News you may have missed #456 (Israel edition)

November 25, 2010 1 Comment

  • US Senate intel committee ex-chief wants Israel spy free. Former Democratic Senator Dennis DeConcini, who used to chair the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for the release of Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy Intelligence Analyst who was found guilty in 1987 of spying on the US on behalf of Israel. Pollard “is guilty, but it’s time for this to be resolved in a better way”, said DeConcini.
  • Israel about to announce next Mossad chief. On Thursday, or at the latest, early next week, the Israeli Prime Minister will announce his pick for the top post at the Mossad. Despite widespread speculation, nobody really knows who will replace Meir Dagan, the current Mossad chief.
  • Mossad book authors accused of plagiarism. The Mossad, a new book on the major exploits of Israel’s storied spy agency, has been on the Israeli best-seller list for months. But if much of the text sounds familiar, it’s because the authors, Nissim Mishal and Michael Bar-Zohar, apparently relied on previously published material –without crediting the original sources.

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News you may have missed #455

November 24, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Israel says it did not kill German politician. Israel has rejected a claim by a Swiss chemistry professor that the 1987 murder of German politician Uwe Barschel had the hallmarks of a Mossad assassination. For more on Barschel see previous intelNews story here.
  • Foreign cyber spies targeted UK defense official. Foreign spies, probably working for the People’s Republic of China, targeted senior British defense official Joanna Hole, in a sophisticated spear phishing operation that aimed to steal military secrets. The plan was foiled last year when Hole became suspicious of an email she received from a contact she had met at a conference.
  • The 10 most interesting CIA-backed startups. America’s only federally funded venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, was created in 1999 during the tech boom. The company invests in startups developing technologies that could prove useful to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

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Colombians blast Panama for sheltering ex-spy director

November 23, 2010 Leave a comment

María del Pilar Hurtado

María Hurtado

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
Public prosecutors in Colombia have strongly criticized the Panamanian government for granting political asylum to one of Colombia’s former spy directors, who is facing charges of spying on opposition figures. María del Pilar Hurtado directed the highly disreputable Administrative Department for Security (DAS) from 2007 to 2008. But on October 31, she apparently left Colombia unobstructed, despite being among the chief subjects of a high-level investigation into political spying by DAS. Hours later, she surfaced in Panama, where she formally requested political asylum. The latter was granted on November 19, causing the amazement of public prosecutors in Bogota, who have accused the Panamanian government of subverting (what little is left of) Colombian justice. Hurtado is among 18 senior officials in the administration of Alvaro Uribe, a close ally of the United States and hardline proponent of Washington’s ‘war on drugs’. Critics of DAS accuse him of authorizing a massive program of political surveillance, which targeted the former Presidents, Supreme Court judges, prominent journalists, union leaders, human rights campaigners, and even European politicians. Read more of this post

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Did Mossad kill German politician involved in Iran-Contra scandal?

November 22, 2010 Leave a comment

Uwe Barschel

Uwe Barschel

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Accusations of Israeli involvement in the suspicious death of a German politician have been revived, following new autopsy evidence revealed by a medical examiner. The case involves the death of Christian Democratic Union politician Uwe Barschel, who on October 11, 1987, was found dead in the bathtub of room 317 of the Beau-Rivage hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. His sudden death occurred less than a month after he was forced to resign from the post of Governor of West Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein state, following his involvement in a dirty-tricks campaign against his rival Björn Engholm, of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Swiss authorities, based on an initial postmortem that revealed lethal levels of barbiturates in Barschel’s system, ruled the death a suicide. But now Dr Hans Brandenberger, who was one of the toxicological experts that examined Barschel, claims that he is possession of new evidence that points to murder as the cause of the German politician’s death. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #454

November 19, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Georgia lets Russian envoy visit jailed spy suspect. Georgia says it has allowed a representative of the Russian consulate to meet with a Russian citizen detained on charges of espionage. The jailed man is one of 13 individuals suspected of spying for Russia, who were arrested by Georgian counterintelligence earlier this month. Four of the detained suspects are Russian citizens and nine are Georgian nationals.
  • Danish agency aware of CIA spying since 2004. The Danish security services have released a statement saying they have known since 2004 that the US Embassy in Copenhagen was collecting information on Danish citizens. Last week, several Scandinavian countries launched investigations into the activities of intelligence gathering networks employed by US embassies.
  • Iran charges German reporters with espionage. Iranian officers detained the journalists, who were pretending to be tourists, as they conducted an interview with the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, condemned to death by stoning.

