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News you may have missed #344

May 6, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

CIA base in Afghanistan hit again. A suicide car bomber killed one civilian and wounded two security guards at the entrance to the CIA’s Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Afghanistan’s Khost province. It is the same base where Jordanian suicide bomber Humam Khalil al-Balawi killed seven CIA officers in December of 2009.
Fiji to set up new spy agency. The government of Fiji plans to re-establish its intelligence agency, ten years after it was disbanded by Labour Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. The new organization will be called the National Intelligence Agency of Fiji.
MI5 and MI6 must release Guantánamo records, says judge. MI5 and MI6 have been told by a British judge that they cannot use secret evidence to defend themselves from civil damages claims brought by six former detainees in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, including Binyam Mohamed.

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UK barring replacement of London’s Mossad resident

May 5, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

Mossad seal

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The British government is officially preventing the replacement of Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s London representative, after it expelled his predecessor six weeks ago. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office announced the expulsion in March, in response to the use of at least 12 forged British passports by a Mossad hit squad, whose members traveled to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, last January, to assassinate Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. According to Israeli media, the British Foreignand Commonwealth Office has requested written assurances from Israel that it will refrain from using British travel documents in future intelligence operations. But the Israeli government is so far refusing to comply with Britain’s request, claiming that doing so would amount to “an admission of culpability” in the assassination of al-Mabhouh. Read more of this post

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New book on Canada’s mysterious Agent 235

April 21, 2010 by intelNews 2 Comments

De Graaf

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A new book published by the Pennsylvania State University Press sheds new light into the life and work of mysterious Agent 235, Canada’s mysterious mid-20^th-century spy known as ‘Johnny’. In Johnny: A Spy’s Life, R.S. Rose and Gordon Scott present the outcome of 14 years of research on ‘Johnny’, whose real name was Johann Heinrich Amadeus de Graaf. De Graaf was born in Germany in 1894, but later moved to Britain, and at the start of World War II worked as an informant for MI6. Although he conducted some of his operations in Germany, most of them took place in the UK, where he unmasked a number of native pro-Nazi sympathizers and agents of the Gestapo. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #333

April 20, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Ex-MI6 officer allegedly betrayed spies. Daniel Houghton was arrested last month while trying to sell classified documents to MI5 spooks posing as foreign agents. But now the former MI6 employee is accused by British authorities of trying to trade lists of British intelligence personnel. It is unclear which nation’s spy service Houghton believed he was selling to at the time of his arrest, though it is believed that Dutch intelligence tipped off MI5.
NSA director under friendly fire in US Senate. US National Security Agency director, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, spoke last Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He addressed the synergies among the NSA, the newly created Cyber Command, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the concept of cyberwar: “In general terms, I do think a cyberwar could exist”, he said, but only “as part of a larger military campaign”.

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News you may have missed #317

March 29, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Captured MI6 spy denied bail. Daniel Houghton, a former MI6 officer who allegedly attempted to sell British classified top-secret computer files to what he thought was a foreign intelligence agency (but were in fact MI5 counterintelligence agents) has had his bail application rejected.
Alleged Israeli spy arrested in Algeria. The Algerian security services have arrested an unidentified Israeli, who allegedly entered Algeria using a forged Spanish passport. No further information available at this time.
MI6’s top ranking female spy dies at 88. Daphne Park, the Baroness of Monmouth, who died Wednesday, aged 88, had a long career in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which culminated in her appointment as Controller Western Hemisphere in 1975, the highest post ever occupied by a woman at MI6.

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Philby’s granddaughter revisits Moscow in search of ‘Kim’

March 11, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Charlotte Philby

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Charlotte Philby, daughter of John Philby, H.A.R. “Kim” Philby’s oldest son, has written an account of a recent trip to Moscow to revisit her grandfather’s apartment and grave. In her article, published in British daily The Independent, she describes her visit to Kuntsevo Cemetery, where her grandfather, a British intelligence officer, who secretly spied on behalf of the Soviet KGB and NKVD, was given a hero’s burial in 1988. Even though Kim Philby has been dead for over 20 years, his legacy is very much alive in both sides involved in the Cold War. Charlotte Philby reveals that, in 2005, she and her mother were refused service in a store in the US state of Arizona “on account of the name on our credit cards”. She also claims that “a gang of five or six of Kim’s former colleagues still meet up every month [in Moscow] and raise a toast in his honor”. Read more of this post

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MI6 employee arrested for trying to sell documents

March 6, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Daniel Houghton

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British authorities have detained a former MI6 employee after he was caught trying to sell classified documents to MI5 spooks posing as foreign agents. Daniel Houghton, 25, who was arrested on Monday at a central London hotel, worked for MI6 between September 2007 and May 2009. During the course of his employment, he apparently stole MI5 (and not MI6, as has been suggested) electronic documents, classified secret and top-secret, by copying them to CDs and DVDs. He then attempted to sell the material, which is said to relate to “techniques for intelligence collection”, for £2 million ($2.9 million), to MI5 agents posing as intelligence handlers of an unspecified foreign intelligence service. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0289

February 18, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

UK spies worry about human rights lawsuits. Intelligence officers at Britain’s MI5 and MI6 are allegedly being diverted from counter-terrorism work to sift through thousands of documents relating to former terrorism detainees, who are suing the security services for breaching their human rights. The article makes it look like it is the torture victims’ fault for pursuing their rights. But in reality, MI5 and MI6 should have known better than to allow and participate in extralegal torture.
Bangladesh arrests alleged Burmese spies. Bangladesh coast guards have arrested eight citizens of Myanmar on suspicion of spying. Photographs of Bangladesh Navy warships and security installations were found in their possession, according to the country’s police chief.

