News you may have missed #0249

  • Analysis: Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan. “The military backgrounds of the fallen CIA operatives cast a light on the way the world of intelligence is increasingly muscling up and becoming militarized […]. This is no longer intelligence as anyone imagines it, nor is it military as military was once defined […]. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims […] it seems remarkably ineffective”.
  • CIA planned to ‘rendition’ suspects in Germany in 2001. The CIA had 25 agents in Germany after the September 11 attacks and planned to illegally rendition al-Qaeda suspects without informing the German government. In the end, the plan was scrapped because of objections by the Agency’s German section.
  • French president appoints woman in charge of spy school. Nicolas Sarkozy is to create a ‘school for spies’, whose principal job will be to discourage French intelligence chiefs from spying on, and fighting against, one another. There are rumors that the school’s first director will be woman academic with no previous experience of espionage.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0248

  • Cuba insists jailed US contractor is secret service agent. Cuban officials say that a US citizen working for Maryland-based international aid group Development Alternatives Inc., who was arrested in Havana last month, was actually recruiting local Cubans to spy on the government.
  • Analysis: Spying in Eastern Europe heats up again. The Cold War may be 20 years dead and buried, but it seems that the old East-West spying game is not only alive and kicking, but gaining vigor in places like Warsaw, Prague and Tallinn.
  • Obama designates new list of secrecy gatekeepers. The US president has designated over two dozen officials as “original classification authorities” (OCAs), who have the power to classify government information as Top Secret or Secret, and (in most cases) to delegate such authority to their subordinates. Importantly, the directive says that OCAs will lose their job if they fail to “receive training in proper classification […] at least once a calendar year”.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0247

  • US government lowers threshold for inclusion on no-fly lists. According to senior US State Department officials, the government has already lowered the threshold for information deemed important enough to put suspicious individuals on a watch list or no-fly list. CNN reports that suspects will now include citizens of the notorious Islamist country of Cuba….
  • CIA starts sharing data with climate scientists. This blog has kept an eye on the CIA’s Climate Change Center, which was established late last year. It now turns out the Agency had started monitoring climate change in 1992, under project MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis), but the program was shut down in 2001 by the Bush Administration. The Climate Change Center, therefore, represents the re-establishment of an earlier effort.
  • How the KGB tried to recruit an NBC News reporter. FBI files show that the Soviet KGB tried to recruit the late NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine, while he was stationed in Moscow in the 1950s.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0246 (CIA bombing edition)

  • Analysis: Strike on CIA base tests US assessment of al-Qaeda. The militant group appears to have achieved a new level of sophistication and may not be as weakened as US officials had thought.
  • Photo of CIA suicide bomber published. Qatar-based Arabic news network Al Jazeera has published a photograph of Jordanian doctor Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 36, who last month killed at least 7 CIA agents in Khost, Afghanistan.
  • Al-Qaida CIA bomber was furious over Gaza war. Suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was furious over Israel’s Gaza offensive, the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported on Thursday, citing the man’s sister.
  • Analysis: The view from Jordan on CIA’s deaths in Khost. For Jordan, far more embarrassing than its role in the Khost suicide bombing, is its connection with the CIA, which while relatively well-known before, has now been put out in the public sphere for all to see –especially the Arab street.
  • London Arabic newspaper visits home of CIA bomber. The Jordanian authorities have imposed a security cordon around al-Balawi’s family home, which is located in the residential al-Nuzha district, close to the Jabal al-Hussein Palestinian refugee camp in the Jordanian capital of Amman. But a London-based Arabic-language newspaper correspondent managed to visit the location and speak with the bomber’s family members and neighbors.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0245 (CIA edition)

  • CIA saw Jordanian double spy as valuable asset. Before detonating a suicide bomb in Afghanistan last week, Jordanian double spy (or was he?) Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was considered by US spy agencies “the most promising informant in years about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s top leaders”.
  • CIA going through worst spell since 9/11. America’s most recognizable intelligence agency is currently going through its worst time since 9/11, what with Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the loss of at least seven of its agents in Khost, Afghanistan.
  • US intel in Afghanistan is broken, irrelevant, says US insider. A new report (.pdf) by US Major General Michael Flynn, the top intelligence aide to International Security Assistance Force Commander General Stanley McChrystal, says the US intelligence community “is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy” in Afghanistan. The report recommends “[s]weeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself, from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan”.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0244

  • Former S. African spy chief dies. Mike Louw former head of South Africa’s apartheid-era National Intelligence Service (NIS) and later the South African Secret Service (SASS), has died. As deputy director general at NIS, Louw helped facilitate some of the very first meetings between the government of F.W. De Klerk and Nelson Mandela, the then imprisoned leader of the African National Congress.
  • Kiwi spies get augmented cyber-surveillance powers. Reports from New Zealand indicate that new “cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced”, giving the country’s law enforcement and intelligence services increased online surveillance powers. Veteran intelligence observer Nicky Hager describes the changes as “the largest expansion of police and [intelligence] surveillance capabilities [in New Zealand] for decades”.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0243

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0242

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0241

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0240

  • Major purge in Gambian security services continues. Ngorr Secka, the former deputy director general of Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency, has reportedly been arrested. The arrest marks the latest development in a major purge that began last July, after the chief of the country’s armed forces, Lt. Colonel Sainey Bayo, fled to the United States reportedly while being “investigated for supplying sensitive state secrets to an unnamed Western country”.
  • Jerusalem memorial may honor British Auschwitz spy. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem may honor Denis Avey, 91, who as a British prisoner of war in Monowitz (a.k.a. Monowice or Auschwitz III) prisoner camp, convinced Ernst Lobethall, a Jew held at nearby Auschwitz concentration camp, to give him his ID badge and concentration camp uniform. He then walked back to Auschwitz on two occasions, gathering valuable evidence about the Nazis’ Final Solution.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0239

  • Iran denies secret deal to import Kazakh uranium. Iran and Kazakhstan have denied a report that they were close to clinching a deal to transfer to Iran 1,350 tons of Kazakh purified uranium ore. The IAEA has declined comment.
  • US travel security lapses to mark end of the line for DHS? The US Department of Homeland Security “is adrift and treated as an orphan by the rest of the [US intelligence] community but is so badly staffed by low quality people that no other agency will ever take them seriously”, according to an anonymous former senior US intelligence official.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0238

  • The real story behind Nigerian bomber security lapses. “The real story line internally is not information sharing or connecting dots”, a former intelligence official said. “It was separating noise from chaff. It’s not that information wasn’t passed around; it’s that so much information is being passed” (Research credit to Politico‘s Laura Rozen).
  • Obama orders creation of declassification center. US President Barack Obama created by executive order Tuesday a National Declassification Center to oversee efforts to make once-secret government documents public. Among other things, the executive order eliminates the ability of intelligence officials to veto declassification decisions.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0237

  • Christmas Day bomb plot exposes fissures in US spy community. As intelNews regulars know, turf wars between US intelligence agencies are nothing new. But lapses that allowed Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab to board a Detroit-bound plane with a bomb on Christmas Day, and the finger-pointing that followed, have raised questions about supposedly sweeping changes made to improve intelligence-sharing after the 9/11.
  • Mysterious life of Soviet spy couple unveiled. Soviet agents Mikhail and Yelizaveta Mukasey were legends among illegals –i.e. international spies operating without diplomatic credentials. Now the Russian government is carefully releasing information on their activities and missions, which ranged from the US to Israel, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0236

  • Airline bomb plotter’s father warned CIA about his son. Dr. Umaru AbdulMutallab, the father of Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day airline bomb plot suspect, visited the US embassy in Nigeria in November, where he told a CIA agent that he believed his son was under the influence of religious extremists and had traveled from London, England, to Yemen.
  • New book details Stasi spying on Günter Grass. A new book, entitled Guenter Grass im Visier: Die Stasi-Akte (Günter Grass in the Crosshairs: The Stasi Files), is to be published in March in Germany. Among other things, it will detail spying operations against the Nobel Prize-winning author by the East German secret police, the Stasi.
  • Former Albanian spymaster claiming benefits in Britain. Ilir Kumbaro, Albania’s former spymaster, is wanted by authorities for having kidnapped and tortured three men in his homeland. But after falling out with officials there, he fled to Britain in 1996, where he has lived for 13 years using the alias Shaqa Shatri.

Bookmark and Share

News you may have missed #0235

  • How the CIA was conned by a compulsive gambler. In 2003, the CIA took seriously the fabricated claims of Dennis Montgomery, co-owner of a software gaming company in Nevada, who claimed he could read messages hidden in barcodes listing international flights to the US, their positions and airports to be targeted by al-Qaeda.
  • Obama names intel advisory board members. The US President has appointed members to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), a critical oversight group tasked with alerting the White House about US intelligence activities that may be illegal or may go beyond Presidential authorization. The appointees are Roel Campos, Lee Hamilton, Rita Hauser, Paul Kaminski, Ellen Laipson, Les Lyles, and Jami Miscik. For more on PIAB, see here.
  • Turkey arrests three on espionage charges. Turkish media won’t say which country the arrestees allegedly spied for, but one of them is said to have “often visited Greece”. A tit-for-tat?

Bookmark and Share