Officers of the United States' Central Intelligence Agency operated as consultants to Anatoly Chubais, the Russian deputy prime minister who oversaw the privatization of the country's economy in the early 1990's, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

"In Chubais' entourage, it has now turned out, CIA officers worked as consultants," Putin said at a live Q&A session with the Russian public.

Putin also said "intelligence officers" had been prosecuted in the United States for illegally "enriching" themselves "during the course of privatization in Russia."

He gave no further details.

Putin also said "many mistakes" had been made during the controversial privatization of Russia's post-Soviet economy, but praised Chubais and the other reformers for their "courage" in taking the measures they deemed necessary.

One month before U.S. President Barack Obama pays his first visit to meet Pope Francis at The Vatican, an explosive new report has exposed the seedy side of the Catholic Church.

Secrets of the Vatican - a PBS Frontline exclusive which first aired last Tuesday - is a jaw-dropping piece of work, utterly unflinching in its depiction of the church's ongoing child sexual abuse scandal.

Not only that, it delves extensively into allegations of money laundering on the part of the Vatican Bank -

"It is unbelievable that this documentary was ever produced and shown on American television, much less by the government's PBS network," one source told us in commending it to our attention.

We agree ...

The FrontLine story begins with the story of Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado. Maciel was the Mexican priest who founded the Roman Catholic Church's Legion of Christ, an order which recruited young men for the priesthood.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Mike Billington, with the Executive Intelligence Review, from Leesburg, about US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel calling on Russia to be cautious about its military exercises along Ukraine's border


What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview:

Press TV: Mike Billington, it is pretty apparent that Putin is mad and we have just heard from the US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that it hopes that it is not going to be provocative these military drills and that it would not lead to miscalculations.

Where do you see the situation headed?

Billington: Well it is a disgusting hypocrisy. The problem of course that everyone knows is that it is not the Russians who are intervening in the internal affairs of Ukraine. It was the US and NATO. Everybody heard Victoria Nuland's open discussion with ambassador [Geoffrey] Pyatt about who they want to put in office and who they want to keep out on the street, continue the violent demonstrations that were going on.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has got the go-ahead from parliament to use the country's military in Ukraine in a marked escalation of the crisis.

The Kremlin has already been accused of sending 6,000 troops into Crimea despite calls by Britain and the US for Moscow to back off.

Two Russian anti-submarine warships have also appeared off the Crimea coast, violating an agreement on Moscow's lease of a naval base, Interfax news agency quoted a Ukrainian military source as saying.

The source said the two vessels, part of Russia's Baltic Fleet, had been sighted in a bay at Sevastopol, where Moscow's Black Sea Fleet has a base.

On Friday, US President Barack Obama warned Moscow "there will be costs" if it intervened militarily.

His national security team met on Saturday for an update on the crisis.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is still one of the most powerful lobby organizations in the country, but fortunately, it is starting to lose its iron-clad grip on our policymakers. AIPAC lost the fight to stop Chuck Hagel from being confirmed as Secretary of Defense; it lost the push for the US military to attack Syria, and it is losing its effort to derail nuclear talks with Iran. In the old days, AIPAC bragged that it could, within 24 hours, get the signatures of 70 Senators on a napkin if it really wanted to. This year, AIPAC got stuck at 59 cosponsors for its S.1881 sanctions bill - not enough support to force Senator Harry Reid to bring the bill to the floor or to override a threatened presidential veto.

Another sign of AIPAC's waning influence is the fact that this year, at their March 2-4 Policy Conference in Washington DC, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend but not President Obama or Vice President Joe Biden - both of whom have spoken in past years.

But it's certainly not time to sound the death knell. AIPAC still has a lot of muscle and will keep trying to flex it. Here's what we have to look forward to coming out of AIPAC 2014:

1. AIPAC continues to gun for a military confrontation with Iran. AIPAC has been pushing for increased sanctions during these delicate international nuclear talks, a move that would violate the terms of the agreement, signal to Iran that the US negotiating team cannot deliver on its commitments, divide the US from its international negotiating partners, and embolden Iranian hardliners. AIPAC is still pushing for this, but as a backup is trying to set the conditions for the talks. AIPAC's policy would lead us down a path to yet another disastrous war in the Middle East (AIPAC was a big promoter of the war in Iraq - and look how that one turned out!).

