Embassy in Ireland Embassy ● Roster captured ● host list

The Times reported on October 6th that “Russian intelligence used a “honey­trap” to recruit an Irish politician as an agent for the Kremlin during the Brexit talks. One of the aims was to undermine relations between Britain, Ireland and the EU. The Irish military and security services identified the agent but, remarkably, they are still at large in the country’s parliament. Their identity is known to The Sunday Times but for legal reasons we are calling them “Cobalt”. A surveillance operation found they met Sergey Prokopiev, a Russian spy who worked out of the Russian embassy in Dublin between 2019 and 2022. In a meeting outside Dublin, Cobalt, who was under surveillance by the military and the Irish police, the gardai, offered to connect the Russians and paramilitaries in Northern Ireland at a sensitive time in the Brexit talks. Intelligence sources believe the Kremlin hoped to exploit tensions and undermine relations between the UK, Ireland and the EU. Loyalist paramilitaries were threatening violence over the 2019 and 2020 Brexit deals, which created a customs border in the Irish Sea, to prevent a land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Security chiefs believe that Cobalt, who has received no payments from the Russians, was recruited as part of a honeytrap operation, where an enemy intelligence officer or agent lures the target into compromising sexual encounters. Several meetings between Cobalt and a female agent were logged. She was monitored entering the state on several occasions for short periods, but no action could be taken as Cobalt was not breaking any law.”

On Saturday the Irish Times reported that the Russian ambassador to Ireland, “Yuriy Filatov, self-styled ‘whipping boy of Orwell Road’, mocks the idea the Dublin embassy is used for espionage.” The article continues that “Ireland has engaged in “unacceptable rhetoric which in my mind does not have any place in politics”, says Filatov. Dublin has already expelled four Russian diplomats this year after Taoiseach Micheál Martin said “their activities are not in accordance with the international standards of diplomatic behaviour” — political terminology for espionage. In turn, two Irish diplomats were expelled from Moscow”, and it concludes that “the Orwell Road complex has long been believed to operate as an espionage hub as well as an embassy. Security services suspect it is used to intercept signals as well as a base for agents tasked with influencing or blackmailing influential Irish figures.”

According to news reports on The Journal of Ireland, confidential sources informed The Journal that the “Russian Embassy in South Dublin is not just a diplomatic unit but also that it has a high end intelligence capability including monitoring and communicating with agents across Europe.” It was was characterised as a major communications centre, and a training/testing ground prior to deployments to other English-speaking countries. The confidential sources expect 10–15 Russian communications and signals intelligence (SIGINT) experts operating there, mainly from Russia’s Military Intelligence (GRU) and its Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).