News you may have missed #366 (Gaza flotilla edition III)

June 2, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Israel insists Hezbollah members were on flotilla. Israeli officials are privately saying that they had intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were hidden among the crew and passengers of several Gaza Freedom Flotilla ships. The plan, they say, was to board all the ships, bring the flotilla to Ashdod, and then deal separately with the Gaza activists and alleged Hezbollah members.
  • Analysis: Flotillas and the wars of public opinion. In the aftermath of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla massacre, “[t]he Israeli threats against Iran will be seen in a different context, and Israeli portrayal of Iran will hold less sway over the world”, says StratFor.
  • Turkey compares flotilla massacre to 9-11. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu drew a parallel between the Israeli raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and September 11, 2001. “Psychologically this attack is like 9/11 for Turkey,” he said. Meanwhile, as two more aid ships are approaching Gaza, an anonymous senior Israeli Navy commander told The Jerusalem Post that Israel will “use more force next time”.

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Former Mossad officer calls Israel’s flotilla raid ‘stupid’

June 2, 2010 by Leave a comment

Victor Ostrovsky

Victor Ostrovsky

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A former officer in Israeli intelligence agency Mossad has criticized Monday’s raid by Israeli forces on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as a failure “on every level”. Victor Ostrovsky, who worked as a case officer for the Mossad during the 1980s, described the raid as an act that was “so stupid it is stupefying”. Speaking to The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, the former Mossad operative suggested that the early-morning operation, which killed at least 10 and wounded nearly 100 aid volunteers of various nationalities, was probably carried out by Shayetet 13, an elite commando unit of the Israeli Navy. He described Shayetet 13 as “one of the top units in the Israeli military”, which nevertheless failed in its mission to take over the ship convoy without resorting to a bloody mayhem. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #365 (Gaza flotilla edition II)

June 1, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Palestinian Authority to send delegation to Gaza. The Fatah-controlled Palestinian National Authority will send a delegation to Gaza “in the next few days” to try to reconcile with Hamas, in the aftermath of Israel’s assault on a flotilla of ships trying to break the Gaza blockade.
  • Egypt lifts its side of Gaza blockade for aid. The Egyptian government is temporarily lifting its blockade of the Gaza Strip to allow aid into the area, a day after Israel raided an international flotilla carrying supplies to the Palestinian territory and killed nine activists. The key word is “temporarily”.
  • Palestinian Authority to continue talks with Israel. The Palestinian National Authority leadership in the West Bank refrained Monday from suspending the upcoming proximity talks with Israel, despite the uproar over the Israel Navy raid on the Gaza aid flotilla Monday, in which nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed.

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News you may have missed #364 (Gaza flotilla edition I)

June 1, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Israel abducts nine American citizens on Gaza flotilla. As many as nine Americans may have been aboard the Gaza relief flotilla attacked in international waters by the Israeli Navy, and are now being held by Israeli authorities, a US State Department official has said. It is said that among them is former US Ambassador Edward Peck. The White House has so far refrained from issuing a statement on the abducted US citizens.
  • US blocks Security Council criticism of Israeli raid. Israel faced heavy criticism in an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council on Monday, in response to its deadly attack on the aid flotilla trying to breach the Gaza blockade, but attempts to issue a formal statement stalled after the United States rejected the strong condemnation.
  • Australian citizen shot in Israeli raid. Bilateral relations between Israel and Australia, which are already at a low point, are set to worsen after an Australian citizen was shot during the deadly attack by the Israeli Defense Forces on the Gaza relief flotilla on Monday. Australia recently expelled

the Israeli Mossad representative in Canberra, after confirming that the Israeli spy agency had illegally forged at least four Australian passports.

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Could Turkey invoke NATO clause over Israeli attack on flotilla? [updated]

June 1, 2010 by 5 Comments

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Tayyip Erdoğan

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
IntelNews hears there is some speculation in diplomatic circles that the government of Turkey may try to involve the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in its dispute with Israel, which began after Israeli commandos killed several Turkish citizens in international waters yesterday. Up to 19 civilians are thought to have been killed during an early dawn raid by Israeli Defense Forces commandos on a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of the four-year-old Israeli blockade. The fact that the deadly raid took place in international waters prompted Ankara to call for an emergency meeting of NATO’s 28 member states. A NATO spokesperson confirmed that ambassadors from all 28 member states, Turkey included, will be attending an emergency meeting today in Brussels, Belgium. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #363

May 31, 2010 by 1 Comment

  • Who killed ex-Mossad agent Ashraf Marwan? Dr. Marwan, son-in-law of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who spied for Israel after 1969, fell to his death from the balcony of his London home in June 2007. British investigators have now announced a new inquiry into the circumstances of his death.
  • Ex-CIA agent accused of rape says he was set up. Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s former Algiers station chief, who is accused of drugging and raping two Algerian women at his official residence, says the Algerian government set him up in a honey trap.
  • US Senate candidate admits false military intel award. Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist who was elected to Congress in 2001, and is currently a Republican candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, has admitted to falsely claiming he received the US Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award in 2000.

