CIA scores Washington Post charm offensive

April 27, 2010 by 1 Comment

CIA HQ

CIA HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
For an agency whose very future is routinely questioned by former employees, the CIA has been getting plenty of positive press in the pages of The Washington Post lately. On Monday, The Post’s Jeff Stein cited “a former top CIA official” who claimed that the Agency’s unmanned drone assassination program in the Afghan-Pakistan border has the Taliban in disarray, “thinking that we can track them anywhere”. The former official also said that the speed of the CIA and “its Pentagon partners” (presumably NSA) in intercepting targeted communications makes the process of assassinating Taliban leaders “like mowing a lawn”. Does this sound too good to be true? How about an article published on the same day, also in The Washington Post, which claims that the CIA’s Predator drone assassination program has “kept the number of civilian deaths extremely low”? Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #337

April 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Another Iranian nuclear researcher reportedly defects. An academic linked with Iran’s nuclear program has defected to Israel, according to Ayoub Kara, Israel’s deputy minister for development in the Negev and Galilee. Kara said it “is too soon to provide further details”, adding that the defector is “now in a friendly country”.
  • Dutch spies to become more active abroad. The Dutch secret service, the AIVD, has announced a shift in strategy, deployed increasingly more officers abroad: “in Yemen, Somalia, and the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.
  • Why did the CIA destroy waterboarding evidence? It has been established that Porter J. Goss, the former director of the CIA, in 2005 approved the destruction of dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two terrorism detainees. But why did he do it? Former CIA officer Robert Baer examines the question.

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Abduction of former Pakistani ISI officials raises questions

April 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

Colonel Imam

Colonel Imam

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Questions are being raised about the reported abduction of two well-known veterans of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, who appear to have been kidnapped by an unknown group in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions. The two are Khalid Khawaja and Sultan Amir Tarar, a.k.a. Colonel Imam. Khawaja, a retired ISI officer, was a critical mediator between the CIA and Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, during the al-Qaeda’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Colonel Imam, also a former intelligence officer and a diplomat, was the ISI handler of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar in the 1980s and early 1990s. Both Khawaja and Imam are considered senior members of the ISI’s ‘old guard’, who have strong ideological sympathies for both al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and frequently voice support for the latter. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #336

April 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA tech arm invests in camera lens start-up. The CIA’s venture-capital investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has struck again. This time it has funded LensVector, a hi-tech start-up that specializes in micro-camera technology for cell phones.
  • NSA cyberdefense exercise underway. Detailed status report on the National Security Agency’s 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of US military academies against each other –and against the competition’s leaders at NSA– in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills.
  • US spy researchers working on computational intel. IARPA, the US intelligence community’s research arm, is apparently working on a new program, called Aggregative Contingent Estimation, which aims to create a computational model that can enhance human hypotheses and predictions, by catching inevitable biases and accounting for selective memory and stress in intelligence analysis.

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CIA not surprised by Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, documents show

April 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

Alexander Dubček

Alexander Dubček

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Newly declassified CIA documents from 1968 show that the Agency had warned the Lyndon B. Johnson administration that the USSR was preparing to invade Czechoslovakia later that year. Some of the documents have been released before, but were presented for the first time in an organized, searchable format last Friday, at a symposium held at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, on University of Texas campus. The symposium, entitled “Strategic Warning and The Role of Intelligence: Lessons Learned from the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia”, included participants from academia, as well as from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among documents presented at the gathering was a May 10, 1968, CIA memo, which termed Soviet-Czechoslovak relations a “crisis” and warned that the possibility of an armed Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia could “no longer be excluded”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #334

April 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: Split up the CIA, says veteran officer. A 15-year CIA veteran, who goes by the pseudonym Ishmael Jones, reveals in a new book that the Agency now has only “a handful” of non-official-cover officers, i.e. spies not affiliated with a US diplomatic mission abroad. In The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, Jones argues the CIA should be broken up and its pieces absorbed by other US intelligence agencies.
  • Turkey appoints new intelligence director. It is expected that Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) will soon be headed by Dr. Hakan Fidan, who will replace Emre Taner. MİT’s reputation has recently been severely hit by the involvement of some of its personnel in the notorious Ergenekon affair.

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Comment: Is Palestinian Fatah Spying for Israel?

April 18, 2010 by 8 Comments

Mohammed Dahlan

Dahlan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Gaza-based Palestinian movement Hamas has again accused a senior official of rival Palestinian group Fatah of spying for Israel. Speaking last week from Gaza Damascus, Syria, Hamas official Mohammed Nazal said that Fatah Central Committee member Mohammed Dahlan, who has been tipped for the post of Vice President in Fatah-controlled Palestinian National Authority, is actively gathering information on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Nazal said Hamas received a tip-off about Dahlan from a former security officer in the Palestinian National Authority, who appears to have defected to Hamas. The unnamed informant reportedly met with Hamas defense officials on Friday, and told them that Dahlan had asked him to “collect detailed information” about the March 26 execution of two Palestinians, who were accused by Hamas of working for Israeli intelligence. He also claimed that Dahlan showed him a lengthy list of known Hamas operatives and asked him to determine the precise location of their residences in the Gaza strip. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #331

April 16, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA deputy director to step down. The Agency has denied it for months, but now the longtime rumor that its powerful deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, was planning to resign has came true. Jeff Stein reports that “recently, grumbling about Kappes from within the CIA and without, on issues ranging from his nit-picking management style to his ties to the old order, has gotten louder. And now, apparently, Kappes has heard enough”.
  • US eyes cash deal for Kyrgyzstan base. How will the recent coup in Kyrgyzstan affect US-Kyrgyz arrangements on the Manas Air Base? A lot will depend on oil purchase deals between the US military and Kyrgyz autocrats.
  • Court case may reveal IRA spy’s role. Freddie Scappaticci, an IRA spy alleged to be the British army agent ‘Stakeknife’ could be forced into court by the wife of another IRA informer, who claims she suffered nervous breakdown after being kidnapped by him.

