NATO spy convicted by Estonian court

February 27, 2009 by 1 Comment

Herman Simm

Herman Simm

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Herman Simm, the Estonian spy who handed classified NATO material to Russia, has been convicted to 12.5 years’ imprisonment and ordered to pay $1.6 million for damages he caused while spying for the Russians. Simm, a high-level official at the Estonian defense ministry, who once headed the country’s National Security Authority, was arrested last November along with his wife and charged with spying for Russia for over 10 years. At the time of his arrest, Simm’s spying activities were described by Western counterintelligence officials as perhaps “the most serious case of espionage against NATO since the end of the Cold War”. Read more of this post

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Vienna is world’s largest espionage hub, say experts

February 27, 2009 by Leave a comment

Vienna

Vienna

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A few months ago, a federal office under Austria’s Interior Ministry published a report on foreign intelligence activity in the country, in which it predicted that “Austria will remain an operational area for foreign intelligence agencies […], which will account for a consistently high number of intelligence agents”. An article in German newspaper Die Welt explains that not only does post-Cold-War Vienna continue to be “a spy hub between East and West”, but the Austrian capital now has “the highest density of [foreign intelligence] agents in the world”. Read more of this post

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US Special Forces already stationed in Pakistan, article reveals

February 26, 2009 by 1 Comment

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
American and Pakistani military officials have disclosed to The New York Times what defense and intelligence analysts have suspected for quite some time: namely that US military forces are already secretly operating in Pakistan. The officials, who spoke “on condition of anonymity”, confirmed [article reprinted in The International Herald Tribune] that more than 70 US “military advisers […] and technical specialists” are helping Pakistan’s armed forces fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the remote areas bordering Afghanistan. Predictably, the US advisers, who have been stationed in Pakistan since the summer of 2008, include “communications experts and other specialists”. The latter allegedly do not participate in ground combat, but routinely provide Pakistani commandos and specialist units with intelligence data. Read more of this post

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Lebanese-Israeli spy war is intensifying

February 26, 2009 by Leave a comment

Mughniyah

Mughniyah

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
On February 19, intelNews reported on the arrest in Nabatiyeh of Kamal Faqih, a Lebanese citizen who was allegedly recruited by Israeli intelligence while living in France in the mid-1990s. Faqih, who was initially arrested by Hezbollah, the Shia Islamic political and paramilitary organization that controls large parts of Lebanon, was subsequently surrendered to the Lebanese authorities. However, late last week, Lebanese newspapers revealed that, several days before Faqih’s arrest, another Lebanese man suspected of espionage was detained in Beirut. That was Yussef Sader, a Middle East Airlines employee, who witnesses say was kidnapped in the morning of February 14, while on his way to Beirut’s Rafiq Hariri International Airport. Read more of this post

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Comment: EU wants to intercept encrypted VOIP communications

February 25, 2009 by 2 Comments

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
Italian authorities are taking the initiative in a European Union (EU)-wide effort to terminate the tacit immunity of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VOIP) communications from authorized interception. Italy’s delegation to Eurojust, an EU coordination body tasked with combating transnational organized crime, issued a statement last weekend, promising to spearhead a project to “overcome the technical and judicial obstacles to the interception of internet telephony systems”. The statement contains several references to Skype, a Luxembourg-based VOIP provider that has so far reportedly refused to share its communications encryption system with government authorities. Because of this, the latter have accused Skype of providing organized crime syndicates with the ability to communicate without fear of their messages being intercepted.

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Analysis: Ex-CIA Agent Involved in Arms Scandal

February 23, 2009 by Leave a comment

Imants Liepiņš

Imants Liepiņš

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has heard allegations that a retired agent of the CIA was instrumental in facilitating a vast diamonds-for-arms smuggling operation on behalf of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor. Taylor, who headed the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), became the country’s President in 1997. He is currently held by the United Nations in The Hague, pending trial for crimes against humanity. Roger D’Onofrio Ruggiero, an Italian-American 40-year veteran of the CIA, worked with Charles Taylor and others to channel diamonds into Europe through a number of front-companies. According to the allegations, D’Onofrio helped organize the smuggling operation with Ibrahim Bah, a Senegalese with Libyan connections, who was connected with D’Onofrio in the 1970s, when the former was funded by the CIA to join the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviet Red Army. In the early 1990s, Bah, who by then had established al-Qaeda connections, became Charles Taylor’s “Minister for Mineral Resources”, a post that enabled him to handle the majority of NPFL’s diamonds-for-arms deals. Read article →

