News you may have missed #907
June 21, 2020 1 Comment
• Pakistan releases two Indian diplomats. Pakistan has released two employees of rival India’s embassy in Islamabad after briefly detaining them in connection with a hit-and-run road accident in the capital. A city police report noted the Indian officials were taken into custody on Monday morning after their “reckless driving” injured a pedestrian. The Indian External Affairs Ministry on Monday summoned the deputy chief of the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi to protest the detention of its officials and demanded their immediate release. Pakistani authorities familiar with the incident argued the detainees were released to the Indian High Commission in Islamabad within hours because they held diplomatic immunity.
• As US intelligence community returns to work, employees confront new anxieties. More US federal employees and contractors in the intelligence community have been gradually returning to their office spaces in the past two weeks. But for IC leadership, “reopening” isn’t only about rearranging office spaces and cobbling together cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer, it’s also about easing the concerns of their employees and contractors who are uneasy or nervous to return to the physical workplace.
• Belgian police officer convicted of spying for terrorist network. A police officer in Brussels has been jailed for four years after prosecutors found he had acted as an informant for the brother of a man seen as the mastermind of the Brussels and Paris attacks. The 53-year-old officer with the Brussels North police zone was sentenced to 50 months imprisonment, his lawyers confirmed on Friday.
• Turkish court jails US consulate employee for terrorism offenses. A Turkish employee of the US consulate in Istanbul has been 
The director of America’s largest spy agency claims in a signed affidavit that a forthcoming book by John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, would critically compromise intelligence secrets if published. Bolton served in that capacity from April 2018 until September 2019. His memoir of his time as President Trump’s national security advisor, titled 
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered what is believed to be the first-ever case of hackers using LinkedIn to infect the computers of targeted users with viruses, according to a new report. The hackers appear to have been sponsored by government and to have targeted employees of carefully selected military contractors in central Europe, according to sources.
Complacency and substandard security by the United States Central Intelligence Agency were behind the Vault 7 leak of 2017, which ranks as the greatest data loss in the agency’s history, according to an internal report. The Vault 7 data loss was particularly shocking, given that the CIA should have taken precautions following numerous leaks of classified government information in years prior to 2017, according to the report.
Russian prosecutors have accused one of the country’s most respected hydroacoustics specialists, and globally recognized expert on the Arctic region, of spying for Chinese intelligence. This development highlights the competitive relationship between the two neighboring countries, who in recent years have tended to work together against what they perceive as a common threat coming from the United States.
Researchers at a university in Israel claim to have discovered a new low-tech eavesdropping technique, which relies on sound vibrations on the glass surface of light bulbs and requires equipment costing less than $1,000. The researchers claim that the technique, which they call “lamphone”, enables eavesdroppers to intercept, in real time, audible conversations from a room located hundreds of feet away, simply by recording the vibrations that sounds create on the glass surface of a common light bulb present in the room.
• French forces kill al-Qaeda head and capture ISIS leader in Mali. In the past few days, the French military 
• UN report says Afghan Taliban still maintain ties with al-Qaida. The Taliban in Afghanistan still maintain close ties with the al-Qaida terror network, despite signing a peace deal with the United States in which they committed to fight militant groups, a UN 
A court in Austria has found a retired Army colonel guilty of providing classified military information to Russia, following a closed-door trial. Interestingly, the alleged spy’s name has not been made public. Some Austrian media have been referring to him as “Martin M.”.
Members of neo-Nazi groups in Germany attended paramilitary training camps in Russia, which were organized by a group that the United States has designated a global terrorist organization, but which the Russian government has not banned. If true, these claims add further credence to the view that Russian far-right groups are becoming increasingly central in the worldwide network of racially motivated radical organizations.
Moscow has reacted angrily to the Czech government’s decision to expel two Russian diplomats from the country, in response to allegations that the Kremlin plotted to assassinate three outspoken Czech politicians using a deadly poison. Russian officials pledged to respond in kind to Prague’s “indecent and unworthy deed”.
The United States Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon organization tasked with collecting foreign military secrets, has rejected reports that it is spying on protestors inside the country. However, it confirmed that it has set up an “internal coordination group” to respond to “requests for information” by the Department of Defense. This development follows reports that some DIA employees communicated their concerns about being asked to spy domestically to the organization’s director last week.
• State-level espionage on EU a ‘very high threat’ says report. The most successful attempts of espionage at a top EU institution are state sponsored, according to an 
intelNews.org 
Analysis: A look at the CIA’s half-century-old ‘disease intelligence’ program
June 22, 2020 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
The article was published in the declassified edition of Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s in-house research publication. Written by Warren F. Carey and Myles Maxfield, the article appeared [.pdf] in the spring 1972 issue of the journal, and is titled “Intelligence Implications of Disease”. It discusses the 1966 outbreak of meningitis in China’s Guangdong Province, which prompted the CIA to begin tracking diseases in a systematic way. The outbreak first appeared in the city that is today known as Guangzhou, and within weeks it had resulted in a military takeover of the Chinese healthcare system. The latter collapsed in places, and prompted the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (known today as the Directorate of Science and Technology) to begin collecting data in order to assess the political fallout of the disease.
The article states that the CIA cryptonym for the disease was Project IMPACT. Its scope was limited, but it expanded 1968, when the world health community began to issue alerts about the so-called Hong Kong flu. Known officially as Hong Kong/A2/68, the virus spread around the world in a few months, and is believed to have killed between 1 and 4 million people, including around 100,000 Americans. At that time, according to the article in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s Project IMPACT “went global”, and was combined with BLACKFLAG, an ongoing effort by the Agency to “computerize disease information and derive trends, cycles and predictions” on a global scale.
Project BLACKFLAG tracked the spread of the disease in the Soviet Union and in North Vietnam, and issued regular analyses of the political ramification of the epidemic. That was not easy, say the authors, given the fact that most nations of the communist bloc tried to conceal information about it. The CIA was also able to issue warnings to its teams of operatives abroad, instructing them to shield themselves from the flu as it spread around East Asia and, eventually, the world.
According the authors, the CIA’s early disease intelligence projects were able to demonstrate that data aggregation was critical in helping monitor and forecast outbreaks. It also showed that these such forecasts could have “an initiating and vital role” in political, military and economic intelligence. Today, says Ferran, the CIA’s disease intelligence program has the same twofold mission it had when it was first conceived: first, to collect intelligence about the actual extent of the spread of diseases abroad —which may differ from the official information provided by foreign governments; and second, to try to forecast the consequences of these trends for American interests in the regions impacted by an ongoing epidemic or pandemic.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 22 June 2020 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, disease intelligence, history, Myles Maxfield, News, Project BLACKFLAG, Project IMPACT, Studies in Intelligence, Warren F. Carey