Circling the Lion's Den

About Agentura.Ru

Agentura.Ru is an Russian web-site founded in 2000 as internet-community of journalists monitor and write about Russian, American, British, and other Western security and intelligence agencies. Editor of Agentura.Ru is Andrei Soldatov, deputy editor - Irina Borogan.

Agentura.Ru has been reported and featured in the New York Times, the Moscow Times, the Washington Post, Online Journalism Review, Le Monde, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN, Federation of American Scientists, BBC, as well in websites of The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Center for Defence Information, The Library of Congress, Cambridge Security Programme.

On December 14, 2000 Agentura.Ru was profiled in the New York Times in an article by Sally McGrane entitled "A Web Site That Came in From the Cold to Unveil Russian Secrets".

According to the Moscow Times' report on June 18, 2008:

    "Agentura.ru has developed into an information and analytical hub, updated on a daily basis and covering developments related to security services in Russia and the former Soviet Union and terrorist groups worldwide. It also publishes articles on the history and practices of foreign security agencies and issues like media and legislative oversight of security services".

In January 2010 Adam Federman wrote in Columbia Journalism Review's report "Moscow's New Rules":

    Meanwhile, access to information and sources within the government has greatly diminished. This is particularly true with the intelligence community. Andrei Soldatov, the founder of the investigative Web site agentura.ru (modeled on Steven Aftergood’s Project on Government Secrecy), has covered the FSB and national security issues for more than a decade. In the early 1990s, he says, intelligence agencies feared that they would be disbanded, as happened to the East German Stasi. In an attempt to preserve their power, they established press offices to deal with journalists and the public in the name of transparency. But under Putin, a career intelligence officer and head of the FSB from 1998 to 1999, those fears subsided and “the FSB just decided to forget about this filter,” Soldatov said.

In September 2010 Soldatov and Borogan published a book "The New Nobility. The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB".

Contact Us:

References: