All posts by Mark Hackard

BA in Russian Language (Georgetown University), MA in Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (Stanford University). I study the intersection of political culture, religion and strategic issues, which I approach from a traditionalist-conservative position. Some of my major intellectual influences are Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortes, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rene Guenon and Fr. Seraphim Rose. I translate classic Russian political and religious texts.
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Italian Job: The KGB, Gladio & P-2 Lodge

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While stationed in Italy, Soviet journalist and undercover KGB officer Leonid Sergeevich Kolosov (1926-2008) was told by none other than mafia boss Nicola Gentile about the realities of power in postwar Italy. Gentile’s revelations and information provided by other agents pointed to a “secret government” running Italy through an elite masonic lodge: P-2, itself a tool of the CIA and NATO’s infamous Gladio program.

My meetings with Nicola Gentile, already without Felice Chilanti, took place on a more or less regular basis. “Grandfather” (our service assigned him this code name) took a great liking to me, especially after I gave him an antique Russian icon for his collection, so to say. At one of our meetings there was a rather strange conversation that Gentile himself started.

Continue reading Italian Job: The KGB, Gladio & P-2 Lodge →
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Italian Job: The KGB, Mafia & Red Brigades

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Leonid Sergeevich Kolosov (1926-2008) was a Soviet international correspondent for Izvestia and also attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the KGB First Chief Directorate (FCD). Kolosov was stationed in Italy, his country of specialization, in the 1960s and 1970s under journalistic cover. In this interview he recounts his work with Sicilian mafia boss Nicola Gentile and penetrating the Red Brigades.

Leonid Sergeevich, how did you get into intelligence work?

I got into intelligence work by accident, but the secrets of this service’s techniques were revealed to me by my instructor when I was learning the mysteries of this complex but rather fascinating and interesting, work in Balashikha, a town outside Moscow, at the 101st School. In this school there were one-year and three-year training courses for intelligence officers. I made it into the one-year course.

Continue reading Italian Job: The KGB, Mafia & Red Brigades →
Articles

Who Was Yuri Bezmenov?

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Over the past several years, the testimony of a previously obscure Soviet defector has grown ever more potent as America unravels into chaos. Should we trust him?

The late Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), styled a man who turned his back on the KGB and a “fighter against totalitarianism,” has gained exalted status among independent media commentators and has even found currency in the mainstream. Bezmenov, the son of a Red Army officer and trained in oriental languages, was a journalist for the Soviet news agency Novosti and scored a posting to India in the late 1960s. In 1970 he vanished from the USSR embassy colony disguised as a hippy and made his way to the West, where he would rail against the Soviet system, writing pamphlets like Love Letter to America; No Novosti is Good News; World Thought Police; and Black is Beautiful, Communism is Not.

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Robert Maxwell & the KGB

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According to new revelations, the ultra-wealthy financier and elite sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had a mentor who recruited him into Israeli intelligence early in his career: billionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell. And nearly three decades before Epstein’s highly suspicious death, Maxwell would suffer a similar murky fate. What did Soviet intelligence know about Maxwell? KGB veteran Col. Nikolai Shvarev tells Moscow Center’s side of the story:

At the beginning of the 1990s, his mysterious death became a sensation. And that’s just for starters, after all, 68-year-old Lord Robert Maxwell – owner of one of the largest media empires on the planet; a billionaire; friend of Leonid Brezhnev and other politicians around the world; a carouser and debauchee whose impressive size and ferocious personality earned him the nickname “the killer whale” – had died. Continue reading Robert Maxwell & the KGB →

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Victor Rothschild, Soviet Spy

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The mystery of Lord Victor Rothschild’s (1910-1990) connections to Soviet intelligence has vexed researchers for over a half century now. As the scion of an ultra-wealthy banking house and confidante to Winston Churchill, Rothschild was an influential figure in Britain’s power elite for decades, occupying key positions in counterintelligence, the energy sector and strategic policy planning. But was he also the notorious Cambridge Spy Ring’s “Fifth Man,” a spy for Moscow who could access the crown jewels of UK secrets?

The Cambridge network – consisting of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – has gone down in history as one of Soviet secret service’s most successful penetrations, to the shame of the British establishment. Long after their exposure, Rothschild was well-situated as a grey cardinal of UK politics, seemingly untouchable. Continue reading Victor Rothschild, Soviet Spy →

Articles

Did Russia Hack the Election?

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Did Russian intelligence sway the outcome of the 2016 United States presidential race? Ask the CIA and mainstream Western media organs, and they’ll have you believe that yes, it was none other than Moscow’s shadowy operatives who managed to infiltrate Donald Trump into the newly gold-bedecked Oval Office. Blame the Russians, our betters declare, rather than a year of skewed coverage and loaded polls. While the theory has become popular among opposition to the new administration, it is based on exactly zero evidence – which means we should designate it under the establishment’s own rubric as “fake news.”

