{"id":4500,"date":"2011-08-09T10:26:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T15:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stonescryout.org\/?p=4500"},"modified":"2011-08-09T10:26:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T15:26:00","slug":"must-be-all-that-smart-diplomacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/?p=4500","title":{"rendered":"Must Be All That Smart Diplomacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

After supposedly "resetting" relations between the US and Russia, the Russians seem to not have gotten the message<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

In the past four years, Russia<\/a>\u2019s intelligence services have stepped up a campaign of intimidation and dirty tricks against U.S. officials and diplomats in Russia<\/a> and the countries that used to form the Soviet Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n

U.S. diplomats and officials have found their homes broken into and vandalized, or altered in ways as trivial as bathroom use; faced anonymous or veiled threats; and in some cases found themselves set up in compromising photos or videos that are later leaked to the local press and presented as a sex scandal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point was to show that \u2018we can get to you where you sleep,\u2019 \u201d one U.S. intelligence<\/a> officer told The Washington Times. \u201cIt\u2019s a psychological kind of attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite a stated policy from President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev<\/a> of warm U.S.-Russian ties, the campaign of intelligence intimidation – or what the CIA<\/a> calls \u201cdirect action\u201d – has persisted throughout what both sides have called a \u201creset\u201d in the relations.<\/p>\n

They have become worse in just the past year, some U.S. officials said. Also, their targets are broadening to include human rights workers and nongovernmental organizations as well as embassy staff.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Presenting a toy "reset button" is no diplomacy. Understanding who America’s enemies are, is. Indeed, we must try to get them to understand a mutual benefit, but the promise of the Obama administration has fallen flat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After supposedly "resetting" relations between the US and Russia, the Russians seem to not have gotten the message. In the past four years, Russia\u2019s intelligence services have stepped up a campaign of intimidation and dirty tricks against U.S. officials and diplomats in Russia and the countries that used to form the Soviet Union. U.S. diplomats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,321,18,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doug","category-foreign-policy","category-government","category-russia"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}