News you may have missed #0219

December 14, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Kennedy considered supporting 1963 coup in S. Vietnam, documents show. New audio recordings and documentation unearthed by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, show that US President John F. Kennedy supported a military coup against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, even though he recognized the planned coup had no chance of a political success. See previous intelNews coverage for more Vietnam War-related declassified items.
  • Speak Farsi? Israel’s Shin Bet is interested. Israel’s Shin Bet internal intelligence agency is advertising jobs for speakers of the Iranian language Farsi. Israeli intelligence agencies appear to have similar problems with those faced by their US counterparts.

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Iranian defector briefed UN inspectors on Iran nuclear program

December 14, 2009 by Leave a comment

Iranian nuclear facility in Qum

Qum facility

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
An Iranian nuclear scientist who vanished during a pilgrimage to Mecca last June has defected to the West and has briefed American and United Nations officials about Iran’s nuclear program. As intelNews reported on October 9, rumors have been circulating in the Arab press that Shahram Amiri, a senior figure in the Iranian nuclear research program, was not abducted by Saudi and Western intelligence agencies, as Iran claims, but actually defected to the West. Now British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph has cited “a source close to France’s overseas secret service, the DGSE”, who claims that Amiri’s defection was facilitated through a carefully planned intelligence operation involving the CIA, as well as French and German operatives. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0218

December 13, 2009 by Leave a comment

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News you may have missed #0217

December 12, 2009 by Leave a comment

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Canadian police spying on anti-Olympics groups sparks debate

December 12, 2009 by Leave a comment

Jamie Graham

Jamie Graham

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Intense debate has been sparked in Canada by the revelation that local police departments are actively spying on peaceful citizen groups opposing the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, due to be held in Vancouver in February. The surprise disclosure was made by Victoria Police chief Jamie Graham, during his keynote speech at the Vancouver International Security Conference, a closed-door event held earlier this month to discuss emergency management and public safety arrangements for the Games. Speaking at the Conference, Graham, who formerly was Chief of Vancouver Police, revealed that law enforcement operatives planted among an anti-Olympics protest group an undercover officer, who posed as the driver of a leased bus and drove the group to an anti-Olympics demonstration. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0216

December 11, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • China launches new spy satellite. Beijing says the satellite will be used for “land resources surveys [and] crop yield estimates”, but outside experts say it is likely an electro-optical spy satellite that will be operated by the Chinese military.
  • Man accused of spying on Israeli military chief may go free. Arab Israeli Rawi Sultani was arrested last August for allegedly spying on Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, on behalf of Lebanese group Hezbollah. But he may be released due to a technical oversight by the prosecutors.

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US use of stealth spy drones in Afghanistan raises questions

December 11, 2009 by 3 Comments

RQ-170 Sentinel

RQ-170 Sentinel

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
On December 6, we posted a link to a photo of what appeared to be a classified US drone aircraft, which was published on a blog belonging to French newspaper Libération. Then, unexpectedly, on December 8, the US Air Force admitted that the mystery aircraft, dubbed ‘the Beast of Kandahar’ by aviation spotters, is the RQ-170 Sentinel, an unmanned, unarmed surveillance and reconnaissance drone with stealth capabilities, that is officially still in production by US defense contractor Lockheed Martin. That’s all well and fine. But the question is: why would the US be using a stealth drone against the Taliban in Afghanistan, who have no known antiaircraft radar systems, and are therefore unable to track enemy surveillance planes? Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0215

December 11, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Ex-MI5 officer cannot publish memoirs, court decides. A former MI5 officer, known only as “A.”, cannot publish his memoirs, which consist of a 300-page manuscript, a panel of British judges has decided. Interestingly, “A.” has said he intends to remain anonymous.
  • Turkey denies Israel use of its airspace to spy on Iran. If Israel were to violate Turkish airspace in order to conduct reconnaissance operations on Iran, Ankara’s reaction would resemble an “earthquake”, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said in an interview.

