CIA conducting ‘unprecedented’ operations in Britain
January 4, 2009 Leave a comment
British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph has published an article (reprinted in Australia’s The Age) discussing what it describes as CIA’s “unprecedented intelligence-gathering operation in Britain”. The paper cites “security sources in Washington and London” in revealing that the US spy agency is “recruiting and handling a record number of informers within the British Pakistani community”. Security circles in Washington have been known to express concerns about militant tendencies in that community, which is nearly one-million-strong. Bruce Reidel, a 26-year CIA veteran and al-Qaeda expert, who now advises US President Elect Barack Obama’s transition team, says that Britain’s Muslim community (whose members can travel to the US without visas) is “regarded by the American intelligence community as perhaps the single-biggest threat environment.” Read more of this post
intelNews.org 
Costa Rican political police rocked by high-level corruption scandal
January 5, 2009 1 Comment
DIS scandal
For years, Costa Rica’s unions and opposition activists have accused the country’s political police, the Dirección de Inteligencia y Seguridad (DIS), of illegally spying on lawful political activity. Yet their allegations never made it into the US State Department’s annual human rights reports on Costa Rica. The Department’s latest report claims that the country’s “civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces”. Last November, however, government investigators uncovered an enormous money-laundering cartel operating inside DIS, whose head was no other than the organization’s Deputy Director, Roberto Guillén. Guillén, who was forced to step down on November 25, employed DIS computers to access private information of unsuspecting citizens, and used the data to launder nearly half a million dollars in illegal transfers to himself and others. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Costa Rica, DIS (Costa Rica), Francisco Dall'Anesse, Interpol, José Torres, News, Roberto Guillén, US Department of State