User:gurkubondinn
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| — Wikipedian — | |
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| Name | Ben |
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| Born | Benedikt Kristinsson 1987 (age 38–39) |
| Nationality |  Icelandic |
| Country |  Germany |
| Time zone | Europe/Berlin |
| Education and employment | |
| Occupation | Programmer |
| Education | Computer Science, B.Sc. |
| University | Reykjavik University |
| Contact info | |
| Website | sudo.is |
| GitHub | benediktkr |
| Bluesky | ben.sudo.is |
| Matrix | @ben:sudo.is |
| Codeberg | benk |
| Account statistics | |
| Joined | November 26, 2009 |
| Signature | --gurkubondinn |
Benedikt (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈbɛːnɛtɪxt]; born 1987), best known as Ben, is an Icelandic programmer, hacker and Wikipedia user, who lives in Berlin.
About
[edit]| de-1 | Dieser Benutzer beherrscht Deutsch auf grundlegendem Niveau. |
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Welcome to my user page. My name is Ben, I am a WP:HOBBIT and long-time Wikipedia reader.
Advice and criticisms are always welcome, I would like to know if I did something that I shouldn't have and I do my best to listen to feedback from others and learn from it. Feel free to leave me a message on my talk page. If you want to contact me in private, you can email me (though I might not notice right away) or message me on Matrix.
Bookmarks
[edit]An index of Wikipedia articles that I find interesting, often refer to, or watch for changes, categorized by subject matter, spanning Wikipedias of the languages that I speak.
More than anything, this is a personal collection of bookmarks.
Espionage
[edit]Cold war
[edit]- Iceland in the Cold War
- Berlin Wall
- Russian espionage in Germany during the Cold War.
- IB affair: former intelligence service within Försvarsstaben, exposed by Jan Guillou in 1973.
- First Chief Directorate: Department of the Soviet KGB concerned with external intelligence
- Rosenholz files
Intelligence officers
[edit]- Grigory Mairanovsky: ran secret poison program in the NKVD and participated in political assassinations, arrested in the doctors' plot.
TODO: expand using WhatLinksHere/Grigory Mairanovsky articles.
- John Cairncross: alleged fifth member of the Cambridge Five.
- Elżbieta Zawacka (Zo): Polish SOE officer and courier during WWII.
- Tore Forsberg was one of Swedish intelligence's most experienced counterintelligence officers who lead the Säpo operation that photographed Markus Wolf (codenamed "Mischa"), leading to Werner Stiller identifying him as the head of the Stasi foreign intelligence directorate,[a][1] known in the west as "the man without a face".
- Eliza Manningham-Buller: British MI5 officer and one of only five people who were fully read in on Gordievsky and later became the Director General of MI5.[2] She was aware that it was Gordievsky who had exposed Michael Bettaney.[3][4] Two of her assistants shared an office with Bettaney,[2] and she reportedly served him breakfast in an MI5 safehouse shortly before he confessed.
- Valerie Pettit (named Veronica Price in The spy and the traitor)[5]: British MI6 officer and operative, who devised and maintained the PIMLICO plan for Gordievsky's escape from Moscow.[6] One of very few people to know Gordievsky's identity, she was his case officer when he was recruited by MI6 in Copenhagen in 1974 and remained throughout the case until his escape and defection.[7] When aske
Defectors and turncoats
[edit]In no particular order;
- Mitrokhin Archive: Handwritten copies of secret KGB documents made by Vasili Mitrokhin in the 1970s and 1980s and given to MI6 in 1991.
- Oleg Gordievsky: former KGB rezident and MI6 double agent, betrayed by Aldrich Ames and exfiltrated from the Soviet Union in 1985 under Operation PIMLICO.[7]
- Gunvor Haavik: Norwegian woman who arrested in 1977 after a tip-off from Gordievsky.
- Michael Bettaney: British MI5 officer in the Soviet counter-espionage section in 140 Gower Street, who incompetently approached the KGB London rezident, Arkady V. Guk, by pushing secret documents through his letterbox and requiring communication via dead-drops and signals. Guk believed this to be a potential dangle and did not act on it, but Gordievsky found out and told his MI6 handlers, who in turn informed MI5 of this. Shared an office with two of Eliza Manningham-Buller's assistants.[2][4]
- Michał Goleniewski (codename SNIPER) defected to the US, but he knew CIA was compromised (Ames), so he only trusted FBI but CIA intercepted without his knowledge. There is no record of his death.
