News you may have missed #708
April 5, 2012 Leave a comment
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Swedish Cold War spy dies at 79. Bertil Stroberg, a former Swedish air force officer, who was convicted of spying for Poland during the Cold War, but always maintained his innocence, has died, following a yearlong battle against cancer. He was sentenced to six years in prison for spying in 1983, but released on parole after serving three years. The key evidence in his case was a letter the prosecution said he had written to the Polish embassy offering to sell military secrets. The letter was signed Sven-Roland Larsson and asked that money be sent in that name to the Central Post Office. Stroberg was arrested when he went to the post office to collect Larsson’s mail.
►►US keeping Britain in the dark on intel issues. American intelligence agencies are increasingly keeping their British counterparts in the dark on key information, for fear those secrets could end up on full display in UK courts. “The Americans have got nervous that we are going to start revealing some of the information and they have started cutting back, I’m sure, on what they disclose”, Ken Clarke, the United Kingdom’s justice secretary, said in a Wednesday interview with the BBC. The American intelligence community has become wary about sharing sensitive intelligence with the UK ever since a 2008 court case forced the British government to disclose specific details on terror detainee operations.
►►Bush official says CIA ‘committed war crimes’. Philip Zelikow, who was a top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime”. What is more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under US law —“even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them”. Zelikow’s memo was an internal bureaucratic push against an attempt by the Justice Department to flout long-standing legal restrictions against torture.
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
intelNews.org 
Founder of Polish special forces unit found shot dead in Warsaw
June 19, 2012 by Joseph Fitsanakis 6 Comments
Polish authorities have launched an official investigation into the death of a senior retired military intelligence officer who founded Poland’s best-known special forces unit. The body of Brigadier General Slawomir Petelicki, who held senior intelligence positions in both communist and post-communist Poland, was discovered by his wife on Saturday. It was reportedly lying on a pool of blood on the floor of the garage located under his apartment in the Mokotow district of Polish capital Warsaw. Polish media said on Monday that Petelicki’s body carried a single gunshot wound to the head and that a gun was found at the site. Petelicki, 66, had joined Poland’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1969 and was soon afterwards posted as a “Military Attaché” at the Polish consulate in New York. He later served in a similar capacity at the Polish embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as in China and North Vietnam, among other countries. He managed to survive the post-communist purges in Poland’s intelligence community, and in 1990 he was assigned to a brand new special forces unit codenamed JW 2305. Through his leadership, the obscure unit was eventually transformed into the GROM (meaning ‘thunder’ in Polish) Special Forces regiment, which he led from 1990 until 1995. Initially, the existence of GROM was kept secret and was not openly acknowledged by the Polish government until 1994. Polish authorities said on Monday that they were treating Petelicki’s death as a case of suspected suicide. But many of the late intelligence officer’s colleagues and friends have voiced skepticism about the alleged suicide, claiming that the Brigadier General had not seemed depressed, and that he was not the kind of person who would contemplate taking his own life. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with GROM Special Forces (Poland), JW 2305 (Poland), Leszek Miller, Marek Siwiec, military intelligence, News, Poland, Slawomir Petelicki, suicides, suspicious deaths