News you may have missed #341

May 3, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • Russian court rejects ‘spy’ scientist’s appeal. A Russian court has rejected an appeal for the release of academic Igor Sutyagin, former division head in the Russian Academy of Sciences’ USA and Canada Institute, who is serving a 15-year sentence for allegedly passing state secrets to foreign officials.
  • Ex-CIA agent’s arrest in VA was eventful, say sources. We reported earlier this week that Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s Algiers station chief, who is accused of having drugged and raped two Algerian women at his official residence, was arrested at a Norfolk, Virginia motel, after he failed to show up for a court hearing. It now appears that Warren “had a gun in his waistband […] and officers used a taser to subdue him”.
  • Documents show CIA thought Gary Powers had defected. Declassified documents show the CIA did not believe that Gary Powers, who piloted the U2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960, causing the U2 incident, had been shot down. Instead, the agency spread the rumor that Powers “baled out and spent his first night as a defector in a Sverdlovsk nightclub”!

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Alleged Iranian spy cell busted in Kuwait

May 3, 2010 by Leave a comment

Al-Qabas

Al-Qabas website

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A leading Kuwaiti newspaper has claimed that government agencies captured members of an alleged Iranian spy cell in the Gulf state. Citing “senior intelligence sources”, Al-Qabas daily said that Kuwaiti counterintelligence officers arrested at least seven men last week, and are looking for up to seven others, in connection with an extensive espionage ring operating on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards are an independent administrative and paramilitary institution in Iran, tasked with –among other things– exporting the Iranian Revolution abroad. They handle most of Iran’s intelligence operatives around the world, who, according to some observers, number in the tens of thousands. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #340

May 2, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • West Bank urged to drop Israeli cell phone companies. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is urging Palestinians to stop using the Israeli cellular companies Pelephone, Orange, Cellcom and Mirs. The official reasons are economic (Israeli companies don’t pay taxes to the PA), but the real reasons are probably related to communications security.
  • US police wiretaps up 26 percent in one year. The number of wiretaps authorized by US state and federal judges in criminal investigations jumped 26 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a report released Friday by the Administrative Office of the US Courts.
  • Taliban group executes high-profile ex-ISI spy. Khalid Khawaja, one of two Pakistani former Inter-Services Intelligence directorate officers captured by a Taliban splinter group, named Asian Tigers, has been found dead. The other ex-ISI official, Sultan Amir Tarar, a.k.a. Colonel Imam, who was Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar’s former handler, remains in captivity.

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Author gets subpoenaed to reveal CIA sources

April 30, 2010 by Leave a comment

James Risen

James Risen

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The US government has issued a subpoena against a journalist who authored a book on the CIA’s operations during the years of the Bush administration. The move has surprised many, because the book in question, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by New York Times journalist James Risen, has been out since 2006. The subpoena, which Risen received last Monday, requests him to testify before a grand jury about his confidential sources for chapter 9 of his book (pages 193-218), entitled “A Rogue Operation”, in which he describes in relative detail an attempt by the CIA to sabotage the Iranian nuclear weapons program. In the chapter, Risen writes of a thwarted CIA operation to pass to the Iranians a series of faulty nuclear bomb design documents. To do this, the Agency apparently recruited a Russian former nuclear scientist, who had defected to the United States. The unnamed scientist was told to travel to Vienna, Austria, in early 2000, and offer to sell the documents to the Iranians. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #339 (arrest edition!)

April 28, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • US couple arrested for spying for Cuba cooperating, say authorities. Admitted spies Walter and Gwendolyn Myers have met with US federal officials “50 to 60 times” to divulge details of their three decades of spying for Cuba, Justice Department officials said Tuesday. The couple pleaded guilty in November to working for the government of Caribbean island.
  • Indian diplomat arrested for spying for Pakistan. Madhuri Gupta, a second secretary at the Indian high commission in Islamabad, Pakistan, has been arrested and accused of passing on secrets to Pakistan’s ISI spy agency. Indian officials believe she may be part of a wider spy ring.
  • Former CIA station chief arrested in Virginia. Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s Algiers station chief, who is accused of having drugged and raped two Algerian women at his official residence, has been arrested at a Norfolk, Virginia motel, after he failed to show up for a court hearing last week. It is unclear why he skipped the hearing and why he was staying at the motel in his hometown.

