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Who tried to burn down the US embassy in Skopje in 1999?

January 19, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Pavlovic-Latas

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On March 25, 1999, approximately 200 people broke off from a much larger crowd of pro-Serbian demonstrators in downtown Skopje, Macedonia, and, in a military-style operation, tore down the security perimeter around the US embassy and occupied its courtyard for several hours. With the US ambassador, Christopher Hill, and most of the embassy staff inside the building, the occupiers set fire to embassy cars and tried to set the building alight. By the time they were dispersed by police, the rioters had managed to destroy all the cars parked in the embassy’s courtyard, as well as a large part of the embassy building’s exterior. The demonstrators were protesting US and NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia, which had begun on the previous day, sparked by brutal ethnic clashes in the Kosovo region. But the question remains: who, if anyone, organized the attempted burning down of the US embassy? Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Balkans, Christopher Hill, Dragan Pavlovic-Latas, former Yugoslavia, informants, Kosovo, lawsuits, Macedonia, NATO, News, Serbia, Skopje (Macedonia), State Security Service (Serbia), United States, US embassy in FYR Macedonia

News you may have missed #0259

January 19, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Jordanians threatened Balawi’s family, says paper. The Washington Post reports that members of the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) threatened to end Khost suicide bomber Humam Khalil al-Balawi’s “medical career, and […] hinted they could cause problems for his family”, unless he cooperated with them.
Google hack attack was ultra sophisticated, new details show. Unknown hackers seeking source code from Google, Adobe and dozens of other high-profile companies used unprecedented tactics that combined encryption, stealth programming and an unknown hole in Internet Explorer, according to new details released last week by the anti-virus firm McAfee.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Adobe, China, CIA, computer hacking, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, General Intelligence Department (Jordan), Google, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, informants, Jordan, McAffee, News, news you may have missed, suicide bombings, torture

News you may have missed #0255 (espionage edition)

January 15, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

South Korea jails alleged spy for 10 years. A 37-year-old college professor, identified only as Lee, has been handed a 10-year prison sentence for allegedly spying undercover on behalf of North Korea for 17 years. South Korean authorities said Lee, who was charged in November, was recruited by the North in 1992, while studying in New Delhi, India.
New details in Nozette spy case. Maryland scientist Stewart Nozette, who is accused of giving classified defense information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer, may have impersonated a naval research official in order to acquire classified information, according to new court documents.
“I didn’t kill Islamic Jihad members because I was busy spying for Israel“. Mahmoud Qassem Rafeh, a retired Lebanese Internal Security Forces official, has already confessed to having “collaborated with Israeli intelligence agents” between 1993 and 2006. But he denies having participated in the 2006 assassinations of two Islamic Jihad leaders in Lebanon, because on the night of the assassinations he was conducting a reconnaissance mission in Lebanon on behalf of Israeli spy agency Mossad.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with assassinations, counterintelligence, espionage, FBI, India, informants, Islamic Jihad of Lebanon, Israel, Lebanese Internal Security Forces, Lebanon, Lee, Mahmoud Qassem Rafeh, Mossad, New Delhi, News, news you may have missed, North Korea, South Korea, Stewart David Nozette

News you may have missed #0251 (analysis edition)

January 13, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Bomber’s betrayal shows spy challenge for West. The December 30 suicide attack that killed seven CIA agents in Khost, Afghanistan, shows that al-Qaeda is currently keener on killing Western spies than infiltrating them.
Christmas Day bomber affair was intel failure of the highest order. On Christmas Day, 2009, the US had 16 intelligence agencies, a czar for national intelligence and an intelligence budget of more than $75 billion. There was sufficient intelligence available to detect the Christmas Day bomber. However, US intelligence efforts were unimaginative, divided and diffuse, argues former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman.
Endemic failures in US intelligence gathering, analysis. Excellent summary analysis from Deutsche Welle on how endemic failures in communication and information gathering by US spy agencies are threatening to undermine Washington’s so-called “war on terrorism”.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Analysis, CIA, double agents, Forward Operating Base Chapman, informants, intelligence analysis, intelligence failures, intelligence sharing, Khost, Melvin A. Goodman, news you may have missed, Nigeria, Pakistan, suicide bombings, UK, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, United States, War on Terrorism, Yemen

