Indian Home Minister points to sophistication of Mumbai attacks

January 5, 2009 by Leave a comment

Prior to an official visit to the US, later this week, India’s Home Minister said yesterday that the sophisticated planning and professional execution of the 2008 Mumbai attacks points to involvement of “state actors” in the operation. Speaking to India’s NDTV news network, Palaniappan Chidambaram, who is the Indian government’s  Union Minister of Home Affairs, said he presumes those behind the attack “are state actors or state-assisted actors unless the contrary is proved”. The Home Minister justified his rationale based on the meticulous execution of the coordinated militant assault of last November, which killed nearly 180 people in India’s largest city. “Somebody who is familiar with intelligence and who is familiar with commando operations has directed this operation”, said Chidambaram. “It was too enormous a crime and required very elaborate planning, communication networks, financial backing. It was a very, very sophisticated operation”. The Home Minister will be delivering a “detailed dossier” to US Homeland Security officials later this week, which reportedly includes “electronic evidence […] and intercepts” as well as reports from interrogations. [IA]

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Costa Rican political police rocked by high-level corruption scandal

January 5, 2009 by 1 Comment

DIS scandal

DIS scandal

For years, Costa Rica’s unions and opposition activists have accused the country’s political police, the Dirección de Inteligencia y Seguridad (DIS), of illegally spying on lawful political activity. Yet their allegations never made it into the US State Department’s annual human rights reports on Costa Rica. The Department’s latest report claims that the country’s “civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces”. Last November, however, government investigators uncovered an enormous money-laundering cartel operating inside DIS, whose head was no other than the organization’s Deputy Director, Roberto Guillén. Guillén, who was forced to step down on November 25, employed DIS computers to access private information of unsuspecting citizens, and used the data to launder nearly half a million dollars in illegal transfers to himself and others. Read more of this post

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CIA conducting ‘unprecedented’ operations in Britain

January 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph has published an article (reprinted in Australia’s The Age) discussing what it describes as CIA’s “unprecedented intelligence-gathering operation in Britain”. The paper cites “security sources in Washington and London” in revealing that the US spy agency is “recruiting and handling a record number of informers within the British Pakistani community”. Security circles in Washington have been known to express concerns about militant tendencies in that community, which is nearly one-million-strong. Bruce Reidel, a 26-year CIA veteran and al-Qaeda expert, who now advises US President Elect Barack Obama’s transition team, says that Britain’s Muslim community (whose members can travel to the US without visas) is “regarded by the American intelligence community as perhaps the single-biggest threat environment.” Read more of this post

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Hamas copies Israel’s random phone call tactic

January 3, 2009 by Leave a comment

Hamas message

Hamas message

IntelNews has been reporting in recent days that Israeli intelligence are placing random calls to cell phones of Gaza residents prompting them to evacuate Hamas-affiliated targets. We also reported that this technique, which Israel also employed in Lebanon and Syria during the last couple of years, seems to have resulted in a backlash for the Israeli Defense Forces, as Gaza residents receiving these random calls often rush to the roofs of potential target buildings in efforts to prevent the attacks. It now appears that Hamas, the Palestinian group in charge of the Gaza strip, is employing a similar tactic to warn Israeli cell phone subscribers that Qassam rockets will fall “on all cities” and that “shelters [will] not protect” them. Read more of this post

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Taliban Information Minister arrested in Peshawar

January 3, 2009 by 1 Comment

Ustad Yasar, who heads the Taliban information division in Afghanistan, has been arrested in Peshawar, Pakistani intelligence officials announced today. Yasar was previously arrested in 2005, again in Pakistan, by Pakistani security forces and was handed over to the Afghan authorities in the same year. In 2007, however, he was released in exchange for Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who had been abducted by the Taliban earlier that year. Other high-level Taliban operatives released along with Yasar include Mansoon Ahmad, Abdul and Hamdullah Ghaffar, and Mullah Abdul Latif Hakimi, the spokesman for the Taliban in Afghanistan. All of them remain at large. An unnamed Pakistani security official has said that, at the time of his recent arrest, Yasar was acting under orders from Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, who had sent him to the Pakistani borderlands “to mediate in a dispute between Taliban factions” there. It will be interesting to see if the Pakistanis give US interrogators access to Yasar, and if they extradite him to Afghanistan. [IA]

