US, UK spy agencies on alert after unprecedented court decision

February 11, 2010 Leave a comment

Binyam Mohamed

Binyam Mohamed

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British and American intelligence agencies have been placed on alert following an unprecedented ruling by a British court, which forces the British government to disclose CIA documents in its possession. The documents relate to the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian resident of Britain, who says he was severely tortured with the collaboration of the CIA and British domestic intelligence agency MI5, after he was renditioned to Morocco. Last February, two British judges overseeing Mr. Mohamed’s case revealed that the British government kept “powerful evidence” secret after being threatened by the US that it would “stop sharing intelligence about terrorism with the UK”. In July, it emerged that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally threatened the British government that Washington would stop collaborating with London on intelligence matters if evidence in Mr. Mohamed’s case was publicly released. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0282

February 11, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Iran summons Canadian ambassador over CIA links. The Iranian government announced that it summoned the Canadian charge d’affaires in Tehran, in connection with revelations that Canada’s former ambassador to Iran secretly worked for the CIA in the late 1970s.
  • Charlie Wilson dead at 76. Charlie Wilson, a 12-term American congressional representative, who orchestrated the covert funding of Muslim mujahedeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, has died in Texas.
  • Analysis: Is Colombia turning into a nation of informants? On January 27, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe announced his goal of putting a thousand spies in college classrooms. He offered to pay students $50 per month to report any suspicious ideas or behavior to the Colombian authorities. Forrest Hylton, who teaches at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, explains the disturbing political background of Uribe’s announcement.

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Civil war continues in South African spy agency

February 10, 2010 Leave a comment

Arthur Fraser

Arthur Fraser

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In July of last year, South Africa’s ministerial Review Commission on Intelligence warned that a steadily declining culture of accountability in South Africa’s spy services threatened the country’s constitutional order. In October, the government’s minster for state security, Siyabonga Cwele, cited the Commission’s findings and policy suggestions in announcing a “major restructuring” of South Africa’s security services. Several months later, the “restructuring” process resembles a major civil war between rival political factions of the African National Congress. An entire generation of pro-ANC intelligence officials, who staffed the post-apartheid South African intelligence apparatus, has already been purged. The wave of purges was completed with the resignation this past week of Arthur Fraser, until recently director of the South African National Intelligence Agency’s Operations Division. Read more of this post

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Iran arrests seven with alleged CIA ties

February 9, 2010 1 Comment

RFE/RL old HQ

RFE/RL's old HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Iranian government has announced the arrests of seven people linked to a US government-funded radio station, some of whom it says were working for the CIA. The arrests were announced on February 7 by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, which said some of the seven detainees had been “officially hired by US intelligence agencies” and had gone through “a selection and training process in Dubai and Istanbul”, in sabotage and black operations. The radio station in question is Radio Farda, the Farsi-language arm of the US government’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which has been broadcasting to Iran from Prague, Czech Republic, its headquarters in Europe, since 2003. According to the Iranian government, the seven detainees participated in fermenting opposition protests that led to the demonstrations in Iran during Ashura, the Shiite day of mourning, on December 27, 2009. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0281

February 9, 2010 5 Comments

  • US intel director confirms CIA can kill US citizens abroad. It’s official; speaking before the House Intelligence Committee, US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged that President Obama is continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens if they are considered “a terrorist threat to the United States”.
  • Funny sign at CIA gift shop. Actual notice displayed at a CIA gift store inside the Agency’s Langley, VA, headquarters: “Don’t forget! If you are undercover, you cannot charge! It will blow your cover”. Good point.
  • Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars out in paperback. IntelNews has received the new paperback edition of Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars: 100 Years of British Intelligence. Joseph Fitsanakis reviewed the hardback edition last May.

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US admits ‘200 troops’ on the ground in Pakistan

February 9, 2010 1 Comment

Afghan-Pakistani Border

AfPak border

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Last December, when Washington’s Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, categorically denied that the US had troops on Pakistani soil, we at intelNews were among some who refused to believe him. Instead, we referred readers to earlier revelations in The New York Times that US military forces were already secretly operating in Pakistan, and that more than 70 US “military advisers […] and technical specialists” were embedded with Pakistan’s special forces in the remote areas bordering Afghanistan. Those in the know are aware that embedded US troops have operated in Pakistan since at least February of 2008, no matter what Holbrooke claims. It took the deaths of three of these American soldiers, in a suicide attack by Pakistani Taliban, last week, for American officials to begin to admit that US troops are indeed operating inside Pakistan. Read more of this post

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Russia accuses Georgia of aiding al-Qaeda in North Caucasus

February 8, 2010 Leave a comment

Dagestan

Dagestan

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
It may not make headlines in Western media, but Russia’s low-intensity war in Chechnya and Dagestan continues, with scores of separatists and government agents dying on an almost daily basis. Last week, Vyacheslav Shanshin the Dagestan regional director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, announced the killing by FSB agents of Makhmoud Mokhammed Shaaban. Egyptian-born Shaaban is said to have co-founded the al-Qaeda network in the Russian North Caucasus, along with Saudi-born Ibn al-Khattab, whom the FSB managed to poison in 2002, with the help of a double agent. Shanshin also said that, like al-Khattab, Shaaban was partially funded and equipped by the Georgian secret services. Read more of this post

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Al-Mabhouh assassins used Irish passports, says Dubai police

