US spies on Israel (shock, horror)

September 7, 2011 by 7 Comments

Shamai Leibowitz

Shamai Leibowitz

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Ever since Monday, when The New York Times exposed the reason behind the May 2010 incarceration of FBI linguist Shamai Leibowitz, US and international media have been buzzing with prominent headlines like: “US government spied on Israel’s Washington embassy”. Although these headlines are accurate, they —like the articles themselves— miss the actual story behind the revelations: namely the extent of Israeli covert propaganda operations inside the United States. As intelNews reported in May 2010, Leibowitz, a lawyer with dual American-Israeli citizenship, who worked as a translator for the FBI, was sentenced to right under two years in prison, for leaking classified information. The government disclosed no further information at the time of Leibowitz’s conviction, saying only that he had been jailed for “having unlawfully disclosed classified documents to an unidentified blogger”. Now the “unidentified blogger” has come forward to reveal the details of Leibowitz’s court case, and to defend the former FBI linguist “as an American patriot and a whistle-blower”. Richard Silverstein, a Jewish American scholar, who writes a blog called Tikun Olam, said that Leibowitz gave him about 200 pages containing transcripts of conversations intercepted by the FBI in its monitoring of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. Most of the transcripts contain what appear to be telephone exchanges between staff at the Israeli embassy and outside contacts, though some appear to be the products of eavesdropping of face-to-face conversations conducted inside the Israeli embassy premises. This may be seen as evidence that the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, which is responsible for maintaining interception systems targeting foreign embassies on US soil, conducts extensive monitoring of the goings on at the Israeli embassy. Read more of this post

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White House considering covert operations against Iran

September 6, 2011 by Leave a comment

Iran

Iran

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
One of the major strategic objections to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the near-certain prospect that removing the Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party from power would increase Iranian-Shiite influence in the country. As the US military exit strategy gradually unfolds in Iraq, the administration of US President Barack Obama is faced with precisely this prospect. While US troops are leaving Iraq, Iran is doing what any logical regional power would do: namely strengthening its clandestine footprint inside Iraq and preparing Tehran-allied Iraqi groups for the impending showdown with Sunni power centers. An article that appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal notes that “growing concern [about regional] influence from Iran” has prompted the Obama administration to explore covert ways of countering it. According to the article, US intelligence agencies have detected “increased arms smuggling [by Iran] to its allies” in Iraq, Bahrain and Syria (and, one would suppose, Lebanon, though this is not mentioned in the piece). The administration has therefore “pushed the military and intelligence communities to develop proposals to counter Tehran”, says the Journal. The push has prompted American intelligence and military planners to request “greater authority to conduct covert operations to thwart Iranian influence in neighboring Iraq”. This essentially implies an appeal for a Presidential “finding”, a secret executive authorization that —under the National Security Act— would provide the required legal basis for covert operations conducted abroad. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #585 [updated]

September 6, 2011 by Leave a comment

GCHQ

GCHQ

►►GCHQ recovers £300m worth of stolen information. Details stolen from more than a million credit cards across Europe, worth an estimated £300 million, have been recovered by Britain’s GCHQ signals intelligence spy agency, according to The Daily Telegraph.
►►Kuwait arrests alleged Iraqi spy. Kuwait security forces have arrested a man of Iraqi origin for alleged intelligence links with Iraq, a Kuwaiti daily said on Sunday. The man, who was arrested on Friday, and is referred to by the media as “Abu Ahmad”, was staying illegally in the country and allegedly provided Iraq with sensitive information about vital facilities in Kuwait. This is the third time in recent months that the government of Kuwait has pressed espionage charges against a spy suspect. [Update: Kuwait denies reports of spy’s arrest]
►►Hackers steal CIA and Mossad SSL certificates. The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the UK’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday. According to some sources, the hackers were Iranian.