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US military group sees Canada Muslims as potential security threat

February 22, 2009 by 4 Comments

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
For the past two months, I have been reporting that the US intelligence community sees the radical fringe in Britain’s Muslim community as “the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on US soil”. It turns out that the US Pentagon’s Joint Task Force-North, a group that provides military support to federal agencies in domestic security operations, has a different opinion. For it, Muslims residing in Canada present the “greatest potential for foreign terrorists’ access to the homeland”. This is according to a briefing document that the group inadvertently published on the reading room section of its website a couple of weeks ago, only to abruptly remove it last Wednesday. According to InsideDefense, which noticed the report before it was withdrawn, the internal document blames Canadian immigration policies for “creating a favorable environment” for “foreign terrorist opportunities”. Read more of this post

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Tajikistan charges Kyrgyz army officer with espionage

February 21, 2009 by Leave a comment

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
An officer of Kyrgyzstan’s Special Forces who was arrested in neighboring Tajikistan last August has appeared in court in Tajik capital Dushanbe, charged with espionage. The Kyrgyz officer, Muhammadin Salimzoda, who is an ethnic Tajik, was allegedly in Tajikistan to attend his daughter’s wedding, when he was arrested by Committee of National Security (CNS) agents. He then essentially disappeared until last January, when the Tajik authorities finally confirmed his arrest and imprisonment. Salimzoda has now appeared in court, charged with spying for Kyrgyzstan and attempting to incite insurrection against the government of Tajikistan. Kyrgyzstan’s premier intelligence service, which is also called Committee for National Security (CNS), has rejected Tajikistan’s espionage allegations and claims that Salimzoda is not an officer in the Kyrgyz Special Forces. The Tajik government has refused to comment on the case. Kyrgyz-Tajik relations have been especially tense ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the two countries’ intelligence agencies have frequently been at loggerheads with each other since then.

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Israel’s covert war on Iranian nuclear program intensifies

February 21, 2009 by Leave a comment

Ahmedinejad

Ahmadinejad

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
Citing unnamed “US intelligence sources”, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph has revealed what it calls a covert “decapitation program” by Israeli intelligence, targeting Iran’s nuclear program. The program has also been confirmed by Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor. Israel’s program is part of an international intelligence effort to hamper Iran’s nuclear program. As intelNews has reported before, this effort includes an extensive CIA operation approved by President George W. Bush in early 2008 and “hand[ed] off to President […] Barack Obama”.  The Israeli program, however, appears to be much more extensive than America’s, and includes assassinations, bribing, “front companies and double agents”, according to The Daily Telegraph. The most aggressive part of the scheme centers on “the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations”, according to Ms. Bhalla. Read more of this post

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Guatemala formally apologizes for Bay of Pigs invasion

February 20, 2009 by Leave a comment

Alvaro Colom

Alvaro Colom

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
The President of Guatemala has issued a formal apology to the government of Cuba for his country’s role in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Speaking on Tuesday in a packed auditorium at the University of Havana, President Alvaro Colom said he wanted to “ask Cuba’s forgiveness for having offered our country, our territory, to prepare an invasion of Cuba” and to officially apologize “as president and head of state, and as commander in chief of the Guatemalan Army. It wasn’t us” who carried the operation, said President Colom, “but it was our territory”. Beginning in 1960, the Guatemalan dictatorship hosted nearly 1,500 Cuban anti-Castro exiles. They were transported from Miami, Florida, and trained in paramilitary tactics with CIA money. They invaded southern Cuba on April 17, 1961, by landing in the Bay of Pigs. Read more of this post

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Analysis: US issues financial warfare warnings against China, Russia

