News you may have missed #484

March 18, 2011 2 Comments

  • Analysis: CIA may face reduced role in Pakistan after murder row. People familiar with the views of the Pakistani government say that, as part of the deal for the freeing of CIA operative Raymond Davis, the CIA agreed to give Pakistan more credit for its role in counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan, to cut back on US spying in Pakistan and to keep Pakistani authorities better informed of CIA activities.
  • Lebanese Army dismantles Israeli spying device. The Lebanese Army has dismantled an Israeli electronic spy device after receiving a tip-off from members of Hezbollah, according to reports from south Lebanon. This is not the first such reported incident. More pictures of the device are posted here.
  • Exhibition commemorates Soviet spy legend. An exhibition, dedicated to the 100th birth anniversary of legendary Soviet intelligence agent Nikolai Kuznetsov has opened in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. Kuznetsov uncovered German plans to launch a massive tank attack in Ukraine’s Kursk region, as well as an operation to assassinate Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran in 1943.

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Egypt busts alleged Israeli spy ring

March 17, 2011 Leave a comment

Egypt

Egypt

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Authorities in Egypt announced Wednesday that they uncovered an espionage network, which they accuse of spying on the country on behalf of Israel. According to Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm, which cited “informed security sources”, the alleged ring consisted of one Egyptian and several Israeli citizens, at least two of whom have been arrested. Other sources, however, state that the entire spy ring has been captured by Egyptian counterintelligence. The paper says that one of the detained Israelis entered Egypt in late January, carrying Jordanian travel documents and posing as a business executive interested in investing in the country. Al-Ahram has published a follow-up report suggesting that the alleged spy ring specialized on collecting information relating to the Egyptian military. The report also claims that the carrier of the Jordanian passport admitted before Egypt’s state prosecutor that he spied for the Mossad, Israel’s primary external intelligence agency. Al-Masry states that the alleged spy ring began its operations in Egypt following the January 25 revolution, with the aim of passing on information to Tel Aviv about the handover of power from the clique of former President Hosni Mubarak to Egypt’s military leadership, which has controlled the government since Mubarak’s ouster. Read more of this post

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Pakistan releases CIA operative in ‘carefully choreographed’ deal [updated]

March 16, 2011 Leave a comment

Raymond Allen Davis

Raymond Davis

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Pakistani groups had warned of “Egyptian-style protests” if CIA operative Raymond Allen Davis was released from detention, so his release earlier today, which hardly surprised intelligence observers, appears to have been arranged so as to limit its feared political spillover. In a move that The Washington Post described as “carefully choreographed”, Islamabad handed Davis to the Americans, while the latter thanked the families of the two men killed by Davis for “their generosity” in forgiving him. The exchange was announced later in the day, so by the time it made the rounds on Pakistani media, it was after nightfall, and too late to organize street protests. Some violent clashes between police and demonstrators were reported in Lahore (where the killings took place), but the streets other Pakistani cities appear to be generally quiet. Davis, who was charged with murder by a Pakistani court earlier this year, appears to have been freed after the US agreed to give $700,000 to the families of each of his two victims. The total cost to the US behind Davis’ deal may be as high as $2.3 million (update: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton  has said the US “did not pay compensation” for Davis’ release). Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #483

March 15, 2011 Leave a comment

  • Ex-CIA chief criticizes ‘too much cybersecurity secrecy’. In an article published in the new issue of the US Air Force’s Strategic Studies Quarterly, former CIA and NSA Director, General Michael “I-want-to-shut-down-the-Internet” Hayden, argues that the US government classifies too much information on cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
  • Renault arrests security chief over spy hoax. Dominique Gevrey, a ex-military intelligence agent, who is French car maker Renault’s chief of security, has been arrested in Paris, just before boarding a flight to Guinea in West Africa. He is accused of concocting the spying allegations which shook the French car giant –-and the entire motoring world-– last January. Meanwhile, Renault has apologized to the three senior executives who were fired after being accused of selling secrets about the company’s electric car strategy to “foreign interests”.
  • Analysis: Gadhafi’s spies keep watch in Libyan rebel capital. “Pro-Gaddafi spies are blamed for assassinations, grenade attacks, and sending rebels threatening text messages. Rebels believe that Gaddafi’s forces are all around them. They lurk outside the Benghazi courthouse that serves as the Capitol for the liberated east, sometimes armed with cameras. They sit in vans outside hotels that house journalists and aid workers, and silently watch who comes and goes”.

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UN official confirms Israel abducted Palestinian engineer from Ukraine

March 14, 2011 3 Comments

Dirar Abu Sissi

Dirar Abu Sissi

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A UN official has confirmed that a Palestinian engineer, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Ukraine on February 19, is currently in Israeli custody. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior, Dirar Abu Sissi, 42, who was born in Jordan, but has lived in the Gaza strip for over a decade, had gone to Ukraine to apply for citizenship in the Eastern European country. His Ukrainian wife, Veronika, said Sissi disappeared in the early morning hours of February 19, shortly after boarding a train from Kharkiv to capital Kiev, in order to reunite with this brother, a Dutch national, whom he had not seen since 1997. His disappearance has puzzled Ukrainian police investigators. But on Thursday, Maksim Butkevych, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ukraine, told the Associated Press that Sissi was kidnapped by Israeli operatives and is currently in prison in Israel. Butkevych did not openly name the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, but said that the Palestinian engineer was abducted by “Israeli security forces”, possibly with the assistance of Ukrainian intelligence officers. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #482

March 11, 2011 2 Comments

  • Kissinger wants US spy for Israel freed. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is urging President Barack Obama to release Jonathan Pollard, an American convicted of spying on the US for Israel 24 years ago. He has sent Obama a letter, in which he writes “I believe justice would be served by commuting” Pollard’s life sentence.
  • MI5 short of surveillance officers says minister. A senior British official has revealed MI5 does not have enough spies to allow it to increase its counterintelligence surveillance, as per government plans. Security Minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones said the Security Service needed to recruit and train more surveillance officers.
  • US spy agencies lack fluent bilingual speakers. Many Americans don’t learn a second or a third language from birth, let alone a language that the CIA or US Foreign Service might want. The situation has forced US government agencies to learn how to cultivate the most talented second-language speakers from among college students with little to no other-language expertise.

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Russia may swap convicted spy for ‘merchant of death’ held in US

March 10, 2011 4 Comments

Viktor Bout

Viktor Bout

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Moscow and Washington may swap a Russian former defense official, convicted for spying for the United States, with notorious Russian weapons dealer Viktor Bout, who is being held in a US prison. Andrei Klychev, 49, who worked at Rosatom Russia’s Nuclear Energy State Corporation, was arrested last year on espionage charges. Last week, he was given an 18-year sentence in a closed-door trial, for spying on behalf of the United States. But Russia’s Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday that Russia is actively considering swapping Klychev with Viktor Bout, history’s most notorious weapons smuggler, whose shady activities inspired the 2005 motion picture Lord of War. Bout, who was born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Soviet Tajikistan, served in the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) until the dissolution of the USSR, at which point he began supplying weapons to groups ranging from Congolese rebels and Angolan paramilitaries to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In March of 2008, Bout was arrested by the Royal Thai Police, after a tip by US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers. The latter had managed to lure Bout to Thailand by pretending to be Colombian FARC arms procurers. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #481

March 9, 2011 3 Comments

  • Who brought down the CIA website last Thursday? US Federal officials as of Monday afternoon were still investigating the cause of a Thursday cyber incident that knocked offline the public website of the CIA and its unclassified e-mail system. The interference was isolated to CIA networks. Some cyber experts say the disruption may have been caused by a denial of service attack perpetrated by pranksters to show off their skills, rather than an act committed by a foreign government.
  • Israeli cabinet minister to visit jailed spy in US. Israel’s Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon is to make a visit next week to see Jonathan Pollard, an American serving a life term in a US jail for spying on the US for Israel. Israeli media claim that Kahlon will give Pollard a “verbal message” from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
  • Egypt’s spies dragged from shadows. New evidence of spying and torture by Egypt’s General Intelligence Services (GIS) has piled pressure on the country’s military rulers to abolish the agency. After breaking into the GIS Cairo headquarters and ransacking archives, activists posted videos showing a torture chamber with a bloodstained floor and equipped with chains.

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Libyan TV accuses detained Dutch helicopter crew of spying

March 8, 2011 Leave a comment

Sirte, Libya

Sirte, Libya

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Just days after the capture of a British paramilitary and intelligence team in Libya, the country’s state television has accused three Dutch marines, captured by pro-government loyalists, of spying. The three-member team was detained by armed militias in the outskirts of Libya’s pro-government stronghold of Sirte, while using a Lynx helicopter, allegedly to evacuate two foreign nationals. The Libyans allowed the two unnamed evacuees, a Dutch engineer and another European Union citizen, to transfer to the embassy of the Netherlands in Tripoli, but arrested the crew of the helicopter, which includes a female pilot named Yvonne Niersman. Soon after news of the arrest emerged, the Dutch government said that the mission of the helicopter crew was to evacuate Dutch nationals from Libya. But on March 6, Libyan state television aired footage of the detainees, which showed a collection of items allegedly confiscated from them by the Libyan authorities. They include several weapons, ammunition, as well as a significant amount of United States currency. Read more of this post

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Arrest of British spy team in Libya reveals covert involvement

March 7, 2011 5 Comments

Benghazi, Libya

Benghazi, Libya

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
All eight members of the British military and intelligence team arrested in Libya on Friday have now been released and are en route to Malta. But what exactly is behind this news story, and what does it reveal about covert Western involvement in Libya? Those detained were part of group of around 20 Britons who landed by helicopter before sunrise on Friday, several miles from Benina International Airport, which is right outside Libya’s second-largest city Benghazi. Witnesses reported that the helicopter was met by another group on the ground. Soon after landing, the mysterious passengers split after being surrounded by heavily armed Libyan rebels; the latter managed to capture eight of them, which included six members of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS, although some sources suggest they were from the Special Boat Service, or SBS), one British Army officer, and an operative of MI6, Britain’s foremost external intelligence agency. The Britons, all of whom were dressed in black coveralls, offered no resistance, telling their captors that they were unarmed. When searched, however, they were found to be carrying “arms, ammunition, explosives, maps and passports from at least four different nationalities”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #480 (CIA edition)

March 4, 2011 Leave a comment

  • Cuban-American exile leader funded ex-CIA agent on trial. Oscar De Rojas, the bookkeeper for New Jersey business mogul Arnoldo Monzon, who was once a director of the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, testified Thursday that he wired as much as $9,600 in 1997 to Ramon Medina, one of the aliases used by Luis Posada Carriles, an ex-CIA operative currently on trial for perjury and immigration fraud.
  • Ex-CIA station chief sentenced for sexual abuse. Former senior CIA officer Andrew Warren has been sentenced by a US court to more than five years in prison for sexually abusing a woman in Algeria, while he was the CIA station chief in that country.
  • Analysis: What should the CIA be doing in Libya? US President Barack Obama said on Thursday that he had “instructed […] all those who are involved in international affairs to examine a full range of options” on Libya, which presumably includes the CIA and other special operations assets. But what should the CIA be doing in Libya, if anything at all?

