“Russian intelligence has had an intensive interest in San Francisco stretching back to the beginning of the Cold War,” wrote Zach Dorfman in Politico this summer in an in-depth article about foreign intel activity in Silicon Valley.
Russians initially aimed at gathering information on local military installations, but as Silicon Valley transformed itself into a tech hub, Russia began showing interest in certain “valuable or sensitive technologies being developed or financed by companies or venture-capital firms based in the region.”
Russian intel targeted civilian, military and dual-use technologies, according to Dorfman, who reminds that Russia’s consulate in San Francisco was forcibly closed by the US administration in Sept. 2017.
One of the “potential mechanisms” for Russian intelligence-gathering in Silicon Valley is Rusnano USA, according to the unnamed former intelligence officials whom Dorfman interviewed.
Rusnano USA is a subsidiary of Rusnano, a Russian state-owned corporation dedicated to investing in nanotechnologies. The subsidiary was launched in 2011: at that time, Rusnano USA opened an office in Menlo Park, in the heart of Silicon Valley, jointly with two other Russian state-owned tech organizations, Skolkovo and RVC.
“The Russians treated [Rusnano USA] as an intelligence platform, from which they launched operations,” one former intelligence official told the US journalist.
Dorfman’s article makes no mention of Skolkovo and RVC being involved in intel activities.
Another method for Russian intel to gather information from or on Silicon Valley tech and VC executives was what the US journalist calls “a classic Russian ‘honeypot’ maneuver” — to enlist local high-end Russian and Eastern European prostitutes.
Last year, when leaking the ‘Paradise Papers,’ journalists from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) implicitly, but not very convincingly, saw in Russian VC activity in the USA a reflection of the Kremlin’s political and strategic goals.
Rusnano used for Russian intel activity in Silicon Valley, says US mediaRead More
