Declassified study sheds new light on Soviet nuclear war thinking

Brezhnev

Brezhnev

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
US defense analysts exaggerated Soviet aggressiveness and understated Moscow’s fears of a US first nuclear strike, according to a recently released study on Soviet Intentions: 1965-1985, prepared in 1995 by the Pentagon contractor BDM Corporation. The two-volume report, published earlier this week for the first time by the National Security Archive, is based on an extraordinarily revealing series of interviews with former senior Soviet defense officials, conducted during the final days of the Soviet Union. Read more of this post

Total US intelligence budget revealed for the first time

Dennis Blair

Dennis Blair

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The US Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has revealed the total amount of America’s military and civilian intelligence budget for the first time in history. Blair, who oversees all 16 American intelligence agencies, said the country’s intelligence program costs $75 billion annually. This number includes funds for military intelligence agencies, which have previously been classified. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Blair argued that the “old distinction between military and non-military intelligence is no longer relevant”. The DNI was referring to the traditional budgetary distinction between the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) and the National (civilian) Intelligence Program (NIP), which make up the US intelligence budget. Read more of this post

French former spy wanted in Dubai to be tried in Florida

Herve Jaubert

Herve Jaubert

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A French former spy who escaped secretly from the United Arab Emirates, where he is wanted for fraud and embezzlement, will face trial in the US, where he currently resides. Herve Jaubert left Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency, in 1993, to pursue a career in the luxury tourist market, first in Florida and then in Dubai. But less than a year ago, Emirates authorities accused the Frenchman of embezzling nearly $4 million from Dubai World, a company he helped found in the country. Jaubert says he was threatened with torture by Emirates authorities and decided to escape, despite having been forced to surrender his French passport. He allegedly left the country using an inflatable rubber dinghy to reach a sailboat located just outside UAE territorial waters, which he then used to sail to India. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0107

  • CIA invests with low-power Wi-Fi company. The CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has announced a strategic investment and technology development agreement with GainSpan. The company makes single-chip wireless sensor networks and other embedded applications, with the aim of enabling portable devices to run for up to 10 years on a single AA battery. In-Q-Tel has invested with more than 140 companies in recent years, including relatively unknown software startups Lingotek and Lucid Imagination.
  • Indian spies released from Pakistani prison seek compensation. Three Indian intelligence agents, who were in recent years released from captivity in Pakistani jails, have said that the Indian government has not honored its commitment to take care of them and their families.

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Lawsuit halted in 15-year-old CIA wiretap case

Judge Lamberth

Judge Lamberth

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A lawsuit against an alleged illegal wiretap operation by the CIA, which was initially filed 15 years ago, was put on hold late last week by a US federal appeals court. The court imposed the temporary hold in an apparent disagreement with US District Judge Royce Lamberth, who last July said CIA attorneys committed fraud in alleging that US national security would be threatened if details of the lawsuit were openly discussed. Judge Lamberth ruled that the CIA had kept the case secret for years in order to avoid embarrassment. But the appeals court appears to have accepted the CIA’s claim that discussing the case openly will reveal operational secrets and harm US national security. A simultaneous decision by the appeals court to order the government to grant security clearances to lawyers on both sides of the argument probably means that the case, which briefly surfaced last July after Judge Lamberth’s decision to reveal it to the public, will disappear once again under the “state secrets” clause. Read more of this post

Analysis: CIA “cronyism, favoritism” prompts resignations

Art Brown

Art Brown

By IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
Rumors emerged last week that the leading candidate to head the CIA’s station in Kabul, Afghanistan, has no experience in the Middle East or south Asia, and speaks no local languages. This is despite a bitter bureaucratic turf battle between the CIA leadership and the office the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to find the best-suited person for the job. Why is it still so hard, after nearly eight years in Afghanistan, for the CIA to find qualified senior managers? Jeff Stein of SpyTalk says it’s because skilled staff are demoralized and frustrated by the Agency’s chronic inefficiencies. He quotes an anonymous former senior counterterrorism officer who claims that escalating “cronyism and favoritism” are coupled by the lack of any serious “effort to address […] massive senior leadership problems”. Read more of this post

Did CIA engage in non-consensual human experimentation?

CIA HQ

CIA HQ

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Late last month, I warned that it would take several weeks before journalists, academics, historians, lawyers, and other interested parties comb through the recently declassified report on torture by the CIA inspector general, as well as several other newly available documents pertaining to the CIA’s interrogation program. The search continues. Meanwhile, several observers are focusing on the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, as well as on Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) a secretive US Army unit, whose work appears to have informed the CIA’s torture program. Read more of this post

