News you may have missed #684

February 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Boris KarpichkovBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Pakistan sacks health workers who helped CIA locate bin Laden. Seventeen local health workers have been fired in Abbottabad for their part in a CIA scheme to try to confirm the presence of Osama bin Laden in the northern Pakistani town. The low-ranking health department employees were punished for helping Dr Shakil Afridi, who was assigned by the CIA to set up a fake vaccination scheme in Abbottabad, ahead of the US military operation that found and killed the al-Qaida leader there.
►►Estonia arrests couple for spying for Russia. Estonian prosecutors said Aleksei Dressen, who works for Estonia’s security police, and his wife, Viktoria Dressen, were arrested at Tallinn airport as she was boarding a flight to Moscow on February 22. Aleksei Dressen allegedly went to the airport to give his wife a folder that contained classified information. Meanwhile, in neighboring Lithuania, the government has released the names of 238 citizens who were reservists for the KGB during the Cold War.
►►KGB defector talks to British newspaper. Since fleeing to Britain in the late 1990s Boris Karpichkov has preferred to keep a low profile —unlike another, better-known Moscow agent who fled to London, one Alexander Litvinenko. He says he ran audacious disinformation operations against the CIA and broke into and planted bugs in the British embassy in Riga. But in 1995 he grew unhappy with the increasingly corrupt FSB (the KGB’s successor), which, he says, failed to pay him. He spent several months in a Moscow prison before slipping into Britain on one of the false passports he was given as a KGB officer. He hasn’t been back to Russia since.

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WikiLeaks document to expose Swedish Foreign Minister as US spy

February 23, 2012 by 2 Comments

Carl BildtBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
International whistleblower website WikiLeaks says it intends to publish a classified document that allegedly exposes Sweden’s current Foreign Minister as a spy for the United States. According to Swedish newspaper Expressen, which says it has seen the document in question, Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, is shown to have operated as an informant for the United States since the mid-1970s. The revelation, which is allegedly included in a classified diplomatic cable sent from the American embassy in Stockholm to the US Department of State, is likely to cause a major political crisis in Sweden and end the career of Carl Bildt, a popular politician who served as Sweden’s Prime Minister between 1991 and 1994. In an article published on Wednesday, Expressen cites an anonymous WikiLeaks source that claims Bildt “cooperated with the American government in a manner that is in direct violation of Swedish law”. The paper also states that, according to the incriminating document, Bildt was initially recruited by US intelligence through Republican political strategist Karl Rove, who is known to have been “an old personal friend” of the Swedish politician. According to the Expressen report, WikiLeaks has decided to publicize the leaked diplomatic cable as a warning against the Swedish government, which is said to be considering extraditing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #681

February 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Vladimir NesteretsBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Mossad ‘bolsters activity in Tunisia’. The Mossad has bolstered its activity in several Tunisian cities since the start of the revolt that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali last January, Tunisian magazine Al-Musawar has reported. According to the magazine, the Israeli intelligence agency has been working with its US-based counterpart, the CIA, to revive its spy network in post-revolution Tunisia.
►►US ‘used quake’ to send Special Forces into Pakistan. The US Pentagon used the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 to send operatives from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into Pakistan, reveals a new book by D.B Grady and Marc Ambinder, entitled The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army. The authors claim that dozens of CIA operatives and contractors entered Pakistan using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, thus avoiding the requisite background checks from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
►►Russian officer convicted of spying for CIA. A Russian military court last week convicted Lt. Col. Vladimir Nesterets of providing the CIA with secret information on Russia’s new intercontinental ballistic missiles and sentenced him to 13 years in prison. The officer pleaded guilty to passing on that classified information in exchange for money, said the Federal Security Service, the main agency that replaced the Soviet-era KGB. Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency quoted the officer’s wife, Irina, as saying she could not understand the guilty plea because her husband had told her he did nothing wrong and had not betrayed his country.

