Analysis: US commentator argues in favor of breaking up NSA

March 27, 2010 by 1 Comment

NSA Headquarters

NSA HQ

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is a gigantic intelligence organization –the world’s largest– which is tasked by the US government with worldwide communications surveillance, as well as communications security. But Wired magazine’s Noah Shachtman explains that the NSA’s two-fold mission forces two essentially distinct agencies to coexist under one roof. There’s the signals-intelligence directorate, the Big Brothers who, it is said, can tap into any electronic communication. And there’s the information-assurance directorate, the cybersecurity nerds whose job is to make sure the US government’s computers and telecommunications systems are hacker- and eavesdropper-free. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , ,

News you may have missed #315

March 25, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Nuclear bunker spy comes out of hiding. A British retiree named Mike Lesser has revealed he was one of the so-called “spies for peace”, a group of peace activists who in the 1960s helped uncover Britain’s secret network of underground bunkers built to protect the government in case of nuclear war.
  • Aussie spy agency spied on little girls. Secret files kept by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation reveal spooks tailed the teenage children of suspected socialists and communist sympathizers during the late 1960s, and anyone with whom they associated, including school friends and boyfriends.
  • Analysis: Under Panetta, a more aggressive CIA. Expectations among CIA hardliners were low when Leon Panetta arrived at the Agency’s headquarters in February 2009. But almost from the first week, Panetta positioned himself as a strong advocate for the CIA, to the extent that critics worry that Panetta has become a captive of the agency he leads.

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Latest from Hungary and Turkey on Budapest assassination

March 24, 2010 by 6 Comments

Trache murder

Trache murder

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
Despite the overwhelming silence in Western media about last week’s suspicious murder in broad daylight of a Syrian man in Hungary, the story continues to make headlines in Israel, the Arab world, Turkey and Hungary. IntelNews reported on Friday that a Bassam Trache, a Syrian man who had lived in Hungary for 20 years, was shot dead in Budapest on Wednesday morning, as he was driving his car. Witnesses reported that the assailant stole a small black briefcase from the 52-year-old victim’s vehicle, before fleeing the scene of the crime on foot. It also emerged that, in the week prior to the mysterious shooting, Hungarian air controllers located two Israeli Gulfstream spy planes hovering over the Hungarian capital, close to the airport, where Wednesday’s shooting occurred. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Breaking news: UK expels Israeli diplomat over Dubai assassination

March 23, 2010 by Leave a comment

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Al-Mabhouh

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
While Israel continues to insist that “there is no proof” of its involvement in January’s assassination of a top Hamas military official, Britain has announced the pending expulsion of an Israeli diplomat over the killing. At least 12 forged British passports were used by a Mossad hit squad, whose members traveled to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, on January 19. Announcing the decision, British foreign secretary David Miliband said that the high quality of the forged passports made it almost certain that “a state intelligence service” was behind the operation, and that London had “compelling reasons” to suspect Israel. He told the British Parliament that “such misuse of British passports is intolerable” and that the fact that it was perpetrated by an ally of the UK added “insult to injury”. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #314

March 23, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Canadian spy agency to display cold war spy tools. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is lifting the lid on some of Canada’s secret Cold War history with a first-ever public exhibit of the era’s exotic gadgetry and shadowy tradecraft, from a James Bond attaché case to Igor Gouzenko’s revolver.
  • Why planespotting in Egypt is a bad idea. British tourist Corbie Weastell, who was planespotting from his hotel window in Egypt, was arrested for spying, thrown in a filthy cell without food or water and left handcuffed and chained to other inmates for two days

Bookmark and Share

.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

West German spy service employed former Nazis, documents show

March 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

Reinhard Gehlen

Reinhard Gehlen

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
West Germany’s intelligence service employed hundreds of former Nazi criminals from 1956 until at least 1971, according to internal documents. The links between the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the main foreign intelligence agency of the German government, and the remnants of the German Nazi party, are well known; even its first director, Reinhard Gehlen, was a former General of the Wehrmacht. But documents dating to the 1960s, which were leaked last week to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, show that Gehlen, who worked as a CIA agent after 1945, was aware of his officers’ Nazi past, as were his American counterparts. The Nazi connections were internally revealed in detail after 1963, when Gehlen set up an internal BND investigation office, called Unit 85, to unmask potential Soviet moles inside the agency. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #313

March 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • British spies operated ‘renegade torture unit’ in Iraq. British military intelligence operated a secret operation in Iraq, called Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT), which was authorized to utilize degrading and unlawful treatment of prisoners. The officers running the operation claimed to be answerable only “directly to London”.
  • Poland’s Jaruzelski was counter-intel officer. Documents in the infamous East German Stasi archives allegedly show that in 1952 the then colonel Wojciech Jaruzelski, who later became Poland’s last communist leader, began working for the Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army –-the military police and counter-espionage agency in Poland.

