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News you may have missed #378

June 28, 2010 Leave a comment

Knesset thanks Hamas leader’s son for spying for Israel. The Israeli Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has sent a letter of thanks to Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas West Bank leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who from 1998 to 2007 spied for Israel’s Shin Bet security service.
Analysis: Will McChrystal’s intel staff survive his exit? In the shock wave following General Stanley McChrystal’s abrupt summons from Kabul, there were rumors in special operations circles that his senior staff had been relieved of duty, too. But the fevered buzz appears to have been false, or at least premature.
Iran embassy dismisses Czech report on weapons smuggling. The Iranian embassy in Prague has criticized the Czech counterintelligence’s (BIS) 2009 annual report, which says that Iran strove to gain access to component parts that can be used in the production of mass destruction weapons.

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CIA slowly opens up about botched 1952 mission in China

June 28, 2010 2 Comments

CIA HQ

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The CIA has produced an hour-long documentary about a failed 1952 covert mission inside China, which resulted in the death of two American pilots and the capture of two CIA paramilitary officers, who spent a total of 40 years in Chinese prisons. The documentary, which premiered last week on a restricted basis at the Agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, is based on internal CIA accounts of the operation, some of which were released in 2006. The premiere was reportedly attended by John Downey and Richard Fecteau, two CIA paramilitary officers on their first mission, who were captured by Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units inside Chinese territory, after the CIA-operated C-47 Skytrain airplane that was carrying them deep inside Chinese airspace was shot down in a Chinese ambush. Read more of this post

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Has US Pentagon revived Bush-era domestic spy program?

June 25, 2010 2 Comments

US Pentagon

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A little-known US Department of Defense counterintelligence is suspected to have resuscitated a notorious Bush-era domestic surveillance program, which was banned by Congress for being too obtrusive. In 2002, the then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz authorized the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON), a US Air Force intelligence collection program aimed to gather data on potential threats to American armed forces personnel in the US and abroad. But the initiative was allegedly shelved by the Bush administration, after it emerged that TALON intelligence collection focused largely on political policing against lawful antiwar groups. But now new reports suggest that an obscure unit under the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), called the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), is creating a new system of consolidated databases whose focus closely resembles that of TALON. Read more of this post

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Germany refuses to drop Mossad prosecution, despite Israeli pressure

June 24, 2010 5 Comments

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
German-Israeli relations sunk to a new low this week, after the German government rejected Israel’s call to drop a public investigation into the actions of a suspected Israeli spy. The alleged spy, whose travel documents identify him as “Uri Brodsky”, was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4. He is wanted by German prosecutors, not for directly participating in the assassination by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad of senior Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, as had been previously reported, but for procuring a forged German passport for the assassins. “Brodsky” appears to have traveled under the cover name of “Alexander Verin” to Cologne, Germany, where he employed the services of a lawyer to acquire the forged passport. It was later used used by Israeli Mossad agents to travel to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where al-Mabhouh was assassinated. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #377

June 23, 2010 Leave a comment

Romania sentences two for espionage. A court in Bucharest has sentenced Romanian citizen Floricel Achim and Bulgarian Petar Marinov Zikolov to 12.5 years in prison each, for passing classified information to Ukraine. The two were arrested last February.
Top US senator has concerns about Obama’s DNI nominee. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, has publicly joined those who have expressed concern about President Barack Obama’s nomination of James Clapper to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She says she prefers a civilian for the post.
Yemen arrests leader of attack on southern spy HQ. Yemen has arrested the suspected mastermind of Saturday’s spectacular attack on the government’s southern intelligence headquarters in Aden, which freed detainees and left 11 people dead.

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Senior Russian nuclear expert found dead in Malta

June 22, 2010 4 Comments

Alexander Pikayev

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Authorities in Malta have reported the death of a senior Russian expert on nuclear disarmament, whose body was discovered in his holiday apartment. Dr. Alexander Pikayev, 48, was the director of the Department of Disarmament and Conflict Resolution at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations. His work on nuclear armaments policy is internationally recognized and he was among Russia’s most visible media commentators on issues relating to nuclear proliferation. But last Wednesday, Dr. Pikayev’s body was discovered lying on the floor of an apartment he owned in Bugibba, Malta, where he had been holidaying since earlier this month. The German Press Agency reports that the Russian scientist appeared to have “accidentally slipped” and hit his head on a door. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #376

June 21, 2010 Leave a comment

Dubai plans more cameras after Mossad operation. Dubai will beef up its surveillance capability by installing more cameras around the city-state after the Israeli hit squad that murdered a senior Hamas operative was caught on a hotel video. As intelNews has reported before, Mossad has really helped the Gulf surveillance industry.
Iran hangs ‘spy’ with alleged US connections. Iran hanged Sunni militant leader Abdolmalek Rigi last weekend for allegedly having connections with foreign secret services, including “intelligence officers of the US and Israel working under the cover of NATO and certain Arab countries” as well as “anti-revolutionary expatriate groups such as the MEK”, the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran.
Analysis: FBI use of Muslim informers now part of daily life. Gathering information on people in Muslim communities in the United States has become part of daily life. After 9/11, all data is considered useful. But, Stephan Salisbury of The Philadelphia Inquirer asks, is that how America should be?