CIA censored me to avoid embarrassment, says ex-οfficer

V.L. Montesinos

V.L. Montesinos

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
More than a month after Secrecy News reported the legal victory of a former CIA agent, who managed to have a censored report he wrote about the CIA’s dirty dealings in Peru declassified, a US news outlet has finally given some attention to the story. On August 4 (see previous intelNews reporting), Secrecy News revealed that a memorandum drafted in 2001 by CIA officer Franz Boening, detailing assistance illegally provided by the CIA to the then chief of Peruvian intelligence, had finally been declassified following an eight-year court battle. In the censored memorandum, Boening argued that the Agency violated US law by providing material and political assistance to Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos Torres, a graduate of the US Army’s School of the Americas and longtime CIA operative, who headed Peru’s Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN) under the corrupt administration of President Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori is now in prison, as is Montesinos himself. Read more of this post

Lawsuit claims US government paid reporters during Cuban Five spy trial

NCFCF rally

NCFCF rally

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Campaigners in support of the release of a group of Cuban government agents jailed in the US have sued the US government for allegedly influencing media coverage of the trial by paying journalists in Miami. The Cuban Five were arrested in 1998 and convicted in 2001 of spying on US soil on behalf of the Cuban government. But now the Washington-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has joined forces with The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, in accusing the US government of employing journalists to shape American public opinion about the Five. According to the lawsuit, 16 American journalists working for Radio y Televisión Martí, a US government-funded TV and radio station targeting Cuba, were employed by the US government to air critical views about the Cuban Five through non-governmental news outlets. Read more of this post

News you may have missed #0102

  • NSA helped UK arrest convicted bomb plotters. Email correspondence intercepted by the US National Security Agency in 2006 helped lead to the arrest and conviction of three Muslim militants, who were planning attacks in Britain. IntelNews learns that this case was brought up by American intelligence officials who recently threatened to terminate all intelligence cooperation with the UK, in reaction to the release from a Scottish prison of convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
  • Bush Administration tried to alter “enforced disappearances” international treaty standards. The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those that plagued Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. But the documents suggest that initial US support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the US military at foreign sites. So the Bush Administration tried to alter the language of the treaty from 2003 to 2006, reveals The Washington Post.

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News you may have missed #0100

  • Iran says US is forging nuclear intelligence. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, says the US government is using forged intelligence to make the case to the UN’s nuclear watchdog group that Iran is pursuing an atomic weapons program. What is arguably missing in the Iranian nuclear debacle is conclusive IAEA confirmation of the existence of Iran’s nuclear arms program, as in the case of Syria.
  • Pakistanis call for intelligence dialogue with India. Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s former national security adviser, has called for a “frank dialogue” between Pakistani and Indian security services. As intelNews reported earlier this year, Durrani was fired for his dovish stance vis-à-vis India and for being “too pro-American”.
  • US official was investigated for espionage. Alberto Coll, a Cuban-American who lost a senior job at the Navy War College after he was convicted of lying about a 2004 trip to Havana, was also investigated for espionage, according to an FBI document.

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CIA furious over UK-Libyan bomber release deal

Al-Megrahi

Al-Megrahi

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The CIA has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with UK spy services in protest over the recent release from a Scottish prison of a Libyan intelligence agent convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, according to a British newspaper. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is now back home in Tripoli, was released by British authorities on August 19 on compassionate grounds, after medical tests allegedly showed he is suffering from terminal cancer. Many observers, including former CIA agent Robert Baer, voiced suspicion about the reasons behind al-Megrahi’s release, while several British newspapers, including The London Times, alleged that the release was part of a lucrative oil exploration deal between British Petroleum (BP) and the Libyan government. Now an article in British newspaper The News of the World claims that the CIA leadership has vowed to terminate intelligence cooperation with the UK over the Libyan’s release. Read more of this post

Australians investigate Chinese telecom over suspected spy links

Huawei HQ

Huawei HQ

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), has admitted it is investigating an Australian-based subsidiary of a Chinese telecommunications firm because of its rumored links to China’s intelligence establishment. Several intelligence insiders see Huawei Technologies, based in Shenzen, China, as a covert arm of Chinese military intelligence. The company, which has business concerns in several countries around the world, has attracted the attention of American, Indian and British counterintelligence agencies, among others. As intelNews reported last December, in 2005 the government of India cancelled an initial investment of $60 million on its telecommunications superhighway by the Chinese company. Read more of this post

Software startup supplying CIA, FBI, DoD, with analytical tools

Palantir Tech

Palantir Tech

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
CIA and Pentagon insiders are crediting a virtually unknown software startup with having designed the most effective analytical tool to date. The Wall Street Journal reports that Palantir Technologies, headquartered in Silicon Valley, has created a new, user-friendly search engine whose name has not been disclosed. Allegedly, it has the ability to fuse countless separate data banks at once, thus making complex investigative connections in intelligence operations with a regional or global scope. The paper says the software is already in use at the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense, and has already “uncovered details of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq” and “discovered a spy infiltration of an allied government”, among other things. The Wall Street Journal also says that rival software contractors are not happy about Palantir’s growth, dismiss it as “the new sexy thing”, and argue that it won’t be able to make it in the government contracting business.

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News you may have missed #0096

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