MSNBC/Newsweek’s blogger, Eric Alterman, links a story claiming former KGB boss and Russian PM Yevgeny Primakov is a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security, as are ex-HVA chief Markus Wolf and KGB General Oleg Kalugin, saying that “someone ought to look into this”. Well, somebody did, and that somebody is me. Alterman seems to think the story ran on Al-Jazeera…well, it did, but not the Al-Jazeera everyone else knows.
If you go to the MSNBC story, you’ll find this link, which doesn’t go to the Arab satellite TV network’s website (aljazeera.net) but to aljazeerah.info instead. Now, when Al-Jaz set up their website they omitted to register the domain name in all TLDs, so there’s also an aljazeera.com floating about that publishes news stories with a distinctly Israeli slant, and God knows what else. In this case, it’s not even spelt right.
In this case, it’s a poorly designed site full of quite deranged ravings and that never-failing marker of internet bollocks, a link to rense.com’s vast holdings of tinfoil-hatted nonsense. There is no sign of the story on aljazeera.net, and a WHOIS lookup on aljazeerah.info shows it as registered to “Al-Jazeerah Information Center” of Dalton, Georgia.
Amusingly, despite this it’s actually not impossible that Kalugin is working for the CIA. He became a US citizen in 2003, which saved him from extradition to Russia on charges of espionage. Primakov, though, certainly isn’t. His last interventions in world politics were to oppose NATO expansion vigorously, visit Saddam Hussein in Baghdad exactly when he was meant to be joining DHS, and testify in Slobodan Milosevic’s defence.
(Amusing amendment – I had to look up Markus Wolf to find out if he was actually alive. He is.)