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News you may have missed #489

March 31, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Russian spies want their stuff back from the FBI. Two of the ten Russians deported from the United States in a spy row last July have demanded that some of the property they were forced to leave behind be returned to them. The claim was lodged on behalf of Vladimir and Lidia Guryev, better known as Richard and Cynthia Murphy.
Kuwait sentences three to death for espionage. Two Iranians and a Kuwaiti national, all serving in Kuwait’s army, were condemned to death yesterday for belonging to an Iranian spy ring, which allegedly passed on information to the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards. A Syrian and a stateless Arab, who are also members of the alleged spy ring, were handed life terms.
‘Foreign spies’ hacked Australian leader’s computer. Chinese hackers seeking information on commercial secrets are suspected of having broken into a computer used by Julia Gillard, the Australian prime minister. Her computer was among 10 machines used by senior government ministers which were compromised by the hackers. According to one source, the Australians were tipped off to the hacking by the CIA and the FBI.

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Turkey, Iran, offer warship protection for Gaza flotillas

June 7, 2010 by intelNews 4 Comments

Tayyip Erdoğan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Close aides to the Turkish Prime Minister’s office have disclosed that Ankara is funding a new fleet of ships to sail to Gaza under protection by Turkish warships. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps have also offered warship protection. The office of Turkey’s Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, is now actively assisting the Turkish-based Humanitarian Aid Foundation (ÍHH) in fundraising for the acquisition of a new fleet of ships to carry humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Last Monday, an ÍHH-funded flotilla bound for Gaza was raided in international waters by the Israeli Navy, which diverted the ships to Israel after killing nine and injuring over 60 passengers. According to reports from The Associated Press and Agence France Presse, Mr. Erdogan plans to be among the passengers of the new flotilla, which will be escorted en route to Gaza by Turkish warships. Meanwhile, reports from Iran’s government-aligned Mehr News Agency indicate that the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have offered their warships as protection for future aid ship convoys to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Ali Khamenei, Ali Shirazi, Ashdod (Israel), Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Gaza Strip, Humanitarian Aid Foundation, Iran, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Israel, News, Palestine, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey

Documents reveal Bill Clinton’s secret contact with Iran

May 31, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

M. Khatami

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Two newly declassified high-level documents reveal a short-lived overture between Washington and Tehran, initiated in 1999 by the Bill Clinton administration. The US President resorted to the secret communication with Iran in an attempt to preempt several hawkish policy planners in his administration. The latter pressed for strong American military retaliation against Iran, in response to the latter’s alleged involvement in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. The bombing, which targeted a US Air Force base in the suburbs of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 and wounded 400 American servicemen and women. By 1999, US intelligence agencies were convinced that the bombing had been financed and orchestrated by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), an independent administrative and paramilitary institution tasked with –among other things– exporting the Iranian Revolution abroad. But the Clinton Administration decided to contact the then newly elected reformist Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, and sternly inform him of the evidence against the IRGC. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, Ali Khamenei, Bill Clinton, declassification, Dhahran (Saudi Arabia), diplomacy, Iran, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, News, Oman, Saudi Arabia, secret meetings, suicide bombings, Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said of Oman, United States, US Air Force

News you may have missed #346 (Iran spy ring edition)

May 10, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Iran denies connection with Bahrain spy ring. Tehran’s Ambassador to Bahrain has dismissed reports about Iran’s alleged involvement in a spy ring in Bahrain. There are reports that the ring was in contact with a similar outfit in the nearby state of Kuwait.
Kuwait media banned from reporting on alleged spy ring. The government of Kuwait has banned the country’s media from reporting on an extensive espionage ring allegedly operating on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, which was uncovered earlier this month.
Saudi minister denies Kuwait visit linked to Iran spy ring. Prince Khaled Bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of defense, has denied a rumored connection between his recent visit to Kuwait and the alleged busting of an Iranian spy ring there.

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Alleged Iranian spy cell busted in Kuwait

May 3, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Al-Qabas website

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A leading Kuwaiti newspaper has claimed that government agencies captured members of an alleged Iranian spy cell in the Gulf state. Citing “senior intelligence sources”, Al-Qabas daily said that Kuwaiti counterintelligence officers arrested at least seven men last week, and are looking for up to seven others, in connection with an extensive espionage ring operating on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards are an independent administrative and paramilitary institution in Iran, tasked with –among other things– exporting the Iranian Revolution abroad. They handle most of Iran’s intelligence operatives around the world, who, according to some observers, number in the tens of thousands. Read more of this post

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Interview with alleged CIA spy in Iran

April 9, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

A Time to Betray

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
US government-owned Radio Liberty has aired an interview with an Iranian defector who claims to have worked as a CIA agent in the 1980s and early 1990s. The defector, who goes by the pseudonym Reza Kahlili (codename ‘Wally’), has authored what appears to be a CIA-sanctioned book, entitled A Time to Betray, in which he says he was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC is a sizable branch of the Iranian military that is ideologically committed to the defense of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Kahlili, who now lives in California, says he concluded his studies in the US and returned to Iran shortly after the Revolution. But he quickly became disillusioned with the Islamic regime, and in 1981 met with the CIA in the United States and offered them his services. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Iranian spymaster a major player in Iraq

