Floor plans of MI6 headquarters in London ‘temporarily lost’ by contractor
December 30, 2019 2 Comments
The floor plans of the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence agency, were temporarily lost by a contractor, an incident that led to a temporary lockdown of the building and the termination of the contract, according to media reports. The alleged incident took place at 85 Albert Embankment, a distinctive-looking building that has served since 1994 as the headquarters of MI6 —known officially as the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS. The imposing structure is located on the bank of the River Thames alongside Vauxhall Bridge in downtown London.
Up until a few weeks ago, sections of the building were reportedly being refurbished by Balfour Beatty, a multinational construction services company based in London. Balfour Beatty employs over 25,000 workers worldwide and is known as a major British government contractor. According to reports, the company produced several floor plans of the sections of the MI6 headquarters that it had been hired to refurbish. The floor plans were kept in a secure location inside the MI6 building, and were accessible only to cleared Balfour Beatty employees.
A few weeks ago, however, over 100 pages of floor plans went missing, according to the British tabloid The Sun, which first reported the story. The alleged incident prompted a lockdown of the building, said the paper, even though the missing papers were not technically classified. They did, however, contain sensitive information about the layout of the MI6 headquarters, including information about entry and exit points, security features, and other potentially sensitive details.
After a while, “many” of the missing documents were found inside the building, said The Sun. The BBC’s security correspondent Gordon Corera said later that “[m]ost, but not all, of the documents were recovered” inside the building. It was eventually determined that the papers had gone missing due to “carelessness, rather than any hostile activity”, said The Sun, and the Balfour Beatty workers were allowed to leave the building. However, the company has reportedly been removed from the project as a result of what The Sun described as a “shocking security gaffe”.
The Sun and the BBC reached out to Balfour Beatty for comment, but were told that the company could not comment on sensitive matters involving government projects. The British Foreign Office also said that it did not comment on matters involving intelligence.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 30 December 2019 | Permalink
The Islamic State has regrouped, rearmed and refinanced itself, and its forces are now actively patrolling nearly all of northern Iraq, according to a senior intelligence official in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. The Islamic State, which is also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), used to control territory in the Levant that equaled the size of Germany. But its forces were pushed back by an international coalition of state armies and militias, a development that prompted several heads of governments, including United States President Donald Trump, to announce that ISIS had been defeated.
The intelligence service of Russia has openly honored two British members of the so-called Cambridge Five spy ring, who caused great controversy during the Cold War by defecting to Moscow. The intelligence services of the Soviet Union recruited five Enlishmen, H.A.R. ‘Kim’ Philby, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, as well as an unnamed fifth person, to spy for them in the 1930s. All five were recruited while they were promising young students at Britain’s elite Cambridge University, and entered the diplomatic and security services in order to supply Moscow with classified information about Britain and its allies.
The son of a Russian couple, who fraudulently acquired Canadian citizenship before being arrested for espionage in the United States, has won the right to keep his Canadian citizenship, which was effectively annulled when his parents were found to be Russian spies.
Credit Suisse, one of the world’s most powerful banking firms, says it has opened an investigation into claims that it paid private investigators to spy at individuals, just two months after a similar scandal involving espionage and surveillance rocked the company.
The German government has announced plans to hire hundreds of new police and intelligence officers, in order to step up its monitoring of violent far-right groups in the country. The announcement came at a press conference hosted on Tuesday in Berlin by Horst Seehofer, Germany’s Interior Minister.
Last Thursday Danish authorities arrested 22 terrorism suspects in early morning raids across the country. Reports from Israel suggest that the raids were carried out following a tip from Israeli intelligence. The 22 suspects include men and women. Danish police said they were involved in the final stages of a plot to carry out attacks “in Denmark or abroad”, but have provided no specific information, except to say that the attacks were “thwarted” while they were well underway.
The United States quietly expelled two Chinese diplomats in October of this year, a move that neither Washington nor Beijing chose to make public, according to a report published on Sunday. If true, the incident would signify the first known expulsions of Chinese diplomatic personnel from the US since 1987.
A court in Frankfurt has found a married couple guilty of spying in Germany on behalf of India’s external intelligence service. Due to Germany’s strict privacy laws, the couple have been identified only as 50-year-old Manmohan S. and his wife, Kanwal Jit K., who is 51.
