International Intelligence news

[habal]

Is something afoot .. some self-inflicted wound that would clear the way for better passage of sinister plans. A plan that would fix Russia, Iran & SYria with one shot. Preparing for natural disaster, now that's a new one. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/ ... 8G20150414

The New York branch of the U.S. Federal Reserve, wary that a natural disaster or other eventuality could shut down its market operations as it approaches an interest rate hike, has added staff and bulked up its satellite office in Chicago.

Some market technicians have transferred from New York and others were hired at the office housed in the Chicago Fed, according to several people familiar with the build-out that began about two years ago, after Hurricane Sandy struck Manhattan.

Officials believe the Chicago staffers can now handle all of the market operations that are done daily out of the New York Fed, which is the U.S. central bank’s main conduit to Wall Street.

In all of U.S. history, there has never been a natural disaster in New York City

[schinnas]

It is very common in the corporate world post 911 to evolve a credible Disaster recovery plan (DRP) that assume that one whole city or a region is lost in a disaster. Every one of the fortune 100 companies operating in US have these plans. I would only be surprised if Federal reserve is not prepared for any contingency however remote its chances are.

DRP consultancy used to be a big $$$ market in some areas... but now there are several such DRP experts in USA.

[Neshant]

This has got to be a joke.

Why would they be spending thousands of dollars to 'teach' Indian journalist how to report the news.

All this considering CNN and other large media in the US are practically govt propaganda agencies.

_____

US State Dept to teach Indian journos ‘honesty, impartiality’

http://rt.com/news/251389-us-teach-indian-journalists/

The US Consulate in Hyderabad is set to team up with a non-profit organization to create an ethics course in journalism. It is aimed at allowing those in the Indian media to get a better knowledge and understanding of “international industry standards.”

The State Department wants the course to include the key standard bearers of quality international journalism, such as “accuracy, honesty, transparency, impartiality and accountability.” It says it is prepared to spend up to $25,000 on achieving this goal.

[Philip]

We must offer to send Arnab and KT in return!

[RoyG]

This has got to be a joke.

Why would they be spending thousands of dollars to 'teach' Indian journalist how to report the news.

All this considering CNN and other large media in the US are practically govt propaganda agencies.

_____

US State Dept to teach Indian journos ‘honesty, impartiality’

http://rt.com/news/251389-us-teach-indian-journalists/

The US Consulate in Hyderabad is set to team up with a non-profit organization to create an ethics course in journalism. It is aimed at allowing those in the Indian media to get a better knowledge and understanding of “international industry standards.”

The State Department wants the course to include the key standard bearers of quality international journalism, such as “accuracy, honesty, transparency, impartiality and accountability.” It says it is prepared to spend up to $25,000 on achieving this goal.

Surprised that the HM hasn't stepped in.

[svinayak]

This has got to be a joke.

Why would they be spending thousands of dollars to 'teach' Indian journalist how to report the news.

All this considering CNN and other large media in the US are practically govt propaganda agencies.

_____

US State Dept to teach Indian journos ‘honesty, impartiality’

Surprised that the HM hasn't stepped in.

India has to discourage all the patronizing attitude of the western countries. The SD should work on Pak and islamic states for reporting news

[Philip]

German spies 'monitored European targets for the US against German interests'

The National Security Agency and the BND cooperate closely against terrorism, but new reports allege the agency spied on European defence interests for the US
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... rests.html

[Philip]

fascinating tale of Russia's equivalent of Mata Hari

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... field.html

A Very Dangerous Woman: the Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia’s Most Seductive Spy by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield, review: 'unnecessarily portentous'

Duncan White unravels the rackety life of one of Russia’s most notorious spie
Moura with HG Wells (left) and Maxim Gorky, 1920 Photo: David King Collection

Duncan White
By Duncan White
01 May 2015

The dangerous Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya was born into an aristocratic Ukrainian family in 1892. Her father was a high-ranking lawyer for the Tsar and she grew up politically liberal, culturally sophisticated and a devoted Anglophile. Moura, as she was known, married young, to Djon von Benckendorff, an Estonian aristocrat who was destined to play the role of Tolstoy’s Alexei Karenin in Moura’s melodrama.

During the revolution, Benckendorff fled to his estate in German-controlled Estonia (where he was to be killed in mysterious circumstances), leaving Moura with a free run of St Petersburg. Moura worked as a translator in the propaganda office of the British embassy, which was packed with agents of the Secret Intelligence Service. Through these contacts she met Robert Bruce Lockhart.

According to the authors of A Very Dangerous Woman, Lockhart was “an adventurer, in the Victorian mould… a man of daring, acute intelligence, charisma, skilled equally with a pen or revolver, he had at least one debilitating weakness – women”. Prime Minister Lloyd George sent him to Russia in a semi-official capacity to see if a deal could be done with the Bolsheviks, with the ultimate goal of thwarting German interests.

READ: The Zhivago Affair: the strange story of how Boris Pasternak’s classic novel was used by the CIA to fight the Russians

Like everyone else, Lockhart fell for Moura. Unlike everyone else, his affection was fully reciprocated. They spent their evenings riding in sleighs along the banks of the Neva and their relationship became more serious as the political situation deteriorated. Lockhart began to realise that Trotsky and Lenin were stringing him along and he resolved to take matters into his own hand, fomenting coups, funding plots, that sort of thing.

At some point Moura started to spy on the British for the Cheka, possibly as a double agent at Lockhart’s instigation. The Cheka then sent her to Ukraine to spy on the German-sponsored Hetmanate, which she succeeded in doing by offering to spy on the Russians for the Ukrainians.

