Spy novel written by Kim Philby’s granddaughter to be published this week
July 15, 2019 2 Comments
A spy novel written by the granddaughter of Kim Philby, the British senior intelligence officer who secretly spied for the Soviet Union, will be published this week. Charlotte Philby, 36, is the London-based daughter of John Philby, who was one of the five children Kim Philby had with his English wife Aileen Furse. While working as a senior member of British intelligence, Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known as ‘Kim’ to his friends, spied for the Soviet NKVD and KGB. His espionage activities lasted from about 1933 until 1963, when he defected to the USSR from his home in Beirut, Lebanon. Philby’s defection sent ripples of shock across Western intelligence and is often seen as one of the most dramatic incidents of the Cold War. He was part of a larger ring of upper-class British spies, known collectively as ‘the Cambridge spies’ because they were recruited by Soviet intelligence during their student days at the University of Cambridge in England.
Following his sensational defection, Philby lived in the Soviet capital until his death in 1988 at the age of 76. His granddaughter gave an interview to British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph, in which she said that her father, John, “never said anything against Kim” and “enjoyed a very good relationship” with him. The family visited Kim Philby in Moscow every year until his death, when Charlotte was five. She told The Telegraph that she remembers these trips, and staying at Kim Philby’s apartment. She said the family would be met at the airport in Moscow “by men in grey suits” who would usher them into a government car and “whiz [them] to the gated apartment block where Kim lived” in downtown Moscow. During those trips, the family would give the double spy supplies of his favorite English foods and magazines. This may surprise some, given that Philby abandoned his second wife, an American, and his five children from his first wife. She had died six years prior to his defection, so the children, including Charlotte Philby’s father, were raised by relatives and family friends.
Charlotte Philby worked as a journalist for The Independent, a London-based British newspaper that ceased print circulation in 2016, and has since been writing as a freelancer. Her first novel, entitled The Most Difficult Thing, features a female protagonist who has to balance her espionage work with her relationship with those closest to her. The author says that Kim Philby’s ghost “hovers over the pages”. She notes that, if her grandfather had any regrets at the end of his life, “they wouldn’t be to do with betraying his country but with the individuals and the family members that he had to dupe and separate from”.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 15 July 2019 | Permalink
Germany has extradited a former senior official of the Yugoslav intelligence service to Croatia, where he is expected to serve a 30-year prison sentence for organizing the assassination of a dissident in Munich in 1983. Josip Perković is a former senior official in the Yugoslav State Security Service, known as UDBA. In 2014, he was extradited to Germany from Croatia alongside another former UDBA officer Zdravko Mustać. The two men were tried in a German court in the Bavarian capital Munich for organizing the assassination of Stjepan Đureković on July 28, 1983. Đureković’s killing was carried out by UDBA operatives in Wolfratshausen, Bavaria as part of a UDBA operation codenamed DUNAV. Đureković, who was of Croatian nationality, was director of Yugoslavia’s state-owned INA oil company until 1982, when he suddenly defected to West Germany. Upon his arrival in Germany, he was granted political asylum and began associating with Croatian nationalist émigré groups that were active in the country. It was the reason why he was killed by the government of Yugoslavia.
The French government has admitted that four anti-tank missiles found in a Libyan rebel camp belonged to its Special Forces units, but denied accusations that it deliberately breached the United Nations-imposed weapons embargo on Libya. Libya’s UN-recognized government, the Government of National Accord (GNA), which is headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, announced in June that it discovered a cache of FGM-148 Javelin portable anti-tank missiles during a raid on a rebel camp. The camp belonged to forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, a rogue Libyan warlord who is supported by a group of Western-led nations that includes the United States, France, Israel, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
The Polish government has authorized the release on bail of a former counterintelligence officer who was charged in January of this year with spying for China. The man has been identified in media reports as Piotr Durbajlo and is believed to have served as deputy director of the Internal Security Agency, Poland’s domestic counterintelligence service. A cyber security expert, Durbajlo also served in Poland’s Office of Electronic Communications with a top security clearance and unrestricted access to classified systems of Poland and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Poland is a member.
A hacker attack of impressive magnitude targeted specific individuals of interest to the Chinese government as they moved around the world, in what appears to be the first such operation in the history of cyberespionage. The attack was revealed late last month by Cybereason, an American cybersecurity firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. Company experts 
The son of a South Korean former cabinet minister has defected to North Korea, marking a rare instance of a citizen of South Korea switching his allegiance to the North. It is even rarer for such high-profile South Korean citizens to defect to North Korea. The defector is Choe In-guk, son of Choe Deok-sin, who served as South Korea’s minister of foreign affairs in the 1970s under the South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee. Choe was an American-trained army officer who served under United States command in the Korean War. He then served as a member of the cabinet and as South Korea’s ambassador to West Germany.
