News you may have missed #304

March 8, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Interesting history of former German embassy building in DC. When the State Department took the building over in 1945, officials found $3 million in American currency that was reportedly designated for espionage payments.
  • Number of Dubai killing suspects at 27. Another person has been added to the list of suspects in the January killing of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, bringing the number of identified suspects to 27. Some say the number will exceed 30 before too long.
  • Robert Baer on Dubai assassination. Stepped-up surveillance technology may be tipping the scales in the cat-and-mouse game between spies and their targets. Former CIA operative Robert Baer on the Mossad’s recent Dubai hit and the current state of spycraft.

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News you may have missed #299

February 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US lawmaker wants to stop CIA agents working second jobs. Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA) says she will offer an amendment to the Intelligence Reauthorization bill later this week that would put new rules into place on the practice of intelligence officers who take second jobs in the private sector.
  • Poland admits to aiding CIA. After human rights groups revealed evidence that showed CIA rendition planes landing in Poland in 2003, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency has admitted for the first time that Poland played a role in the controversial US program.
  • Former Romanian-German spy fired for secret past. German author Peter Grosz was fired on Thursday from his role as director of the theater festival in the German city of Oppenheim, following revelations that he had spied on fellow authors for Romania’s Securitate communist secret police during the 1970s. Large numbers of Romanian former intelligence agents now reside in Germany.

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Answers to questions about al-Mabhouh’s assassination

February 17, 2010 by 5 Comments

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Al-Mabhouh

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The intelNews email inbox is literally bulging with messages about the recent assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the co-founder of Hamas’ military wing, who was found dead in Dubai last month. Here are brief answers to a selection of readers’ questions. Q. Is there any doubt that Mossad was behind the assassination? A. Almost none. By no means was Israel al-Mabhouh’s sole enemy. In fact, his killing caused little distress among Fatah’s leadership, and at least two Palestinians are believed to have assisted in the assassination. Nevertheless, the operation has all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored action, something particularly evident in the sophisticated travel documentation forgery involved. Moreover, the tactics of the hit squad, its composition, as well as its methods, point almost directly to the Mossad.  Q. Were those passports real, or not? If not, who are the people in the photos? The eleven known members of the hit squad utilized British, Irish, German, and one French (the squad leader) passports. Read more of this post

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Israeli minister in handshake debacle with Saudi spy chief

February 12, 2010 by Leave a comment

Danny Ayalon

Danny Ayalon

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Much has been made of an episode in the recent Munich Security Conference, in which Israel’s deputy foreign minister shook hands with Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence director. As is often the case in international conferences involving high-level participants from Israel and Muslim states, organizers at the Munich Security Conference went out of their way to ensure that Egyptian, Saudi, and –lately– Turkish government representatives were not to meet in the same seminars with Israeli officials. Participants were surprised, however, to see Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, present in a seminar that featured a panel contribution by Israeli deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. During the remarks session, Ayalon expressed dissatisfaction with the Muslim participants’ insistence to stay clear of the Israeli delegation, to which Turki al-Faisal responded with reference to Israel’s recent diplomatic spat with the Turkish government. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0263

January 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Up to 30,000 Chinese spies in Germany, say newspapers. According to German media, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution says that up to “thirty thousand Chinese residents residing in Germany are spies”, and that “60 percent of industrial spies residing in Germany are Chinese”.
  • Israeli agencies see Turkey moving toward radicalization. Israel’s chief intelligence official, General Amos Yadlin, has told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Turkey’s recent diplomatic moves are indicative of its shift toward radical Islam.

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News you may have missed #0261

January 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: CIA has long struggled with ensuring safe interrogations. The debate within the CIA about how to handle agents in war zones surfaced in Iraq in 2003. There was a dispute about how to balance the safety of CIA personnel with the needs of intelligence gathering. The controversy went on for more than a year, but in the end, by 2005, CIA officers had generally stopped meeting agents in the “red zones” of Iraq, that is, outside secured areas.
  • Germany to probe CIA murder and rendition plots on its soil. German legislators will probably launch an investigation into claims that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plotted to murder an alleged al-Qaeda fundraiser in Hamburg, and that it placed agents in Germany to sweep up terrorist suspects without informing German authorities.

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News you may have missed #0253

January 14, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Iran undecided on nukes, says US military spy chief. The US Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, has said what intelNews has been pointing out again and again, namely that the key finding of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran has not yet committed itself to nuclear weapons production, is still valid.
  • Nobel winner demands Germany uncover Romanian ex-spies. Herta Mueller, the Romanian-born German winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, has called on Germany to find and prosecute former agents of Romania’s Securitate secret police, large numbers of whom have resettled in Germany after communism ended in Romania 20 years ago.

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News you may have missed #0249

January 11, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan. “The military backgrounds of the fallen CIA operatives cast a light on the way the world of intelligence is increasingly muscling up and becoming militarized […]. This is no longer intelligence as anyone imagines it, nor is it military as military was once defined […]. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims […] it seems remarkably ineffective”.
  • CIA planned to ‘rendition’ suspects in Germany in 2001. The CIA had 25 agents in Germany after the September 11 attacks and planned to illegally rendition al-Qaeda suspects without informing the German government. In the end, the plan was scrapped because of objections by the Agency’s German section.
  • French president appoints woman in charge of spy school. Nicolas Sarkozy is to create a ‘school for spies’, whose principal job will be to discourage French intelligence chiefs from spying on, and fighting against, one another. There are rumors that the school’s first director will be woman academic with no previous experience of espionage.

