Amateurish recording of ‘CIA’s MH17 plot’ ridiculed

MOSCOW: As high-stakes espionage goes, it is more Carry On Spying than John le Carre. An audio recording purporting to be two American CIA agents conspiring to bring down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has been ridiculed online, after a series of embarrassing errors exposed it as poorly made Russian propaganda.

The seven-minute recording is presented as a series of bugged phone conversations between two secret operatives, but the stilted greetings and cumbersome dialogue suggest that both men are reading from a script and are unfamiliar with English.

One of the two “spies” speaks in an affected US accent, while the other sounds British for half the recording before becoming American. Some have noted their dialogue sounds like a bad Google translation to English.

At the end of their first conversation, both men say “Luck!” to each other — a common farewell in Russian.

The recording, released by Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda this week, features two men calling themselves David Hamilton and David L Stern, supposedly speaking about three weeks before MH17 was shot down over Ukraine. But it was dismissed as poor-quality propaganda created by the Russian security service, the FSB.

Flight MH17 crashed on 17 July last year, killing all 298 people on board. Ukraine and Western governments have accused pro-Russian rebels, suggesting that they could have used a Buk missile system supplied by Moscow.

In the recording, the men refer to “orders” that they should implicate the separatists, “preparations” for an operation that involves shooting down a plane with a surface-to-air missile, and a Plan B — placing a bomb inside the aircraft.

The implication is that the attack was carried out by the West to embarrass Russia.

A video of the recording has been viewed 92,000 times on YouTube, but many commenting are brutal, with one giving it “three out of five spy stars”.

Another added: “I don’t know what’s worse, that the FSB is so incompetent they’d make such a ridiculously scripted video that anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of English can understand is fake, or that they have such a low opinion of the intelligence of the average Russian, that they thought this would be enough to convince them.”