Comment: What Can the US Do To Stop WikiLeaks?

August 19, 2010 by 4 Comments

Julian Assange

Julian Assange

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Ever since whistleblower site WikiLeaks published 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan, several pundits have urged US government agencies, including the Pentagon, to take action. Late last week, former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen urged the Pentagon to unleash its “cyber capabilities to prevent WikiLeaks from disseminating those materials”. Some columnists have even suggested that US intelligence services should “come up with an up-to-date photo of [WikiLeaks founder Julian] Assange and distribute it to […] SEAL sharpshooters”. Pentagon representatives have also stepped up their rhetoric, warning that “[i]f doing the right thing isn’t good enough for [WikiLeaks], we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing”.

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Germany lets captured Mossad spy suspect return to Israel

August 16, 2010 by 1 Comment

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Al-Mabhouh

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
German authorities have allowed an Israeli intelligence operative suspected of links to an assassination of a Palestinian official to return to Israel, despite outstanding passport forgery charges against him. The operative, whose travel documents identify him as Uri Brodsky, was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4, 2010. An Interpol arrest warrant for Brodsky had been previously issued by German prosecutors, who accuse Brodsky of  helping procure a forged German passport for use by a member of an assassination squad operating under Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The user of the forged passport is believed to have used the travel document to enter Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in mid-January of this year, where he participated in the killing of Palestinian Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons procurer, who was found dead in his luxury Dubai hotel room on January 20. Polish authorities decided to extradite Brodsky to Germany despite intense diplomatic pressure from Israel, who pressed Warsaw and Berlin to allow the operative to return home to Israel without facing charges. But intelligence observers, who were initially impressed with Poland and Germany’s strong stance on the issue, soon realized that Brodsky’s extradition was part of a Polish-German-Israeli deal, under which Brodsky would avoid jail sentence and get away with a minor fine for forging an official German travel document. This is precisely what happened. Read more of this post

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Mossad operative to avoid jail in extradition deal

August 10, 2010 by 6 Comments

Uri Brodsky

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
An operative of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, who was arrested in Poland on charges of forging a German passport, will avoid prison time for the offense, under a suspected Polish-German-Israeli secret deal. The man, whose travel documents identify him as Uri Brodsky, was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4. He is wanted by German prosecutors for procuring a forged German passport for use by a member of a Mossad hit squad, who used it to enter Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in mid-January of this year. The user of the forged passport is thought to have participated in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons procurer, who was found dead in his luxury Dubai hotel room on January 20.  German prosecutors believe that Brodsky, who worked in Germany under the name of Alexander Werin, assisted numerous Mossad operatives acquire forged identity papers of several European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Austria and Switzerland. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #409

August 7, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Probe unearths secrets of Bulgaria’s assassination bureau. Previously unknown details on Service 7, Bulgaria’s Cold War-era assassination bureau, have been unearthed by one of Bulgaria’s leading newspapers, following a probe into 5,000 pages of declassified archives from the country’s former communist intelligence service, the First Directorate of the Committee on State Security.
  • US Pentagon bars troops from reading WikiLeaks. Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks web site, and download detailed information. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents, because “doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks”.
  • Analysis: Chasing Wikileaks. “[W]hatever the imperfections of WikiLeaks as a startup, its emergence points to a real shortcoming within our intelligence community. Secrets can be kept by deterrence –that is, by hunting down the people who leak them […]. But there are other methods: keep far fewer secrets, manage them better –and, perhaps, along the way, become a bit more like WikiLeaks. An official government Web site that would make the implementation of FOIA quicker and more uniform, comprehensive, and accessible”.