Things then got very messy. Lockhart was entrapped by the Cheka into signing documents implicating him in a potential coup. The attempted assassination of Lenin fuelled Bolshevik paranoia and Lockhart was arrested and threatened with execution.

Moura, pregnant with Lockhart’s child, appears to have saved him, although it is not clear how she managed it. In the midst of all this she miscarried. On his release, Lockhart was whisked off back to England. Moura, caring for her dying mother, could not follow. It was the defining tragedy of her life.

Lockhart was by no means her only serious relationship. Moura soon became the mistress of Maxim Gorky, who offered her valuable protection. She then married an Estonian baron, Nikolai Budberg, as a means of securing Estonian citizenship and an escape route from Russia. In exile she had a long relationship with H G Wells, who desperately wanted to marry her.

All the while, MI5 kept her under close watch, suspicious of her connections with Russian intelligence. She was a friend of Guy Burgess, one of the Cambridge Five, and when Burgess and Donald Maclean disappeared in 1951, she was stringently observed. Perhaps to prove she wasn’t working for the Russians, she warned MI5 that Anthony Blunt was a member of the Communist Party. She never lost her appetite for intrigue. She died in Italy in October 1974 and was buried in Chiswick, west London.

Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield, drawing on a plethora of sources, including Moura’s MI5 file, have done a sterling job of piecing together the pieces of this mysterious, peripatetic life. While there are still some large gaps, they have managed to address at least some of the myths, such as the persistent claim that Moura spied for Germany in the First World War, and, if the hard facts remain elusive, they at least show how it was that these rumours got started.

With such an abundance of rich material, then, it is baffling why they have seen the need to embellish it with novelistic flourishes. Here’s one particularly ripe scene in which Moura is writing to Lockhart: “Moura paused, her pen hanging over the notepaper. How should she address him? Not as 'Lockhart’, certainly, not now. But he never went by any other name. Her pen inscribed a hesitant line and at the end of it wrote… Locky. She smiled.”

There is also an excess of portentousness to overcome in the first 50 pages. For Moura there is “not a trace of foreboding of that nightmare that is to come”. She had “no inkling yet how heavy a toll her choice, when she eventually made it, would exact from her”.

The good news is that once the authors have got this out of their system, A Very Dangerous Woman starts to canter along. McDonald and Dronfield are at their best when they let the events do the talking. And they are very clear about the limits of what can and cannot be known from the extant evidence. They speculate, but let you know when they are doing so.

Many mysteries remain just that. What did Moura give up to the Cheka to secure Lockhart’s release from the Kremlin? Did she have a role in the murder of her husband? Were the Cheka using her to spy on Gorky? How did she get back into the Soviet Union so quickly when Gorky was on his deathbed? Was she working for Russian intelligence in English exile? There are more questions about Moura Budberg than can ever be answered.

A Very Dangerous Woman: the Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia’s Most Seductive Spy by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield

416pp, Oneworld, t £16.99 (plus £1.99 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £20, ebook £13.29). Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk

[chetak]

This has got to be a joke.

Why would they be spending thousands of dollars to 'teach' Indian journalist how to report the news.

All this considering CNN and other large media in the US are practically govt propaganda agencies.



_____

US State Dept to teach Indian journos ‘honesty, impartiality’

http://rt.com/news/251389-us-teach-indian-journalists/

The US Consulate in Hyderabad is set to team up with a non-profit organization to create an ethics course in journalism. It is aimed at allowing those in the Indian media to get a better knowledge and understanding of “international industry standards.”

The State Department wants the course to include the key standard bearers of quality international journalism, such as “accuracy, honesty, transparency, impartiality and accountability.” It says it is prepared to spend up to $25,000 on achieving this goal.

They are not happy that the NaMo govt is doing fairly well and has completely bypassed the DDM.

more anti Hindu, pro xtian, pro muslim reportage is what they desperately want and of course, a more anti India and a more pro west slanted media so that media pressure and propaganda can be maintained on the Modi govt for making policies where the western companies will all benefit.

[Philip]

"Ethics in journalism",from the US of A?

Teaching the Indian media that brought down Indira Gandhi,Rajiv Gandhi,Snake-Oil Singh and numerous state CMs for malfeasance,authoritarianism,corruption,etc.,etc.,is a sick joke.The US media would do better to expose the scams attached to their current and future leaders,presdiential hopefuls,like Hillary C,who has been as greedy as Tony B.Liar in grasping money from any quarter no matter how controversial and despicable the donor is.

[chetak]

"Ethics in journalism",from the US of A?

,like Hillary C,who has been as greedy as Tony B.Liar in grasping money from any quarter no matter how controversial and despicable the donor is.

just like "mother" teresa??

[rgosain]

This would actually be a sick joke like being lectured on chastity from a whore, but Indian journalists who are involved with this SD college of ethics would be truly presstitutes.
The fact that is being run directly by the embassy instead of an FF ngo shows that they no can longer rely on the UPA, ngos or the DDM to promote their agenda. The GOI should simply put the tax authorities on to them as they are not under diplomatic immunity, or registered as an educational institution

[Philip]

India likely to consider another security review after Afghanistan terror attack
By Rahul Tripathi, ET Bureau | 16 May, 2015

NEW DELHI: A piece of "highly credible" intelligence input received four months ago that indicated preparations for a "spectacular attack" on Indian assets in Afghanistan had put the country's security brass on high alert and led to a comprehensive security review. Security agencies are looking at Wednesday's attack in Kabul, in which four Indians were killed, in this perspective and another review is likely.

