News you may have missed #892 (legislative update)

May 7, 2015 by Leave a comment

Jens MadsenBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
►►Canadian lawmakers vote to expand spy powers. Legislation that would dramatically expand the powers of Canada’s spy agency has cleared a key hurdle. The House of Commons on Wednesday approved the Anti-Terror Act, which was spurred by last year’s attack on parliament. The act would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) the ability to operate overseas and make preventative arrests. It also makes it easier for police to arrest and detain individuals without charge. Dominated by the Conservative party, the Senate is expected to approve the act before June.
►►Danish spy chief resigns over Islamist attacks. The head of Denmark’s Police Intelligence Service (PET), Jens Madsen, quit just hours before a report was due to be released into February’s fatal shootings in Copenhagen by an Islamist. Omar El-Hussein killed two people at a free speech debate and a synagogue before being shot dead by police. “It’s no secret that it is a very demanding position,” said Madsen, without giving a reason for his resignation. Justice Minister Mette Frederiksen declined to say whether the move was linked to criticisms of the police response to the attack.
►►OSCE urges France to reconsider controversial spying bill. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe urged French lawmakers to reconsider provisions of a proposed law that would expand government surveillance, a measure that was backed by French parliamentarians on Tuesday, despite criticism from rights groups. “If enforced, these practices will impact the right of journalists to protect the confidentiality of sources and their overall work”, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic said Wednesday. “If confidentiality of sources is not safeguarded within a trusted communications environment, the right of journalists to seek and obtain information of public interest would be seriously endangered”, he added

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News you may have missed #863

January 14, 2014 by Leave a comment

Carmi GillonBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
►►Al-Qaeda controls more Arab territory than ever before. Al-Qaeda currently controls territory that stretches more than 400 miles across the heart of the Middle East. Indeed, the group appears to control more territory in the Arab world than it has done at any time in its history. Its affiliates now control much of northern and northwestern Syria as well as some parts of eastern Syria, as well as much of Anbar province, which is around a third of Iraqi territory.
►►German diplomats survive shooting in Saudi Arabia. Two German diplomats survived a shooting attack on their car while on a visit to eastern Saudi Arabia on Monday, the state news agency SPA reported, but their vehicle was burned. In Berlin, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said: “I can confirm that there was an incident during a drive out in the country. The car was shot at and it caught fire. There were no injuries. The embassy in Riyadh has launched an investigation”.
►►Israel’s ex-security chief flees Denmark to avoid arrest. Carmi Gillon, former director of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency, who is also Israel’s former ambassador to Denmark, has left the Scandinavian country following a formal complaint accusing him of committing crimes of torture and brutality against Palestinian detainees. Gillon is reported to have left the country hastily to avoid being detained.

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Scotland sees Nordic spy agencies as post-independence models

July 30, 2013 by 5 Comments

United Kingdom and IrelandBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Government administrators in Scotland, which may soon become independent from the United Kingdom, are looking to possibly model their intelligence agencies after those of Scandinavian countries, according to sources. An agreement for an independence referendum, to be held in September 2014, was struck last year between the devolved Scottish Government and the British state. According to the agreement, residents of Scotland, which has been ruled by English-dominated Britain for over 700 years, will be asked whether they agree that the territory should form an independent country. In January of this year, Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister of Scotland, told the Scottish Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs that an independent Scotland would have to build a domestic intelligence agency to combat security threats such as terrorism, organized crime and cyber attacks. Sturgeon, who is also Deputy Leader of the pro-independence Scottish National Party, opined that, even though a Scottish intelligence agency would serve the interests of the Scottish government and people, it would inevitably maintain “very close intelligence sharing with the rest of the UK”. But Committee members opposed to independence warned Sturgeon that Scottish intelligence agencies would have to prove that they were reliable and safe before they struck intelligence-sharing arrangements with British and American organizations. It appears that, in response to such criticisms, Scottish civil servants have initiated contacts with intelligence experts abroad, in an attempt to replicate the intelligence-agency model of Nordic countries. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #816

