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Declassified MI5 files offer wealth of new information

March 11, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

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

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News you may have missed #305

March 9, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

So is America engaged in cyberwar, or not? US Army says yes, but Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration insists “there is no cyberwar” going on.
Indian spy master among Victims of recent Kabul blast. The victims of the February 26 suicide attacks in Afghanistan included Nitish Chibber, an undercover RAW (Indian spy agency) official assigned to the Indian consulate in Kandahar.
FBI paid racist informant ‘in excess of $100,000’. White supremacist radio talk-show host Hal Turner is being tried for threatening three Chicago-based federal appeals judges, by writing on his blog that they “deserve to be killed” for upholding a gun control ordinance. He has also disclosed that the FBI paid him “in excess of $100,000” over a five-year period.

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Son of senior Hamas official was Shin Bet informant

February 24, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments

Yousef/Joseph

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The son of a senior Hamas official, who moved from the Gaza Strip to the United States in 2007, has said he was an informant for Israeli intelligence for at least a decade. Mosab Hassan Yousef, who legally changed his name to Joseph after converting to Christianity, is son of Hamas parliamentarian Sheikh Hassan Yousef. He told Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that he was turned by Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, in 1997, after serving a year in an Israeli prison. The newspaper also spoke with Joseph’s Shin Bet handler, a “Captain Loai”, who said the Hamas official’s son was the agency’s most prized Hamas informant, and was given the operational alias GREEN PRINCE. Read more of this post

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How many government informants are there in China?

February 15, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Kailu County

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The interest of intelligence observers was stirred last week by a rare revelation made by a Chinese regional police official, who said that his bureau employs one in every 33 local residents as an informant. Speaking to Xinhua News Agency, Liu Xingchen, deputy public security bureau director for Inner Mongolia’s Kailu County, said his force employed 12,093 informants out of approximately 400,000 inhabitants. The informants’ task, he said, was to provide government with intelligence, to weed out “non-harmonious elements”, and to uncover “all sorts of information that might destabilize society”. Some reports note that, when applied nationwide, these statistics point to the possible existence of “at least 39 million informants”, a number that represents 3 per cent of China’s population and “lays bare the enormous scale of China’s surveillance network”. Such extrapolations, however, are risky for a number of reasons. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0285

February 13, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Canadian government resists release of Cold-War-era files. Canadian journalists are fighting for the release of Cold-War-era government files on Tommy Douglas, a prominent social democratic politician idolized in Canada for his central role in establishing the country’s public health care system. But the government argues that releasing the files would imperil national security and compromise contemporary spy sources and methods.
NPR launches series on confidential informants. Informants are often considered a vital crime fighting tool; but what happens if those informants go astray? Washington-based National Public Radio is launching a special investigation into this controversial subject.
CIA returns to US university campuses. American anthropologist David Price explains that the US intelligence community is gradually re-establishing its academic recruitment network, which was shattered in the 1970s.

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News you may have missed #0284

February 12, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Real IRA faction killed MI5 informant, says Irish police. The Gardai have concluded that a Real IRA faction executed Denis Donaldson, a former Sinn Fein official who turned informer for MI5 and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Last year, the Real IRA took responsibility for the 2007 killing.
NATO spy station up for sale. A Canadian NATO spy station in Nova Scotia that operated between 1983 and 2006 is for sale for US$1.4 million. It appears that the site’s current owner, who doesn’t want to be identified, bought it from the Canadian Defense Department after the base was closed down.
Analysis on the Binyam Mohamed disclosures and UK-US spy cooperation. This analysis, by Michael Clarke, director of Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, is probably the best synopsis of the meaning of the recent court order to disclose Binyam Mohamed’s torture records, which has complicated US-UK spy relations.

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News you may have missed #0282

February 11, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Iran summons Canadian ambassador over CIA links. The Iranian government announced that it summoned the Canadian charge d’affaires in Tehran, in connection with revelations that Canada’s former ambassador to Iran secretly worked for the CIA in the late 1970s.
Charlie Wilson dead at 76. Charlie Wilson, a 12-term American congressional representative, who orchestrated the covert funding of Muslim mujahedeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, has died in Texas.
Analysis: Is Colombia turning into a nation of informants? On January 27, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe announced his goal of putting a thousand spies in college classrooms. He offered to pay students $50 per month to report any suspicious ideas or behavior to the Colombian authorities. Forrest Hylton, who teaches at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, explains the disturbing political background of Uribe’s announcement.

