r/espionage

>Once, a hostile secret service had to send a skilled and experienced operative to commit assassination, sabotage or terrorism thousands of miles away, or activate networks of sleeper agents, or find and train ideologically committed recruits ready to betray their country. Such schemes took years to prepare.

Now spymasters can use a series of proxies, each thousands of miles apart, to find candidates for recruitment. Their new operatives might be less capable than their predecessors but are easier to find in significant numbers.

The Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company — EAPC — was formed as a 50-50 joint venture between Israel and Iran in 1968. Shell companies in Liechtenstein and Panama concealed the arrangement. The company's chairman represented the Government of Iran, appointed by the Israeli Minister of Finance.

For over a decade, Iranian oil flowed through Israeli soil to European refineries. Both governments publicly denied any relationship.

The 1979 revolution ended the formal arrangement. Iran's compensation claims against Israel remain unresolved to this day.

The pipeline never stopped running.

In 2003 it reversed direction — carrying Russian oil to Asian markets. In October 2020, signed in Abu Dhabi with US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin present, it got a new customer: UAE oil, flowing to European markets as the first operational output of the Abraham Accords.

The pipeline the Islamic Republic of Iran built is now carrying Emirati oil to the markets Iran can no longer reach.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

In 1963, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory calculated exactly how many nuclear bombs it would take to dig a canal along the same corridor.

His answer: 520.

That document was classified for 30 years. Declassified in 1993.

The canal route goes around Gaza. Because Gaza is populated. Controlling Gaza removes the most expensive detour on a hundred-billion-dollar project generating ten billion a year in transit fees.

In December 2025, Jared Kushner unveiled a $112 billion plan to develop Gaza's Mediterranean coastline — three miles from the pipeline's northern terminal. His firm had raised $3.5 billion from Gulf sovereign wealth funds. The presentation made no mention of the pipeline, the canal, or the geography.

It was twilight in September, a date chosen carefully as it is a time of year when the temperatures drop below freezing on the border between Siberia and Kazakhstan but the snow is yet to arrive, allowing an escapee to take cover among the grasses and crops which carpet the frontier in the early autumn.

The high-flying Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, dressed in a gas mask, a rubber suit and wrapped in tin foil, was running for his life from Vladimir Putin’s death squads – populated by a number of his former colleagues.

His escape from the cow, over the border and onto the back of a motorcycle driven by a former Soviet KGB spy, played out in the shadows of two of the biggest espionage cases in European legal history.

But Senin, 47, is no defector. At least, not in his telling.

Instead, he is what screenwriters would call a rogue agent: an innocent man, he claims, framed for a crime he did not commit, using a very particular set of skills acquired over a long and highly decorated career to stay a step ahead of his own side while trying to clear his name.

It is a story almost too extraordinary to believe. But much of his tale, including how Russian agents have pursued him and his family across Europe, is corroborated by court records and investigations by European security services seen by The Telegraph. Senin’s account, told here for the first time, sheds light on how the Kremlin has dodged repeated rounds of security crackdowns and sanctions to keep a network of spies dotted throughout the Continent – including agents, Senin claims, who have acquired British citizenship.

And it demonstrates how Russia abuses international legal systems to search for those it wants to “liquidate”.