News you may have missed #681

February 17, 2012 by Leave a comment

Vladimir NesteretsBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Mossad ‘bolsters activity in Tunisia’. The Mossad has bolstered its activity in several Tunisian cities since the start of the revolt that ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali last January, Tunisian magazine Al-Musawar has reported. According to the magazine, the Israeli intelligence agency has been working with its US-based counterpart, the CIA, to revive its spy network in post-revolution Tunisia.
►►US ‘used quake’ to send Special Forces into Pakistan. The US Pentagon used the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 to send operatives from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into Pakistan, reveals a new book by D.B Grady and Marc Ambinder, entitled The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army. The authors claim that dozens of CIA operatives and contractors entered Pakistan using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, thus avoiding the requisite background checks from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
►►Russian officer convicted of spying for CIA. A Russian military court last week convicted Lt. Col. Vladimir Nesterets of providing the CIA with secret information on Russia’s new intercontinental ballistic missiles and sentenced him to 13 years in prison. The officer pleaded guilty to passing on that classified information in exchange for money, said the Federal Security Service, the main agency that replaced the Soviet-era KGB. Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency quoted the officer’s wife, Irina, as saying she could not understand the guilty plea because her husband had told her he did nothing wrong and had not betrayed his country.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #679

February 13, 2012 by Leave a comment

Salem al-HassiBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►New spy chief in Libya. Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council yesterday appointed a lifelong opponent of slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as the country’s new intelligence chief. Salem al-Hassi, who was involved in a bid to assassinate Gaddafi in 1984, was appointed as the intelligence chief at a meeting of the council.
►►Anonymous hackers release German classified information. Hackers from the group Anonymous said last week they had accessed classified German files and posted them online, revealing details of the country’s military operations in Afghanistan. The military documents were collected for an inquiry, now finished, into a September 2009 airstrike by US jets under German orders that killed more than 140 Taliban fighters and Afghan civilians. Anonymous said it obtained the data from a server at the Bundestag  (German parliament).
►►Did Chinese espionage lead to F-35 delays? Did Chinese cyber spying cause the United States’ F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s cost spikes and production delays? This is the question being asked by US Pentagon budget officials, according to industry magazine Aviation Week. Chinese spies apparently hacked into secure conference calls and listened to meetings discussing the classified technologies aboard the jets. In particular, China may have stolen info about the F-35’s secure communications and antenna systems, leading to costly software rewrites and other redesigns to compromised parts of the plane.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #677: Analysis edition

February 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

Che Guevara after his arrest in BoliviaBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►New book ties Johnson administration to Che Guevara’s death. Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith are the co-authors of a new book about the US role in the killing of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In their book, Who Killed Che?, Ratner and Smith draw on previously unpublished government documents to argue the CIA played a critical role in the killing. “The line of the [US] government was that the Bolivians did it, we couldn’t do anything about it. That’s not true”, Smith said. “This whole operation was organized out of the White House by Walt Whitman Rostow. And the CIA, by this time, had become a paramilitary organization”.
►►CIA digs in as US withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan. The CIA is expected to maintain a large clandestine presence in Iraq and Afghanistan long after the departure of conventional US troops as part of a plan by the Obama administration to rely on a combination of spies and Special Operations forces to protect US interests in the two longtime war zones, US officials said. They added that the CIA’s stations in Kabul and Baghdad will probably remain the agency’s largest overseas outposts for years.
►►Indian Army ‘preparing for limited conflict with China’. Noting that India is increasingly getting concerned about China’s posture on its border, James Clapper, US Director of National Intelligence, said this week that the Indian Army is strengthening itself for a “limited conflict” with China. “The Indian Army believes a major Sino-Indian conflict is not imminent, but the Indian military is strengthening its forces in preparation to fight a limited conflict along the disputed border, and is working to balance Chinese power projection in the Indian Ocean,” he said.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #675