- Oleg Penkovsky
- § Possible compromise and the "Zepp" incident: In April 1961, Penkovsky and Greville Wynne were secretly recorded by the KGB in a Moscow restaurant where they mentioned a woman called "Zeph"', which the KGB misheard as "Zepp". While Wynne was imprisoned in Moscow over the Penkovsky affair, he was played the 1961 recording from the restaurant and was asked by the interrogator "Who is Zepp?".
- Yuri Nosenko: GRU Colonel that was recruited by MI6 and CIA in London, and defected to the US in 1964. Some within the CIA, for example chief of counterintelligence James Angleton, believed that he might be a false defector, while the FBI largely accepted him as genuine. Eventually Nosenko was determined to be a genuine defector. In 1962, before his defection, Nosenko unexpectedly asked his CIA case officers, Tennent H. Bagley and George Kisevalter, about "Zepp", claiming this was an Indonesian military attaché whom KGB surveillance had caught speaking with an American naval attaché.
- Anatoliy Golitsyn: KGB defector
- Robert Hanssen was one of the most damaging turncoats in US intelligence, evetually ensared by Eric O'Neill and arrested.
- Aldrich Ames
- Aleksandr Poteyev: former head of Directorate "S" of the SVR, who revealed the illegals program to the Americans. Believed to be living in the US under and assumed identity.
- Aleksey Kulak (codename FEDORA), a KGB officer who offered his services to the FBI and CIA between 1962 and 1977. His assertion that there was a KGB mole within the FBI lead to a decades long hunt. He was considered a possible dangle, and betrayed by Aldrich Ames.
- Stig Bergling
- Stig Wennerström
- Fritiof Enbom
- Arne Treholt was arrested by POT counterintelligence officers in 1984 at Fornebu lufthavn in Oslo on his way to meet his KGB handler Gennady Titov in Vienna. He was uncovered by Barbara Verica and Jim Downey in an undercover FBI surveillance operation in NYC,[b] where he was posted as a member of the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations, following a tip-off from POT who had grown suspicious of his clandestine meetings with Titov in Europe. Treholt was sentenced to 20 years in prison, was pardoned in 1992 and died in 2023 in Moscow.
- Victor Kravchenko: author of I Chose Freedom.
- Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi (codename CURVEBALL), chemical engineer who defected to Germany from Iraq in 1999. Despite warnings from CIA, MI6 and BND, the US and British governments used his allegations as rationale for the Iraq War.
- Rainer Rupp (codename Topaz or Topas) was willingly recruited by the Stasi and infiltrated NATO Headquarters in 1977. NATO were made aware of Topaz in 1990 when Heinz Busch defected, but he was not identified until 1993 when some parts of the Rosenholz files were handed to the BStU. He now claims to have averted a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Soviet Union, when the KGB head Andropov was convinced[c] that the Able Archer 83 exercise was a NATO cover to launch a surprise attack on the Soviets.
- Werner Stiller was an Oberleutnant in the Stasi foreign intelligence directorate,[a] and a double agent for the BND. In 1979 he defected with a trove of secret documents that he had collected. He identified Markus Wolf (codenamed "Mischa") as the head of HV A when he was shown the photographs taken by Säpo in Sweden.[1]
- Stanislav Levchenko
Events
[edit]- Catalina affair: Two Swedish aircraft shot down by the Soviet Air Force over international waters in June 1952.
- "Whiskey on the rocks": Standoff in 1981 after the Soviet Navy submarine ran aground on the south coast of Sweden, close to a Swedish Navy base.
- 1961 F-84 Thunderstreak incident: Two German Air Force jets land at the French-controlled Tegel after accidentally violating GDR airspace and successfully evading Soviet fighters. Ordered by USAF ATC controllers at Tempelhof to land in West Berlin.
- 1961 Ndola Transair Sweden DC-6 crash: The crash that resulted in the death of Dag Hammarskjöld.
