CIA-DNI turf war enters new phase

November 18, 2009 by Leave a comment

Dennis Blair

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The CIA may have won a lengthy turf battle against the office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), but the war between the two agencies continues. As intelNews reported last July, the dispute started when DNI Dennis Blair argued in a still-classified directive that his office, and not the CIA, as has been the case for over 60 years, should have a say in certain cases over the appointment of senior US intelligence representatives in foreign cities. A few days ago, when the White House finally came down in favor of the CIA, the imbroglio appeared to be ending. But now the DNI has hit back by announcing it will be evaluating all “[s]ensitive CIA operations overseas” including all of the CIA’s active paramilitary and espionage operations abroad. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0188

November 17, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • India arrests Pakistani ‘spy’ carrying documents at airport. The Delhi Police says it arrested a Pakistani spy just as he was set to board a flight to Saudi Arabia, carrying with him a set of vital documents on Indian defense installations. The man was reportedly using a fake passport bearing the name “Aamir Ali”.
  • Hezbollah claims infiltration of Israel. Lebanese militant group Hezbollah says it has infiltrated the security services of Israel and obtained vital documents regarding military activity, by “taking pictures and copying sensitive documents”.
  • Spy arrest causes major Peru-Chile diplomatic row. A senior Peruvian Air Force officer was arrested in Lima on Saturday, on charges of spying for Chile. The spying affair caused the Peruvian delegation to pull out of an Asia-Pacific summit in Singapore on Sunday.

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One third of Pakistani spy budget comes from CIA, say officials

November 17, 2009 by 1 Comment

ISI HQ

ISI HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
As much as one third of the annual budget of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence has come from the CIA in the last eight years, according to a new report in The Los Angeles Times. The paper says that even more US dollars have been supplied to the ISI through a secret CIA monetary rewards program that pays for the arrest or assassination of militants wanted by Washington. The payments reportedly began during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, and are now continuing under the Obama administration, despite “long-standing suspicions” that the ISI and the Pakistani military maintain close links with the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and elsewhere. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0187

November 17, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Cambodia arrests Thai for spying on exile leader. Cambodian authorities said the man, Siwarak Chothipong, who works for the Cambodia Air Traffic Service, spied on the flight itinerary of visiting former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has been living in exile since a 2006 military coup in Thailand. The Thai government has rejected the charge.
  • CIA’s Panetta to visit India, Pakistan. CIA director Leon Panetta will visit Pakistan and India for three days, starting on November 20. IntelNews will be keeping an eye on his visit.
  • Former Monaco spymaster says prince invokes immunity. More on the saga of former FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Eringer, who until recently was spymaster to prince Albert II of Monaco, and is now suing him for €360,000 ($542,000) in alleged unpaid income. Eringer’s lawyers have accused Albert of invoking head-of-state immunity, “an absolute defense used by dictators around the world to avoid accountability in US courts”.

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Abducted Iranian defense official reportedly held in Israel

November 17, 2009 by 3 Comments

 

Ali Reza Asgari

Ali-Reza Asgari

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Iran’s former deputy defense minister, who went missing during a 2006 official visit to Turkey, was kidnapped in a joint Israeli-German-British operation, according to an Iranian newsmagazine. Brigadier general Ali-Reza Asgari, who once commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, disappeared on December 9, 2006, from his hotel room in Istanbul, Turkey. Little more than a year later, Hans Rühle, former Director of Policy Planning in the German Ministry of Defense, wrote in Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung that Asgari was in Western hands and that “information was obtained” from him. Since then, other sources have alleged that Asgari defected willingly, including Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post and intelligence historian Gordon Thomas, in his 2009 book Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence (see intelNews book review). Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0186

November 16, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • UN shares intel with Rwandan rebels, says paper. Rwandan daily The New Times has aired allegations that the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has an intelligence-sharing relationship with Hutu FDLR rebels, which runs “even deeper than earlier thought”.
  • Pakistan militants target spy agency. Militants have stepped up their fight against the Pakistani government in western Pakistan, by ramming a truck bomb into the Peshawar regional office of the Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s main spy agency. This is the first large-scale specific targeting of intelligence agents in the region, outside of Afghanistan.
  • US bases in Colombia to be used for spying, says Chávez. Venezuela’s President says he does not think that the new US bases will be used for counternarcotics efforts, but rather for “electronic spying”.

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Book claims CIA turned blind eye on Pakistan’s post-9/11 terror links

November 16, 2009 by 1 Comment

Jean-Louis Bruguiere

J.L. Bruguiere

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A new book by France’s former leading investigating magistrate on counterterrorism affairs alleges that the CIA allowed the Pakistani army to train members of a notorious Islamist militant group, even after 9/11. In the book, entitled Ce que je n’ai pas pu dire (The Things I Would Not Utter), Jean-Louis Bruguiere says the US spy agency was aware that Pakistani army trainers worked with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani group responsible for a series of sophisticated strikes in India, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The former magistrate bases his allegations on official testimony provided by Willy Brigitte, a French citizen from Guadeloupe, who was arrested in Australia in 2003, in connection with Lashkar-e-Taiba activities there. Soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Brigitte traveled to Pakistan aiming to join the Taliban insurgency, but was unable to cross the Pakistani-Afghan border. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0185

November 16, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Article claims US employed cyberwar in 2007. A cover story in the Washington-based National Journal claims former US President George W. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to “launch a sophisticated attack […] on the cellular phones and computers that insurgents in Iraq were using to plan roadside bombings”. IntelNews regulars will remember that we had suspected as much.
  • Somali suicide bomb recruiter had US residency. Somali Mohamud Said Omar, who was arrested a week ago in Holland on suspicion of recruiting youth in Minneapolis for suicide missions in Somalia, has a US green card, Dutch media reported Friday.
  • Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial a huge challenge for US judiciary. The alleged 9/11 mastermind’s case poses the question of how to deal with what is likely to be an extremely large body of classified evidence that the prosecution will want to present.

