News you may have missed #318

March 30, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US State Dept. lawyer defends CIA drone attacks. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh has told a conference that “the considered view of this administration” is that the controversial CIA-operated drone attacks inside Pakistan “comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war”.
  • How the CIA let Anwar al-Aulaqi escape to Yemen. Last year, the Yemeni government asked the CIA to help collect intelligence on US-born al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Aulaqi. But the CIA refused, and so did US Special Forces officials, who had been asked by the Yemenis to help them pursue Aulaqi. Just months later, US Army Major Malik Nidal Hasan, who was in contact with al-Aulaqi, killed 13 US soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas.
  • More on alleged Israeli spy caught in Algeria. Algerian authorities insist that a man (identified only as “Alberto”), who was captured after entering Algeria using a forged Spanish passport, is a Mossad agent. There are also rumors that the US embassy in Algiers has been involved in the case, and that it was for this reason that FBI deputy director John Pistole traveled to Algeria last week.

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News you may have missed #316

March 28, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • News videos on UK expulsion of Israeli ‘diplomat’. Commendable video-based amalgamation by Newsy.com of worldwide media comments on the recent expulsion of an Israeli intelligence officer by the British government. The expulsion was in response to the forging of British passports, employed by the Mossad in the killing of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last January.
  • How Khost suicide bomber lured CIA agents to their deaths. According to the CIA’s internal investigation of the killing of seven CIA officers by Humam al-Balawi, in Khost, Afghanistan, last December, the fatal explosion happened as the CIA officers had gathered around Balawi to present him with a cake as a present for his birthday.

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News you may have missed #315

March 25, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Nuclear bunker spy comes out of hiding. A British retiree named Mike Lesser has revealed he was one of the so-called “spies for peace”, a group of peace activists who in the 1960s helped uncover Britain’s secret network of underground bunkers built to protect the government in case of nuclear war.
  • Aussie spy agency spied on little girls. Secret files kept by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation reveal spooks tailed the teenage children of suspected socialists and communist sympathizers during the late 1960s, and anyone with whom they associated, including school friends and boyfriends.
  • Analysis: Under Panetta, a more aggressive CIA. Expectations among CIA hardliners were low when Leon Panetta arrived at the Agency’s headquarters in February 2009. But almost from the first week, Panetta positioned himself as a strong advocate for the CIA, to the extent that critics worry that Panetta has become a captive of the agency he leads.

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West German spy service employed former Nazis, documents show

March 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

Reinhard Gehlen

Reinhard Gehlen

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
West Germany’s intelligence service employed hundreds of former Nazi criminals from 1956 until at least 1971, according to internal documents. The links between the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the main foreign intelligence agency of the German government, and the remnants of the German Nazi party, are well known; even its first director, Reinhard Gehlen, was a former General of the Wehrmacht. But documents dating to the 1960s, which were leaked last week to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, show that Gehlen, who worked as a CIA agent after 1945, was aware of his officers’ Nazi past, as were his American counterparts. The Nazi connections were internally revealed in detail after 1963, when Gehlen set up an internal BND investigation office, called Unit 85, to unmask potential Soviet moles inside the agency. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #312

March 19, 2010 by Leave a comment

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News you may have missed #311

March 18, 2010 by 1 Comment

Al-Qaeda technical expert believed killed. Hussein Yemeni, an al-Qaeda bomb expert and trainer, is believed to have been among more than a dozen people killed in a CIA strike last week in Miram Shah, the largest town in Pakistan’s North Waziristan. Yemeni is thought to have had a major planning role in the December 30 suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.

Al-Qaeda on the run, claims CIA director. CIA air attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal region have driven Osama bin Laden and his top deputies deeper into hiding and disrupted their ability to plan sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday. Interesting; that’s not exactly what he said last week.

UK government defends use of foreign intel. The British Foreign Office has defended its use of intelligence obtained by foreign security agencies from terrorism suspects, even when it could not be sure how the informants had been treated. It’s not the first time this opinion has been expressed by a senior UK government source.

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News you may have missed #310

March 17, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: Outsourcing Intelligence. David Ignatius points out that the latest rogue operation of the US Defense Department, revealed last weekend by The New York Times, points to the increasing irrelevance of the CIA in the so-called “global war on terrorism”: “by using contractors who operate ‘outside the wire’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the [US] military has gotten information that is sometimes better than what the CIA is offering”, says Ignatius.
  • White House threatens veto on intelligence bill. The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of US lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities.
  • CIA’s Kiriakou authors new book. John Kiriakou, who spent 14 years working for the CIA, and has made headlines in the past for defending the practice of waterboarding in interrogations, while recognizing it is torture, has a new book out, entitled The Reluctant Spy.

