Hamas | intelNews.org

UN official confirms Israel abducted Palestinian engineer from Ukraine

March 14, 2011 by intelNews 3 Comments

Dirar Abu Sissi

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A UN official has confirmed that a Palestinian engineer, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in Ukraine on February 19, is currently in Israeli custody. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior, Dirar Abu Sissi, 42, who was born in Jordan, but has lived in the Gaza strip for over a decade, had gone to Ukraine to apply for citizenship in the Eastern European country. His Ukrainian wife, Veronika, said Sissi disappeared in the early morning hours of February 19, shortly after boarding a train from Kharkiv to capital Kiev, in order to reunite with this brother, a Dutch national, whom he had not seen since 1997. His disappearance has puzzled Ukrainian police investigators. But on Thursday, Maksim Butkevych, representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ukraine, told the Associated Press that Sissi was kidnapped by Israeli operatives and is currently in prison in Israel. Butkevych did not openly name the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, but said that the Palestinian engineer was abducted by “Israeli security forces”, possibly with the assistance of Ukrainian intelligence officers. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Spy Agencies Failed to Predict Egypt Uprising

February 1, 2011 by intelNews 2 Comments

Egypt uprising

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
It is becoming increasingly clear that the ongoing popular uprising in Egypt represents the most important geopolitical development in the Middle East since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. In light of this, it is remarkable how unprepared foreign intelligence agencies have proven in forecasting the crisis. Even the Israelis were caught completely unaware: on January 25, the day when massive protests first erupted across Egypt, Major General Aviv Kochavi, newly appointed head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, told a Knesset committee that “there are no doubts about the stability of the regime in Egypt” and that “the Muslim Brotherhood is not organized enough to take over”. Instead, Kochavi focused on political volatility in Lebanon; ironically, the latter now seems like an oasis of tranquility compared to the explosive state of Egyptian politics. If the Israelis, whose very concept of national security is inextricably linked with developments in Cairo, were so unsuspecting of the popular wave of anger against the thirty-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak, one can only imagine Washington’s surprise at the protests. Click here to read my article in Intelligent-Intelligence.com, a specialist publication edited by Kyle Cunliffe. Continue reading →

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Analysis: What is the CIA doing in Egypt?

January 28, 2011 by intelNews 4 Comments

Egypt

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Every time there is a popular uprising anywhere in the Muslim world, the minds of American intelligence planners go immediately to 1979, when the Iranian Revolution tore down almost overnight one of Washington closest allies in the Middle East. By ignoring the immense unpopularity of the Shah’s brutal regime, and by limiting its Iranian contacts among the pro-Shah elites in the country, the CIA was caught completely in the dark as the Islamic revolution unfolded. Could the same be happening now in Egypt? Hopefully not, says The Washington Post’s veteran intelligence correspondent Jeff Stein. As in the case of Iran under the Shah, the US has stood by the 33-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, choosing to abide by the simplistic dogma of ‘either secular repression or anti-American Islamism’. But, unlike 1970s Iran, one would hope that US intelligence agencies have been able to develop useful contacts across the fragmented but dynamic and energized Egyptian opposition community, says Stein, quoting former US Defense Intelligence Agency official Jeffrey White. It is unlikely that the CIA and other agencies have fully embraced persistent calls, such as those by Emile Nakhleh, former head of the CIA’s program on political Islam, to develop trustworthy contacts inside the Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood, as well as groups close to it, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Read more of this post

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New clues in extensive recount of al-Mabhouh assassination

January 11, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Ronen Bergman

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The current issue of US-based magazine GQ contains what must be the most extensive account in English of the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Written by Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman (author of The Secret War with Iran), the piece contains several new clues about the targeted killing of al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas official, in a luxury hotel in Dubai last January. One new element that stands out in Bergman’s account is that, two months prior to his assassination, al-Mabhouh survived a poisoning attempt by the same team of Israeli operatives, again in Dubai. The Hamas official fell ill, but recovered fully. Bergman also claims that the operation to target al-Mabhouh, which must have lasted several months or even years, involved the use of an elaborate Trojan horse virus that was implanted on al-Mabhouh’s computer, and allowed Mossad operatives to monitor his email correspondence. It was through this method that the Israelis became aware of al-Mabhouh’s itinerary during his fatal trip to Dubai. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #466

January 7, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

France blasts economic warfare by industrial spies. The French government says it is the victim of an economic war, after Renault, France’s partially state-owned carmaker, suspended three top executives over leaks of secret electric-car technology. The French intelligence services are probing a possible Chinese connection. It should be noted that, according to US estimates, France leads industrial spying in Europe.
Canada a target for foreign interference, says spy chief. A keenly anticipated report by Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Richard Fadden paints a picture of a broad threat of foreign interference from countries out to influence Canada’s policy and politicians, target dissidents and pilfer technology. It is the most detailed articulation of the spy service’s concerns about overtures from foreign agents, including two suspected cases involving provincial cabinet ministers.
Jordanian Hamas spy awarded PhD in jail. Jordanian Azzam Jaber, jailed in Jordan for spying for the Palestinian group Hamas on potential targets including the Israeli embassy, has obtained his doctorate from the University of Yarmuk.