The input received earlier this year stood out because it included a specific communication intercept picked up from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, stressing the need to target Indian assets in Afghanistan, said officials familiar with the matter.

Intelligence officials said the "chatter" put the needle of suspicion on the Haqqani network. Once the veracity of this input was established, alarm bells went off in New Delhi.

A hijack alert was sounded for the daily Air India flight to Kabul and extra security checks were added at the Kabul airport. A high-level team was sent to Afghanistan in early February for a thorough review of the security arrangements.

The team comprised representatives from Intelligence Bureau, Research & Analysis Wing — India's premier external intelligence agency, and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) — the paramilitary outfit deployed to secure Indian assets in Afghanistan.

The team not only reviewed the security of the Indian embassy and the personal security of the ambassador, but also surveyed arrangements for the Afghan parliament building, which is being built by India. The members also visited Indian consulates and key project sites such as Salma dam, where India is the main executing agency.

Following the review, the Air India office in Kabul is being shifted closer to the embassy in Wazir Akbar Khan, the city's most fortified area that houses high-profile foreign establishments. The security review, however, did not cover guesthouses frequented by Indians as the input made no specific mention.

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/art ... aign=cppst

What should be done is to limit the number of Indian diplomats/expats,etc. at functions which would attract attacks,due to the number if high value targets all assembled at one spot. All Indian embassy/consular HQs should be designed as fortresses,with bollards,barriers,etc,preventing suicide vehicular attacks a considerable distance away from the main blg. which should also have shatter/bullet proof glass and external features to ward off RPG rounds,etc. Sings of the times. diplomatic enclaves have to be considered as being in a war zone,which in truth many are!

[Philip]

German intelligence have a truly sh*tty problem on their hands!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... ]Germany's bathroom thief strikes again as ministry toilet seats go missing[/b]

German police baffled as taps and toilet seats removed from new interior ministry headquarters in Berlin, months after taps stolen from BND intelligence agency

Thomas de Maiziere, who as interior minister is responsible for security, is facing embarrassing jibes that he can't even secure the lavatories in his own officesPhoto: GETTY

By Justin Huggler, Berlin
26 May 2015

A mysterious thief preying on German government offices appears to have struck again - and stolen the loo seats from the brand new interior ministry.

Thomas de Maiziere, who as interior minister is responsible for security, is facing embarrassing jibes that he can't even secure the lavatories in his own offices.

Days before ministry officials moved into their new offices, some one broke in and stripped the bathrooms of everything they could move: loo seats, taps, even loo paper holders.

The incident comes just two months after burglars stole all the taps from the BND intelligence agency's new headquarters in Berlin, in an incident that was quickly dubbed Germany's Watergate on social media.

The headquarters of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) in Berlin

It appears that an elusive thief is preying on German government office sanitary ware - and police are stumped as to the identity of the cuplrit.

Embarrassed ministry officials took refuge behind bureacratic jargon.

“In the days before the relocation, particularly in the course of furnishing and cleaning the offices, in a few circumstances the usability of sanitary systems was impaired,” a spokesman told Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

A ministry employee who chose to remain nameless was more blunt.

“Many of the toilets are unusable. The atmosphere is rather strained,” he said. *(constipated? )

The missing ware has now been replaced, according to the ministry.

Unlike the earlier incident at the intelligence headquarters, the theft at the ministry is not believed to have caused much damage.

At the BND offices, the removal of the taps started leaks which are belived to have caused millions of euros' worth of damage.

But at the interior ministry, it appears some one took the wise precaution of shutting off the water until officials had moved in.

[Surya]

Maybe I missed it

Do we know who the 4 Indians who were killed in the Kabul attack?

TIA

[Philip]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015 ... d-us-spies

Russia and China broke into Snowden files to identify western spies, says MI6

Sunday Times says Downing Street believes both nations have hacked into American whistleblower’s files, and that agents have been put in peril

Edward Snowden takes part in an online Q&A session from Moscow last year.
James Tapper

Sunday 14 June 2015 01.02 BST Last modified on Sunday 14 June 2015
Downing Street believes that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have used documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden to identify British and US secret agents, according to a report in the Sunday Times.

The newspaper says MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, has withdrawn agents from overseas operations because Russian security services had broken into encrypted files held by American computer analyst Snowden.
Congress passes NSA surveillance reform in vindication for Snowden

Snowden provided the Guardian with top secret documents from the US National Security Agency (NSA), which revealed that western intelligence agencies had been undertaking mass surveillance of phone and internet use.

He fled to Hong Kong, then to Moscow, and the Sunday Times claims that both Chinese and Russian security officials gained access to his files as a result.

The files held by Snowden were encrypted, but now British officials believe both countries have hacked into the files, according to the report.

The newspaper quotes a series of anonymous sources from Downing Street, the Home Office and British intelligence saying that the documents contained intelligence techniques and information that would enable foreign powers to identify British and American spies.

The newspaper quoted a “senior Downing Street source” saying that “Russians and Chinese have information”.

The source said “agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information”. The source said they had “no evidence” that anyone had been harmed.
Intelligence and security committee report: the key findings

A “senior Home Office source” was also quoted by the newspaper, saying: “Putin didn’t give him asylum for nothing. His documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure and we have now seen our agents and assets being targeted.”

The Sunday Times also quoted a “British intelligence source” saying that Russian and Chinese officials would be examining Snowden’s material for “years to come”.

“Snowden has done incalculable damage,” the intelligence source reportedly said. “In some cases the agencies have been forced to intervene and lift their agents from operations to prevent them from being identified and killed.”

A Downing Street spokeswoman told the Observer on Saturday night: “We don’t comment on leaks.”

