News you may have missed #838 (analysis edition)

May 29, 2013 by 1 Comment

Predator droneBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Delisle spy case barely caused ripples between Canada and Russia. The arrest of Jeffrey Delisle, a Canadian naval officer spying for Russia, did little to discourage Canada from welcoming that country’s defense chief to a Newfoundland meeting of Arctic nations last year. The visit underscored the puzzling lengths to which the Canadian government went to carry on a business-as-usual relationship with the one-time Cold War adversary. Most other planned military contacts between the two nations last year —including participation in the anti-terrorism exercise Operation Vigilant Eagle— also remained curiously normal.
►►Don’t believe the hype on Chinese cyberespionage. Within a day of each other, The Washington Post published a shocking list of US defense programs whose designs have reportedly been stolen by Chinese cyberattacks, and ABC news said the plans for Australia’s spy headquarters were also stolen by Chinese hackers. It makes China sound like a secret-sucking cyber espionage machine, but is that really the case? The knee-jerk interpretation to this disclosure (and others) is that China is a powerhouse of cyber espionage capable of stealing whatever secrets they want and that the US is powerless to stop them. This seems very unlikely.
►►US Predator drone program quietly shifted from CIA to DoD. The White House has quietly shifted lead responsibility for its controversial armed drone program from the CIA to the Defense Department. In a landmark speech last week at National Defense University in Washington, US President Barack Obama offered some clues into the status of the program, opaquely signaling it will now primarily be conducted by the United States military.

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Canada spy agency refused to notify Mounties about Russian agent

May 27, 2013 by 7 Comments

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Canada’s main counterintelligence agency opted to keep secret from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) vital information about a Canadian naval officer who spied for Russia. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the case of Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy, who until 2011 was employed at Canada’s ultra-secure TRINITY communications center in Halifax. Delisle was arrested in January 2012 for passing information gathered from radio and radar signal interceptions to a foreign power, most likely Russia. In May of last year, it emerged that it was in fact the United States that alerted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) about Delisle’s espionage activities. What was supposed to happen next was that the CSIS —which is not a law enforcement agency— should have notified the RCMP of Delisle’s activities and requested his prompt arrest. Remarkably, however, the CSIS chose to keep the Delisle file concealed from the RCMP, ostensibly to prevent the possible exposure of intelligence sources and methods in open-court proceedings. The Canadian Press, which broke the story on Sunday, cited “numerous sources familiar with the Delisle case” in claiming that the CSIS’ refusal to request Delisle’s arrest “frustrated Washington”, which feared that the spy was routinely compromising United States secrets shared by America with its Canadian allies. So frustrated were the Americans, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sketched out a plan to lure Delisle onto US soil and arrest him there. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #804

October 25, 2012 by 1 Comment

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►CIA officer reportedly among dead in Afghanistan bombing. The attack, which was carried out in a remote area of Kandahar Province, occurred when a guard working for the Afghan intelligence service detonated a suicide vest as a delegation of American coalition members and Afghan intelligence officials arrived at the intelligence office in the Maruf District. The blast killed Ghulam Rasool, the deputy intelligence director for Kandahar Province, two of his bodyguards, another Afghan intelligence official, and some Americans, including the CIA officer. A spokeswoman for the CIA declined to comment.
►►Canadian intel officer was ‘on Russian payroll for years’. Former navy intelligence officer Jeffrey Paul Delisle, who pleaded guilty this month to spying, was leaking secrets to Russia, sending classified data about Canada as well as the United States, according to David Jacobson, the US ambassador in Ottawa. So far, the Canadian government has refrained from revealing the identity of “the foreign entity” to whom Delisle passed the classified information. Ambassador Jacobson refused to specify the nature of the information, saying only that “there was a lot of highly classified material”.
►►Panama wants to adopt euro as legal tender. Panama, one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America, wants to adopt the euro as legal tender to run alongside the country’s US dollar economy. Panama’s President Ricardo Martinelli made the request to German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a visit to Europe. The president indicated he had every faith that the crisis in the eurozone would soon be at an end, adding that Panama “would be possibly the only country in the world to have two currencies, the euro and the dollar”.