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News you may have missed #679

February 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Salem al-HassiBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►New spy chief in Libya. Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council yesterday appointed a lifelong opponent of slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as the country’s new intelligence chief. Salem al-Hassi, who was involved in a bid to assassinate Gaddafi in 1984, was appointed as the intelligence chief at a meeting of the council.
►►Anonymous hackers release German classified information. Hackers from the group Anonymous said last week they had accessed classified German files and posted them online, revealing details of the country’s military operations in Afghanistan. The military documents were collected for an inquiry, now finished, into a September 2009 airstrike by US jets under German orders that killed more than 140 Taliban fighters and Afghan civilians. Anonymous said it obtained the data from a server at the Bundestag  (German parliament).
►►Did Chinese espionage lead to F-35 delays? Did Chinese cyber spying cause the United States’ F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s cost spikes and production delays? This is the question being asked by US Pentagon budget officials, according to industry magazine Aviation Week. Chinese spies apparently hacked into secure conference calls and listened to meetings discussing the classified technologies aboard the jets. In particular, China may have stolen info about the F-35’s secure communications and antenna systems, leading to costly software rewrites and other redesigns to compromised parts of the plane.

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News you may have missed #673

February 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Israel outsources intelligence-gathering to rightwing groups. The government and military of Israel have unofficially outsourced some of their intelligence work to private organizations that monitor anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media and are associated with right-wing politics, according to several high-ranking government and military sources.
►►NATO report finds Pakistan spies help Taliban. The BBC says it has seen a NATO report stating that the Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services. The leaked report, derived from material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians, also claims Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders. The US said exactly the same thing last September.
►►Another Russian diplomat ‘leaves’ Canada. Another Russian diplomat has left Canada. Dmitry Gerasimov, a consular officer with the Russian government’s office in Toronto, left in January. He is the second diplomat that the Russian embassy in Canada acknowledges has quit this country in January. The other was Colonel Sergey Zhukov, the defense attaché for the Russian government in Ottawa. All totaled, six Russian diplomats that have been dropped from Ottawa’s list of recognized foreign representatives in the last 11 days. It’s not clear which, if any, of recent these exits can be tied to the Jeffrey Paul Delisle spy controversy.

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News you may have missed #674

January 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Fayez KaramBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Lebanese ex-general gets prison sentence for spying for Israel. Last Tuesday’s sentence of former Brigadeer General Fayez Karam (pictured) means he will spend six more months in jail. He has been in prison since mid-2009, said the officials on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. Karam, who in the late 1980s led Lebanon’s counterespionage unit, ran for a parliament seat in 2009 as a senior member of the Free Patriotic Movement of Christian leader and Hezbollah ally Michel Aoun.
►►US may share intelligence with Nigeria. Nigeria and the United States plan to “explore the development of intelligence fusion capability”. This statement was contained in a joint communiqué issued at the end of a two day inauguration of a regional security cooperation working group held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Abuja, Nigeria. The two countries will be collaborating “on training, logistics intelligence sharing, modernization of the security services and other requirements”.
►►Afghan jailed for 16 years for spying for Iran. An Afghan man, named only as Mahmmood, has been jailed for 16 years for spying for neighboring Iran. He was allegedly found in possession of photographs of foreign and Afghan military installations in western Herat province, and had Iranian intelligence officials’ phone numbers in his notebook.

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News you may have missed #673

January 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

John KiriakouBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Canada arrest shows spy times have changed in Russia. There are aspects of the spy case of Canadian Sub-Lt. Jeffery Delisle that differ substantially from spy cases dating back to Cold War espionage waged by the now-defunct Soviet system. As a sign of changing times, the Russian media has acknowledged Delisle was allegedly spying for them —something that would never be admitted in Soviet times when the KGB and GRU were in ascendency.
►►US court upholds S. Korean ex-spy’s asylum ruling. Kim Ki-sam, who left South Korea’s state spy agency in 2000, applied for asylum in the US in 2003, saying he would face persecution and prosecution if he was forced to return to South Korea because he had revealed information about secret operations to help then-President Kim Dae-jung win the Nobel Peace Prize. A US court has now upheld a 2008 ruling to grant him political asylum.
►►Kiriakou’s wife resigns from CIA. Heather Kiriakou, who has served as a top analyst at the Agency, resigned Tuesday amid accounts that she had been pressured to step down after her husband —John Kiriakou, a former agency employee— was charged with leaking classified information to the press. Two sources in direct contact with the Kiriakous told The Washington Post that Heather had submitted her resignation under pressure from superiors at the CIA.