Comment: CIA Deaths a Failure of Intelligence, Not Security

January 11, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments

Khalil al-Balawi

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Early on Thursday, rumors began spreading among intelligence observers that the December 30 suicide blast in Khost, Afghanistan, which killed seven and seriously injured six CIA personnel, went off in the open air, and not inside a gym on the base, as had previously been reported. Soon afterwards, an article written by CIA director Leon Panetta for the Sunday edition of The Washington Post, dated January 10, was published by the paper two days early. The op-ed is an apparent attempt by the CIA leadership to officially get the word out that suicide bomber Humam Khalil al-Balawi “was about to be searched by our security officers –a distance away from other intelligence personnel– when he set off his explosives”, according to Panetta. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, CIA, counterintelligence, Forward Operating Base Chapman, General Intelligence Department (Jordan), Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, informants, Jordan, Joseph Fitsanakis, Khost, Leon Panetta, Pakistah, spycraft, suicide bombings

News you may have missed #0247

January 8, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

US government lowers threshold for inclusion on no-fly lists. According to senior US State Department officials, the government has already lowered the threshold for information deemed important enough to put suspicious individuals on a watch list or no-fly list. CNN reports that suspects will now include citizens of the notorious Islamist country of Cuba….
CIA starts sharing data with climate scientists. This blog has kept an eye on the CIA’s Climate Change Center, which was established late last year. It now turns out the Agency had started monitoring climate change in 1992, under project MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis), but the program was shut down in 2001 by the Bush Administration. The Climate Change Center, therefore, represents the re-establishment of an earlier effort.
How the KGB tried to recruit an NBC News reporter. FBI files show that the Soviet KGB tried to recruit the late NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine, while he was stationed in Moscow in the 1950s.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Bush Administration, CIA, CIA Center on Climate Change, climate change, Cold War, Cuba, declassification, history, informants, Irving R. Levine, KGB, Moscow (Russia), News, news you may have missed, no-fly lists, Project MEDEA, US Department of State, USSR

News you may have missed #0245 (CIA edition)

January 7, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

CIA saw Jordanian double spy as valuable asset. Before detonating a suicide bomb in Afghanistan last week, Jordanian double spy (or was he?) Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was considered by US spy agencies “the most promising informant in years about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s top leaders”.
CIA going through worst spell since 9/11. America’s most recognizable intelligence agency is currently going through its worst time since 9/11, what with Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the loss of at least seven of its agents in Khost, Afghanistan.
US intel in Afghanistan is broken, irrelevant, says US insider. A new report (.pdf) by US Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence aide to International Security Assistance Force Commander General Stanley McChrystal, says the US intelligence community “is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy” in Afghanistan. The report recommends “[s]weeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself, from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan”.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, CIA, double agents, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, HUMINT, informants, Jordan, Khost, Michael Flynn, News, news you may have missed, Stanley McChrystal, suicide bombings, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, United States

