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News you may have missed #421 (‘not news’ edition)

August 30, 2010 1 Comment

Not news: Senior Afghan officials on CIA payroll. The New York Times‘ Mark Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins are right to air this story, but the real news here is the media industry’s collective gasp of fake shock and horror. Really?
Not news: Pentagon breached by foreign hacker. US Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn has disclosed that an undisclosed foreign spy agency carried out a serious cyberattack on US military networks with the help of a tainted flash drive that was inserted into a laptop in the Middle East. Ah, the old memory-stick gift trick…
Not news: Sex-obsessed coverage of Russian espionage continues. Russian and US media keep avoiding serious analysis of post-Cold-War Russian intelligence operations by focusing on Anna Chapman. This is no surprise, since pursuing the real story behind Russian deep-cover espionage in the United States takes hard work.>response to Le Carre’s comments.

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Police see ‘professional job’ in British spy’s death

August 30, 2010 1 Comment

Gareth Williams

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
As authorities investigate the recent death of British spy Dr. Gareth Williams, the country’s notorious tabloid media industry is having a field day disorienting interested observers. It is thus easy to miss important news breakthroughs in the cacophony of sensationalized headlines about Williams, whose body was discovered a week ago, stuffed in a sports duffle bag in the bath of his London apartment. One such breakthrough was yesterday’s report by Britain’s widely respected Channel 4, which said that law enforcement investigators described Williams’ death as “a neat job”, a term used to refer to professional killings. The Channel 4 report was preceded by strong official denials by police that Williams’ murder was sex-related, as had been previously reported. Some investigators now believe that Williams was killed by a foreign agent, who then deliberately “planted a trail of clues” pointing to a homosexual link to the death. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #420

August 27, 2010 Leave a comment

Nokia and Siemens deny helping Iranian spying. Isa Saharkhiz, a one-time reporter for the Islamic Republic News Agency, is suing Nokia Siemens Networks in US federal court, claiming the companies facilitated his capture and torture at the hands of the Iranian government. The European-based consortium denies the allegations.
New Aussie spy agency HQ ‘on time and on budget’. The new ASIO $606 million (USD $540 million) headquarters in Parkes, Canberra, is progressing on time and on budget, with completion scheduled for mid-2012. Meanwhile, the 270 construction workers on site have been vetted for security clearance, must pass security checkpoints each day, and have signed papers not to discuss anything that happens on site.
US Pentagon spends big on outsourced spy imagery. The production and maintenance of US spy satellites used to be in government hands, but now this critical aspect of national security is routinely outsourced. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Department of Defense’s operator of military spy satellites, recently awarded $7.3 billion in contracts for its EnhancedView commercial imagery program.

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News you may have missed #419 (Gareth Williams edition)

August 26, 2010 1 Comment

Media suggest sexual motive behind MI6 man’s murder. British media claim police suspect sexual jealousy to be behind the death of GCHQ and MI6 employee Dr. Gareth Williams. The Sun suggests Williams was “a secret transvestite who may have been killed by a gay lover”.
MI6 dead man’s post-mortem inconclusive. A post-mortem on MI6 worker Gareth Williams, who was found dead in his London apartment has proven “inconclusive”, but shows he was not stabbed.
MI6 worker may have been strangled. It appears increasingly likely that MI6 worker Dr. Gareth Williams, who was killed a fortnight ago, was strangled –rather than stabbed– to death.

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British MI6 employee found dead in London flat

August 26, 2010 1 Comment

Gareth Williams

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British authorities are keeping silent on the mysterious death of a Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) employee, whose body was found in the bath of his London apartment, stuffed in a sports duffle bag. By Monday afternoon, when police entered the top apartment of the five-storey townhouse in Pimlico, London, the man had been laying dead for nearly a fortnight. On Wednesday, he was identified as Dr. Gareth Williams, a 31-year-old mathematician employed by General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British government’s foremost communications security and surveillance agency. For the past year, Williams had been temporarily transferred to MI6, the country’s external intelligence agency, whose headquarters is located less than a mile from the apartment where the mathematician’s body was discovered. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #418