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Analysis: Germany’s spies struggle to adapt to post-Cold War changes

January 9, 2010 by Leave a comment

BND logo

BND logo

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Nearly everyone in Germany recognizes that the global intelligence landscape has changed, almost beyond recognition, in the years since the end of the Cold War. Current challenges are far more underground in nature, far more flexible, far more unpredictable. The question is, has Germany’s primary intelligence agency, the BND, changed along with the times? The answer is not so simple. The BND continues to struggle immensely with bureaucratic inefficiency and substandard human and financial resources, explains Deutsche Welle‘s Peter Philipp. Even when it does produce useful intelligence, its advice is not always taken into consideration by German government officials, who tend to have their own opinions on political developments. “Most politicians do have their own view of the world order”, says former BND chief Hans-Georg Wieck, “so [we] must address the[m] in a way that makes them more likely to act on [our] information”. Philipp’s interesting editorial can be accessed here.

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Comment: Is CIA Lying About its Blackwater Contacts?

January 8, 2010 by 11 Comments

Blackwater logo

Blackwater logo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
After CIA director Leon Panetta revealed last summer that private contractor Blackwater was part of a covert CIA hit squad, tasked with summary killings and assassinations of al-Qaeda operatives, the CIA vowed to sever its contacts with the trigger-happy security firm. But did it do so? It doesn’t look like it. Last November, it became known that the company, (recently renamed Xe Services) remains part of a covert CIA program in Pakistan that includes planned assassinations and kidnappings of Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects. More recently, it was revealed that two of the seven Americans who died in the December 30 bomb attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, were actually Blackwater employees subcontracted by the CIA.

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News of CIA/Blackwater hit squad upset German government

January 7, 2010 by Leave a comment

Mamoun Darkazanli

M. Darkazanli

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
German politicians have finally caught up with the startling revelations of Blackwater founder and CEO, Erik Prince, who last month told Vanity Fair that he worked as a CIA spy, carrying out secret missions with the help of a Blackwater hit squad. The Vanity Fair article revealed that, among other targets, the squad planned to assassinate Mamoun Darkazanli, an alleged al-Qaeda financier living in Hamburg, Germany. But did anyone in Washington think to ask the German government whether it was OK for a Blackwater/CIA assassination team to run around the country, planning extrajudicial murders of alleged al-Qaeda members? Apparently no, says German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, adding that the revelation has upset members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, as well as opposition Social Democrats and Greens, who are now demanding a special investigation into the matter. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0240

January 3, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Major purge in Gambian security services continues. Ngorr Secka, the former deputy director general of Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency, has reportedly been arrested. The arrest marks the latest development in a major purge that began last July, after the chief of the country’s armed forces, Lt. Colonel Sainey Bayo, fled to the United States reportedly while being “investigated for supplying sensitive state secrets to an unnamed Western country”.
  • Jerusalem memorial may honor British Auschwitz spy. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem may honor Denis Avey, 91, who as a British prisoner of war in Monowitz (a.k.a. Monowice or Auschwitz III) prisoner camp, convinced Ernst Lobethall, a Jew held at nearby Auschwitz concentration camp, to give him his ID badge and concentration camp uniform. He then walked back to Auschwitz on two occasions, gathering valuable evidence about the Nazis’ Final Solution.

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A veteran British envoy on diplomacy, sex and espionage

December 17, 2009 by Leave a comment

Christopher Meyer

Christopher Meyer

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
British newspaper The Daily Mail has published a well-written and entertaining essay by a longtime UK government envoy, explaining the close links between diplomacy, sex and espionage. Sir Christopher Meyer, a career diplomat with the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, served in several countries during his career, including the Soviet Union and Spain, as well as in Germany and the United States, where he was ambassador from 1997 to 2003. He argues in his article that “sex and diplomacy have long been bedfellows”, and recounts some of his personal experiences in the former USSR, where he began his 35-year diplomatic career in 1968, as “an innocent, unmarried 24-year- old”. He arrived in Moscow along with Sir Duncan Wilson, Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1968 to 1971. Sir Christopher is bold enough to recount that Sir Duncan’s predecessor, Sir Geoffrey Harrison (ambassador from 1965 to 1968), “had to leave [Moscow] in a hurry, having fallen for the charms of his Russian maid –trained and targeted, of course, by the KGB”. Read more of this post

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Iranian defector briefed UN inspectors on Iran nuclear program

December 14, 2009 by Leave a comment

Iranian nuclear facility in Qum

Qum facility

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
An Iranian nuclear scientist who vanished during a pilgrimage to Mecca last June has defected to the West and has briefed American and United Nations officials about Iran’s nuclear program. As intelNews reported on October 9, rumors have been circulating in the Arab press that Shahram Amiri, a senior figure in the Iranian nuclear research program, was not abducted by Saudi and Western intelligence agencies, as Iran claims, but actually defected to the West. Now British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph has cited “a source close to France’s overseas secret service, the DGSE”, who claims that Amiri’s defection was facilitated through a carefully planned intelligence operation involving the CIA, as well as French and German operatives. Read more of this post

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Germany arrests Chinese informants for spying on exiles

November 25, 2009 by Leave a comment

Chinese consulate in Munich

Chinese consulate

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
German federal and local detectives yesterday raided the homes of four Chinese residents of Munich, who are suspected of spying on the city’s Uighur Chinese community on behalf of the government in Beijing. The four were charged after German counterintelligence agents spotted them holding secret meetings with a Chinese diplomat operating out of China’s consulate in Munich (photo). Munich has the world’s largest Uighur population outside of China, and is home to the World Uighur Congress, which Beijing views as an anti-Chinese organization. The Uighur people are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia, and are primarily concentrated in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Read more of this post

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