Surely there’s an innocent explanation!
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Clearly he shares Thoreau’s philosophy. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,
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Like x 1000.
It’s perplexing. The tradecraft is terrible, no question about it. You can explain away the shooting skill, particularly the tactical shooting described by Julia Ioffe’s article about her from Moscow, by the fact that her group appears to have mostly comprised former (or at least nominally former) KGB/FSB/GRU/SRV types who really would no no other way of training someone to shoot.
But then there’s the part where she turns up in Donetsk pallin’ around with terrorists and that ain’t no freelancer or wannabe stuff, IMO.
My speculation is that we’re looking at SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, apparently the same agency behind the ten agents (including Anna Chapman) we rounded up and deported in 2010. Same sloppy tradecraft, a more aggressive and successful version of the same kind of amorphous political mission, same kind of activity that doesn’t really qualify as espionage under our law. See this from here, c. 2010.
My impression is that the assessment of the success of that band has gone up over the years, in a “we didn’t really grasp what they were up to” kind of way. But it also suggests that the SRV doesn’t give its agents the same kind of training and operating parameters and missions that you see with FSB and GRU.
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If I was doing, in Russia, what she was doing here, the Russians would call it spying for sure.
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A joke my father once told me–helpfully available on the internet:
A secret agent was sent to Ireland to pick up some very sensitive information from an agent called Murphy. His instructions were to walk around town using a code phrase until he met his fellow agent. He found himself on a desolate country road and finally ran into a farmer.
"Hello, said the agent, “I’m looking for a man called Murphy.”
“Well you’re in luck,” said the farmer. “As it happens, there’s a village right over the hill where there’s a butcher called Murphy, the baker is named Murphy, three widows are called Murphy. In fact my name is Murphy.”
“Aha,” thought the agent, “Here’s my man.” So he whispered the secret code. “The sun is shining…the grass is growing…the cows are ready for milking.”
“Oh,” said the farmer, “You’re looking for Murphy the spy – he’s in the village over the other direction.”
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The FSB group referred to as the Assets
What to call Mariia Butina:
Prisoner No. 1111547
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I watched this film for the first time ever a few weeks ago. I know my body’s glucose levels spiked from all the sweetness.
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More attractive to the targeted gun nuts here in the US, too.
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Agent? Recruiter?
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She meant so much to so many.
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OT but stealth boom: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/unanswered-questions-trail-high-ranking-doj-official-with-russia-ties/565940/
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And get this…She’s 92, soon to be 93 and still kickin’.
And much like Pussy Galore and the term Honeypot, both are undoubtably relics of the Cold War. Though Pussy Riot seems to be a reclamation as well as a form of resistance to those types of designations.
Personally, every time I hear honeypot, I think Pooh bear.
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It seems like the proper classification depends mostly on whether she belongs to the Russian IC, not what her skill set is, what her cover story was, or what acts she has performed for her true masters.
Most of the rest of it is common to both spies and assets: both act in secret, both may lie about their history and identity, both may have all kinds of interesting skills, both may even have training in some espionage tradecraft.
I know how to pick locks and transfer information and items covertly, but that’s because I like the spy genre and have done a lot of reading on the side. I’m not a spy. If I start going out with a pretty Russian lady (who is a straight-up spy), I don’t become an asset until and unless I begin assisting her with her mission (whether or not I’m aware that I’m doing so). If she pushes me to take some self-defense classes and I get really good at it, I’m still not a spy.
I’d say the fact that most convinces me she isn’t a spy is that she appears to have taken no precautions to secure her communications with Torshin.
That said, it’s entirely possible that she engaged in lots of very secure comms, and she deliberately did some suspicious stuff over insecure channels so that investigators wouldn’t bother to look harder. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist…
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If nothing else, we can certainly call her someone with truly dreadful taste in clothing.
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A tool of the Russian state?
“Oh, bother.”
Nothing spells Legal Shark like a plaid suit.
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