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US intel wants to automate analysis of online videos

June 18, 2010 Leave a comment

IARPA logo

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A new project funded by the US intelligence community’s research unit aims to automate the collection and analysis of videos from YouTube and other popular online platforms, with the intent of unearthing “valuable intelligence”. The program is called Automated Low-Level Analysis and Description of Diverse Intelligence Video (ALADDIN). It is directed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), whose mission is to work under the Director of National Intelligence to create hi-tech applications for America’s intelligence agencies. Few people are aware of the existence of IARPA, which was quietly established in 2007, is based at the University of Maryland, and is staffed mostly by CIA personnel. The research body’s latest project apparently aims to equip the US intelligence community with the ability to scan “for the occurrence of specific events of interest” embedded in online video files, and then “rapidly and automatically produce a textual English-language recounting [and] describing the particular scene, actors, objects and activities involved”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #375 (analysis edition)

June 17, 2010 1 Comment

Analysis: Israel worried by new Turkey spy chief’s defense of Iran. Israel’s defense establishment, which maintains ties with Turkey’s national intelligence organization (MİT), is concerned over the recent appointment of Hakan Fidan as head of that organization, and the implications of that appointment vis-a-vis Turkish relations with Israel and Iran.
Analysis: How the CIA bolstered radical Islam during Cold War. The CIA’s battle with communism during the Cold War allowed radical Islamists to gain a foothold in Europe, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ian Johnson, entitled A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West.

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US agencies still lack basic language skills, says new report

June 16, 2010 3 Comments

GAO report

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A major US government audit into the performance of national security departments and agencies has once again criticized the substantial absence of skilled foreign-language speakers. According to the Government Accountability Office’s latest assessment (.pdf) of the US Department of Defense and the Department of State, not only has the availability of foreign language fluency not improved, but has actually deteriorated during the past few years. The situation is especially desperate in the State Department, says the report, where the percentage of “generalists and specialists in language-designated positions” who fail to meet essential language criteria increased from 29 percent in 2005 to 31 percent last year. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #374

June 15, 2010 Leave a comment

South Korean general arrested for spying for North. South Korea’s military is investigating an army general, identified only as Major-Gen. Kim, suspected of leaking secrets to a former spy for Seoul who then sold the information to North Korea. The leaked information is reportedly related to Operational Plan 5027, formulated by the Korea-US Combined Forces Command (CFC) in preparation for a possible war on the Korean Peninsula.
A shared glimpse of CIA officer’s secret life. The family of the late Darren James LaBonte, who was among the seven CIA officers killed in Khost, Afghanistan, last December, decided recently to acknowledge that he was among the dead, and to tell the world a bit about the man behind the name. Meanwhile, the CIA has announced that 12 new stars will be added to the wall in the lobby of the agency’s headquarters building –the most in one year since the agency’s founding.

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Alleged Mossad agent arrested in Poland

June 14, 2010 6 Comments

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Authorities in Poland have detained an alleged Israeli agent who may be connected with the assassination of a senior Hamas operative last January. German newsmagazine Der Spiegel quoted anonymous government prosecutors in Berlin, who said the man works for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4. The alleged agent, whose travel documents identify him as “Uri Brodsky”, is wanted by German prosecutors for using a forged German passport to enter Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in January of this year. He then joined a team of Mossad assassins to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons procurer, who was found dead in his luxury hotel room on January 20. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Israel Suffers Strategic Blowback in Flotilla Raid

June 12, 2010 4 Comments

Flotilla raid

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Speaking before a parliamentary committee about last month’s Israeli raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which killed nine and injured over 60 international volunteers, a senior Israeli intelligence official warned that “[e]vents [like this] are likely to go out of control and the situation could deteriorate to extreme scenarios”. The official was no other than Meir Dagan, director of the Mossad, Israel’s foremost external intelligence agency. As I explain in an article published yesterday in Daily News Corner, to some extent, Dagan’s “extreme scenario” has already materialized. The raid’s outrageous death toll has further-worsened Israel’s deteriorating relations with Australia and has caused the outright termination of the Jewish state’s diplomatic contacts with several non-Western countries that used to be among its closest international friends, such as Turkey, South Africa, Ecuador and Nicaragua. More importantly, the flotilla attack has even stigmatized Israel’s relations with the United States, a development that fits into the broader pattern of steadily worsening US-Israeli relations in recent years. It is no coincidence that, on the day after the raid, Mossad chief Dagan said that “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden”. Read article →

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News you may have missed #373 (CIA edition)

June 11, 2010 2 Comments

CIA forerunner’s sabotage manual released. Here is the Simple Sabotage Field Manual (.pdf) of the Office of Strategic Services (wartime forerunner of the CIA), dating from 1944. Via Bruce Schneier’s blog.
CIA misread South Korea signs, documents show. Declassified CIA documents on South Korea show that the US spy agency was surprised by the 1979 assassination of dictator Pak Chung Hee, by his intelligence chief, did not anticipate the ensuring military coup d’etat, and dismissed the growing unrest that eventually led to a near-civil war in the country.
Ex-CIA top official’s op-ed supports Miranda rights. In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Philip Mudd, a former senior official at the CIA and the FBI, argues that reading terrorist suspects their Miranda rights has never impeded an intelligence investigation.

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News you may have missed #372

June 10, 2010 Leave a comment

Afghan interior minister and spy chief removed. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has removed interior minister Hanif Atmar and national security director Amrullah Saleh, after accusing them of failing to prevent last week’s Taliban attack on the country’s parliament. It is worth noting that both officials have close ties to Washington.
Analysis: Fight looms over new US intelligence chief. Warring opinions are emerging about James R. Clapper, after US President Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate the Pentagon’s current intelligence chief to serve as director of national intelligence.
Analysis: The dangers of turning spies into generals. The CIA’s controversial Predator-drone targeted killings program blends Title 10 of the US code, which governs the military, and Title 50, which covers intelligence operations. This unnerves a number of scholars, who recall that the last time this was done on such a large scale was in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.