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News you may have missed #343

May 5, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Taliban leader H. Mehsud reportedly not dead. Last February US and Pakistani officials claimed a CIA airstrike had killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the largest faction of the Pakistani Taliban. But it now appears that Mehsud is alive and well.
Analysis: Operation MINCEMEAT and the ethics of spying. The New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell on operation MINCEMEAT, a World War II British deception plan, which helped convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia in 1943, instead of Sicily.
US DoJ announces FISA court appointment. Judge Martin L.C. Feldman, of the Eastern District of Louisiana, has been appointed to a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, which reviews (and invariably approves) government applications for counterintelligence surveillance and physical search under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 0 Analysis: Operation MINCEMEAT and the ethics of spying, 0 Taliban leader H. Mehsud reportedly not dead, 0 US DoJ announces FISA court appointment, Analysis, assassinations, CIA, deception operations, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Germany, Hakimullah Mehsud, history, Louisiana, Martin L.C. Feldman, News, news you may have missed, Operation MINCEMEAT, Pakistan, Predator drones, Taliban, UK, US Department of Justice, World War II

New book on Canada’s mysterious Agent 235

April 21, 2010 by intelNews 2 Comments

De Graaf

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A new book published by the Pennsylvania State University Press sheds new light into the life and work of mysterious Agent 235, Canada’s mysterious mid-20^th-century spy known as ‘Johnny’. In Johnny: A Spy’s Life, R.S. Rose and Gordon Scott present the outcome of 14 years of research on ‘Johnny’, whose real name was Johann Heinrich Amadeus de Graaf. De Graaf was born in Germany in 1894, but later moved to Britain, and at the start of World War II worked as an informant for MI6. Although he conducted some of his operations in Germany, most of them took place in the UK, where he unmasked a number of native pro-Nazi sympathizers and agents of the Gestapo. Read more of this post

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West German spy service employed former Nazis, documents show

March 22, 2010 by intelNews 1 Comment

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

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News you may have missed #309

March 15, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments

Iran claims arrest of US cyberspies. Iranian security forces have arrested 30 people accused of waging cyberwar against the country, with the backing of the United States. The Iranian government accuses them of running a network of websites funded by US intelligence, which aims to “collect information about Iran’s nuclear program”.
Nazis planned to infiltrate Vatican with spies. Nazi Germany hatched a plan during World War II to infiltrate the Vatican with spies disguised as monks, according to secret MI5 intelligence reports. The codename for the plan was Operation GEORGIAN CONVENT.
US misled even us on detainees, says ex-MI5 chief. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of the Britain’s foremost domestic spy agency, MI5, has said that United States intelligence agencies misled even MI5 about the mistreatment of suspected terrorists.

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Declassified MI5 files offer wealth of new information

March 11, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Sophie Kukralova

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Britain’s National Archives have authorized the release of nearly 200 files from the vaults of MI5, the country’s domestic intelligence service. The release of the documents, which range from 1937 to 1955, has given rise to numerous interesting historical revelations, including an apparent effort by German Hitler Youth groups to establish personal and institutional links with Lord Baden-Powell, founder and leader of the Boy Scouts. The relevant MI5 file notes that Baden-Powell, who was “wined and dined by senior Hitler Youth figures”, responded enthusiastically to the Nazi charm offensive. Other revelations include the Soviet sympathies of Sidney Bernstein, later Baron Bernstein, who founded Britain’s Granada Theatres (later Granada Television) in 1926. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0278

February 3, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Israelis arrest two alleged Hamas informants. Israeli security service Shin Bet says 24-year olds Murad Kamal and Murad Nimer were recruited by Hamas in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Descendant of Richard Sorge’s accomplice receives Soviet-era award. An updated report on the 81-year-old niece of Yotoku Miyagi, a Japanese accomplice of famous German-born Comintern spy Richard Sorge, who has been awarded the Soviet Order of the Patriotic War medal in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in Tokyo, Japan. The medal was originally granted in 1965, but Miyagi was unable to collect it, as he had been executed by the Japanese, along with Sorge, in 1944.

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News you may have missed #0256

January 17, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

Descendant of Richard Sorge’s accomplice receives Soviet-era award. The 81-year-old niece of Yotoku Miyagi, a Japanese accomplice of famous German-born Comintern spy Richard Sorge, has been awarded the Soviet Order of the Patriotic War medal in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in Tokyo, Japan. The medal was originally granted in 1965, but Miyagi was unable to collect it, as he had been executed, along with Sorge, by the Japanese in 1944.
Analysis: Alleged US spy’s arrest in Cuba affects bilateral relations. Cuban officials say that a US citizen working for Maryland-based aid group Development Alternatives Inc., who was arrested in Havana last month, was actually recruiting local Cubans to spy on the government. This development means that initial hopes for better US-Cuban relations after Barack Obama’s election success may be fading.
CIA, DoD drone attacks in Afghanistan intensify under McChrystal. Under the command of US and NATO forces by US Army general Stanley McChrystal, unmanned drone strikes in Afghanistan have been steadily increasing. A good question to ask is who is in charge of similar strikes in Pakistan, which are also on the increase.