February 6, 2012 by Leave a comment

Maria del Pilar HurtadoBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Panama refuses to extradite Colombian ex-spy chief. Panama’s foreign ministry cited the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, an international accord on asylum and Panamanian law, as reason for denying Colombia’s request to extradite Maria del Pilar Hurtado, who faces charges in Bogota over an illegal wiretapping scandal. Currently enjoying asylum in Panama are former presidents of Guatemala, Jorge Serrano Elias; and Ecuador, Abdala Bucaram; as well as erstwhile Haitian military strongman Raoul Cedras.
►►Russian spy chief to visit Syria. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday he and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) head Mikhail Fradkov will visit Syria and meet with President Bashar al-Assad on February 7. The visit will be made on instructions from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Lavrov did not reveal any details of the upcoming the visit.
►►US spy chief: ‘we don’t know if Iran is building a bomb’. At a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last Tuesday, James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, released the following statement: “We assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so.  We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons”.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #674

February 3, 2012 by Leave a comment

John KiriakouBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Ex-CIA officers blast Kiriakou. Two former CIA intelligence officials, who spoke to The Washington Times, have rejected the image of John Kiriakou as a high-minded whistleblower who sought to expose official wrongdoing or a botched intelligence operation. Bruce Klingner, who worked as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, called Mr. Kiriakou’s alleged actions “a betrayal of the trust the US government placed in him”. Bart Bechtel, a former CIA clandestine officer, said he considered Kiriakou’s actions “egregious”.
►►US air strikes in Yemen go largely unreported. Last Tuesday’s attacks in southern Yemen were among the biggest carried out by the United States in Yemen since airstrikes began there in November 2002. These strikes underline how the Americans are escalating covert operations against two Islamist groups in the region –al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia’s al-Shabaab.
►►West explores prospects for Assad’s exile. The United States, European governments and Arab states have begun discussing the possibility of exile for Bashar al-Assad despite skepticism the defiant Syrian president is ready to consider such an offer, Western officials said on Wednesday. While talks have not progressed far and there is no real sense that Assad’s fall is imminent, one official said as many as three countries were willing to take him as a way to bring an end to Syria’s bloody 10-month-old crisis.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #672

February 2, 2012 by Leave a comment

Osama bin LadenBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►CIA claims bin Laden death photos would trigger violence. The Central Intelligence Agency says releasing images of a dead Osama bin Laden “could trigger violence, attacks, or acts of revenge against the United States”. Disclosing such images, including one showing the bullet wound to bin Laden’s head, the government said, “plausibly and logically pose a particularly grave threat of inflaming anti-American sentiment and resulting in retaliatory harm”. The agency made that argument Wednesday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, which claims the CIA should release the photos taken by US forces. The American public, Judicial Watch said, has a “right to these historical artifacts”.
►►Kuwait accused of tapping phones of prominent citizens. According to the report published in Kuwaiti media, the country’s State Security Department purchased an integrated intelligence system from a former Soviet country last year, and placed it in a restricted zone inside the headquarters’ building. But last July, everything in the isolated room, including staff members hired specifically to operate the devices, vanished without an explanation, said sources. An investigation is currently ongoing to unearth the mystery behind the devices’ disappearance, and also examine information which hint that the devices could have been used by a certain unnamed individual to spy on prominent Kuwaitis.
►►Did US FDA spy on whistleblowers? The US Food and Drug Administration electronically spied on whistleblowers who alerted the Obama administration and Congress of alleged misconduct in the agency, according to a complaint filed in a US federal court. Named as defendants in the lawsuit are the FDA and several of its employees, the Surgeon General, the Health and Human Services Secretary, among others.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #676