December 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

Kim Jong-namBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Danish minister vows more control over spy agency. Following the uproar created by the revelations from former Danish secret service (PET) agent Morten Storm, Denmark’s Minister of Justice, Morten Bødskov, is now calling for parliament to have more control over the domestic intelligence agency. In an interview with Berlingske newspaper, Bødskov said that he is seeking increased powers for parliament’s Kontroludvalg, a committee established in 1964 to oversee PET. The move comes in response to the many questions that have arisen about PET’s actions following Storm’s decision to contribute to a series of articles in Jyllands-Posten newspaper that chronicled his time as a PET double-agent.
►►South Korea jails alleged North Korean assassin. A South Korean court has jailed an unidentified North Korean spy reportedly ordered to attack Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Kim Jong-nam, who is believed to have fallen out of favor with Kim Jong-il in 2001, was thought to have been living in Macau, but media reports indicate he may have moved to Singapore. South Korean media said the alleged assassin had spent a decade in China tracking down North Korean defectors before coming to the South, and that he had admitted trying to organize “a hit-and-run accident” targeting Kim Jong-nam.
►►US Pentagon to double the size of its worldwide spy network. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the US Pentagon’s military intelligence unit, is aiming to recruit 1,600 intelligence collectors —up from the several hundred overseas agents it has employed in recent years. The DIA’s new recruits would include military attachés and others who do not work undercover. But US officials say that the growth will be driven a new generation of spies who will take their orders from the Department of Defense. The project is reportedly aimed at transforming the DIA into a spy service more closely aligned with the CIA and elite military commando units.

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Danish Muslim convert claims he was CIA’s mole inside al-Qaeda

October 12, 2012 by 8 Comments

Morten StormBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A Danish citizen who converted to Islam in the early 2000s claims he was a spy for the United States Central Intelligence Agency and helped track down an American-born Islamist cleric who was killed by a drone strike in 2010. The man, who goes by the name Morten Storm, told Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that he converted to Islam while living in the United Kingdom. But he quickly grew disillusioned, he said, and in 2006 he was recruited by the Danish Police Intelligence Service (PET). In subsequent years, he traveled several times to Yemen on PET missions, and gradually managed to gain the trust of members of the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Eventually, he said, he grew close to one of AQAP’s central figures, the American-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. At that point, claims Storm, the PET turned him over to the CIA, who allegedly used him to gather information on al-Awlaki. The Danish Muslim convert claims that his role as a CIA informant was so important that US President Barack Obama knows his name. He also told the paper that it was his information that eventually helped the CIA track and assassinate the charismatic cleric. According to Storm, the CIA supplied him with a memory stick that contained a stealth Global Positioning System tracking device. He sent the memory stick to al-Awlaki, who used it on his computer, thus allowing the CIA to track him down. In April 2010, President Obama ordered that al-Awlaki’s name be included on a list of individuals that the CIA was officially authorized to kill. Little less than a year later, on September 30, 2011, the cleric and three other suspected members of AQAP were killed when their car was hit by two Hellfire missiles in Yemen’s northern al-Jawf province. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #801

October 10, 2012 by 4 Comments

Alan TuringBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Israel charges Arab man with spying for Hezbollah. Israel has charged Milad Khatib, a 26-year-old Arab Israeli truck driver, who was arrested a month ago, with spying for Hezbollah, making contact with a foreign agent, conspiring to aid the enemy and belonging to an illegal group. According to the indictment, Khatib was in contact with a man named Barhan, a Hezbollah agent who operated in various European locations. The two allegedly met several times between 2007-2009 in Barhan’s home in Denmark, with all of Khatib’s expenses, including food, hospitality and entertainment, covered by Barhan.
►►Britains’ GCHQ praises Alan Turing legacy. In a rare public speech, Iain Lobban, the Director of GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, has praised the legacy of British mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing. Widely considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing committed suicide in 1954, after the British government prosecuted him for being a homosexual. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered a public apology for Turing, who is also credited with cracking the Nazi Enigma code —a vital part of the Allied effort in World War II.
►►Canada’s SIGINT agency to get new headquarters. Canada’s electronic spy organization believes that the state-of-the-art headquarters now being built in an Ottawa suburb will make it a leader among its allies and attract the best and brightest of spies, according to newly released Canadian government documents obtained by The Ottawa Citizen. When finished in 2015-16, the Canadian Communications Security Establishment’s new $880-million spy campus in Gloucester is expected to be home to more than 1,800 employees.