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CIA Helped Gaddafi Torture Libyan Dissidents, Documents Show

September 5, 2011 by 5 Comments

Abdel Hakim Belhaj

Abdel Belhaj

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Back in February, when Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi blamed the popular revolt against him on al-Qaeda, he was ridiculed in the international media. But documents discovered at an abandoned Libyan government office complex show that the Libyan rebels’ supreme military commander was abducted in 2004 by the CIA, which suspected him of links to al-Qaeda. Abdel Hakim Belhaj, also known as Abdullah al-Sadiq, was snatched by a CIA team in Malaysia, and secretly transported to Thailand, where he says he was “directly tortured by CIA agents”. The CIA then renditioned him to Libya, where he says he was tortured routinely until his release from prison, in 2010. In the 1980s, Belhaj was a member of the foreign Mujahedeen summoned by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Upon returning to Libya in the early 1990s, he led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al-Qaeda-inspired armed organization that unsuccessfully sought to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi. Ironically, Belhaj is now the Tripoli-based military commander of the Libyan National Transitional Council, and says that he wants a full apology from the United States and Britain “for the way he was transported to prison in Libya in 2004”. But the former Mujahedeen is one of several terrorism suspects delivered to Libya by Western intelligence agencies in the years after 9/11, according to Libyan government documents discovered by Human Rights Watch (HRW) workers at the office of Libyan former intelligence chief and foreign minister Moussa Koussa. The documents show that Libya’s External Security Organization maintained extremely close relations with German, Canadian, British, and American intelligence services. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #584

September 4, 2011 by Leave a comment

Nicky Hager

Nicky Hager

►►Billing dispute reveals details of secret CIA flights. On August 12, 2003, a conracted Gulfstream IV aircraft carrying six passengers took off from Dulles International Airport for Bangkok. When it returned four days later, it carried Indonesian terrorist Riduan Isamuddin, who had been captured in Thailand and would spend the next three years in various secret CIA prisons. The Gulfstream IV’s itinerary, as well as the $339,228 price tag for the journey, are among the details of shadowy CIA flights that have emerged in a New York courthouse, in a billing dispute between contractors. Incidentally, even the airplanes’ owners didn’t always know that the CIA was using them.
►►French admit secret service spied on reporter. French interior minister Claude Guéant has admitted that the secret service spied on investigative reporter Gérard Davet, from the newspaper Le Monde, in order to trace the source of a leak about the so-called “Bettencourt party funding scandal“, which has been a source of embarrassment for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party.
►►NZ let Israeli spies go free in return for passports. Another revelation from Nicky Hager’s book Other People’s Wars (see previous intelNews coverage here). The investigative reporter claims that New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service released captured Mossad spies Eli Cara and Uriel Zoshe Kelman, in return for Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #583

September 3, 2011 by Leave a comment

Chiou I-jen

Chiou I-jen

►►Ex-Akamai worker pleads guilty to spy charge. Elliot Doxer, an American employee of Massachusetts-based Akamai Technologies, is charged with providing inside company information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli spy. Ironically, Israel may have helped the Bureau nab Doxer.
►►Taiwan ex-spy cleared of corruption charge. Chiou I-jen, Taiwan’s ex-spy chief and right-hand man of jailed former president Chen Shui-bian, was cleared Tuesday of embezzling diplomatic funds during Chen’s term in office. The former head of the National Security Bureau, was acquitted of pocketing $500,000 –earmarked for expanding Taiwan’s participation in international affairs– in 2005, due to a lack of evidence.
►►Wiretaps seen as key in hunt for Gaddafi. “There are some groups who are looking for him and also trying to listen to his calls. Of course he doesn’t use the phone, but we know the people around him who use the phones”. This is according to Hisham Buhagiar, a senior military official in Libya’s National Transitional Council, who is coordinating efforts to find Muammar al-Gaddafi.

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News you may have missed #582

September 2, 2011 by Leave a comment

John Yoo

John Yoo

►►US government conceals Bush surveillance memos. The Justice Department is refusing to release legal memos by lawyer John Yoo, which the George W. Bush administration used to justify its warrantless surveillance program, one of the most contentious civil liberties issues during the Republican president’s time in office.
►►Ex-CIA bin Laden Unit boss wants rendition back. Michael Scheuer, a former insider and vocal critic of the US intelligence establishment, has described the Arab revolutions as “an intelligence disaster for the US and for Britain, and other European services”. Speaking from Scotland, he also urged for a return to the Bush administration’s rendition program, in order to gather new intelligence on Middle Eastern and North African groups.
►►French firm helped Gaddafi spy on opposition. We have written before about technical intelligence support provided by Western firms to some of the world’s most brutal regimes, including Iran and Bahrain. We can no add Libya to the long list. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amesys, a subsidiary of French telecommunications firm Bull helped the Gaddafi regime spy on the emails and chat messages of its opponents.

