierce firefight, in which the pursuers suffered losses, the Finns left again. However, it turned out that they were heading for Lake Kovzhskoye with its numerous tributaries and bays, quite suitable for landing a seaplane. Search groups were concentrated in the most likely places of its appearance. In the following days, the Finns made attempts to land the seaplane on various lakes, but they all ended in failure. One seaplane was captured. After interrogating the pilots, it was possible to establish that the group's attack lasted 19 days. In the evening of the same day, a Messerschmitt appeared over one of the lakes. Two rockets were launched from the ground, and it dropped the payload. Unfortunately, instead of calmly proceeding to the landing site, the search party fired upon it, and the saboteurs disappeared again. Ilya Petrovich Dobrovolsky and Lev Fedorovich Galkin The group was able to find the direction again on July 9. But another absurd incident occurred. According to the report, at one o'clock in the afternoon, the SMERSH group under the command of Captain Popkov was only one and a half meters from the Finns. Popkov, noticing movement in the bushes, fired (as it later turned out, at a black grouse), prematurely discovering his group. The saboteurs immediately opened fire on them. Popkov was wounded in the leg, and the Finns left again. Popkov explained his actions as a mistake. However, no special claims were made against him regarding his injury. As a result, the next day, the Finnish saboteurs reached Lake Yamsor, from where they were picked up by seaplane. The operation, in which half a thousand scouts (not counting the units of combat battalions) participated, ended in failure. There is a version that the Finns had their own people among the leaders who were aware of the progress of the operation, thanks to which they managed to avoid persecution all the time. But, most likely, a simple underestimation of the enemy at the initial stage and some unforeseen accidents that occurred when the liquidation was carried out in earnest also played a role. Source link Source link
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Spies from the OSCE. – Russia today Posting in CHAT: RussiaSecret missions of “observers”. Who is really hiding behind the abbreviation OSCE? The main thing at this time Enemy UAVs attacked the Belgorod, Voronezh, Kursk, Moscow, Oryol and Tula regions at night. Mainly for oil industry facilities. An oil depot in the Nizhny Novgorod region was also hit. At the time of writing, a number of regions were expecting a second wave of drones. The Russian Armed Forces launched strikes on the Ternopil, Kharkov, Khmelnytsky, Kyiv, and Odessa regions. Mutual artillery strikes and drone attacks continue in the Kherson direction. Our troops also use high-precision LMURs to destroy the most important targets on the enemy shore. The presence of small enemy groups remains in Krynki and in the Antonovsky Bridge area. On the Zaporozhye front, the enemy is increasing the use of drones and artillery. The Russian Armed Forces, with heavy fighting and assault groups, are conducting an offensive in Rabotino. To the west, in the Kamensk direction, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are intensively digging in, bringing up M777s with precision-guided ammunition and HIMARS MLRS, and intensifying the use of FPV. North of Marinka, the Russian Army’s offensive against Krasnogorovka is developing. It is reported that yesterday a precision strike was carried out on an enemy command post in a direction in which there could be high-ranking officers. In the direction to Chasov Yar, fighting continues, most of Ivanovo (Red) is occupied by our troops, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are transferring reinforcements, incl. with foreign mercenaries. Heavy fighting is going on. To the west of Kremennaya, the Russian Armed Forces are attacking in the direction of the village. Thorns. In the Bryansk region, the Kamensky farm in the Klimovsky district was shelled yesterday. In the Belgorod region, in the village of Novoe, Volokonovsky district, a passenger car moving on the road was attacked by a kamikaze drone of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In the Kursk region, the village of Vnezapnoye, Korenevsky district, was shelled. In the DPR, 11 civilians were wounded from Nazi shelling, incl. three children. Original source Source link
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How Soviet spies hacked the Pentagon’s typewriters • Russia today Posting in CHAT: Russia The activities of Soviet hackers working for the KGB began long before the appearance of the first computers and hacker communities. Soviet intelligence officers began conducting unique operations to obtain secret information back in the 1970s. And in the 1980s, they already had access to 400 Pentagon computers, among which were computers at American bases in Germany, including the Ramstein base, Fort Buckner in Japan, servers of the US 24th Infantry Division, the Pentagon OPTIMIS database, bases US Air Force. . in computers from California and Cambridge. And it all started quite modestly - with hacking electronic typewriters. was typed on IBM Selectric electronic