February 8, 2010 3 Comments

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Al-Mabhouh

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
At least four of the seven people believed to have participated in last month’s assassination of a senior Hamas military official in Dubai, used forged Irish passports to enter and exit the United Arab Emirates, according to local police. The body of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, co-founder of the Palestinian Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, was discovered by staff at Dubai’s luxury Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, where al-Mabhouh was a guest, on January 20. Nine days later, on January 29, Hamas accused Israeli intelligence service Mossad of having killed al-Mabhouh. Now the Dubai police alleges that four of the seven assassins, which included at least one woman, used real Irish travel documents with falsified identities to enter the Emirates, and used them again to “flee to a European country” several hours before al-Mabhouh’s body was discovered.   Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0280

February 4, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Interview with Canadian ambassador who worked for the CIA. Iran’s Press TV has published an extensive interview with Ken Taylor, Canada’s former ambassador to Iran, who recently admitted that he secretly worked for the CIA in the late 1970s, after the US embassy in Iran was taken over by students during the Islamic Revolution. Part one of the interview is here. Parts two and three here, and parts four, five and six here.
  • US Pentagon’s black budget tops $56 billion. About $56 billion of the US Defense Department’s publicized 2010 budget goes simply to “classified programs” or to projects known only by their code names, like “Chalk Eagle” and “Link Plumeria”. That’s the Pentagon’s black budget, an it’s about $6 billion more than last year.
  • CIA agents working for private companies on the side. In the midst of two US wars and the fight against al-Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side –a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent.

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Analysis: The Downward Spiral in US-Pakistan Intelligence Relations

February 3, 2010 1 Comment

Pragati magazine

Pragati

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
For decades, US geopolitical interests in southern Asia have centered on controlling the Indian Ocean, with its lucrative energy transport routes to and from Japan and China. The events of 9/11, however, in association with nuclear weapons proliferation and the rise of al-Qaeda, have immensely complicated US regional goals. This newfound complexity has created severe tensions between Washington and Islamabad, which are most notable in their rapidly deteriorating intelligence relations. In recent months, the inter-agency conflict between the CIA and Pakistan’s security agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, has intensified to a stage of open war. I explain how this situation came about in a guest article for Pragati, the English-language review of Southeast Asian international relations published in India. The article is available here. In fact, for those looking for informed views on Central and Southeast Asian diplomacy and security issues, it is worth downloading (.pdf) the entire latest issue of this very professional publication.

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News you may have missed #0278

February 3, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Israelis arrest two alleged Hamas informants. Israeli security service Shin Bet says 24-year olds Murad Kamal and Murad Nimer were recruited by Hamas in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
  • Descendant of Richard Sorge’s accomplice receives Soviet-era award. An updated report on the 81-year-old niece of Yotoku Miyagi, a Japanese accomplice of famous German-born Comintern spy Richard Sorge, who has been awarded the Soviet Order of the Patriotic War medal in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in Tokyo, Japan. The medal was originally granted in 1965, but Miyagi was unable to collect it, as he had been executed by the Japanese, along with Sorge, in 1944.

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Did Blackwater bribe Iraqi officials after 2007 shooting?

February 3, 2010 Leave a comment

Blackwater logo

Blackwater logo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The US-based private security company Blackwater is under investigation by the US State Department, which suspects the corporation of having bribed Iraqi officials, in order to gain permission to continue to operate in Iraq, after the 2007 Nisour Square massacre. The company’s license to operate in Iraq was revoked by the Iraqi government on September 17, 2007, a day after trigger-happy Blackwater guards indiscriminately opened fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 civilians, including women and children. But information obtained by The New York Times shows that the company hired well-connected Iraqi lawyers, and may have tried to buy off Iraqi lawmakers, in order to regain the right to operate on Iraqi soil. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0279

February 2, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Pakistani spy agencies drug political activists. Intelligence agencies in Pakistan are using drugs to extract information from political activists, with the cooperation of doctors on the payroll of the state, according to one of Pakistan’s leading newspapers.
  • Georgia jails alleged Russian spy. Vakhtang Maisaia, a military expert who advised Georgia’s mission to NATO, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for spying for Russia during the 2008 South Ossetia War. Last week, Tsotne Gamsakhurdia, son of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first post-communist president, was formally charged with “collaborating with Russian intelligence services”.

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News you may have missed #0277

February 2, 2010 Leave a comment

  • Western officials say a CIA air strike has killed Hakimullah Mehsud. Mehsud was the leader of the largest faction of the Pakistani Taliban, and one of the handlers of Humam Khalil al-Balawi, the Jordanian who killed seven CIA officers last December in Khost, Afghanistan. Mehsud took over the leadership of the Pakistan Taliban last August, after another CIA air strike killed his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud (no relation).
  • US citizen requests North Korea asylum. An unidentified 28-year-old American man who crossed into North Korea from China has allegedly sought asylum because he did not “want to become a cannon fodder in the capitalist military”. He apparently told North Korean officials that he “wants to serve in the North Korean military” instead.

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Leaked MI5 report sees China as ‘most significant’ spy threat

February 2, 2010 2 Comments

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A restricted MI5 report describes China as Britain’s most serious espionage threat, and says British business executives are increasingly targeted by Chinese intelligence operatives. The 14-page document was authored by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, a unit of MI5, Britain’s primary counterintelligence and security agency. In it, the intelligence agencies of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, as well as the Ministry of State Security, are identified as leaders in a massive targeting of British corporate executives who regularly make business trips to China. The report warns that most of the hotel rooms where they stay are “likely to be bugged”, that they are regularly “searched while the occupants are out of the[ir] room[s]”, and that hotels are frequented by Chinese female intelligence agents, looking “to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities”. Read more of this post

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