A private management consulting firm that was hired to streamline the United States Intelligence Community’s communication and decision-making process has made these practices worse, according to insiders. The news website Politico, which published the 
Tunisian authorities are investigating two Belarusian men who were found to be in possession of several forged passports and electronic surveillance equipment. The two men were 
An Islamic State militant who blew himself up in the Philippines last week was probably history’s first-ever Filipino suicide bomber, according to police officials. The man was one of two militants who 
In a rare public appearance, the director of the Mossad spy agency said that the Middle East is witnessing a historic shift of alliances as many Arab states are forming tacit pacts with Israel against Iran and its proxies. Yosef “Yossi” Cohen 
Foreign intelligence agencies are allegedly trying to acquire the medical file of German Chancellor Angela Merkel after she was seen trembling uncontrollably in public twice in as many weeks. Reports about foreign spy interest in Merkel’s health emerged in German and British newspapers last weekend, after the German chancellor was seen trembling during high-level meetings earlier this month. The first incident took place during an official meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on June 18. The German Chancellery said Merkel had suffered from dehydration and “felt like herself again after drinking a few cups of water”. But the tremors were back again on June 27 during the German leader’s visit to Japan for the G20 Summit. 
Hackers used a malware described by experts as the “crown jewel” of cyber-espionage tools to hack into Russia’s version of Google, in an effort to breach user accounts, according to the Reuters news agency. The hackers targeted Yandex (Яндекс), a Moscow-headquartered company that operates as the Russian version of Google. Yandex is the largest technology venture company in the Russian Federation and the fifth most popular search engine in the world. It also provides services such as mapping and email in Russia and several other countries in Central Asia and the Middle East. It claims that it serves more than 150 million monthly users worldwide.
The younger sister of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un appears to have been promoted to the number two position in the country’s ruling apparatus, according to a South Korean intelligence assessment. Until recently, Kim Yo-jong (pictured), 30, was Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). She also served as an alternate member of the Political Bureau, which is the highest decision-making body within the WPK.
Iranian state media announced on Sunday the arrest of 16 officials in the country’s Ministry of Petroleum, allegedly for sabotaging Iranian energy policy. It is not known whether these arrests are in any way connected with Tehran’s announcement last week that it had dismantled “one of the most complicated” espionage operations by the United States Central Intelligence Agency in several countries. According to the state-owned Fars News Agency, the 16 officials were arrested over the weekend in synchronized pre-dawn raids. All of them had managerial positions in Iran’s oil industry —including in the areas of exploration, production and distribution of Iran’s oil and petrochemical products inside the country as well as abroad.
intelNews.org 
Italian police find ‘combat-ready’ air-to-air missile in raids on far-right groups
July 16, 2019 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
At least three men were arrested in connection with the raids, two of them in Forli and one in Galarate, a small town near Varese on the Italian-Swiss border. They were named as Alessandro Monti, 42, a Swiss national, and Fabio Bernardi, 51, an Italian national. A third man, Fabio Del Bergiolo, 50, also an Italian national, is reportedly a retired customs officer who in 2001 run for office with Forza Nuova, a neo-fascist Italian grouping. Until 2014, Forza Nuova activists were known to have close links with Svoboda, the far-right Ukrainian paramilitary group. But in the past five years, the Italian neo-fascist group’s leaders have openly sided with Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebels. Italian police reported that they found several guns in Bergiolo’s home, including nine unspecified “assault weapons” and 29 hunting rifles, as well as pistols and ammunition. But the most worrying find was an air-to-air guided missile at an airport hangar, which was placed inside a box that belonged to one of the three men. The missile is designed to be fired from an aircraft to target another aircraft. It is reportedly a Matra Super 530F, which was manufactured by France in 1980. According to the police report, it is “in perfect working order”. The most recent legal owner of the missile was the Qatar Air Force. It is not known how it ended up in the hands of the three suspects, but it is believed that they have been seeking to sell it in the black market.
The police raids took place less than two weeks after a court in Genoa sentenced three men for traveling to Russia and taking up arms alongside pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The three men were identified in court reports as Antonio Cataldo, an Italian citizen, Olsi Krutani, from Albania, and Vladimir Vrbitchii, who is from Moldova. The three men received jail sentences ranging from 16 months to 34 months. As a reminder, last September security agencies in Eastern Europe voiced concern about the rise of far-right paramilitary groups whose members allegedly have access to increasingly heavy weaponry, including in some cases armored vehicles and tanks.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 16 July 2019 | Permalink
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Italy, News, rightwing extremism, Turin (Italy), weapons smuggling