News you may have missed #0139

  • Pakistan tells US diplomat to be quiet. Perturbed by the recent remarks of US Deputy Chief of Mission in Islamabad, Gerald Feierstein, that top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are presently hiding in Quetta, Pakistan has summoned the US diplomat and demanded that he stops discussing intelligence issues in media. The move follows a closed-door meeting last week between the director of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and CIA director Leon Panetta.
  • Analysis: HUMINT worries al-Qaeda more than drone assassinations. The CIA-operated drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan get all the headlines. But what’s really worrying al Qaeda are the agents in their midst, says Adam Rawnsley of Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog.
  • Chinese spymaster complains about US news leak. It has emerged that Major General Yang Hui, China’s most senior military intelligence official, recently made a secret visit to the US and complained to the Pentagon over the US press leak on the Chinese submarine that secretly shadowed the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier in 2006. He said senior Chinese leaders suspect the Pentagon deliberately disclosed the encounter as part of an effort to send a “tough” message to China’s military.

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Former agent reveals aspects of CIA’s bin Laden hunt

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Arthur “Art” Keller, a retired CIA agent who spent several years looking for Osama bin Laden in the Afghan-Pakistani border areas has given a rare interview to The London Times. Until his recent retirement, Keller participated in the 50- to 100-strong covert CIA force in the region, whose primary task since 9/11 has been to capture or kill senior al-Qaeda commanders. He told the paper that the failure to find bin Laden has led the agency to start bringing back retired members of “The Cadre”, a close-knit group of Pashto- and Dari-speaking CIA agents, who spent many years in Afghanistan in the 1980s, during America’s proxy war with the Soviet Union. Read more of this post

Al-Qaeda book warns West is winning spy war

al-Libi

Abu al-Libi

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A guidance report authored by an al-Qaeda field commander in Afghanistan says that Western-handled spies have infiltrated the organization’s networks and are sabotaging is activities. As intelNews pointed out on July 12, the report, penned by Abu Yahya al-Libi, also contains an illustrated essay on the CIA’s use of SIM cards planted on al-Qaeda militants’ cell phones to direct unmanned drone strikes. But most of the circular, entitled Guidance on the Ruling of the Muslim Spy, is devoted to cautionary advice on the “swarms of locusts” of Western-aligned spies, who have even penetrated “the military and financial supply roads of the mujaheddin, which are far from the enemy’s surveillance”. Read more of this post