Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak’s phone was both hacked and turned into a ‘hot mike’ for recording conversations by a Five Eyes intelligence agency,
Sources with links to Western intelligence report that a similar ‘SS7’ exploit as that used by consent on the phones of James Comey, and other FBI agents, by the FBI and Justice Department, was placed on the phone of Sergei Kislyak – most certainly without consent – and that the Russian Ambassador to the US not only had his phone bugged, but that his phone was being used as a microphone to record those with whom he was speaking.
Sources do not say when the exploit was placed on Kislyak’s phone. One source speculated that Ambassador Kislyak had only survived in his position in America ‘because of optics’.
The Five Eyes intelligence agreement prevents members of the world’s premier intelligence alliance – America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – from spying on each other’s territories and citizens. However, crucially, embassies, such as those of Ecuador in London and Russia in Washington DC, are regarded as sovereign territory of their native countries. The NSA is free to spy within the Ecuadorean embassy in London, and GCHQ, its British equivalent, is free to spy within Russia’s embassy in DC. The Five Eyes alliance is the closest intelligence partnership in the world. Recently Canada assisted DGSE, France’s CIA, in spying on Rebel Media on behalf of M. Macron, the then French Presidential candidate. Sources report that both the FBI, NSA and Britain’s GCHQ assisted Canada in this operation, because of the involvement of the Trump-Russia partisan Jack Posobiec.
In his testimony to the Senate today, Jeff Sessions, who as Patribotics reported in February, was a suspect in the Trump Russia hack, suddenly changed his tune, admitting that he “might have” had a conversation with Kislyak at the Mayflower Hotel.
As I reported exclusively earlier this year, Page, Manafort, Epshteyn and Kislyak, along possibly with Donald Trump himself, were recorded by US intelligence discussing the tape promising a policy shift in exchange for help with the elections, at the Mayflower. If Sessions was there, he was recorded too. Sources with links to the U.S. intelligence community now report that the group of men played the tape that was to be played in Moscow by Page and then, literally, had a discussion about trading it for hacking help, a discussion which is in the possession of US intelligence. It is not known however if this tape was recorded via a Five Eyes SS7 exploit placed on Mr. Kislyak’s phone, or by normal surveillance of any Russian Ambassador on US soil that is always carried out by the American authorities.
Sources with links to Western intelligence would not give any details of when the exploit was placed or how long it had lasted.
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