Could Turkey invoke NATO clause over Israeli attack on flotilla? [updated]

June 1, 2010 by 5 Comments

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Tayyip Erdoğan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
IntelNews hears there is some speculation in diplomatic circles that the government of Turkey may try to involve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in its dispute with Israel, which began after Israeli commandos killed several Turkish citizens in international waters yesterday. Up to 19 civilians are thought to have been killed during an early dawn raid by Israeli Defense Forces commandos on a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of the four-year-old Israeli blockade. The fact that the deadly raid took place in international waters prompted Ankara to call for an emergency meeting of NATO’s 28 member states. A NATO spokesperson confirmed that ambassadors from all 28 member states, Turkey included, will be attending an emergency meeting today in Brussels, Belgium. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #363

May 31, 2010 by 1 Comment

  • Who killed ex-Mossad agent Ashraf Marwan? Dr. Marwan, son-in-law of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who spied for Israel after 1969, fell to his death from the balcony of his London home in June 2007. British investigators have now announced a new inquiry into the circumstances of his death.
  • Ex-CIA agent accused of rape says he was set up. Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s former Algiers station chief, who is accused of drugging and raping two Algerian women at his official residence, says the Algerian government set him up in a honey trap.
  • US Senate candidate admits false military intel award. Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist who was elected to Congress in 2001, and is currently a Republican candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, has admitted to falsely claiming he received the US Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award in 2000.

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Documents reveal Bill Clinton’s secret contact with Iran

May 31, 2010 by Leave a comment

Mohammad Khatami

M. Khatami

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Two newly declassified high-level documents reveal a short-lived overture between Washington and Tehran, initiated in 1999 by the Bill Clinton administration. The US President resorted to the secret communication with Iran in an attempt to preempt several hawkish policy planners in his administration. The latter pressed for strong American military retaliation against Iran, in response to the latter’s alleged involvement in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing, which targeted a US Air Force base in the suburbs of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 and wounded 400 American servicemen and women. By 1999, US intelligence agencies were convinced that the bombing had been financed and orchestrated by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), an independent administrative and paramilitary institution tasked with –among other things– exporting the Iranian Revolution abroad. But the Clinton Administration decided to contact the then newly elected reformist Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, and sternly inform him of the evidence against the IRGC. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #362 (sex & politics edition)

May 30, 2010 by 4 Comments

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News you may have missed #361

May 28, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • FBI linguist jailed in leak probe. The Obama administration’s crackdown on government whistleblowers continued on Tuesday with the jailing of Shamai Leibowitz, a former FBI contract linguist who disclosed classified information to the media.
  • Yemen sentences alleged Iranian spies to death. Two members of an alleged Iranian spy cell operating in Yemen were sentenced to death on Tuesday. The Yemeni government accuses Iran of arming the Shiite so-called Sa’adah insurgency along the Yemeni-Saudi border.
  • New Turkish intel chief has big plans. Among the changes that Hakan Fidan, new chief of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT), intends to spearhead is “starting a separate electronic intelligence organization like the American NSA or the British GCHQ”.

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Did US airstrike in Yemen kill a mediator by mistake?

May 28, 2010 by Leave a comment

Predator drone

Predator drone

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
While US media are focusing on a questionable attempt by the US military to expand its clandestine activities in the Muslim world, the Pentagon has quietly intensified its unmanned drone strikes on suspected militants. Although the role of the CIA has dominated the debate about these targeted killings, it is not widely known that the US Department of Defense also carries out its own air strikes, which are separate from the CIA’s. The most recent of these was most probably launched against a target in Yemen last Monday night.  The US government refuses to confirm or deny its involvement in the operation, but CBS News reported on Tuesday that the strike was aimed at “a meeting of al Qaeda operatives”. However, a subsequent news report from the Reuters news agency said that the drone strike “missed its mark” and instead killed a Yemeni government-authorized mediator who was trying to negotiate the surrender of Mohammed Jaid bin Jardan, a senior member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #360

