intelNews

More on Iranian physicist’s assassination

January 13, 2010 4 Comments

Blast site

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
American intelligence and State Department officials, some anonymous, have denied any connection with the assassination yesterday of Iranian physicist Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, in Tehran. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that Ali-Mohammadi was among several Iranian researchers who had regular contacts with Israeli and Arab physicists, through a United Nations-sponsored scientific collaboration project based in Amman, Jordan. The program, known as Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME), was focused on non-nuclear physics applications in the medical industry and nanotechnology. To further complicate the issue, the Iranian opposition issued a report late last night saying that photographs taken at the scene of the bombing shortly after the blast, reveal the presence at the site of Abu Nasser Hossein, assistant to Manif Ashmar, who is Hezbollah’s public face in Iran. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Abu Nasser Hossein, Amman (Jordan), Ardeshire Hassanpour, assassinations, Hezbollah, Iran, Iranian nuclear program, Israel, Jordan, Manif Ashmar, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, News, nuclear espionage, nuclear proliferation, Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, United States, University of Tehran

News you may have missed #0250

January 12, 2010 Leave a comment

Pakistanis ask US to quit drone strikes. A Pakistani intelligence official has told the Associated Press that the response to the December 30 suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents should not include intensifying unmanned drone strikes inside Pakistan. However, the CIA has reportedly “stepped up drone strikes” since the bombing.
Bush, Obama administrations guilty for neglecting info sharing. Thomas E. McNamara, former head of the US federal Information Sharing Environment, says the Bush and Obama administrations are both guilty of either losing interest or not focusing at all on promoting information sharing among often-secluded US government agencies.
China ends probe into Rio Tinto espionage case. Chinese prosecutors have now taken over the case of Stern Hu, the jailed boss of Anglo-Australian mining corporation Rio Tinto, after officials ended their investigation. Hu was arrested last July on espionage charges.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, Australia, Bush Administration, China, CIA, energy resources, espionage, intelligence sharing, News, news you may have missed, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Predator drones, Rio Tinto, Stern Hu, Thomas E. McNamara, UK, United States, US Information Sharing Environment

BREAKING NEWS: Bomb blast kills Iranian physicist

January 12, 2010 Leave a comment

Dr. Mohammadi

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
Iran’s state broadcaster has said a government physicist was “martyred” earlier this morning in a suspicious blast outside his home. The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) news agency reports that police forces have sealed off the area around the Tehran residence of Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, whom it described as a “dedicated revolutionary professor”. Dr. Ali-Mohammadi was reportedly killed by a remotely controlled explosive device that was planted at the entrance of his residence. Iranian officials hint that the remnants of the device point to the work of “outside intelligence agencies”, and some implicate the Mossad. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Ardeshire Hassanpour, assassinations, CIA, defectors, IAEA, Iran, Iranian nuclear program, Israel, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mossad, News, nuclear espionage, nuclear proliferation, Qum (Iran), Shahram Amiri, United States

Too much intelligence collection overwhelms US agencies

January 12, 2010 3 Comments

USAF drone

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The broad debate about America’s recent intelligence setbacks has centered on the view that US spy agencies do not share enough information with each other. Several days ago, however, Politico’s Laura Rozen noticed an important remark by an anonymous former intelligence official, buried in a longer piece in The Washington Post about the Christmas Day bomber. The official told the Post that “[t]he real story line internally [in the Christmas Day bomber affair] is not information-sharing or connecting dots […]. Information was shared. It was separating noise from chaff. It’s not that information wasn’t passed around, it’s that so much information is being passed. There’s an inherent problem of dealing with all the data that is sloshing around” (emphasis added). This view may in fact be closer to reality than the more dominant ‘turf war’ argument. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with airborne surveillance, information overload, intelligence overload, intelligence sharing, Laura Rozen, News, turf wars, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, United States, US Air Force

News you may have missed #0249

January 11, 2010 Leave a comment

Analysis: Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan. “The military backgrounds of the fallen CIA operatives cast a light on the way the world of intelligence is increasingly muscling up and becoming militarized […]. This is no longer intelligence as anyone imagines it, nor is it military as military was once defined […]. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims […] it seems remarkably ineffective”.
CIA planned to ‘rendition’ suspects in Germany in 2001. The CIA had 25 agents in Germany after the September 11 attacks and planned to illegally rendition al-Qaeda suspects without informing the German government. In the end, the plan was scrapped because of objections by the Agency’s German section.
French president appoints woman in charge of spy school. Nicolas Sarkozy is to create a ‘school for spies’, whose principal job will be to discourage French intelligence chiefs from spying on, and fighting against, one another. There are rumors that the school’s first director will be woman academic with no previous experience of espionage.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, Analysis, CIA, extraordinary rendition, France, Germany, intelligence training, military, News, news you may have missed, Nicolas Sarkozy