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News you may have missed #464 (Mossad edition)

January 3, 2011 by intelNews 4 Comments

Mossad may apologize for use of UK passports. There are unconfirmed reports that Tamir Pardo, the newly installed Director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, is “drafting an apology to London” for the use of forged British passports by a Mossad hit squad that killed Hamas senior official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh a year ago in Dubai.
NZ halted Mossad probe to safeguard secrets. New Zealand’s former Prime Minister, Helen Clark, was hesitant to publicly prosecute Uriel Kelman and Eli Cara, two Israeli Mossad spies arrested in New Zealand in March of 2004, fearing that the court case would expose counterintelligence methods. This according to the latest leaked US embassy cables released by whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
Did Israel abduct and kill Iranian ex-deputy defense minister? Iran has asked the United Nations to help probe the reported death of Iran’s deputy defense minister, General Ali-Reza Asgari, allegedly in an Israeli jail. But Politico‘s Laura Rozen quotes well-informed Iranian-American activist Pooya Dayanim, who says Asgari was never in Israel.

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WikiLeaks revelations keep coming, but few pay attention

December 22, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

WikiLeaks

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Most Western news outlets are now focusing almost exclusively on the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Few are paying attention to the details of Assange’s rape allegations in Sweden, which have sparked an interesting —though limited— debate about possible links between Assange’s accusers and American intelligence. Even fewer are paying attention to the actual US diplomatic cable revelations by WikiLeaks, which keep appearing daily, mostly in British quality broadsheet The Guardian (The New York Times has largely lost interest at this point). One such revelation, published on Monday, concerns allegations by the Director of the Shabat, also known as Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service), that Palestinian group Fatah asked Israel to attack rival Palestinian group Hamas, in 2007. The leaked cable claims Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin told US diplomats that Fatah, the secular Palestinian nationalist faction that controls the West Bank, was “demoralized” and “desperate” to halt the rapid rise of Islamic Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Diskin further told US officials that Fatah understood it could only survive with Israeli support, and had thus directly “asked us [Israel] to attack Hamas”. Perhaps more importantly, the leaked cable appears to confirm intense speculation among some intelligence observers that Fatah is “actively gathering information on behalf of Israeli intelligence”. Read more of this post

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Did Mossad kill German politician involved in Iran-Contra scandal?

November 22, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Uwe Barschel

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Accusations of Israeli involvement in the suspicious death of a German politician have been revived, following new autopsy evidence revealed by a medical examiner. The case involves the death of Christian Democratic Union politician Uwe Barschel, who on October 11, 1987, was found dead in the bathtub of room 317 of the Beau-Rivage hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. His sudden death occurred less than a month after he was forced to resign from the post of Governor of West Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein state, following his involvement in a dirty-tricks campaign against his rival Björn Engholm, of Germany’s Social Democratic Party. Swiss authorities, based on an initial postmortem that revealed lethal levels of barbiturates in Barschel’s system, ruled the death a suicide. But now Dr Hans Brandenberger, who was one of the toxicological experts that examined Barschel, claims that he is possession of new evidence that points to murder as the cause of the German politician’s death. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with assassinations, Björn Engholm, Christian Democratic Union (Germany), Contras, Geneva (Switzerland), Germany, Hamas, Hans Brandenberger, history, Hotel Beau-Rivage (Switzerland), Iran, Iran-Contra Scandal, Israel, News, Nicaragua, Noludar, Palestine, Sandinistas, Social Democratic Party (Germany), Switzerland, United States, Uwe Barschel

Israel intelligence source warns of West Bank collapse

November 15, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Mahmoud Abbas

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A senior source inside Israel’s intelligence community has warned that the continuing building of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories could cause the rapid collapse of the Fatah government in the West Bank. Speaking anonymously to the BBC, the intelligence official cautioned that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, “is tired and fed up”, and that if he “continued to be humiliated” by Israel’s refusal to halt illegal settlement construction he might “step down and return home”. This would terminate the ongoing negotiations between Israel and Fatah, mediated by Washington, and could bring down the Fatah government in the West Bank, in a chaotic process that would ultimately “be a major setback for Israel”, said the official. Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and elsewhere, lack international recognition, and in recent years Israel has been pressured by its allies, including the United States, to stop residential expansion into the Palestinian Territories. Read more of this post