May 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • New book hints at covert US-French spy war. A forthcoming book, Diplomats: Behind the Façade of France’s Embassies, by Franck Renaud, claims that in 2008 French security agents discovered hidden bugs placed by the CIA in the Paris apartment of Pierre Brochand, head of the  DGSE, France’s primary intelligence agency. A CIA spokesperson refused to speculate on the accuracy of the allegations.
  • Obama rethinking his lead pick for DNI. Following skepticism expressed by intelligence insiders, President Obama is reportedly reevaluating his initial choice of James R. Clapper as the leading contender for the post of the Director of National Intelligence.

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We use false passports too, Australians admit

May 27, 2010 by 1 Comment

Julie Bishop

Julie Bishop

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Israeli intelligence agencies are not alone in using false passports. In fact, intelligence and law enforcement agencies in Australia, the country that is currently involved in a diplomatic spat with Israel due to the latter’s use of forged Australian passports in spy operations, also use forged travel documents. This admission was made yesterday by Australian senior opposition politician Julie Bishop during a live session in the Australian parliament. The parliamentary debate concerned recent revelations that agents of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad used forged Australian passports during an assassination operation against Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was found murdered in a luxury Dubai hotel last January. Australian government officials were quick to condemn Ms Bishop’s revelation as “a grievous breach of national security”. But Australian daily newspaper The Age reports that the opposition politician “merely made public an inconvenient truth”. Read more of this post

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Documents show Israel offered nukes to apartheid South Africa

May 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Polakow-Suransky

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Apartheid-era government documents unearthed by an American doctoral researcher reveal that the government of Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the racist regime in South Africa, and could possibly provide the first documentary evidence of the existence of Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal. Successive Israeli governments have followed what is often called ‘a policy of ambiguity’, refusing to either confirm or deny the nuclear weapons’ rumored existence. But the documents, which date from 1975, contain detailed minutes of meetings between senior Israeli and South African cabinet officials, including then South African defense minister P.W. Botha and then Israeli defense minister –and Israel’s current President– Shimon Peres. Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the American academic who requested the declassification of the controversial documents, says the Israeli government tried but ultimately failed to prevent the South African government of Jacob Zuma from releasing them. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #359

May 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Another alleged North Korean spy captured in South. A month after two alleged North Korean assassins, posing as defectors, were arrested in the South, Seoul has announced that another defector, an unnamed 36-year-old female, was captured for receiving “Seoul subway information from a former high-ranking subway official”, with whom she had a romantic relationship.
  • New book on GCHQ out in July. A new book on the history of Britain’s secretive General Communications Headquarters, authored by Warwick University Professor Richard J. Aldrich, is to be published in a few weeks. The book, entitled GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, will be published by Harper Collins.
  • Ex-DIA officials skeptical about rumored new DNI. Two former top US Defense Intelligence Agency officials, Jeffrey White and W. Patrick Lang, say retired Air Force Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr., a leading candidate to be the next Director of National Intelligence, nearly wrecked the agency’s analysis wing when he ran the organization in the mid-1990s.

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Israeli envoy ‘in alarm’ after Australia expels Mossad agent

May 25, 2010 by 3 Comments

Yuval Rotem

Yuval Rotem

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Israeli ambassador to Australia, who was in Israel on business, expedited his return to Canberra yesterday, immediately after Australia announced the expulsion of Israel’s senior Mossad representative in the country. Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that ambassador Yuval Rotem decided to cut short his trip to Israel “in alarm”, as the “escalated crisis” between Israel and Australia appears to be deepening. As intelNews readers read on April 14, Australia had announced the pending expulsion after official investigations by Australian law enforcement and intelligence authorities revealed beyond doubt that the Israeli spy agency Mossad had forged at least four Australian passports. The passports were among several Western identity documents employed by Mossad agents in targeting Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was assassinated in a luxury Dubai hotel last January. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #358

May 25, 2010 by 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 1 Comment

Leaked document

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 1 Comment

Dennis Blair

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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