CIA to continue working with Jordanians, despite suicide attack

January 11, 2010 1 Comment

GID logo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The vast majority of intelligence insiders, as well as intelligence observers, seem to agree that the CIA is determined to maintain its close links with Jordanian intelligence services, despite the December 30 suicide bombing that killed and injured 13 CIA personnel. Jordanian doctor Humam Khalil al-Balawi, who detonated a concealed bomb shortly after he was allowed into the US Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, had been recruited as a high-level informant by Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID). The Jordanian agency, which is known for its brutal interrogation tactics, is widely considered America’s most valuable intelligence partner in the Arab world. But the December 30 blunder, which resulted in the CIA’s second highest casualty disaster in its 63-year history, prompted some to question GID’s overall value. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, CIA, Forward Operating Base Chapman, General Intelligence Department (Jordan), Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, intelligence cooperation, Jordan, Khost, News, Phillip Knightley, suicide bombings, United States

Comment: CIA Deaths a Failure of Intelligence, Not Security

January 11, 2010 3 Comments

Khalil al-Balawi

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Early on Thursday, rumors began spreading among intelligence observers that the December 30 suicide blast in Khost, Afghanistan, which killed seven and seriously injured six CIA personnel, went off in the open air, and not inside a gym on the base, as had previously been reported. Soon afterwards, an article written by CIA director Leon Panetta for the Sunday edition of The Washington Post, dated January 10, was published by the paper two days early. The op-ed is an apparent attempt by the CIA leadership to officially get the word out that suicide bomber Humam Khalil al-Balawi “was about to be searched by our security officers –a distance away from other intelligence personnel– when he set off his explosives”, according to Panetta. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, CIA, counterintelligence, Forward Operating Base Chapman, General Intelligence Department (Jordan), Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, informants, Jordan, Joseph Fitsanakis, Khost, Leon Panetta, Pakistah, spycraft, suicide bombings

News you may have missed #0248

January 10, 2010 Leave a comment

Cuba insists jailed US contractor is secret service agent. Cuban officials say that a US citizen working for Maryland-based international aid group Development Alternatives Inc., who was arrested in Havana last month, was actually recruiting local Cubans to spy on the government.
Analysis: Spying in Eastern Europe heats up again. The Cold War may be 20 years dead and buried, but it seems that the old East-West spying game is not only alive and kicking, but gaining vigor in places like Warsaw, Prague and Tallinn.
Obama designates new list of secrecy gatekeepers. The US president has designated over two dozen officials as “original classification authorities” (OCAs), who have the power to classify government information as Top Secret or Secret, and (in most cases) to delegate such authority to their subordinates. Importantly, the directive says that OCAs will lose their job if they fail to “receive training in proper classification […] at least once a calendar year”.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Analysis, Barack Obama, classified Secret, classified Top Secret, Cuba, Czech Republic, Development Alternatives Inc., Eastern Europe, espionage, Estonia, government secrecy, Havana (Cuba), News, news you may have missed, Original Classification Authorities, Poland

Analysis: Germany’s spies struggle to adapt to post-Cold War changes

January 9, 2010 Leave a comment

BND logo

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Nearly everyone in Germany recognizes that the global intelligence landscape has changed, almost beyond recognition, in the years since the end of the Cold War. Current challenges are far more underground in nature, far more flexible, far more unpredictable. The question is, has Germany’s primary intelligence agency, the BND, changed along with the times? The answer is not so simple. The BND continues to struggle immensely with bureaucratic inefficiency and substandard human and financial resources, explains Deutsche Welle‘s Peter Philipp. Even when it does produce useful intelligence, its advice is not always taken into consideration by German government officials, who tend to have their own opinions on political developments. “Most politicians do have their own view of the world order”, says former BND chief Hans-Georg Wieck, “so [we] must address the[m] in a way that makes them more likely to act on [our] information”. Philipp’s interesting editorial can be accessed here.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Analysis, BND, Germany, Hans-Georg Wieck, intelligence analysis, intelligence reform

News you may have missed #0247

January 8, 2010 Leave a comment

US government lowers threshold for inclusion on no-fly lists. According to senior US State Department officials, the government has already lowered the threshold for information deemed important enough to put suspicious individuals on a watch list or no-fly list. CNN reports that suspects will now include citizens of the notorious Islamist country of Cuba….
CIA starts sharing data with climate scientists. This blog has kept an eye on the CIA’s Climate Change Center, which was established late last year. It now turns out the Agency had started monitoring climate change in 1992, under project MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis), but the program was shut down in 2001 by the Bush Administration. The Climate Change Center, therefore, represents the re-establishment of an earlier effort.
How the KGB tried to recruit an NBC News reporter. FBI files show that the Soviet KGB tried to recruit the late NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine, while he was stationed in Moscow in the 1950s.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Bush Administration, CIA, CIA Center on Climate Change, climate change, Cold War, Cuba, declassification, history, informants, Irving R. Levine, KGB, Moscow (Russia), News, news you may have missed, no-fly lists, Project MEDEA, US Department of State, USSR