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Analysis: Former USAF Secretary discusses hidden history of nukes

January 3, 2009 by 1 Comment

It is not necessary to agree with Thomas C. Reed’s worldview in order to appreciate his deep knowledge of the history of nuclear politics. His argument, for instance, that “the world is safer for having all the permanent UN Security Council members possess nuclear weapons” may be seen as absurdly myopic -especially in light of numerous instances in which the US and the USSR came close to annihilating the entire world during the Cold War. Nevertheless, the former nuclear weapons designer and US Air Force Secretary always has interesting insights to share on the dark history of nuclear proliferation. For instance, in a recent interview with US News & World Report, Reed discussed how Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear scientist who was jailed in 1950 for having spied for the Soviets, also shared his immense nuclear knowledge with the Chinese, following his release from prison. He also outlined the Chinese contribution to nuclear proliferation in the Third World, which he attributes to a 1982 decision by the Chinese leadership, under the Chairmanship of Deng Xiaoping, to “proliferate nuclear technology to communists and Muslims” around the world. Read more of this post

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Gaza civilians ignoring IDF cell phone warnings

January 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

Nizar Rayan

Nizar Rayan

IntelNews has reported in recent days that Israeli intelligence are employing cell phones to warn Gazan civilians that they may killed if located nearby Hamas-affiliated targets. Specifically, an undisclosed number of Gaza residents have been receiving “unusual phone calls” with an automated request in Arabic “that they and their families leave their homes as soon as possible for their own safety”. It now appears this technique has resulted in a backlash for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as Gaza residents receiving such calls often rush to the roofs of potential target buildings in efforts to prevent the attacks. An article in The Australian reports that “in some cases, [Gaza] residents have gone up to the roof to show themselves to circling aircraft and succeeded in preventing the attack”. Read more of this post

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Finish security police declassify early Cold War archive

January 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

Suojelupoliisi, Finland’s security police (otherwise known as SUPO), declassified today segments of its Cold War counterintelligence archives. The declassified archives include the entirety of its 1949 document collection, as well as archive indexes for the decade 1949-1959. It is the first time that SUPO has made internal documents available to the public. The 1949 archive is important because it marks the beginning of SUPO’s intense monitoring of Soviet intelligence operations in Finland, and of activities of the Communist Party of Finland, forerunner of today’s Communist Party of Finland (Unity). Read more of this post

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Analysis: Report discusses foreign espionage targets inside US

January 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a new strategy report broadly addressing foreign espionage activity in the US. The report, which has been circulated within the National Association of Chiefs of Police, claims that America is “targeted from nearly every corner of the globe”. Citing data from 2003, it states that “dozens of countries” had “hundreds of known or suspected intelligence officers [entering or traveling] within the United States”. Accordingly, FBI counterintelligence investigations spanned the entire country and involved “all 56 [of the Bureau’s] field offices”. More importantly, the FBI strategy report stresses that foreign intelligence activity within the nation is today “far more complex than it has ever been historically” due to its increasingly asymmetrical character. Read more of this post

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French Presidential scandal linked to journalist’s disappearance

January 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

Couraud

Couraud

Jean-Pascal Couraud was Editor-in-Chief of Tahiti News, a large Polynesian newspaper based in Pape’ete, the capital of French Polynesia. In 1997, he disappeared. His body has never been found. The official explanation, which is fervently rejected by Couraud’s family, is that the prominent journalist committed suicide. However, on December 29, a suspicious letter was seized from the office of former Polynesian President, Gaston Flosse. It was written by Vetea Cadousteau, a former member of Groupement d’ Intervention de la Polynésie (GIP), the Polynesian secret services. In it, Cadousteau claims that he helped GIP abduct Couraud to stop him from further investigating an alleged illegal fund transfer by a large Polynesian company to a secret Japanese bank account belonging to French former President Jacques Chirac. Read more of this post

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FBI continues arrests of Iraqi intelligence operatives in US