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News you may have missed #671

January 26, 2012 by 2 Comments

Pablo Neruda (right) and Salvador AllendeBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►German ‘spies’ detained in Pakistan. Three alleged German spies have been detained in Pakistan by police and released to German diplomats, according to reports. The men were detained last Saturday in the northeastern city of Peshawar by officers who accused them of belonging to “an unauthorized liaison office of the German embassy”. A Pakistani official said counterintelligence authorities had been observing the three Germans “for months”.
►►Was poet Pablo Neruda murdered? Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, died exactly 12 days after the brutal coup that ended the life of his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende. The official version was that he died of natural causes brought on by the trauma of witnessing the coup and the lethal persecution of many of his friends. But now Neruda’s body might be exhumed for testing to address long-simmering suspicions that the poet was poisoned.
►►Britain’s secret mission to beat Gaddafi. British efforts to help Libyan rebels topple Colonel Gaddafi were not limited to air strikes. On the ground –and on the quiet– British special forces soldiers were blending in with rebel fighters. The BBC’s Newsnight program has produced a report on the subject. The report includes information on E Squadron, which has not hitherto been discussed publicly. It was formed in 2007 to work closely with MI6, and is mainly involved in missions “where maximum discretion is required”.

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News you may have missed #669

January 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Raoul WallenbergBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►UK admits using fake rock to spy on Russians. Britain has admitted for the first time that it was caught spying when Russia exposed its use of a fake rock in Moscow to conceal electronic equipment. Russia made the allegations in January 2006, but Britain has not publicly accepted the claims until now. Jonathan Powell, then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, told a BBC documentary it was “embarrassing”, but “they had us bang to rights”. He added: “clearly they had known about it for some time”.
►►New book examines forgotten CIA officer Jim Thompson. The CIA’s longtime man in Southeast Asia, Jim Thompson, fought to stop the agency’s progression from a small spy ring to a large paramilitary agency. Now a new book, The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War, by Joshua Kurlantzick, examines the life and exploits of the man known as “Silk King” Jim.
►►Sweden to probe fate of WWII hero Wallenberg. Raoul Wallenberg (pictured) was a shrewd businessman who, in the summer of 1944, was posted as Sweden’s ambassador in Budapest, Hungary. He was also an American intelligence asset, having been recruited by a US spy operating out of the War Refugee Board, an American government outfit with offices throughout Eastern Europe. He was abducted by Soviet intelligence officers in the closing stages of World War II, and his fate is one of the unsolved mysteries of 20th century espionage. Now Sweden says it will open a new probe into his disappearance.

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Canada reportedly expels Russian diplomats over spy affair

January 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Canadian government officials have refused to confirm or deny media reports that Ottawa expelled several Russian diplomats recently in connection with an alleged espionage affair. The alleged expulsions are reportedly connected with the case of Royal Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle. Earlier this week, Delisle became the first person to be charged under Canada’s post-9/11 Security of Information Act, for allegedly passing protected government information to an unspecified foreign body. According to media reports, Delisle, who had top-level security clearance, worked at Canada’s ultra-secure HMCS Trinity communications center in Halifax. Canadian authorities have refused to reveal the country for which Delisle allegedly spied. But late last night, CTV revealed that the names of two Russian diplomats and two technicians stationed at the embassy of the Russian Federation in Ottawa had been quietly dropped from the list of recognized diplomatic officials in Canada. The list, which is approved periodically by the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, contains the names of all foreign diplomats legally permitted to operate in Canada. One of the missing names, that of Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry V. Fedorchatenko, bears the title of the embassy’s Assistant Defense Attaché. Russian consular officials in Canada rejected speculation that the missing diplomats were expelled by the Canadian government in connection with the Delisle affair. It appears that Canadian counterintelligence investigators had been monitoring Jeff Delisle for quite some time, perhaps even before 2010. If Delisle acted —as he is reported to have done— as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia, it is certainly not surprising that he was a naval officer. He was probably selected by the Russians because he was a member of the Royal Canadian Navy. Ever since Canada joined NATO, in the late 1940s, its tactical contribution to the Organization has been mostly naval. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #666 (superstition edition)

