^ Bellingcat, er, Bill the Cat

Navalny poses as a higher ranking ‘apparatchik’ within Russia’s security services, scrambling to understand what went wrong with the plot to murder (himself) with the nerve agent novichok. He (Navalny) ostensibly has reached one of the foot-soldiers (a Russian intelligence services officer, at his home phone) tasked with carrying out Navalny’s assassination (I would have said you can’t make this shit up except for someone clearly did.) The hoax is audacious.

The 1st problem with Navalny’s ‘hoax call’ reported by Bellingcat is the dates. The 2nd problem is Bellingcat is the reporter. Or, you can switch the order, these are co-equal problems, followed by a 3rd problem that is the call itself.

1) The poisoning happened on 20 August, the ‘hoax call’ is made on 14 December, and released by Bellingcat on 21 December. Now, wait a minute. The context of the call, a desperate demand for answers of what went wrong (Navalny didn’t die) for a report to higher up authority, is something you would expect within the first 48 hours, not nearly three months later. By the time this call was made, that dust should have settled and been vacuumed up by Russia’s intelligence services, everyone would have been debriefed by this time, including the target of the hoax call.

2) Bellingcat is an organization on the point of ‘the Russians did it’ (or the Russians should be held responsible, even if they didn’t do it) world information warfare stage from Syria chemical warfare crimes to MH17 to the Skripal poisoning to (now) Navalny (and whatever else escapes my memory at the moment.)

Every reasonably competent intelligence officer from either side of the ongoing state of warfare between the NATO & NATO associated intelligence agencies, and Russia, perfectly assumes Bellingcat is a front for British intelligence, if they are honest, which is forbidden in this case, if you work for Western intelligence (as well, the CIA might easily request a favor from MI6 and its proxy Bellingcat, time to time.) Of course, if you are Russian, it is not permitted in the liberal democracies to believe anything you have to say (whether truthful or not.)

3) The recorded call itself requires you to believe Russian intelligence officers assigned to assassinations are 85 IQ troglodytes in eternal state of drunk or hungover. That works, if you are a Robert Littell (CIA disinformation) spy novel fan or, alternatively, a 007 freak where Russian intelligence operatives, when it comes to assassinations, are so muscle-bound around the head, there is no space left for brains (having all been squeezed out by steroids, obviously.) But the propaganda ploy works for precisely the subliminal stereotype created in the Western media audience; at many levels we all are conditioned (or attempted to be conditioned) to believe the stereotypes.

At 14 minutes in, there are real questions. He’s too slow & dumb (the FSB guy) he should have been wide awake by now, this all seems scripted. Do we know it is actually the Russian officer on the other end? Rather, is it a MI6 or CIA actor? In the very early stages (long before the 14th minute), the ‘Russian’ intelligence officer should have demanded to make the call himself, calling back from a secure phone to his interrogator (after confirming with his own chain of command), at the least. I can’t believe the Russians are without strict protocol training in this regard. The so-called ‘Konstantin Kudryavtsev’ (a real person but certainly not the person in the call) is too stupid, by far, to demand this obviously important security protocol, and that stupidity is covered by the very fact of discussing ‘a secure line’ while posing him as half-awake & consequently ‘snookered.’ But even a hungover and half-awake 85 IQ (if such ever existed in the FSB, not likely) should grasp violating this protocol while running his mouth could find him hung upside down in chains in the basement of the Lubyanka (FSB Headquarters in Moscow) while his bosses decided what would become of him. This raises a related issue; why would someone who’d so famously screwed up a hit still be on the job? The entire business stinks from the beginning.

Then, at 18 minutes in, the ‘Russian’ troglodyte is volunteering via unsecured line a local investigative chief’s phone number to a ‘superior officer’ (Navalny’s alias) that prior to this call he has never even heard of:

It just goes downhill from there…

The concluding question should be, did Nalvany understand he had been talking to a Western intelligence asset/actor? The answer would be “probably not.” Narcissists are brilliant material for intelligence agency manipulations, in this case of Western intelligence engineering (from the outset) Nalvany being of greater value as an information operations asset in Berlin as opposed to a perpetually failed color revolutionary in Russia.

 

Related: Initial impression in the Navalny ‘poisoning’ (22 August)

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A former Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces, Ronald Thomas West is a retired investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption. Ronald had lived over thirty years in close association with Blackfeet Indians (those who still speak their language), and is published in international law as a layman: The Right of Self- Determination of Peoples and It’s Application to Indigenous People in The USA or The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole. Ronald has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background (no degree) is social psychology. His therapeutic device is satire.

Contact: penucquemspeaks@googlemail.com