The CIA in Iran Today: A Realistic Assessment

July 13, 2009 by 4 Comments

Iran protestors

Iran protestors

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
It is hardly surprising to witness the sudden cessation of the US media frenzy that placed Iran under the microspore last month. And yet I believe that now, as the regime in Tehran is redeploying its machinery of social control, is the perfect time to calmly and sensibly provide a rational assessment of what really took place in Iran in June, as well as the US involvement, if any. The CIA’s past shenanigans in Iran are by now widely known and understood –particularly by the Iranians themselves, who, regardless of their feelings toward the present regime in Tehran, are suspicious of collaborating with US agencies. But what is the US involvement in fomenting unrest in Tehran today? More importantly, to what extent can the CIA’s ongoing covert activities in the Middle East be said to have played a role in last June’s seemingly spontaneous popular uprising in Tehran? With this question in mind, I wrote The CIA in Iran Today: A Realistic Assessment, which you can now read in Jeremy Hammond’s Foreign Policy Journal. Here’s a tip: for the CIA’s intelligence directorate  analysts, the recent unrest in Iran was more like 1979 than 1953. Read article →

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News you may have missed #0020

July 7, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Social media is ruining spy industry, says IT security group. IT security consultancy NCC Group says that intelligence “agencies are concerned that Facebook and other social networking tools are ruining the spy industry”. The comments come just hours after British newspaper The Mail on Sunday revealed that personal details about the future head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, had been accessible to 200 million online users through his wife’s Facebook account.
  • Pakistan’s nukes face insider threat, says ex-CIA official. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a 23-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, argues in Arms Control Today that “[t]he greatest threat of a loose nuke scenario stems from insiders in the nuclear establishment working with outsiders, people seeking a bomb or material to make a bomb […]. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan. Pakistani authorities have a dismal track record in thwarting insider threats”, claims the retired US intelligence agent.
  • Hamas says Israeli spy cell in Ramallah busted. Hamas says it has dismantled an Israeli spy network, which served through the West Bank-based administration of Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas. The group claims that the network “channeled […] false information to Ramallah [in the Fatah-dominated West Bank] and then to the Israeli occupation”, in order to create “target bank” in Gaza.

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Larry Franklin, implicated in Israeli spy affair, breaks silence

July 6, 2009 by Leave a comment

Franklin

Franklin

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Lawrence Anthony Franklin, the former US Defense Department analyst whose 12-year prison sentence was suspended last month, has finally broken his silence. Franklin, who was accused by the US government of handing classified US military information to two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists, has told Jeff Stein of SpyTalk that he handed out the secret information “in hopes that it would be passed on to the White House”. He said he was “worried” the Bush administration pursued a schizophrenic policy on Iran and had not calculated the Iranian reaction to a possible US invasion of Iraq. He therefore decided to pass on the classified information, which included “the names and locations of Iran’s secret agents and safe houses in Iraq”, to AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who claimed they had senior contacts in the Bush administration. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0019

July 6, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • More interesting podcasts on Afghanistan at Electric Politics. George Kenney, of Electric News, has posted a full transcript of last month’s interesting interview with Graham E. Fuller, CIA’s former station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan. Also, a new highly interesting interview on Afghanistan has been posted on the Electric News website, this time with George Wilson. A veteran reporter who covered the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Wilson makes some noteworthy comparisons between Vietnam and Afghanistan.
  • Panetta, not Blair, should name CIA station chiefs, says ex-CIA agent. Haviland Smith, former CIA agent in Europe and the Middle East, has penned an editorial for The Baltimore Sun, in which he denounces as “simple insanity” efforts by Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, to have a say at who gets appointed as CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.  This is the second ex-CIA agent to issue the same warning in recent days.
  • Two more people arrested in Lebanon for spying for Israel. This raises the number of those arrested for belonging to an alleged Israeli spy ring in southern Lebanon to nearly 40. The latest arrestees include Ziad al Homsi, who in 1969 was photographed with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat.