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Ex-Bush official advised Gaddafi until early August, documents show

September 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

Libya

Libya

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Intelligence documents found at the headquarters of Libya’s abandoned spy agency appear to show that the regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi enjoyed the support of an American diplomat who served in the Bush administration. Al Jazeera reports that David Welch, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs in the US Department of State between 2005 and 2008, met on August 2 with Gaddafi officials in the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo, Egypt. According to a Libyan intelligence memo from the meeting, Welch, who now works for Bechtel Corporation, gave the Gaddafi officials tips on how “to win the propaganda war” against the rebel National Transitional Council (NTC). He also instructed them to undermine Libya’s rebel movement by relying on several “confidence-building measures”, including controlled intelligence leaks aimed at manipulating the news output of Arab and Western media. The documents also reveal that Gaddafi maintained spies at the highest echelons of the rebel council, and that at least one of these spies offered to assassinate rebel leaders by “poisoning their food and water”. However, despite maintaining an ample amount of informants inside the NTC, the Gaddafi regime found it difficult to collect reliable and actionable intelligence during the civil war. Characteristically, many of the names of NTC’s central figures are misspelled in intelligence field reports, and one intelligence analyst complained recently that “the majority of those currently working for the intelligence administration are ill-prepared to carry out intelligence duties”. Despite these shortcomings, however, Gaddafi’s spies inside the NTC appear to have managed to intercept a large number of telephone messages and confidential emails between the NTC and foreign diplomats. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #581

September 1, 2011 by Leave a comment

Jin Yinan

Jin Yinan

►►CIA wants to censor book by ex-FBI agent. The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the CIA missed a chance to derail the 9/11 plot by withholding from the FBI information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego. He also says that torture interrogation methods against terrorism detainees were unnecessary and, ultimately, counterproductive. Both these things are known and have been publicly discussed. As The Independent correctly notes, the CIA’s objections are “less for national security reasons than out of a desire to avoid re-airing incidents that show the Agency in an unflattering light”.
►►New scandal at India’s SIGINT agency. The Indian government founded the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) in 2004, as a potential communications nerve center for all of India’s intelligence agencies. But the SIGINT agency has been involved in one financial scandal after the other, most recently relating to an elaborate procurement scam.
►►China silent about spy lecture leak. China has remained quiet as a recently leaked video of a Chinese general’s candid remarks on sensitive spying cases continued to draw international attention. The ministries of defense and foreign affairs have not responded to media inquiries, and numerous phone calls to National Defense University, where the general, Jin Yinan (pictured), teaches, went unanswered. State media made no mention of the story.

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New Zealand base in Afghanistan was secret CIA station, book claims

