IS THE COVERT WAR HEATING UP? September 5, 2023 / Joseph P. Farrell

For some time now I've been trying to warn that the statements of the Russian government and its major officials - people like Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitri Medvedev or even the Bad Vlad himself - need to be taken seriously. We all know this history. For years prior to the "special military action" Russian officials were warning the West that attempts to expand NATO eastward into the Ukraine would not be tolerated. This after worthless Western "guarantees" not to expand the alliance into the former Warsaw Pact nations were ignored. We know what happened next. The Ukraine elected a pro-Russian government, the USSA helped to sponsor a coup to overthrow that president, and install a "new government" more friendly to the West. And here we are. Along the way, the Ukraine also reached "agreements" concerning GMOs, and extended special port facilities to western GMO companies like Mon(ster)santo while the USSA opened up "biolabs" throughout the country to do "research". Prosecutors were fired, and money changed hands.

In short, the warnings were ignored, and now the West and NATO have embroiled themselves in a proxy war against Russia they cannot win for the very simply reason that financial instruments do not win wars. Factories that produce things like ... oh, I don't know... ammunition and weapons do, and we (the West) have been busy the past few decades shipping factories to China. Countries like Germany that were smart enough to keep their factories so they could make actual things forgot that being a friend of the USSA is very dangerous, especially when the energy to run those factories came from Russia, and when, for some reason, they were stupid enough to shut down their nuclear and coal power plants to become Wandervogeln and congratulate themselves on how progressively green they were in following a nonsensical environmental dogma.

So, in the light of all of this, Russia's warnings changed in the last months, and as regular readers of this website know, I've been commenting and blogging about that change. Russian academics began to write op-ed pieces that appeared in the Russian media, and since the media in Russia is without exception a government enterprise, those articles presumably carried the de facto approval of the Russian government. The tenor of these pieces was more or less uniform: Russia should consider the possibility of escalating the war with the Ukraine (and the West) all the way up to nuclear. Along the way, there were distinctive steps and phases in that escalation that Russia could consider, including "horizontal" escalation (whatever that means). Then Medvedev made a statement -- which has since been repeated and reinforced - that basically, the Russian government "knows where you (the "leaders" of the West), live.

In short, amidst the drone campaign that has been unleashed on Russia (doubtless with support from the West both on the ground and in space), Mr. Medvedev was saying that two can play the assassination-by-drone game. Of course, that's a very high phase of "escalation", and we may or may not be there yet, but it is intriguing to contemplate that, suddenly and as if on cue, the droning of Mr. Globalooney lackeys like Baal Gates, Ketchup Kerrey, and der Hochklaus von Blohschwab Freiherr von Bomburst, has become a possibility, and their own monotone and hypocritical preaching has tapered off from the nutty-idea-a-week offering that was their average.

But with that as the context, ponder this story from Gateway Pundit:

Russian Hackers Target UK’s Ministry of Defense and leak Thousands of Top Secret Documents Online
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/09/russian-hackers-target-uks-ministry-defense-leak-thousands/

If the story is true, and "Russian hackers" have pried their way into the British Ministry of Defence, and have managed to purloin a few highly secret documents and then to release them, then imagine the implications (and herewith, our high octane speculation of the day):

Secret information about military sites and high-security prisons was also stolen by the LockBit group – one of the world’s most dangerous hacking gangs.

The group – whose key suspects include Russian Mikhail Matveev – is said to have shared the data on the dark web which is accessible through special software, The Mirror reports.

Labour MP Kevan Jones, who sits on the Commons Defence Select Committee, told the newspaper: ‘This is potentially very damaging to the security of some of our most sensitive sites.

The hackers are said to have targeted the databases of Zaun, a company responsible for protecting maximum security sites.

It follows serious security breaches involving the Met Police – where 47,000 officers’ details were at risk – and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who accidentally shared the personal details of 10,000 employees.

There you have it: hackers penetrated sensitive information via the private defense contractors in Britain. They then published some of these documents on the so-called "dark net".

I rather suspect this is but the tip of a very large and nasty iceberg, one that will likely be sending shockwaves through the corridors of intelligence power throughout all western NATO allies, for the very simple reason that such a hack implies, at some point, the possibility of moles - actual human agents - within those corporations and their "security" that may have assisted or even enabled such a hack. Even without such a possibility, the incident has to be quietly echoing like a thunderclap in those corporations and intelligence agencies, for the cache of documents may be but a small fraction of what was seen and taken, again, for a very simple reason: how long was the hacking taking place?

There are, indeed, even further possibilities: what if some of the information taken has not yet been revealed, and what if it is of such a compromising nature to western leadership that they are now compromised? What if it is blackmail material? Or conveys strong leverage over that leadership? If any of these scenarios are in play, then we should expect to see, over time, changes of behavior and policy advocacy from these people or these corporations and defense groups. And finally, there is the possibility that by revealing the hack, the Russians may be sending a message, and the message may be that their cyber warfare abilities have been and are far beyond western estimations.

In short, folks we may have just seen another shot in what may be a very hot covert war taking place. We may have just witnessed one of those "horizontal escalations" the Russians have been warning would happen.