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British citizen among Mossad assassins intrigues investigators

October 20, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Lockwood

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Only a handful of the 33 members of an Israeli assassination squad, who killed a senior Hamas member in Dubai last January, carried non-fraudulent passports. Most of the assassins, who in all probability worked for Kidon, an elite assassination unit within Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, used forged British, Irish, German, Australian, and other passports. Dubai officials investigating the murder of Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh have identified at least one British citizen among non-fraudulent passport holders in the Mossad assassination team: he is 62-year-old Christopher Lockwood (photo), who helped facilitate al-Mabhouh’s assassination by transporting some of the Mossad members around Dubai “in a [rented] white minivan with tinted windows”. Read more of this post

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Germany lets captured Mossad spy suspect return to Israel

August 16, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Al-Mabhouh

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
German authorities have allowed an Israeli intelligence operative suspected of links to an assassination of a Palestinian official to return to Israel, despite outstanding passport forgery charges against him. The operative, whose travel documents identify him as Uri Brodsky, was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4, 2010. An Interpol arrest warrant for Brodsky had been previously issued by German prosecutors, who accuse Brodsky of helping procure a forged German passport for use by a member of an assassination squad operating under Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The user of the forged passport is believed to have used the travel document to enter Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in mid-January of this year, where he participated in the killing of Palestinian Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons procurer, who was found dead in his luxury Dubai hotel room on January 20. Polish authorities decided to extradite Brodsky to Germany despite intense diplomatic pressure from Israel, who pressed Warsaw and Berlin to allow the operative to return home to Israel without facing charges. But intelligence observers, who were initially impressed with Poland and Germany’s strong stance on the issue, soon realized that Brodsky’s extradition was part of a Polish-German-Israeli deal, under which Brodsky would avoid jail sentence and get away with a minor fine for forging an official German travel document. This is precisely what happened. Read more of this post

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Mossad operative to avoid jail in extradition deal

August 10, 2010 by intelNews 6 Comments

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
An operative of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, who was arrested in Poland on charges of forging a German passport, will avoid prison time for the offense, under a suspected Polish-German-Israeli secret deal. The man, whose travel documents identify him as Uri Brodsky, was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4. He is wanted by German prosecutors for procuring a forged German passport for use by a member of a Mossad hit squad, who used it to enter Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in mid-January of this year. The user of the forged passport is thought to have participated in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons procurer, who was found dead in his luxury Dubai hotel room on January 20. German prosecutors believe that Brodsky, who worked in Germany under the name of Alexander Werin, assisted numerous Mossad operatives acquire forged identity papers of several European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Austria and Switzerland. Read more of this post

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US money transfer firms linked to Dubai killing of Hamas official

August 3, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Al-Mabhouh

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Preliminary results of an ongoing international investigation into the January 2010 murder of a senior Hamas official show that US-based money transfer companies were used to finance the killing. The body of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, co-founder of the Palestinian Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, was discovered by staff at Dubai’s luxury Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, where al-Mabhouh was a guest, on January 20, 2010. His murder is widely believed to have been the work of a multi-member hit squad operating under the command of Israeli external intelligence agency Mossad. But, according to American newspaper The Wall Street Journal, the funds used by the Israeli hit squad members during the assassination operation came from fund transfers in the United States. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #386 (Israel edition)

July 5, 2010 by intelNews 4 Comments

IDF soldier suspected of spying for Hezbollah. A career Israel Defense Forces soldier is among several civilians suspected of spying for the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Israeli authorities revealed on Wednesday.
Israeli, Turkish ministers hold secret meeting. The Israeli Foreign Minister has reacted furiously to reports that Benjamin Ben Eliezer, a Labor Party Knesset member, met secretly with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Switzerland.
Top Hamas spy set for asylum in US. Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a Hamas co-founder and spy for Israel was set to be granted asylum after the US government withdrew its opposition to his request to remain in the country on Wednesday.

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News you may have missed #378

June 28, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Knesset thanks Hamas leader’s son for spying for Israel. The Israeli Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has sent a letter of thanks to Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas West Bank leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who from 1998 to 2007 spied for Israel’s Shin Bet security service.
Analysis: Will McChrystal’s intel staff survive his exit? In the shock wave following General Stanley McChrystal’s abrupt summons from Kabul, there were rumors in special operations circles that his senior staff had been relieved of duty, too. But the fevered buzz appears to have been false, or at least premature.
Iran embassy dismisses Czech report on weapons smuggling. The Iranian embassy in Prague has criticized the Czech counterintelligence’s (BIS) 2009 annual report, which says that Iran strove to gain access to component parts that can be used in the production of mass destruction weapons.