(RightWing.org) – Voice of America has removed content written by a Spanish freelance journalist – after he was arrested on suspicion of being a Russian spy. The news agency says it’s reviewing everything written by Pablo Gonzalez. Was Russia trying to turn VOA into an unwitting propaganda tool?
NEW:
Voice of America is “thoroughly reviewing” stories the agency published from a suspected Russian spy.They’re making no judgement on whether he is a spy, but have scrubbed the stories from the web and social media out of an abundance of caution https://t.co/WfOqisgXDb
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) March 7, 2022
On February 28, Polish agents arrested Pablo Gonzalez, a Russian-born Spanish citizen, as he attempted to cross the border into Ukraine. Poland says Gonzalez is an agent for GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, who had been collecting information inside Poland and was planning to do the same in Ukraine.
Journalists are obvious targets for intelligence agencies because nobody finds it suspicious when they collect information and try to get access to secrets, but there will inevitably be questions about whether Voice of America should have been more suspicious of Gonzalez. Michael Pack, who was CEO of the US Agency for Global Media – which supervises VOA, warned 18 months ago that the agency had lax security standards and was “a great place to put a foreign spy.” Now it looks like Russia thought the same, and acted on it.
VOA says it has no information to confirm the Polish allegations against Gonzalez, but “out of an abundance of caution” has taken down all his content for review.
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