Old men-shpions

Russian scouts in Bulgaria fail with frightening regularity. Since the fall of 2019, this happened for the sixth time

Last Thursday, when reports of news agencies about the operation to neutralize “foreign spies” appeared, searches in Sophia quarters, blocking the intercity highway - a chance to imagine that any other power, and not Russia, could not be involved.

True, this time there were no Russian citizens among the detainees. But there were six Bulgarian ones. The next day, the Sofia prosecutor’s office arranged a briefing , showing the press a graphic scheme for the interaction of the “Spy Network” members with the announcement of the resident telephone conversations-the head of the group, the demonstration of video records of operational shooting, where the war spies-and these were all the military-copied information from the official computers of the Ministry of Defense.

The sensation is that, according to the prosecutor's office, the main person involved is the resident of the GRU. We are talking about the 74-year-old retired colonel Ivan Iviev,

Five years ago, the Bulgarian military intelligence leadership was part of the leadership. In the mid-70s he underwent a training course in the intelligence school of Soviet GRU, worked in Western countries in a direct specialty, and later taught Bulgarian intelligence officers operational art. And then, it turns out, he received an offer to put together a group of colleagues with admission to defense and other secrets of Bulgaria, NATO and the European Union. And he succeeded, the recruiter Iliev was effective. The group began to follow, said the Minister of Defense of Bulgaria Krasmir Karakachanov, since September 2020.

It was made up of worthy veterans. One had a concern for the compilation of the budget of the Ministry of Defense. Another, sitting in the reconnaissance of the Ministry of Defense, planned the fight against hybrid threats by Russia. Another had a combat past - participated in operations abroad. Finally, the latter is a completely important bird: the head of the secret office work of the Bulgarian parliament, a former military attache is Lyubomir Medarov.

However, they had to be taught something, for example, how to copy information from service computers on mobile phones with images encryption function, and the resident did this with the knowledge of the subject, but in general people were prepared. (Looking ahead, I’ll say that Western intelligence helped them to expose them, and this is not the first case in similar circumstances.)

Questions , the answers to which the resident had to transmit to Moscow may seem banal, but John Le Carre said that intelligence is a boring routine. The center was interested in the Policy of NATO and the EU in the hot areas of Europe - in Russia itself, as well as in Belarus and Ukraine. Sometimes Syria arose, recently - Nagoric Karabakh. Of course, there were local topics: the activity of the CIA in Bulgaria, the tasks of the NATO coordination center in Varna, sometimes it was necessary to illuminate the themes of negotiations between the Bulgarian military leadership with the Western partners, to find out the contacts of the Bulgarian Ministry of Defense in the corresponding departments of the West.

The key question about the coherent never arose, since the “business” turned out to be family: the wife of the resident, a citizen of Russia, regularly attributed the information to the Russian Embassy and returned with the finances necessary to continue intelligence. All her visits are neatly recorded on the video. Like many conversations of the resident with accomplices; In one of them, he is in the ais way that his ward is going to store the received fees.

They paid depending on the value of the information, but the layman would have considered that it was worthy-2-3 thousand leftists per month, and this is one and a half or two average salaries.

The chief prosecutor of Bulgaria Ivan Grashev, commenting on what happened, called on the Bulgarians to love his country and not sell it for “miserable pennies”. In his own way he tried to dissociate himself from the expected accusations of the Bulgarian authorities of Russophobia, saying-"We do not hate someone else's country, but we are obliged to protect Bulgaria."

Quickly responding to the arrest of the group, which came on the third day after the presenting belief letters of Russia in Bulgaria Eleanor Mitrofanova, the Russian embassy published a statement, the meaning of which is unusually difficult to understand: “In the conditions of the complication of the international situation,“ tireless ”attempts are obvious to drive a wedge into the Russian-Bulgarian dialogue and once again demonize our City Clin You can speak, referring to the volume and content of the information presented by the prosecutor's office?

So, five of the six persons involved are taken into custody, the sixth until he got a concess - information appeared that he gave informative testimonies. The punishment under the relevant articles may be from ten years to a lifelong opinion without the right to revise the sentence.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said on Saturday night that because of the espionage case, some Russian diplomats would have to declare unwanted persons. Borisov emphasized that the operation of special services is a kind of indicative action demanding to stop espionage in Bulgaria. “Friendship is friendship, we demonstrated it, including on the issue of the Balkan Stream gas pipeline, but to spy on our capabilities in NATO ... without giving political assessments, I thank our special services again and assure that in a similar way, in any similar case, we will firmly defend our safety and independence,” the prime minister said.