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Belgium suspends senior diplomat on suspicion of spying for Russia

October 8, 2012 by 3 Comments

Belgian embassy in CopenhagenBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The Belgian government has admitted suspending one of its senior diplomats following allegations in the press that he had spied for the Soviet Union and Russia for over two decades. According to Flemish-language Belgian magazine MO, the diplomat, identified only as “O.G.”, has been “suspended in the interest of the [Belgian diplomatic] service” and is currently under investigation by the Office of the Federal Prosecutor. Citing “sources in the Belgian State Security Service”, the SV/SE, the article said the subject was stationed at the Belgian embassy in Danish capital Copenhagen when he was recalled to Brussels late last year. The man is said to have spent nearly three decades as an employee of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, having served in several Belgian embassies and consulates in Japan, India, Algeria, Nigeria, Portugal, and the United States, prior to arriving in Denmark. However, according to the MO article, he was accosted by the Soviet KGB in the late 1980s, shortly after he arrived at the Belgian embassy in Tokyo, Japan, for his first-ever diplomatic posting. Since that time, said the magazine, “O.G.” has spied for the KGB and its successor, the SVR, having stayed in contact with “several different Russian handlers”. Prior to 2011, when he ceased contact with Russian intelligence, the Belgian diplomat was allegedly tasked with providing the FSB with information that could be used to concoct false identities belonging to deceased Belgian citizens. The Russians would then use these identities to supply their intelligence operatives with high-quality Belgian identity papers and travel documentation. Late last week, another Belgian publication, The EU Observer, contacted the Belgian Foreign Ministry to inquire about “O.G.”. A Ministry spokesperson told the paper: “we can confirm that an official from our ministry was suspended from his functions a bit over one year ago, following indications of a security breach”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #743 (espionage edition)

June 4, 2012 by Leave a comment

Vladimir LazarBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Denmark professor jailed for spying. Timo Kivimäki a Finnish professor of international politics in Copenhagen, Denmark, has been sentenced to five months in prison for spying, following a trial held behind closed doors, from which even the verdict was not released. Several Russian diplomats left Denmark after the start of the spy case and, according to Danish media, Kivimäki’s lawyer, Anders Nemeth, had attempted to have them return to act as witnesses.
►►Retired Russian colonel convicted of spying for US. A Russian court has ruled that retired Colonel Vladimir Lazar spied for the US, and sentenced him to 12 years in prison. Lazar will be sent to a high-security prison and stripped of his military rank, the Federal Security Service said in a statement. Prosecutors said Lazar purchased several computer disks with more than 7,000 images of classified maps of Russia from a collector in 2008 and smuggled them to neighboring Belarus, where he gave them to an alleged American intelligence agent.
►►India arrests military intel staffer for spying. The soldier, identified only as Shivdasan, worked for the Indian Army’s Technical Support Division, which is a newly founded unit within Indian Military Intelligence. He was reportedly trapped by the Indian Directorate of Revenue Intelligence in an elaborate operation that involved a “double agent” and a relative of the soldier in Dubai.

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News you may have missed #740

May 31, 2012 by Leave a comment

Timo KivimäkiBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Denmark professor accused of spying challenges court secrecy. Timo Kivimäki, a Finnish humanities professor at the University of Copenhagen, is accused of spying for the Russians and is being tried at the city court in the Danish city of Glostrup behind closed doors, meaning no information about the trial, including the precise charges, can be disseminated. But following demands from both Kivimäki’s lawyer and the Danish media, he has been granted permission to appeal against the decision to hold the trial in secret.
►►Analysis: CIA’s links with Hollywood are longstanding. Some US officials are suggesting that the producers of a new motion picture, which deals with the raid that killed al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, received “extremely close, unprecedented and potentially dangerous collaboration” from the Obama administration, and particularly the US Intelligence Community. In light of this, a well-researched article in The Los Angeles Times reminds readers that the close connection between the movie industry and the US military and intelligence community goes back decades. The US military has been using movies to drive up recruitment since the 1920s; and the CIA these days even posts potential movie story lines on its website.
►►CIA funds helped launch literary journal. The Paris Review has been hailed by Time magazine as the “biggest ‘little magazine’ in history”. At the celebration of its 200th issue this spring, current editors and board members ran down the roster of literary heavyweights it helped launch since its first issue in 1953. Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T.C. Boyle, Edward P. Jones and Rick Moody published their first stories in The Review; Jack Kerouac, Jim Carroll, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides all had important early stories in its pages. But as American novelist Peter Matthiessen has told interviewers –most recently at Penn State– the journal also began as part of his CIA cover.