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News you may have missed #0184

November 15, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Rumors of joint US-Israel-Egypt-Jordan spy meeting. Israeli site DEBKAfile is one of several Middle Eastern news outlets alleging that a secret meeting was held earlier this month between senior intelligence officials of the US, Israel, Egypt and Jordan.
  • Germany won’t prosecute suspect in Litvinenko murder. Germany has dropped attempts to prosecute Dmitri Kovtun, a former Soviet military intelligence officer implicated in the 2006 killing in London of Russian former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. Meanwhile the primary suspect in the case, former KGB bodyguard Andrey Lugovoy, who lives in Russia, said he may be ready to face questioning in the UK “under certain conditions”.
  • FBI charged terrorism suspect after trying to recruit him. Tarek Mehanna, a Massachusetts man accused of plotting to kill Americans, was charged by the FBI only after he refused to work as an informant against Muslims, according to his lawyer. This is not the first time such allegations have surfaced.

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News you may have missed #0183

November 14, 2009 by 1 Comment

  • Did US Rep. Hoekstra compromise a secret NSA spy program? Rep. Peter Hoekstra (MI), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence panel, may have inadvertently compromised a sensitive National Security Agency email collection program while commenting on allegedly intercepted emails sent and received by Fort Hood shooter Malik Nadal Hasan.
  • Blog requests readers’ help to examine released documents. Wired magazine’s Threat Level blog has issued a request for readers to help pore over thousands of US government documents relating to the proposed immunity for telephone companies involved in the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The documents were released following a FOIA lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  • An opportunity in Cuba for CIA field agents? They’d have to pose as McDonald’s restaurant workers.

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Suspected IRA militant charged in undercover agent’s killing

November 14, 2009 by Leave a comment

Robert Nairac

Robert Nairac

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A man suspected by British authorities to be a former member of the Irish Republican Army has been charged with participating in the killing of a British army undercover agent, who tried to infiltrate the IRA in the 1970s. Robert Nairac, a captain of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, was among numerous British government agents who attempted to infiltrate the IRA from the 1960s onwards. Although educated at Oxford, Nairac studied Irish republican culture and put on a convincing Northern Irish accent in order to carry out the infiltration. His activities centered on patronizing various pubs in Catholic stronghold areas of Belfast, using the cover name “Danny McErlaine”, and pretending to be a member of the Official IRA (an IRA splinter faction) from north Belfast. But on May 14, 1977, a group of IRA members abducted Nairac from a pub in South Armagh and drove him to a remote location, where they interrogated him prior to executing him. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0182

November 13, 2009 by 2 Comments

  • China to keep Rio Tinto boss in prison. The Chinese government has extended (again) by two months a probe into Stern Hu, the jailed boss of Anglo-Australian mining corporation Rio Tinto. Hu was arrested by the Chinese last July on espionage charges.
  • Czech spy agency objects to outing Cold War agents. Recently a Czech research center published an extensive list of names of agents of StB, the country’s main intelligence agency in the communist era. But StB’s post-communist successor, the ÚZSI, condemned the airing of the names, calling it “a massive violation of protection of sources that is part of intelligence work, which also may have a negative impact on the Czech Republic’s [current] interests”.
  • Iran reportedly creates new domestic spy agency. A radical dissident Iranian group in Paris, with known ties to Washington, claims the Iranian regime has undertaken “the largest overhaul of the [country’s] intelligence structure since 1989”.

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CIA reportedly wins turf battle with DNI office

November 13, 2009 by Leave a comment

Leon Panetta

Leon Panetta

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The CIA has reportedly won a turf battle with the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), after the White House came down in support of the CIA position on Thursday. This blog has kept tabs on the dispute, which started last May, when DNI Dennis Blair argued in a still-classified directive that his office should have a say in certain cases over the appointment of senior US intelligence representatives in foreign cities. Former CIA officials publicly denounced the directive, which would allow the appointment of non-CIA personnel to these positions for the first time in 60 years, as “simple insanity”. Since then, various actors have sided with the two antagonists, with the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence committee supporting the DNI and Vice President Joe Biden backing the CIA’s position. But the stalemate reportedly ended on Thursday, after the White House ruled that the CIA, not the DNI, should appoint senior US intelligence representatives abroad. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0181

November 13, 2009 by Leave a comment

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Israel reveals long-awaited Levinson spy case details

November 13, 2009 by Leave a comment

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
As part of a move by Israeli intelligence agencies to adhere to elementary provisions of Israel’s declassification laws, Shin Bet has for the first time published details about the Shimon Levinson spy case. Levinson was a senior agent in Shin Bet (domestic intelligence) and the Mossad (external intelligence), who in 1991 was jailed for 12 years for spying on Israel on behalf of the Soviet KGB. Levinson’s career culminated with his appointment as head of the Mossad station in Ethiopia. This happened shortly before he voluntarily retired in1978, in frustration over an awaited promotion that failed to materialize. According to Shin Bet, it was Levinson’s business failures and financial instability, not ideology, that led him to contact the KGB and “offer his services to the Soviet Union” shortly after his retirement. Eventually the Soviets flew Levinson to the USSR, where he was trained in Soviet espionage techniques before being sent back to Israel. Read more of this post

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