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News you may have missed #453

November 18, 2010 Leave a comment

  • France accuses Iran of violence at Tehran embassy. A diplomatic standoff between France and Iran has ensued, after Paris accused Iran’s security services of committing “unacceptable acts of violence” on French diplomatic personnel at the French embassy in Tehran. The alleged incident happened as guests gathered at the embassy for a traditional Persian music concert. Iranian plainclothes security forces and uniformed police stopped about two-thirds of 130 invited guests from entering the building, and an unknown number of people were seen being taken away in unmarked vans.
  • CIA picks Air Force general to lead military ops office. The CIA announced Monday that it has chosen an Air Force Lt. Gen. Kurt A. Cichowski, who has extensive experience in Predator drones, to head its military affairs office. In 2009, Cichowski called the CIA drone assassination program a “phenomenal […] success”.
  • Aussie spies spooked out by student filmmakers. Three media students filming a tourist site near the controversial new headquarters of Australia’s spy organization, ASIO, in Canberra, prompted a late-night police check, apparently over security concerns.

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Did FSB leak Russian double spy’s name to the media?

November 17, 2010 1 Comment

SVR seal

SVR seal

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The revelation that a double agent betrayed the ten Russian deep-cover spies, who were arrested in the United States last summer, may have been leaked to the media as part of a turf war between two rival Russian spy agencies. On November 11, Russian newspaper Kommersant disclosed that a senior officer in Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) had defected to the United States shortly before the arrest of ten Russian deep-cover spies by the FBI, on June 27, 2010. The paper identified the alleged double agent as “Colonel Shcherbakov”, believed by veteran KGB officer Oleg Kalugin to be Aleksandr Vasilyevich Shcherbakov. The Kommersant disclosure was later confirmed by no other than Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. But who leaked Shcherbakov’s name to Kommersant, and why? According to Pavel Felgenhauer, military and intelligence correspondent for Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, the leak originated from within the Russian intelligence establishment. Specifically, Felgenhauer suggests that it was Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) that leaked the information to the media, in an attempt to score points against the SVR. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #452

November 16, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Britain’s GCHQ turns to Google for help. GCHQ, Britain’s Cheltenham-based signals intelligence agency, is recruiting an expert on MapReduce, the patented number-crunching technique developed by Google to distribute the load of billions of web searches across its cluster of hundreds of thousands of commodity servers.
  • CIA double agent pleads guilty from prison. CIA officer Harold James Nicholson, who in 1997 was jailed for spying for Russia, has pleaded guilty to enlisting his son Nathan to sell the Russians more secrets and collect money owed to him by the Russian spy services.
  • Georgia offers to negotiate with Russia over spies. Tbilisi is ready for negotiations with Moscow on the repatriation of several alleged Russian spies arrested in Georgia, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Nino Kalandadze has said.

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Israel intelligence source warns of West Bank collapse

November 15, 2010 Leave a comment

Mahmoud Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A senior source inside Israel’s intelligence community has warned that the continuing building of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories could cause the rapid collapse of the Fatah government in the West Bank. Speaking anonymously to the BBC, the intelligence official cautioned that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, “is tired and fed up”, and that if he “continued to be humiliated” by Israel’s refusal to halt illegal settlement construction he might “step down and return home”. This would terminate the ongoing negotiations between Israel and Fatah, mediated by Washington, and could bring down the Fatah government in the West Bank, in a chaotic process that would ultimately “be a major setback for Israel”, said the official. Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and elsewhere, lack international recognition, and in recent years Israel has been pressured by its allies, including the United States, to stop residential expansion into the Palestinian Territories. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #451 (history edition)

November 12, 2010 Leave a comment

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Colombian agency spied on Spanish politician

