news you may have missed | intelNews.org

News you may have missed #509 (Blackwater edition)

May 17, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Blackwater founder sets up Emirates mercenary force. Fearing pro-democracy protesters, the United Arab Emirates has paid Blackwater founder and former CIA operative Erik Prince $529 million to set up an 800-strong undercover American-led mercenary army, staffed mostly by Colombian dogs of war.
US studies legality of US-led private army in UAE. The US state department said on Sunday that it was examining the legality of an American-led private army that is being established in the United Arab Emirates.
Ex-Blackwater members set up private spy firm. Veterans from Blackwater (now Xe Services) and former members of the US military’s ABLE DANGER intelligence data mining program, have founded a new private intelligence firm called –wait for it– Jellyfish.

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News you may have missed #508

May 12, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

US not to withdraw Pakistan CIA chief. The US has said it will not withdraw the CIA station chief in Pakistan, despite his name being leaked to local media last week. But officials quoted by US media said the name published in Pakistani news outlets was spelled incorrectly.
CIA, not Pentagon, ran bin Laden operation. Has anyone noticed that CIA Director Leon Panetta has said a lot more about the Navy commandos’ killing of Osama bin Laden than has the Pentagon chief? The reason Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said exactly nothing about the raid is that the CIA, not the Pentagon, ran the operation.
Spy vs. spy in China. Interesting summary of the case of Glenn Shriver, an American who was arrested last year for accepting $70,000 from Chinese spies as he attempted to secure jobs with the CIA and US Foreign Service that would have allowed him to expose US government secrets.

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News you may have missed #507

May 10, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Pakistani media reveal name of CIA station chief. Mark Carlton, the purported CIA station chief in Islamabad, was named by a Pakistani newspaper and a private television news network over the weekend, the second holder of that post in less than a year to have his cover blown by the media.
How an immigrant from Taiwan came to spy for China. Well-researched article on Tai Shen Kuo, a Taiwanese-born American citizen who is serving time in an Arizona prison for spying on the US for China.
Domestic surveillance grew in US in 2010. The level of domestic US intelligence surveillance activity in 2010 increased from the year before, according to a new Justice Department report to Congress. Moreover, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved all 1,506 government requests to electronically monitor suspected “agents” of a foreign power or terrorists on US soil.

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News you may have missed #506 (bin Laden edition)

May 9, 2011 by intelNews 1 Comment

Terror data key to fight, experts say. Article by Boston Herald staff writer Marie Szaniszlo, which includes quotes by intelNews‘ own Joseph Fitsanakis, and Executive Action CEO Neil Livingstone.
US Navy SEALs did not bring tape measure. The heavily armed, electronically wired SEALs didn’t come with a tape measure to get an accurate height reading of Osama bin Laden. According to reports, a Navy SEAL of about 6-feet laid out next to bin Laden’s corpse to gauge the al-Qaeda leader’s height. The corpse was “several inches taller”.
Analysis: CIA takes a victory lap after Bin Laden raid. The CIA, battered by years of setbacks and criticism, is relishing a rare public triumph after tracking down Osama bin Laden in his hideout deep inside Pakistan.

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News you may have missed #505 (bin Laden edition)

May 4, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Bin Laden assassins confiscated digital devices. According to US officials, members of the US elite forces that raided Osama bin Laden’s residence in Pakistan “carried off five computers, 10 hard drives and more than 100 storage devices, such as DVDs and removable flash drives”.
Bin Laden compound was once spy agency safe house. Reports from the United Arab Emirates suggest that the compound in Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was killed was once used as a safe house by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Pakistan’s premier spy agency.
CIA says it will release bin Laden pictures. The White House says that it intends to release images of Osama bin Laden’s assassination, but warns that they are “gruesome” and “could be inflammatory”.

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News you may have missed #504

April 29, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Israel spy pleads to Obama for release. United States Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for spying for Israel, has pleaded for his release in a personal letter to President Barack Obama. The letter was apparently handed to Obama by Israeli President Shimon Peres when he visited the White House on April 5.
US-Pakistan spy feud boils over CIA drone strikes. The Pakistani government has voiced strong criticism of a fresh CIA drone attack, which has killed 26 people. But an anonymous US counterterrorism official, who spoke to the McClatchy news agency, said that “the Pakistanis should spend less time complaining to the press [about the drone strikes] and more time trying to root out terrorists within their country”.
Colombia to issue international warrant for ex-spy chief. Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office will issue an international arrest warrant for Maria Pilar Hurtado, former director of the country’s disgraced DAS intelligence agency, who was granted political asylum in Panama.

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News you may have missed #503

April 27, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Dutch forces’ covert operations in Africa revealed. Dutch forces have for several years been training government soldiers in Mali, Senegal and Chad, without the Dutch parliament being informed, according to Dutch newspaper AD, which cites documents from the US Congress and the Pentagon.
Israel destroys spying devices found in Gaza. Hamas sources have told Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram that they discovered several “audio-visual spying devices” in the sand hills south of Gaza City. But, as soon as they started removing the devices, they “received a phone call from Israeli intelligence elements” telling them that the site would be bombed “within three minutes” —which is precisely what happened, according to al-Ahram. Regular readers of this blog will know this incident was not a first.
Leaked documents reveal Guantanamo secrets. A batch of leaked US government intelligence documents, not meant to surface for 20 years, shows that intelligence collection at Guantánamo often was much less effective than the George Bush administration has acknowledged. According to the documents, the US military used interrogation and detention practices that they largely made up as they went along.

