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News you may have missed #358

May 25, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Ex-CIA analyst to lead US declassification center. Sheryl Jasielum Shenberger, who currently serves as a Branch Chief at the CIA Declassification Center, has been named as the first director of the recently established US National Declassification Center. The Center’s aim is to eliminate the backlog of over 400 million pages of classified records by the end of 2013.
Hamas expels Egyptian spy from Gaza. A senior Egyptian intelligence officer, who had allegedly “infiltrated the region to collect information on residents and the Hamas government” was arrested and expelled from Gaza on Monday.
Israeli nuclear whistleblower back in prison. More than six years after his release from 18 years in solitary confinement, Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has been sentenced to another three months in prison for allegedly “contacting foreign agents”.

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Saudis scramble to contain leak pointing to al-Qaeda contacts in Iraq

May 24, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Leaked document

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A series of unconfirmed reports from Iraq indicate that the Saudi monarchy has initiated a frantic probe into the leak of a secret document allegedly pointing to close links between Saudi intelligence and al-Qaeda activities in Iraq. The leaked government document was published last Thursday by the independent Iraqi news agency Buratha, whose editors allegedly acquired it “from a source”. The document appears to contain references to considerable support provided by Saudi intelligence services to militant Iraqi groups associated with al-Qaeda. According to Buratha, the alleged support has been mostly in the form of cash, but also through significant amounts of weapons and explosives. The alleged leak is bound to inflame the discussion about Saudi Arabia’s purported material support for Sunni paramilitary groups in Iraq (with tacit US consent), which serve Riyadh’s broader aim of buffering the rise of Sunni militancy in the country. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Axing of US DNI points to structural issues

May 24, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Dennis Blair

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Although few American intelligence observers were astonished by last week’s involuntary resignation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the silence by the White House on the subject has raised quite a few eyebrows in Washington. Admiral Dennis C. Blair, who became DNI in January of 2009, announced his resignation on Friday. Blair’s announcement came after a prolonged period of controversy, which included bitter infighting with the CIA, and culminated with the recent partial publication of a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which blamed “systemic failures across the Intelligence Community” for the so-called Christmas bomb plot of last December. The problem is that Admiral Blair’s replacement will be the fourth DNI in five years, after John Negroponte, Mike McConnell and Blair himself. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #357

May 22, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

IDF colonel with intelligence duties ‘commits suicide’. An unnamed colonel with the Israel Defense Forces was found dead in a forest in northern Israel Saturday, after allegedly taking his own life. The officer reportedly served in high-ranking positions in the Intelligence Corps.
Australian Wikileak founder’s passport confiscated. Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled. Wikileaksleaked footage of US forces laughing at the dead bodies of people they had just killed in Iraq in 2007. rose to prominence last month, after posting

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News you may have missed #356

May 21, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

US intel failures facilitated Christmas bomb plot: Senate report. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released a summary (.pdf) of their investigation into the so-called Christmas bomb plot of last December. The report concludes that the would-be bomber was effectively assisted by “systemic failures across the Intelligence Community”.
More alleged Korean double spies dispute charges. Inspired by the case of the late Lee Soo-geun, who was shot by South Korea after being falsely charged with spying for North Korea, more alleged South Korean double spies are coming forward to reveal that, like Lee, their incriminating confessions were extracted through torture.
Israeli IDF soldiers fall prey to Facebook spy. A number of Israeli soldiers fell victim to a Facebook spy scam, according to German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. The Israel Defense Forces members appear to have befriend a young woman on the social networking site, who may have been a Hezbollah operative. This is not the first time this has happened.

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Comment: Was Clotilde Reiss a French Spy in Iran?

May 20, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments

Clotilde Reiss

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The case of Clotilde Reiss acquired new momentum earlier this week, after a former French intelligence official claimed she had collaborated with French secret services. Pierre Siramy, who until late last year was a senior official at DGSE, France’s external intelligence agency, said on Sunday that Reiss had worked “very well” for France. Reiss, a 25-year-old Farsi-speaking French-language assistant at the University of Isfahan, was arrested in Iran last year on accusations of being a ‘nuclear spy’. But last weekend her ten-year prison sentence was suddenly commuted to a fine, and she was able to return home to France, in an apparent secret deal with Paris, which included the release of two Iranian operatives held in France.

News you may have missed #355

May 20, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Jones, Panetta, brief Pakistanis on Times Square bomb plot. US President Barack Obama’s national security advisor Jim Jones and CIA Director Leon Panetta are in Pakistan to brief local officials about the failed Times Square bomb plot. A sign of tighter US-Pakistan spy relations? Don’t hold your breath.
Partial history of NSA computers released. The link to the .pdf document that explores the history of US National Security Agency computers up to 1964, is available through Bruce Schneier’s blog.
Rio Tinto employees lose espionage appeal. Three of the four senior staff members of Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian mining concern, who were arrested last July by Chinese authorities on espionage charges, have lost an appeal against their convictions.

