News you may have missed #612 (analysis edition)

October 18, 2011 by 1 Comment

Cevat Ones

Cevat Ones

►►What is a senior CIA clandestine officer doing at NYPD? Three months ago, one of the CIA’s most experienced clandestine operatives started work inside the New York Police Department. His title is special assistant to the deputy commissioner of intelligence. On that much, everyone agrees. Exactly what he’s doing there, however, is much less clear.
►►Iranian plot shows even super spies have bad days. The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States may have revealed the biggest secret of all –intelligence agencies mess up and do not always live up to the James Bond ideal.
►►Former spy makes plea for peace in Turkey. Cevat Ones, former deputy chief of MİT, Turkey’s leading spy agency, speaks candidly to Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper about the state of Turkey’s internal security and foreign policy.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #611

October 14, 2011 by Leave a comment

Kalevi Sorsa

Kalevi Sorsa

►►Diplomat says Finland’s ex-prime minister was Stasi agent. Finnish former diplomat Alpo Rusi said last week that Kalevi Sorsa, Finland’s longest serving prime minister, who led the country in the 1970s and 1980s, is on a secret list of 18 high-profile Finns with links to the Stasi, East Germany’s Cold-War security service. West German intelligence handed the file to its Finnish counterpart in 1990, but the Finnish Supreme Court ruled last year that the list would not be made public.
►►Nazi criminal spied for West Germany. A wiretap operation conducted in the early 1960s by the CIA against the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, revealed that the BND employed a senior Nazi war criminal, Franz Rademacher, to spy for it in Syria, CIA records show.
►►US government aims to build ‘data eye in the sky’. Social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet — Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cell phones to “predict the future”.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #609

October 13, 2011 by Leave a comment

Ilan Grapel

Ilan Grapel

►►Questions over Chinese spy hang over Putin visit. The arrest of a Chinese spy in Moscow has cast a cloud over Vladimir Putin’s two-day visit to Beijing. Tong Shengyong was arrested last October for allegedly trying to buy plans to the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. But perplexingly, the news of his arrest only emerged last week, in what appears to have been a deliberate leak by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
►►Egypt steps up charges against suspected Israel spy. Egypt’s State Security Prosecutor has added additional criminal offenses against alleged Israeli spy Ilan Grapel. Meanwhile, there are indications that Egypt seeks the release of 78 Egyptian prisoners held in Israeli jails in return for Grapel. Israel may agree with the proposal.
►►CIA to be last out of Afghanistan. US Special Forces and the CIA are girding for the moment when Afghanistan’s security rests once again with them, working together with Afghan forces against the Taliban. Recent remarks from the White House suggest the CIA and special operations forces will be hunting al-Qaida and working with local forces long after most US troops have left.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #608 (analysis edition)

October 11, 2011 by 1 Comment

Anwar al-Aulaki

Anwar al-Aulaqi

►►Spying on the United Nations. “Here is one of the well-known but seldom spoken truths about the United Nations: The international organization, which was founded in the name of peace and security, is also a hotbed of spying and clandestine operations, where someone might very well be listening to your conversations and monitoring your emails —-or perhaps reading your speeches in advance […]. The CIA is prohibited from domestic intelligence-gathering but, since the United Nations is considered foreign soil, it is authorized to run covert actions there”.
►►Secret panel can put Americans on ‘kill list’. American militants like Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month, are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior US government officials, which then informs the President of its decisions, according to officials. There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council.
►►Blowback from CIA’s bin Laden vaccination ruse gets worse. If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: the fake vaccination program that the CIA set up before the Osama bin Laden raid really went awry. Not only did this plan not work –no bin Laden family DNA was obtained– but it also hobbled polio immunization drives and forced Save the Children to evacuate staffers from Pakistan out of fear of a backlash.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #607

