FSB has Special Budget for Hiring Prostitutes to Compromise Foreigners, Regional Officials, Kubin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 16 – Like its predecessor the KGB, the FSB uses specially selected Russian prostitutes to compromise foreigners of interest who visit Moscow as well as officials and businessmen from the provinces, according to Feliks Kubin who worked with the Russian organs before fleeing to the United States.

            That process, long the subject of spy novels and films, has attracted new attention following the claims of the so-called Christopher Steele dossier about Moscow’s reported use of prostitutes against American businessman and now US President Donald Trump, claims he and his supporters dispute but that many others give credence to.

            Kubin describes his own experience with such tactics and information he gleaned from conversations with his colleagues in the Russian interior ministry and the FSB’s counter-intelligence service in an interview with US-based Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova posted online today (tverezo.info/post/63024).

            He says that an acquaintance of his “was personally involved in the selection of prostitutes” the center used against “some governors who came to Moscow. I personally know that the girls were selected for attracting high level officials and Russian politicians … Possibly,” they were also used “for work with foreigners as well,” although “no one told [him] about that.”

            “The level of the girls and their pay depended on the level of ‘the object’ involved,” Kubin continues. “The authorities found girls” on various acquaintance sites online as well as hiring models. “I know one guy who specialized in models and had a whole list of suitable candidates” for what the FSB wanted undertaken.

            “I don’t remember his name, but I know that he took part in making porno films,” the émigré says. For lower level targets, the FSB chose girls not from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the provinces so that after they had fulfilled their ‘tasks,’ these workers of the oldest profession could immediately go back home.”

            For higher level targets, however, the FSB chose women from among “elite Moscow prostitutes;” and in a change from Soviet times, its officers were not unwilling to pay large sums of money, up to a thousand dollars or even more for a one-time assignation.  Such professionals knew their worth and insisted on being well paid, Kubin says.

            Some of them were undoubtedly “afraid that they would be killed after fulfilling their assignments as unneeded witnesses.” To calm them, the FSB was willing to pay even more, as much as 10,000 US dollars, for a single assignation in the most important cases. According to Kubin, the FSB also used another stratagem with such women.

            It gave them contracts which guaranteed them regular payments over time. “However,” the former intelligence office, says, “many were all the same afraid,, and to find someone,, I remember, was very difficult.”

            According to Kubin, “the special services acted not only in those hotels which they constantly monitored but selected others as well, especially” if the girls recruited were able to lead their targets there. That made it easier to set up monitoring, always a problem for the organs in the busier hotels of the Russian capital.