News you may have missed #341

May 3, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • Russian court rejects ‘spy’ scientist’s appeal. A Russian court has rejected an appeal for the release of academic Igor Sutyagin, former division head in the Russian Academy of Sciences’ USA and Canada Institute, who is serving a 15-year sentence for allegedly passing state secrets to foreign officials.
  • Ex-CIA agent’s arrest in VA was eventful, say sources. We reported earlier this week that Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s Algiers station chief, who is accused of having drugged and raped two Algerian women at his official residence, was arrested at a Norfolk, Virginia motel, after he failed to show up for a court hearing. It now appears that Warren “had a gun in his waistband […] and officers used a taser to subdue him”.
  • Documents show CIA thought Gary Powers had defected. Declassified documents show the CIA did not believe that Gary Powers, who piloted the U2 spy plane shot down over Russia in 1960, causing the U2 incident, had been shot down. Instead, the agency spread the rumor that Powers “baled out and spent his first night as a defector in a Sverdlovsk nightclub”!

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News you may have missed #340

May 2, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • West Bank urged to drop Israeli cell phone companies. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is urging Palestinians to stop using the Israeli cellular companies Pelephone, Orange, Cellcom and Mirs. The official reasons are economic (Israeli companies don’t pay taxes to the PA), but the real reasons are probably related to communications security.
  • US police wiretaps up 26 percent in one year. The number of wiretaps authorized by US state and federal judges in criminal investigations jumped 26 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a report released Friday by the Administrative Office of the US Courts.
  • Taliban group executes high-profile ex-ISI spy. Khalid Khawaja, one of two Pakistani former Inter-Services Intelligence directorate officers captured by a Taliban splinter group, named Asian Tigers, has been found dead. The other ex-ISI official, Sultan Amir Tarar, a.k.a. Colonel Imam, who was Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar’s former handler, remains in captivity.

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News you may have missed #339 (arrest edition!)

April 28, 2010 by 3 Comments

  • US couple arrested for spying for Cuba cooperating, say authorities. Admitted spies Walter and Gwendolyn Myers have met with US federal officials “50 to 60 times” to divulge details of their three decades of spying for Cuba, Justice Department officials said Tuesday. The couple pleaded guilty in November to working for the government of Caribbean island.
  • Indian diplomat arrested for spying for Pakistan. Madhuri Gupta, a second secretary at the Indian high commission in Islamabad, Pakistan, has been arrested and accused of passing on secrets to Pakistan’s ISI spy agency. Indian officials believe she may be part of a wider spy ring.
  • Former CIA station chief arrested in Virginia. Andrew M. Warren, the CIA’s Algiers station chief, who is accused of having drugged and raped two Algerian women at his official residence, has been arrested at a Norfolk, Virginia motel, after he failed to show up for a court hearing last week. It is unclear why he skipped the hearing and why he was staying at the motel in his hometown.

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News you may have missed #338

April 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US intel on Iran suffering from information overload? The US National Intelligence Estimate was due last fall but has been delayed at least twice amid efforts to “incorporate information from [Iranian] sources who are still being vetted”. Some say that significant new material has come from Iranian informants, who are motivated by antipathy toward the Iranian government and its suppression of the opposition.
  • Canada’s ex-intel boss slams new anti-terrorism measures. Reid Morden, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has urged the country’s Conservative government to re-think its plans to re-introduce controversial anti-terrorism measures initially adopted in the wake of 9/11.
  • Wiretapping scandals continue in Colombia. Caracol TV reports that Colombian security agency DAS has asked opposition Senator Piedad Cordoba to hand over evidence of her claims that President Alvaro Uribe ordered DAS to spy on her.

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News you may have missed #337

April 26, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Another Iranian nuclear researcher reportedly defects. An academic linked with Iran’s nuclear program has defected to Israel, according to Ayoub Kara, Israel’s deputy minister for development in the Negev and Galilee. Kara said it “is too soon to provide further details”, adding that the defector is “now in a friendly country”.
  • Dutch spies to become more active abroad. The Dutch secret service, the AIVD, has announced a shift in strategy, deployed increasingly more officers abroad: “in Yemen, Somalia, and the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan”.
  • Why did the CIA destroy waterboarding evidence? It has been established that Porter J. Goss, the former director of the CIA, in 2005 approved the destruction of dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two terrorism detainees. But why did he do it? Former CIA officer Robert Baer examines the question.

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News you may have missed #336

April 24, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA tech arm invests in camera lens start-up. The CIA’s venture-capital investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has struck again. This time it has funded LensVector, a hi-tech start-up that specializes in micro-camera technology for cell phones.
  • NSA cyberdefense exercise underway. Detailed status report on the National Security Agency’s 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of US military academies against each other –and against the competition’s leaders at NSA– in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills.
  • US spy researchers working on computational intel. IARPA, the US intelligence community’s research arm, is apparently working on a new program, called Aggregative Contingent Estimation, which aims to create a computational model that can enhance human hypotheses and predictions, by catching inevitable biases and accounting for selective memory and stress in intelligence analysis.

