News you may have missed #568
August 16, 2011 Leave a comment

Gareth Williams
►►Lebanon intercepts covert arms shipment bound for Syria. It looks like anti-Syrian Lebanese groups, allied with former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, are smuggling Kalashnikovs and M-16s across the border to anti-government rebels in Banyas and other Syrian towns. The question is, where are these arms coming from? It is also worth noting that the Syrian army claimed last week that it has detained hundreds of Salafi fighters –including Afghans– with Lebanese documents.
►►Russian embassy cars seen near murdered MI6 officer’s flat. British paper The Daily Mail quotes an unnamed “former KGB agent who fled to London 12 years ago”, who says that he “logged two cars with Russian diplomatic number plates […] parked or driving close” to the central London apartment of MI6 and GCHQ officer Gareth Williams. The unnamed former agent says he noticed the vehicles around the time when Williams is believed to have been murdered in his apartment.
►►Indonesian intel reports on West Papua leaked. Hundreds of intelligence briefs from Indonesia’s elite special forces unit, Kopassus, have been obtained by Australian newspaper The Age. They include a detailed analysis of the separatist movement in oil-rich Western Papua. According to the Australian press, the reports “illustrate the level of paranoia in Jakarta about its hold over the resource-rich region”.




















News you may have missed #569
August 17, 2011 by Ian Allen Leave a comment
China & Taiwan
►►Taiwan begins to deal with its amateur spies caught by China. We have written before about the army of businessmen recruited by Taiwan’s Military Information Bureau (MIB). Many of these amateur spies were sent to collect intelligence in mainland China, often with minimal training or institutional support. Predictably, many were arrested, and dozens are believed to remain in China’s prisons today.
►►Egypt to try Israeli on espionage charges. And, no, it’s not Ilan Grapel, the American-Israeli who was arrested on espionage charges earlier this summer, and who is still in prison in Egypt. This case concerns another alleged Mossad operative, Ofir Herari, who has allegedly escaped and will be tried in absentia. Another man, Jordanian telecommunications engineer Bashar Ibrahim Abu Zeid, has been apprehended on charges of collaborating with Herari. He will be tried for “spying for a foreign country with the purpose of harming Egyptian national interests”.
►►Pakistan ‘gave China access’ to US copter used in bin Laden raid. According to a report in The New York Times, in the days after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s intelligence service “probably allowed” Chinese military engineers to examine the wreckage of a stealth American helicopter that crashed during the operation. This is the view of Read more of this post
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