News you may have missed #570
August 18, 2011 Leave a comment
Abdullah Nassr
►►Libya internal security chief defects. Egyptian airport officials said Nassr al-Mabrouk Abdullah, Muammar al-Gaddafi’s interior minister, landed in a private plane in Cairo with nine family members traveling on tourist visas. Nassr was the minister responsible for police, civil defense, domestic intelligence, and some border security units.
►►S. Korea admits 1962 death occurred in spy training camp. A special committee is reviewing whether the family of a South Korean man who died half a century ago while being trained as a spy for elite missions into North Korea is eligible for compensation. South Korea’s military intelligence command admitted in a July 14 letter that “Mr. Jeon Gwang-su died during training on Sept. 30 of 1962 ahead of being dispatched for a mission in the North”.
►►NSA announces ‘hiring blitz’. The National Security Agency, America’s largest cryptologic intelligence agency, has announced its intention to hire as many as 3,000 people over the next two years, many of them cybersecurity experts. In fact, NSA recruiters even took a trip to Las Vegas in the last few weeks to look for potential hires at DefCon, a high-profile hacker conference there.
Former Finnish diplomat reveals she worked for the CIA
August 19, 2011 by Joseph Fitsanakis 2 Comments
Linkoaho
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A Finnish diplomat in Cold-War East Germany has revealed how she was recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall. Marja-Liisa Linkoaho spoke to the Sunday edition of Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, and admitted that she worked for American intelligence. She did so despite representing Finland, which was notably pro-Soviet during the presidency of ‘neutralist’ Finnish statesman Urho Kekkonen. She told the paper that, in 1961, at age 27, she became an assistant at the Finnish trade mission in East Germany, which at the time served as Finland’s de facto embassy in the communist country. The trade mission was headed by Consul General Olavi Wanne, and was centrally located on Mauerstrasse, within walking distance from the border between East and West Berlin. In August of 1961, less than three months after Linkoaho moved to East Germany, the country’s government, under Walter Ulbricht, took the decision to begin the construction of the Berlin Wall. However, as a foreign diplomat, Linkoaho was able to travel freely between East and West Germany despite the construction in Berlin of the heavily policed partition barrier. Several months later, Linkoaho borrowed a sum of money by one of her Finnish co-workers at the trade commission, which she used to purchase a German-made Volkswagen Beetle, from an American car dealership in West Berlin. However, shortly after she returned to East Berlin with her new car, it was stolen. Interestingly, Linkoaho said that, soon after the theft of her car, she was contacted by the CIA and asked to work for them as an agent, in return for money and a new car. The Finnish former diplomat told the Helsingin Sanomat that she had been contacted by the CIA “a few times before”, but had politely declined the Agency’s offers for work. This time, however, she needed the money, and the car, so she took up the offer. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with CIA, Cold War, declassification, diplomacy, espionage, Federal Republic of Germany, Finland, German Democratic Republic, history, human smuggling, Lennart Sumelius, Marja-Liisa Linkoaho, News, Olavi Wanne, Stasi (GDR), United States, Urho Kekkonen