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News you may have missed #335

April 23, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Leading al-Qaeda expert to leave FBI. J. Philip Mudd, one of the US intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was the National Security Branch’s associate executive director. He will be replaced by 23-year FBI veteran Sean Joyce.
  • Three more domestic spying programs revealed. The US Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged the existence of three more government programs charged with spying on American citizens in the aftermath of 9/11. The programs, Pantheon, Pathfinder and Organizational Shared Space, used a variety of software tools to gather and analyze information about Americans.
  • NSA Utah facility contractors shortlisted. We have mentioned before that for contractors in northern Utah, where the NSA is preparing to build a million-square-foot facility, at Camp Williams, it’s party time. Five of them, including three from Utah, have now been shortlisted by the government.

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News you may have missed #334

April 21, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Analysis: Split up the CIA, says veteran officer. A 15-year CIA veteran, who goes by the pseudonym Ishmael Jones, reveals in a new book that the Agency now has only “a handful” of non-official-cover officers, i.e. spies not affiliated with a US diplomatic mission abroad. In The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, Jones argues the CIA should be broken up and its pieces absorbed by other US intelligence agencies.
  • Turkey appoints new intelligence director. It is expected that Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) will soon be headed by Dr. Hakan Fidan, who will replace Emre Taner. MİT’s reputation has recently been severely hit by the involvement of some of its personnel in the notorious Ergenekon affair.

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News you may have missed #333

April 20, 2010 by 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 #332

April 19, 2010 by Leave a comment

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News you may have missed #330

April 15, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Pakistan released captured Taliban behind CIA’s back. IntelNews has not joined the chorus of commentators who have been claiming that the relationship between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and the CIA has warmed up. It now appears that even as the ISI was collaborating with the CIA, it quietly freed at least two captured senior Afghan Taliban figures.
  • Kiwi activists accuse police of spying. New Zealand’s Peace Action Wellington has submitted an Official Information Act (OIA) request relating to domestic police surveillance, after accusing the police of “heavily spying on and running operations on protest groups”. It is not the first time that similar accusations have been directed against the country’s police force.
  • CIA suspected existence of Israeli nukes in 1974. Israel will neither confirm nor deny the rumored existence of its nuclear arsenal. But the CIA, which has kept an eye on Israel’s nuclear weapons project since at least the early 1960s, was convinced of its existence by 1974, according to a declassified report.

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News you may have missed #329

April 13, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Iran insists US hikers had intelligence links. Iran’s intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, has said that Americans Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal and Sarah Shourd, who were arrested on Iranian soil last July, “were in contact with intelligence services”. The evidence would “soon be made public”, he said.
  • Gerdes case shows difficulty of CIA jobs. The case of CIA employee Kerry Gerdes, who was recently convicted for falsifying interview reports while performing background checks on CIA employees and potential employees, reveals how difficult the job is for young CIA recruits, who expect it to be exciting or glamorous, according to seasoned investigators.
  • US still denying India access to Headley. There has been intense speculation in India and Pakistan that David Coleman Headley, a former US Drug Enforcement Administration informant, who was arrested by the FBI in October for plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper, is in fact a renegade CIA agent. Could this be why the US is denying India access to Headley?

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News you may have missed #328 (breaking)

April 12, 2010 by 1 Comment

  • Breaking: Real IRA admits NI MI5 base bomb. The Real IRA has admitted it was behind a car bomb which exploded shortly after midnight local hour, outside the Palace Barracks army base, in Holywood, County Down, which houses MI5’s Northern Ireland headquarters. Police said no warning was given.
  • Venezuela releases 4 of 8 alleged spies. Four of the eight Colombians arrested by Venezuela on espionage charges last week have been released, after a judge found there was not enough evidence to take them to trial. Meanwhile Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has said that the alleged spy ring used “secret or semi-secret codes”.
  • Analysis: Security services will determine fate of Kyrgyz uprising. Unlike the 2005 so-called Tulip Revolution, this time the anti-government protesters in Kyrgyzstan are armed. But the real question may be whether they have the support of (and control over) the Internal Security Services and the military.

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News you may have missed #327

April 10, 2010 by 2 Comments

  • Cyberspies eyed Canadian visa applications. Personal information about Canadians applying for visas was swiped by cyberspies who hacked into Indian embassy computers in Afghanistan. The data theft was part of a wider cyberespionage operation launched by the underground hacking community in China and aimed primarily at political targets, according to academic researchers.
  • Israeli Arab jailed for spying on top general. Rawi Sultani, who is accused of informing Hezbollah of his membership in the same fitness club as Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as of methods of accessing the club, has been sentenced to nearly six years’ imprisonment.
  • CIA places American on assassination list. US-born al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Aulaqi, who now lives in Yemen, has become the first US citizen to be placed on a CIA “targeted killing” list, which requires “special approval from the White House”.

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News you may have missed #326

April 8, 2010 by 2 Comments

  • US spends millions on deception operations. The US Joint Information Operations Warfare Center at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas has a 435-person unit tasked with “development of television commercials and documentaries, focus group and polling services, television air time, posters, banners, and billboards”, as well as “novelty items”. Novelty items? Jeff Stein takes a closer look.
  • Iranian embassy in Australia spying on activists. The Iranian embassy in Canberra has been accused of spying on Iranian opposition activists in Australia, collecting intelligence on their activities and reporting back to Tehran. The allegations come amid growing concern within Australian security services over the activities of Iranian government-backed militants in Australia.
  • Newsflash: Israeli, Iranian spies active in Gulf! The profound commentary by Dubai Police continues. Last time they warned all spies “present in the Gulf” to leave the region within a week. This time they are reminding us that “Israel and Iran have their spies active in the Gulf region”. You don’t say.

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