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News you may have missed #802 (Jeffrey Paul Delisle edition)

October 15, 2012 by 5 Comments

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►New information released on Canadian spy case. Newly released information from Canadian naval officer Jeffrey Paul Delisle‘s bail hearing in January reveals that, facing chronic financial difficulties, Delisle began a four-year espionage career by walking into the Russian Embassy in Ottawa in 2007. Wearing civilian clothes, Delisle displayed his Canadian military identification badge and asked to meet someone from GRU, the Russian military intelligence service. Canadian prosecutors said Delisle regularly downloaded a ”vast amount” of classified information to share with his Russian handlers.
►►Canada spy had escape plan. Canadian naval officer Jeffrey Paul Delisle told a Canadian court that he had an escape plan in place —one he never got a chance to use. If he needed to seek refuge or re-establish contact with the Russians, for whom he spied for over four years, he was told he could walk into a Russian embassy —preferably not the one in Ottawa— and inform them he was “Alex Campbell”. The Russians would then ask him “did I meet you at a junk show in Austria?”, and he was supposed to reply “no, it was in Ottawa”.
►►Canada spy accessed Australia intelligence. This is not exactly news for intelNews readers, since we have covered it before, but it appears that Jeffrey Paul Delisle has openly admitted selling highly classified intelligence gathered by the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia to Russian agents. He said he had access to signals intelligence produced by the US National Security Agency, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, Australia’s Defence Signals and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau.

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News you may have missed #772

August 3, 2012 by 1 Comment

Israeli team at the 1972 Munich OlympicsBy TIMOTHY W. COLEMAN | intelNews.org |
►►India restricts agency-to-agency contacts with CIA. According to The Deccan Herald, Indian intelligence officials are growing increasingly wary of the frequent interactions between their own intelligence personnel and the CIA. Cooperation between the US intelligence organizations and Indian government agencies has been increasing under the guise of counter-terrorism efforts. Calcutta News reports that a book published by author Prem Mahadevan, called The Politics of Counterterrorism in India, identifies at least two CIA penetrations of Indian intelligence officials since 2001.
►►Canadian spy revealed classified information in “massive leak”. As was previously reported on this blog, former Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a navy intelligence officer, is accused of spying for Russia. According to The New Zealand Herald, the accused Canadian spy provided the Russian government with classified information on the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia in what is being termed a “massive leak”.
►►Germany had advance warning of 1972 Olympics massacre. Israel-based English-language newspaper The Jerusalem Post is reporting that an article in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, stated Germany had advance warning about a potential terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic games. Previously classified documents accessed by Der Spiegel show that not only were there indications of a terror plot, but that there were explicit warnings and details. Perhaps more damaging are the lengths and extremes that German intelligence officials went to in order to cover up blatant mistakes in the case.

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News you may have missed #770

July 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

Horn of Africa mapBy TIMOTHY W. COLEMAN | intelNews.org |
►►Kaspersky Lab is ‘thwarting US cyber spies’. According to an article in Wired magazine, Eugene Kaspersky, the CEO of Russia-based Kaspersky Labs has been working to support Russian allies in the Kremlin and the FSB. Kasperksy’s firm first discovered the cyber attack weapon known as Stuxnet. As the profile piece notes, “Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable —and to some, downright troubling— given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB”.
►►Al-Shabaab executes alleged CIA and MI6 assets. Somalia’s largest and most deadly armed Islamist group, al-Shabaab, announced that it had captured and executed at least three informants who were allegedly passing intelligence to the CIA and to MI6. The Associated Press stated that Al-Shabaab’s official Twitter feed stated that the individuals, who were summarily interrogated and then executed by firing squad, “were part of a wide network of spies deployed by the British and American intelligence agencies”.
►►Australian intelligence briefed on Canadian spy. The espionage case against accused Canadian spy, former Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle, continues to garner intrigue. As was previously reported on this blog, Delisle, a former navy intelligence officer is accused of spying for Russia. But a report in The National Post states that representatives of Canada’s intelligence service briefed members of Australia’s intelligence services on the Delisle’s case and that information exchanges appear ongoing. The particulars of Australia’s involvement in the case are explained here.