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Australian espionage convict leaving US for home

June 30, 2009 by Leave a comment

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
An Australian former intelligence officer who was arrested by the FBI for trying to sell classified US defense documents will be allowed to serve the remaining of his prison sentence in Victoria, Australia. Jean-Philippe Wispelaere was an employee of Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation, the agency responsible for assessing and relaying intelligence information to Australian government officials. In 1999, he resigned from his job and flew to Bangkok, Thailand, where he contacted embassy officials of a third country (rumored to be Singapore) and offered to sell them over 700 pages of classified US documents. Read more of this post

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Low-tech radio ciphers helped Myers couple avoid detection for years

June 21, 2009 by 1 Comment

Walter Myers

Walter Myers

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The recent arrest in the US of Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, on charges of spying for Cuba for over 30 years,  have prompted discussions about how the couple managed to escape detection by US counterintelligence authorities for so long. The reasons are many, and undoubtedly include careful spycraft and shrewd handling. But Carmen Gentile offers another suggestion in The Washington Times: low-tech shortwave radio transmissions. Specifically, the Walter and Gwyn Myers “appears to have avoided capture for 30 years because their communications with [Cuba] were too low-tech to be detected by sophisticated US monitors”. Read more of this post

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Analysis: What is the state of Cuban spying in the US?

June 18, 2009 by Leave a comment

Gwen Myers

Gwen Myers

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The recent arrest by the FBI of Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, on charges of spying for Cuba for over 30 years, offers a good opportunity to contemplate the current state of Cuban espionage in the US. In an article published in The Miami Herald, Juan Tamayo relays a brief history of Cuban espionage in the US, from the first decades (1950-1980), when the island’s intelligence services were “regarded as among the world’s best”, to the purges of the late 1980s, to today. Read more of this post

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Another Israeli-handled spy in the US walks away free

June 15, 2009 by Leave a comment

Franklin

Franklin

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On April 23 intelNews first reported, and on May 4 confirmed, that the two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists involved in the Lawrence Franklin spy case in the US would escape trial. Lawrence Anthony Franklin was a US Defense Department analyst who in 2006 was given a 12-year prison sentence for handing classified US military information to Israeli agent Uzi Arad, Israeli Embassy official Naor Gilon, as well as to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, both former AIPAC lobbyists. But last month US Justice Department prosecutors dropped all charges against the two former AIPAC members due to “significant reservations about the case”, even though several Department officials believe that Rosen and Weissman “acted imprudently”, according to The New York Times. As IntelNews learned, the decision was taken despite significant objections from FBI officials, who desperately pressured the Department to go forward with the trial until the very last minute. The Bureau appears to be infuriated about the dismissal, which is rumored to be partly based on fears that classified information exposed during a trial could harm US national security. But this appears to be making no difference. In a final blow to the Bureau, a US federal judge has now decided to let Larry Franklin walk scot-free, despite his former conviction for espionage against the United States.  Read more of this post

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W. German cop behind fatal 1967 shooting was a spy, documents show

May 30, 2009 by Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On June 2, 1967, West German police opened fire on leftist students demonstrating against a visit to Berlin by the Shah of Iran. One of the shots fired by the police killed student protester Benno Ohnesorg. His killing was dubbed in Germany “the shot that changed the republic”. It had a major role in radicalizing the West German student movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s and directly sparked the creation of the militant student organization Red Army Faction –also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. But a group of researchers working at Germany’s Office of the Federal Commissioner Preserving the Records of the Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic (BStU), led by archivist Marianne Birthler, now claim they have discovered that the West German police officer who fired the shot that killed Ohnesorg was actually an East German spy. Read more of this post

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Unlike AIPAC lobbyists, retired DoD official to face charges

