Russia Jails Think Tanker for Selling Secrets to German Firm

Here is more from Reuters:

A Russian court jailed a Russian think-tank expert specializing in military affairs to seven years on Thursday after convicting him of treason for allegedly selling secrets to a German consulting firm.

The court in Saint Petersburg said Vladimir Neyelov had admitted to selling information linked to how the Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, trains and retrains its operational staff. But, it said, Neyelov did not consider the data classified.

The trial was held behind closed doors because of what the court said was its classified nature, and details of the case have not been made public. The court did not name the German consulting company. 

Prior to his arrest in 2018, Neyelov had written about private military contractors and worked for two think tanks including one called the Centre for the Study of Strategic Outlooks, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper said. 

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) said that Neyelov worked with Moscow's Center for Strategic Forecasting.

Former Brookings Scholar Booted from Singapore for Covert Activities

Here is what the New York Times recently reported:

Singapore has ordered the expulsion of a noted American academic for what it said was his covert effort to influence Singapore's foreign policy on behalf of an unnamed foreign government.

The academic, Huang Jing, was accused of passing "privileged information" to senior Singapore officials with the intent of affecting their decisions.  He was quickly removed from his position as the Lee Foundation professor on United States-China relations at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

"He did this in collaboration with foreign intelligence agents," the Singapore Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement on Friday that announced the order.  "This amounts to subversion and foreign interference in Singapore's domestic politics."

Mr. Huang has held posts at the Brookings Institution, Stanford University and Harvard University.  Some view his academic writings as pro-Chinese.

Here is a link to the biography page of Huang Jing when he was at Brookings, where he was a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program.  His past writings at the liberal-leaning think tank can be found here.

Think Tanks vs. CIA

Do think tanks do better work than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)?

Here is more from the Weekly Standard:

All the big issues surrounding the CIA—about the basic competencies of how it does its work operationally and analytically—are difficult for outsiders to assess, of course, even the more intrepid in the congressional intelligence committees and the executive branch. One operational success—the right "walk-in" or volunteer in just the right place—can paper over the doubts, which, in any case, tend to evanesce quickly behind the protective barrier of classified information. Were the CIA's routine Cold War operations, for the most part, so much busy work? Has the vast majority of Langley's classified analytical products been less insightful than the unclassified work of Washington's better think tanks? It didn't really matter if the agency could provide, now and then, eye-popping information against our number-one threat.

Think Tank Watch should note that think tanks, both in the US and overseas, are full of former people from the intelligence community.

Brookings even started its own mini-CIA a few years ago, and new CIA Director Mike Pompeo just spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Another big question: Do consultancies do better work than think tanks?

Mission of Russian Spy: Target Think Tanks

Jack Barsky (also known as Albrecht Dittrich), a former Russian spy, has recently gone on record about details of the spying operations he was expected to partake in during his time in the United States.  Here is an excerpt from The Guardian:

Dittrich was given his mission: to establish contacts with foreign policy think tanks, and in particular President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.  He was given little guidance as to how he should do this, or even how best to blend into US society. The people who trained him had little feeling for the real fabric of America, its visceral, unquantifiable essence. “It’s as if they had spent time looking at fish swimming in an aquarium, and now they are training you to be a fish,” Barsky says. “But they don’t actually know what it’s like to be a fish.”

The book Deep Undercover by Mr. Barsky says that he was expected to establish contacts with people connected to "influential think tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the Columbia University Institute of Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission."

Think tanks have been a hotbed a spy recruitment for decades.  Here is a previous Think Tank Watch post on which think tanks spies like.  It is no secret that think tanks are filled with former spies.

While human intelligence still goes on at think tanks, these days much of the spying is done through signals intelligence, with nearly every single large think tank facing serious breaches in recent years.

Here is a recent story by Molly Ball on Washington spy paranoia, with several mentions of think tanks.

The Think Tank Connection of Accused Spy Edward Lin

This is what Newsweek is reporting about Edward Lin, the naval flight officer accused of leaking sensitive information to either China or Taiwan (or both):

Among Lin’s Chinese contacts on LinkedIn was a former Washington, D.C.–based Taiwanese military attaché whose job was to “file intelligence reports on current statuses and events of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to superiors in the home navy force.” Another Taiwanese who endorsed Lin listed himself as a current “security manager” for Apple who previously worked high up in Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense, where he was “responsible for U.S. and European think tanks engagement,” an intelligence-oriented billet. A former senior British nuclear submarine commander, who served as a Royal Navy liaison officer in Washington, D.C., from 2012 to 2015, also endorsed Lin for various military and communication skills.

Think Tank Watch has written extensively about think tank spying in the past, including in this 2013 post entitled "Think Tanks a Hotbed for Spy Recruitment."