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Canadian spy compromised Australian, British intelligence

July 27, 2012 by 3 Comments

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Most regular readers of this blog are undoubtedly familiar with the case of Jeffrey Paul Delisle, a Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy, who until recently was employed at Canada’s ultra-secure TRINITY communications center in Halifax. Delisle was arrested in January on suspicion of passing information gathered from radio and radar signal interceptions to a foreign power, most likely Russia. Back in May, when it was disclosed that the United States helped Canadian counterintelligence investigators build their case against Delisle, we warned that “a far more important subject concerns the degree in which [Delisle’s] penetration has affected Canada’s intelligence-sharing relationship with its […] partners”. Now a new report in The Sydney Morning Herald reveals that Delisle’s espionage activities compromised Australian secrets that had been shared with Canada under longstanding intelligence cooperation arrangements. Citing “Australian security sources”, the paper said that the Delisle case “has sent shock waves through Western security agencies” due to the volume of compromised information. The Herald claims that the stolen intelligence is “on a scale comparable to the alleged handover to WikiLeaks of US military and diplomatic reports by US Army private Bradley Manning”. An unnamed “Australian security source” told the paper that Delisle’s access to classified information was “apparently very wide” and that Australian intercepts were “inevitably compromised”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #761

July 15, 2012 by Leave a comment

Robert de La RochefoucauldBy TIMOTHY W. COLEMAN | intelNews.org |
►►US aircraft company owner charged with supplying Venezuelan military. Kirk Drellich, owner and president of SkyHigh Accessories in Florida, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he illegally supplied Venezuelan military contacts with pressure switches and cooling turbines, as well as other airplane parts. Court documents indicate that the aircraft parts were to be used for Venezuelan F-16 jets, attack helicopters and other military crafts. Prosecutors in Florida have filed charges (.pdf), stemming from violations of the Arms Export Control Act, on three other individuals who are supposedly involved in the conspiracy to export arms to Venezuela. Other defendants in the case include Alberto Pichardo and Freddy Arguelles, both former members of Venezuela’s Air Force, as well as Victor Brown, a local businessman.
►►Trial delayed again in Delisle espionage case. As previously reported on this blog, the espionage case against Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, the Canadian navy intelligence officer accused of spying for Russia, has again been delayed. The attorney for Delisle requested an adjournment based on the governments disclosure of new documents and evidence in the case. The adjournment is expected to last until July 17.
►►Legendary WWII spy de La Rochefoucauld dies. Robert de La Rochefoucauld, a French national who became a legendary British spy, helping direct and organize the Free French forces in England and underground movements in France during World War II, has died of natural causes at the age of 88. De La Rochefoucauld’s exploits as a spy have all the makings of a movie. As a little boy, he met Adolf Hitler, and as a spy he twice escaped execution by the Nazi’s. He was a knight in the French Legion of Honor, received the Medal of Resistance from France, was widely herald for his exceptional service by the British and he is believed to have been the last remaining French member of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive.

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News you may have missed #755

June 29, 2012 by 2 Comments

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy TIMOTHY W. COLEMAN | intelNews.org |
►►MI5 chief says al-Qaeda threatens UK from Arab Spring nations. Brittan’s domestic intelligence agency chief, Jonathan Evans, has stated that al-Qaeda is continuing to gather a foothold in nations that experienced the Arab Spring. In his speech, Evans, who directs the UK’s MI5, warned that al-Qaeda is attempting to reestablish itself in countries that had revolted, and that “a small number of British would-be jihadis [sic] are also making their way to Arab countries to seek training and opportunities for militant activity, as they do in Somalia and Yemen. Some will return to the UK and pose a threat here”. With a suspected 100-200 British born Islamist militants operating in the Middle East and Africa, the MI5 Director General warned that the coming summer Olympics in London made for an attractive target.
►►Russia to conduct airborne surveillance of Canada’s infrastructure. Canada’s National Post newspaper reports that Russian surveillance aircraft will conduct a flyover of Canada’s military and industrial infrastructure in what appears to be an annual Russian air reconnaissance mission. For the past ten years and under the Open Skies treaty, Russia is allowed to conduct flyovers of key Canadian sites. This will be the first flyover since the arrest last January of Jeffrey Paul Delisle (pictured), a Royal Canadian Navy officer, for allegedly spying on Canada on behalf of the Russians.
►►Japanese official who leaked DRPK missile info found dead. A Japanese Foreign Ministry official, who was largely thought to the source of leaked information regarding a Chinese missile technology transfer to North Korea in April, has been found dead. The official, previously under investigation for publicly disclosing national security information, was found hanged in his Chiba prefecture home on June 20. Additional details, including the individual’s name, were not made available, but Japanese government officials did indicate that the death did not appear to be suspicious.