January 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Gevork VartanianBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Soviet spying legend Gevork Vartanian dies. Legendary Soviet spy Gevork Vartanian, who helped foil Operation LONG JUMP, a Nazi plot to kill the three main Allied leaders in Tehran during World War II, has died in Moscow, aged 87. Operating in Tehran during World War II, he tracked German commandos, including the infamous Nazi operative Otto Skorzeny, who had arrived to attack a summit attended by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill.
►►Turkey arrests ex-armed forces chief over coup charges. Turkish government prosecutors allege that Ilker Basbug, who retired as Turkey’s chief of staff in 2010, led a terrorist organization and plotted to overthrow the government. Remarkably, most English-language sources, including the Financial Times, managed to report Basbug’s arrest without mentioning Ergenekon, the ultra-nationalist network uncovered by Turkish police in 2007, which has resulted in hundreds of arrests, including that of Basbug.
►►Lebanon claims arrest of ‘longtime’ Israeli spy. The Lebanese army has detained a man on suspicion of collaborating for years with Israel’s Mossad spy agency. The man, identified as Elias Younes, is a retired employee of the state telecommunications company Ogero. Hezbollah-affiliated sources said Younes had been dealing with Israel for “over 35 years”. See here if you are wondering where you have heard before about Lebanese telecommunications employees allegedly spying for Israel.

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News you may have missed #665

January 13, 2012 by 2 Comments

Matthew M. AidBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Joseph Fitsanakis interviewed on ABC Radio National. IntelNews‘ own Dr Joseph Fitsanakis was interviewed on Friday by reporter Suzanne Hill, for ABC Radio National’s flagship evening news program ‘PM‘. In the interview, which was about the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, Fitsanakis points the finger at the Mossad, and explains why he doesn’t believe the United States had anything to do with the killing. You can listen to the interview here. The transcript is here.
►►India releases diplomat jailed for spying. Last April, Madhuri Gupta, second secretary at the Indian high commission in Islamabad, Pakistan, was arrested for working for Pakistan’s ISI spy agency. She apparently had a “relationship of personal affection” with an aide of her Pakistani handler. On Tuesday, she was granted bail by an Indian court, after 21 months in prison.
►►Matthew Aid interviewed about his new book. Matthew M. Aid, author of The Secret Sentry, has written a new book, Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror. You can listen to an extensive interview he gave on January 11 on NPR’s Fresh Air, in which Aid outlined his view that “overlapping jurisdictions, bureaucratic policies and a glut of data have crippled the intelligence community in its war against would-be terrorists”.
►►British spies to be cleared on torture allegations. The British government, including Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service, has just finished a four-year inquiry into the country’s security and intelligence services, sparked by allegations by terrorist suspects released from Guantanamo Bay, that they were severely tortured. The results have not yet been announced. But British media report that, according to information from trusted sources, the inquiry has concluded that (…drumroll…) there is no evidence that officers from either MI5 or MI6 were aware of the mistreatment of prisoners.

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Did cell phone companies help India spy on the United States?

January 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Page from the Lords of Dharamraja document leakBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Leaked documents acquired by a computer hacker collective appear to show that international cell phone manufacturers helped Indian intelligence agencies spy on the United States, in return for access to the Indian cellular phone market. The documents, which are written in English, were posted online on Saturday by a group of Indian hackers calling themselves Lords of Dharamraja. In a statement, the group said they obtained the documents by breaking into the computer servers of Indian Military Intelligence, after managing to acquire the source code of Symantec Corporation, makers of Norton antivirus software. According to the documents, the companies arm-twisted to assist Indian intelligence agencies to spy on the US included Apple, Nokia, and Research in Motion, the company that builds BlackBerry devices. The documents also appear to show that Indian intelligence agencies were particularly eager to spy on the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Established by the US Congress in 2000, the Commission is tasked with researching and reporting on the national security implications of bilateral trade between the US and China. Allegedly, the cellular telephone makers provided Indian intelligence agencies with backdoor access to personal phones used by Commission members. These back doors allegedly allowed the Indian Military Intelligence Directorate and India’s Central Bureau of Investigation to spy on Commission members beginning in April of 2011. Read more of this post

