News you may have missed #348

  • US knew Guatemalan Army was behind notorious 1982 massacre. Declassified documents released on May 7 show that US officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible for the 1982 Dos Erres massacre, one of Guatemala’s most shocking human rights crimes.
  • New presiding judge in US FISA court. Three years after he was first appointed to serve on the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), John D. Bates has taken over as the presiding judge. Last week, Judge Martin Feldman was appointed to serve on the secretive court, which reviews (and invariably approves) government applications for counterintelligence surveillance and physical search.
  • UAE security sector benefits from al-Mabhouh assassination. Business for security companies in the United Arab Emirates has been brisk, with some companies reporting a 40% increase in business, as hotels spend millions bolstering their security systems. Some attribute this to last January’s killing in Dubai of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, by a Mossad hit squad.

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Analysis: An Economic Security Role for European Spy Agencies?

Economic espionage

Economic spying

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Last February, Spain’s intelligence service began investigating alleged suspicious efforts by foreign financial speculators to destabilize the Spanish economy. According to newspaper El País, the Spanish government asked the country’s Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) to probe links between speculative moves in world financial markets and a series of damaging editorials “in the Anglo-Saxon media”. There are indications that the National Intelligence Service of Greece (EYP) is following in the CNI’s footsteps. In February, when Athens and Brussels began to realize the magnitude of the financial crisis threatening the European common currency, several news outlets suggested that the EYP was cooperating with Spanish, Irish and Portuguese intelligence services in investigating a series of coordinated speculative attacks on money markets, most of which allegedly originated from London and Washington. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #343

  • Taliban leader H. Mehsud reportedly not dead. Last February US and Pakistani officials claimed a CIA airstrike had killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the largest faction of the Pakistani Taliban. But it now appears that Mehsud is alive and well.
  • Analysis: Operation MINCEMEAT and the ethics of spying. The New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell on operation MINCEMEAT, a World War II British deception plan, which helped convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia in 1943, instead of Sicily.
  • US DoJ announces FISA court appointment. Judge Martin L.C. Feldman, of the Eastern District of Louisiana, has been appointed to a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, which reviews (and invariably approves) government applications for counterintelligence surveillance and physical search under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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News you may have missed #341

  • Russian court rejects ‘spy’ scientist’s appeal. A Russian court has rejected an appeal for the release of academic Igor Sutyagin, former division head in the Russian Academy of Sciences’ USA and Canada Institute, who is serving a 15-year sentence for allegedly passing state secrets to foreign officials.
  • Ex-CIA agent’s arrest in VA was eventful, say sources. We reported earlier this week that Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s Algiers station chief, who is accused of having drugged and raped two Algerian women at his official residence, was arrested at a Norfolk, Virginia motel, after he failed to show up for a court hearing. It now appears that Warren “had a gun in his waistband […] and officers used a taser to subdue him”.
  • Documents show CIA thought Gary Powers had defected. Declassified documents show the CIA did not believe that Gary Powers, who piloted the U2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960, causing the U2 incident, had been shot down. Instead, the agency spread the rumor that Powers “baled out and spent his first night as a defector in a Sverdlovsk nightclub”!

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CIA not surprised by Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, documents show

Alexander Dubček

Alexander Dubček

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Newly declassified CIA documents from 1968 show that the Agency had warned the Lyndon B. Johnson administration that the USSR was preparing to invade Czechoslovakia later that year. Some of the documents have been released before, but were presented for the first time in an organized, searchable format last Friday, at a symposium held at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, on University of Texas campus. The symposium, entitled “Strategic Warning and The Role of Intelligence: Lessons Learned from the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia”, included participants from academia, as well as from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among documents presented at the gathering was a May 10, 1968, CIA memo, which termed Soviet-Czechoslovak relations a “crisis” and warned that the possibility of an armed Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia could “no longer be excluded”. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #323 (Cold War edition)

  • Story of the Soviet Trojan seal retold. Ken Stanley, who was chief technology officer at the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service from 2006 to 2008, retells the story of the large wooden replica of the US Great Seal, which the Soviets gave to the US ambassador to Moscow as a present in 1945. The seal, which was, of course, bugged, hanged in the US ambassador’s office until 1952, when it was discovered.
  • Soviet spy radio found in a Welsh field. It has been revealed that a Soviet encrypted radio transmitter was found near the Welsh coastal town of Ipcress in 1960. It is speculated that it belonged to the late Goronwy Rees, an academic from Aberystwyth, who was a friend of the Cambridge Five, although his daughter disputes it.
  • 1950s-60s spy gadgets on sale at eBay. Gadgets used by British spies who trained from the 1940s to the 1960s at top-secret camp Camp X near Ontario, Canada, are being sold off on eBay. They include a camera that shoots darts, a lipstick tube containing a dagger and fake monkey dung that explodes (!).