- In 1987, Mathias Rust lands a Cessna 172, registration D-ECJB, in the Red Square in Moscow. This embarrased the Soviet military and enabled Gorbachev to remove many of the strongest opponest of Perestroika.
North Korea
[edit]Contributed minor rewrites.
WWII
[edit]- Witold Pilecki: Volunteered to infiltrate Auschwitz.
- Raoul Wallenberg
- Operation Jupiter (Norway): Petsamo.
Notable criminal cases
[edit]- Baneheia murders: Double murder and miscarriage of justice that happened in Norway in 2010.
- Werner Pinzner: German contract killer who became known as the "St. Pauli Killer".
- 2003 Angola Boeing 727 disappearance
- 2012 Alps killings
- 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators
Medicine
[edit]- Supraventricular tachycardia
- Rat Park: A study into addiction that has served as a basis for current understanding of addiction, but has not been reliably replicated.
- Head-twitch response
People
[edit]- Stéphane Lambiel: Swiss figure skater (born 1985)
- Minik Wallace: an Inughuaq who was brought as a child in 1897 from Greenland to New York City, with his father and others, by Robert Peary.
Clocks
[edit]- Sector clock: British army clocks with coloured triangles.
German
[edit]Aviation
[edit]Wikipedia
[edit]| Editing |
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Writing
[edit]Ideas
[edit]- Draft:Werner Stiller (see § Defectors and turncoats)
- 1998 Gothenburg discotheque fire: improve the article, needs a fair amount of rewriting
- Category:Airports in Brandenburg and Category:Airports in Berlin additions:
- Eberswalde-Finow Airport
- Strausberg Airport (webcams)
- Saarmund Airport
- Schönhagen Airport
- Staaken Airfield (historic, mentioned in Staaken)
- Gransee Airport
- German administrative classification of (small) airports and airfields:
Biographies
[edit]- Template:Biography: sample layout for biographical articles.
- MOS:BIO: the manual of style for biographical articles.
Essays
[edit]Documentation
[edit]Documentation and Help: pages that I often refer to.
- Wikipedia:Department directory
- Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia: The most useful Wikipedia link of supreme guidance (or so claimed by TurboSuperA+).
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style
- MOS:GNL: Gender-neutral language.
- MOS:CITEPUNCT: Punctuation and footnotes.
- MOS:DATE: Dates, months and years (see also: Automatic date insertion).
- MOS:FOREIGN: Non-English terms.
- WP:REPEATCITE: Multiple uses of the same inline citation or footnote.
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking
- Wikipedia:Citing sources
- Help:Citation Style 1: There is also WP:CS2 (but it ends there, there is no WP:CS3).
- WP:RSP: The perennial sources list, classifies sources by degrees of reliability.
- WP:SOURCEGUIDE: Supplement to RSP.
- Help:Footnotes
- Wikipedia:Large language models
- Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
- WP:LLMCOMM: Comments that do not represent an actual person's thoughts are not useful.
- WP:AIREMOVAL: Handling suspected LLM-generated content
- WP:AIC: WikiProject AI Cleanup
- WP:AINB: Noticeboard
- meta:Artificial intelligence/Policies by project
- Template:Interlanguage link: Linking to other Wikipedia languages.
- Template:Icelandic name
- Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines
- Help:Wikitext
- Help:Magic words
- WP:DUMPS: Database download and mirrors
- WP:SIP: sensitive IP addresses, but more like "interesting IP ranges".
Tools
[edit]Helping others
[edit]Pages and documentation to point newer editors to when they need help:
- H:INTRO / WP:START: Introduction to Wikipedia
- WP:ADVENTURE: A training adventure game
- WP:HI: Getting started as a new editor
- WP:REFBEGIN: Referencing for beginners
Vandalism
[edit]Old vandalism
[edit]Some old vandalism that went undetected for an embarassing amount of time.