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Political wiretap scandal erupts in India

April 28, 2010 by Leave a comment

Outlook magazine

Outlook magazine

By IAN ALEN | intelNews.org |
A major scandal has erupted in India, with the revelation last weekend that government intelligence services have monitored the telecommunications of senior political figures since at least 2006. Indian newsmagazine Outlook, which is published nationwide, reported on Sunday that the left leaning government of the United Progressive Alliance and the Indian National Congress ordered intelligence officers to tap the telephone communications of several politicians. The list allegedly included Bihar state chief minister Nitish Kumar, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat, and minister for agriculture Sharad Pawar. According to Outlook, the government also used powerful communications interception hardware to “listen in on the conversations of opposition leaders during the July 2008 no-confidence motion on the Indo-US nuclear deal”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #338

April 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US intel on Iran suffering from information overload? The US National Intelligence Estimate was due last fall but has been delayed at least twice amid efforts to “incorporate information from [Iranian] sources who are still being vetted”. Some say that significant new material has come from Iranian informants, who are motivated by antipathy toward the Iranian government and its suppression of the opposition.
  • Canada’s ex-intel boss slams new anti-terrorism measures. Reid Morden, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has urged the country’s Conservative government to re-think its plans to re-introduce controversial anti-terrorism measures initially adopted in the wake of 9/11.
  • Wiretapping scandals continue in Colombia. Caracol TV reports that Colombian security agency DAS has asked opposition Senator Piedad Cordoba to hand over evidence of her claims that President Alvaro Uribe ordered DAS to spy on her.

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CIA scores Washington Post charm offensive

April 27, 2010 by 1 Comment

CIA HQ

CIA HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
For an agency whose very future is routinely questioned by former employees, the CIA has been getting plenty of positive press in the pages of The Washington Post lately. On Monday, The Post’s Jeff Stein cited “a former top CIA official” who claimed that the Agency’s unmanned drone assassination program in the Afghan-Pakistan border has the Taliban in disarray, “thinking that we can track them anywhere”. The former official also said that the speed of the CIA and “its Pentagon partners” (presumably NSA) in intercepting targeted communications makes the process of assassinating Taliban leaders “like mowing a lawn”. Does this sound too good to be true? How about an article published on the same day, also in The Washington Post, which claims that the CIA’s Predator drone assassination program has “kept the number of civilian deaths extremely low”? Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #337

April 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Another Iranian nuclear researcher reportedly defects. An academic linked with Iran’s nuclear program has defected to Israel, according to Ayoub Kara, Israel’s deputy minister for development in the Negev and Galilee. Kara said it “is too soon to provide further details”, adding that the defector is “now in a friendly country”.
  • Dutch spies to become more active abroad. The Dutch secret service, the AIVD, has announced a shift in strategy, deployed increasingly more officers abroad: “in Yemen, Somalia, and the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.
  • Why did the CIA destroy waterboarding evidence? It has been established that Porter J. Goss, the former director of the CIA, in 2005 approved the destruction of dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two terrorism detainees. But why did he do it? Former CIA officer Robert Baer examines the question.

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Russian intelligence arrests, extradites fmr Kyrgyz interior minister

April 26, 2010 by 2 Comments

Moldomusa Kongantiyev

Kongantiyev

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
If there were any doubts that Russia is aggressively courting the new interim government in Kyrgyzstan, they were dispelled earlier today with the announcement that Russian authorities arrested the Central Asian republic’s former interior minister. Kyrgyzstan’s National Security State Service (NSSS) announced that Moldomusa Kongantiyev was arrested on Sunday in Moscow, by agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), and will be extradited to Bishkek, where he will face charges of using state repression against demonstrators. Kongantiyev had escaped to Russia in mid-April, after he was abducted and viciously beaten by Kyrgyz opposition demonstrators, who released him after his family paid a significant amount of money as ransom. IntelNews hears that Kongantiyev suspected that Moscow planned to extradite him to Kyrgyzstan, and that some of the supporters of the deposed regime in Russia offered to hide him. But their attempt to smuggle him out of a hospital in Moscow, where he was receiving medical care, was thwarted by the FSB, after a tip from  NSSS. Read more of this post