 

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News you may have missed #314

  • Canadian spy agency to display cold war spy tools. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is lifting the lid on some of Canada’s secret Cold War history with a first-ever public exhibit of the era’s exotic gadgetry and shadowy tradecraft, from a James Bond attaché case to Igor Gouzenko’s revolver.
  • Why planespotting in Egypt is a bad idea. British tourist Corbie Weastell, who was planespotting from his hotel window in Egypt, was arrested for spying, thrown in a filthy cell without food or water and left handcuffed and chained to other inmates for two days

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West German spy service employed former Nazis, documents show

Reinhard Gehlen

Reinhard Gehlen

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
West Germany’s intelligence service employed hundreds of former Nazi criminals from 1956 until at least 1971, according to internal documents. The links between the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the main foreign intelligence agency of the German government, and the remnants of the German Nazi party, are well known; even its first director, Reinhard Gehlen, was a former General of the Wehrmacht. But documents dating to the 1960s, which were leaked last week to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, show that Gehlen, who worked as a CIA agent after 1945, was aware of his officers’ Nazi past, as were his American counterparts. The Nazi connections were internally revealed in detail after 1963, when Gehlen set up an internal BND investigation office, called Unit 85, to unmask potential Soviet moles inside the agency. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #313

  • British spies operated ‘renegade torture unit’ in Iraq. British military intelligence operated a secret operation in Iraq, called Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT), which was authorized to utilize degrading and unlawful treatment of prisoners. The officers running the operation claimed to be answerable only “directly to London”.
  • Poland’s Jaruzelski was counter-intel officer. Documents in the infamous East German Stasi archives allegedly show that in 1952 the then colonel Wojciech Jaruzelski, who later became Poland’s last communist leader, began working for the Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army –-the military police and counter-espionage agency in Poland.

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News you may have missed #309

  • Iran claims arrest of US cyberspies. Iranian security forces have arrested 30 people accused of waging cyberwar against the country, with the backing of the United States. The Iranian government accuses them of running a network of websites funded by US intelligence, which aims to “collect information about Iran’s nuclear program”.
  • Nazis planned to infiltrate Vatican with spies. Nazi Germany hatched a plan during World War II to infiltrate the Vatican with spies disguised as monks, according to secret MI5 intelligence reports. The codename for the plan was Operation GEORGIAN CONVENT.
  • US misled even us on detainees, says ex-MI5 chief. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of the Britain’s foremost domestic spy agency, MI5, has said that United States intelligence agencies misled even MI5 about the mistreatment of suspected terrorists.

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Declassified MI5 files offer wealth of new information

Sophie Kukralova

Sophie Kukralova

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Britain’s National Archives have authorized the release of nearly 200 files from the vaults of MI5, the country’s domestic intelligence service. The release of the documents, which range from 1937 to 1955, has given rise to numerous interesting historical revelations, including an apparent effort by German Hitler Youth groups to establish personal and institutional links with Lord Baden-Powell, founder and leader of the Boy Scouts. The relevant MI5 file notes that Baden-Powell, who was “wined and dined by senior Hitler Youth figures”, responded enthusiastically to the Nazi charm offensive. Other revelations include the Soviet sympathies of Sidney Bernstein, later Baron Bernstein, who founded Britain’s Granada Theatres (later Granada Television) in 1926. Read more of this post

The day a CIA-trained cat was run over by a taxi

Experiment fail

Experiment fail

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A newly declassified report shows that the US Central Intelligence Agency terminated an ambitious project to embed an elaborate wiretap mechanism in a cat, after several failed attempts at controlling the bugged cat’s behavior in real-life situations. The document (.pdf), entitled “Views on Trained Cats [Redacted] for [Redacted] Use”, dates from March 1967. It wraps up by stating that “the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that, for our [redacted] purposes, [using bugged cats] would not be practical”. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #304

  • 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 #301

  • Six more arrested in Lebanon for spying for Israel. The Lebanese army has arrested at least six more people in southern and northern Lebanon, among them former army officers, on suspicion of spying sharing information about the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah with Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Dozens of alleged Israeli spy cells have been uncovered in Lebanon in recent months.
  • Survey of US spy agencies’ web presence. US intelligence agencies are using the Web to share information and engage the public. Some offer mobile versions and social networking tools –others badly need an update.
  • Danish journalist admits using job as cover to spy for Israel. Herbert Pundik, a Danish former newspaper editor, has admitted he used his journalism credentials to spy for Israel for a decade in the 1960s, saying he felt an obligation as a Jew.

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News you may have missed #299

  • 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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