February 20, 2009 by 1 Comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
It turns out that Admiral Dennis Blair wasn’t kidding when he said last week that “the primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications”. Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence warned during his annual threat assessment that “the longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to US strategic interests”. The continuing credit vulnerability of the US economy is central to these fears, and it appears to be forcing the rapid rise of microeconomic concerns to the top of the US intelligence community’s threat list. A major aspect of these concerns centers on the hard-to-ignore fact that China currently holds close to $1 trillion-worth of US monetary debt. Trade experts suggest that, should China suddenly decide to offer these securities for sale, “the US dollar would tank”. The chances of this happening are slim -the Chinese economy would also suffer from such a move- but US intelligence agencies are taking no chances. On February 19, the office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a public warning to the Chinese government that it would consider any attempts to sell US Treasury bonds an act of “financial warfare”. Keep reading →

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Polish priest claims Soviets tried to kill Pope in 1987

February 19, 2009 by 4 Comments

Zdzisław Król

Zdzisław Król

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
A Polish Catholic priest, who accompanied Pope John Paul II during his 1987 trip to Poland, has said he helped foil a Soviet attempt to assassinate the Pontiff. Zdzisław Król, who today heads the Warsaw Metropolitan Curia, Poland’s largest Catholic institute, claims that the Soviet Union’s foreign military intelligence directorate (GRU) had planned to assassinate the Pope during his speech at Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra, in the city of Częstochowa. The monastery houses the Black Madonna painting, a popular shrine to the Virgin Mary. Zdzisław Król, claims that GRU had supplied a Bulgarian operative living in Poland with precise information on the Pope’s travel itinerary, which had not been publicized for security reasons, as well as train tickets to Częstochowa. Read more of this post

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Lebanese officials claim arrest of Israeli spy

February 19, 2009 by Leave a comment

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star quotes unnamed official sources who report the arrest of an alleged Israeli spy in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh. The arrestee has been identified as Kamal Faqih, a Lebaneze citizen who lived for several years in France before returning to Lebanon to work in the oil retail industry. Lebanese security sources claim Faqih was recruited either by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, or by Mossad, fifteen years ago while living in France. It is thought that Hezbollah, the Shia Islamic political and paramilitary organization that controls large parts of Lebanon, was initially alerted to Faqih’s “suspicious behavior” during the July 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. Read more of this post

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Austrian police officers arrested on Kazakh espionage charges

February 18, 2009 by 2 Comments

Rakhat Aliyev

Rakhat Aliyev

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last month we reported on Rakhat Aliyev, former Director of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB) and former son-in-law to the country’s dictatorial president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. In 2007, following his divorce with Nazarbayev’s eldest daughter, Aliyev was stripped of his government positions, issued with an arrest warrant, and now lives in exile in Vienna, Austria. Soon afterwards, Aliyev began exposing President Nazarbayev’s corrupt dealings with foreign oil companies operating in Kazakhstan. In January of this year, a Kazakh-employed public relations firm working to “exonerate” Nazarbayev was found to have received assistance from “two anonymous serving officers of MI6”, Britain’s external intelligence agency. Now a new scandal has erupted in Vienna, where two Austrian police officers have been arrested by the country’s authorities and charged with “spying for Kazakhstan”. The two officers were apprehended by counterintelligence agents while reportedly “gathering information from a computer about Rakhat Aliyev”. Read more of this post

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Former MI5 head warns UK turning into a police state

February 18, 2009 by Leave a comment

Rimington

Rimington

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
It is one thing for the British government to be accused of exploiting anxiety over terrorism to restrict civil liberties. It is quite another for these accusations to be made by the former Director-General of MI5, Britain’s foremost counterintelligence organization. Dame Stella Rimington, who headed the secretive agency between 1992 and 1996, recently gave an interview to Spanish daily La Vanguardia, in which she accused the British government of “scaring people to pass laws restricting freedoms”. She criticized the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown of failing to strike the proper balance between civil liberties and security, thus gradually giving in to “one of the goals of terrorism”, namely living “in fear and under a police state”. She also criticized the US for going “too far with Guantánamo and torture, [which] has the opposite effect [to security]: there are more and more suicide bombers who find greater justification”, she said. Read more of this post

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