[sum]

^^ How does China get access and crack it open but Indians get no such favours?

[Philip]

China has a massive "cyber-army",while we have a "cypher-army"!

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... -china-in/?
Ex-NSA official: Cybersecurity breach gave China intelligence ‘crown jewels’

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/j ... s-above-us
The New Spymasters by Stephen Grey review – the spies above us
Do spies still have a role in the age of electronic surveillance? Quite definitely, says this valuable and thought-provoking book

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi AKA Curveball, an Iraqi defector who passed on dubious information on Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons program. Photograph: David Levene

Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday 13 June 2015

What makes a good spy? Is there such a thing? To what extent should spymasters turn a blind eye to crimes, even collusion in murder, committed by their informants or agents?

These important – perhaps increasingly important – issues are discussed in this valuable and thought-provoking book by Stephen Grey, the journalist whose first book, Ghost Plane, about US and UK involvement in the secret rendition of detainees in the “war on terror”, raises questions that remain unanswered.

The New Spymasters breaks new ground, not so much in revealing hitherto unknown cases of espionage, but in identifying and pursuing a number of cases – including that of MI6’s spies, who were never in Iraq before the 2003 invasion – where British and US security and intelligence agencies were deeply involved.

They include Steak Knife, pseudonym of the IRA member recruited as a British agent in Northern Ireland; a member of Eoka, the guerrilla group fighting British colonial rule in Cyprus, who spied for the British army (and later for British customs and police fighting the drug trade); and Omar Nasiri, pseudonym of a member of Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group (GIA), who spied both for French foreign intelligence and MI5.

The more active an agent is, working, even killing, for the enemy, the less likely he is to be suspected of being a double agent, providing information that would help save other lives. That, at least, is the spymasters’ argument. The case of the murdered Belfast lawyer Patrick Finucane illustrates the dangers of running agents inside terror gangs, Grey writes. As the third inquiry conducted by the former Met police commissioner John Stevens into collusion between loyalist paramilitary groups and British intelligence stated: “Informants and agents were allowed to operate without effective control and to participate in terrorist crimes.” This is part of the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland, which has left deep scars that are far from healed.

There are many people, as Grey says, who used contacts with British and other western agencies to their own advantage. He recounts the case of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball, who duped German, US and British intelligence officials with claims that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories, in his efforts to see the end of Saddam Hussein.

“The really disturbing thing,” Grey writes, “was not the spinning of evidence or the imagined conspiracy, but rather that the intelligence itself was wrong.” MI6 succumbed to intense political pressure and allowed its Iraqi agents and contacts to spin the evidence. As Sir David Omand, Tony Blair’s former chief security and intelligence adviser, told the Chilcot inquiry, MI6 “overpromised and underdelivered”.

Intelligence chiefs indulge in wishful thinking, just as they ignore inconvenient information, a syndrome called “cognitive dissonance” in the trade. And if western spooks knew little about what was going on in Saddam’s Iraq, they knew even less about al-Qaida and what was going on in Afghanistan. The CIA fatally dropped its guard when it allowed itself to be convinced that a Jordanian, Human al-Balawi, whom it had never met, was a spy who could be trusted. In 2009, Al-Balawi was able to enter the large US base in Khost in Afghanistan unsearched, before blowing himself up along with seven CIA employees.

In their intelligence-gathering role, it is the task of MI5 (in Britain) and MI6 (abroad) to recruit agents and informers. It is much harder for them now than it was in Ireland and during the cold war. Young, ideologically motivated, extreme jihadists are not likely to trust a state’s spy agencies. Grey records that a friend of Michael Adebolajo, one of the two men involved in the brutal murder of fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013, has said Adebolajo was “well-known” to British intelligence. He was “being harassed by MI5”, the friend told the BBC.

Grey quotes Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time of the invasion of Iraq (who is expected to be strongly criticised by Chilcot), as saying that while the west occupied the moral high-ground at the end of the cold war, it was “not on it at the moment”. Dearlove was referring to “extraordinary rendition” – the CIA practice, in which both MI5 and MI6 colluded, of sending mainly Arab prisoners to secret jails where they were tortured. Curiously, though, Grey does not mention the clearest case of MI6 involvement in rendition – the abduction in 2004 of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, two prominent Libyan dissidents, to Tripoli, where they were tortured by Gaddafi’s security police.

British and US intelligence agencies have had some successes: Morten Storm successfully infiltrated al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsular (AQAP) in Yemen for the CIA, and MI6 recruited a spy in AQAP in a joint operation with the Saudis. The US succeeded in getting Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan to help identify targets for drone attacks.

MI6 officers have also engaged in activities that are not spying. With varying degrees of encouragement from their political masters, they have opened secret back channels hoping to pave the way for peace talks. Michael Oatley did so with the IRA. More recently, Alastair Crooke held talks with Palestinian militants and Hamas, though after being outed in the Israeli press, he was summoned back to London, handed an honour by the Queen and sacked.

Edward Snowden has revealed how America’s National Security Agency and its British partner, GCHQ, can indulge in mass surveillance and intercept private electronic communications. The Queen’s speech made plain that the new government intends to expand the intelligence agencies’ statutory powers for the bulk interception of the content of communications.

But Humint – “human intelligence”, old-fashioned spying by individuals – will still be needed, as the automatic electronic data-gathering will prevent the NSA and GCHQ from seeing the wood from the trees. So despite his omissions, Grey has provided a good manual for the spy cadets of the future, the dangers they face and the traps they may well fall into – but also the potential rewards.

