News you may have missed #0264

January 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • India jails two Pakistanis on spying charges. India has jailed Adil Anjum Nazir Ahmed and Abdul Shakur Hafiz, claiming they spied on behalf of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. The two were arrested in Lucknow in 2006.
  • US Pentagon re-examines PsyOp doctrine. The field of Psychological Operations (PsyOps) is among the oldest of military disciplines, but a new US Department of Defense report on the subject shows that the DoD continues to wrestle with basic definitional issues.

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Analysis: US spy turf-war flares up on Capitol Hill

January 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

Dennis Blair

Dennis Blair

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Wednesday’s testimony by US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, received plenty of media coverage. But few have examined the ongoing public hearings by three separate Senate committees on the Christmas Day bomb plot in light of the turf battles taking place between US intelligence agencies. An excellent article by Politico’s Kassie Hunt does just that, by pointing out that the hearing proceedings should be viewed in light of the “three-way turf war among Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter”. Capitol Hill lawmakers appear to be aware of this: Hunt’s article quotes Peter King, the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s senior Republican member, who warns that US intelligence agencies will use the public hearings to place blame about the Christmas Day bomber fiasco on each other. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0263

January 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Up to 30,000 Chinese spies in Germany, say newspapers. According to German media, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution says that up to “thirty thousand Chinese residents residing in Germany are spies”, and that “60 percent of industrial spies residing in Germany are Chinese”.
  • Israeli agencies see Turkey moving toward radicalization. Israel’s chief intelligence official, General Amos Yadlin, has told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Turkey’s recent diplomatic moves are indicative of its shift toward radical Islam.

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China not top priority for US spy agencies under new policy

January 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

US and China

US and China

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
American intelligence agencies have been directed by the US National Security Council (NSC) to downgrade intelligence collection on China. Under the directive, which was first proposed last October, Chinese intelligence targets will be coded “Priority 2” (Pri-2), from their current “Priority 1” (Pri-1) status. The Washington Times reports that the move is part of a wider Obama administration effort “to develop a more cooperative relationship with Beijing”. The latter recently requested a new bilateral relationship with Washington, free from “Cold War and power politics mentality”. But the NSC proposal was contested by CIA director Leon Panetta and director of national intelligence Dennis Blair. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0262

January 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US Navy posts classified report on China by mistake. An obviously confused official of the US Office for Naval Intelligence (ONI) posted on an open website a classified USN report on the state of the Chinese navy. The 47-page document has now been reposted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists.
  • Analysis: Think different, CIA. Robert Jervis, professor of international politics at Columbia University and a consultant to the US intelligence community, explains that one of the biggest challenges for American intelligence is the way the human brain works.

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Released cable reveals CIA decision to destroy torture tapes

January 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

CIA HQ

CIA HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The US Justice Department’s investigation into the destruction of videotapes by the CIA, which reportedly showed acts of torture committed during interrogations of terrorism detainees, began in 2007, but has stalled. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is spearheading what appears to be the only organized attempt to discover when and why those tapes were destroyed. Last year the ACLU uncovered that the CIA destroyed the videotapes in question after –not before, as the Agency had originally claimed– a spring 2004 report by the Agency’s inspector general, which described the interrogation methods employed on CIA prisoners as “constitut[ing] cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment”. Thanks to the ACLU, we have also known for quite some time that the decision to destroy the incriminating tapes was taken sometime in November of 2005. But now, with the release of a new batch of documents in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, we have the exact date that decision was taken: Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0261

January 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: CIA has long struggled with ensuring safe interrogations. The debate within the CIA about how to handle agents in war zones surfaced in Iraq in 2003. There was a dispute about how to balance the safety of CIA personnel with the needs of intelligence gathering. The controversy went on for more than a year, but in the end, by 2005, CIA officers had generally stopped meeting agents in the “red zones” of Iraq, that is, outside secured areas.
  • Germany to probe CIA murder and rendition plots on its soil. German legislators will probably launch an investigation into claims that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plotted to murder an alleged al-Qaeda fundraiser in Hamburg, and that it placed agents in Germany to sweep up terrorist suspects without informing German authorities.

