News you may have missed #0212

December 9, 2009 by 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.

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Analysis: The role of spies in Latin America

December 1, 2009 by Leave a comment

Latin America

Latin America

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
These days it’s a full-time job keeping up with intelligence news coming out of Latin America. In recent weeks alone, there were major spy scandals involving the busting of an alleged Colombian espionage ring in Venezuela, the acknowledgment by Bogotá that it spied on Ecuador, and the ongoing high-level intelligence scandal that some say may cause recalls of diplomats between Chile and Peru. So what is going on in Latin America? How widespread is espionage in the continent and is it on the rise? The BBC’s Juan Paullier has consulted several regional and international experts for his well-written analysis on the subject. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0154 [updated]

October 26, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Breaking news: Castro’s sister says she spied for the CIA. Juanita Castro, Fidel and Raúl Castro’s sister, says she voluntarily spied for the CIA from 1961 to 1964, when she left the island for Miami. She said she met a CIA officer called “Enrique” at a hotel in Mexico City in 1961; she was then given the codename “Donna” and codebooks so she could receive encoded instructions from Washington.
  • Was Milan Kundera a communist police informant? Documents unearthed by Czech academics allegedly show that the Czech-born author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being denouncing a Western spy to Czechoslovakia’s StB secret police during his student days.
  • Afghans complain about US spy balloon. A US spy balloon (see previous intelNews coverage) flying over the city of Kandahar in Afghanistan, is prompting privacy complaints from residents.

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Mexican agency spied on Nobel laureate author Márquez

October 23, 2009 by Leave a comment

Márquez

Márquez

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Mexico’s defunct Dirección Federal de Seguridad  (DFS) intelligence agency spied on Colombian-born Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez, according to revelations published in El Universal newspaper. The Mexican daily aired declassified documents allegedly showing that the DFS tapped the author’s home telephone, systematically monitored his whereabouts, and kept a “bulging file” on him spanning several decades. The monitoring began in 1967, when Márquez moved from Colombia to Mexico, and continued until at least 1985. The apparent reason for the spying is that the Mexican state considered the best-selling author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude to be a communist sympathizer and even “a Cuban agent”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0077

August 23, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • US Army documents reveal Mexican military’s role in massacre. Newly declassified documents from the US Defense Intelligence Agency describe the Mexican Army’s role in backing paramilitary groups in Chiapas at the time of the Acteal massacre. The massacre involved the killing of 45 people attending a prayer meeting of Roman Catholic indigenous townspeople, including a number of children and pregnant women, who were members of the pacifist group Las Abejas (“The Bees”).
  • Tamils in the UK continue fundraising despite spy fears. Members of the Tamil community in Oxford, England, have vowed to continue fundraising despite fears that the Sri Lankan government is spying on them.
  • Major purge at Bulgarian intelligence agency. More key officials of Bulgaria’s State National Security Agency (DANS) have submitted their resignations after its director, Petko Sertov, was recently replaced. Sertov was allegedly axed because Bulgaria’s “American partners were said to have lost faith” in him.

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News you may have missed #0028

July 15, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Iran could have the bomb in six months, says German intelligence. Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) alleges that if the Iranians “wanted to they could test a nuclear bomb within half a year.”
  • Australian PM threatens China over Rio Tinto spy case. Kevin Rudd warned China it has “economic interests at stake”, less than a week after Beijing arrested the Australian chief of the Anglo-Australian mine company’s iron ore operations in China.
  • 12 Mexico intelligence officers mutilated and killed. The mutilated bodies of the one female and 11 male federal intelligence officer were left in a heap beside a road in rural Michoacan state. Drug gangsters launched a brutal offensive against the Mexican government last Saturday, after the capture of their senior leader, Arnaldo “La Minsa” Rueda. “We’re waiting for you,” read a taunting sign left with the bodies.
  • NRO releases unclassified portions of 2009 budget. The super-secretive US National Reconnaissance Office, which is in charge of US satellite spying, has released fragments of its FY2009 Congressional Budget Justification Book. Incidentally, a couple of weeks ago there were rumors circulating in Washington that NRO may be broken up into several smaller agencies.

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US military group sees Canada Muslims as potential security threat

February 22, 2009 by 4 Comments

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
For the past two months, I have been reporting that the US intelligence community sees the radical fringe in Britain’s Muslim community as “the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on US soil”. It turns out that the US Pentagon’s Joint Task Force-North, a group that provides military support to federal agencies in domestic security operations, has a different opinion. For it, Muslims residing in Canada present the “greatest potential for foreign terrorists’ access to the homeland”. This is according to a briefing document that the group inadvertently published on the reading room section of its website a couple of weeks ago, only to abruptly remove it last Wednesday. According to InsideDefense, which noticed the report before it was withdrawn, the internal document blames Canadian immigration policies for “creating a favorable environment” for “foreign terrorist opportunities”. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Behind the Recent CIA Espionage Indictments

January 31, 2009 by Leave a comment

Harold Nicholson

H.J. Nicholson

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
In 1997, when Harold James Nicholson was convicted for working for Russian intelligence, he became the highest-ranking CIA officer to be convicted of spying on behalf of a foreign agency. Last Thursday, it emerged that 24-year-old Nathaniel James Nicholson, Harold Nicholson’s youngest son, was arrested by FBI counterintelligence officers and charged with repeatedly contacting Russian officials on behalf of his imprisoned father. According to the court documents (.pdf) released Thursday, the purpose of Nathaniel Nicholson’s contact with the Russians was “to collect moneys from the Russian Federation for his [father’s] past espionage activities”. In reporting on the Nicholsons’ case, The New York Times quoted an anonymous “intelligence official” who played down Harold Nicholson’s importance for the Russians and suggested that “[t]his just shows that the Russians are either sentimental or stupid”. In fact, the Russians are neither, and The New York Times‘ sources should know better than to downplay Nicholson’s continued contact with his Russian handlers. Read article→

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