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Analysis: A detailed look into Taiwanese espionage on mainland China

May 19, 2010 by intelNews 4 Comments

Lin Yi-lin

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun has published the first part of a captivating two-part examination into Taiwanese espionage activities in China, authored by Tsuyoshi Nojima, the paper’s former Taipei bureau chief. In the article, Nojima highlights the cases of a number of former civilian agents of Taiwan’s Military Information Bureau (MIB), including that of Lin Yi-lin. The MIB recruited Lin in the late 1980s, during what has been called the modern heyday of Taiwanese intelligence activities in China. Taiwan spies had been active on the Chinese mainland for decades following the Chinese Civil War, but a nationwide counterintelligence crackdown by Beijing in the late 1970s virtually decimated Taiwan’s espionage networks inside China. It took nearly a decade for the MIB to reestablish its informant architecture on the mainland. By that time, the rapprochement between the two rival countries was beginning, with commercial ties rapidly accelerating. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #354

May 19, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments

Germany arrests Libyans on spy charges. Two Libyans have been arrested in Berlin on suspicion of working as secret agents, spying on members of the Libyan opposition in Germany. The two, identified only as 42-year-old ‘Adel Ab’ and 46-year-old ‘Adel Al’, are being held in custody in Berlin, pending possible spying charges.
Israeli handler discusses relationship with Hamas spy. Israeli broadsheet Ha’aretz has aired a fascinating interview with ‘Captain Loai’, a Shin Bet operative who handled Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a senior Hamas official, who was an informant for Israeli intelligence for at least a decade. Note the strong personal connection between handler and informant, which would be considered unprofessional in US intelligence culture.
Analysis: Iran’s murky link to al-Qaeda confounds CIA. It’s one of the enduring mysteries of the US ‘war on terrorism’: what will become of the al-Qaeda leaders and operatives who fled into Iran after 9/11 and have been detained there for years?

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Former CIA couple in effort to ‘un-demonize’ agency

May 18, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Mendez in 1990

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A husband-and-wife CIA team, who married after retiring from the agency, after a collective career spanning over half a century, are speaking around the country in an effort to “humanize [and] un-demonize the CIA”. Antonio (Tony) and Jonna Mendez joined the agency in the 1960s, and spent the next 25 years at the CIA’s Office of Technical Services. Tony was eventually promoted to Chief of Disguise, and later Chief of the Graphics and Authentication Division, whose mission is –among other tasks– transforming the identities of CIA field operatives, by supplying them with high-quality forged documentation for use in their various missions. In 1997, he was honored by the CIA as one of the “50 trailblazers” in the agency’s history. Jonna Mendez worked for 27 years as a spy camera expert, and was tasked with training CIA officers in the use of covert technologies. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #353

May 18, 2010 by intelNews 2 Comments

Name of British Mossad agent handed to Interpol. Dubai police have identified another suspect in the January murder of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He is reportedly a 62-year-old British citizen, who is believed to be currently hiding in western Africa.
Russia jails man for spying for the US. Gennady Sipachyov, a Russian whose age and profession have been kept secret by Moscow, has been sentenced to a four-year sentence for allegedly emailing secret military maps identifying classified Russian military infrastructure to the US Pentagon in 2008. Earlier this month, a Russian court rejected an appeal by another alleged US spy, Igor Sutyagin.
Bulgarian government wants to copy CIA. Bulgaria’s Defense Minister, Anyu Angelov, has proposed the merging of intelligence services to create a mega-structure of the CIA type. Meanwhile, a panel investigating Bulgaria’s communist-era police files has exposed two of the country’s former counterintelligence heads as former communist state security agents.

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Was release of French ‘spy’ part of Iranian-French deal? [updated]

May 18, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Majid Kakavand

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
This blog has closely monitored the case of Clotilde Reiss, a French language assistant who was arrested in Iran last year on accusations of being a ‘nuclear spy’. Despite the obviously nonsensical nature of the allegations, Reiss, a 25-year-old Farsi-speaking French-language assistant at the University of Isfahan, was forced to confess to her ‘crime’ on Iranian television. Last August, however, after spending nearly two months in the notorious Evin prison complex, Reiss was released on bail, on condition that she would remain confined inside the walls of the French embassy compound in Tehran. Then, last weekend, her ten-year prison sentence was suddenly commuted to a fine of $285,000, and she was able to return home to France on Sunday. Why the sudden change of heart on the part of Tehran? Read more of this post

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Private US spy network still operating in Pakistan

May 17, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

US Pentagon

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Senior US Pentagon officials continue to rely almost daily on reports from a network of contracted spies operating deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to The New York Times. Last March, when the paper revealed the existence of the network, several senior US military sources expressed serious concerns about the operation, which some say borders on illegality, and is currently under investigation by the US government. Although The Times is apparently “withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of [its] agents”, it appears that the network is staffed by former CIA and Special Forces operatives. The entire operation appears to be an attempt to evade some of the stringent oversight rules under which the CIA and the US Pentagon are required to operate. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #352

May 17, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

CIA rewarded extraordinary rendition supervisor. A CIA counterterrorism official who supervised the agency’s extraordinary rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri –a German citizen who was later found to be innocent– has been promoted twice since that episode.
US Pentagon picks contractors for intel IT. The Defense Intelligence Agency has picked 11 private contractors to compete for up to $6.6 billion in information technology contracts over the next five years. They include the usual suspects, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, General Dynamics Corp, and Northrop Grumman, among others.
Alleged spy’s lawyers threaten trial boycott in Israel. Lawyers representing Israeli citizen Amir Makhoul, who is accused of spying on behalf of Hezbollah, have threatened to boycott an upcoming trial hearing unless they are allowed to meet with their client.

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CIA ‘used fake British passports’ in kidnap operation

May 17, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

British passport

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British authorities are looking into allegations that a team of CIA agents made use of forged British passports during an abduction operation in 2003. The allegations surfaced last week in Spain, where a team of prosecutors is currently investigating the activities of 13 CIA agents (11 men and two women) who appear to have used the Spanish tourist resort of Majorca as a base for conducting various operations around Europe. Following the example of Italy, which last year convicted several CIA operatives for illegally abducting a Muslim cleric in Milan, Spanish authorities are now considering issuing arrest warrants for the 13 CIA agents. They are all believed to have been involved in the abduction and rendition of German citizen Khaled El-Masri. El-Masri was abducted in Skopje, Macedonia, in 2003, and later transferred on a secret CIA flight to a Syrian prison, where he says he was brutally tortured. He was later released without explanation, once US authorities realized they had the wrong man. Read more of this post