Russian Image Management

Making Unpleasant Historical Truths About Poland Disappear:  The KGB’s latest intelligence coup, and NATO’s latest intelligence disaster

By Eugene Poteat *

http://www.doomedsoldiers.com/polish-tu-154-crash-russia.html

Hat tip to V for sending me the link to this article.

The author sets the stage for this story by telling of the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and elite in the Katyn Forest by the Russians.  The Russians have always put the blame on the Germans.

The slaughter came under orders from Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, and endorsed by Stalin and the Politburo. Beria was Vladimir Putin’s KGB predecessor. The Katyn forest victims included 8000 military offices, the rest being doctors, professors, lawmakers, police officers, public servants, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and anyone considered Poland’s “intelligentsia.”

Fast forward to 2010, the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Forest massacre.  The Polish government hoped that the Russian government might tell the truth; most of the government leadership and a few of the families of those massacred flew to Russia in a Polish TU-154 aircraft, to the city of Smolensk, Russia.  On 10 April 2010 the plane crashed just short of the runway in Smolensk, killing all aboard.

The plane had just been refurbished and upgraded with the latest state of the art equipment.  The pilot was fluent in Russian, which the airport used to coordinate the landing. Though the airport was fogged in, a plane had recently landed and the plane was equipped with the appropriate equipment to do a fogged in landing.

The author, a former technical scientist at the CIA, knew that the Russians had both the capability and the motivation to cause the aircraft to crash despite having the latest navigational equipment.

For many of us from the intelligence community we well remember the Soviet practice of manipulating navigational beacons to lure American military planes into Soviet territory to be shot down, “for violating sacred Soviet airspace.” They thought nothing of shooting down Korean Air Boeing 747, knowing it held several hundred civilian passengers.

After the crash, things became eerily familiar.

Immediately after the crash the Russian Minster of Security declared the crash was the fault of the pilot. The air traffic controller working in the Smolensk tower disappeared.

Russians quickly took control of the crash site, recovered the black boxes, and – never to miss an intelligence-gathering opportunity – stripped the 96 dead passengers of personal effects, luggage, laptop computers, flash drives, cell phones, sensitive papers, names, telephone numbers, correspondence, documents, and top secret military and diplomatic codes—a coup for Russia’s intelligence service. Because of the intelligence value from the crash, and the need for the smoothest of public sleight-of-hand with the coming denials, Putin placed himself in charge of the Russian crash investigation.

On June 6th, Russia announced publicly that four of their soldiers had been charged with the theft of credit cards from the bodies of some of the victims and using the cards to obtain cash—within two hours of the crash.

Russian security officers interrogated Polish family members who traveled to Moscow to recover the bodies, sometimes for hours, denying access to the bodies until after the interrogations. There has been no verification that all the bodies were accounted for. The bodies were returned to Poland in sealed coffins for burial and families of the victims were not permitted to open the coffins. Under Polish law, official permission from the state prosecutor’s office is required to exhume a body, and that office has denied family requests, apparently for fear of offending Russian sensibilities.

As for the investigation, the Russians have kept all the airplane’s black boxes and refuse to release or comment on their findings, except to say it could be a year before any results are announced. It could indeed take a long time. Putin’s ‘commission’ investigating the crash needs time – for memories to fade and time to concoct a Russian-version of the cause of the crash

Sound familiar?

When MH-17 was shot down with a Russian Grad “Buk”, Russian “volunteers” took control of the crash site, recovered the black boxes, much of the passenger’s effects were confiscated by those guarding the site or recovering the sensitive equipment. The bodies themselves were controlled by the rebels and only after a lengthy period of time were released to the families and their governments. Credit cards were stolen and used by a few of the Russians at the site. Russians maintained control of the site and only after an extraordinarily long time were external investigators allowed into the crash site, which had already been scrubbed clean by the Russians.

The Russian story, concocted to cover up their guilt, changed frequently.  Like in the Katyn Forest, where the Germans were blamed, in the case of MH-17 the Ukrainians were blamed.

In regards to the Katyn Forest massacre, the author offered one key phrase, which also seems appropriate for the MH-17 crash and subsequent coverup:  “The Poles Forgot One Thing… the Russian Motto: Maintain Total Deniability”.  This is also applicable to Crimea and overall to East Ukraine.