News you may have missed #496

  • US secretly collaborating with Chinese spies on North Korea. Leaked records of highly sensitive US-China defense consultations reveal that the CIA, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Defense Department, have all held secret discussions on North Korea with Chinese military intelligence.
  • Cuba denounces acquittal of ex-CIA agent. Cuba has denounced as a ‘farce’ the acquittal in the United States of Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA agent who Havana says participated in terrorist attacks against the island. Carriles was accused of lying to US immigration officials.
  • Analysis: US spy agencies struggling to adjust to Middle East changes. With popular protests toppling rulers in Tunisia and Egypt and threatening leaders in Yemen and elsewhere, US intelligence agencies are struggling to adjust to a radically changed landscape, US officials, former intelligence officers and experts say.

News you may have missed #480 (CIA edition)

  • Cuban-American exile leader funded ex-CIA agent on trial. Oscar De Rojas, the bookkeeper for New Jersey business mogul Arnoldo Monzon, who was once a director of the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, testified Thursday that he wired as much as $9,600 in 1997 to Ramon Medina, one of the aliases used by Luis Posada Carriles, an ex-CIA operative currently on trial for perjury and immigration fraud.
  • Ex-CIA station chief sentenced for sexual abuse. Former senior CIA officer Andrew Warren has been sentenced by a US court to more than five years in prison for sexually abusing a woman in Algeria, while he was the CIA station chief in that country.
  • Analysis: What should the CIA be doing in Libya? US President Barack Obama said on Thursday that he had “instructed […] all those who are involved in international affairs to examine a full range of options” on Libya, which presumably includes the CIA and other special operations assets. But what should the CIA be doing in Libya, if anything at all?

News you may have missed #476

Revelations continue in ex-CIA agent’s trial in Texas

Luis Posada Carriles

Carriles

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A United States government informant testifying at the immigration trial of a former CIA agent has described how he was smuggled into the US from Mexico onboard a luxury boat. It was believed that the former agent, Cuban-born Luis Posada Carriles, had arrived in the US from Honduras in 2005 using a forged Guatemalan passport. But Gilberto Abascal, an anti-Castro Cuban exile who has been an informant for the FBI since 1999, has told a court in Texas that Carriles was smuggled into Miami on a 90-foot luxury yacht, which carried him from Mexico’s Isla Mujeres to a waterfront Cuban restaurant. Abascal told the court that Carriles disembarked the yacht using a small speedboat, before the yacht’s owner, Santiago Alvarez, reported to US Customs in Miami. Remarkably, Carriles’ smuggling went according to plan, despite the fact that the Miami Chief of Police was among the restaurant’s patrons at the time of the speedboat’s arrival. Carriles is a militant anticommunist who is idolized by America’s anti-Castro Cubans, but is considered a terrorist in parts of Latin America due to his self-confessed participation in a string of bombings of hotels in Havana, Cuba, in 1997. Read more of this post

Ex-CIA agent and anti-Castro militant on trial in Texas

Carriles in 1962

Carriles in 1962

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A former CIA agent and militant anticommunist, who is idolized by America’s anti-Castro Cubans, but is considered a terrorist in parts of Latin America, has gone on trial in Texas. Luís Posada Carriles, 82, known as “the bin Laden of the Americas” by his detractors, gained notoriety for his self-confessed participation in a string of bombings of hotels in Havana, Cuba, in 1997. He is wanted by the governments of Cuba and Venezuela for his alleged role in the dramatic 1976 midair bombing of Cubana flight 455, which killed all 73 crew and passengers onboard. The United States government has placed Carriles on trial for lying about his militant activities to US immigration officials, after arriving here in 2005. Specifically, Carriles faces 11 charges of perjury, obstruction and naturalization fraud, which he is said to have committed at a 2007 immigration hearing in El Paso. At that hearing, he allegedly denied under oath his participation in the 1997 Havana bombings, and failed to report being in possession of a fake Guatemalan passport, which he had used to enter the United States two years earlier. Read more of this post

Anti-Castro terrorist was CIA informant, declassified documents show

Luis Posada Carriles

Posada Carriles

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
An anti-Castro operative, who has admitted planting bombs against civilian targets in Cuba, and currently faces immigration fraud charges in the US, was a CIA informant, newly declassified documents show. Five CIA memoranda from 1965 and 1966 reveal that Luis Posada Carriles, code name “A15”, acted as an information link between Langley and violent anti-Castro groups in Miami, Florida, in which he was active. The five documents were declassified by the CIA between 1998 and 2003 and were made public on Tuesday by Peter Kornbluh, who heads the National Security Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project at George Washington University. Remarkably, the documents show that Posada’ handler at the CIA, Grover T. Lythcott, believed that the Cuban exile was a “moderate force” who could be counted on not to embarrass the US government or the CIA with his actions. Read more of this post

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