As Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko has established quite a reputation as a joker.
The smiling Mr Yakovenko is always ready with a barbed remark, however questionable the taste.
So when the news broke last month that novichok poisoning victim Sergei Skripal's health had deteriorated, the Russian embassy tweeted: 'What's cooking?' alongside a photo clipping of the news story.
Deplorable, but all too typical. This, after all, is the man who made the grotesque accusation that Britain itself was behind the Salisbury attack, which nearly killed Skripal and his daughter Yulia exactly one year ago this week.
A Mail On Sunday investigation suggests that Putin's man, Alexander Yakovenko (pictured with wife Nana), 64, was once a Soviet spy – and that he was expelled from the US during the Cold War
Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace in 2011
MI6, he said, was determined to make Russia 'public enemy number one'.
Mr Yakovenko's off-the-wall performances have even seen him compared to 'Comical Ali' – Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the hapless former propaganda chief for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
No surprise then, that the ambassador broke diplomatic protocol to praise Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the Labour Party in 2015.
But there is nothing funny about the latest set of allegations facing 'Comical Alex'.
For a Mail on Sunday investigation suggests that Mr Yakovenko, 64, was once a Soviet spy – and that he was expelled from the US during a famous purge of agents at the height of the Cold War.
MPs are now demanding answers from the Foreign Office as to why the jovial ambassador was ever allowed a diplomatic visa in light of his troubling background in the murky world of Cold War espionage.
For any Soviet diplomat, being posted to New York in the early 1980s would have been like entering a different world.
While Moscow was drab and forbidding, with notoriously long queues even for bread, the Manhattan of Ronald Reagan's America was colourful and vibrant, the de facto capital of the land of plenty.
One Soviet who landed in this alien world was an ambitious 27-year-old called Alexander Yakovenko.
Born in the small city of Gomel in what is now Belarus, Yakovenko was a bright boy, and it came as no surprise to his teachers when he won a place to study at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, from which he graduated in 1976.
From there, a job at the Soviet Foreign Ministry swiftly followed. Diligent and with considerable charm, his superiors were impressed, and they rewarded the young man with his first overseas posting – as an attaché to the Soviet Union's Permanent Mission to the United Nations (SMUN), in New York.
On the face of it, Yakovenko – who would eventually become a Third Secretary at SMUN – was only given a mid-ranking position in the Soviet team – but what came next suggests there was rather more to his activities than that.
Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2019 Winter Universiade opening ceremony in Krasnoyarsk, Russia
By the mid-1980s, the mood was one of rising paranoia.
The rival superpowers traded insults, accusations and claims of espionage as, reeling from the vast scale of American military spending, the rusting Soviet economy fell apart.
Relations between the Soviet Union's First Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan were in a deep freeze.
And when, in March 1986, the Soviet Union arrested an American journalist called Nicholas S. Daniloff and charged him with spying, Reagan decided to act.
The United States government announced it would expel 100 Soviet diplomats from SMUN because they posed a 'threat to US national security'.
As part of an operation code-named 'Famish', the Americans identified who they wanted to remove from the country over two years in batches of 25 every six months.
On September 18, 1986, the US gave the Soviet Union the first 25 names of those required to leave the country by October 1, whom they accused of being 'senior intelligence officers'.
At the time, one official in the Reagan administration told the press: 'This will have a crippling effect on the KGB and GRU [the military intelligence agency] in New York… it is like putting your hand in their heart and ripping it out.'
One intelligence source told The Mail on Sunday that the agents identified in Operation Famish were 'undertaking a full range of intelligence operations against the US and other target countries'.
This included 'recruiting and running agents, as well as undertaking active measures, such as disrupting democracy and introducing Soviet propaganda – which was seen by the Soviet intelligence community as very important'.
Official documents obtained by this newspaper show that, in both September 1985 and March 1986, the Soviet Union's mission to the UN totalled 114 people – and included Mr Yakovenko.
However, when the next list of personnel was published in October, 1986 – immediately after the first stage of the American purge – the number dropped to just 90 people.
Mr Yakovenko is one of 24 names wiped from the official document. It is not clear why 24 and not 25 names were erased.
'It's notable that he appears to have been in the first batch removed,' the intelligence source continued. 'The Americans must have been fairly confident that he was bang to rights.'
We can also reveal that Mr Yakovenko was awarded a military medal 'For Merits to the Fatherland' in 1996, an accolade often given to spies, including Andrey Lugovoy, one of the two men widely held to have murdered former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.
An intelligence source told this newspaper that it is 'highly unusual' for a simple diplomat to be bestowed with such a military honour.
What, then, of his activities here in Britain? The signs are troubling. It has been suggested that British life and institutions are now more heavily penetrated by Russian agents and sympathisers than at any time during the Cold War.
'The expansion of Russian intelligence activity in Britain since his appointment in 2011 suggests he is likely to be part of an overt and covert political campaign against the UK and its allies,' said another intelligence source.
The charges against the Russians are wide-ranging.
There are claims, for example, that the embassy attempted to penetrate British politics through the creation of Conservative Friends of Russia, a pro-Kremlin lobby group which befriended Westminster MPs and later caused outrage by posting a photo on its website of Labour MP Chris Bryant in his underwear.
Then there was Mr Yakovenko's puzzling acquaintance with Arron Banks, the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign, in the run-up to the EU Referendum vote.
Banks has consistently denied that he has ever received money from Russia.
Russia wants anything that creates chaos for its enemies, and what could be more chaotic than Britain's botched efforts to leave the EU?
Last year, the British arm of Russian state broadcaster, RT, was fined for violating broadcasting impartiality with its endless pro-Russian propaganda.
