Imagine someone attending think tank meetings in Washington while secretly maintaining ties to Russian intelligence! Zarubina’s guilty plea is a reminder that espionage isn’t always about stealing files. Sometimes it’s about gaining access, building trust and finding people worth recruiting. #FBI #Counterintelligence #NationalSecuritySpycraft101 (@spycraft101)Russian national Nomma Zarubina pleaded guilty in February 2026 to lying to the FBI regarding her relationship with Russian intelligence while working in the United States.
Zarubina arrived in the US in 2016 after completing her master’s degree in public administration in Moscow. She began working at the Russian Center in New York City, promoting cultural events. She also worked with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington DC, although her profile on their website has now been deleted.
The FBI first interviewed Zarubina in October 2020 regarding her relationship with Elena Branson, who led the Russian Center in New York and was already under investigation as an unregistered foreign agent of the Russian government. Branson later fled to Russia to avoid arrest, where she remains to this day.
Over the course of five interviews, Zarubina repeatedly stated she had no affiliation with the FSB. But the FBI has submitted an affidavit alleging she was recruited by an FSB officer in December 2020 and given the codename Alyssa, and that her mission was to develop relationships with journalists, think tank members, and Russian dissidents living in the United States. She eventually admitted to working with the FSB and was arrested in November 2024 but granted bail and allowed some limited freedom while awaiting trial.
In early 2025, Zarubina sent a series of bizarre and flirtatious text messages and photos to one of the FBI agents who had previously interviewed her. Most of the messages were sent late at night while she was apparently drunk.
In December 2025 she was ordered to return to jail to await trial. In addition to lying to the FBI, she was charged with lying on her immigration application. In February she pleaded guilty and was later sentenced to 14 months in prison.
#washingtondc #russia #fbi #immigration #guilty— https://x.com/spycraft101/status/2111185416070336725
— @Robert4787 Oct 17, 2026
Category: Articles and Tweets
Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
Joint #NCIS and #FBI case leads to guilty plea by former #CIA official and Navy Reserve member, David Rush, 43, who defrauded the government of over $190 million. We are committed to pursuing those who undermine public trust. tinyurl.com/5n7m55wj
— @RealNCIS Oct 17, 2026
#Putin Putin #911Investigation 9/11 Investigation #FBI FBI
Putin’s reaction to this:
thenewsandtimes.blogspot.com…
post:
“It is EERIE, PA.
To change the official, the “al Qaeda” version of the results of the 9/11 investigation is like to try to BEND THE SILVER (FAST, EASY) RAIL.”
Search:
Erie, Pa
Bend, Silver RailPic.: kremlin.ru/events/president/…
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Oct 16, 2026
#Putin Putin #911Investigation 9/11 Investigation #FBI FBI
Putin’s reaction to this:
thenewsandtimes.blogspot.com…
post:
“It is EERIE, PA.
To change the official, the “al Qaeda” version of the results of the 9/11 investigation is like to try to BEND THE SILVER (FAST, EASY) RAIL.”
Search:
Erie, Pa
Bend, Silver Rail— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Oct 16, 2026
Vasili Mitrokhin (1922-2004), a Soviet KGB archivist who secretly copied and compiled thousands of classified intelligence files during the Cold War…
Every evening between 1972 and 1984, a quiet, bespectacled archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin walked out of the KGB’s foreign intelligence headquarters in Moscow with crumpled slips of paper tucked into the soles of his shoes. Past armed guards, metal detectors, and internal security checkpoints, the fifty-something bureaucrat flashed his pass and stepped out into the Moscow cold. Under his arm sat no classified briefcase; in his pockets lay nothing suspicious. But stuffed into his socks and underwear were minute, handwritten notes detailing the Soviet Union’s deepest global operations: assassination directives, illegal networks, foreign political bribes, and clandestine weapons caches buried across NATO territory. For over a decade, while the most paranoid surveillance state on earth hunted Western moles, an unassuming clerk was methodically stealing the entire KGB archive from the inside out.
Mitrokhin had spent his early career as an undercover operative in the Middle East before an ideological clash saw him sidelined to the archive section of the First Chief Directorate. Disillusioned by Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin’s terror and permanently radicalized by the brutal 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Mitrokhin viewed the Soviet apparatus as a criminal conspiracy against humanity. In 1972, fate handed him the keys to the kingdom: the KGB began transferring its vast foreign intelligence archives from the cellars of the Lubyanka to a new, sprawling complex at Yasenevo. Mitrokhin was assigned the monumental task of cataloging, verifying, and sealing roughly three hundred thousand secret files.
Working entirely alone in windowless vaults, surrounded by decades of operational espionage, Mitrokhin began his silent counter-revolution. Because photocopying machines were strictly guarded and heavily audited, he copied files by hand onto scraps of paper, transcribing names, operational code words, dead-drop locations, and cipher systems in microscopic handwriting. At the end of each workday, he concealed the stolen notes on his body and walked through the security checkpoints without raising suspicion.
Back at his modest family dacha outside Moscow, Mitrokhin spent his nights transcribing the scribbles onto an ordinary typewriter. He packed the carbon copies and typed sheets into steel milk churns, tin trunks, and aluminum containers, sealing them with tar paper. Late at night, beneath the floorboards of his dacha and under the flowerbeds of his garden, he dug deep pits and buried the metal containers, carefully tamping down the soil so not even his wife suspected what lay below. By the time he retired in 1984, Mitrokhin had assembled over twenty-five thousand pages of KGB history, creating the single largest unauthorized intelligence breach in Soviet history.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, Mitrokhin knew his hour had arrived. In early 1992, carrying a sample of handwritten notes hidden in his luggage, he boarded a train to the newly independent Baltic states. In Estonia, he walked into the United States Embassy in Tallinn offering to trade his secret archive for political asylum; the CIA officer on duty dismissed him as a crank peddling forged documents and turned him away. Undeterred, Mitrokhin traveled to Riga, Latvia, and walked into the British Embassy. There, an MI6 officer took one look at the authentic operational codes, poured Mitrokhin a cup of tea, and recognized the intelligence discovery of the century.
Within months, British intelligence exfiltrated Mitrokhin and his family to the United Kingdom. Soon after, under the noses of Russian security forces, MI6 operatives quietly entered his Moscow dacha, pried up the floorboards, and dug up six heavy milk churns and trunks packed with thousands of classified pages.
— @archeohistories Oct 16, 2026
news – Google Search google.com/search?q=news&num…
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Oct 16, 2026
Bend OR school shooting: 5 killed in Silver Rail Elementary shooting koin.com/news/oregon/active-…
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Oct 16, 2026
Many FBI Files on 9/11 Remain Classified. Victims’ Families Want Them Released. | Truthout truthout.org/articles/many-f…
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Oct 16, 2026
‘This is my answer’: Zelensky smiles when asked about Trump making him a ‘scapegoat’ as he faces disastrous mid-terms trib.al/sQR4rFj
— @DailyMail Oct 16, 2026
RT @Englishremnant: One of the great ironies of English history is Henry VIII’s desperate determination to produce a male heir. He married…
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Oct 16, 2026