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Iran factory blast coincides with reported bomb attack on Ahmadinejad

August 6, 2010 by 3 Comments

Ahmadinejad

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Official Iranian denials of an alleged bomb attack on the life of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday have been followed by reports of a simultaneous attack on a state-of-the-art Iranian petrochemicals complex. Specifically, on August 4, Reuters news agency cited an Iranian “presidential office source” in reporting a strong blast “500 meters from Ahmadinejad’s motorcade”. The blast, which Reuters attributed to either a hand grenade or a homemade explosive device, occurred as the Iranian President was being transported from the regional airport of Hamadan, in western Iran, to the city’s sports complex, where he was scheduled to deliver a speech. Reuters’ unnamed source said the President escaped unhurt, but subsequent reports indicated that several other passengers on the motorcade were injured. Interestingly, President Ahmadinejad’s office initially appeared to confirm the assassination attempt, but soon afterwards official state news agency IRNA attributed the blast on “an excited young man from Hamadan [who] exploded a firecracker in order to express his happiness”. Read more of this post

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CIA killed Chile Army commander, says Pinochet’s spy chief

August 4, 2010 by Leave a comment

Carlos Prats

Carlos Prats

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The convicted former chief of Chile’s intelligence services during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet has accused the CIA of murdering the deposed leader of the Chilean army and former Vice-President of Chile, in 1974. General Carlos Prats González was a close political ally of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was toppled by a CIA-assisted military coup in 1973, led by General Augusto Pinochet. General Prats managed to escape with his family to neighboring Argentina. It was there where, in 1974, he was killed along with his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, in a massive car bomb. A Chilean court has convicted General Manuel Contreras, who headed Pinochet’s feared DINA secret police, for the murder of General Prats and his wife. But Contreras, 81, who has been in prison since 1995, servicing over 100 years for several kidnappings and murders of anti-Pinochet dissidents, now accuses the CIA of the Prats murders. Read more of this post

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US money transfer firms linked to Dubai killing of Hamas official

August 3, 2010 by 1 Comment

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Al-Mabhouh

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Preliminary results of an ongoing international investigation into the January 2010 murder of a senior Hamas official show that US-based money transfer companies were used to finance the killing. The body of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, co-founder of the Palestinian Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, was discovered by staff at Dubai’s luxury Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, where al-Mabhouh was a guest, on January 20, 2010. His murder is widely believed to have been the work of a multi-member hit squad operating under the command of Israeli external intelligence agency Mossad. But, according to American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, the funds used by the Israeli hit squad members during the assassination operation came from fund transfers in the United States. Read more of this post

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Largest leak in US military history reveals Afghan war details

July 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
American, British and German military planners are scrambling to contain the political impact of a massive cache of classified reports from Afghanistan, which has been leaked by an anti-secrecy activist group. It has now become known that, several weeks ago, the group Wikileaks.org handed over a total of 91,731 classified incident and intelligence reports from the US-led occupation force in Afghanistan to American newspaper The New York Times, British broadsheet The Guardian, and German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. All three outlets agreed to examine the material, abiding by Wikileaks’ condition that they would wait until Sunday, July 25, to release it. All three news media published news of the leak almost simultaneously on Sunday night, (see here, here and here), and posted several of the files, which provide an unprecedented six-year archive (from 2004 to 2009) of day-to-day US-led military operations in Afghanistan. This unprecedented disclosure is believed to represent the largest public leak of classified material in US military history. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #398

July 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Britain’s first spy chief ordered Rasputin’s murder. Mansfield Cumming, or ‘C’ as he became known, was the first chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). In December 1916, he sent three agents in Russia to eliminate Grigori Rasputin, an influential Orthodox Russian priest who had a positive view of Germany.
  • Russian spy network moved money to Zimbabwe. A Zimbabwean company called Southern Union is alleged to have been used by exposed Russian spy Anna Chapman in a money smuggling operation involving a syndicate linked to the Robert Mugabe regime.
  • Iran says nuclear scientist gave valuable info on CIA. Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency says that Iranian nuclear scientist Dr. Shahram Amiri, who resurfaced and returned home last week from the United States, after having disappeared during a 2009 religious pilgrimage to Mecca, has provided Iran with “valuable information” on the CIA.