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News you may have missed #746

June 18, 2012 by Leave a comment

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Germany charges alleged Moroccan spy. German Federal prosecutors on Tuesday said the suspect, identified only as Moroccan-German dual national Mohammed B., was spying for Moroccan intelligence on supporters of the POLISARIO Front, which seeks independence for the Western Sahara region. They say he was paid €22,800 for the work in 2011, and then falsified invoices to claim he had done work for Morocco’s state airline to disguise where the money originated. He was arrested in February but released from custody on June 5 after prosecutors say he admitted to the charges.
►►Delisle spy case in Canada adjourned until July 4. The case of Canadian navy intelligence officer Jeffrey Paul Delisle, who is accused of espionage, has been adjourned until next month, because his lawyer, Mike Taylor, says he needs more time to review information about his client. According to Taylor, much of the information he has received so far from the Canadian government has been redacted because of security concerns. Moreover, he said that the “voluminous” amount of information has to be vetted by several justice and intelligence agencies before it can be handed over to him, slowing down the process of moving the case forward.
►►Obama to deny Israeli calls for Pollard’s release. The administration of US President Barack Obama has indicated that it will reject any appeal by senior Israeli political figures to commute the life sentence of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. “Our position has not changed and will not change today”, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters at his daily briefing last week. “Mr. Pollard was convicted of extremely serious crimes”, he said.

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Comment: US helped Canada nab accused spy Jeff Delisle

May 25, 2012 by 5 Comments

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Back in January of this year, when the Jeffrey Delisle spy affair made headlines around the world, I spoke with several journalists from The Globe & Mail, The Canadian Press, and other Canadian news outlets. Most of them were –rightly– curious about the role of the United States in the affair, in which Sub-Lieutenant Delisle, who had been employed at Canada’s ultra-secure TRINITY communications center in Halifax, was accused of spying for a foreign power. I told them that, given that Trinity handled –aside from Canadian– NATO communications, Canada was in fact obligated to notify all of its NATO partners about the suspected penetration. That aside, I said that it could be “safely assumed” that US counterintelligence agencies were “fully involved in the Delisle case, and probably ha[d] been for several months”. By the latter phrase, I implied that US counterintelligence agencies had been closely involved in helping their Canadian counterparts build their case against Delisle. Now a new report in The Globe & Mail suggests that US counterintelligence officials “supplied vital information” to their Canadian colleagues during “the early days of the investigation” into the Delisle affair. The article says that the full extent of what the Americans told Canadian authorities remains unclear; but it quotes “a source familiar with the matter”, who claims that the US “helped Canada build its investigation”, not necessarily by providing a single tipoff clue, but through “an accumulation of information”. The paper adds that Washington’s involvement in the investigation from an early stage “adds a key new detail to [the] story”. Not necessarily, I would argue. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #673

February 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Israel outsources intelligence-gathering to rightwing groups. The government and military of Israel have unofficially outsourced some of their intelligence work to private organizations that monitor anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media and are associated with right-wing politics, according to several high-ranking government and military sources.
►►NATO report finds Pakistan spies help Taliban. The BBC says it has seen a NATO report stating that the Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services. The leaked report, derived from material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians, also claims Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders. The US said exactly the same thing last September.
►►Another Russian diplomat ‘leaves’ Canada. Another Russian diplomat has left Canada. Dmitry Gerasimov, a consular officer with the Russian government’s office in Toronto, left in January. He is the second diplomat that the Russian embassy in Canada acknowledges has quit this country in January. The other was Colonel Sergey Zhukov, the defense attaché for the Russian government in Ottawa. All totaled, six Russian diplomats that have been dropped from Ottawa’s list of recognized foreign representatives in the last 11 days. It’s not clear which, if any, of recent these exits can be tied to the Jeffrey Paul Delisle spy controversy.

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News you may have missed #673

January 27, 2012 by Leave a comment

John KiriakouBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Canada arrest shows spy times have changed in Russia. There are aspects of the spy case of Canadian Sub-Lt. Jeffery Delisle that differ substantially from spy cases dating back to Cold War espionage waged by the now-defunct Soviet system. As a sign of changing times, the Russian media has acknowledged Delisle was allegedly spying for them —something that would never be admitted in Soviet times when the KGB and GRU were in ascendency.
►►US court upholds S. Korean ex-spy’s asylum ruling. Kim Ki-sam, who left South Korea’s state spy agency in 2000, applied for asylum in the US in 2003, saying he would face persecution and prosecution if he was forced to return to South Korea because he had revealed information about secret operations to help then-President Kim Dae-jung win the Nobel Peace Prize. A US court has now upheld a 2008 ruling to grant him political asylum.
►►Kiriakou’s wife resigns from CIA. Heather Kiriakou, who has served as a top analyst at the Agency, resigned Tuesday amid accounts that she had been pressured to step down after her husband —John Kiriakou, a former agency employee— was charged with leaking classified information to the press. Two sources in direct contact with the Kiriakous told The Washington Post that Heather had submitted her resignation under pressure from superiors at the CIA.

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Canada reportedly expels Russian diplomats over spy affair

January 20, 2012 by Leave a comment

Jeffrey Paul DelisleBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Canadian government officials have refused to confirm or deny media reports that Ottawa expelled several Russian diplomats recently in connection with an alleged espionage affair. The alleged expulsions are reportedly connected with the case of Royal Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle. Earlier this week, Delisle became the first person to be charged under Canada’s post-9/11 Security of Information Act, for allegedly passing protected government information to an unspecified foreign body. According to media reports, Delisle, who had top-level security clearance, worked at Canada’s ultra-secure TRINITY communications center in Halifax. Canadian authorities have refused to reveal the country for which Delisle allegedly spied. But late last night, CTV revealed that the names of two Russian diplomats and two technicians stationed at the embassy of the Russian Federation in Ottawa had been quietly dropped from the list of recognized diplomatic officials in Canada. The list, which is approved periodically by the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, contains the names of all foreign diplomats legally permitted to operate in Canada. One of the missing names, that of Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry V. Fedorchatenko, bears the title of the embassy’s Assistant Defense Attaché. Russian consular officials in Canada rejected speculation that the missing diplomats were expelled by the Canadian government in connection with the Delisle affair. It appears that Canadian counterintelligence investigators had been monitoring Jeff Delisle for quite some time, perhaps even before 2010. If Delisle acted —as he is reported to have done— as an unregistered foreign agent of Russia, it is certainly not surprising that he was a naval officer. He was probably selected by the Russians because he was a member of the Royal Canadian Navy. Ever since Canada joined NATO, in the late 1940s, its tactical contribution to the Organization has been mostly naval. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #667

January 17, 2012 by Leave a comment

Bob RaeBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Canadian authorities spied on political leader. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police spied on Bob Rae, current leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, when he was a student, and likely amassed a personal dossier on him, newly declassified documents reveal. Really, is there anyone in Canada who has not been spied on by the RCMP?
►►US intel community says Taliban want Afghanistan back. The Associated Press cites “two current and one former US official” who said anonymously that the classified Afghan National Intelligence Estimate declares the Afghanistan War “at a stalemate“, and says NATO security gains are “far outweighed by corruption at all levels of Afghan government”.
►►Canadian naval officer charged with espionage. A member of the Royal Canadian Navy has become the first person charged under the country’s post-9/11 secrets law for allegedly passing protected government information to an unknown foreign body. Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle, 40, was charged Monday under the Security of Information Act, which came into effect in 2001.

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