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US-Pakistan spy ties still tense, despite alleged thaw

March 17, 2010 by 1 Comment

Cantt, Lahore

Cantt, Lahore

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last December, US officials accused Pakistani security agencies of conducting a “blatant harassment campaign [against] American diplomats”, which reportedly included “frequent checking of American diplomatic vehicles in major cities across the country”. Recent articles in the Pakistani press appear to confirm these reports, indicating that they may be connected with ongoing attempts by US intelligence to increase its limited footprint in Pakistan beyond the safety of the US embassy compound in Islamabad. One such case is in Cantt, Lahore’s military zone, where it appears American intelligence officers have covertly leased “an outpost of several houses”. It is not clear when precisely the Americans began leasing the houses. But the Pakistanis, who have surrounded Cantt with security checkpoints, noticed the increased traffic by vehicles carrying US personnel, and started insisting on inspecting them, as they do with all vehicles entering and exiting Cantt. Read more of this post

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Reports of a possible rogue US DoD operation in Pakistan

March 15, 2010 by 3 Comments

Michael Furlong

Michael Furlong

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A New York Times article published late yesterday alleges the existence of a clandestine intelligence network of private contractors, set up by a US Pentagon employee, possibly without supervision or approval by senior US Defense officials. The network, which appears to operate under the cover of an Internet-based research company, is actually used to gather intelligence on the activities and whereabouts of individuals on the CIA’s assassination list, claims the paper. What is more, the network coordinator, retired US Air Force officer Michael D. Furlong, is currently being investigated by the US Department of Defense for fraudulent dealings with private contractors. It is not clear whether these were the same contractors (mostly former CIA and US Special Forces operatives) who were employed in the undercover intelligence network uncovered by The New York Times. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #308

March 13, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA boss warns of al-Qaeda changing tactics. CIA director Leon Panetta has said that the Agency’s counterterrorism operations are actively disrupting al-Qaeda’s command and control structures. But the group is now changing its tactics by deploying people inside the US who have no history of terrorist activity or documented connection to the organization, he told a conference.
  • New US TSA boss is a counter-intel specialist. Robert A. Harding, the fifth person in nine years to head the beleaguered US Transportation Security Administration, served 33 years as a counterintelligence specialist in the US Army. TSA has been operating under an acting administrator for months.

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Analysis: Forged Irish passports have long history

March 12, 2010 by 1 Comment

Passports

Passports

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
At least six of the nearly 30 Mossad assassins who killed Hamas military official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last January in Dubai, used forged Irish passports to enter and leave the United Arab Emirates. This upset the Irish government, but did not surprise intelligence observers familiar with the long history of forged Irish passports in the international espionage and smuggling worlds. The Mossad and the CIA are among several intelligence agencies known to routinely rely on cloned Irish passports to enable their agents to move around the world undetected. In 1986, several Iran-Contra affair insiders, including US National Security Council member Oliver North, covertly traveled to Iran using forged Irish passports. The Provisional Irish Republican Army is also known to possess significant quantities of false Irish passports, which it uses to enable its senior members to network with supporters abroad. Read more of this post

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The day a CIA-trained cat was run over by a taxi

March 8, 2010 by 2 Comments

Experiment fail

Experiment fail

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A newly declassified report shows that the US Central Intelligence Agency terminated an ambitious project to embed an elaborate wiretap mechanism in a cat, after several failed attempts at controlling the bugged cat’s behavior in real-life situations. The document (.pdf), entitled “Views on Trained Cats [Redacted] for [Redacted] Use”, dates from March 1967. It wraps up by stating that “the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that, for our [redacted] purposes, [using bugged cats] would not be practical”. Read more of this post

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CIA technical expert arrested for pilfering equipment

March 5, 2010 by Leave a comment

Anritsu spectrum analyzer

An analyzer

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A CIA communications technology specialist has been charged with selling CIA communications equipment to a private broker. FBI counterintelligence agents arrested Todd Brandon Fehrmann on February 26, several weeks after he sold $60,000-worth of equipment to Massachusetts-based Bizi International, Inc. Fehrmann’s CIA connection is concealed in the FBI affidavit, but The Washington Times says US government officials and even Fehrmann himself have now confirmed that he worked for the agency. The pilfered equipment appears to have included a dozen portable spectrum analyzers –handheld devices used to detect and gauge cell phone signals, among other things. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #299

February 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US lawmaker wants to stop CIA agents working second jobs. Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA) says she will offer an amendment to the Intelligence Reauthorization bill later this week that would put new rules into place on the practice of intelligence officers who take second jobs in the private sector.
  • Poland admits to aiding CIA. After human rights groups revealed evidence that showed CIA rendition planes landing in Poland in 2003, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency has admitted for the first time that Poland played a role in the controversial US program.
  • Former Romanian-German spy fired for secret past. German author Peter Grosz was fired on Thursday from his role as director of the theater festival in the German city of Oppenheim, following revelations that he had spied on fellow authors for Romania’s Securitate communist secret police during the 1970s. Large numbers of Romanian former intelligence agents now reside in Germany.

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News you may have missed #297

February 25, 2010 by Leave a comment

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