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US mosque says FBI informant responsible for shootout killing

January 20, 2010 by Leave a comment

Luqman Ameen Abdullah

L.A. Abdullah

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Community relations between the FBI and American Muslim groups took a turn for the worse yesterday, after an African-American Muslim congregation in Detroit accused a Bureau informant of luring a Mosque member to his death. Luqman Ameen Abdullah, leader of the self-described Ummah Mosque in Detroit, was killed in a shootout with FBI agents on October 28, during a raid at a warehouse reportedly aimed at recovering stolen goods. But Mosque worshipers claim that Abdullah was led to the warehouse by a man going by the name of Jabril, who they say was an FBI informant. The man allegedly infiltrated the Mosque for several months leading to the shootout, but disappeared following the FBI raid. The FBI has admitted it employed three informants to spy on the group, but has refused to reveal details, and is now seeking a protective order to shield the informants’ identities. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0260

January 20, 2010 by Leave a comment

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Georgian paramilitaries posed as election observers, say Ukrainians

January 20, 2010 by Leave a comment

Viktor Yanukovych

V. Yanukovych

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Ukraine’s largest political party has accused the nearby nation of Georgia of sending to Ukraine a team of paramilitary operatives disguised as international election monitors. Vladyslav Lukianov, who represents Ukraine’s Party of Regions in the country’s parliament, has given to the press ten names of Georgian paramilitary agents who allegedly performed “law enforcement operations” in Ukraine, while supposedly monitoring last Sunday’s Ukrainian elections. It appears that three more Georgians, who were arrested on Saturday in Donetsk, reportedly did not possess identity papers or travel documentation, and are so far refusing to speak to Ukrainian security officials. To further complicate the issue, an allegedly wiretapped conversation between Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, and an unidentified woman surfaced in the Ukrainian news media last week. Read more of this post

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Who tried to burn down the US embassy in Skopje in 1999?

January 19, 2010 by Leave a comment

Dragan Pavlovic-Latas

Pavlovic-Latas

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On March 25, 1999, approximately 200 people broke off from a much larger crowd of pro-Serbian demonstrators in downtown Skopje, Macedonia, and, in a military-style operation, tore down the security perimeter around the US embassy and occupied its courtyard for several hours. With the US ambassador, Christopher Hill, and most of the embassy staff inside the building, the occupiers set fire to embassy cars and tried to set the building alight. By the time they were dispersed by police, the rioters had managed to destroy all the cars parked in the embassy’s courtyard, as well as a large part of the embassy building’s exterior. The demonstrators were protesting US and NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia, which had begun on the previous day, sparked by brutal ethnic clashes in the Kosovo region. But the question remains: who, if anyone, organized the attempted burning down of the US embassy? Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0259

January 19, 2010 by Leave a comment

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France accuses US of launching military invasion of Haiti

January 19, 2010 by 3 Comments

Haiti

Haiti

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Rivalries between the major donor powers, as well as non-profit agencies, in earthquake-devastated Haiti are delaying humanitarian help to the island. The infighting surfaced during the weekend, as the growing US military force in Haiti appeared to refuse flights from other nations consistent access to the island’s airport, giving priority instead to its own military aircraft. The move triggered a diplomatic row between the US, France, Haiti’s former colonial power, and Brazil, which technically commands the United Nations mission there. Complaints by the two countries, which lodged official protests with Washington, were echoed by officials from the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, who said emergency flights to the island were diverted to the Dominican Republic by the US military. The tense situation led to France accusing the US of using the island’s Toussaint L’Ouverture airport as a “military annex”, while French and Brazilian diplomats in the Caribbean complained that the US has launched what appeared to be a military invasion of Haiti. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0258

January 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

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Mystery surrounds arrest of renegade CIA agent in Indonesia

January 18, 2010 by 2 Comments

Bogor, Indonesia

Bogor, Indonesia

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
In January of 2008, a man with an American accent appeared at a passport office in the popular West Java tourist resort of Bogor, Indonesia, and applied for an Indonesian passport. But his inability to speak Bahasa Indonesia triggered the suspicion of passport officials, who subsequently discovered that his Indonesian birth certificate was faked. He was arrested on the spot, but it took nearly a year for Indonesian authorities to ascertain the man’s real identity: he was Bob Marshall, a 61-year-old American-born former CIA agent who allegedly went renegade on the Agency in 1974. For the past 35 years, Marshall has reportedly been cited in dozens of countries, operating a worldwide arms smuggling and check-fraud network. There are rumors at Interpol that Marshall has made use of no fewer than 40 passports during this time, some of which he acquired while working for the CIA. Read more of this post

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