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Cold War KGB agent Judith Coplon dies in Manhattan

March 2, 2011 3 Comments

Judith Coplon

Judith Coplon

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Judith Coplon, an American Justice Department analyst who spied for the Soviet Union, and whose 1949 espionage trial became an international sensation, died last weekend in New York. When she was arrested by the FBI at age 27, Coplon worked as an analyst for the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Section, and was privy to counterintelligence reports issued daily by the Bureau. A few years prior to her March 1949 arrest, Coplon had begun an affair with Valentin A. Gubitchev, a married Soviet NKGB (forerunner of the KGB) officer stationed at the United Nations headquarters in New York. It is believed that Gubitchev recruited her and acted as her handler, meeting her regularly at various New York locations in order to obtain from her copies of Justice Department documents. In 1948, her role as an NKGB agent code-named ‘Sima’, was revealed through the National Security Agency’s VENONA project, which decoded wartime Soviet diplomatic cables that had been intercepted by US intelligence. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #480 (Libya edition)

March 1, 2011 Leave a comment

  • Unconfirmed: Gaddafi fires spy chief. A Benghazi-based Libyan newspaper has said that Muammar Gaddafi has fired the director of Libya’s intelligence service, Abdullah Al-Senussi, who is considered a key player in a brutal crackdown against anti-regime protesters. The paper said that the Libyan leader named one of his bodyguards, Mansur Al-Qahsi, in Al-Senussi’s place.
  • Libya replaces ambassador to US who defected. The US said it received word Monday that Libya has got rid of its ambassador in Washington, Ali Aujali, after he defected to the opposition, and has now replaced him with a charge d’affaires at the embassy, who is a regime supporter. Changes in Libya’s diplomatic representation in the US are extremely important, since communication links between Washington and Libya may have a drastic impact on the situation in the North African country.
  • Libya’s poison gas stockpiles reportedly unaffected by turmoil. A senior US administration official has told The Washington Post that the White House has no reason to believe the current turmoil in Libya has made its chemical weapons stockpiles more vulnerable to theft. Experts believe that some 10 metric tons of mustard sulfate and sarin gas precursor are stockpiled in barrels at three locations in the Libyan desert south of Tripoli, where Muammar al-Gaddafi has holed up in a last-ditch fight to keep from being overthrown.

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US reducing spy presence in Pakistan, say papers

February 28, 2011 Leave a comment

Pakistan

Pakistan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Several Pakistani publications report that the United States has suspended some of its intelligence operations in Pakistan and is pulling several of its operatives out of the country. The Islamabad-based Express-Tribune, which is partnered with The International Herald Tribune (the global edition of The New York Times), says that the US move is designed to pre-empt an ongoing investigation by Pakistani authorities into the whereabouts and activities of hundreds of US diplomats in several of the country’s regions. According to the paper, Pakistan’s foreign ministry is in the process of conducting its first detailed investigation into the US diplomatic community in Pakistan in almost three years. The ministry has told the Express Tribune that it has detected 851 Americans operating in Pakistan with diplomatic immunity, of whom nearly 300 “are not working in a diplomatic capacity”. The paper also cites sources inside Pakistan’s ministry of the interior, which claim that as many as 414 American diplomats operating in Pakistan are members of the US intelligence community. Over 40 US intelligence operatives have allegedly left the country or have completely suspended their activities in recent weeks. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #479 (Iran edition)

February 25, 2011 2 Comments

  • Iran arrests alleged CIA agent. Iran’s intelligence minister, Heidar Moslehi, has told the country’s state TV that authorities arrested an Iranian that he says was working for the CIA, and allegedly set up a network of aides to gather information during anti-government protests last week.
  • Yemen charges family with spying for Iran. Yemeni prosecutors allege that Muhammad al-Hatmi was a paid Iranian agent from 1998 to 2010, and passed money to rebels so they could expand their activities into Saudi Arabia. Al-Hatmi’s wife and son have been charged with aiding him by conveying money and communications.
  • Leaked intelligence report claims Iran intensifies uranium hunt. The Associated Press has published the findings of a leaked intelligence report, from an undisclosed IAEA member-country, which claims that Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi met secretly last month with senior Zimbabwean mining officials “to resume negotiations […] for the benefit of Iran’s uranium procurement plan”.

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