Time to Probe Strobe?

A new book by US journalist Pete Earley claims Soviet intelligence has recruited high ranking agents in the US and Canada.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War officially ended, and a new world order began. We thought everything had changed. But one thing never did: the spies. From 1995 until 2000, a man known as “Comrade J” directed all Russian spy action in New York and oversaw all covert operations against the U.S. and its allies.

He recruited spies, planted Russian agents, penetrated U.N. and U.S. security, and manipulated events that influenced American policy, under the direct leadership of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. He was a legend, the man who guarded Russia’s secrets – secrets that he never revealed.....until now. Based on exclusive interviews with Russian spymaster and double agent, Sergei Tretyakov, Comrade J exposes how the “new” Russia continues to spy and undermine the U.S.

One senior US official named by Tretyakov as a Russian intelligence "source" was former Time magazine editor and US deputy secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbott.


From Congressional Quarterly

Tretyakov says Russian intelligence considered Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s top Moscow hand, such a valuable source of inside information, and so vulnerable to its manipulation, that it classified him as a SPECIAL UNOFFICIAL CONTACT.

“I want to underline that he was not a Russian spy,” Tretyakov says of Talbott, who was a Rhodes Scholar with future president Bill Clinton at Oxford and a highly respected Time magazine correspondent before turning to diplomacy. “In fact, I suspect he was the opposite — an ardent American patriot.”

But a Russian official under the control of the SVR, then-Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Mamedov, Tretyakov alleges, was able to get inside information from Talbott by massaging his considerable ego.

“He became a valuable intelligence source,” Tretyakov says.

Talbott had been under suspicion of inappropriate contacts with Russian intelligence before.

From American Spectator April 1998

The Clinton administration has consistently turned a blind eye to Russian misdeeds and found excuses for Russian boorishness - sort of like a den mother offering milk and cookies to the neighborhood bully no matter how many times he beats up on Johnny. The architect of our Cub scout policy toward Russia is a former Time magazine journalist who has admitted to a close personal and professional relationship to an alleged top KGB agent during the Cold War - Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

Allegations that Talbott had been used by the KGB during his journalistic career were briefly aired at his confirmation hearing on Feb. 8, 1994 by Senator Jesse Helms, who was then ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And despite Talbott's equivocal answers, they were just as quickly ignored. Except for a single AP wire story, and a subsequent report in the Wall Street Journal (and of course, the Washington Times), not a single mainstream media organization picked up on Helm's queries that Talbott owed his journalistic career at Time magazine to a suspected KGB agent of influence named Victor Louis.


Citing U.S. intelligence reports and statements by KGB defectors, Helms asserted that Louis was responsible for leaking the memoirs of former Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev to Talbott in 1969 and for assisting Talbott at critical moments later in his career with inside Kremlin information.

Strobe Talbott still has influence as head of Washington based "think tank", the left leaning Brookings Institution.

Perhaps its time to probe Strobe, before President Hillary Clinton appoints him head of the CIA or Secretary of Defence?