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Mossad spy network allegedly busted in Mauritania

January 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

Fares al-BannaBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Authorities in the northwestern African country of Mauritania have allegedly busted an Israeli spy network linked to the 2010 assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. One of Mauridania’s leading daily newspapers, Al-Huriyeh, says that the spy ring, which allegedly consisted “businessmen and activists [from] several Arab nationalities”, was uncovered following the arrest of one of its members, identified as Fares al-Banna. A Jordanian citizen of Palestinian extraction, al-Banna was arrested for larceny, which eventually lead to a warrant issued for searching his premises. Upon searching his house, authorities reportedly found a handwritten letter, addressed to the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates in Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, in which al-Banna claimed had been recruited by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. In the letter, al-Banna also claimed that he had participated in the January 2010 assassination of Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The letter also alleges that al-Banna helped Mossad carry out a bombing of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET409, which blew up in mid-air on January 24, 2010, five minutes after taking off from Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport, en route to Addis Ababa. Al-Huriyeh reports that al-Banna’s letter suggests the Mossad blew up the plane in order to kill one or more Hezbollah targets who were on board. The Mauritanian daily says that police officers who searched al-Banna’s home, as well as his office at a travel agents called “United Travel Services”, found several different passports containing his picture, “dozens of credit cards”, as well as a sophisticated device believed to be a transmitter of some kind. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #656: Outed spies edition

December 30, 2011 by 1 Comment

Alexander LennikovBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Iran seeks death penalty for alleged CIA spy. Iran is seeking the death penalty for an American man accused of working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. At his trial Tuesday, Amir Mizraei Hekmati said the CIA sent him to Iran to infiltrate Iran’s intelligence systems, Iran’s Fars News Agency reported. Sources in America deny Hekmati’s intelligence connections and say the confession was coerced. Washington has also accused Iran of denying Hekmati access to Swiss consular officials.
►►North Korean alleged spy ‘kills self’ in South. A man who claimed to be a North Korean defector has reportedly committed suicide after allegedly confessing that he was sent to spy on the South. During questioning, the unnamed man, who was in his 30s, said he had received orders from Pyongyang to report on a South Korean organization that helps defectors from the North.
►►Ex-KGB spy spends third Christmas in Vancouver church. Ex-KGB spy Alexander Lennikov (pictured) has been living in Canada with his wife and teenage son since 1992. But in 2009, the Canadian government ordered him to leave the country, under a law which dictates that any former member of a spy agency that spies on democratic governments is inadmissible to Canada. Since then, he has taken sanctuary at the First Lutheran Church in Vancouver, and has not left the building. For previous intelNews coverage of this story see here.

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News you may have missed #653: India edition

December 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Research and Analysis WingBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►India’s external intel agency gets wiretapping powers. India’s government has given the country’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the right to intercept domestic phone calls, emails and voice and data communications. This is the first time that RAW has been authorized to intercept communications inside the country. Should Indian citizens be bracing for more political policing?
►►India uncovers alleged Pakistan honey trap operation. A lieutenant colonel in the Indian Army was reportedly caught in a ‘honey trap’ by Pakistani intelligence agencies, as a result of which he was forced to spy for them against Indian interests, according to Indian media. The officer was allegedly in Bangladesh this past summer to attend a course at a military academy, when he was trapped by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), sources said. What is it with Indian government employees and honey trap operations?
►►Indian arrested for spying for Pakistan. Indian police in Rajasthan said it arrested Pawan Kumar Sharma, a clerk working at the regional Sub-Divisional Magistrate’s office in Suratgarh town, on charges of spying for Pakistan. Authorities said Sharma is suspected of spying for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate for the past year-and-a-half, using a prepaid cell phone provided by the ISI.

