Revealed: Afghan government at war with ‘CIA vigilante group’
November 17, 2011 1 Comment
Afghanistan
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Very little has been written about the Kandahar Strike Force, a controversial CIA-funded vigilante group operating in Afghanistan’s Kandahar, Zabul and Uruzgan provinces. In 2009, The New York Times reported that the late Ahmed Wali Karzai, notorious drug lord and younger brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, helped the CIA run the group. But ever since Wali Karzai’s assassination, in July of this year, the CIA-operated group appears to be engaged in a brutal war, not with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but with provisional Afghan authorities. The Christian Science monitor spoke to the former leader of the Kandahar Strike Force, Atal Afghanzai, who is currently in prison, having been convicted of shooting dead a senior Afghan police commander in broad daylight. The group is made up of elite members of Afghanistan’s regular army, selected by CIA case officers and trained by US Special Forces personnel in Kandahar’s Camp Gecko, a former al-Qaeda base built by Osama bin Laden’s forces in 1996. The group operates outside the institutional parameters of the Afghan government, and answers directly to the CIA, says The Monitor, which claims to have corroborated this information with “US diplomats, other Western officials, and Afghan authorities”. The group’s imprisoned former leader told the newspaper that he and his men were paid directly by the CIA, and that they were transported by United States Blackhawk helicopters to various locations around the country, where they were expected to conduct “raids on Taliban targets at a moment’s notice”. Afghanzai claims that the group’s operations were so effective that they received letters of appreciation by no other than Hamid Karzai. But the idyllic relationship between the Kandahar Strike Force and the Afghan government appears to have ended, as members of the group are now accused of “extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, and larceny”. Read more of this post
intelNews.org 
Hezbollah uncovered CIA network in Lebanon, admit US officials
November 22, 2011 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
Hezbollah rally
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In June of this year, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah claimed it had rooted out three of its members who were allegedly spying for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The US State Department refused to comment on the allegations, and the US embassy in Lebanon issued a statement denying Hezbollah’s accusation. But the Associated Press now says that the Lebanese Shiite group’s claims were accurate, and that the CIA has had to significantly scale back its operations in Lebanon, as a result of Hezbollah’s counterintelligence success. The news agency cites current and former US officials, who say that the Agency’s operations in Lebanon were “badly damaged” after Hezbollah identified and captured several CIA ‘assets’. It appears that the militant group, which controls large parts of southern Lebanon, was able to capture CIA agents —local ‘assets’ recruited by CIA case officers to spy on behalf of Washington— but not actual CIA officers. Still, according to the Associated Press, the operational blow suffered by the Agency’s station in the Near Eastern country has been substantial, and local CIA case officers “have secretly been scrambling to protect their remaining spies […] before Hezbollah can find them”. The agency quotes an unnamed government source, who claims that the damage to the CIA’s network of agents in Lebanon has been “greater than usual”. Many attribute the Shiite group’s counterintelligence success to a relatively new counterespionage apparatus, which Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Hasrallah often calls the “spy combat unit”. The group, which is said to have gone operational in 2004, is responsible for essentially decimating Israel’s intelligence network in southern Lebanon, having conducted over 100 arrests since 2009. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, counterintelligence, Hezbollah, Lebanon, News, United States