To bolster the charge, the US Intelligence Community (of Iraq WMD fame) has released a public report intimating that Vladimir Putin “hacked the election.” Through cyberwarfare, agents of influence and information campaigns, we are told, the Kremlin pulled off the unthinkable and effectively ran a regime-change operation in America. Warmongering neoconservatives and virtue-signaling liberals alike commenced their reenactment of Red Dawn. Piling on, CNN and Buzzfeed unveiled a sloppy, error-ridden and highly dubious dossier detailing Trump’s alleged Russian ties and sexual blackmail material (kompromat). None of these claims have been backed by a shred of credible proof presented to the public, so why should they be taken as an article of faith? Continue reading Did Russia Hack the Election? →

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KGB Directorate S: Training an Illegal

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How did the KGB train its deep-cover officers to pose, operate and live under the guise of foreign nationalities? Former KGB Chairman Vladimir Efimovich Semichastny (1924-2001) describes how the KGB First Chief Directorate’s elite Directorate S processed, prepared and deployed illegal officers for work abroad in the field – without the protection of the Soviet embassy or Moscow Center.

Our nation’s intelligence was distinguished by one particularity that could be discovered only extremely rarely in the practices of other secret services. This concerns the training and use of so-called “illegals” – Soviet citizens who settled in other countries under assumed names, thereby allowing us to create the consummate agent network. Such a network couldn’t be uncovered by the Western counterintelligence services that were orbiting mainly around our embassies; representations; trade missions; bureaus; and press agencies. Continue reading KGB Directorate S: Training an Illegal →

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Lights, Camera, Covert Action

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KGB Colonel Stanislav Lekarev (1935-2010) was an especially apt observer of the interplay between intelligence, culture and deep politics. While we know about the CIA’s extensive ties with Hollywood, the KGB had its own assets in the USSR film industry. Here Lekarev, an officer of the KGB First Chief Directorate, goes undercover as a Soviet film executive in 1970’s London, where he crosses swords with British counterintelligence, MI5. 

SovExportFilm wasn’t a cover for everyone – you could crash and burn quickly here. A three-month probation period in State Cinema before my departure gave me little to work with. Moscow negotiations with Western commercial representatives didn’t allow me to delve into the nuances of SovExportFilm’s specifics. Viewing Western productions also didn’t help me any. And it was so obvious their quality was higher. Only on the job do you understand that you have to figure out the details of film production – be able to precisely determine the worthiness of reels from the point of view of mastery by scenarists, directors, cameramen, actors, as well as the quality of the film. It’s additionally useful to know the basics of the Stanislavsky System; this impresses those conversing with you. Along with all of that, you need accounting knowledge and the ability to write reports. If you don’t go the distance, the question of your replacement will be raised. So it happened – people wishing to replace you will always be found.

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Stopping Skorzeny

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In late 1943 SS commando Otto Skorzeny, known as “the most dangerous man in Europe,” was tasked by Hitler with a daunting mission: kill Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, the Big Three, in Tehran, Iran. The bold plan, code-named Unternehmen Weitsprung (Operation Long Jump), might even have succeeded but for the efforts of Allied intelligence services. Below is the story of Ivan Agayants, Soviet NKVD resident in Tehran, who played a key role in foiling Berlin’s assassination plot. 

In the old Soviet action film Tehran-43, the fearless and sexy intelligence officer sent from Moscow to Iran’s capital with a special mission dashingly neutralized Hitler’s terrorists, who were preparing the assassination of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. In that film there are three truths. The first: At the end of 1943 in Tehran, the Big Three Conference took place. The second truth: the fascists were preparing an assassination attempt on the leaders of the USSR, USA, and Great Britain. And the third: Soviet intelligence liquidated the terrorists. Continue reading Stopping Skorzeny →

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The Bolsheviks’ Occult War

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In his analysis of the modern world, French Traditionalist thinker René Guénon noted that the true masters of revolutions, materialism and secularism were not actually ends in themselves, but only the initial phases in the occult processing of society. The ultimate end of the cryptocratic elites, Guénon believed, was the destruction of sacred tradition and the enthronement of infernal forces in a new counter-religion. With the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and early-period Soviet intelligence’s forays into the realms of the esoteric, we have a powerful example of Guénon’s thesis in action, as recounted by contemporary Russian journalist Georgy Filin.

Sami sorcerers and Buryat shamans, connoisseurs of cryptography and ancient poisons, hypnotists and psychics, telepaths and clairvoyants – who wasn’t brought in to work in the OGPU [Unified State Political Directorate] Special Department directed by one of Lenin’s closest colleagues, Gleb Bokii. The Special Department was consulted by luminary of Soviet psychiatry academic Vladimir Bekhterev, and one of its key officers was none other than the famed terrorist Yakov Blumkin, a favorite of Cheka head Felix Dzerzhinsky and the prototype of Maksim Isaev, Stierlitz. And Bokii himself possibly served as the prototype of another well-known personage – Bulgakov’s Woland. It was said that at the Chekist’s dacha events frequently took place akin to the ball described in Master and Margarita.

Continue reading The Bolsheviks’ Occult War →