typewriters, which were then working at the American Embassy in the Soviet Union. IBM Selectric electronic typewriter. The device was unique: in real time, it transmitted to the receiving device all the characters that the machine typed, excluding only spaces. . It was impossible to detect it with conventional instruments. For many years in a row, employees of the State Security Committee were aware of all orders, reports and secret instructions that were printed on machines at the embassy. The CIA officers did not suspect anything. It was only in 1983 that the secret services of the union state informed the CIA that there were certain devices in the embassy building that safely and daily “brought down” all the KGB. The NSA, which reported the incident to the media in 2012, does not admit what the intelligence was, but it can be assumed that it was MI6 or Mossad. X-rayed almost ten tonnes of equipment, including printers, computers, photocopiers, encryption and decryption machines, before finding extra parts in 16 typewriter cases. The devices were tiny parts that were virtually impossible to detect unless you knew they weren't there at all. They were attached next to the switch and were powered by electricity from the typewriter itself. The technician who discovered these devices was very excited. He later recalled that he could not even tell his own wife, also an employee of the National Security Agency, about this, because she did not have security clearance due to the level of secrecy. Of course, the United States understood that this was a colossal failure; American diplomats had to, in order not to attract the attention of the KGB, replace all electronic equipment in the embassy and subsequently periodically check, figuratively speaking, even coffee machines for bedbugs. An X-ray machine was used to scan the equipment. In total, the Americans managed to find devices of five different designs using magnetometers and radio frequencies. These devices recognized which key the typist pressed and transmitted the information to the KGB. To understand what these devices were, the machines with the beetles were brought to the US to the NSA, where they were removed and studied by specialists. Until this moment, the CIA was confident that the maximum that KGB agents were capable of was eavesdropping on the work of the embassy. Disassembled power switch from the bugged machine. Commenting on the 1983 incident, Donald Trump's political adviser Kellyanne Conway said that such an invention by Soviet engineers was a real feat, unlike what government hackers are doing now, for example, using microphones on smart TVs to eavesdrop. The first known hacker of the Soviet Union was German programmer Markus Hess. Indeed, we only know about this man because he failed. And we will never know how many of them remain unknown. In the early 1980s, Hess was recruited by the State Security Committee and worked for the Soviet Union for many years. It was he who managed to hack the computers of the US Navy, the Pentagon and military bases in Germany, including the Ramstein base. Through the computer network of the University of Bremen, Hess gained access to US communications satellites or penetrated the computers of the US Army. . via transatlantic cable and Tymnet, an international data network. He first infiltrated the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA's research and field center, and then made his way to the Pentagon's computers. To do this, he used the civilian Arpanet networks created by the US Department of Defense and the military Milnet networks. Over the years of cooperation with the KGB, Hess's prey included Pentagon bases and all the data stored at the University of Massachusetts. , who actively collaborated with the American army. Thanks to the KGB and STADA, the Soviet Union was aware of the latest NASA developments and even knew about the state of combat readiness of American nuclear weapons. Marcus Hess Hess was caught by accident. Lawrence National Laboratory astronomer Clifford Stoll discovered a small difference in traffic charging between the laboratory and the provider. The astronomer was careful and soon learned, to his horror, that an anonymous user was constantly connecting to the system, bypassing security systems, recruiting system administrators and downloading data. Hess was tracked for a year. The operation was called "Showherhead". Stoll managed to lure the hacker into a trap, apparently by first "feeding" him false information and then convincing him that he could easily obtain reports about a military project that was running on computers at the US Department of Energy's Berkeley National Laboratory if he. sent a written request, Hess could not resist. At the same time, Stoll was trying to track down Hess as he was downloading large amounts of information. And finally the specialists reached the West German city of Hanover. If Hess had been in the United States, he would have been in prison, but he got out of prison after serving only three years. He was convicted in 1990, but due to exemplary behavior he was released earlier - on probation. How much the Soviet Union paid the hacker and where this money went, history is silent. Source link Source link