• To order The New Spymasters for £16 (RRP £20), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

[Multatuli]

For all users of Lenovo computers: They ship their computers with malware pre-installed. This article describes what it does and how to remove it. This is a dangerous malware as it allows anyone with the knowledge and intent to break into supposedly secure connections, like when you're connected with online shops or using an online banking service.

https://blog.kaspersky.com/lenovo-pc-wi ... installed/

I advice to be careful with Chinese hardware/software in general. It has been demonstrated that free utilities from Chinese software makers came with trojans/spyware.


Five cyber spy technologies that cannot be stopped by going offline

https://blog.kaspersky.com/when-going-o ... esnt-help/


Darkhotel: a spy campaign in luxury Asian hotels

https://blog.kaspersky.com/darkhotel-apt/


Hunt for Deep Panda intensifies in trenches of U.S.-China cyberwar

http://news.yahoo.com/hunt-deep-panda-i ... nance.html

[Multatuli]

Surveillance software vendor Hacking Team hacked

Admins asleep as 400GB of data walks out the door and into BitTorrent

Italian surveillance software slinger Hacking Team has allegedly been cracked with some 400 gigabytes of data exfiltrated.

The plunder has been uploaded to BitTorrent in a monstrous listing of directories, allegedly including audio recordings, emails, and source code.

Hacking Team sells the Da Vinci malware surveillance software to law enforcement agencies claiming to only deal with ethical governments. It is marked as an Enemy of the Internet by activist outfit Reporters Without Borders.

The unknown hackers also hijacked Hacking Team's Twitter account and, at the time of writing, are tweeting screenshots of emails stolen in the raid.

The trove also allegedly reveals all Hacking Team customers and when they purchased the software.

Read more: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/06 ... _password/

[Philip]

Whatever the truth of the report,the stark fact is that Greece and Russia are much closer under the new regime than before.The overwhelming desire of the EU bosses to punish Greece for its audacity in rejecting the fatal austerity economics,unacceptable to its population,is only driving Athens closer to Moscow. Putin must be smiling no doubt,but Greece will also expect substantial help from Moscow in the days to come if there is no deal with the EU and Grexit becomes inevitable.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... html[quote]
Moscow Rules

07.08.151:00 AM ET

Is Putin Playing Puppetmaster in Greece?

As the Greeks move further away from the European Union and NATO, the Kremlin is poised to reap the benefits—with rumors swirling that Putin is already calling the shots.

The weekend’s stunning repudiation of further European bailouts by a strong majority of Greeks shocked Brussels and beyond. That 61 percent of Greek voters want nothing to do with European Union “fixes” to their country’s grave fiscal crisis, which has preoccupied the EU for five years, represents a shocking development to Eurocrats.

What happens next is on everyone’s mind. Unless Athens comes up with a revised—and more plausible—finance plan very soon, expulsion from the Eurozone appears imminent. While that could cause financial instability for Europe, and may bring bad tidings far beyond, there’s one country that seems to be savoring this crisis.

That’s Russia. To the surprise of no one who pays attention to Vladimir Putin’s persistent efforts to undermine the EU and NATO, Moscow is poised to reap political benefits from Greece’s financial collapse.

The morning after the referendum, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke with Putin to discuss the fallout—a full day before Tsipras spoke with President Obama.

Neither are close ties between Athens and Moscow anything new, or exactly hidden. Tsipras’s first foreign outreach upon becoming prime minister was to Moscow’s ambassador—not to EU or NATO partners.

The affection of Greece’s ruling Syriza party for much of the Putin worldview, including a reflexive anti-American and anti-NATO posture with strong doses of “anti-imperialist” rhetoric, isn’t something Athens has been shy about. Although Syriza’s far-left political orientation would seem to make it an unlikely partner for Putin’s conservative, even traditionalist, Kremlin, shared anti-Western values seem to be enough.

Syriza’s robust Moscow links exist at several levels and are nothing new. Ideological harmony has been matched by money deals behind the scenes. Long before taking power at the beginning of this year, party leaders had regular discussions with top Russian officials as well as with far-right activists like Alexander Dugin, a neo-fascist ideologue who intermittently has the Kremlin’s ear.

Unsurprisingly, given the extent of Greece’s financial-cum-political crisis, anti-EU and anti-American sentiments run deep, to a degree not found in any other NATO country. Mounting concerns that Athens is falling into Moscow’s orbit, its ostensible Western political and military ties notwithstanding, are no longer a fantasy.

“For Athens, NATO seems to be mostly a paper exercise at this point,” a senior Alliance official told me, expressing a common frustration at Alliance headquarters, where Greek representatives are viewed with mounting suspicion. Many in NATO fear that information shared with Greece, including intelligence, is winding up in Moscow. Recently the Alliance executed a long-overdue cull of Russian liaison officers in Brussels, many of whom were barely concealed spies, and now there’s fear that the Kremlin can make up that setback with Greek help.

It’s premature to suggest that Greece might actually leave NATO, much less the EU, since Athens gets considerable benefits from both partnerships, but it’s certainly time to ask where that country’s sympathies truly lie. More than a shared Orthodox faith, buttressed by hazy paeans to long-dead Byzantium, is at work now in the relationship between Athens and Moscow.

The involvement of Russian intelligence in present-day Greek turmoil plays an important role, albeit one seldom discussed openly. Greece has long been a playground for Kremlin spies. During the Cold War, KGB operatives worked in Greece with a degree of impunity they found in no other NATO country, while Soviet spies penetrated Greek politics and society very deeply.