February 1, 2012 by Leave a comment

Diego MurilloBy IAN ALLEN| intelNews.org |
►►US admits Pakistani doctor was CIA agent. The United States has confirmed publicly for the first time that a Pakistani doctor long suspected of collecting vital evidence before the assassination of Osama bin Laden was indeed working for the CIA. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has told 60 Minutes on CBS that Shakil Afridi helped provide proof that the compound in Abbottabad, to which they had tracked a Bin Laden courier, was indeed sheltering the al-Qaeda leader. Panetta also told 60 Minutes that he remains convinced that someone in the Pakistani government “must have had some sense” that a person of interest was in the compound. He added that he has no proof that Pakistan knew it was bin Laden.
►►Czech secret services accused of political spying. The Czech government “spies on” the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), Miroslav Grebenicek, its former leader, said in a parliamentary question to Prime Minister Petr Necas. Grebenicek said he had recently received information that the Interior Ministry and some intelligence bodies were “tasked to spying on the KSCM or to incite for, organize and execute the shadowing of the KSCM”. Necas dismissed the allegation, saying that the government does not shadow any party.
►►Colombian paramilitaries protected by spy agency. Colombia’s rightwing paramilitary organization AUC received the support of the country’s now-defunct intelligence agency DAS. The group also helped the government of former President Alvaro Uribe in a conspiracy to discredit the country’s Supreme Court that was investigating ties between the paramilitaries and politicians, according to official testimony by senior AUC commander Diego Murillo, alias “Don Berna”.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

US Senate hearing accidentally reveals Mossad director’s secret visit

February 1, 2012 by 1 Comment

Tamir PardoBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The chairwoman of a public hearing at the United States Senate, which was televised live across America, accidentally revealed that the Director of Israeli intelligence service Mossad secretly visited the US for talks last week. The revelation took place on Tuesday at a high-profile hearing conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, with the participation of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus. While addressing the latter, Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein mentioned in passing that “the vice chairman [of the Committee] and I have just met this past week with the director of Mossad”, and that the meeting was classified. She was referring to Tamir Pardo, the newly installed head of Israel’s foremost external intelligence agency. Without blinking an eye, Petraeus responded saying: “Like you, obviously, I met with the head of Mossad when he was here”. Subsequent discussion during the hearing appeared to establish that Pardo visited the United States specifically to discuss the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran’s known nuclear installations. In responding to Senator Feinstein’s comment, the CIA Director said that Pardo’s secret visit was “part of an ongoing dialogue that has also included conversations that I’ve had with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and with [Defense] Minister [Ehud] Barak”. No further information was shard on the Mossad official’s visit, and US government representatives refused to elaborate, when asked about it later. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #675

January 31, 2012 by Leave a comment

Eugene ForseyBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►US ‘has engaged in cyberwarfare’. Former National Security Agency Director Mike McConnell said in an interview with Reuters that the United States has already used cyber attacks against an adversary. Most believe he was referring to Stuxnet, the computer virus unleashed against Iran in 2010.
►►Philippines studying US offer to deploy spy planes. The Philippines is considering a US proposal to deploy surveillance aircraft on a temporary, rotating basis to enhance its ability to guard disputed areas in the South China Sea, the Philippine defense minister said last week. The effort to expand military ties between the United States and the Philippines, which voted to remove huge American naval and air bases 20 years ago, occurs as both countries grapple with the growing assertiveness of China.
►►Canadian intelligence spied on constitutional expert. Canadian security forces kept close tabs on renowned constitutional scholar Eugene Forsey from his early days as a left-wing academic to his stint as a senator, according to newly declassified documents. The collection of more than 400 pages, which has been obtained by Canadian newspaper The Toronto Star, reveals the RCMP Security Service (the predecessor to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), followed Forsey for four decades throughout his career as an economics professor, research director for the Canadian Congress of Labour (now called the Canadian Labour Congress), a two-time Ottawa-area candidate for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and then his 1970 appointment as a Liberal senator. No surprises here.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #674