May 19, 2009 by 1 Comment

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
In a development that one observer described as “the tip of the iceberg with insider threats” at the US Pentagon, a retired official with the US Department of Defense has been charged with conspiracy to communicate classified information to a foreign agent. The US Department of Justice alleges that James Wilbur Fondren, Jr., 62, was part of a spy ring that operated on US soil under the supervision of Chinese government officials, whom Fondren supplied with several classified documents for over three years, beginning in 2004. According to US government prosecutors, six years after retiring from his high-level post at the US Pacific Command’s Washington Liaison Office, Lieutenant Colonel Fondren offered his private consulting services to Tai Shen Kuo, a Taiwanese-American handled by an intelligence agent of the People’s Republic of China. Read more of this post

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Belarus puts on trial members of alleged Polish military spy ring

May 6, 2009 by Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Very little information has appeared in Western news outlets of an ongoing trial in Belarus of four army officers accused of spying for Poland. The four, all of whom are Belarusian, are accused by Belarus security officials of collaborating with Polish intelligence agents by providing them with classified data on Belarusian military technologies, as well as with information on Russia’s air defense system, of which Belarus is a partner. A fifth alleged member of the spy ring, who is a Russian military officer, is facing similar charges in Moscow. The four Belarusians were reportedly arrested several months ago by the KGB, Belarus’ intelligence service. The discovery of the alleged spy ring led to a major political scandal in Minsk, prompting the dismissal of KGB’s director, Stepan Sukhorenko, by Belarus’ longtime President, Alexander Lukashenko. If convicted of treason and espionage, the army officers could technically face the death penalty under Belarusian law.

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Article on formerly unknown Soviet spy published

April 24, 2009 by Leave a comment

George Koval

George Koval

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On November 2, 2007, some of Russia’s most senior military and intelligence officials gathered at the Kremlin to honor a Soviet spy whose name was until then completely absent from the annals of espionage history. Russian defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) chief Valentin Korabelnikov were among several officials who joined Russian president Vladimir Putin to pay tribute to George Koval. Koval was an American citizen born in Iowa to immigrant parents from Belarus. In 1932, Koval, his parents and two brothers, all of whom were US citizens, moved back to the then rapidly developing Soviet Union to escape the effects of the Great Depression. It was there that the young George Koval was recruited by the GRU, the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces. He received Soviet citizenship and returned to the US through San Francisco in October 1940. Read more of this post

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Comment: AIPAC agents accused of spying may walk scot-free

April 23, 2009 by 3 Comments

Jane Harman

Jane Harman

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The controversy over Democratic Representative Jane Harman’s alleged telephone deal with a suspected agent of Israel is still raging. One of its unfortunate side effects has been to shift media attention away from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) involvement in the Lawrence Franklin spy case, and focus instead on Washington micro-politicking. But what about the two former AIPAC lobbyists who are technically at the center of the Harman imbroglio? Read more of this post

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Comment: NSA listened in on Rep. Harman secret phone deal

April 21, 2009 by 3 Comments

Jane Harman

Jane Harman

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) has been in the limelight since Sunday evening, when veteran national security correspondent Jeff Stein published an article alleging that the Democratic politician struck a quid pro quo deal with a suspected Israeli spy. In the article, Stein cites several unnamed “former national security officials” who say Harman’s incriminating telephone conversation with the suspected Israeli agent was picked up in 2005 by a FISA-authorized NSA wiretap. During the call, the agent asked Harman to pressure US Justice Department officials to show leniency toward two American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobbyists, who were arrested in 2005 for receiving classified information by convicted Israeli spy Lawrence Anthony Franklin. The two lobbyists, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, are still awaiting trial.

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Lebanese arrest second member of Israeli spy ring

April 17, 2009 by Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Early yesterday morning I wrote that Adib Al-Alam, a retired Lebanese brigadier general who was arrested last Saturday on charges of spying for Israel, was “part of a wider spy ring operating out of the town of Bint Jbeil, in southern Lebanon, and that more arrests are likely to follow before too long”. Several hours later, Lebanese officials announced the arrest of J’ Al-Alam, nephew of Abid Al-Alam, in the town of Naqoura, on charges of spying for Israel. Like his uncle, J’ Al-Alam is a Lebanese Christian and, like is uncle, is rumored to be an employee “in a non-civilian capacity” of Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces (ISF). Read more of this post

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