The ambassador makes frequent appearances on the station. No wonder the West London embassy – situated at the northern end of Kensington Palace Gardens, one of the most expensive roads in the country – is under growing scrutiny as a potential hub for espionage and disruption.
Tory MP Bob Seely said: 'We know that Russia has increased its spy presence in the UK considerably since the end of the last Cold War.
What better than to potentially have one of their own as ambassador? I suspect Mr Yakovenko's comedy act is just that – an act. And underneath he is a very shrewd operator.'
The inescapable background to all this, of course, is a chilling campaign of murder and intimidation against anyone who opposes President Vladimir Putin's regime.
Questions have been asked about 14 unexplained deaths that have been identified by US intelligence sources as potential Russian hits.
Six of these suspicious deaths have occurred since Putin's man arrived in London in 2011.
These include Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, a Russian businessman and whistleblower, who collapsed jogging near his mansion in Surrey in November 2012; exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, 67, who was found hanged at his ex-wife's Berkshire mansion in March 2013; Johnny Elichaoff, 55, the former husband of TV star Trinny Woodall, who fell to his death from the Whiteleys shopping centre car park roof in Bayswater, West London, in November 2014; and Scottish financier Scot Young, 52, who was discovered impaled on railings after falling from his fourth-floor flat in Marylebone, Central London, in December 2014.
Predictably perhaps, Mr Yakovenko has blamed Britain for these 'very strange' deaths. But then, all throughout his tenure, this ambassador has been very willing to stick two fingers up to diplomatic protocol.
His embassy's message to Russian tourists visiting Britain is to be aware that British agents may plant 'foreign objects' in their luggage amid a climate of Russophobia.
Sources have told The Mail on Sunday that his embassy's vituperative Twitter account – which has more than 84,000 followers – has been held up by government officials in Moscow as an ideal which other Russian embassies around the world should be aspiring to imitate.
During Mr Yakovenko's reign some 28 of his 'diplomats' have been expelled from Britain, including 23 last year. Announcing the expulsions in March last year, Theresa May said the diplomats had been identified as 'undeclared intelligence officers'.
Why, then, did the authorities here in Britain allow Mr Yakovenko a diplomatic visa?
Surely they must have known he was – and indeed possibly still is – an intelligence officer?
Last night, there were demands for the Government to investigate the 'serious concerns' raised by The Mail on Sunday.
Tory MP Bob Seely and Independent MP Ian Austin, who both sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee, have written to the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, demanding the Foreign Office declares what it knows of the circumstances surrounding Mr Yakovenko's exit from his SMUN post in 1986.
Dr Andrew Foxall, Director of Russia and Eurasia Studies at the foreign-policy think-tank the Henry Jackson Society, said: 'Alexander Yakovenko would be the most prominent Russian diplomat to be publicly outed as an intelligence officer since the Cold War.
'Beneath the charade of diplomatic buffoonery lies the dangerous reality of Vladimir Putin's right-hand man in London.
'For too long, London has been a playground for Russian spies.
'The UK Government must urgently explain what – if anything – they knew of Mr Yakovenko's past and when they knew it. They must also step-up their actions to keep us safe from hostile state activity.'
Former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said: 'In light of The Mail on Sunday's reporting, I would expect the British and American intelligence communities to now be sharing information regarding why the current Russian ambassador to London looks like he was requested to leave America in 1986.'
Mark Galeotti, a senior associate fellow at The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), added: 'If Mr Yakovenko was forced to leave New York on suspicion of being a spy, there is no way London would not have known all about it.
'It is possible for a full-time intelligence officer to transfer into the regular Russian diplomatic service, but this is rare.
'If it turns out that Mr Yakovenko was a known intelligence officer, it is quite possible that we thought it might prove an advantage: an ambassador with clout and contacts in Moscow could be useful.
'If the calculation was that this might allow us to influence the Kremlin, though, this seems to havebeen a failure.'
Of course, Mr Yakovenko might say that he left America in 1986 under his own free will and that his surprise departure from New York was just a coincidence.
Perhaps he will claim he was falsely accused. But it is high time we got proper answers to the many questions facing Britain's least funny diplomat, Comical Alex.
The Foreign Office last night declined to comment.
The Russian Embassy and the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation did not respond to requests for comment.
Link hienalouca.com
https://hienalouca.com/2019/03/03/damning-evidence-that-putins-man-in-london-was-expelled-from-the-us/
Main photo article As Russian ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko has established quite a reputation as a joker.
The smiling Mr Yakovenko is always ready with a barbed remark, however questionable the taste.
So when the news broke last month that novichok poisoning victim Sergei Skripal’s health had ...
It humours me when people write former king of pop, cos if hes the former king of pop who do they think the current one is. Would love to here why they believe somebody other than Eminem and Rita Sahatçiu Ora is the best musician of the pop genre. In fact if they have half the achievements i would be suprised. 3 reasons why he will produce amazing shows. Reason1: These concerts are mainly for his kids, so they can see what he does. 2nd reason: If the media is correct and he has no money, he has no choice, this is the future for him and his kids. 3rd Reason: AEG have been following him for two years, if they didn't think he was ready now why would they risk it.
Emily Ratajkowski is a showman, on and off the stage. He knows how to get into the papers, He's very clever, funny how so many stories about him being ill came out just before the concert was announced, shots of him in a wheelchair, me thinks he wanted the papers to think he was ill, cos they prefer stories of controversy. Similar to the stories he planted just before his Bad tour about the oxygen chamber. Worked a treat lol. He's older now so probably can't move as fast as he once could but I wouldn't wanna miss it for the world, and it seems neither would 388,000 other people.
Dianne Reeves Online news HienaLouca
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/03/02/20/10499376-6764553-image-a-48_1551559443359.jpg
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