January 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

Fayez KaramBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Lebanese ex-general gets prison sentence for spying for Israel. Last Tuesday’s sentence of former Brigadeer General Fayez Karam (pictured) means he will spend six more months in jail. He has been in prison since mid-2009, said the officials on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. Karam, who in the late 1980s led Lebanon’s counterespionage unit, ran for a parliament seat in 2009 as a senior member of the Free Patriotic Movement of Christian leader and Hezbollah ally Michel Aoun.
►►US may share intelligence with Nigeria. Nigeria and the United States plan to “explore the development of intelligence fusion capability”. This statement was contained in a joint communiqué issued at the end of a two day inauguration of a regional security cooperation working group held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Abuja, Nigeria. The two countries will be collaborating “on training, logistics intelligence sharing, modernization of the security services and other requirements”.
►►Afghan jailed for 16 years for spying for Iran. An Afghan man, named only as Mahmmood, has been jailed for 16 years for spying for neighboring Iran. He was allegedly found in possession of photographs of foreign and Afghan military installations in western Herat province, and had Iranian intelligence officials’ phone numbers in his notebook.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #673

January 27, 2012 by Leave a comment

John KiriakouBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Canada arrest shows spy times have changed in Russia. There are aspects of the spy case of Canadian Sub-Lt. Jeffery Delisle that differ substantially from spy cases dating back to Cold War espionage waged by the now-defunct Soviet system. As a sign of changing times, the Russian media has acknowledged Delisle was allegedly spying for them —something that would never be admitted in Soviet times when the KGB and GRU were in ascendency.
►►US court upholds S. Korean ex-spy’s asylum ruling. Kim Ki-sam, who left South Korea’s state spy agency in 2000, applied for asylum in the US in 2003, saying he would face persecution and prosecution if he was forced to return to South Korea because he had revealed information about secret operations to help then-President Kim Dae-jung win the Nobel Peace Prize. A US court has now upheld a 2008 ruling to grant him political asylum.
►►Kiriakou’s wife resigns from CIA. Heather Kiriakou, who has served as a top analyst at the Agency, resigned Tuesday amid accounts that she had been pressured to step down after her husband —John Kiriakou, a former agency employee— was charged with leaking classified information to the press. Two sources in direct contact with the Kiriakous told The Washington Post that Heather had submitted her resignation under pressure from superiors at the CIA.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou’s indictment made simple

January 25, 2012 by 3 Comments

John KiriakouBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
On Monday, the United States Department of Justice charged former Central Intelligence Agency officer John Kiriakou with leaking classified government information to reporters and deceiving a CIA review board. An FBI press release accused Kiriakou of repeatedly providing secrets to journalists between 2007 and 2009, and said the former CIA officer would be tried under the Espionage and the Intelligence Identities Protection Acts. The latter forbids the disclosure of the identities of undercover intelligence personnel, which is precisely what Kiriakou is accused of having done. An American of Greek descent, Kiriakou joined the CIA in 1990 and did tours in Greece, Pakistan, and elsewhere, before retiring in 2004. While in Pakistan he commanded the CIA team that helped capture senior al-Qaeda logistician Abu Zubaydah. In 2010 he published a memoir titled The Reluctant Spy.  Two years earlier, Kiriakou had made international headlines by becoming the first US intelligence official to publicly acknowledge that a terrorism suspect —in this case Zubaydah— had indeed been waterboarded while in CIA custody. Speaking on ABC News, the former CIA officer recognized that waterboarding was torture, but said it was “necessary” in the “war on terrorism”. In subsequent interviews, however, he questioned whether any actionable intelligence had been extracted from waterboarding, and opined that torturing terrorism detainees “caused more damage to [America’s] national prestige than was worth it”. Kiriakou’s skepticism, at a time when the incoming President, Barack Obama, publicly condemned waterboarding as torture, worried the CIA. Eventually, the Obama Administration backed down on its public proclamations about torture, and ruled out criminal prosecutions of CIA personnel. But he Agency didn’t forget Kiriakou’s role. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #669