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News you may have missed #0240

January 3, 2010 by intelNews Leave a comment

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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News you may have missed #0194

November 24, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Ex-Monaco spymaster renews lawsuit on principality. Robert Eringer, who until recently was spymaster to prince Albert II of Monaco, and is now suing him for €360,000 ($542,000) in alleged unpaid income, has filed a new lawsuit against the principality itself, to prevent Albert II from invoking head-of-state immunity.
WWII spy photos declassified after 60 years. A collection of astonishing World War II air surveillance photos from Britain’s Aerial Reconnaissance Archives can now be seen by the public for the first time.
US couple accused of spying for Cuba pleads guilty. As expected, Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, who were arrested by the FBI last summer on charges of spying for Cuba for over 30 years, have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with investigators.

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French spies saw Hitler danger in 1924, document shows

November 23, 2009 by intelNews 1 Comment

Hitler in 1924

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
At the same time when British intelligence was employing Benito Mussolini, and US diplomats were describing segments of the German Nazi party as “moderate [with] appeal to all civilized and reasonable people”, French intelligence reports were identifying Adolf Hitler as a “fascist […] demagogue” and “the German Mussolini”. This emerges from a 1924 report by an anonymous French intelligence operative, which is due to be declassified along with thousands of similar documents currently stored in the French National Archives, according to French newspaper Le Monde. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0159

October 29, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

US Congress wants to change locks in document safes. Some Congress members have revived “a decade-old debate” on replacing security locks on government safes for storing classified documents with new electromechanical locking mechanisms. According to one independent security consultant, existing mechanical locks in classified document safes “can be penetrated surreptitiously within 20 minutes”, and older barlock containers still in use “can be penetrated within seconds”.
A US spy in wartime Ireland. The interesting story of Major Martin S. Quigley, one of three US spies sent by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, CIA’s forerunner) to Ireland, on a mission to find out whether the country’s government, which was officially neutral in the War, was actually siding with Nazi Germany.

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News you may have missed #0142

October 14, 2009 by intelNews 2 Comments

Egypt assisting Yemen in alleged Iranian spy infiltration. Egypt has allegedly provided Yemen with information on Iran’s intelligence activities targeting it and other Arab and African states in the region, according to Egyptian daily Akhbar Al-Youm. Meanwhile, the appeals of two Yemeni nationals convicted last October of spying for Iran are to be heard Monday in Yemeni capital Sana’a. Yemen, a major intelligence center in the Arab world, is probably the most underreported front in Washington’s so-called “war on terrorism”.
New book examines Operation GREENUP. A new book, They Dared Return, by Patrick K. O’Donnell, examines the operations of five German Jews, who returned to WWII Germany for Operation GREENUP, an espionage project funded by the German Operational Group of the US Office of Strategic Services –forerunner of the CIA.

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Documents show Japan government aide was CIA mole

October 5, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

Shigeru Yoshida

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A senior military aide to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida in the 1950s was an informant for the CIA, according to documents unearthed at the US National Archives. A CIA memorandum dated November 26, 1956, describes Lt. Gen. Eiichi Tatsumi (ret.), who advised the Japanese Prime Minister on defense matters, as “one of the best, safest, most qualified persons in Japan today for CIA use”. Waseda University professor Tetsuo Arima, who unearthed the documents, said the CIA codenamed Tatsumi POLESTAR-5. Bearing fresh memories from Japan’s destructive participation in World War II, the government of Prime Minister Yoshida refused calls to remilitarize Japan. But a hardcore group of senior military officials, including Tatsumi, who had fought in the war, wished to see Japan rearm. Washington, which interpreted Yoshida’s refusal to rearm as a friendly gesture to Russia, also wanted to see Japan remilitarize. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0119

September 28, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

CIA opens center on climate change. The CIA Center on Climate Change and National Security is a small unit led by senior specialists from the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology. It focuses on “the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources”. Methinks the emphasis will probably be on the latter.
Brazilian political figures spied on after dictatorship. Senior Brazilian politicians, religious leaders and activists were spied on illegally for 16 years after the 1964-1985 military regime, according to recent allegations in the country’s press. Major surveillance targets included Brazil’s current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, opposition leader and Sao Paulo Governor Jose Serra, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, and others.
New book examines life of Franco-sympathizer British spy. Jimmy Burns has written a biography of his father, Tom Burns, an anti-communist sympathizer of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who organized the British intelligence network in Spain during and after World War II.

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News you may have missed #0115

September 25, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment

China says US intelligence report shows Cold War prejudice. The 2009 US National Intelligence Strategy (.pdf) report singles out Iran, North Korea, China and Russia as nations with the ability to challenge US interests. But government-owned China Daily newspaper says the report is “stuffed with outdated pride and prejudice” and “reflects typical Cold War and power politics mentality”.
Somali suicide bomber lived in the US. After Shirwa Ahmed, a US citizen of Somali descent who last October became history’s first known US-born suicide bomber, another Somali-American, who lived in Seattle, has been identified as one of the participants of a suicide bombing that killed 21 peacekeepers in Mogadishu last week. US officials have been warning for almost a year about the strange phenomenon of the “disappearing Somali youths” from their US homes.
UK spies used Monopoly sets to help WWII prisoners escape. British secret services embedded escape tools and maps in Monopoly game sets distributed by humanitarian groups in care packages to imprisoned British soldiers during World War II. The article contains some interesting photographs.