October 10, 2011 by Leave a comment

Shakil Afridi

Shakil Afridi

►►Ex-worker sues US spy agency for anti-Islamic bias. Mahmoud Hegab, a former employee of the super-secretive US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, says he lost his security clearance because his wife attended an Islamic school and worked for a Muslim charity, Alexandria-based Islamic Relief USA.
►►Russia says China still spies the old-fashioned way. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), issued a rare statement last week, claiming it had arrested Tong Shengyong, a Chinese citizen who, posing as a translator for official delegations, was working under the direction of the Chinese government in an attempt to buy state secrets from Russians about Russia’s S-300 missile system. It now says that the Tong case shows that China continues to employ an old standby in the tradecraft playbook: outright bribery.
►►Pakistan panel says doctor who aided CIA should face charges. Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi, who ran a vaccination program for the CIA to help track down Osama bin Laden, should be put on trial for high treason, a Paksitani government commission said Thursday.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Computer virus found on CIA’s Predator drone remote-control system

October 10, 2011 by 2 Comments

Predator drone

Predator drone

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The remote control cockpits of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Predator drones have been infected by a potentially disastrous computer virus, which surreptitiously records every keystroke made by the pilots. Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, which aired the exclusive report, said that the virus was discovered by the US Pentagon’s network security specialists less than two weeks ago. It also said that the virus has successfully resisted “multiple efforts” to remove it from the computers that guide the remote-controlled missions of the Agency’s unmanned drones. The blog cited a Pentagon computer specialist, who claims that he and his network security team “keep wiping it off and it keeps coming back”. The specialist also said that it is unclear at the present stage whether the computer virus is malicious or benign, in terms of its security implications. It also remains unknown whether the virus was introduced to the system intentionally or by accident, and how far it has spread into the system. It has been confirmed that the primary task of the virus is keylogging —recording all keystrokes made by users. But nobody at the Pentagon seems to know what happens to the keylogged data —that is, whether it remains within the Predator drone computer system, or whether it is clandestinely transmitted to individuals located outside the US military’s chain of command. The Wired report notes that there have been no reports of incidents relating to compromised information as a result of the keylogging virus. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #606

October 7, 2011 by Leave a comment

Gaza Freedom Flotilla raid

2010 Flotilla raid

►►N. Korea planned to trade nukes for full ties with US. North Korea in 2008 indicated it would retain its nuclear bombs until the end of the six-party talks as a final bargaining chip for attaining full diplomatic relations with the United States, according to US diplomatic cables leaked recently by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
►►Judge refuses to sanction CIA for destroying torture tapes. A federal judge won’t hold the CIA in contempt for destroying videotapes of detainee interrogations that included the use of a torture technique known as waterboarding, ruling instead that the spy agency merely committed “transgressions” for its failure to abide by his court order. The Obama administration has kept its promise to the CIA.
►►Turkey says NATO members will not share intelligence with Israel. Turkey has says it is certain that NATO member states will keep their promise of not sharing the Alliance’s intelligence within with Israel. Turkish-Israeli relations badly damaged last year, after Israeli naval commandos stormed a Turkish ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza to breach the naval blockade, killing nine Turkish civilians.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #604 (CIA edition)

October 5, 2011 by Leave a comment

Raymond Allen Davis

Raymond Davis

►►Aid agency leaves Pakistan following CIA vaccination scheme. Fears that a fake CIA vaccination scheme, created to hunt Osama bin Laden, has compromised the operations of aid agencies in Pakistan have intensified, after it emerged that Save the Children, a major NGO, was forced to evacuate its staff following warnings about their security.
►►CIA contractor arrested in car park brawl. A CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who was freed by Pakistani authorities after the families of two men he killed in a shootout agreed to accept more than $2.34 million in blood money, has been arrested after a brawl over a car parking space, according to police in the US state of Colorado.
►►Judge approves secret evidence for CIA leak trial. A federal judge has ruled that prosecutors pursuing a leak case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling may use a controversial procedure known as the “silent witness rule” to present evidence to the jury that will not be seen by the public. Sterling is accused of leaking CIA secrets to New York Times journalist James Risen.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #601 (CIA edition)

September 30, 2011 by Leave a comment

Tony Mendez

Tony Mendez in 1990

►►CIA invests in information technology. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s technology investment group, is backing NetBase, which develops semantic search technology, as well as Connectify, which develops VPN software. In-Q-Tel’s role is to back commercial technologies that have the potential to aid intelligence and national security operations if developed further.
►►Interview with CIA disguise experts. The Washington Times has an interesting, lengthy interview with Tony and Joanna Mendez, both retired CIA disguise specialists. The two worked in the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, helping develop and deploy espionage gadgets –including a low-light camera that was used during the first moon landing and miniature lithium batteries that were the predecessors of the batteries used in modern portable electronics.
►►US government fights to keep Osama bin Laden death photos secret. Photographs and videos of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after he was killed in May in a US military/Central Intelligence Agency raid in Pakistan should not be released publicly. The reason, according ot the Obama administration, is because they would reveal military and intelligence secrets and could lead to violence against US personnel. This was argued by the administration’s lawyers in federal court in Washington on Monday.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #599

