Largest leak in US military history reveals Afghan war details

WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
American, British and German military planners are scrambling to contain the political impact of a massive cache of classified reports from Afghanistan, which has been leaked by an anti-secrecy activist group. It has now become known that, several weeks ago, the group Wikileaks.org handed over a total of 91,731 classified incident and intelligence reports from the US-led occupation force in Afghanistan to American newspaper The New York Times, British broadsheet The Guardian, and German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. All three outlets agreed to examine the material, abiding by Wikileaks’ condition that they would wait until Sunday, July 25, to release it. All three news media published news of the leak almost simultaneously on Sunday night, (see here, here and here), and posted several of the files, which provide an unprecedented six-year archive (from 2004 to 2009) of day-to-day US-led military operations in Afghanistan. This unprecedented disclosure is believed to represent the largest public leak of classified material in US military history. Read more of this post

Poland to extradite Israeli spy to Germany on lesser charges

Uri Brodsky

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A judge in Poland has ruled in favor of the extradition to Germany of an Israeli alleged spy, wanted by Interpol in connection with the assassination of a Hamas official last January. The court ruling stipulates that Israeli citizen Uri Brodsky, who was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4, is to be extradited to Germany, where he will face charges of forgery. Authorities in Berlin accuse Brodsky of having helped an assassination team working for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to acquire a forged German passport, used by an assassination team member to travel in and out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. While there, the Israeli assassins are thought to have killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a weapons procurer for Palestinian group Hamas, who was in Dubai on a business trip. Shortly after Brodsky’s arrest in Warsaw, Poland and Berlin came under intense pressure from Israel to ignore the Interpol arrest warrant for the alleged Israeli spy, drop all charges, and allow him to flee to Israel. Read more of this post

Germany refuses to drop Mossad prosecution, despite Israeli pressure

Uri Brodsky

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
German-Israeli relations sunk to a new low this week, after the German government rejected Israel’s call to drop a public investigation into the actions of a suspected Israeli spy. The alleged spy, whose travel documents identify him as “Uri Brodsky”, was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4. He is wanted by German prosecutors, not for directly participating in the assassination by Israeli intelligence agency Mossad of senior Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, as had been previously reported, but for procuring a forged German passport for the assassins. “Brodsky” appears to have traveled under the cover name of “Alexander Verin” to Cologne, Germany, where he employed the services of a lawyer to acquire the forged passport. It was later used used by Israeli Mossad agents to travel to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where al-Mabhouh was assassinated. Read more of this post

Alleged Mossad agent arrested in Poland

Uri Brodsky

"Uri Brodsky"

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Authorities in Poland have detained an alleged Israeli agent who may be connected with the assassination of a senior Hamas operative last January. German newsmagazine Der Spiegel quoted anonymous government prosecutors in Berlin, who said the man works for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and was arrested upon arriving in Poland on June 4. The alleged agent, whose travel documents identify him as “Uri Brodsky”, is wanted by German prosecutors for using a forged German passport to enter Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in January of this year. He then joined a team of Mossad assassins to kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas weapons procurer, who was found dead in his luxury hotel room on January 20. Read more of this post

West German spy service employed former Nazis, documents show

Reinhard Gehlen

Reinhard Gehlen

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
West Germany’s intelligence service employed hundreds of former Nazi criminals from 1956 until at least 1971, according to internal documents. The links between the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the main foreign intelligence agency of the German government, and the remnants of the German Nazi party, are well known; even its first director, Reinhard Gehlen, was a former General of the Wehrmacht. But documents dating to the 1960s, which were leaked last week to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, show that Gehlen, who worked as a CIA agent after 1945, was aware of his officers’ Nazi past, as were his American counterparts. The Nazi connections were internally revealed in detail after 1963, when Gehlen set up an internal BND investigation office, called Unit 85, to unmask potential Soviet moles inside the agency. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #313

  • British spies operated ‘renegade torture unit’ in Iraq. British military intelligence operated a secret operation in Iraq, called Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT), which was authorized to utilize degrading and unlawful treatment of prisoners. The officers running the operation claimed to be answerable only “directly to London”.
  • Poland’s Jaruzelski was counter-intel officer. Documents in the infamous East German Stasi archives allegedly show that in 1952 the then colonel Wojciech Jaruzelski, who later became Poland’s last communist leader, began working for the Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army –-the military police and counter-espionage agency in Poland.