One of Belgium’s leading universities has decided to shut down a research institute funded by the Chinese government, after the Belgian intelligence service accused its director of spying on behalf of Beijing. The news was 
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said his country is prepared to deploy troops to Libya, just days after Ankara surprised analysts by announcing an agreement with the embattled Libyan government in Tripoli. The Turkish-Libyan agreement has spurred angry reactions from Israel, Greece and Egypt, all of which are 
Victor Ivanovich Sheymov, who is often referred to as one of the most important intelligence defectors of the Cold War, has reportedly died in the American state of Virginia. He was one of the most senior officials in the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (KGB) to ever defect to the West, and revealed important KGB secrets to the United States.
An unprecedented closed-door trial of a man identified only as “Witness J”, who was convicted earlier this year of a crime that cannot be revealed, has raised questions about the relationship between security and the law in Australia. The man, who is also known as “Prisoner 123458”, was sentenced to a jail sentence in February of this year. His sentencing came following a closed-door hearing, which was 
A court in Estonia has ordered the release of a former senior defense official who spied on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for Russia, causing what experts 
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Year in review: The biggest spy-related stories of 2019, part I
December 31, 2019 by intelNews Leave a comment
10. Germany’s BND now boasts the world’s largest spy headquarters. In February, German Chancellor Angela Merkel inaugurated the Zentrale des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, which is the new headquarters of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). The BND, which operates as Germany’s foreign-intelligence service, is now believed to be the owner of the largest headquarters of any spy agency in the world. Interestingly, the German spy agency employs fewer than 7,000 employees, which is only a fraction of the employees employed by the BND’s American, Russian or Chinese equivalents. Some analysts have interpreted this development as part of Germany’s attempt to reassert itself as a major player in the global security landscape, especially following the election of US President Donald Trump, whom Berlin views as being disinterested in European security. During her inauguration speech, Chancellor Merkel said that the world was becoming “increasingly confusing”, which made the need for a “strong and efficient [German] foreign intelligence service […] more urgent than ever”. Interestingly, the new complex features a sizeable visitor’s center that is open to the public, making the BND the world’s first foreign intelligence agency with a public-access visitors’ facility.
09. Israel extends intelligence document classification period to 90 years. Israel, home of one of the world’s most active intelligence communities, augmented the secrecy of its espionage apparatus by raising the classification period of official intelligence documents to 90 years. Until the end of last January, government documents produced by Israel’s spy agencies, such as its external spy organization, the Mossad, or its domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, could remain hidden from public view for up to 70 years. In 2018, Israel’s Supreme Council of Archives, a body within the Israel State Archives that advises the Office of the Prime Minister on matters of classification, recommended against extending the classification period by more than five years. But in early 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the recommendation and managed to pass an amendment to the classification regulations, which will keep documents secret for 90 years from now on. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which published news of the amended regulation, said that documents from 1949, the year that the Shin Bet and the Mossad were founded, would normally have been published this year. But now they will remain hidden from public view until 2039. Documents relating to more recent cases will not be released until 2100.
08. The CIA kept a secret communication channel with North Korea for 10 years. The overtures made in recent years by US President Donald Trump to North Korea surprised many —but probably not the United States Central Intelligence Agency. In an article published in July, The Wall Street Journal claimed that an intelligence channel between the CIA and North Korean intelligence officials has been active for at least a decade. The previously unreported channel has led to a number of public meetings, such as the 2014 visit to Pyongyang by James Clapper, the then US Director of National Intelligence, as well as an earlier visit to the North Korean capital by former US President Bill Clinton in 2009. However, most of the contacts have been secret. They include several visits to North Korea by CIA official Joseph DeTrani before and after Clinton’s visit, as well as two trips to Pyongyang by CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, in 2012 and 2013. His successor, Avril Haines, also visited North Korea, said The Journal, but noted that the channel went “dormant late in the Obama administration”. Upon becoming CIA director following the election of Trump to the presidency, Mike Pompeo was briefed about the secret channel’s existence and decided to resume it, with Trump’s agreement. That led to his eventual visit to North Korea along with Andrew Kim, who at the time headed the CIA’s Korea Mission Center. Eventually, this channel of communication facilitated the high-level summit between Trump and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un in June 2018 in Singapore.
This is part one in a three-part series; Part two is here. Part three is available here.
► Author: J. Fitsanakis and I. Allen | Date: 31 December 2019 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with year in review