August 25, 2010 1 Comment

US military pays for intel widely available online. Experts say that the vast majority of the ‘intelligence’ needed by the United States is freely available on the Internet. But that has not stopped a company called Military Periscope from selling its subscription services to the US government, on things such as updates on foreign militaries, peacekeeping missions, weapons databases and terrorist organizations “via monthly CD-ROM delivery”.
Son of Russian spies could return to US for school. Tim Foley, the elder son of Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, the two deported US residents who were living a double life as Russian spies, may be trying to return to study in the United States, but his younger brother plans to stay in Moscow.
German spy chief notes cyberattack surge. Cyberattacks against German corporate and government computers have been on the rise since 2005, according to Heinz Fromm, Director of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He said the attacks “come mainly from Asia, often from China”, and that often “state agencies are involved”.

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Ireland not to recall passports following Mossad forgeries

August 25, 2010 1 Comment

Forged passports

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The government of Ireland has decided against recalling millions of passports issued before 2005, following the discovery of several forged Irish passports used by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. At least seven of the Mossad operatives who took part in last January’s assassination of senior Hamas military official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, used forged Irish passports to enter and exit the United Arab Emirates. An official investigation into the affair by the Irish government uncovered an extensive Israeli document forgery network in Ireland, and led to the expulsion of an Israeli embassy official from the country. But Irish government officials, tired of the long history of forged Irish passports used by intelligence agencies around the world, flirted with the idea of recalling all Irish passports issued before 2005, when sophisticated security features were introduced. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #417

August 24, 2010 1 Comment

US Senators question Chinese telecom hardware bid. Senior Republican senators have called for an investigation on whether US national security will be compromised by the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei seeking to sell equipment to Sprint Nextel, which provides services to the US military and law enforcement agencies.
Pakistan environmental chaos causes security concerns. The catastrophic floods in Pakistan, which have displaced millions of persons over the last several weeks, when combined with the other socioeconomic and political stresses on Pakistan, have the potential to further weaken an already weak Pakistani state, according to a new US Congressional Research Service report.
Russian base in Armenia to stay through 2044. Russia has secured a long-term foothold in the energy-rich and unstable Caucasus region by signing a deal with Armenia that allows a Russian military base to operate until 2044 in exchange for a promise of new weaponry and fresh security guarantees.

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‘Lord of War’ weapons smuggler enjoys Russian protection

August 24, 2010 1 Comment

Viktor Bout

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The case of notorious arms smuggler Viktor Bout is well known. Born in Dushanbe, Soviet Tajikistan, in 1967, Bout served in the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) until the collapse of the USSR, at which point he began supplying weapons to shady groups, ranging from Congolese rebels and Angolan paramilitaries to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In March of 2008, Bout, known as ‘Lord of War’, was finally 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. Recently, Washington scored a second victory by convincing Thai authorities to extradite Bout to the United States on terrorism charges. Presumably, Bout will be tried as an arms smuggler acting on his own accord. But is this right? Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #416 (Iran edition)

August 23, 2010 Leave a comment

Israel not to attack Iran in 2011, say US sources. The Obama administration, citing evidence of continued troubles inside Iran’s nuclear program, has persuaded Israel that it would take roughly a year for Iran to complete a “dash” for a nuclear weapon. US officials say the assessment has dimmed the prospect that Israel would pre-emptively strike Iran within the next year.
Iran launches first spy drone. Iran has launched a domestically made long-range high-altitude drone, called Karrar, according to state media. Hamed Saeedi, managing director of Farnas Aerospace Company, which is in charge of the project, said plans are under way to produce additional drones and unmanned choppers.
Iranian tried for espionage collapses in Armenian court. Behnam Bagheri, an Iranian citizen being tried in Armenia on charges of spying for Azerbaijan, collapsed in court in Yerevan on August 19 while delivering his defense speech, according to reports. In a similar case in October of 2009, Armenia charged one of its own officers with spying for Azerbaijan.