- Kristín Helga Gunnarsdóttir: 2,5 years
- Saayad 2: 6 years, 3 months
- C. C. Mukundan
- Mjóifjörður: was in a category for Norway for 16 years
Fixing LLM generated nonsense
[edit]Significant contributions
[edit]I often refer to the wikisource of articles that I have contributed to myself for practical examples of how I've done something, or how to use wikitext syntax that I know I've used but can't remember the exact syntax for. "Significant" does not mean "major" or a large contribution of text, these are articles that I have spent some nontrivial amount of time on improving, or where my contributions feel otherwise significant to me. This list is meant for myself, and I don't necessarily expect anyone else to have to agree that my contributions were significant in any way.
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Essays on Wikipedia
[edit]Interesting essays about life on Wikipedia, some less serious than others, some are practical and useful, but all are good reads.
- Just drop it: Some people just thrive on arguments.
- WP:OWB: Observations on Wikipedia behavior (by User:Antandrus)
- These are the LLM users in your neighborhood (by User:LWG)
- The Cynic's Guide to Wikipedia: If you wrestle with a pig, both of you will get muddy.[f]
- WP:DENY: Don't feed the trolls, deny recognition.
- Drop the stick and back slowly away from the horse carcass: Because dead horses can't be made to go anywhere, no matter how hard you keep beating them. Speaking of horses, do you know how many legs they have?
- How to lose: Great advice for life in general, though scarcely learned.
- No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man: Take the lift instead.[g]
- WP:RANDY: the archetypal uninformed but relentless Wikipedia editor.
- WP:DOLT: Don't overlook legal threads, like Colin in Auchterturra.
- WP:PROUD: why an article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing
- WP:USED-AI? / WP:LLM?: did someone ask if you used an AI? Read this.
- WP:NOAILIARS: do not lie about using AI, it will not end well for you.
There's a lot of good essays on or about Wikipedia.
Notes
[edit]- 1 2 Main Directorate for Reconnaissance of the Ministry for State Security (German: Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit; HV A des MfS)
- ↑ Treholt lived at 801 Second Avenue (close to the UN). The FBI rented the apartment directly across the hall, surveilled him and befreinded him and his wife while posing as a couple.
- ↑ A truly paranoid fucker who had genuinely convinced himself that the west and NATO were going to start a nuclear war.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Improved after AIC cleanup
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Stubified AI-generated article
- ↑ And the pig will enjoy it.
- ↑ Or go on a tour of the building.
References
[edit]- 1 2 Svarstad, Asbjørn (16 July 2000). "Säpo hade en spion på DDR:s ambassad" [Säpo had a spy at the embassy of the DDR]. Aftonbladet (in Swedish). Archived from the original on 17 September 2019. Retrieved 14 May 2026.
- 1 2 3 "Profile: Eliza Manningham-Buller". BBC News. 10 November 2006. Archived from the original on 3 May 2023. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
- ↑ Norton-Taylor, Richard (19 March 2004). "The Guardian profile: Eliza Manningham-Buller". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 7 December 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
- 1 2 Simpson, Anne (5 September 2011). "Ex-head of MI5 retains power to raise alarm". The Herald. Archived from the original on 5 September 2026. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
- ↑ "Valerie Pettit obituary". The Times. 24 March 2020. Archived from the original on 30 April 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
- ↑ Twomey, John. "Miss Marple mastermind of Cold War spy's escape". Daily Express. Archived from the original on 29 September 2023. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
- 1 2 Macintyre, Ben (24 March 2020). "Revealed: woman who sprang Gordievsky from KGB clutches". The Times. Archived from the original on 30 April 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
Account
[edit]
Committed identity: bf2502c86327e19032a51c71559426ada3cb25420c43f2227043abcafda1fa2f86f8854e757d0b5f2d8b6560d70f434e217b40af2da787cbaf5f5e89776a675c is an SHA-512 commitment to this user's real-life identity.
Summary |
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Latest contributions |
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8 October 2026
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Categories:
- Wikipedian WikiGnomes
- WikiProject Espionage participants
- Members of the Fifteen Year Society of Wikipedia editors
- Wikipedians in Germany
- User en
- User en-N
- User is
- User is-N
- User sv
- User sv-N
- User no
- User no-2
- User de
- User de-1
- Wikipedians in Berlin
- Wikipedians interested in Ukraine
- Wikipedians interested in United States politics
- WikiProject AI Cleanup
- WikiProject Iceland participants