Under Putin, such covert linkages have been reestablished, and secret Russian activities in Greece today enjoy a degree of openness they never had in Soviet times. Since Syriza came to power, the already significant contingent of Russian intelligence officers serving in Athens under official covers (usually as diplomats) has been bolstered, according to Western security officials. Friendly meetings between Greek officials and representatives of the SVR and GRU, Russian military intelligence, detected by NATO intelligence, have been a cause of discussion and concern in Brussels, Washington, and beyond.

It’s not like Syriza has been hiding all of this. Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, shortly after a visit to Moscow last fall, signed a memorandum of understanding between his Athens think tank, the Institute for Geopolitical Studies, and a Moscow counterpart, the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, known as RISI.

However, RISI is no ordinary think tank.Headed by Leonid Reshetnikov—a career KGB officer who retired as a lieutenant-general and the head of analysis for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR—RISI is a Kremlin outfit, a sort of governmental NGO that functions as the public face of Putin’s vast intelligence apparatus. Officially RISI is no longer part of the SVR, falling under the presidential administration, but no Western intelligence services accept that claim at face value.

“It’s like the bad old days when we didn’t trust the Greeks and they didn’t trust us. Only now Putin’s in the middle of the game.”

Reshetnikov, a one-time communist but now a devout, indeed militant, Orthodox Christian, is close to Putin and is one of the top movers and shakers in the Kremlin when it comes to spy matters. Speaking Greek and Serbian, he plays a large role in Russian activities in the Balkans, which have increased noticeably in recent months. Reshetnikov’s regular trips to southeastern Europe, where he denounces Western “imperialism” and does photo ops with senior Orthodox clergy, feature in local media, usually with praise.

Prime Minister Tsipras, too, has visited RISI headquarters, leading to the odd situation that one of the top security partnerships possessed by a NATO and EU country is with Putin’s foreign intelligence service. Current government assessments coming out of Athens “read like they’re written by the SVR—which they probably are,” bemoaned a European intelligence official. “We’ve always had our doubts about the Greeks,” he added, “but today’s situation is even worse than it was during the Cold War. The Russians are quietly running the show.”

Rumors of Russian money and influence calling the shots in Athens—or at least playing an outsized role—are no secret in NATO security circles. That Putin wants to harm Greece’s already precarious links with the EU and NATO is plain to see, and it seems to be getting close to fruition as the Greek crisis worsens.

“They’re only technically on our side,” explained a retired CIA officer with long experience in Greek matters. U.S. intelligence has never fully trusted the Greeks, with the CIA especially having misgivings stemming from the 1975 murder of Richard Welch, the agency’s station chief in Athens. While Langley blamed Phil Agee, a former CIA officer who went over to the Cubans and Soviets—think of Agee as the Ed Snowden of the mid-1970s—for Welch’s death, it was long obvious that Athens was never very eager to catch Welch’s killers. Neither did the 1988 terrorist assassination of the U.S. naval attaché to Greece, Capt. Bill Nordeen, promote trust.

Ties between U.S. intelligence and the Greek security services suffered for years, and things are getting unpleasant again. “We’re back to square one,” rued the former CIA case officer. “It’s like the bad old days when we didn’t trust the Greeks and they didn’t trust us. Only now Putin’s in the middle of the game.”

Time will tell if Moscow can pull a strategic win out of Greece’s mounting chaos. But there’s little doubt anymore that the Syriza government’s barely concealed ties with the Kremlin, particularly with its intelligence services, are causing serious heartburn inside NATO and the EU alike. It’s now Putin’s game to lose.
[/quote]

[Philip]

http://zeenews.india.com/news/india/sev ... 32962.html
Several Kashmiri youths recruited by terrorist organisations: Intelligence agencies

[Philip]

http://warontherocks.com/2015/07/chinas ... nglepage=1

War on the Rocks
China's New Intelligence War Against the United States
Peter Mattis

July 22, 2015 · in Analysis

The Chinese intelligence threat is set to change dramatically as hackers believed to be linked to China’s civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), acquired millions of personal records from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Although the full extent of the damage remains unknown, fears have emerged about the compromise of data gathered during security clearance background checks, including foreign national contacts. Security experts are right to suggest this information is a treasure trove for an intelligence service trying to penetrate the U.S. national security community. Such treasure is only as valuable as the motivation to use it and, for the MSS, such information would provide the foundation for a new espionage campaign against the United States and demonstrate its value to Chinese policymakers who have had good reason to be skeptical about what the MSS brings to the table. The OPM data offers a way for Chinese intelligence to focus on Americans that matter rather than relying on the creativity of individual agents to find ways to bridge China’s domestic intelligence base with national security professionals abroad.

The Misadventures of the MSS

To the unschooled observer, China might seem like a master of intelligence operations targeting the United States. This is only partially true. Since the arrest in 2005 of Chi Mak, a San Diego-based engineer with defense contractor Power Paragon, the FBI has arrested several dozen individuals for espionage on behalf of China — most recently in May. Meanwhile, Chinese collectors in cyberspace have made headlines every month as governments and companies admitted gaping breaches of information. The MSS, however, could claim little of the glory. China’s successes predominantly belonged to the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) intelligence departments. Hackers reportedly working for the PLA’s signals intelligence department, such as those indicted by the FBI, stole terabytes of corporate and government data, and human intelligence collectors from the General Staff Department’s Second Department (2PLA) penetrated the Pentagon and sensitive programs related to the Virginia-class submarine and the Aegis Combat System.

However, to the extent that it can be gauged, the record of the MSS is far from enviable.