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Abduction of former Pakistani ISI officials raises questions

April 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

Colonel Imam

Colonel Imam

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Questions are being raised about the reported abduction of two well-known veterans of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, who appear to have been kidnapped by an unknown group in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions. The two are Khalid Khawaja and Sultan Amir Tarar, a.k.a. Colonel Imam. Khawaja, a retired ISI officer, was a critical mediator between the CIA and Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, during the al-Qaeda’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Colonel Imam, also a former intelligence officer and a diplomat, was the ISI handler of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in the 1980s and early 1990s. Both Khawaja and Imam are considered senior members of the ISI’s ‘old guard’, who have strong ideological sympathies for both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and frequently voice support for the latter. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #336

April 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA tech arm invests in camera lens start-up. The CIA’s venture-capital investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has struck again. This time it has funded LensVector, a hi-tech start-up that specializes in micro-camera technology for cell phones.
  • NSA cyberdefense exercise underway. Detailed status report on the National Security Agency’s 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of US military academies against each other –and against the competition’s leaders at NSA– in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills.
  • US spy researchers working on computational intel. IARPA, the US intelligence community’s research arm, is apparently working on a new program, called Aggregative Contingent Estimation, which aims to create a computational model that can enhance human hypotheses and predictions, by catching inevitable biases and accounting for selective memory and stress in intelligence analysis.

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South charges North Korean agents with assassination plot

April 23, 2010 by 1 Comment

Hwang Jang-yop

Hwang Jang-yop

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Two North Koreans who defected to South Korea last November have allegedly admitted to being intelligence officers on a mission to assassinate a North Korean former senior official. The official, Hwang Jang-yop, caused a sensation on both sides of the border when he defected to the South in 1997. A former secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, Hwang was the North’s primary theorist and the ideological architect of juche, the philosophy of self-reliance, which is North Korea’s officially sanctioned state dogma. Since his defection, the 87-year-old Hwang, who is believed to have ideologically mentored North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, has been living in the South with around-the-clock security protection. The two self-confessed spies, Tong Myong Kwan and Kim Myung Ho, both 36, have allegedly admitted posing as defectors, while in reality being on an assassination mission on behalf of the intelligence unit of the North Korean Ministry of Defense. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #335

April 23, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Leading al-Qaeda expert to leave FBI. J. Philip Mudd, one of the US intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was the National Security Branch’s associate executive director. He will be replaced by 23-year FBI veteran Sean Joyce.
  • Three more domestic spying programs revealed. The US Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged the existence of three more government programs charged with spying on American citizens in the aftermath of 9/11. The programs, Pantheon, Pathfinder and Organizational Shared Space, used a variety of software tools to gather and analyze information about Americans.
  • NSA Utah facility contractors shortlisted. We have mentioned before that for contractors in northern Utah, where the NSA is preparing to build a million-square-foot facility, at Camp Williams, it’s party time. Five of them, including three from Utah, have now been shortlisted by the government.

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CIA not surprised by Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, documents show

April 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

Alexander Dubček

Alexander Dubček

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Newly declassified CIA documents from 1968 show that the Agency had warned the Lyndon B. Johnson administration that the USSR was preparing to invade Czechoslovakia later that year. Some of the documents have been released before, but were presented for the first time in an organized, searchable format last Friday, at a symposium held at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, on University of Texas campus. The symposium, entitled “Strategic Warning and The Role of Intelligence: Lessons Learned from the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia”, included participants from academia, as well as from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among documents presented at the gathering was a May 10, 1968, CIA memo, which termed Soviet-Czechoslovak relations a “crisis” and warned that the possibility of an armed Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia could “no longer be excluded”. Read more of this post

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