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News you may have missed #299

  • US lawmaker wants to stop CIA agents working second jobs. Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA) says she will offer an amendment to the Intelligence Reauthorization bill later this week that would put new rules into place on the practice of intelligence officers who take second jobs in the private sector.
  • Poland admits to aiding CIA. After human rights groups revealed evidence that showed CIA rendition planes landing in Poland in 2003, the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency has admitted for the first time that Poland played a role in the controversial US program.
  • Former Romanian-German spy fired for secret past. German author Peter Grosz was fired on Thursday from his role as director of the theater festival in the German city of Oppenheim, following revelations that he had spied on fellow authors for Romania’s Securitate communist secret police during the 1970s. Large numbers of Romanian former intelligence agents now reside in Germany.

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Did missing Polish intel officer defect to Russia?

Stefan Zielonka

Stefan Zielonka

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
We have been keeping an eye on the mysterious case of Stefan Zielonka, a senior SIGINT officer with Poland’s Military Intelligence Services (SWW), who disappeared without trace in early May of 2009. The seriousness of Zielonka’s disappearance stems from his extensive knowledge of Polish undercover intelligence networks operating overseas, including names and contacts of illegals –i.e. agents operating without diplomatic cover. Consequently, Polish intelligence officials have expressed fears that, if Zielonka defected, or was kidnapped by foreign intelligence agents, “much of the country’s intelligence network could be compromised”. The possibility that Zielonka actually defected increased after it became known that his wife and young child also disappeared. In December, a report in Poland’s Dziennik Gazeta Prawna claimed that the signals intelligence officer’s mysterious disappearance is connected with a “trail leading to the Far East”, with “all clues lead[ing] to China”. Earlier this week, however, Russian weekly Argumenti Niedieli suggested that Zielonka was in fact recruited by Russian military intelligence. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0274

  • Japanese reporter cleared of 1974 espionage charges. A Japanese newspaper correspondent in South Korea, whose life was ruined in 1974, after he was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of helping fund North Korean espionage activities, has been acquitted in a retrial.
  • CIA interrogated al-Qaeda suspect in Poland, claims UN. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, suspected of the 2000 al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, was interrogated in a secret CIA prison in northern Poland, claims a UN report. Similar allegations have also been leveled against 12 nations, among them EU states such as Romania and Lithuania.

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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”.

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Polish officials reveal arrest of alleged Russian spy

Valentin Korabelnikov

V. Korabelnikov

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Polish government has announced the arrest of a Russian resident of Warsaw, on charges of spying for Russia. The man, whose identity has not been released, was apparently arrested last February or March, after a six-month surveillance operation by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW). Polish officials did not say why the arrest was kept secret for so long, but revealed that the alleged spy’s capture was known only to Poland’s president, the prime minister and the office of the prosecutor. The alleged spy is said to be a Russian citizen and a fluent Polish speaker, who has lived in Poland under permanent residency status for at least decade. His legal income appears to have come from his ownership of a hunting-rifle accessories store. Read more of this post

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.

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Missing Polish intel officer probably defected to China

Stefan Zielonka

Stefan Zielonka

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
We have been keeping an eye on the mysterious case of Stefan Zielonka, a senior signals intelligence officer with Poland’s Military Intelligence Services (SWW), who disappeared without trace in early May. The seriousness of Zielonka’s disappearance stems from his extensive knowledge of Polish undercover intelligence networks operating overseas, including names and contacts of illegals –i.e. agents operating without diplomatic cover. Consequently, Polish intelligence officials have expressed fears that, if Zielonka defected, or was kidnapped by foreign intelligence agents, “much of the country’s intelligence network could be compromised”. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0198

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US prevented Israel from bombing arms ship, says paper

The Francop

The Francop

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Israel wanted to bomb a German cargo ship, which allegedly carried tons of weapons from Syria and Iran to Lebanon, but the plan was “rejected” by US intelligence, according to a London-based Arabic-language newspaper. An article in last Friday’s Asharq Alawsat appears to confirm earlier speculation that the ship, which was seized by Israeli commandos in a predawn raid on Wednesday off the coast of Cyprus, was first brought to the Israelis’ attention by US intelligence agencies on October 18. The newspaper alleges that the raid by Israeli commandos took place only after the US rejected an Israeli suggestion to bomb the ship while it was sailing through the Red Sea. An air attack on the cargo ship, named Francop, would have undoubtedly caused a multinational diplomatic episode. The vessel is reportedly German, leased by Greek-Cypriot charter company UFS Shipping International, and was sailing under the flag of Antigua & Barbuda, with an Egyptian crew and a Polish captain. Read more of this post