Of recent Chinese human intelligence cases in the United States, the MSS probably was responsible for only one: Glenn Duffie Shriver. And that can hardly be called a success. In 2010, U.S. counterintelligence caught Shriver during his background and security check while applying to work for the CIA. He had already failed twice to join the State Department’s diplomatic corps. The MSS paid him $70,000, but failed to gather a single piece of intelligence. The money may not seem like much; however, multiply those costs by even a few attempts and such failed efforts become costly.

In the last three years, the MSS has lost three senior vice ministers to scandal. The first, Lu Zhongwei, fell in 2012 owing to reports that one of his personal aides spied for the United States since the 1980s. The next, Qiu Jin, fell in 2014 because he and a protégé at the Beijing State Security Bureau politicized MSS investigations to support the agenda of disgraced former security chief Zhou Yongkang. Politicization may be a feature of a communist system’s security apparatus, but Deng Xiaoping created the MSS in 1983 to move Chinese intelligence away from internal party politics and refocus it on legitimate counterespionage and intelligence-gathering abroad. Earlier this year, another vice minister, Ma Jian, became mixed up in a corruption investigation involving crooked real estate dealings and was removed from office. The MSS might weather such a storm if its intelligence operations bore more fruit, but, as is, the Chinese leadership may be wondering whether the MSS continues to be effective.

The Shortcomings of Chinese Intelligence Collection

Most Chinese intelligence operations are launched from within China, even those targeting foreign governments and militaries. In contrast to the more familiar scenario of intelligence personnel posing as diplomats working the cocktail scene in foreign capitals, Chinese intelligence officers regularly approach their targets inside China, in many different guises — from municipal office workers to think tank scholars to businesspeople — sometimes without even a fig leaf to hide their intelligence affiliation. Reviewing the history of Chinese espionage cases, only two cases we know of (and now a possible third in Taiwan) have involved recruitment of foreign agents outside China.

Having so many agents recruited inside China necessarily leaves blind spots, and the skills required for this approach are very different than working the diplomatic cocktail circuit. The most obvious implication is that Chinese sources must travel to China. Although the number of people traveling to China for any reason has expanded dramatically, those who do so regularly, especially foreign government officials, tend to have China or Asia portfolios. The MSS, then, is more likely to do well on issues that are directly related to China than on, say, U.S. or European policy in the Middle East. Finding potential agents inside China also means sifting through these visiting foreigners and expatriates — a task made easier by the ability to download and sort a person’s electronic data when they leave their personal devices unattended.

The MSS, like its other ministerial counterparts, is really a system with a central ministry supported by provincial departments and municipal bureaus that perform most of the system’s day-to-day operations. The capabilities and performance of the different sub-national elements vary widely as each is responsible for recruiting its own personnel. The Beijing and Shanghai state security bureaus, for example, can readily pull from the best pool of Chinese university graduates, whereas the Shaanxi and Gansu state security departments may only get similar talent if recent graduates are forced back to their original homes because of China’s internal migration controls. There may also be other differences that affect the quality of MSS elements, such as access to technology or those skilled in its use, as well as foreign language capability. The responsibilities for state security undoubtedly vary across locations. Though Beijing may be well suited for operations against foreign countries, the huge number of foreign officials and businesspeople living in and transiting the city probably keep the focus on counterintelligence.

The unevenness of MSS capabilities means that, without a central database of dossiers, the ability of state security elements to identify and research persons of interest is limited. Identifying a person and why they are potentially valuable, however, is only the first step toward recruitment. Personal relationships must be developed; vulnerabilities must be identified or manufactured. Finally, an intelligence officer has to make the recruitment pitch, which, in the words of former British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove, must be “asked in the right way, by the right person, at the right time.” For many of the backwoods state security departments, completing all of these tasks — even identifying potentially useful individuals — might be beyond their capabilities without operational leads and support from MSS headquarters.

With China developing more and more foreign interests, the MSS almost certainly faces an imperative to expand its operations overseas. A few small operations, such as the MSS handling in Sweden of a Uighur arrested in late 2010, suggest the ministry is becoming more aggressive in pursuit of intelligence abroad. The ministry, however, must overcome a legacy of inaction on overseas clandestine operations. Back in 1985, Deng Xiaoping placed draconian restrictions on MSS operations from Chinese embassies and other official platforms. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reportedly persuaded Deng that MSS officers getting caught running clandestine operations from official facilities could derail the international aspects of his revolutionary Reform and Opening policy of market-based reforms. Building up a robust, foreign-based collection effort takes time, and intelligence services need practical training based on experience. The ability to do dead drops, covert communications, and the other hallmarks of clandestine tradecraft are important because a spy service is asking agents to place their lives and freedom in the service’s hands.

The Practical Application of OPM Data for Chinese Intelligence

The theft of the OPM files on current and former U.S. government employees with security clearances, along with their foreign contacts — including Chinese contacts — will give the MSS (or other parts of the Chinese intelligence apparatus) an incredible resource for building an intelligence program targeting the United States. As I mentioned above, marginal cases like that of Glenn Duffie Shriver indicate the MSS so far has struggled to mount a serious and sustained program that is producing results for Beijing. That could now change.

One of the keys to success in China’s spying against Taiwan appears to be China’s substantial knowledge of the island’s government, military, and intelligence officials, as well as their families and their retired colleagues. In almost every case — including the 33 Taiwanese convicted of espionage-related crimes in the last five years recently highlighted by Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB) director — Chinese intelligence has identified and recruited former officials traveling through or working in the mainland and then used them to draw out their colleagues still in government. Instead of having to evaluate the thousands of Taiwanese traveling in and out China, the MSS just needs to check whether a particular person is one who should be approached. In 2000, the then-personnel director at the NSB retired into a job based in China, and, even if he did not betray personnel lists, numerous others in intelligence and counter-espionage have provided the names and backgrounds of their undercover colleagues to Chinese intelligence.