September 28, 2011 by 1 Comment

Erwin Rommel

Erwin Rommel

►►SAS planned to kill Nazi Field Marshal Rommel. The veil of secrecy surrounding Britain’s SAS special forces unit has been partially lifted to allow the publication of a new book detailing daring attacks behind Nazi lines in the Second World War. The book features an order for an ambitious but unsuccessful mission to kill or kidnap Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel just after D-Day in 1944.
►►CIA says global-warming intelligence is ‘classified’. Two years ago, the US Central Intelligence Agency announced it was creating a center to analyze the geopolitical ramifications of “phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources”. But whatever work the Center on Climate Change and National Security has done remains secret.
►►Japan sends new spy satellite into orbit. Japan at present has a total of three information-gathering satellites in orbit. All three are optical, which means they are able to capture images in broad daylight and in clear weather. The new spy satellite is said to replace one which is almost at the end of its useful life. The country is also planning to launch in two years time, radar satellites which can capture objects at night and in cloudy weather.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #598 (US edition)

September 27, 2011 by Leave a comment

Brian Kelley

Brian Kelley

►►CIA officer wrongly accused of being KGB mole dies. CIA officer Brian J. Kelley, who was falsely accused by his own agency, as well as by the FBI, of supplying covert information to Moscow, has died at the age of 68. The real mole, the FBI agent-turned-spy Robert P. Hanssen, was apprehended in 2001, but not before Mr Kelley had been followed, interrogated, suspended and told that he might well be charged with a capital offense.
►►NSA working on secure smartphone technology. Troy Lange,  mobility mission manager at the US National Security Agency, says he is developing a secure smartphone that can be used to access classified information and apps while on the move. He is working on a pilot project using a smartphone that looks like any bought in stores but with security configurations to allow top-secret communication.
►►Kabul attack kills CIA contractor. An Afghan working for the US government killed a CIA contractor and wounded another American in an attack on the intelligence agency’s office in Kabul, making it the latest in a series of high-profile attacks this month on US targets. An anonymous US official in Washington said the Afghan attacker was providing security to the CIA office and that the American who died was working as a contractor for the CIA.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Analysis: Ex-CIA WMD director warns of ‘morphed’ Islamist groups

September 26, 2011 by Leave a comment

Charles S. Faddis

Charles S. Faddis

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In recent months, the heads of the United States Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have opined that the United States may be close to “strategically defeating al-Qaeda”. These were the words used by former CIA Director and current Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta in July, to describe the current state of Washington’s ‘war on terrorism’. Shortly afterwards, General David Petraeus, who replaced Panetta at the helm of the CIA, echoed his predecessor, arguing that the situation following the death of Osama bin Laden “hold[s] the prospect of a strategic defeat […], a strategic dismantling, of al-Qaeda”. But do such optimistic projections correspond to reality on the ground? In a new column for Homeland Security Today, former CIA operations officer Charles S. Faddis, who retired from the Agency in 2008 as the chief of its weapons of mass destruction counterterrorism unit, agrees that al-Qaeda has been “severely battered” in the ten years since 9/11. But he warns that, while America insists of engaging in “large-scale conventional military operations” in Afghanistan, and essentially “a strategic bombing campaign” in Pakistan, a new generation of terrorist groups appears to have “shifted, morphed and evolved”. In light of this reality, the recent comments by Panetta and Petreaus may suggest “the possibility of a loss of focus” in American counterterrorist operations, says Faddis. The former CIA covert operations officer, who has written several books since his retirement, goes on to discuss the rapid rise of several ethnic or regional militant Islamist groups, including Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The organization made macabre headlines earlier this month, when it launched a massive suicide attack against a United Nations office complex in the Nigerian city of Abuja, killing and injuring over 100 people. He also mentions the Islamic State of Iraq, a notorious outfit whose most recent strikes display an operational sophistication that often surpasses that of Boko Haram’s. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #597

