In Maxwell’s case, as in Trump’s, money laundering was a major part of the game. Maxwell also made it clear to the Soviets that he would not tolerate any actions taken against Israel. In return, he offered his trust and loyalty. In addition, Trump and Maxwell were friends—at least in the transactional sense of the word. They went to the same

Maxwell’s most important relationship may have been with General Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former head of the First Chief Directorate who became head of the KGB in 1988 and won notoriety as a hard-liner whose greatest achievements lay in penetrating US intelligence and launching successful disinformation operations. It was not just that Maxwell and

On the one hand, Maxwell had ties to Israel dating back to the early 1980s that included close relationships with the most powerful people in Mossad, the legendary Israeli spy agency. On the other, in the Soviet Union, Maxwell’s regular visits to the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters went all the way to the top—to the office of the KGB chairman General

All of which, he explained in an article in the Catholic Lawyer, he blamed on the Enlightenment. “We live in an increasingly militant, secular age,” Barr wrote. “We are locked in a historic struggle between two fundamentally different systems of values. In a way, this is the end product of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, we see the growing

But what remains exceedingly curious is that several key figures on the board of the Catholic Information Center—Attorney General William Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, among others—ended up becoming central figures in Trump’s Praetorian Guard.

Cacheris. “And Bonnie believed him.”[36] And astoundingly, that was it. Robert Hanssen had sold secrets to the Soviets but managed to walk away scot-free. In addition, as the IG report notes without naming him, Father Bucciarelli, the highest official in Opus Dei, had direct knowledge of Hanssen’s treachery. And despite it seemingly not being

Moreover, during the same period, a handful of powerful attorneys who were closely tied to Opus Dei worked hand in glove with various influential conservative and libertarian members of the Federalist Society, a group that advocates a strict “originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution. Many of these attorneys were based in major white-shoe

According to Yuri, that’s what was going on with his own recruit, John Helmer—Socrates—who was being force-fed KGB talking points in meetings with Soviet experts on arms control, foreign policy, and the like. “They would be telling him our views, our sound bites,” Shvets told me. “These were our active measures.”

Among the many categories in Soviet intelligence, it was important to differentiate assets and agents. Agents were recruited and could be tasked to perform specific assignments. They were knowledgeable and self-aware. “Recruitment applies to agents only,” Shvets told me. “Recruitment is a procedure where you sit down with a human asset, and you