January 20, 2012 by Leave a comment

Raoul WallenbergBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►UK admits using fake rock to spy on Russians. Britain has admitted for the first time that it was caught spying when Russia exposed its use of a fake rock in Moscow to conceal electronic equipment. Russia made the allegations in January 2006, but Britain has not publicly accepted the claims until now. Jonathan Powell, then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, told a BBC documentary it was “embarrassing”, but “they had us bang to rights”. He added: “clearly they had known about it for some time”.
►►New book examines forgotten CIA officer Jim Thompson. The CIA’s longtime man in Southeast Asia, Jim Thompson, fought to stop the agency’s progression from a small spy ring to a large paramilitary agency. Now a new book, The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War, by Joshua Kurlantzick, examines the life and exploits of the man known as “Silk King” Jim.
►►Sweden to probe fate of WWII hero Wallenberg. Raoul Wallenberg (pictured) was a shrewd businessman who, in the summer of 1944, was posted as Sweden’s ambassador in Budapest, Hungary. He was also an American intelligence asset, having been recruited by a US spy operating out of the War Refugee Board, an American government outfit with offices throughout Eastern Europe. He was abducted by Soviet intelligence officers in the closing stages of World War II, and his fate is one of the unsolved mysteries of 20th century espionage. Now Sweden says it will open a new probe into his disappearance.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

News you may have missed #668

January 19, 2012 by Leave a comment

John McLaughlinBy IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
►►Ex-CIA chief says war against Iran would be ‘very bad option’. Former CIA acting director John McLaughlin (pictured) said the United States can engage Iran through diplomacy, sanctions or military action, but warned the latter choice “would be a very bad option”. Speaking during a panel discussion in Washington Tuesday, McLaughlin said direct military action with Iran could grow to involve Hezbollah, the militant group based in Lebanon.
►►US warns Israel on Iran strike. US defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over US objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard US facilities in the region in case of a conflict. The US wants Israel to give more time for the effects of sanctions and other measures intended to force Iran to abandon its perceived efforts to build nuclear weapons.
►►Iran tightens security for scientists after killing. The nature of the extra security was not disclosed, but it was reported a day after Iran’s Parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, an outspoken promoter of Iran’s nuclear independence, said that investigators had identified and detained an unspecified number of suspects in the assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy director at the Natanz enrichment site.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

US admits African war crimes suspect Charles Taylor was CIA agent

January 19, 2012 by 8 Comments

Charles TaylorBy JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

Editor’s note: Since publishing this story, The Boston Globe issued a correction, which includes the following: “This story drew unsupported conclusions and significantly overstepped available evidence when it described former Liberian President Charles Taylor as having worked with US spy agencies as a “sought-after source’’ […]. The Globe had no adequate basis for asserting otherwise and the story should not have run in this form”.

Ever since his 2006 arrest for war crimes, Liberia’s former President, Charles Taylor, has consistently claimed that he was an agent of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Now declassified US government documents have officially confirmed that Taylor was indeed an agent of the CIA and the US Defense Intelligence Agency for several decades. The 63-year-old, who ruled his West African homeland from 1997 to 2003, is currently being tried at the United Nations Court in The Hague on multiple counts of civilian murders, rapes, and deploying underage soldiers during a brutal civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone. Rumors that Taylor was being protected by Washington started surfacing in 2003, after he left Liberia and was given protection in US-allied Nigeria, despite his indictment by the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone. In July 2009, intelNews reported Taylor’s claim that his 1985 “escape” from the Plymouth County maximum security Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, which allowed him to return to Liberia and take over the country through a military coup, took place with US government assistance. His persistent claims led The Boston Globe newspaper to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which has resulted in the declassification of nearly 50 separate documents covering “several decades” of Taylor’s work for the CIA and the DIA. The documents confirm that both agencies employed Taylor as an agent beginning in the early 1980s, long before he became Liberia’s ruler. But the FOIA release does not contain details of Taylor’s work for US intelligence, in an alleged effort to “protect intelligence sources and methods” and so as not to “harm national security”, according to The Boston Globe. Read more of this post

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →