Latest news with #Cheka
Focus Malaysia
3 days ago
- Politics
- Focus Malaysia
PAS claims Pahang is set to vote for PN in the next GE
PAS deputy president Datuk Seri Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man claims public support in Pahang for PAS and Perikatan Nasional (PN) has significantly increased, indicating voters are ready to choose PN as the state government in the upcoming 16th General Election (GE16). 'This development is not only evident from the encouraging attendance at various grassroots programmes, but it is also supported by independent studies and on-the-ground observations. 'Moreover, we can see that the people are increasingly rejecting any explanations or statements by the government on various issues,' he said in a statement. The Cheka assemblyman Tuan Ibrahim also claims young voters, civil servants, and rural communities are increasingly rejecting the UMNO-Pakatan Harapan state government, forcing it to work harder to prove its competence. Backing the claims by the PAS leader, Pahang PAS information chief Ustaz Aireroshairi Roslan, stressed that UMNO must mentally prepare to become the opposition after the GE16, following the increasing public support for PAS from GE13 to GE15. He also said the 'PAS Leads Pahang' slogan taunted as mere rhetoric by UMNO shows that the ruling party is still in denial and refuses to accept the reality of the changing political landscape in the state. 'The strong public response to this tagline proves that the people are ready for a leadership change that is cleaner and more trustworthy,' he said in a statement, adding that UMNO is riddled with internal crises and leadership turmoil while PAS has strengthened party machinery. On the other hand, he also said the cooperation between DAP and Umno is now a heavy liability for the Malay party. 'How can UMNO claim to fight for the Malay agenda when they are willing to collaborate with a party that has always opposed the special position of the Malays?' he questioned. — July 19, 2025 Main photo credit: Bernama
Scotsman
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Scotsman
The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies by Shaun Walker review
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Readers will leave this book wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the stories of the illegal spies, but also with a new understanding of Russian political history and theory over the last 150 years. To understand the illegals, Shaun Walker explains, we need to go back to Lenin and his party as they worked to overthrow the Tsar. Central to their methodology was the notion of konspiratzia, a word closer in meaning in English to 'subterfuge' than 'conspiracy'. This involved planting 'fifth columnists' into the government's secret services, and crossing between legal and illegal activities, from demonstrations and petitions to crime – theft and killings. This continued when the Soviet Union was established. The Cheka, the founding forerunner of the KGB, used these methods to root out and punish dissent at home, and to infiltrate spies overseas. In the late 1920s and into the 1930s these most secret of spies were not declared to a host nation as embassy-based intelligence officers but infiltrated into the country with a false identity and documents. If discovered, they could not claim diplomatic immunity but faced the full force of the law. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It is when Walker gets into the Cold War period that his book is at its most startling. This is because the key to intelligence research is interview and his skills as an investigative journalist have taken him to several illegals as well as to the intelligence officers who snared them. He has also gone into the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin's Archive in Cambridge and Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service Records. These approaches, for example, give us the full story of Yuri Linov, who was an illegal in Austria, Belgium, the UK, Ireland, and later in Israel: it was for that assignment that he had to undergo adult circumcision. We meet and get to know a number of illegals and their families, learning more about their recruitment, their role and how lives and relationships were broken. Many retired illegals became alcoholics or had mental breakdowns and spent the rest of their lives in hospitals for the mentally ill. None were fully trusted again when they returned to Russia. Some parents never saw their children grow up, others, the more recent illegals, had children born after they had been implanted in Canada or the USA, these children not knowing that they were Russian, never meeting extended families. What a waste of a life, some of them thought, when their careers ended. The last part of the book deals with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Putin is a Chekist, a KGB man through and through, and his job before he became president was as director of the FSB – the domestic arm of the former KGB. Putin is no Leninist, he is more inclined to Stalinism, but he absorbed the konspiratzia mindset which imbued both these predecessors. Under his leadership, not only is the illegals policy is still in place, but it has developed to include what have become known as 'virtual illegals': social media trolls with a range of Western names, sat at computer screens in office blocks in St Petersburg manipulating social media exchanges with voters in elections across the Western world. In Russia itself, the security service is the spine of the new nation, with the illegals celebrated in books and exhibitions, while the glamorous Anna Chapman, one of the illegals captured in New York 15 years ago, became a host on a Moscow TV talk show and is a fashion consultant. The field this book covers is vast and the breadth and depth of the research exceptional, with 52 pages of notes, references, and a bibliography of nearly 250 published works, many of them in Russian. Perhaps the editing down of the secondary material on the early illegals has meant the loss of some nuances, but that is a mere quibble. This is a splendid and most important book.