Breaking news: CIA officers were killed by Jordanian double spy

January 4, 2010 by intelNews 2 Comments

Chapman FOB

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Ever since I posted “The Meaning of the Suicide Attack on the CIA” on this blog, I have been telling reporters who contacted me that the attack at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman was probably carried out by a double agent. I dismissed claims on other websites that the bomber had been just a “potential recruit” who was “not required to go through full security checks [at Chapman FOB] in order to help gain [his] trust”. Instead, as I wrote on Saturday, I suggested that “the bomber was able to evade safety search standards [at the US base] by relying on a long-term informant-handler relationship with CIA personnel stationed at the outpost. This would lead to the strong possibility that the informant-turned-bomber had been groomed as a double agent from the very start by local Taliban operatives”. A news report has just appeared on NBC, which appears to confirm just that: namely that the suicide bomber had been “an al-Qaeda double agent” who was “arrested by Jordanian intelligence more than a year ago”, and turned over to the Americans by his Jordanian handlers, who believed he “had been successfully reformed”. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, CIA, double agents, Forward Operating Base Chapman, General Intelligence Department (Jordan), Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, informants, Jordan, Jordanian royal family, News, Pakistan, Sharif Ali biin Zeid, suicide bombings, United States, Zarqa (Jordan)

Iran monarchists, foreign spies, behind suspicious news reports

January 4, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments

M.R. Madhi

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
There is no question that the domestic security situation in Iran is critical, and that we may soon witness crucial political shifts in the Islamic Republic. At the same time, however, observers should be cognizant of what Politico’s Laura Rozen calls “a notable uptick […] in very fishy stories” forecasting the immediate end of the Islamic government by supposed radical Western-aligned forces. IntelNews has detected several such stories in recent days, such as this unconfirmed December 31 report in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which stated that the Iranian government was moving “[h]undreds of military forces and tens of armored vehicles towards Tehran”, something which never actually occurred. Two days earlier, a report in Dutch government-owned Radio Netherlands had suggested that members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, including Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, were preparing to abandon the country and seek political asylum in Russia. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Ali Khamenei, ASIO, Australia, BOSCH, Czechoslovakia, informants, Iran, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Laura Rozen, Maximilian Wechsler, Mohammad Reza Madhi, Netherlands, News, psyops, Russia, Supreme National Security Council (Iran), Thailand

Analysis: The Meaning of the Suicide Attack on the CIA

January 2, 2010 by intelNews 2 Comments

Chapman FOB

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS* | intelNews.org |
The recent deaths of seven and the serious injury of another six CIA personnel in Afghanistan’s Khost province has undoubtedly shocked an Agency not used to mass casualties. But what exactly is the significance of Wednesday’s suicide attack at the Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman, and how will it affect the US military and intelligence presence at the Afghan-Pakistani border? Given that the CIA team at Chapman FOB could not have consisted of more than 15 to 20 agents, it would be logical to conclude that the attack virtually decimated the CIA presence in Khost. But the impact of this development on US operations in Afghanistan will be minimal, in contrast to operations inside Pakistan, which constituted the primary objective of the CIA team at Chapman FOB. Read article →

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, assassinations, CIA, double agents, Forward Operating Base Chapman, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, Humam Khalil al-Balawi, HUMINT, informants, Joseph Fitsanakis, Khost, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Predator drones, suicide bombings, Taliban, United States

News you may have missed #0228

December 21, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Irish nationalists planting honey traps on British troops? The Belfast Telegraph reports that British Army personnel have been “warned about the recruitment by dissidents of attractive females to identify soldiers at popular nightspots and lure them into ambushes” in Northern Ireland. This is highly unnecessary. Usually British troops in the North are easily identifiable by their haircuts, accents, even by their choice of beer!
Egyptian spy chief meets Israeli defense minister. Ehud Barak and Omar Suleiman, director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services, met in Jerusalem on Sunday. The meeting included a “private 30-minute session” between the two men (and the eavesdroppers on either side, presumably –ed.).
Terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’. The London Times has woken up to the rumors circulating about David Headley, a full month after Indian media began reporting them, and nearly three weeks after intelNews alerted its readers. Nice of them to catch up.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with David Coleman Headley, Egypt, Egyptian General Intelligence Services, Ehud Barak, honey traps, India, informants, Israel, Jerusalem, News, news you may have missed, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, United States

Protestant alleges links between N. Ireland loyalists and British state

December 21, 2009 by intelNews 3 Comments

Ray McCord, Sr.