November 11, 2010 Leave a comment

DAS seal

DAS seal

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
An official report prepared for the Colombian government reveals that an illegal unit set up within the Colombian intelligence services spied on a member of the Spanish parliament. A copy of the report was leaked earlier this week to Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which has published an executive summary. The paper claims that Colombia’s scandal-prone and soon-to-be-dismantled DAS intelligence service spied on members of the Spanish-based Valencian Coordination of Solidarity with Colombia (CVSC), which works in support of victim’s of Colombia’s government-tied paramilitary groups. Specifically, in 2004, DAS agents spied on Spanish parliamentarian and CVSC activist Isaura Navarro, while she participated in Global Voices for Colombia, an international human rights conference held in Spain. El Mundo claims that the report, which was prepared for the Office of Colombia’s Inspector General, states that a team of DAS agents “closely monitored” Navarro and several other CVSC conference participants, collecting personal information, audio recordings and photographs. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #450

November 10, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Nuke bomb material found in Georgia black market. Highly enriched uranium that could be used to make a nuclear bomb is on sale on the black market along the fringes of the former Soviet Union, according to evidence emerging from a secret trial in the Republic of Georgia.
  • CIA Director warns against leaks. Asserting that lives have been endangered and sources compromised by “a damaging spate of media leaks” in recent months, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta reminded the spy agency’s employees Monday that unauthorized disclosures of classified information “cannot be tolerated”.
  • US issues new unclassified information policy. The White House has issued an executive order to establish a uniform policy for handling “controlled unclassified information” (CUI), which is information that is restricted from disclosure because it involves personal privacy, proprietary data or law enforcement investigations not relating to national security.

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Scandinavians launch probes into US spying activities

November 9, 2010 3 Comments

Scandinavia

Scandinavia

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Norway, Sweden and Denmark have launched official investigations into media reports that accuse US embassies in Scandinavian countries of operating illegal intelligence gathering networks. The issue first emerged last Wednesday, when a report by Norway’s TV2 channel alleged that the US embassy in Oslo maintained a network of around 20 local former police and intelligence officers, who were conducting “illegal systematic surveillance of Norwegian citizens”. According to TV2, the surveillance network was tasked with collecting visual and physical intelligence on individuals “thought to pose a threat to American interests”. The US Department of State responded to the allegations by arguing that the US embassy had “fully informed” the Norwegian authorities of the surveillance activities. But Norwegian investigations expressed fears that the intelligence collection, which dates back to 2000, may constitute a violation of Norwegian diplomatic legislation, and have launched an investigation into the affair. Read more of this post

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Bulgarian spy services intercept PM assassination plot

November 8, 2010 Leave a comment

Boyko Borisov

Boyko Borisov

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A conspiracy to assassinate the Prime Minister of Bulgaria has been intercepted in its planning stage by the country’s intelligence services, according to information published yesterday in the Bulgarian press. The Sofia-based 24 Chasa daily alleges that Bulgarian intelligence agents were able to intercept telephone conversations leading to a meeting of conspirators, which took place four months ago. The meeting, held at the luxury King George Palace Hotel in downtown Athens, Greece, was reportedly attended by several Bulgarian “participants [who] came onboard yachts, accompanied by numerous bodyguards”. The meeting centered on plans to fund an operation to “eliminate” Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, of Bulgaria’s conservative GERB party, who has led the country since the summer of 2009. According to 24 Chasa, participants at the meeting pledged the sum of €400,000 to fund the assassination of the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, a country that has been a member of the European Union since 2007. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #449

November 5, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Damning report on CIA attack on missionary plane. US Central Intelligence Agency officers involved with a secret counternarcotics mission in the Peruvian jungle routinely violated agency procedures, tried to cover up their mistakes, and misled Congress immediately after a missionary plane was accidentally shot down in 2001, according to a blistering CIA internal report released on Monday.
  • Israeli legislators call on US to release Jewish spy. Members of the Israeli Knesset are calling on US President Barack Obama to pardon American-born spy Jonathan Pollard, having been jailed in a maximum-security facility since 1985. George Bush refused to pardon Pollard in the last days of his presidency.
  • Analysis: Britain’s MI6 operates a bit differently than CIA. “Like the CIA, MI6 has a website, but while the U.S. agency site is only in English, MI6’s is also in Arabic, Russian, French, Spanish and Chinese. Another sign of British sophistication: while the CIA site has games and quizzes for kids, the MI6 site gives short tests to allow potential recruits to assess their analytical and administrative skills”. Interesting comparative assessment by Walter Pincus.

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