News you may have missed #640
December 1, 2011 Leave a comment
Amos Yadlin
►►Chinese defector says Canada right to worry about spying. Li Fengzhi, a former intelligence officer for China’s Ministry of State Security, who defected to Canada in 2003, has told a conference that Canada should be concerned about relationships between senior politicians and journalists from China, saying Beijing is targeting lawmakers everywhere. He was referring to the case of senior Conservative MP Bob Dechert, who was enveloped by controversy in September over amorous e-mails he sent to Shi Rong, a Chinese government journalist based in Toronto. After the Dechert controversy broke, the journalist recalled to Beijing to meet with her superiors and has not returned to her Canadian posting.
►►More intel officials warn against airstrikes on Iran. Meir Dagan, the former head of Israeli spy agency Mossad, is not alone in warning against the possibility of Israeli attacks against Iran’s nuclear program. He has now been joined by Major General Amos Yadlin, who until recently headed Israel’s Military Intelligence directorate. Speaking at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, Yadlin doubted that airstrikes could threaten Iran’s numerous, distant and well-defended nuclear facilities. Another intelligence official, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal, also cautioned last week against any attacks on Iran, saying that “there are other non- military policy alternatives, as yet unexplored, that could have the desired result without the unwanted consequences”.
►►GCHQ challenges code breakers via social networks. Britain’s signals intelligence agency, the General Communications Headquarters, has launched a code cracking competition to help attract new talent. The organization has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website. The challenge will also be ‘seeded’ to social media sites, blogs and forums. A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach.
intelNews.org 
Analysis: How serious a blow did the CIA suffer in Lebanon?
December 2, 2011 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
Lebanon
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Late last month, the Central Intelligence Agency admitted that a number of its agents in Lebanon had been captured by Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group that controls large parts of the country. The group announced the arrests in the summer, but in was only on November 21 that the Associated Press confirmed the accuracy of Hezbollah’s claims from a US intelligence source. Neither Hezbollah nor the CIA have offered details of the arrests, but it is generally assumed that the captured agents were not officers of the CIA, but rather Lebanese or Iranian citizens who had been recruited as assets by CIA case officers. Regardless, the incident has undoubtedly directly impacted the Agency’s operations in Lebanon, and maybe Iran. The question is, how much? Former CIA operations officer Robert Baer, who spent several years in Lebanon in the 1980s, has penned an analysis article in Time magazine, in which he says that his sources tell him the arrests of the CIA agents represent “a serious compromise”, and that the Agency is “still trying to get to the bottom of [it]”. Baer also provides some new information about the method used by Hezbollah counterintelligence to capture the CIA agents. Last week, ABC News reported that the arrests were caused by careless spy tradecraft on behalf of the CIA. Specifically, according to ABC, “Hezbollah operatives figured out that CIA informants, who had infiltrated the Iranian proxy group, were meeting with their agency handlers at a Beirut Pizza Hut. How could Hezbollah deduce that location? The CIA used the codeword ‘PIZZA’ when discussing where to meet with the agents”. But Baer says that the arrests were not necessarily caused by CIA errors; rather it may have been advanced counterintelligence analysis by Hezbollah that compromised the agents. He claims that Hezbollah is using telephone link analysis, a type of signals intelligence testing that utilizes advanced software “capable of combing through trillions of gigabytes of phone-call data”. The aim of telephone link analysis is to search for unusual communications patterns —such as too many brief calls, or heavy reliance on prepaid cell phones that seem to become disused after only a few calls. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Analysis, CIA, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Robert Baer, SIGINT, telephone link analysis, telephony, United States