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We use false passports too, Australians admit

May 27, 2010 by 1 Comment

Julie Bishop

Julie Bishop

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Israeli intelligence agencies are not alone in using false passports. In fact, intelligence and law enforcement agencies in Australia, the country that is currently involved in a diplomatic spat with Israel due to the latter’s use of forged Australian passports in spy operations, also use forged travel documents. This admission was made yesterday by Australian senior opposition politician Julie Bishop during a live session in the Australian parliament. The parliamentary debate concerned recent revelations that agents of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad used forged Australian passports during an assassination operation against Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was found murdered in a luxury Dubai hotel last January. Australian government officials were quick to condemn Ms Bishop’s revelation as “a grievous breach of national security”. But Australian daily newspaper The Age reports that the opposition politician “merely made public an inconvenient truth”. Read more of this post

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Documents show Israel offered nukes to apartheid South Africa

May 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

Sasha Polakow-Suransky

Polakow-Suransky

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Apartheid-era government documents unearthed by an American doctoral researcher reveal that the government of Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the racist regime in South Africa, and could possibly provide the first documentary evidence of the existence of Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal. Successive Israeli governments have followed what is often called ‘a policy of ambiguity’, refusing to either confirm or deny the nuclear weapons’ rumored existence. But the documents, which date from 1975, contain detailed minutes of meetings between senior Israeli and South African cabinet officials, including then South African defense minister P.W. Botha and then Israeli defense minister –and Israel’s current President– Shimon Peres. Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the American academic who requested the declassification of the controversial documents, says the Israeli government tried but ultimately failed to prevent the South African government of Jacob Zuma from releasing them. Read more of this post

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Israeli envoy ‘in alarm’ after Australia expels Mossad agent

May 25, 2010 by 3 Comments

Yuval Rotem

Yuval Rotem

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Israeli ambassador to Australia, who was in Israel on business, expedited his return to Canberra yesterday, immediately after Australia announced the expulsion of Israel’s senior Mossad representative in the country. Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that ambassador Yuval Rotem decided to cut short his trip to Israel “in alarm”, as the “escalated crisis” between Israel and Australia appears to be deepening. As intelNews readers read on April 14, Australia had announced the pending expulsion after official investigations by Australian law enforcement and intelligence authorities revealed beyond doubt that the Israeli spy agency Mossad had forged at least four Australian passports. The passports were among several Western identity documents employed by Mossad agents in targeting Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was assassinated in a luxury Dubai hotel last January. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #358

May 25, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Ex-CIA analyst to lead US declassification center. Sheryl Jasielum Shenberger, who currently serves as a Branch Chief at the CIA Declassification Center, has been named as the first director of the recently established US National Declassification Center. The Center’s aim is to eliminate the backlog of over 400 million pages of classified records by the end of 2013.
  • Hamas expels Egyptian spy from Gaza. A senior Egyptian intelligence officer, who had allegedly “infiltrated the region to collect information on residents and the Hamas government” was arrested and expelled from Gaza on Monday.
  • Israeli nuclear whistleblower back in prison. More than six years after his release from 18 years in solitary confinement, Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has been sentenced to another three months in prison for allegedly “contacting foreign agents”.

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News you may have missed #357

May 22, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • IDF colonel with intelligence duties ‘commits suicide’. An unnamed colonel with the Israel Defense Forces was found dead in a forest in northern Israel Saturday, after allegedly taking his own life. The officer reportedly served in high-ranking positions in the Intelligence Corps.
  • Australian Wikileak founder’s passport confiscated. Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled. Wikileaksleaked footage of US forces laughing at the dead bodies of people they had just killed in Iraq in 2007. rose to prominence last month, after posting

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News you may have missed #356

May 21, 2010 by 1 Comment

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News you may have missed #354

May 19, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • Germany arrests Libyans on spy charges. Two Libyans have been arrested in Berlin on suspicion of working as secret agents, spying on members of the Libyan opposition in Germany. The two, identified only as 42-year-old ‘Adel Ab’ and 46-year-old ‘Adel Al’, are being held in custody in Berlin, pending possible spying charges.
  • Israeli handler discusses relationship with Hamas spy. Israeli broadsheet Ha’aretz has aired a fascinating interview with ‘Captain Loai’, a Shin Bet operative who handled Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a senior Hamas official, who was an informant for Israeli intelligence for at least a decade. Note the strong personal connection between handler and informant, which would be considered unprofessional in US intelligence culture.
  • Analysis: Iran’s murky link to al-Qaeda confounds CIA. It’s one of the enduring mysteries of the US ‘war on terrorism’: what will become of the al-Qaeda leaders and operatives who fled into Iran after 9/11 and have been detained there for years?

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News you may have missed #353

May 18, 2010 by 2 Comments

  • Name of British Mossad agent handed to Interpol. Dubai police have identified another suspect in the January murder of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He is reportedly a 62-year-old British citizen, who is believed to be currently hiding in western Africa.
  • Russia jails man for spying for the US. Gennady Sipachyov, a Russian whose age and profession have been kept secret by Moscow, has been sentenced to a four-year sentence for allegedly emailing secret military maps identifying classified Russian military infrastructure to the US Pentagon in 2008. Earlier this month, a Russian court rejected an appeal by another alleged US spy, Igor Sutyagin.
  • Bulgarian government wants to copy CIA. Bulgaria’s Defense Minister, Anyu Angelov, has proposed the merging of intelligence services to create a mega-structure of the CIA type. Meanwhile, a panel investigating Bulgaria’s communist-era police files has exposed two of the country’s former counterintelligence heads as former communist state security agents.

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