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Russia, Romania, expel diplomats in spy tit-for-tat

August 23, 2010 2 Comments

Gabriel Grecu

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Russian and Romanian governments have expelled each other’s diplomats in a spy scandal that made headlines in both countries last week. The spy affair began last Monday, August 16, when Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced the arrest of a Romanian diplomatic official, who was allegedly caught in the act of espionage. The official was later named as Gabriel Grecu, who was First Secretary of the Political Department of the Romanian embassy in Moscow. According to a laconic FSB press release, Grecu was detained while “attempting to solicit classified military information from a Russian national”. According to Russian media, the Romanian official was found “in possession of various pieces of espionage equipment”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #415

August 20, 2010 Leave a comment

GCHQ tech arm adopts new personnel evaluation tests. The Communications Electronics Security Group is the information assurance arm of the General Communications Headquarters –Britain’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. CESG has now adopted a new testing method of verifying the competency of its IT security professionals, because apparently there are “not enough security professionals in the public and private sectors to go around”.
Swapped Russian insists he was no CIA spy. Of the four jailed Russians the US received from Moscow in exchange for the 11 Russian illegals in July, only one is talking. But Igor Sutyagin, a nuclear proliferation expert, who was convicted of links with a CIA front-company, insists he was no CIA spy. However, if that is so, why was he on Washington’s swap list in the first place?
Militants target Yemen spy officials. Two officers in Yemen’s Political Security Organization, Colonel Ali Abdul Kareem al-Ban, and Juman Safian, have been shot dead in recent days. Al-Qaeda militants, who assumed responsibility for the attacks, warned they will be stepping up operations inside neighboring Saudi Arabia.

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Comment: What Can the US Do To Stop WikiLeaks?

August 19, 2010 4 Comments

Julian Assange

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Ever since whistleblower site WikiLeaks published 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan, several pundits have urged US government agencies, including the Pentagon, to take action. Late last week, former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen urged the Pentagon to unleash its “cyber capabilities to prevent WikiLeaks from disseminating those materials”. Some columnists have even suggested that US intelligence services should “come up with an up-to-date photo of [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange and distribute it to […] SEAL sharpshooters”. Pentagon representatives have also stepped up their rhetoric, warning that “[i]f doing the right thing isn’t good enough for [WikiLeaks], we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing”.

News you may have missed #414

August 18, 2010 Leave a comment

Arab nations challenge US support of Israel’s nuclear secrecy. Ignoring a US warning, Arab nations are urging Washington and other Western powers to end support of Israel’s nuclear secrecy and to push for international inspections of Israel’s nuclear program.
CIA, FBI ready to flee US embassy in Turkey. The American embassy in Ankara and its consulate in Istanbul are so small, creaky and dangerous, that several US agencies housed in them, including the CIA, the FBI and the Agency for International Development, are ready to flee, according to an inspection report released last week.
Ex-CIA chief says WikiLeaks disclosure was ‘inevitable’. Former director of the CIA General Michael Hayden has told the BBC that the shift to sharing intelligence after the 11 September attacks made a leak of tens of thousands of secret US military documents “inevitable”, and that it could happen again.

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Russian alleged CIA spy gives interview

August 18, 2010 1 Comment

Igor Sutyagin

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Of the four Russians alleged spies that the US and the UK received from Moscow in exchange for the 11 Russian illegals in July, only one is talking to the media. The Russian government convicted Igor Sutyagin, a nuclear proliferation expert, of having links with Alternative Futures, a British consulting company alleged by Moscow to be a CIA front. This past weekend, Sutyagin, who now lives in an undisclosed London location, gave a detailed interview to Natalya Golitsyna, a London-based correspondent for US government-owned Radio Liberty’s. As in his previous statements to the press, the Russian scientist rejected he was ever a spy, claiming that “[t]he first thing in my mind […] was doing and thinking for my country”. He also rejected accusations that he provided Alternative Futures with classified information on Russian nuclear weapons policy: “there was no transfer of information”, said Sutyagin, noting that the information he shared with the British-registered company “was just an illustration of the processes that are going on in Russia tasks”. Read more of this post