In passing: Martin Meehan, senior IRA veteran

Martin Meehan, a one-time Irish Republican Army commander who spurred IRA members toward compromise, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack in his Belfast home, the Sinn Fein party said. He was 62.

Meehan spent 18 years in prison for a wide range of offenses but ended his days as a firm advocate for peace and compromise in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams – who, like Meehan, joined the IRA in 1966 and spent time in prison with him in the 1970s – praised Meehan as “a dedicated IRA volunteer, political activist and elected representative.”

Meehan was among the first IRA members arrested in August 1969, the month Britain deployed its army as would-be peacekeepers amid Protestant-Catholic rioting.

Meehan was a Sinn Fein candidate in several elections, narrowly failing to win a seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2003.

To the end, Meehan defended his support for the peace process in no uncertain terms. Earlier this year, when an IRA dissident accused him of being a sellout, Meehan decked the guy.

Meehan is survived by his second wife, Briege, and several children from both marriages.

Moscow

Alexander Feklisov, Soviet-era spy chief

Alexander Feklisov, the Soviet-era spy chief who oversaw the espionage work of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and helped mediate the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, died Oct. 26. He was 93.

The death was confirmed by Sergei Ivanov, a spokesman for the Foreign Intelligence Service, one of the successor agencies to the KGB. He gave no cause of death.

Born March 9, 1914, in Moscow to a railroad signalman’s family, Feklisov was trained as a radio technician and recruited into the American department of the KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD, according to his official biography posted on the Foreign Intelligence Service’s Web site.

Feklisov said Julius Rosenberg was a Soviet sympathizer who handed over secrets on military electronics, but not the atomic bomb. He said Ethel Rosenberg played no part in spying – claims that were consistent with declassified U.S. intercepts of Soviet spy communications.

The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953 after being convicted of supplying the Soviet Union with top-secret information on U.S. efforts to develop the atomic bomb.

Igor Moiseyev, Russian folk dancer

Igor Moiseyev, who transformed folk dance into a legitimate genre of choreographic art that won worldwide acclaim, died Friday. He was 101.

He had been unconscious for the past three days and died in a Moscow hospital, said Yelena Shcherbakova, director of the Moiseyev Dance Company, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Moiseyev, called the king of folk dance, attracted the West to Russian culture at a time of deep political hostility.

He brought traditional folk dance onto the professional stage by combining ethnic moves with classic ballet. His numbers – from the Russian peasant girl dance to the Greek Sirtaki – were hailed as promoting peace and tolerance by showing that each culture is unique. He amazed Americans with his take on rock ‘n’ roll and square dance.

BANGKOK, Thailand

Khun Sa, liberation fighter

One-time drug warlord Khun Sa, variously described as among the world’s most wanted men and a great liberation fighter, has died. He was 74.

Khuensai Jaiyen, a former secretary of Khun Sa who works with ethnic Shan minority guerrilla groups, said his former boss died in the Myanmar capital of Yangon on Friday, according to his relatives.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Khun Sa had long suffered from diabetes, partial paralysis and high blood pressure.

At the height of his notoriety, Khun Sa presided over a veritable narcotics kingdom complete with satellite television, schools and surface-to-air missiles in the drug-producing Golden Triangle region where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet. He preferred to paint himself as a liberation fighter for the Shan ethnic minority, heading up the Shan United Army in Myanmar’s northeastern Shan State.