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British government to investigate death of former Mossad agent

July 20, 2010 by Leave a comment

Ashraf Marwan

Ashraf Marwan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In June 2007, Dr. Ashraf Marwan, son-in-law of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, fell to his death from the balcony of his London home. Last week, British authorities initiated a previously announced official investigation into Dr. Marwan’s death, following accusations by his widow, Mona Nasser, that he had been murdered. Undoubtedly, the late Dr. Marwan had plenty of enemies. In 1969 he walked in the Israeli embassy in London and told diplomatic officials that he wished to be employed as an agent for Israeli intelligence. After several interview sessions with Mossad officers, some involving the use of polygraph techniques, the Mossad employed him as an agent. It is said that Dr. Marwan proved invaluable to the Israelis, over a number of years. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #393

July 16, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US warns Turkey against Gaza flotilla probe. London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat claimed on Saturday that US President Barack Obama told Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan that an independent inquiry into the Free Gaza Flotilla massacre “could turn into a double-edged sword” against Ankara.
  • US experts doubt North Korea sunk South Korean ship. A new study by US researchers raises questions about the investigation into the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship, which went down last March, killing 46 sailors. International investigators have blamed a North Korean torpedo, raising tensions on the Korean peninsula.
  • Nixon-Kissinger dialogue raises CIA assassination suspicions. A loaded dialogue between President Richard M. Nixon and his trusted national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, dating from 1971, appears to confirm that the CIA had a role in the 1970 assassination of Chilean army commander-in-chief Rene Schneider.

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Poland to extradite Israeli spy to Germany on lesser charges

July 15, 2010 by 2 Comments

Uri Brodsky

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A judge in Poland has ruled in favor of the extradition to Germany of an Israeli alleged spy, wanted by Interpol in connection with the assassination of a Hamas official last January. The court ruling stipulates that Israeli citizen Uri Brodsky, who was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4, is to be extradited to Germany, where he will face charges of forgery. Authorities in Berlin accuse Brodsky of having helped an assassination team working for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to acquire a forged German passport, used by an assassination team member to travel in and out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. While there, the Israeli assassins are thought to have killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a weapons procurer for Palestinian group Hamas, who was in Dubai on a business trip. Shortly after Brodsky’s arrest in Warsaw, Poland and Berlin came under intense pressure from Israel to ignore the Interpol arrest warrant for the alleged Israeli spy, drop all charges, and allow him to flee to Israel. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #392

July 14, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Soviet spy stood ready to poison DC’s water, says Ex-KGB general. A Soviet deep-cover agent, who was in the United States from around 1963 to 1965, had orders to poison Washington DC’s water and to sabotage its power supply if war with the United States became imminent, according to Oleg Kalugin, former chief of KGB operations in North America.
  • Two interesting interviews. George Kenney, of Electric Politics, has aired two interesting interviews, one with Dr. Thomas Fingar, former US Deputy Director of National Intelligence, touching on a variety of issues, and one with Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, who comments on the CIA drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
  • Lawyers who won NSA spy case want $2.63 million. Eight lawyers, who managed to prove that Saudi charity al-Haramain was illegally wiretapped by the US National Security Agency (see here for previous intelNews coverage), are demanding millions of dollars in damages from the US government.

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News you may have missed #387

July 6, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Blackwater to ‘abandon US government market’. Erik Prince, occasional CIA operative and CEO of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, has said in an interview that he is tired of Congressional oversight regulations and plans to abandon US government business forever. Meanwhile, there are reports that Xe has just won a $100 million contract to guard CIA facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
  • Congress won’t back down on CIA oversight battle. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is battling a veto threat by US President Barack Obama, as well as against the CIA and powerful House and Senate Democrats and Republicans, over Congressional oversight of US intelligence services.
  • Mossad chief to step down after eight years. Mossad Director Meir Dagan’s request to extend his term by another year has been denied, and he will step down in three months’ time, according to Israeli media reports. The chief of Dubai Police, which exposed a January 2010 Mossad assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, said Dagan’s ousting is related to the botched operation.

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Austrian probe finds Chechen president behind Vienna killing

July 5, 2010 by 1 Comment

Ramzan Kadyrov

Ramzan Kadyrov

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A report by Austrian government officials has found that the Moscow-appointed President of Chechnya ordered the 2009 assassination in Vienna of a Chechen dissident, who had been given political asylum by Austrian authorities. In 2009, Umar Israilov, who was once a bodyguard of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, alleged in Vienna and in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that Kadyrov had “personally participated in the torture of detainees”. But on January 13, 2009, Israilov was shot dead by two men in broad daylight outside a grocery store located less than two miles from Vienna’s historic city center. Now the Vienna Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism has said in a detailed report that Israilov’s murder was a political assassination ordered personally by Chechen President Kadyrov, who is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Read more of this post

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