US considers ending intel sharing with countries that criminalize homosexuality

April 27, 2020 by 2 Comments

Richard GrenellThe administration of United States President Donald Trump is considering the possibility of limiting or terminating the sharing of intelligence with countries around the world that criminalize homosexuality. The move is being led by Richard Grenell, an American diplomat, civil servant and media consultant, who was appointed by the White House as acting Director of National Intelligence in February. This makes Grenell the most senior intelligence official in the US.

The idea behind this proposed move is to apply pressure to countries that continue to criminalize homosexuality to change their laws. The primary force behind this initiative is Grenell himself, who is believed to be the first openly gay individual to serve in a cabinet-level position in the United States. Before his appointment as acting Director of National Intelligence, Grenell had been tasked by President Trump to lead an effort to use the US foreign policy agenda —including financial aid— as a form of incentive to end the criminalization of homosexuality worldwide.

Almost from the moment of his appointment on February 20, Grenell has vigorously prioritized issues relating to discrimination in the workplace. Earlier this month, he sent a letter (.pdf) to the member agencies of the US Intelligence Community urging them to ensure that their policies to protect their LGBT workforce from harassment and discrimination “are specific and deliberate”.

If the ODNI went ahead with limiting intelligence sharing, it would affect Washington’s intelligence relationship with several partners that are considered critical, including Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Nigeria and Egypt. But in an interview with the The New York Times last week, Grenell argued that “ultimately, the United States is safer when our partners respect basic human rights”. Nondiscrimination against LGBT individuals “is an American value”, said Grenell, and argued that the US Intelligence Community should promoting what is effectively “United States policy”. The Times said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had formed a group “to review the issue [of intelligence sharing] and form ideas”.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 27 April 2020 | Permalink

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UK to pardon genius wartime cryptanalyst convicted of ‘indecency’

July 24, 2013 by 4 Comments

Alan TuringBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
One of the greatest mathematical minds of modern times, who is widely considered the father of computer science and is credited with helping the Allies win World War II, is to receive a posthumous pardon by the British government, who in 1952 convicted him of homosexuality. Alan Turing, a mathematician and logician, with careers at the universities of Cambridge and Princeton, worked as a cryptanalyst for the British government during World War II. His work for Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, the British Armed Forces’ wartime joint codebreaking center, was instrumental in helping the British crack German military ciphers. Turing is personally credited with devising a complex method for compromising the Enigma machine, a highly secretive message-encoding device used by the German military and intelligence services. In 1952, while working for the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, Turing was charged with “gross indecency” under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized homosexuality. After pleading guilty to having a sexual relationship with a 19-year-old unemployed man, Turing was convicted and given a choice of imprisonment or undergoing “chemical castration”. The latter was a hormonal treatment based on injections of synthetic estrogen, aimed at reducing a person’s sexual drive. Turing chose the latter option, which rendered him impotent and caused massive chemical imbalance in his brain. Read more of this post

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WWII files reveal bizarre case of British cross-dressing spy

May 24, 2013 by 6 Comments

Dudley ClarkeBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A set of World War II-era British Foreign Office documents detail a highly unusual incident of a senior British spy, who was arrested in Spain for cross-dressing. The files, which were released this week by the National Archives, concern the case of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, a senior operative of British intelligence who served with distinction in Europe and the Middle East. In October of 1941, Clarke was traveling though Spain en route to Egypt, by way of the British colony of Gibraltar. His instructions were to maintain a low profile throughout his trip, during which he posed as a foreign correspondent for The London Times. In reality, he was carrying with him key naval intelligence addressed to the British high command in Cairo. However, soon after arriving in Spanish capital Madrid, Clarke was arrested for appearing in a busy street dressed as a woman. A frantic cable sent to the Foreign Office by the British embassy in Madrid mentioned that the intelligence officer had been detained after he had been found “in a main street dressed —down to a brassiere— as a woman’. According to the —now declassified— memoranda complied by the Foreign Office, Clarke had told his Spanish police captors that he was “a novelist” and had dressed as a woman in order to “study the reactions of men to women in the streets”. But the conservative police officials in Francoist Spain did not buy Clarke’s story, and decided to charge him with “engaging in homosexual behavior”. London, meanwhile, was trying frantically to ensure that Clarke was released before either Spanish or German authorities realized that he was a British intelligence officer. The Foreign Office cabled the British embassy in Madrid with direct instructions that “in no circumstances should it be revealed that C[larke] is a British [intelligence] officer”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #818 (USA edition)

December 19, 2012 by 3 Comments

Osama bin LadenBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►The real-life female CIA officer who helped track bin Laden. The Washington Post has a good article on the real-life career of a female CIA officer who helped the Agency track al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. It is disappointing, however that the article, authored by Greg Miller and Toby Warrick, is headlined “In Zero Dark Thirty she’s the hero; in real life, CIA agent’s career is more complicated”. The CIA employee in question is not an “agent”; she is an officer. In the CIA, agents are assets, people recruited and handled by CIA officers. Amazing that The Post, with its experienced journalists and editors would confuse such a basic operational distinction.
►►US spy agencies to detail cyber-attacks from abroad. The US intelligence community is nearing completion of its first detailed review of cyber-spying against American targets from abroad, including an attempt to calculate US financial losses from hacker attacks based in China. The National Intelligence Estimate, the first involving cyber-espionage, will also seek to determine how large a role the Chinese government plays in directing or coordinating digital attacks aimed at stealing US intellectual property, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified undertaking.
►►CIA begins LGBT recruiting. As part of the CIA’s efforts to diversify its workforce, the spy agency is reaching out to a group that once was unable to get security clearance: lesbians and gay men. CIA officials have held a networking event for the Miami gay community sponsored by the Miami-Dade Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and the CIA. “This is the first time we’ve done a networking event of this type with any of the gay and lesbian chamber of commerces in the United States,” says Michael Barber, a self-identified “straight ally” and the spy agency’s LGBT Community Outreach and Liaison program manager.