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On November 9, 1997, Royal Air Force officer Raymond McCord Jr. was beaten to death in Belfast, Northern Ireland, by members of the Mount Vernon branch of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). McCord’s beating was one of many instances in which Northern Ireland’s most violent loyalist gang targeted members of its own Protestant community. The difference in McCord’s case was that his father, Raymond McCord Sr., decided to come forward and speak out about the decades-old collusion between Northern Irish loyalist paramilitaries and Britain’s security services. Despite repeated death threats and intimidation, McCord’s campaign prompted an official investigation into the matter by Northern Ireland’s police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan. Her 2007 report confirmed that the leader of the Mount Vernon UVF, Mark Haddock, had been repeatedly protected by police authorities, despite being routinely implicated in extortion, blackmail, drug dealing and arson, as well as in dozens of paramilitary-style attacks that resulted in 16 murders and 10 attempted murders. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Belfast (UK), Human Rights and Oversight, informants, Mark Haddock, Mount Vernon council estate (Belfast), News, Northern Ireland, Nuala O'Loan, Raymond McCord Jr., Raymond McCord Sr., Special Branch, terrorism, UK, US House of Representatives, US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, UVF

US forces helped assassinate top FARC commander in Ecuador

December 14, 2009 by intelNews 1 Comment

Raúl Reyes

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
US military intelligence and combat troops helped Colombian forces assassinate a senior leftwing Colombian paramilitary commander on Ecuadoran soil last year, according to an Ecuadoran government report. As this blog reported last month, Colombia’s soon-to-be-dismantled DAS intelligence service admitted it paid “an informant in the Ecuadorean security forces” US$2.5 million to supply information on the whereabouts of Raúl Reyes, senior leader in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Reyes was assassinated along with 16 of his guerillas in a daring raid by Colombian forces, around a mile inside Ecuador’s border, on March 1, 2008. Now an Ecuadoran government report claims that Reyes’ killing, which sparked the so-called 2008 Andean diplomatic crisis between Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, was conducted with logistical and combat assistance by US forces stationed in Ecuador. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 2008 Andean diplomatic crisis, assassinations, Colombia, DAS (Colombia), Ecuador, FARC, informants, Manta Air Base (Ecuador), military bases, narcotics trade, News, Rafael Correa, Raul Reyes, United States, US Air Force, US DoD Southern Command, Venezuela

News you may have missed #0212

December 9, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Government investigator gets US passports using fake names. A GAO investigator managed to obtain four genuine US passports using fake names and fraudulent documents. He then used one of the fake passports to buy a plane ticket, obtain a boarding pass, and make it through a security checkpoint at a major US airport. The post-9/11 security environment in all its glory.
Documents on Argentina’s Operation MEXICO declassified. Operation MEXICO was the codename for a clandestine Argentine rendition program aimed at abducting and murdering leaders of the Montonero Peronist Movement, a leftwing militant group, living in exile in Mexico City in the late 1970s.
Mistrial declared in the trial of FBI informant Hal Turner. Turner will still face a single count of unlawfully threatening three Chicago-based federal appeals judges, by writing on his blog that they “deserve to be killed” for upholding a gun control ordinance.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Argentina, FBI, forgery, Harold Turner, informants, lawsuits, Mexico, Mexico City (Mexico), Montonero Peronist Movement, News, news you may have missed, Operation MEXICO, travel documentation, United States, US Government Accountability Office

News you may have missed #0209

December 7, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Court documents strengthen case of alleged FBI informant. Unsealed court records that Craig Monteilh said would prove he was an informant for the FBI, tasked with spying on California mosques, show that he provided “very, very valuable” information to the FBI.
Britain’s ITV to air documentary on MI5. Until a few years ago, the UK government wouldn’t acknowledge MI5’s existence. Now the quasi-governmental ITV television station is preparing to broadcast a documentary on the agency’s 100-year history.