Russian secret agents are using French Alps as <x0 base>” to plan strikes against European countries

A group of elite Russian military intelligence officers, including some of those who planned to poison a “disident” in Britain, have operated from picturesque villages in the French Alps, Western intelligence officials have told NBC News, wiretaps.

Confirming a report in the French daily “Le Monde”, officials have said European and American intelligence agencies had followed up to 15 members of the Russian military intelligence agency known as GRU, who had lived for a while in France.

Le Monde published those who said they were the names of officers, some of whom had already been published by Bellingas, an investigative group with open sources.

Le Monde also reported that among the Russians who stayed in France's Haute-Savoie department in the Alps were Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Bosirov suspected names of both GRU agents charged with conducting the attack on Scripal.

French officials told the paper they considered the area to be the unit's support base for secret operations in Europe.

It's good that our European partners are taking the Russian threat” seriously, Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer with expertise in Europe and Russia, has said.

“Russia behaves on time as an illegal regime, trying to kill dissidents abroad and fuel unrest in European democracies. It challenges the continued efforts of European security services working together to combat this” threat.

Otherwise, the NBC News recalls, Germany recently expelled two Russian diplomats after authorities concluded that Russian agents orchestrated a Berlin executional assassination of a 40-year-old Russian-Georgian citizen, who is considered terrorist by Moscow.

The victim had fought a Georgian unit protecting South Ossetia during the Georgia-Russia war in 2008, German prosecutors said in a statement.

Meanwhile, British authorities say Russian agents used a nervous agent in March 2018 to poison a former Russian spy, Sergei Scripal. His daughter was also hit. Both have recovered.

In this direction, British authorities accused Russian GRU officers, who used the nicknames Petrov and Bosirov for attempted murder, conspiracy and possession of a nervous agent for the attack on Scripal.

Besides Scripals, the nervous agent damaged the other three who came in contact with him. One of them, Dawn Sturges, died.

However, Russia has denied involvement in poisoning, and Russian officials have called claims propaganda.

As the NBC News further points out, in view of Europe's open borders, Russian operatives do not have much problem in entering and conducting spying operations, intelligence officials say.

What stands out in finding out about the Alps base is that the French authorities decided to make public information, this medium writes.

Also, reportedly the FBI is tracking as many as 200 Russian operatives in the United States as possible, former officials and current ones say.

But some go unnoticed, as demonstrated by the charges of special adviser Robert Mueller accusing the Russians of using social media propaganda to influence the 2016 elections.

The indictment said some of the defendants travelled to the US under false claims “for intelligence collection purposes”. But their scheme was not discovered until much later.