News you may have missed #552
July 29, 2011 2 Comments
Nikolai Kuznetsov
►►This just in: South Korea arrests five for spying for North. South Korean prosecutors have arrested five people on charges of “setting up an underground communist group on the instructions of an espionage unit of North Korea’s ruling Workers Party”, a report from South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said on Friday. According to the report, South Korean authorities are “investigating about 20 other people including union activists and opposition party members”. We will publish more information as it comes in.
►►Some US intel analysts believe al-Qaeda near collapse. Citing classified intelligence reports and closed-door Capitol Hill briefings from the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center and other agencies, some US officials are telling The Washington Post that bin Laden’s death has “pushed al-Qaida to the brink of collapse”. One official told the paper that al-Qaeda is now “largely incapable” of mass-casualty attacks against the United States. Could the ‘Leon Panetta Legacy Committee’ be the source of this report?
►►Russia and Ukraine commemorate legendary Soviet spy. Russia and Ukraine are celebrating 100 years from the birth of legendary Soviet spy Nikolai Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov, who operated in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, uncovered Read more of this post
intelNews.org 
Ukraine jails North Koreans in missile espionage case
July 18, 2012 by Joseph Fitsanakis Leave a comment
A court in Ukraine has jailed two North Korean citizens on charges of trying to obtain secret technical information about missile engines. A Ukrainian government official said on Monday that the North Koreans had each been sentenced to eight years in prison, and that “they will serve their sentence in Ukraine”. Speaking to Russian-language Ukrainian daily Segodnya, the official said that Ukrainian authorities had expected that Pyongyang would request extradition of its two citizens, but that the North Korean government’s reaction had been “passive”. According to the paper, the two convicted men, who have not been named, were employed by the North Korean trade mission in Belarusian capital Minsk. It was from there that, several months ago, they arrived by train to Kiev, where they tried —unsuccessfully— to recruit a number of locals as informants. One of the latter tipped off Ukrainian authorities, who placed the two North Koreans under surveillance. Eventually, the two suspects were arrested in a rented garage in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, while photographing technical documents with a pair of handheld miniature digital cameras. The Segodnya report stated that the documents consisted of doctoral dissertations, marked ‘confidential’, which described highly technical methods of designing effective solid- and liquid-fuel supply systems for missile engines. Some of the documents concerned the technical specifications of computer software to assist in the design of missile fuel supply systems, said the paper. The confidential documents had reportedly been taken from the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, a cornerstone of the Soviet —and now the Ukrainian— space industry, which in the early 1960s developed the R-16 (known in the West as SS-7), the first inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) successfully deployed by the Soviet Union. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Belarus, Dnipropetrovsk (Ukraine), espionage, ICBM, military intelligence, Minsk (Belarus), News, North Korea, North Korean nuclear program, R-16 missile, R-36 missile, SS-18 missile, SS-7 missile, Ukraine, Yuzhnoye Design Bureau