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Civil war continues in South African spy agency

February 10, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Arthur Fraser

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In July of last year, South Africa’s ministerial Review Commission on Intelligence warned that a steadily declining culture of accountability in South Africa’s spy services threatened the country’s constitutional order. In October, the government’s minster for state security, Siyabonga Cwele, cited the Commission’s findings and policy suggestions in announcing a “major restructuring” of South Africa’s security services. Several months later, the “restructuring” process resembles a major civil war between rival political factions of the African National Congress. An entire generation of pro-ANC intelligence officials, who staffed the post-apartheid South African intelligence apparatus, has already been purged. The wave of purges was completed with the resignation this past week of Arthur Fraser, until recently director of the South African National Intelligence Agency’s Operations Division. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0278

February 3, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Israelis arrest two alleged Hamas informants. Israeli security service Shin Bet says 24-year olds Murad Kamal and Murad Nimer were recruited by Hamas in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Descendant of Richard Sorge’s accomplice receives Soviet-era award. An updated report on the 81-year-old niece of Yotoku Miyagi, a Japanese accomplice of famous German-born Comintern spy Richard Sorge, who has been awarded the Soviet Order of the Patriotic War medal in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in Tokyo, Japan. The medal was originally granted in 1965, but Miyagi was unable to collect it, as he had been executed by the Japanese, along with Sorge, in 1944.

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News you may have missed #0275

February 1, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Over 3,000 paid informants work for Colombian security apparatus. This according to the country’s Defense Minister, Gabriel Silva, who said that the 3,000 are paid monthly and are among “2.2 million cooperating civilians” (whatever this means).
Interview with Canadian ambassador who worked for the CIA. Iran’s Press TV has published the first part of an extensive interview with Ken Taylor, Canada’s former ambassador to Iran, who recently admitted that he secretly worked for the CIA in the late 1970s, after the US embassy in Iran was taken over by students during the Islamic Revolution.

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News you may have missed #0273

January 30, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Tinner nuclear spy ring worked for CIA, documents confirm. IntelNews has been reporting for more than a year that Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer who worked under Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, and was said at the time to be leading “the world’s biggest nuclear smuggling ring”, was in fact a CIA informant. Now documents submitted in a Swiss federal court appear to confirm Tinner’s CIA connection.
Son of Georgia’s former president charged with spying for Russia. Some say that Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s first post-communist president, was assassinated in 1993. Now his son, Tsotne Gamsakhurdia, has been formally charged with “collaborating with Russian intelligence services”. The former president’s son’s arrest appears to be the latest episode in an ongoing intelligence war between Russia and Georgia.

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Analysis: NASA Spy’s Israel Ties Deeper Than Initially Thought

January 25, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

S.D. Nozette

By I. ALLEN and J. FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
New court documents show that Stewart David Nozette, an American scientist arrested for attempted espionage during an FBI sting last October, had deeper ties to Israel than initially believed. Nozette, a former employee of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was arrested for attempting to share classified US government data with an undercover FBI officer posing as a handler of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. At the time of Nozette’s arrest, the US Justice Department argued for keeping him in jail, as he “might flee to Israel if not confined”. Interestingly, however, US officials said at the time that Israel had no role in Nozette’s attempted espionage, and the FBI’s own indictment admitted that the Bureau “does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under US laws in this case”. But is this so? We examine the increasing complexities in the Stewart Nozette espionage case, as well as its significance for US-Israeli relations. Read article →

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News you may have missed #0263

January 22, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Up to 30,000 Chinese spies in Germany, say newspapers. According to German media, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution says that up to “thirty thousand Chinese residents residing in Germany are spies”, and that “60 percent of industrial spies residing in Germany are Chinese”.
Israeli agencies see Turkey moving toward radicalization. Israel’s chief intelligence official, General Amos Yadlin, has told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Turkey’s recent diplomatic moves are indicative of its shift toward radical Islam.

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News you may have missed #0261

January 21, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Analysis: CIA has long struggled with ensuring safe interrogations. The debate within the CIA about how to handle agents in war zones surfaced in Iraq in 2003. There was a dispute about how to balance the safety of CIA personnel with the needs of intelligence gathering. The controversy went on for more than a year, but in the end, by 2005, CIA officers had generally stopped meeting agents in the “red zones” of Iraq, that is, outside secured areas.
Germany to probe CIA murder and rendition plots on its soil. German legislators will probably launch an investigation into claims that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plotted to murder an alleged al-Qaeda fundraiser in Hamburg, and that it placed agents in Germany to sweep up terrorist suspects without informing German authorities.

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US mosque says FBI informant responsible for shootout killing

January 20, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

L.A. Abdullah

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Community relations between the FBI and American Muslim groups took a turn for the worse yesterday, after an African-American Muslim congregation in Detroit accused a Bureau informant of luring a Mosque member to his death. Luqman Ameen Abdullah, leader of the self-described Ummah Mosque in Detroit, was killed in a shootout with FBI agents on October 28, during a raid at a warehouse reportedly aimed at recovering stolen goods. But Mosque worshipers claim that Abdullah was led to the warehouse by a man going by the name of Jabril, who they say was an FBI informant. The man allegedly infiltrated the Mosque for several months leading to the shootout, but disappeared following the FBI raid. The FBI has admitted it employed three informants to spy on the group, but has refused to reveal details, and is now seeking a protective order to shield the informants’ identities. Read more of this post