Research sheds light on Japan’s wartime espionage network inside the United States
September 26, 2022 1 Comment
MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the wartime intelligence exploits of the Allies against Japan. Such exploits range from the United States’ success in breaking the Japanese JN-25 naval code, to the extensive operations of the Soviet Union’s military intelligence networks in Tokyo. In contrast, very little is known about Japan’s intelligence performance against the Allies in the interwar years, as well as after 1941. Now a new paper by an international team or researchers sheds light on this little-studied aspect of intelligence history.
The researchers, Ron Drabkin, visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, K. Kusunoki, of the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force, and Bradley W. Hart, associate professor at California State University, Fresno, published their work on September 22 in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence and National Security. Their well-written article is entitled “Agents, 
Attachés, and Intelligence Failures: The Imperial Japanese Navy’s Efforts to Establish Espionage Networks in the United States Before Pearl Harbor”.
The authors acknowledge that the history of the intelligence efforts of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) has received very little attention by scholars. Consequently, it remains unexplored even in Japan, let alone in the international scholarship on intelligence. There are two main reasons for that. To begin with, the IJN systematically destroyed its intelligence files in the months leading to Japan’s official surrender in 1945. Then, following the war, fearing being implicated in war crimes trials, few of its undercover operatives voluntarily revealed their prior involvement in intelligence work.
Luckily, however, the past decade has seen the declassification of a number of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counterintelligence files relating to Japanese intelligence operations targeting the United States. Most of these files date from the 1930s and early 1940s. Additionally, a number of related documents have been declassified by the government of Mexico, which is important, given that Mexico was a major base for Japanese intelligence operations targeting the United States. Read more of this post
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CENTRAL FIGURES OF POLAND’S opposition coalition, which narrowly lost the 2019 parliamentary election, had their cell phones hacked with a surveillance software used by the country’s spy services, according to a new report. A major target of the hacks was Krzysztof Brejza, a member of the lower chamber of the Polish parliament and campaign director of the Civic Coalition, a centrist-liberal alliance. In the parliamentary election of 2019, the Civic Coalition challenged the all-powerful Law and Justice Party (PiS), which has ruled Poland for much of the past decade.
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Reuters investigation focuses on alleged loss of CIA spy networks in Iran
October 3, 2022 by Joseph Fitsanakis 1 Comment
The news agency said two of its reporters, Joel Schectman and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, spent dozens of hours interviewing six Iranian former CIA assets, as well as 10 former employees of the United States Intelligence Community, who have “knowledge of Iran operations”. All six of the Iranians interviewed spent between five and 10 years in prison for their CIA connections. Two of them left Iran after serving their prison sentences, and are now refugees in central and northern Europe. At least one of them claims he was never contacted by the CIA after his release in 2019.
According to the Reuters investigation, CIA assets in Iran operate in a high risk environment, given that the United States has not had diplomatic facilities in the Middle Eastern country since 1979. Diplomatic facilities are regularly used to shelter CIA personnel, who recruit, train and handle foreign assets. Despite the absence of such facilities, the CIA is willing to take great risks in running agents inside Iran, because of the country’s geopolitical significance. The agency’s intensity in operating in Iran is matched by the Islamic Republic’s aggressive counterintelligence posture, which, according to the Reuters investigation, has “netted dozens of CIA informants” in recent years.
It is claimed that Iran’s counterintelligence efforts were inadvertently aided by a mass-produced CIA covert communications system, which the spy agency operated until 2013 in at least 20 countries around the world, including Iran. The Internet-based system was intended for use by CIA sources who were not fully vetted, but were still considered useful due to their access to secret information, according to Reuters. This appears to be a major update on a story that was first reported by Yahoo News in 2018. It claimed that that the CIA had suffered a “catastrophic” compromise of the system it used to communicate with spies, which caused the death of “dozens of people around the world” according to sources.
Reuters said it contacted CIA spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp, who declined to comment on specific allegations. The CIA spokeswoman dismissed the “notion that CIA would not work as hard as possible to safeguard” its assets around the world as “false”. The news agency said it also contacted Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its Mission to the United Nations in New York, but received no responses.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 03 October 2022 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, espionage, HUMINT, Iran, United States