September 1, 2011 by 1 Comment

Nicky Hager

Nicky Hager

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A Kiwi “peacekeeping” and “civil reconstruction” base in Afghanistan was a secret station for the US Central Intelligence Agency, according to a new book by New Zealand’s preeminent investigative writer. Nicky Hager first made international headlines in 1996, with his groundbreaking book Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network. In it, he revealed the existence of the UK-USA Security Agreement and of ECHELON, a US-managed signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis platform that serves as an intelligence-sharing mechanism between UK-USA signatories. The publication of his latest book, entitled Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, is scheduled to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. The book focuses on —among other things— the Bamyan Province base in central Afghanistan, which serves as the center of operations for the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team in the Central Asian country. It serves as a symbol of New Zealand’s cautious contribution to the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, by allowing Kiwi forces to participate with boots on the ground, while performing strictly noncombatant functions, officially described as “peacekeeping” and “civil rebuilding”. But Hager’s book alleges that the “noncombatant” mission of the Bamyan base was simply a cover, devised by the New Zealand Defence Forces’ public relations apparatus, and aimed at pacifying the country’s population. The real mission of the Bamyan base, says Hager, was to “help the Americans” by essentially concealing a covert CIA station. The author further alleges that the Kiwi forces at Bamyan were instructed to keep the presence of the CIA team secret. This they did, even as they shared daily meals with American spies in civilian clothes, who refused to disclose even basic details of their mission to their New Zealand guardians. Hager alleges that New Zealand’s defense establishment took the decision to help the CIA as part of a broader strategy of rapprochement between Wellington and Washington. Why rapprochement? It was in 1984, when, under mounting popular pressure, New Zealand’s Labour government of David Lange voted to bar nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships from entering New Zealand territorial waters. At the time, the nuclear ban imposed by New Zealand was heralded by the global nuclear disarmament movement as a major victory. But Washington did not see it this way. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #580

August 31, 2011 by Leave a comment

Baroness Manningham-Buller

Manningham-Buller

►►Ex-MI5 director says Iraq posed not threat to UK. Iraq posed no threat to the UK when then Prime Minister Tony Blair took Britain to war there, according to Baroness Manningham-Buller, former Director of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency. In an interview, she described the Iraq war as an unnecessary action that increased the domestic threat to the UK, and “a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaeda”. No kidding.
►►Interview about DAS wiretaps with Colombia Attorney General. This blog has covered extensively the wiretapping program against opposition politicians, journalists and civil rights activists, by Colombia’s disgraced DAS domestic intelligence agency. This Washington Post interview with Colombia’s new attorney general, Vivian Morales, displays the toothless nature of the government’s ‘investigation’ into the scandal. Morales says that her investigation has “nothing to do” with allegations that the Colombian government used funds provided by Washington to implement the wiretapping. She also says that she cannot “legally investigate” the question of whether former President Alvaro Uribe knew about the wiretaps.
►►Taiwan losing spy game with China. The deputy news editor of The Taipei Times argues that the United States is scaling back its sales of defense equipment to Taiwan because of “the penetration of almost every sector of Taiwanese society by Chinese intelligence”. Accordingly, “any arms sale to Taiwan carries the risk that sensitive military technology will end up in Beijing”, he says.

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Was French mercenary a ‘spy for Gaddafi’?

August 31, 2011 by 3 Comments

Pierre Marziali

Pierre Marziali

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Back in May of 2011, The New York Times reported that the co-founder of one of France’s largest private security firms had been shot dead in rebel-held Benghazi. His name was Pierre Marziali, a former paratrooper, who in 2003 co-founded Secopex, described as France’s leading private security company. At first, the rebels blamed his death on “gangs that the old regime used”. But a few days later, a press release by the rebel National Transitional Council alleged that the dead Frenchman had been shot because he was among several French “spies hired by the Gaddafi regime”. The story gets murkier when one considers that, according to the Times, Marziali had gone to Libya “on a mission which, I believe, had been ordered by France”. This should not surprise anyone. As intelNews reported on August 23, Western governments have instructed Libya’s rebel authority to use Western-supplied funds to hire Western-based mercenary companies; this ensures plausible deniability on the part of the rebels’ Western allies, while allowing them to engage with boots on the ground outside the NATO command structure. But why would members of a private security firm based in France —a country that supports the Libyan opposition— be spying for Muammar al-Gaddafi? The case of Marziali’s death shows that not everything is what it seems in Libya. Nobody seems to have information about Secopex’s precise operational mission in the North African nation. But, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, it appears that the Libyan rebels tried to apprehend Marziali and four other Frenchmen employees of Secopex, after noticing that their passports had Libyan entry stamps from Tripoli —an indication that they had entered the country with the blessings of the Gaddafi regime. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #579 (CIA edition)

