Ex-Mossad official denies Zygier compromised intelligence operation
May 9, 2013 2 Comments
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A former Mossad official has dismissed as “nonsense” suggestions that an Australian-born Israeli spy, who killed himself in 2010, had been jailed for inadvertently compromising an Israeli secret mission. Ben Zygier was an officer in Israel’s covert-action agency Mossad for several years before he was placed in solitary confinement following his arrest in Israel, in February of 2010. Known to the outside world only as ‘Prisoner X’, he allegedly killed himself in his cell a few months later. In March, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel alleged that Zygier was arrested by Israeli intelligence after contacting a Lebanese Hezbollah operative without Tel Aviv’s authorization. The Australian-born spy was allegedly trying to recruit the operative on his own initiative and without permission from his superiors. In order to prove his Mossad credentials, Zygier is said to have given the man several names of Israel’s double agents operating inside Hezbollah. But the Lebanese recruit surrendered Zygier’s information to Hezbollah, which promptly arrested many of Israel’s informants inside the organization. Those arrested included Ziad al-Homsi, who at the time was believed to be one of the Mossad’s most lucrative assets inside the Lebanese militant group. On Tuesday, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said that, at the time of his arrest in Lebanon, al-Homsi was preparing to assist the Mossad in recovering the bodies of three Israeli soldiers that had been killed in Syria during the 1982 Lebanon War. Read more of this post



By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |













News you may have missed #836
May 10, 2013 by Ian Allen Leave a comment
►►NSA guide explains how to access private info on Google. In 2007, the US National Security Agency produced a book to help its spies uncover intelligence hiding on the World Wide Web. The 643-page tome, called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (.pdf), has just been released by the NSA following a FOIA request filed in April by MuckRock, a site that charges fees to process public records for activists and others. Although the author’s name is redacted in the version released by the NSA, Muckrock’s FOIA indicates it was written by Robyn Winder and Charlie Speight.
►►Are the EU’s unofficial spy services growing out of control? Since its founding, the European Union has been building its own spy programs, often triggered by specific needs, in an ad-hoc manner, without strategy and without a coherent concept about their structure, methods, and people. Unofficially, the has been building an intelligence apparatus of six services so far, some of them brand new, populated already by 1,300 specialists. But because they are technically not conducting covert operations, they simply deny being intelligence services.
►►Hearing on Boston bombings exposes intelligence failures. The US House Committee on Homeland Security’s hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings on Thursday amounted to more than the usual political posturing: it exposed clear deficiencies in communications among intelligence- and law-enforcement agencies. whatever the cause of the intelligence breakdown, the failure to share vital information —and the continued finger-pointing between agencies yesterday— shows the need to improve coordination.
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