2. AIPAC's call for unconditional support for the Israeli government undermines a possible negotiated solution between the Israelis and Palestinians. AIPAC promotes Israeli policies that are in direct opposition to international law, including the establishment of settlements in the Occupied West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian land in its construction of the 26-foot high concrete "separation barrier" running through the West Bank. On February 27 Amnesty International published a report called Trigger Happy providing chilling detail of Israel's use of excessive force in the West Bank. AIPAC's support of these illegal practices is in direct opposition to a negotiated solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. AIPAC has also been pressuring Secretary of State Kerry to keep the political representatives of Palestinians in Gaza - Hamas - completely out of the peace talks. How can you come to a negotiated solution if 40 percent of all Palestinians are not represented?

American exceptionalism has gone into overdrive with stern warnings from US President Barack Obama to Russia to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and to not destabilize the region

By "American exceptionalism" we mean Washington's seemingly unlimited capacity for exceptional arrogance and double think.

Obama has not yet accused Russia outright of "military invasion" in the crisis-torn country, but that was the clear inference from his weekend press conference. In a veiled threat of military confrontation, the American president warned that there would be "costs" for Moscow.

"Any violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity will be deeply destabilizing and the US stands with the international community to affirm that there will be costs [for this violation]," said Obama in a hastily arranged media statement in Washington on Friday.

The White House is obviously rattled by reports of Russian troop movements across Ukraine's southern Crimean Peninsula. Moscow says that its military presence in the autonomous Crimean republic of Ukraine is fully in accord with a long-standing legal agreement to have its soldiers stationed there as part of its Black Sea naval base.

A car bomb blast Thursday in a normally quiet Mogadishu neighborhood blew the facade off a tea shop where intelligence officers are known to congregate, killing at least 11 people, police said.

A ball of smoke rose into the sky, as survivors ducked for cover. One man broke his arm when, startled by the blast, he jumped out of a moving car near the attack.

Police Capt. Mohammed Hussein said he saw 11 dead bodies. The tea shop is frequented by members of Somalia's intelligence unit but it wasn't immediately known how many of the victims were government employees.

The al-Qaida-linked group al-Shabab has increased the frequency of attacks in Somalia's capital in recent weeks, raising the specter of a return to daily violence. Last week an al-Shabab team attacked the presidential palace with two car bombs and seven gunmen. A car bomb exploded near a U.N. convoy earlier this month.

This is a portion of a 30 minute interview Putin granted CNN shortly after the West's adventures in Georgia in 2008. Strangely, it never made it onto CNN itself, although Russia Today apparently aired it.

A "devastating" two hundred and fifty page document: "The Responsibility of UK Officials for War Crimes Involving Systematic Detainee Abuse in Iraq from 2003-2008″, has been "presented to the International Criminal Court, and could result in some of Britain's leading defense figures facing prosecution for "systematic" war crimes" the (London) Independent on Sunday has revealed.

The dossier charges that: '"those who bear the greatest responsibility" for alleged war crimes "include individuals at the highest levels" of the British Army and political system.'

Among those named, states the Independent, are two former Defense Ministry supremos, Geoff Hoon and Adam Ingram, Defense Secretary and Minister of State for the Armed Forces, respectively, under Tony Blair's premiership, during the planning and invasion of Iraq and for most of the UK's occupation. General Sir Peter Wall, head of the British Army is also named.

US President Barack Obama has said he is "deeply concerned" about reports of military movements by Russia inside Ukraine.

Speaking at the White House Mr Obama said any violation of Ukraine's sovereignty would be deeply destabilising and he warned there would be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.

Earlier the US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power called for an urgent, international mediation mission to Crimea to de-escalate tensions in the region following an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council.

Ms Power said the mission would facilitate productive and peaceful dialogue among all Ukrainian parties.

It comes as Russian aircraft carrying nearly 2,000 suspected troops have landed at a military air base near the regional capital of the Crimean peninsula, a top Ukrainian official said accusing Moscow of an "armed invasion".

"Thirteen Russian aircraft landed at the airport of Gvardeyskoye (near Simferopol) with 150 people in each one," Sergiy Kunitsyn, the Ukrainian president's special representative in Crimea, told the local ATR television channel.

He said the air space had been closed.