August 30, 2011 by Leave a comment

Robert Grenier

Robert Grenier

►►Interview with ex-CIA Islamabad station chief. Robert Grenier, who was the CIA’s Islamabad station chief from 1999 to 2001, tells Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper that the US unmanned drone program, which began as “a very surgically employed tool against international terrorists”, has now “become much more of a conventional weapon against militants”. He also rejects allegations that Pakistani government officials were aware of osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, saying that “no one has apparently found any compelling evidence”.
►►Who will guide Petraeus in his new CIA job? Siobhan Gorman, of The Wall Street Journal, opines that, when US General David Petraeus takes the helm at the Central Intelligence Agency next month, it will fall to the Agency’s deputy director Michael J. Morell, a little-known 31-year CIA veteran, to guide the new director.
►►CIA drone kills al-Qaeda deputy. An anonymous US official has told The New York Times that a CIA drone killed al-Qaeda’s second-ranking operative in Pakistan’s northwest province of Waziristan. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who in the past year had taken over as al-Qaeda’s top operational planner, was killed on August 22, according to the official. Al-Qaeda is still officially led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is also believed to be in Pakistan.

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Video of Chinese general’s espionage lecture leaked onto YouTube

August 30, 2011 by 1 Comment

Jin Yinan

Jin Yinan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Video footage of a lecture on recent espionage incidents against China, delivered before a vetted audience by a senior Chinese military official, has been leaked to online video sites, including YouTube. The lecturer has been identified as Major General Jin Yinan, and the location appears to be one of the main lecture halls at China’s National Defense University (NDU) in Beijing. Administered by the Central Committee of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), NDU is China’s equivalent of the United States’ West Point Military Academy. The precise date of the venue cannot be verified, though it appears to have been intended as a cautionary lesson for NDU students, on the fate that awaits Chinese officials spying against their country. In the video, General Jin laments the fact that too many Chinese Communist Party members have “become decadent” and have succumbed to selling classified national secrets to foreign adversaries. He also discusses several recent cases of espionage against China, including that of Xu Junping, a senior colonel in the PLA, who defected to the United States in December of 2000. The speaker also mentions the case of Tong Daning, a Social Security Department economist who was executed in 2006 for sharing classified Chinese economic data with Taiwanese intelligence operatives. But the primary revelations of the speech concern the cases of Li Bin and Kang Rixin, which General Jin addresses in detail. Li Bin was arrested during his tenure as China’s Ambassador to South Korea, and was eventually sentenced to a seven-year prison term for corruption. But General Jin discloses in his speech that the Ambassador was arrested for selling classified information to South Korean intelligence, and that the Chinese prosecutors decided to bring him up on corruption charges, to “avoid embarrassing [our] country”. Read more of this post

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US misused our intel to justify Iraq War, says German ex-spy chief

August 29, 2011 by 6 Comments

August Hanning

August Hanning

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The former Director of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has accused the Bush administration of consciously falsifying intelligence supplied by Germany in order to justify going to war in Iraq. August Hanning, who served as Director of Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (known as BND) from 1998 to 2005, said that the BND had no part in the deception, and that “the responsibility for the war lies solely with the Americans”. In an interview to the Sunday edition of German national newspaper Die Welt, Hanning explained that the administration of US President George W. Bush was especially interested in intelligence collected by the BND from an Iraqi defector codenamed ‘Curveball’. The defector, whose real name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, arrived in Germany in 1999 and applied for political asylum, saying he had been employed as a senior scientist in Iraq’s biological weapons program. Among other things, he told his BND debriefing team that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of biological weapons labs on wheels, in order to avoid detection from America and other countries. After consulting with biological weapons experts, the BND expressed serious doubts about Curveball’s reliability, but kept him in Germany nonetheless. Several years later, al-Janabi confirmed the BND’s suspicions, by admitting that he had invented his allegations in order to help bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein. He also admitted that he was in reality a taxi driver from Baghdad, who had used his undergraduate knowledge of engineering to get asylum in Germany. At the time, said Hanning, the BND strongly and repeatedly communicated to the CIA its doubts about Curveball’s claims, something which is known. What is not known, however, is that Hanning personally wrote to then CIA Director George Tenet and urged him to adopt a skeptical approach to the defector’s allegations. The former BND chief told Die Welt that he was “assured by the Americans that our intelligence would not be used in Powell’s speech”. Read more of this post

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