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News you may have missed #502

April 22, 2011 by intelNews 2 Comments

Interesting interview with career US intelligence officer. A discussion on al-Qaeda’s quest for nuclear weapons with Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and former Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the US Department of Energy.
CIA reveals World War I documents. The CIA has declassified secrets for writing with invisible ink and even opening sealed letters without detection: state-of-the-art spying techniques from World War I.
Israel indicts Australian for spying for Hamas. Australian citizen Iad Rashid Abu Arja, has been indicted in Israel for allegedly entering the country on a mission from Hamas. According to Israel, Arja “aimed to acquire various technological devices for the purposes of encryption, photography, and guiding missiles”.

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News you may have missed #501 (United States edition)

April 21, 2011 by intelNews 1 Comment

Ex-double agent Hanssen’s house goes on sale. The five-bedroom home on Talisman Drive in Vienna, Va., offered by Llewellyn Realtors for $725,000 as “perfect for a growing family”, is the former lair of ex-FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen, who is regarded as one of the most damaging spies ever to betray the US government.
Ex-CIA officer critical of US activities in Pakistan. Speaking on Pakistan’s TV show Express 24/7, former CIA officer Robert Baer said there were no less than 16 US intelligence agencies working in Pakistan and none of them talked to each other, with even officials from the New York police department at one point in time conducting investigations in Pakistan.
US agents descending on Mexico According to Mexican daily El Diario, the country’s Attorney General’s Office estimates that there are currently over 500 US intelligence operatives working in Mexico, up from just 60 in 2005.

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News you may have missed #500

April 19, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

US diplomatic cables reveal lack of Iran intelligence. “Taken together, the cables portray a US government ravenous for any scrap of information about Iran, no matter how incomplete or contradictory —and admittedly blind to much of what is taking place in a country where the US has not had an official presence in more than a generation”.
Castro’s spy who betrayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Benigno Perez Vivancos was only one of dozens of Fidel Castro’s spies who infiltrated exile Cuban plots in the 1960s as part of a highly effective intelligence-gathering operation that allowed the Cuban leader to prepare well for the invasion 50 years ago and to defeat it after just three days of fighting.
Mixed signals over status of Iran’s chief spy. Iran’s intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, offered his resignation from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government on Sunday, but in an apparent high-level political dispute, Iran’s top leader ordered the minister to remain in his post.

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News you may have missed #499 (CIA edition)

April 17, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

CIA sued for failing to release Bay of Pigs history. The non-profit group National Security Archive has sued the CIA over its failure to release its history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the US-sponsored effort to topple Fidel Castro in 1961.
Ex-CIA Deputy Director on intelligence priorities. Thirty-year CIA veteran John McLaughlin explains that he perceives intelligence priorities in terms of concentric circles, with the innermost circle containing items of the highest priority for national security.
Is it OK for spy agency chiefs to tell the truth? “Public officials need to choose their words carefully, but we should not be so timid that our language confuses everyone –including ourselves”, says Michael V. Hayden, who directed the CIA from 2006 to 2009.

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News you may have missed #498

April 16, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

US claims Iran helping Syria crackdown. Iran is secretly helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad put down pro-democracy demonstrations, according to US officials, who say Tehran is providing gear to suppress crowds and assistance blocking and monitoring protesters’ use of the Internet, cellphones and text-messaging.
Frenchmen arrested in Pakistan. One of the French citizens is of Pakistani origin and the other is a Caucasian convert to Islam; the two had apparently intended to travel to Pakistan’s North Waziristan region, where al-Qaida’s top command is based, for terrorist training, according to a US official.
Did US blow up its old spy satellite? The US military’s huge reconnaissance satellite Lacrosse 2, which was launched 20 years ago, has been reported by amateur satellite observers as missing in action –a sign that the classified spacecraft may have been purposely destroyed in Earth’s atmosphere.

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News you may have missed #497

April 14, 2011 by intelNews 1 Comment

Interview with Finnish ex-counterespionage officer. Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat has published a very interesting interview with Hannu Moilanen, who recently retired as a senior officer with SUPO, the Finnish Security Intelligence Service. Among other things, Moilanen says SUPO considered the CIA “the bad boys” of the Western bloc during the Cold War, because the Americans would not always disclose to SUPO the identities of CIA officers stationed in Finland, as they were supposed to.
European Union sent intelligence officers to Libya. But the EU’s Joint Situation Centre denies they were spies. “They were technical specialists who went to help with satellite phones and that type of thing”, said JSC Director Ilkka Salmi.
Talks aimed at mending rift between CIA and ISI. The CIA has agreed to reveal more about its operatives and their activities in Pakistan, and pledged expanded cooperation on drone strikes, US and Pakistani officials said. Meanwhile, however, the drone strikes on Pakistani soil appear to be continuing.

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News you may have missed #496

April 12, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

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.

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News you may have missed #495

April 11, 2011 by intelNews Leave a comment

Nazi who arrested Anne Frank became a spy for West Germany. Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested the Holocaust victim Anne Frank, was one of hundreds of Nazi henchmen who were recruited en masse by West German intelligence after the Second World War to spy on the Soviet bloc, a new book has revealed.
Kremlin rejects Russian spy’s proposal to ban Skype, Gmail. The Kremlin has rejected a proposal by a senior official of the Federal Security Service, Russia’s main domestic security agency, who suggested banning Skype, Gmail and Hotmail because they are a major threat to national security.
Iran expels Kuwaiti diplomats in spying dispute. Iran has expelled three Kuwaiti diplomats in retaliation for the expulsion of three Iranian diplomats accused of spying in the emirate last month.