News you may have missed #901
May 31, 2020 Leave a comment
• US Army already looking to future pandemics. While still in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the US Army is already thinking ahead about the impacts of future pandemics and how they will affect the service, according to the head of Army Futures Command. General John Murray, Futures Command’s commanding general, said on May 27 that “The chances of this happening again are not zero for sure”. “It’s demographics, it’s urbanization, it’s economies, it’s pandemics,” he said during a teleconference with reporters hosted by George Washington University’s Project for Media and National Security.
• The sex worker who spied for Israel’s pre-state militia. Once a disregarded sex worker, today Michal Garbovitz is hailed for aiding the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization in British-Mandate Palestine between 1920 and 1948. Described in contemporary accounts as a “good-looking and handsome” woman, Garbovitz was estranged by her Jewish family for fraternizing with Arabs. However, during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 against the Mandatory forces, she “exploited her contacts with Arabs and British police officers to extract vital information and transfer it to the Haganah”.
• Should COVID-19 status be a protected classification? People who have recovered from COVID-19 already face significant disadvantages, even if they have fully recuperated from the virus. For instance, the military announced several weeks ago that recovering from COVID-19 would be a permanently disqualifying condition for entrance into the armed services. Although the military later clarified that such a disqualification would only apply to individuals hospitalized because of COVID-19, many people who have recovered from the virus will face obstacles to joining the military due to these restrictions.
The Iranian government may have used a female intelligence officer to lure a leading Iranian dissident from his home in France to Iraq, where he was abducted by Iranian security forces and secretly transported to Iran. Iranian authorities 
Indian authorities have arrested an Indian Air Force officer for allegedly giving classified documents to two Pakistani spies on Facebook, who posed as women interested in him. The officer has been named as Arun Marwaha, a wing commander stationed at the Indian Air Force headquarters in Delhi. Marwaha, 51, is a para-jumping instructor who trains members of India’s Garud Commando Force —the Special Forces unit of the Indian Air Force. He was reportedly due to retire in 2019.
The Israel Defense Forces told a press conference on Wednesday that hackers belonging to the Palestinian militant group Hamas lured Israeli soldiers by posing as young women online. Wednesday’s press conference was led by an IDF spokesman who requested to remain anonymous, as is often the case with the Israeli military. He told reporters that the hackers used carefully crafted online profiles of real Israeli women, whose personal details and photographs were expropriated from their publicly available social media profiles. The hackers then made contact with members of the IDF and struck conversations with them that in many cases became intimate over time. At various times in the process, the hackers would send the Israeli soldiers photographs of the women, which were copied from the women’s online public profiles.
A former employee of Germany’s spy agency, who was recalled from his post abroad after dating a foreign woman, has lost his legal battle to be compensated for lost earnings. The former intelligence officer, who has not been identified by name, worked for Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, known by its initials, BND. From 2006 to 2008, he served as the BND’s station chief in Riga, Latvia. The post implies that he the highest-ranking German intelligence officer in the small Baltic state. According to court documents, the BND station chief had explicit directions from his employer, in writing, not to fraternize with locals while serving in the Latvian capital. The instructions expressly forbade romantic affiliations with locals.
The Dutch government has suspended its ambassador to China and has launched an official investigation into an alleged secret relationship between the ambassador and a female Chinese employee at the Dutch embassy. The ambassador, Ron Keller, is a career diplomat and senior member of the Dutch foreign service corps, who has served in Russia and Turkey among other international posts. He assumed duties as Holland’s ambassador to China in late 2015. In December of that year, he arrived in Beijing and took command of one of the largest Dutch embassies in the world.
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
intelNews.org 
Poland to probe alleged ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence
February 6, 2026 by Ian Allen 4 Comments
THE GOVERNMENT OF POLAND has announced plans to launch an investigation into the possibility that an international sex trafficking ring set up by the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was a “honey trap” set up by Russian intelligence to entrap “the elites of the Western world,” according to Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Tusk announced the commencement of what he referred to as a “special investigation” at a press conference on Wednesday, following a senior-level government meeting. He told reporters that the investigation would be led by members of the Office of the Prime Minister in association with the Ministry of Justice and the Polish intelligence services.
In 2008 a Florida court convicted Epstein—a jet-setting financier with links to hundreds of prominent individuals in finance, politics, industry, and academia—for sex offences. The disgraced financier was found dead in his jail cell in 2019. Prosecutors in the United States say they have identified over 100 victims of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, but some estimates claim that as many as 1,000 other victims have yet to come forward.
At last week’s press conference, a stern-looking Tusk pointed to Epstein’s large fortune, describing it as “unexplained” and adding that it raised important questions about the late financier’s links with state actors. He reminded his audience that “a growing number of commentators and experts assume that it is highly probable that this pedophilia scandal was a premeditated operation by the Russian KGB”—a term still frequently used in Eastern European countries to refer to the post-Soviet intelligence community.
The operation may have been a “so-called ‘honey trap’, a sweet bait, a trap set for the elites of the Western world, primarily the United States,” Tusk said. The Polish prime minister then added: “I don’t need to tell you how serious the increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence services co-organized this operation is.” Among other things, it could “mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today.” He added that investigators would systematically review and assess “every document currently available in the public domain.”
In a social media post later that day, Russian businessman Kirill Dimitriev, who last year was appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin as Russia’s special presidential envoy on foreign investment and economic cooperation, dismissed the Polish government’s move. According to Dimitriev, all allegations about connections between Epstein and Russian intelligence are “lies” spread by “leftist elites.”
► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 06 February | Permalink
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