TASS After 1971, TASS was elevated to the status of State Committee at the Government of the Soviet Union. The agency was frequently used as a front organization by the Soviet intelligence agencies, such as the NKVD (later KGB) and Main Intelligence Directorate, with TASS employees serving as informants. In 1959, Alexander Alexeyev was dispatched to Cuba on a fact-finding mission, ostensibly working for TASS. In January 1992, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a Presidential Decree signed by Boris Yeltsin re-defined status of TASS and renamed it the "Information Telegraph Agency of Russia". In May 1994 The Russian Government
Firat News Agency Firat News Agency Firat News Agency, (, ), is a PKK-affiliated news agency that gathers and broadcast news from the Middle-East. The news agency have offices in Amsterdam and journalists around the world. Access to its websites from Turkey has been repeatedly blocked by Turkish courts, and its journalists have been arrested both by Turkey and the European Union countries due to its link to the PKK. According to the Turkish sources, the news agency is funded and operated by the PKK and its supporters. In 2016, one of its journalists, Maxime Azadi, was arrested in Brussels which was issued