News you may have missed #0246

January 8, 2010 Leave a comment

No immediate firings expected over US intel failures. Should some US intelligence officials lose their jobs over the three recent security failures, i.e. the Ford Hood shooting, the Christmas Day bomber, and the Forward Operating Base Chapman suicide bombing? It doesn’t look like it.
Tajikistan sentences alleged Uzbek spy. The Tajik government has sentenced Tajik citizen Boymurod Anarov to 20 years behind bars for gathering “information about energy projects in Tajikistan” on behalf of Uzbek intelligence. Last July, the government leveled similar charges against the director of the country’s Vostokredmet uranium-reprocessing plant.
Nozette first came to FBI attention in 2002. Maryland scientist Stewart Nozette, who is accused of giving classified defense information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer, was under suspicion of breaching top-secret protocols as early as 2002, according to court documents.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, Boymurod Anarov, Central Asia, CIA, espionage, FBI, Fort Hood, Forward Operating Base Chapman, Israel, Killeen (Texas), scientific intelligence, Stewart David Nozette, suicide bombings, Tajikistan, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, Uzbekistan, Vostokredmet uranium-reprocessing plant (Tajikistan)

Comment: Is CIA Lying About its Blackwater Contacts?

January 8, 2010 11 Comments

Blackwater logo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
After CIA director Leon Panetta revealed last summer that private contractor Blackwater was part of a covert CIA hit squad, tasked with summary killings and assassinations of al-Qaeda operatives, the CIA vowed to sever its contacts with the trigger-happy security firm. But did it do so? It doesn’t look like it. Last November, it became known that the company, (recently renamed Xe Services) remains part of a covert CIA program in Pakistan that includes planned assassinations and kidnappings of Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects. More recently, it was revealed that two of the seven Americans who died in the December 30 bomb attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, were actually Blackwater employees subcontracted by the CIA.

News you may have missed #0246 (CIA bombing edition)

January 7, 2010 Leave a comment

Analysis: Strike on CIA base tests US assessment of al-Qaeda. The militant group appears to have achieved a new level of sophistication and may not be as weakened as US officials had thought.
Photo of CIA suicide bomber published. Qatar-based Arabic news network Al Jazeera has published a photograph of Jordanian doctor Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 36, who last month killed at least 7 CIA agents in Khost, Afghanistan.
Al-Qaida CIA bomber was furious over Gaza war. Suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was furious over Israel’s Gaza offensive, the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported on Thursday, citing the man’s sister.
Analysis: The view from Jordan on CIA’s deaths in Khost. For Jordan, far more embarrassing than its role in the Khost suicide bombing, is its connection with the CIA, which while relatively well-known before, has now been put out in the public sphere for all to see –especially the Arab street.
London Arabic newspaper visits home of CIA bomber. The Jordanian authorities have imposed a security cordon around al-Balawi’s family home, which is located in the residential al-Nuzha district, close to the Jabal al-Hussein Palestinian refugee camp in the Jordanian capital of Amman. But a London-based Arabic-language newspaper correspondent managed to visit the location and speak with the bomber’s family members and neighbors.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza conflict, Afghanistan, al-Nuzha (Jordan), Amman (Jordan), Analysis, CIA, Forward Operating Base Chapman, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, Israel, Jabal al-Hussein refugee camp (Jordan), Jordan, Khost, London, News, news you may have missed, Palestine, suicide bombings, United States

Polish officials reveal arrest of alleged Russian spy

January 7, 2010 1 Comment

V. Korabelnikov

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Polish government has announced the arrest of a Russian resident of Warsaw, on charges of spying for Russia. The man, whose identity has not been released, was apparently arrested last February or March, after a six-month surveillance operation by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW). Polish officials did not say why the arrest was kept secret for so long, but revealed that the alleged spy’s capture was known only to Poland’s president, the prime minister and the office of the prosecutor. The alleged spy is said to be a Russian citizen and a fluent Polish speaker, who has lived in Poland under permanent residency status for at least decade. His legal income appears to have come from his ownership of a hunting-rifle accessories store. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with ABW (Poland), counterintelligence, Eastern Europe, espionage, GRU, News, Poland, Russia, Russian embassy in Poland, Russian Ministry of Defense, Valentin Korabelnikov, Warsaw (Poland)

News you may have missed #0245 (CIA edition)

January 7, 2010 Leave a comment

CIA saw Jordanian double spy as valuable asset. Before detonating a suicide bomb in Afghanistan last week, Jordanian double spy (or was he?) Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was considered by US spy agencies “the most promising informant in years about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s top leaders”.
CIA going through worst spell since 9/11. America’s most recognizable intelligence agency is currently going through its worst time since 9/11, what with Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the loss of at least seven of its agents in Khost, Afghanistan.
US intel in Afghanistan is broken, irrelevant, says US insider. A new report (.pdf) by US Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence aide to International Security Assistance Force Commander General Stanley McChrystal, says the US intelligence community “is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy” in Afghanistan. The report recommends “[s]weeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself, from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan”.