December 31, 2008 by 1 Comment

Using Iraqi intelligence documents recovered during the 2003 US invasion, the FBI is continuing its arrests of Iraqi agents on US soil. On December 23, Saubhe Jassim Al-Dellemy, an American citizen of Iraqi origin, pleaded guilty to having “served for more than a decade as an agent of the regime of Saddam Hussein”. FBI documents state that Al-Dellemy exploited the proximity of his Maryland restaurant to the National Security Agency to “gather information about the US government”. On December 24, Mouyad Mahmoud Darwish, a Canadian citizen of Iraqi origin, was arrested while entering the United States from Canada, and charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Iraqi government before, during, and shortly after the US invasion of Iraq. Read more of this post

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UK Home Office to propose outsourcing interception database

December 31, 2008 by Leave a comment

A few months ago, UK Home Office Minister, Jacqui Smith, postponed the proposal of a controversial legislation placing in the hands of private companies a database containing all of the country’s intercepted telephone call and Internet traffic use data. The huge database collects the identity and location of all telephone callers and website visitors in the UK. Smith was eventually forced to abandon the plan, but now says she intends to publish a consultation paper re-introducing it to the public. She enjoys the backing of British law enforcement and intelligence services, who say “it is no longer good enough for communications companies to be left to retrieve such data when requested” to do so. Read more of this post

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Indonesian court clears former spy official of human right activist’s murder

December 31, 2008 by Leave a comment

In 2004, Indonesia’s most renowned human rights activist, Munir Said Thalib, was poisoned during a flight to the Netherlands. He was traveling aboard a plane operated by Garuda, Indonesia’s state carrier, when he consumed arsenic that had been clandestinely dispensed into his in-flight meal. A few months ago, Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, an off-duty Garuda pilot who was sitting next to Mr. Munir during his fatal flight, was given a 20-year prison term for poisoning the activist. During the court case, however, it was revealed that the convicted assassin had engaged in frequent telephone communication with General Muchdi Purwoprandjono, then Deputy Director of Indonesia’s State Intelligence Agency, commonly known as BIN. Read more of this post

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Former US Army engineer admits spying for Israel

December 31, 2008 by Leave a comment

Kadish

Kadish

It was an almost jovial gathering at a US Federal Court in Manhattan, yesterday, when a retired US Army engineer pleaded guilty to charges of passing classified US military documents to Israel. Ben-Ami Kadish, 85, of  Monroe Township, NJ, admitted handing secret technical information on F-15 fighter jets, the Patriot missile, and even on nuclear weapons, to Israel between 1979 and 1985. Last April, after being charged with four counts of conspiracy and espionage, Kadish confessed having worked without compensation for Israeli intelligence and detailed providing the classified documents to Yosef Yagur and Ilan Ravid, who were “science advisers” (probably intelligence agents) at the Israeli Consulate in New York and the Israeli Embassy in Washington, respectively. Mr. Kadish was reportedly extremely pleasant during the hearing and, after declaring that he spied “for the benefit of Israel”, made sure to wish everyone present “a happy New Year”. His lawyer was quick to thank the US government for agreeing “not to oppose or object to a non-jail sentence” and expressed a collective wish that “Mr. Kadish can go on and spend the golden years of his life with his lovely wife, Doris”. Asked about the espionage case, a spokesperson at Israel’s Consulate General dismissively pointed out that “[t]his is an old case which occurred over 25 years ago, and all aspects of it are part of the past”. [IA]

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Israel using cell phones to caution Gazans

December 29, 2008 by Leave a comment

Palestine cell phone

IDF calling

On December 4 we reported that the Israeli intelligence services appeared to be calling thousands of seemingly random telephone subscribers in Syria with automated messages in Arabic, inquiring about missing Israeli soldiers and offering a multimillion dollar reward. It now appears that Israeli agents are again employing cell phones, this time to warn Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip that they may become targets if they live nearby Hamas-affiliated facilities. An article in The Australian reports that an undisclosed number of Gaza residents have been receiving “unusual phone calls” during the past three days, with an automated request in Arabic “that they and their families leave their homes as soon as possible for their own safety”. The male voice is said to identify itself as representing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Read more of this post

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