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News you may have missed #330

April 15, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Pakistan released captured Taliban behind CIA’s back. IntelNews has not joined the chorus of commentators who have been claiming that the relationship between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and the CIA has warmed up. It now appears that even as the ISI was collaborating with the CIA, it quietly freed at least two captured senior Afghan Taliban figures.
  • Kiwi activists accuse police of spying. New Zealand’s Peace Action Wellington has submitted an Official Information Act (OIA) request relating to domestic police surveillance, after accusing the police of “heavily spying on and running operations on protest groups”. It is not the first time that similar accusations have been directed against the country’s police force.
  • CIA suspected existence of Israeli nukes in 1974. Israel will neither confirm nor deny the rumored existence of its nuclear arsenal. But the CIA, which has kept an eye on Israel’s nuclear weapons project since at least the early 1960s, was convinced of its existence by 1974, according to a declassified report.

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News you may have missed #329

April 13, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Iran insists US hikers had intelligence links. Iran’s intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, has said that Americans Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal and Sarah Shourd, who were arrested on Iranian soil last July, “were in contact with intelligence services”. The evidence would “soon be made public”, he said.
  • Gerdes case shows difficulty of CIA jobs. The case of CIA employee Kerry Gerdes, who was recently convicted for falsifying interview reports while performing background checks on CIA employees and potential employees, reveals how difficult the job is for young CIA recruits, who expect it to be exciting or glamorous, according to seasoned investigators.
  • US still denying India access to Headley. There has been intense speculation in India and Pakistan that David Coleman Headley, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration informant, who was arrested by the FBI in October for plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper, is in fact a renegade CIA agent. Could this be why the US is denying India access to Headley?

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Analysis: Inside the US-Israeli intelligence relationship

April 13, 2010 by Leave a comment

US embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel

US embassy, Israel

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, authors of Friends in Deed: Inside the US-Israel Alliance, have produced a lengthy, well-researched and up-to-date essay on US-Israeli intelligence relations. The essay, which appears in the latest issue of Tablet, carefully examines the highly complex subject of the CIA’s associations with the Mossad and Shin Bet. The fact is that, despite their unquestionable alliance Israel and the US have for years been among each other’s primary intelligence targets. Melman and Raviv correctly remind us that, by as early as 1954, US officials at the US embassy in Tel Aviv had already discovered several microphones in the office of the ambassador. Two years later, US counter-surveillance experts uncovered electronic bugs at the Tel Aviv residence of a US military attaché. Since then, the use of bribes and even women by the Shin Bet to lure US embassy guards has been frequent –and mostly unsuccessful. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #327

April 10, 2010 by 2 Comments

  • Cyberspies eyed Canadian visa applications. Personal information about Canadians applying for visas was swiped by cyberspies who hacked into Indian embassy computers in Afghanistan. The data theft was part of a wider cyberespionage operation launched by the underground hacking community in China and aimed primarily at political targets, according to academic researchers.
  • Israeli Arab jailed for spying on top general. Rawi Sultani, who is accused of informing Hezbollah of his membership in the same fitness club as Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as of methods of accessing the club, has been sentenced to nearly six years’ imprisonment.
  • CIA places American on assassination list. US-born al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Aulaqi, who now lives in Yemen, has become the first US citizen to be placed on a CIA “targeted killing” list, which requires “special approval from the White House”.

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Interview with alleged CIA spy in Iran

April 9, 2010 by Leave a comment

A Time to Betray

A Time to Betray

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
US government-owned Radio Liberty has aired an interview with an Iranian defector who claims to have worked as a CIA agent in the 1980s and early 1990s. The defector, who goes by the pseudonym Reza Kahlili (codename ‘Wally’), has authored what appears to be a CIA-sanctioned book, entitled A Time to Betray, in which he says he was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC is a sizable branch of the Iranian military that is ideologically committed to the defense of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Kahlili, who now lives in California, says he concluded his studies in the US and returned to Iran shortly after the Revolution. But he quickly became disillusioned with the Islamic regime, and in 1981 met with the CIA in the United States and offered them his services. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #325

April 7, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA investigator sentenced. CIA employee Kerry Gerdes, who falsified interview reports while performing background checks on CIA employees and potential employees, has been sentenced to two months in prison and six months of home confinement.
  • President Ford authorized warrantless wiretaps, memo shows. Even though he replaced Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign the US Presidency over intelligence abuses, Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document.
  • Yemeni court upholds alleged spies’ sentences. Three Yemenis, who were accused last year by the government of having “links to Israeli intelligence”, have had their sentences upheld by an appeal court.

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Analysis: Can the CIA sabotage the Iranian nuclear weapons program?

April 7, 2010 by 2 Comments

Shahram Amiri

Shahram Amiri

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
There is no doubt that the CIA has been actively trying to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons program since at least February of 2008, when US President George W. Bush authorized Langley to intensify its covert efforts against Tehran. It is also true that the US was able to partially sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by eliminating the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, and by employing scientific front companies and cooperative suppliers, who gave the Iranians faulty hardware. The defection to Washington of senior Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri provides recent evidence of the existence of a covert US project to “decapitate” the Iranian nuclear weapons program, by luring away leading Iranian researchers. On the other hand, it is worth wondering why the CIA chose to remove Amiri from the Iranian nuclear program, instead of asking him to remain an agent-in-place, which would have been far more beneficial for Langley. Read more of this post

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