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News you may have missed #0288

February 17, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Was Charlotte Observer‘s USSR correspondent a KGB spy? An Observer editor tries to find out who was the mysterious Russia correspondent “employed by The Charlotte Observer“, whom an FBI report in the 1950s described as “unusually well-connected with the Kremlin”.
US spy chiefs seek UK assurances after Mohamed court ruling. The recent court ruling forcing MI6 to disclose all of Binyam Mohamed’s CIA torture records in its possession, has predictably complicated US-UK spy relations.

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US, UK spy agencies on alert after unprecedented court decision

February 11, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Binyam Mohamed

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British and American intelligence agencies have been placed on alert following an unprecedented ruling by a British court, which forces the British government to disclose CIA documents in its possession. The documents relate to the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian resident of Britain, who says he was severely tortured with the collaboration of the CIA and British domestic intelligence agency MI5, after he was renditioned to Morocco. Last February, two British judges overseeing Mr. Mohamed’s case revealed that the British government kept “powerful evidence” secret after being threatened by the US that it would “stop sharing intelligence about terrorism with the UK”. In July, it emerged that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally threatened the British government that Washington would stop collaborating with London on intelligence matters if evidence in Mr. Mohamed’s case was publicly released. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0281

February 9, 2010 by intelNews 5 Comments

US intel director confirms CIA can kill US citizens abroad. It’s official; speaking before the House Intelligence Committee, US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged that President Obama is continuing a Bush-era policy authorizing the killing of US citizens if they are considered “a terrorist threat to the United States”.
Funny sign at CIA gift shop. Actual notice displayed at a CIA gift store inside the Agency’s Langley, VA, headquarters: “Don’t forget! If you are undercover, you cannot charge! It will blow your cover”. Good point.
Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars out in paperback. IntelNews has received the new paperback edition of Gordon Thomas’ Secret Wars: 100 Years of British Intelligence. Joseph Fitsanakis reviewed the hardback edition last May.

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News you may have missed #0268

January 25, 2010 by intelNews 2 Comments

Lithuanian foreign minister resigns over CIA black sites. After Lithuania’s intelligence director, Povilas Malakauskas, who resigned last month following the revelation that two CIA black sites operated in Vilnius between 2004 and 2005, the country’s foreign minister, Vygaudas Usackas, has said he will step down in connection with the case.
UK prime minister urges co-operation between spy agencies. It is not just US intelligence agencies that seem to have trouble cooperating with each other. Britain’s leader Gordon Brown says MI5, MI6 and GCHQ need “to be able seamlessly to track and disrupt terrorist activity and movements, whether within the UK or beyond”.

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Former MI6 head testifies in UK Iraq War commission

December 9, 2009 by intelNews 1 Comment

Sir John Scarlett

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Sir John Scarlett, who until recently headed MI6, Britain’s foremost external spy agency, chaired the country’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in the run-up to the Iraq War. He was therefore in charge of an influential government report, produced in September 2002, which argued that Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction constituted an immediate threat to Britain. As part of the official inquiry into Britain’s entry in the Iraq War, Sir John testified yesterday about the controversial report, known as ‘the dodgy dossier’, which has been criticized as a monumental intelligence failure that helped drag the country into an unpopular war. The former JIC chairman admitted that British intelligence services were aware before the War that Iraq had dismantled its long-range missiles and thus had no way of shooting its chemical munitions at distant targets, including Britain. Read more of this post

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EU foreign minister’s husband shunned KGB approaches in 1980s

December 8, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Peter Kellner

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The husband of the recently appointed European Union minister for foreign affairs has acknowledged that the KGB tried to cultivate a relationship with him in the 1980s. Peter Kellner, who now presides over influential British polling company YouGov, is married to Baroness Ashton of Upholland (born Catherine Margaret Ashton), who assumed the prominent EU post on November 19. Intelligence documents show that British domestic intelligence agency MI5 had tagged Kellner and his wife as “communist sympathizers”, because of their anti-apartheid activism and long-term involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, considered a “subversive” movement within the intelligence services. Read more of this post

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London ex-official admits falling for Chinese honey trap

December 1, 2009 by intelNews 2 Comments

Ian Clement

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
London’s former deputy mayor, Ian Clement, has admitted he was lured by a female Chinese secret agent, who drugged him and ransacked his Beijing hotel room after having sex with him. Clement said he fell for “the oldest trick in the book”, euphemistically known as ‘honey trap’ in intelligence circles, while accompanying UK Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell to Beijing to “build contacts with potential investors” for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. He said he became acquainted with an attractive Chinese woman at the exclusive official party on the opening night of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and had a few drinks with her. He then invited her to his hotel room, where he eventually became unconscious. Upon waking up, several hours later, he found that “the woman had rifled through confidential documents and downloaded details about how the capital is run from his BlackBerry Smartphone”. Read more of this post