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Silence over sudden death of Jordan’s ex-spy chief in Vienna

December 11, 2009 by 5 Comments

Imperial Hotel, Vienna

Imperial Hotel

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
There is widespread silence in Jordan about the sudden death of the country’s former intelligence chief, at his luxury Vienna hotel room, on Wednesday. The country’s tightly controlled press barely mentioned the news of the death of Field Marshal Said Bashir Saad Kheir, 56, whose body was reportedly discovered in bed by a maid in Vienna’s Imperial Hotel. Austrian police representatives have ruled out foul play in Kheir’s death, which they attributed to heart failure. But there is conflicting information about the purpose of the former spy chief’s visit to the Austrian capital, which is considered the world’s largest espionage hub, with the highest density of foreign intelligence agents on Earth. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0214

December 10, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Cuban Five member’s prison term cut to 30 years. A Miami court has reduced the earlier prison sentence of yet another member of the Cuban Five. Ramon Labanino has had his original sentence of life imprisonment cut to 30 years. The Cuban Five were sentenced in 2001 for spying on US soil for Cuba.
  • Part 3 of CIA defector’s writings now available. Former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Eringer has published the third installment of the writings of Edward Lee Howard, a CIA officer who defected to the USSR in 1985 (see here for previous intelNews coverage). Did you know that “KGB officers always preferred Malév (Hungary’s national airline) whenever they crossed to [Western] Europe”?

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Suspects arrested for 1981 poisoning of Chilean ex-president

December 10, 2009 by 2 Comments

Eduardo Frei

Eduardo Frei

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A Chilean judge this week charged several people connected with the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, of complicity in the 1981 murder by poisoning of former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Montalva. With the help of the CIA, Frei, a conservative centrist, became Chile’s elected leader from 1964 to 1970. In 1973, he supported the Augusto Pinochet junta movement against Chile’s elected President, Salvador Allende, but soon became disillusioned and opposed the military regime’s widespread human rights abuses. In November 1981, Frei checked into Santiago’s Santa Maria Clinic for a routine hernia operation. It was there, according to the court indictment, that several doctors connected with the Pinochet junta systematically poisoned the former Chilean President with thallium and small doses of mustard gas, which eventually killed him. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0213

December 10, 2009 by Leave a comment

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Controversial Israel-Russia drone deal includes secret Iran clause

December 9, 2009 by 2 Comments

MK II UAV

MK II UAV

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
I have written before on this blog about a controversial $53 million agreement between Russia and Israel to provide Moscow with Israeli-made intelligence-gathering drones. The agreement, revealed last April, marked Israel’s first-ever sale of military systems to Russia, as well as Moscow’s first known purchase of a foreign weapons system. Last time I wroteintelNews received information that the Israeli move angered some US Pentagon officials. It turns out, however, that the Israeli-Russian deal contains a vital clause: the Israelis have agreed to provide Russia with as many intelligence-gathering drones as they want, and even allow them to reverse-engineer them, providing they cancel an agreement with Tehran to provide the Iranian government with Russian-made state-of-the-art air defense missiles. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0212

December 9, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Government investigator gets US passports using fake names. A GAO investigator managed to obtain four genuine US passports using fake names and fraudulent documents. He then used one of the fake passports to buy a plane ticket, obtain a boarding pass, and make it through a security checkpoint at a major US airport. The post-9/11 security environment in all its glory.
  • Documents on Argentina’s Operation MEXICO declassified. Operation MEXICO was the codename for a clandestine Argentine rendition program aimed at abducting and murdering leaders of the Montonero Peronist Movement, a leftwing militant group, living in exile in Mexico City in the late 1970s.
  • Mistrial declared in the trial of FBI informant Hal Turner. Turner will still face a single count of unlawfully threatening three Chicago-based federal appeals judges, by writing on his blog that they “deserve to be killed” for upholding a gun control ordinance.

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Former MI6 head testifies in UK Iraq War commission

December 9, 2009 by 1 Comment

Sir John Scarlett

Sir John Scarlett

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Sir John Scarlett, who until recently headed MI6, Britain’s foremost external spy agency, chaired the country’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in the run-up to the Iraq War. He was therefore in charge of an influential government report, produced in September 2002, which argued that Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction constituted an immediate threat to Britain. As part of the official inquiry into Britain’s entry in the Iraq War, Sir John testified yesterday about the controversial report, known as ‘the dodgy dossier’, which has been criticized as a monumental intelligence failure that helped drag the country into an unpopular war. The former JIC chairman admitted that British intelligence services were aware before the War that Iraq had dismantled its long-range missiles and thus had no way of shooting its chemical munitions at distant targets, including Britain. Read more of this post

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