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Denmark university professor faces charges of spying for Russia

April 17, 2012 by Leave a comment

Timo KivimäkiBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Authorities in Denmark have charged a university professor with assisting “foreign intelligence operatives”, believed to be Russian. Professor Timo Kivimäki, a conflict resolution expert, who teaches international politics at the University of Copenhagen, is accused of “providing or attempting to provide” information to four Russian government officials on several documented instances between 2005 and 2010. The indictment claims Kivimäki, who was born in Finland, intended to give the Russians “information relating to individuals and subjects connected with intelligence activities”. The charges were filed after a lengthy investigation, launched in 2009 by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) in cooperation with Finland’s Security Intelligence Service (SUPO). The university professor spoke to leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and admitted that he carried out contractual “consulting work” for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, for six years. He said he was paid approximately €16,000 (US$20,000) for his services, but denied that he knowingly contacted Russian intelligence operatives in the course of his consulting duties. According to Kivimäki, the Russian officials he interacted with appeared to be “diplomats, not spies”. He also pointed to the fact that none of the Russian officials he worked with as a consultant were apprehended or expelled by Danish counterintelligence, as is customary in such cases. Despite its relatively small size, Denmark had its share of international intelligence activity during the Cold War. During that period, PET amassed detailed files on approximately 300,000 Danish citizens considered to be “leftist sympathizers”. More recently, in November of 2010, media reports from Denmark suggested that the US embassy in Copenhagen maintained a network of local former police and intelligence officers, who were conducting “illegal systematic surveillance of Danish citizens”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #454

November 19, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Georgia lets Russian envoy visit jailed spy suspect. Georgia says it has allowed a representative of the Russian consulate to meet with a Russian citizen detained on charges of espionage. The jailed man is one of 13 individuals suspected of spying for Russia, who were arrested by Georgian counterintelligence earlier this month. Four of the detained suspects are Russian citizens and nine are Georgian nationals.
  • Danish agency aware of CIA spying since 2004. The Danish security services have released a statement saying they have known since 2004 that the US Embassy in Copenhagen was collecting information on Danish citizens. Last week, several Scandinavian countries launched investigations into the activities of intelligence gathering networks employed by US embassies.
  • Iran charges German reporters with espionage. Iranian officers detained the journalists, who were pretending to be tourists, as they conducted an interview with the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, condemned to death by stoning.

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Scandinavians launch probes into US spying activities

November 9, 2010 by 3 Comments

Scandinavia

Scandinavia

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Norway, Sweden and Denmark have launched official investigations into media reports that accuse US embassies in Scandinavian countries of operating illegal intelligence gathering networks. The issue first emerged last Wednesday, when a report by Norway’s TV2 channel alleged that the US embassy in Oslo maintained a network of around 20 local former police and intelligence officers, who were conducting “illegal systematic surveillance of Norwegian citizens”. According to TV2, the surveillance network was tasked with collecting visual and physical intelligence on individuals “thought to pose a threat to American interests”. The US Department of State responded to the allegations by arguing that the US embassy had “fully informed” the Norwegian authorities of the surveillance activities. But Norwegian investigations expressed fears that the intelligence collection, which dates back to 2000, may constitute a violation of Norwegian diplomatic legislation, and have launched an investigation into the affair. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #410

August 9, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Clapper confirmed as US DNI in Senate-White House deal. Retired general James Clapper has been unanimously confirmed by the Senate as US National Intelligence Director, after a series of last-minute deals between objecting Republican Senators and the White House, which nominated Clapper several months ago.
  • Canada rejects residency request by Pakistani ex-ISI spy. The Canadian government has refused a permanent residency application by Haroon Peer, a Danish citizen, who worked for three Pakistani intelligence agencies, including the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Haroon is married to a Canadian-born woman and has three Canadian-born children.
  • Lebanon in shock after ex-general’s arrest on spy charges. Last week’s arrest of Fayez Karam, a well-respected retired general and politician with the Hezbollah-allied Christian Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), on suspicion of spying for Israel, has sent shock waves through Lebanon and left many wondering how deep the Jewish state has infiltrated the country.

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News you may have missed #319

March 31, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • CIA asks Gulf countries to monitor terrorist funding. The CIA has reportedly asked Arab/Persian Gulf countries “to tighten surveillance and look for any suspicious movement of funds” in regional banks.
  • Questions remain in Headley terrorism case. The New York Times has aired an update on the court case of Pakistani-American 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. The paper points out that Headley “moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions”. There has been intense speculation in India and Pakistan that Headley is in fact a renegade CIA agent.

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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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