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

More information on alleged Mossad hit in Budapest

March 20, 2010 by 2 Comments

Crime scene

Crime scene

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
IntelNews reported on Friday that a Syrian man was shot dead in Budapest on Wednesday morning, as he was driving his car. Witnesses reported that the assailant stole a small black briefcase from the 52-year-old victim’s vehicle, before fleeing the scene of the crime on foot. It also emerged that, in the week prior to the mysterious shooting, Hungarian air controllers located two Israeli Gulfstream spy planes hovering over the Hungarian capital, close to the airport, where Wednesday’s shooting occurred. Is this Dubai reloaded? Late on Friday, Reuters news agency reported the dead Syrian-born man’s name as Bassam Trache, 52. Meanwhile, Hungarian officials continue to deny any link between Trache’s murder and the alleged Israeli spy planes. Hungarian government spokesman, Domokos Szollar, said the overflight was “routine” training that was cleared in advance with Hungary’s National Transport Authority by the Israelis. However, Hungarian “defense ministry officials appear not to have been informed” of the alleged training exercise. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #312

March 19, 2010 by Leave a comment

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Another Mossad assassination, this time in Hungary?

March 19, 2010 by 17 Comments

Crime scene

Crime scene

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
IntelNews got word last night that an unidentified Syrian man was shot dead in Budapest early on Wednesday morning, as he was driving his car. Witnesses reported that the assailant stole a small black briefcase from the 52-year-old victim’s vehicle, before fleeing the scene of the crime on foot. A few hours later, it emerged that, in the week prior to the mysterious shooting, Hungarian air controllers located two Israeli Gulfstream spy planes hovering over the Hungarian capital, close to the airport, where Wednesday’s shooting actually occurred. The Hungarian government is so far refusing to release precise information as to the identity of the Syrian victim in Wednesday’s shooting. The country’s Ministry of Defense has also refused comment on the Israeli spy planes, except to say that they were “on a diplomatic mission”. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #311

March 18, 2010 by 1 Comment

Al-Qaeda technical expert believed killed. Hussein Yemeni, an al-Qaeda bomb expert and trainer, is believed to have been among more than a dozen people killed in a CIA strike last week in Miram Shah, the largest town in Pakistan’s North Waziristan. Yemeni is thought to have had a major planning role in the December 30 suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.

Al-Qaeda on the run, claims CIA director. CIA air attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal region have driven Osama bin Laden and his top deputies deeper into hiding and disrupted their ability to plan sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday. Interesting; that’s not exactly what he said last week.

UK government defends use of foreign intel. The British Foreign Office has defended its use of intelligence obtained by foreign security agencies from terrorism suspects, even when it could not be sure how the informants had been treated. It’s not the first time this opinion has been expressed by a senior UK government source.

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Senate bill proposes closer links between US spies, private sector

March 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

Olympia Snowe

Olympia Snowe

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
A bipartisan bill, unveiled yesterday in the US Senate, proposes closer links between US intelligence agencies and private sector companies active in areas of “critical infrastructure”. Drafted and proposed by Republican senator Olympia Snowe and Democrat Jay Rockefeller, the legislation builds on concerns by government officials that US energy and telecommunications systems may not be able to sustain a concentrated cyber-attack by a foreign government agency or organized cybercriminal group. The major practical problem in terms of the government protecting these systems is that most have been deregulated since the Reagan era, and are now almost entirely under the control of private corporations. According to the bill, the US government would have to define the term “critical infrastructure”, and then designate the companies in control of such infrastructure networks as “critical partners” in protecting strategic national interests. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #310

March 17, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: Outsourcing Intelligence. David Ignatius points out that the latest rogue operation of the US Defense Department, revealed last weekend by The New York Times, points to the increasing irrelevance of the CIA in the so-called “global war on terrorism”: “by using contractors who operate ‘outside the wire’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the [US] military has gotten information that is sometimes better than what the CIA is offering”, says Ignatius.
  • White House threatens veto on intelligence bill. The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of US lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities.
  • CIA’s Kiriakou authors new book. John Kiriakou, who spent 14 years working for the CIA, and has made headlines in the past for defending the practice of waterboarding in interrogations, while recognizing it is torture, has a new book out, entitled The Reluctant Spy.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

US-Pakistan spy ties still tense, despite alleged thaw

March 17, 2010 by 1 Comment

Cantt, Lahore

Cantt, Lahore

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last December, US officials accused Pakistani security agencies of conducting a “blatant harassment campaign [against] American diplomats”, which reportedly included “frequent checking of American diplomatic vehicles in major cities across the country”. Recent articles in the Pakistani press appear to confirm these reports, indicating that they may be connected with ongoing attempts by US intelligence to increase its limited footprint in Pakistan beyond the safety of the US embassy compound in Islamabad. One such case is in Cantt, Lahore’s military zone, where it appears American intelligence officers have covertly leased “an outpost of several houses”. It is not clear when precisely the Americans began leasing the houses. But the Pakistanis, who have surrounded Cantt with security checkpoints, noticed the increased traffic by vehicles carrying US personnel, and started insisting on inspecting them, as they do with all vehicles entering and exiting Cantt. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #309

March 15, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • Iran claims arrest of US cyberspies. Iranian security forces have arrested 30 people accused of waging cyberwar against the country, with the backing of the United States. The Iranian government accuses them of running a network of websites funded by US intelligence, which aims to “collect information about Iran’s nuclear program”.
  • Nazis planned to infiltrate Vatican with spies. Nazi Germany hatched a plan during World War II to infiltrate the Vatican with spies disguised as monks, according to secret MI5 intelligence reports. The codename for the plan was Operation GEORGIAN CONVENT.
  • US misled even us on detainees, says ex-MI5 chief. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of the Britain’s foremost domestic spy agency, MI5, has said that United States intelligence agencies misled even MI5 about the mistreatment of suspected terrorists.

Bookmark and Share

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →