Israeli envoy ‘in alarm’ after Australia expels Mossad agent

Yuval Rotem

Yuval Rotem

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Israeli ambassador to Australia, who was in Israel on business, expedited his return to Canberra yesterday, immediately after Australia announced the expulsion of Israel’s senior Mossad representative in the country. Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that ambassador Yuval Rotem decided to cut short his trip to Israel “in alarm”, as the “escalated crisis” between Israel and Australia appears to be deepening. As intelNews readers read on April 14, Australia had announced the pending expulsion after official investigations by Australian law enforcement and intelligence authorities revealed beyond doubt that the Israeli spy agency Mossad had forged at least four Australian passports. The passports were among several Western identity documents employed by Mossad agents in targeting Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was assassinated in a luxury Dubai hotel last January. Read more of this post

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  • Ex-CIA analyst to lead US declassification center. Sheryl Jasielum Shenberger, who currently serves as a Branch Chief at the CIA Declassification Center, has been named as the first director of the recently established US National Declassification Center. The Center’s aim is to eliminate the backlog of over 400 million pages of classified records by the end of 2013.
  • Hamas expels Egyptian spy from Gaza. A senior Egyptian intelligence officer, who had allegedly “infiltrated the region to collect information on residents and the Hamas government” was arrested and expelled from Gaza on Monday.
  • Israeli nuclear whistleblower back in prison. More than six years after his release from 18 years in solitary confinement, Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has been sentenced to another three months in prison for allegedly “contacting foreign agents”.

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News you may have missed #357

  • IDF colonel with intelligence duties ‘commits suicide’. An unnamed colonel with the Israel Defense Forces was found dead in a forest in northern Israel Saturday, after allegedly taking his own life. The officer reportedly served in high-ranking positions in the Intelligence Corps.
  • Australian Wikileak founder’s passport confiscated. Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled. Wikileaksleaked footage of US forces laughing at the dead bodies of people they had just killed in Iraq in 2007. rose to prominence last month, after posting

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  • Germany arrests Libyans on spy charges. Two Libyans have been arrested in Berlin on suspicion of working as secret agents, spying on members of the Libyan opposition in Germany. The two, identified only as 42-year-old ‘Adel Ab’ and 46-year-old ‘Adel Al’, are being held in custody in Berlin, pending possible spying charges.
  • Israeli handler discusses relationship with Hamas spy. Israeli broadsheet Ha’aretz has aired a fascinating interview with ‘Captain Loai’, a Shin Bet operative who handled Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a senior Hamas official, who was an informant for Israeli intelligence for at least a decade. Note the strong personal connection between handler and informant, which would be considered unprofessional in US intelligence culture.
  • Analysis: Iran’s murky link to al-Qaeda confounds CIA. It’s one of the enduring mysteries of the US ‘war on terrorism’: what will become of the al-Qaeda leaders and operatives who fled into Iran after 9/11 and have been detained there for years?

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Former CIA couple in effort to ‘un-demonize’ agency

Tony Mendez

Mendez in 1990

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A husband-and-wife CIA team, who married after retiring from the agency, after a collective career spanning over half a century, are speaking around the country in an effort to “humanize [and] un-demonize the CIA”. Antonio (Tony) and Jonna Mendez joined the agency in the 1960s, and spent the next 25 years at the CIA’s Office of Technical Services. Tony was eventually promoted to Chief of Disguise, and later Chief of the Graphics and Authentication Division, whose mission is –among other tasks– transforming the identities of CIA field operatives, by supplying them with high-quality forged documentation for use in their various missions. In 1997, he was honored by the CIA as one of the “50 trailblazers” in the agency’s history. Jonna Mendez worked for 27 years as a spy camera expert, and was tasked with training CIA officers in the use of covert technologies. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #353

  • Name of British Mossad agent handed to Interpol. Dubai police have identified another suspect in the January murder of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. He is reportedly a 62-year-old British citizen, who is believed to be currently hiding in western Africa.
  • Russia jails man for spying for the US. Gennady Sipachyov, a Russian whose age and profession have been kept secret by Moscow, has been sentenced to a four-year sentence for allegedly emailing secret military maps identifying classified Russian military infrastructure to the US Pentagon in 2008. Earlier this month, a Russian court rejected an appeal by another alleged US spy, Igor Sutyagin.
  • Bulgarian government wants to copy CIA. Bulgaria’s Defense Minister, Anyu Angelov, has proposed the merging of intelligence services to create a mega-structure of the CIA type. Meanwhile, a panel investigating Bulgaria’s communist-era police files has exposed two of the country’s former counterintelligence heads as former communist state security agents.

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Was release of French ‘spy’ part of Iranian-French deal? [updated]

Majid Kakavand

Majid Kakavand

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
This blog has closely monitored the case of Clotilde Reiss, a French language assistant who was arrested in Iran last year on accusations of being a ‘nuclear spy’. Despite the obviously nonsensical nature of the allegations, Reiss, a 25-year-old Farsi-speaking French-language assistant at the University of Isfahan, was forced to confess to her ‘crime’ on Iranian television. Last August, however, after spending nearly two months in the notorious Evin prison complex, Reiss was released on bail, on condition that she would remain confined inside the walls of the French embassy compound in Tehran. Then, last weekend, her ten-year prison sentence was suddenly commuted to a fine of $285,000, and she was able to return home to France on Sunday. Why the sudden change of heart on the part of Tehran? Read more of this post

Private US spy network still operating in Pakistan

US Pentagon

US Pentagon

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Senior US Pentagon officials continue to rely almost daily on reports from a network of contracted spies operating deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to The New York Times. Last March, when the paper revealed the existence of the network, several senior US military sources expressed serious concerns about the operation, which some say borders on illegality, and is currently under investigation by the US government. Although The Times is apparently “withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of [its] agents”, it appears that the network is staffed by former CIA and Special Forces operatives. The entire operation appears to be an attempt to evade some of the stringent oversight rules under which the CIA and the US Pentagon are required to operate. Read more of this post

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CIA ‘used fake British passports’ in kidnap operation

UK passport

British passport

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
British authorities are looking into allegations that a team of CIA agents made use of forged British passports during an abduction operation in 2003. The allegations surfaced last week in Spain, where a team of prosecutors is currently investigating the activities of 13 CIA agents (11 men and two women) who appear to have used the Spanish tourist resort of Majorca as a base for conducting various operations around Europe. Following the example of Italy, which last year convicted several CIA operatives for illegally abducting a Muslim cleric in Milan, Spanish authorities are now considering issuing arrest warrants for the 13 CIA agents. They are all believed to have been involved in the abduction and rendition of German citizen Khaled El-Masri. El-Masri was abducted in Skopje, Macedonia, in 2003, and later transferred on a secret CIA flight to a Syrian prison, where he says he was brutally tortured. He was later released without explanation, once US authorities realized they had the wrong man. Read more of this post

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