March 8, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Qassem Suleimani

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Newsweek’s Chris Dickey has penned an accurate analysis on Qassem Suleimani, leader of the mighty Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) unit tasked with exporting the Iranian Revolution abroad. Relatively little is known about Suleimani, a soft-spoken intelligence operative who oversees Iran’s links with Shiite movements in the Middle East and beyond. His influence inside Iraq has grown in recent years. Although the Quds Force intelligence network in Iraq was solid before the 2003 US invasion, the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime turned Suleimani’s agency to what is probably the most powerful organized intelligence force in the country. Indeed, Suleimani’s links with the Kurdish north and with the Shiite paramilitary groups in Iraq is so encompassing that, as Dickey correctly notes, “this 53-year-old Iranian general could pull the strings that make or break the new government in Baghdad”. Read more of this post

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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

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Abducted Iranian defense official reportedly held in Israel

November 17, 2009 by intelNews 3 Comments

Ali-Reza Asgari

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Iran’s former deputy defense minister, who went missing during a 2006 official visit to Turkey, was kidnapped in a joint Israeli-German-British operation, according to an Iranian newsmagazine. Brigadier general Ali-Reza Asgari, who once commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, disappeared on December 9, 2006, from his hotel room in Istanbul, Turkey. Little more than a year later, Hans Rühle, former Director of Policy Planning in the German Ministry of Defense, wrote in Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung that Asgari was in Western hands and that “information was obtained” from him. Since then, other sources have alleged that Asgari defected willingly, including Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post and intelligence historian Gordon Thomas, in his 2009 book Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence (see intelNews book review). Read more of this post

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Iran has as many as 40,000 spies in Arab world, says defector

October 8, 2009 by intelNews 1 Comment

Al Arabiya logo

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
An alleged former Iranian spy, who defected several years ago, claims that the Islamic Republic has “as many as 40,000” covert operatives in the Persian Gulf. The alleged defector spoke anonymously to al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned pan-Arabic television network based in the United Arab Emirates. He told his interviewer that the activities of the undercover operatives are coordinated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Among other revelations, the unidentified defector said that Iranian spy cells tend to work in groups of five and operate independently, usually unaware of the operations or even existence of other nearby cells. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0060

August 6, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Ex-FBI translator tests US Justice Department again. Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has spent seven years trying to get a court to hear her allegations that Turkish intelligence agents had penetrated her unit, the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress. This weekend she’s going to try again.
Bulgaria appoints new National Security Agency director. Tsvetelin Yovchev is the new head of the State National Security Agency (DANS). The Agency’s previous director, Petko Sertov, recently handed his resignation, allegedly after Bulgaria’s “American partners were said to have lost faith” in him. He will now serve as Bulgaria’s general consul in Thessaloniki, northern Greece.
US paper sees power struggle inside Iranian intelligence. The Washington Times claims the recent firing of intelligence minister Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, two other Ali Khamenei loyalists and nearly 20 other high-ranking officials, has weakened Khamenei’s hold over the Iranian intelligence ministry and has strengthened the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.

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Mysterious “CIA spy in Iran” calls for stronger US policy

August 5, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A mysterious CIA informant, who claims he worked for the CIA inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, has called for “a strong Western hand” against the Iranian government. In an article published earlier today in The Christian Science Monitor, the informant, who uses the pseudonym “Reza Kahlili”, says that defending “what remains of democracy and freedom in Iran” is one of the West’s “most important decisions of our era”. “Kahlili” makes vague mentions of working “for years alongside” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, “as a CIA spy working undercover […], starting in the 1980s”. In arguing for a stronger Western stance against Iran, “Kahlili” alleges that, in the 1980s, unnamed European governments made secret pacts with the Iranian government, allowing them “to assassinate opposition members abroad without interference, as long as European citizens were not at risk”, in exchange for steady supplies of Iranian oil. Read more of this post

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Alleged Iranian intelligence agent arrested in Iraq

December 21, 2008 by intelNews Leave a comment

The US Pentagon-controlled American Forces Press Agency has reported the arrest of an alleged Iranian intelligence agent in Qastin, approximately 30 km north of Baghdad. The unnamed arrestee, who was captured after an intelligence tip, is allegedly a “commander of Iranian special operations” forces stationed covertly on Iraq’s soil. The US information claims he helped facilitate training of Iraqi resistance fighters at clandestine camps operated by Quds Force (Jerusalem Force), a paramilitary unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Coprs, whose mission is to organize, train, equip, and finance foreign Islamist revolutionary movements. The US has long ago accused Quds Force and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps of providing direct assistance to Iraqi resistance groups, including providing them with weapons. [IA]