CIA not surprised by Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, documents show

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

News you may have missed #330

  • 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.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #313

  • British spies operated ‘renegade torture unit’ in Iraq. British military intelligence operated a secret operation in Iraq, called Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT), which was authorized to utilize degrading and unlawful treatment of prisoners. The officers running the operation claimed to be answerable only “directly to London”.
  • Poland’s Jaruzelski was counter-intel officer. Documents in the infamous East German Stasi archives allegedly show that in 1952 the then colonel Wojciech Jaruzelski, who later became Poland’s last communist leader, began working for the Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army –-the military police and counter-espionage agency in Poland.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #309

  • Iran claims arrest of US cyberspies. Iranian security forces have arrested 30 people accused of waging cyberwar against the country, with the backing of the United States. The Iranian government accuses them of running a network of websites funded by US intelligence, which aims to “collect information about Iran’s nuclear program”.
  • Nazis planned to infiltrate Vatican with spies. Nazi Germany hatched a plan during World War II to infiltrate the Vatican with spies disguised as monks, according to secret MI5 intelligence reports. The codename for the plan was Operation GEORGIAN CONVENT.
  • US misled even us on detainees, says ex-MI5 chief. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of the Britain’s foremost domestic spy agency, MI5, has said that United States intelligence agencies misled even MI5 about the mistreatment of suspected terrorists.

Bookmark and Share

Declassified MI5 files offer wealth of new information

Sophie Kukralova

Sophie Kukralova

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Britain’s National Archives have authorized the release of nearly 200 files from the vaults of MI5, the country’s domestic intelligence service. The release of the documents, which range from 1937 to 1955, has given rise to numerous interesting historical revelations, including an apparent effort by German Hitler Youth groups to establish personal and institutional links with Lord Baden-Powell, founder and leader of the Boy Scouts. The relevant MI5 file notes that Baden-Powell, who was “wined and dined by senior Hitler Youth figures”, responded enthusiastically to the Nazi charm offensive. Other revelations include the Soviet sympathies of Sidney Bernstein, later Baron Bernstein, who founded Britain’s Granada Theatres (later Granada Television) in 1926. Read more of this post

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

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

CIA declassifies controversial submarine recovery project

Glomar Explorer

Glomar Explorer

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
I have written before about the CIA’s controversial 1974 project to recover a Soviet submarine that had sunk in 1968, in 17,000 feet of water, about 750 miles northwest of Hawaii. The project involved the infamous ship Hughes Glomar Explorer and was led by CIA agent Christopher Fitzgerald, who died last year. But the CIA recovery team nearly caused a nuclear explosion when the submarine split while being raised, and its body hit the ocean floor. Now the CIA has for the first time declassified a substantial document relating to the project, codenamed AZORIAN. The document is a lengthy article first published in 1985 in the mostly classified CIA research journal Studies in Intelligence, written by an unnamed CIA team member who participated in the recovery effort. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0285

  • Canadian government resists release of Cold-War-era files. Canadian journalists are fighting for the release of Cold-War-era government files on Tommy Douglas, a prominent social democratic politician idolized in Canada for his central role in establishing the country’s public health care system. But the government argues that releasing the files would imperil national security and compromise contemporary spy sources and methods.
  • NPR launches series on confidential informants. Informants are often considered a vital crime fighting tool; but what happens if those informants go astray? Washington-based National Public Radio is launching a special investigation into this controversial subject.
  • CIA returns to US university campuses. American anthropologist David Price explains that the US intelligence community is gradually re-establishing its academic recruitment network, which was shattered in the 1970s.

Bookmark and Share

Released cable reveals CIA decision to destroy torture tapes

CIA HQ

CIA HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The US Justice Department’s investigation into the destruction of videotapes by the CIA, which reportedly showed acts of torture committed during interrogations of terrorism detainees, began in 2007, but has stalled. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is spearheading what appears to be the only organized attempt to discover when and why those tapes were destroyed. Last year the ACLU uncovered that the CIA destroyed the videotapes in question after –not before, as the Agency had originally claimed– a spring 2004 report by the Agency’s inspector general, which described the interrogation methods employed on CIA prisoners as “constitut[ing] cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment”. Thanks to the ACLU, we have also known for quite some time that the decision to destroy the incriminating tapes was taken sometime in November of 2005. But now, with the release of a new batch of documents in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, we have the exact date that decision was taken: Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0252

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0247

  • US government lowers threshold for inclusion on no-fly lists. According to senior US State Department officials, the government has already lowered the threshold for information deemed important enough to put suspicious individuals on a watch list or no-fly list. CNN reports that suspects will now include citizens of the notorious Islamist country of Cuba….
  • CIA starts sharing data with climate scientists. This blog has kept an eye on the CIA’s Climate Change Center, which was established late last year. It now turns out the Agency had started monitoring climate change in 1992, under project MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis), but the program was shut down in 2001 by the Bush Administration. The Climate Change Center, therefore, represents the re-establishment of an earlier effort.
  • How the KGB tried to recruit an NBC News reporter. FBI files show that the Soviet KGB tried to recruit the late NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine, while he was stationed in Moscow in the 1950s.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0238

  • The real story behind Nigerian bomber security lapses. “The real story line internally is not information sharing or connecting dots”, a former intelligence official said. “It was separating noise from chaff. It’s not that information wasn’t passed around; it’s that so much information is being passed” (Research credit to Politico‘s Laura Rozen).
  • Obama orders creation of declassification center. US President Barack Obama created by executive order Tuesday a National Declassification Center to oversee efforts to make once-secret government documents public. Among other things, the executive order eliminates the ability of intelligence officials to veto declassification decisions.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0219

  • Kennedy considered supporting 1963 coup in S. Vietnam, documents show. New audio recordings and documentation unearthed by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, show that US President John F. Kennedy supported a military coup against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, even though he recognized the planned coup had no chance of a political success. See previous intelNews coverage for more Vietnam War-related declassified items.
  • Speak Farsi? Israel’s Shin Bet is interested. Israel’s Shin Bet internal intelligence agency is advertising jobs for speakers of the Iranian language Farsi. Israeli intelligence agencies appear to have similar problems with those faced by their US counterparts.

Bookmark and Share

US government urged to release data on social networking spying

Facebook

Facebook

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
An Internet watchdog has filed a court complaint to force the US government to disclose how its law enforcement and spy agencies monitor social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. IntelNews regulars have known since October that the CIA has invested in a private software company specializing in monitoring online social media, such as YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. Additionally, we have previously reported on persistent rumors that the National Security Agency, America’s communications spying outfit, is actively monitoring popular social networking sites in order to make links between individuals and construct maps of who associates with whom. Now the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to find out the extent to which US intelligence and law enforcement agencies are secretly monitoring social networking sites on the Internet. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0204

  • Release of secret US reports to be postponed (again). Millions of secret US government documents are scheduled to be declassified at the end of the year, unless President Barack Obama extends the deadline, like his predecessors have done. The White House is reportedly preparing an executive order that will postpone the declassification, in order to assuage various US intelligence agencies “unwilling to part with their secrets”. Change, Mr. Obama?
  • Analysis: Why India needs an intelligence revamp. We have written before about the urgent need to restructure Indian intelligence agencies.

Bookmark and Share