News you may have missed #540
July 17, 2011 Leave a comment
Jim Judd
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►► Bulgaria bars ex-spies from holding diplomatic posts. Bulgaria’s conservative-majority parliament has voted to bar individuals who once worked for the country’s communist-era secret service from holding top diplomatic jobs. The aim of the legislation is what Eastern European countries call ‘lustration’, namely the process of cleansing of their security and intelligence agencies from Soviet-era operatives. The practical problem with that, of course, is that, in doing so, Eastern European intelligence services do away with some of their best-trained operatives. Moreover, there is nothing to suggest that Bulgaria’s post-communist spy agencies are significantly more law-abiding than their communist-era predecessors. Regular IntelNews readers might remember our coverage of Operation GALERIA as a case in point. ►► Ex-spymaster says Canada is too concerned about torture. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) struggle to isolate itself from complicity in torture by US and British spy agencies has reached the “point where we were probably alienating foreign partners” by not sharing intelligence. This is the opinion of Jim Judd, former Director of CSIS. He also argued that “strident anti-torture interpretations” would affect “everything and anything CSIS did, with respect to foreign intelligence agencies”. Judd, a career spy who retired in 2009, is considered something of a hawk, and probably rightly so. ►► NSA whistleblower requests reduced sentence (update: No jail time for Drake, judge releases him saying he has been through “four years of hell”). Thomas Drake was a senior official with the US National Security Agency. Read more of this post
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News you may have missed #619 (WikiLeaks edition)
October 31, 2011 by Ian Allen 2 Comments
Peter Van Buren
►►US suspends diplomat for linking blog to WikiLeaks. The State Department has suspended Peter Van Buren (pictured), a 23-year veteran foreign service officer, for writing a book critical of US policy in Iraq and blog posts that included a link to a WikiLeaks cable. Van Buren, who worked in human relations, said he was escorted out of the State Department on Monday and barred from returning for two days while officials there decide what to do next with him. They had stripped him of his top secret security clearance a few days earlier, he said.
►►Solomon Islands minister was CIA source. Classified US diplomatic cables from 2006, recently published by WikiLeaks, have revealed that the Solomon Islands’ former Foreign Affairs Minister and businessman Laurie Chan has acted as a reliable source of US and Australian intelligence in the Pacific island country.
►►Diplomatic cable sheds light on suicides of Bulgarian spies. A diplomatic following cable, sent by John Beyrle, US Ambassador to Bulgaria before going to Moscow, dated January 25, 2007, has been released by WikiLeaks. The cable sheds light on reshuffles in the leadership of the country’s intelligence services and the suicides of two high-ranking intelligence employees.
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