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News you may have missed #652

December 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Amir Mirzaei HekmatiBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Kremlin accused of covert tactics against opposition. The Kremlin says it will allow opposition groups to hold rallies, but cases of alleged preemptive arrests and phone-tapping show that it may be still seeking to defeat the protest movement. For previous intelNews coverage of civil liberties in Russia see here.
►►Iran releases two Kuwaitis accused of spying. Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency says that two Kuwaitis detained In Iran for spying last month have been cleared of their charges and released. The report quoted Iran’s ambassador to Kuwait, Ruhollah Qahremani, as saying the men had illegally worked as journalists in Iran while traveling on tourist visas, but initial speculation that they were spies “had been wrong”.
►►US sources deny spy charges for American detained in Iran. Amir Mirzaei Hekmati (pictured), from Arizona, who has been captured in Iran allegedly on a CIA mission, has not received any intelligence training from the US military, according to Pentagon sources. Also, one of Hekmati’s colleagues claims the Iranian-American helped develop an electronic translator for US troops but “wouldn’t have been involved in espionage”.

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News you may have missed #651

December 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Chris VanekerBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Israel defense minister forbids spy official’s lecture. Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak has refused to allow the head of research for Military Intelligence, Brigadier General Itai Baron, to lecture at the annual conference of Israel’s ambassadors unless the lecture is deemed ‘unclassified’. The conference deals with diplomatic and security issues and public affairs, and the lectures are given by senior Israeli government and military officials.
►►CIA agrees to look into OSINT FOIA request. Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly enough, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified. But in an abrupt reversal, the CIA said that it will process a Freedom of Information Act request by intelligence historian Jeffrey Richelson for documents pertaining to Open Source Works.
►►Dutch former pilot convicted of espionage. A court in The Hague has sentenced former F-16 pilot Chris Vaneker to five years in jail after finding him guilty of selling state secrets to a Russian diplomat. Vaneker wanted half-a-million euros for the information he was trying to sell to the military attaché at the Russian embassy in The Hague. The pilot and the Russian diplomat were arrested in March.

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News you may have missed #650

December 20, 2011 by 1 Comment

Robert BaerBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►US ex-DoD official says drone captured by Iran ‘seems fake’. Newspaper USA Today quotes an anonymous US former Pentagon official, who said that, according to video footage of the drone on display in Iran, not only is it the drone the wrong color, but also the welds along the wing joints do not appear to conform to the stealth design that helps it avoid radar detection.
►►Ex-CIA officer says collapse of CIA operations benefits Iran. The collapse of CIA operations in Lebanon, following Hezbollah’s unmasking of several CIA spies and the recent naming of the agency’s station chief, is a serious blow to the US’ ability to gather intelligence, says Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who operated in Lebanon in the 1980s.
►►Iran indicts 15 in alleged US-Israeli spy ring. An Iranian prosecutor announced on Tuesday that his government has indicted 15 people who allegedly spied on the Islamic Republic for the US and Israel. Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi did not name the alleged spies, who are suspected of having ties to the American CIA and Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. IntelNews readers may remember that, in May, Iran’s intelligence minister, Heidar Moslehi, announced the alleged discovery of a CIA-directed spy network in Iran of more than 30 people.

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Lebanese TV station reveals names of alleged CIA officers

December 13, 2011 by 1 Comment

Al-Manar TV logo

Al-Manar TV

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A Lebanese television station has aired the names of ten American diplomats, which it says are working for the United States Central Intelligence Agency under diplomatic cover. The identities of the ten diplomats were revealed on Friday by al-Manar, a satellite television station affiliated with Hezbollah, the militant Shiite group that controls large parts of Lebanon. The station said that all ten alleged CIA agents, which include women, are stationed at the US embassy located in the Awkar area of northern Beirut. Their names were aired during a special investigative program broadcast on Friday night, which claimed to offer proof of CIA activities in Lebanon, in alleged collaboration with Israel’s intelligence service Mossad. The program featured animated sequences recreating meetings between CIA case officers and their paid informants, which allegedly took place in fashionable Beirut cafés and restaurants, such as Pizza Hut and Starbucks. The revelation by al-Manar follows last month’s acknowledgment by US officials that Hezbollah had indeed busted a Lebanese spy ring that had been set up and operated by the CIA in the Lebanese capital. The ring, which consisted of native Lebanese citizens, including allegedly “a doctor, a researcher and a journalist”, was apparently discovered after Hezbollah counterintelligence forces employed sophisticated telecommunications data analysis software, which flagged unusual usage patterns on phones belonging to CIA officers and agents. IntelNews has viewed the al-Manar broadcast that includes the identities of the alleged CIA officers. Read more of this post

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