September 24, 2011 by Leave a comment

Abdel Hakim Belhaj

Abdel Belhaj

►►Inside the CIA’s secret Thai prison. The United States Central Intelligence Agency appears to have used Bangkok’s former Don Muang International Airport as a secret prison to torture Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who is now the commander of rebel Libyan military forces in Tripoli. If true, Belhaj’s allegations are the first public descriptions of a CIA black site in Thailand. Bangkok-based journalist Richard S Ehrlich investigates.
►►How is the US government using security contractors? “Mark Lowenthal, who was a high-ranking CIA official before joining the contractor work force, told the [US House Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee] that during his time as assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production, half of his staff was made up of contractors”.
►►Leaked cables show Australia nuclear power push. In 2008, John Carlson, head of the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office, which acts as the country’s nuclear safeguard authority, advised the then prime minister Kevin Rudd that no scheme to limit carbon emissions would succeed without the building of civilian nuclear power stations, according to leaked US diplomatic cables. When contacted by the media, Carlson refused to confirm or deny the accuracy of the revelations.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Declassified documents reveal US-Libyan spy war in Malta

September 15, 2011 by 1 Comment

Libya and Malta

Libya and Malta

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A batch of declassified CIA reports from the late 1980s point to the Mediterranean island-nation of Malta as a major battlefield between American and Libyan intelligence operatives. According to the reports, which date from between 1988 and 1991, Malta served as a “primary launching point” for Libyan intelligence and paramilitary units on their way to Germany, Britain, and other countries in Western Europe. Most of the reports, which number over 250 pages in total, contain intelligence from a CIA informant named Abdul Majid Giaka. Referred to as “P/1” in the CIA documents, Giaka was a Libyan employee of Libyan Arab Airlines stationed in Malta. In 1988, however, he walked in the American embassy in the Maltese capital Valetta, and offered to work as an agent-in-place for the CIA. In exchange for his services, he requested regular financial compensation, as well as a promise of eventual relocation to the United States for him and his Maltese wife. Eventually, the intelligence collected by Giaka formed a major component of the prosecution’s case in the Lockerbie bombing court hearings. Giaka’s testimony directly led to the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, who was released from a British prison in August of 2009 on compassionate grounds and is now in Tripoli. The declassified documents show that, in return for Giaka’s services, the CIA arranged a fake surgery for him in 1989, in order to help him secure an exemption from serving in the Libyan armed forces. The CIA’s initial assessment of Giaka was that he was dependable “intelligent, serious and fairly well composed”. Later, however, Giaka’s CIA handlers began questioning his commitment after he started appearing with new information only when in need of money. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Covert war in Somalia involves CIA, European mercenaries

September 14, 2011 by 1 Comment

Richard Rouget

Richard Rouget

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Regular readers of this blog will remember Jeremy Scahill’s report in The Nation last July, about the US Central Intelligence Agency’s expanding operations in Somalia. Since the 2006 US-led Ethiopian invasion, the Western-backed Somali government has been engaged in a brutal war with al-Shabaab, the youth wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which ruled most of the country in the years after 9/11. Scahill revealed that the CIA maintains a growing security complex in the country, located right behind Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport. The complex allegedly contains over a dozen buildings, as well as several metal hangars, which house CIA aircraft. Now a new report by United Press International claims that the clandestine American campaign in the horn of Africa “appears to be growing daily”, and that the CIA complex contains a prison for renditioned militant suspects. The latter are routinely interrogated by members of a Mogadishu-based CIA team consisting of approximately 30 case officers, analysts, linguists, and others. The UPI article suggests that the growing CIA presence in the Somali capital is part of a wider expansion of America’s counter-terrorist campaign in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, the instances when CIA personnel venture outside Mogadishu are few and far between. For this purpose, the Somali government is using American financial aid to hire European private security firms, including Bancroft Global Development, a combat consulting group with a growing presence in Mogadishu. Bancroft’s 40-member team consists of Scandinavian, South African, and French former special forces members, including Richard Rouget (also known as ‘Colonel Sanders’), a former officer in the French Army who has recent combat experience in several African countries. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →