Spy vs. spy in Ukraine


The "apartheid" comment got all the attention when a Daily Beast reporter snuck into a supposedly off-limits meeting to record Kerry's unguarded comments, but this is far more relevant:

“Intel is producing taped conversations of intelligence operatives taking their orders from Moscow and everybody can tell the difference in the accents, in the idioms, in the language. We know exactly who’s giving those orders, we know where they are coming from,” Kerry said at a private meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington. A recording of Kerry’s remarks was obtained by The Daily Beast.
Kerry didn’t name specific Russian officials implicated in the recordings. But he claimed that the intercepts provided proof of the Russians deliberately fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine—and lying about it to U.S. officials and the public.
“It’s not an accident that you have some of the same people identified who were in Crimea and in Georgia and who are now in east Ukraine,” said Kerry. “This is insulting to everybody’s intelligence, let alone to our notions about how we ought to be behaving in the 21st century. It’s thuggism, it’s rogue state-ism. It’s the worst order of behavior.”

Story.

Of course, the Russians already proved they were taping American diplomats, publicizing a conversation in February to make it look like the Americans were running things behind the scenes. (Actually, the best part of that conversation was the diss of the Europeans, which at least showed the State Department is smarter than most people give it credit for. Reuters story here, in case you've forgotten.)

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