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Did Czechoslovakian spies plan to blackmail British leader?

June 26, 2012 by Leave a comment

Ted HeathBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In 1975, Czechoslovakian intelligence officer Josef Frolík, who had defected to the United States, published a book titled The Frolik Defection: The Memoirs of an Intelligence Agent. Among several revelations in the book was an alleged plot by the ŠtB, Czechoslovakia’s Cold-War-era secret intelligence service, to sexually blackmail British Conservative politician Edward “Ted” Heath. According to Frolík, the ŠtB had concluded that Heath, a lifelong bachelor and Britain’s Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, was gay. Based on this —highly questionable— belief, Jan Mrázek, an ŠtB officer working out of the Czechoslovakian embassy in London, had allegedly devised a plan in the mid-1960s, which aimed to expose Heath to homosexual blackmail. Frolík claims in his book that Mrázek developed the plot around Heath’s well-known preoccupation with classical music. Specifically, he planned to recruit Czechoslovakian classical organist Jiří Reinberger, who would be instructed to meet the British conservative politician in London and invite him to Prague for a concert. While there, the ŠtB hoped that a romantic affair would ensue, under the watchful eye of Czechoslovakian spies, who would make sure to capture the more intimate moments of the two men on camera. The audiovisual evidence would, the ŠtB believed, convince Heath to spy for Czechoslovakian intelligence. According Frolík, the plan was put to action but was eventually scrapped after MI5, Britain’s counterintelligence agency, warned Heath that a trip to Czechoslovakia would expose him to blackmail by that country’s intelligence service. When Frolík’s book came out, Heath, who had stepped down from his post as Britain’s Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, dismissed the story as a fabrication, and threatened to sue the author. But was Frolík telling the truth? Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #718 (GCHQ edition)

April 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

GCHQ center in Cheltenham, EnglandBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►GCHQ releases Alan Turing papers. Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ has released two mathematical papers written by cryptographer Alan Turing after keeping the works secret for over half a century. The intelligence agency believes the handwritten papers were produced by Turing during his time at Bletchley Park, the World War II code-breaking center. The year 2012 marks the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. Turing, whose work heavily contributing to the Allied war effort, committed suicide in 1954 by taking cyanide. Turing had been convicted of homosexuality, which was then a crime, and was given the choice between prison or chemical castration. The UK government officially apologized over Turing’s treatment in 2009, over 50 years after his death.
►►Britain’s GCHQ sued for ‘racism’. Alfred Bacchus, 42, claims he was bullied by bosses while he was a senior press officer at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham. He says he wanted to publish an official report in 2010 into race bias inside GCHQ which warned that not enough ethnic minority staff were being recruited to help fight terrorism. It found that black and Asian intelligence officers at GCHQ complained of a racist culture in which they were insulted by white colleagues and challenged over their loyalty to Britain.
►►Ex-GCHQ chief wants more surveillance of Facebook and Twitter. Sir David Omand, an ex-Cabinet Office security chief and former director of Britain’s GCHQ electronic eavesdropping agency, said it was essential that monitoring of social media was put on a proper legal footing. A report by the think-tank Demos, which Sir David co-authored, said existing laws regulating the interception of communications by police and intelligence agencies needed to be overhauled to meet the complexities of social media. However, the ability of state security agencies and the police to intercept social network communications such as tweets must be placed on a clear legal footing, the report says.

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Comment: Bin Laden’s Alleged ‘Magazine Stash’ May be CIA PsyOp

May 15, 2011 by 12 Comments

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
Rumors of an alleged discovery of “a stash of pornography” in Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan have spread like wildfire since Friday, when Reuters published an “exclusive” report on the subject. The report, written by Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria, cites “current and former US officials […] who discussed the discovery […] on condition of anonymity”. According to the allegations, “[t]he pornography recovered in bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive”. The report was almost immediately picked up by several news outlets, including The New York Times, which notes that the disclosure “will be welcomed by counter-terrorism officials because it could tarnish [the al-Qaeda founder’s] legacy and erode [his] appeal”. Indeed. It appears that only Danger Room‘s Spencer Ackerman thought it wise to air a brief disclaimer to the effect that the “welcomed disclosure” may in fact be “a CIA information operation”. He has a point. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #419 (Gareth Williams edition)

August 26, 2010 by 1 Comment

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A terrible week for German spy agencies

November 18, 2009 by Leave a comment

BND logo

BND logo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Germany’s largest intelligence agencies are in for a challenging few days, as two spy scandals are making headlines in the country’s media. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s foremost domestic intelligence organization, is firmly in the hot seat after it emerged that a woman it employed as an undercover informer was among seven extremists indicted for helping operate a hardcore neo-Nazi online radio station. The woman, who has been identified only as “Sandra F.”, had been hired by the spy agency to monitor the German People’s Union (DVU), a national socialist political grouping with substantial following in Brandenburg and Saxony. Read more of this post

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