The information on former U.S. officials with past security clearances may be even more valuable than information on current employees. First, former officials do not face the same travel restrictions or requirements to report foreign contacts or meetings with foreign intelligence services. Second, because they can travel more freely, they can be debriefed in a more leisurely fashion, allowing for questions without immediate operational relevance and time to confirm their responses and thereby further validate the sources themselves. Third, former officials almost certainly will function better than the agents most recently used by Chinese intelligence to gain access to U.S. secrets. Sources like Louisiana furniture salesman Kuo Tai-shen may be able to move and shake their way into access — Kuo did get two U.S defense officials to betray their confidences — but they do not necessarily have a natural set of trusted relationships within national security circles. They have the ability to elicit information without raising alarm bells and evaluate the potential of their former colleagues to a recruitment pitch.

The information on Chinese contacts of cleared U.S. government officials raises the danger of the lost OPM data in MSS or other Chinese intelligence services’ hands. Beijing’s security agents may be willing to detain U.S. officials and citizens at the airport for a few hours, but anything beyond catch-and-release is unlikely. Beijing, however, treats all ethnically Chinese people as PRC citizens, subjecting them to far harsher punishments than those of purely foreign stock, which endangers Chinese family members and contacts named in the stolen OPM data. As a pressure point, being placed in an uncomfortable position or detained for a few hours is one thing; knowing your friend or family member could be detained indefinitely is something completely different. In case this sounds fanciful, it did occur in 2012 to the wife of a Taiwanese intelligence official who visited a friend in Shanghai. Chinese authorities detained her and forced her to write a letter to her husband pleading for him to come to the city. The official stayed in Taiwan, but his wife remains in prison despite Taipei’s efforts to release her. There is little reason to think that an MSS desperate to prove its value to policymakers with intelligence on Washington will hold back from such aggressive efforts to collect intelligence, especially if Beijing is accepting greater risk in its intelligence operations.

Conclusion

The MSS’s possible acquisition of OPM data does not guarantee Chinese success in penetrating the U.S. government; however, it does improve the beleaguered ministry’s chances. Its disparate components can focus on real targets rather than trying to identify, research, and approach every American passing through their jurisdictions. In baseball terms, the OPM data is like a team beginning every inning with runners on base. Each success could be just a bit better than the past.

Peter Mattis is a Fellow in the China Program at The Jamestown Foundation and the author of the recently-published Analyzing the Chinese Military: A Review Essay and Resource Guide on the People’s Liberation Army.

[Philip]

Spies coming in from the cold!
One by one many of our favourite thriller writers are acknowledging their past covert activities.Ian Fleming,John Le Carre (David Cornwell) and now Frederick Forsyth reveal; the fact that they were one-time spies.Facsinating tale here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebri ... 6-spy.html

Frederick Forsyth 'set to reveal he was an MI6 spy'
Day of the Jackal author Frederick Forsyth is expected to reveal in his forthcoming autobiography that he was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6

Frederick Forsyth lived like James Bond
Gordon Rayner
By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter
24 Jul 2015

He has long been lauded for the uncanny realism of his spy thrillers, and now Frederick Forsyth is set to reveal the secret of his insider knowledge: he was himself an agent for MI6.

Fans of the 76-year-old author had suspected he may have had brushes with the Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, and Forsyth is expected to confirm they were right when his autobiography is published in September.

As a journalist for the BBC and Reuters, Forsyth spent time based in Communist East Germany and in Africa, where he became close to key figures including Odumegwu Ojukwu, leader of the Nigerian breakaway state of Biafra.

He has admitted in the past that he often draws on his real-life experiences for the plots and action in his books; his experience of reporting on an attempt to assassinate the French president Charles de Gaulle gave him the idea for his first novel, The Day of the Jackal.

He has also admitted having friends in MI6. In his newspaper column Forsyth has referred to “taking lunch with a senior officer of from the Secret Intelligence Service” though he did not explain how they knew each other and he has never gone as far as revealing that he was recruited by them.

The title of his new book, The Outsider: My Life In Intrigue, provides a huge hint that he will use it to blow his own cover as a former spy, and it has become an open secret in the publishing world that he is about to do just that.

Spies play a major part in Forsyth’s books written in the mid-70s onwards – including The Fourth Protocol and The Devil’s Alternative - suggesting he may already have had some experience of the world of espionage by then.

As a former RAF jet fighter pilot who spoke German and French like a local, and whose job took him behind the Iron Curtain and behind enemy lines in Africa, Forsyth would have been a natural choice for an approach by MI6.

He also lived like James Bond even without the help of Britain’s overseas spying agency.

An incident in Hamburg in 1974 was a case in point. Having found success with his first two novels, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, Forsyth was researching his next book, The Dogs of War, about a mining millionaire hiring mercenaries to topple the leader of an African republic.

Forsyth’s experiences in Biafra had brought him into close contact with mercenaries, but he needed to know how the soldiers of fortune in his novel could acquire an arsenal of military hardware on the black market.

Told by his contacts that the centre of the underworld arms trade was in Hamburg, Forsyth posed as a South African on a buying mission for a wealthy patron using a false identity, and essentially played out the plot of his book.

“I managed to penetrate their world and was feeling rather proud of myself actually,” he later said. “What I didn’t know was that the arms dealer had passed a bookshop shortly after our meeting. And there, in the window, was The Day of the Jackal. With a great big picture of me – the man he thought was a South African arms buyer – on the back cover.”

Forsyth was in his hotel room when a call came through from an “insider friend” telling him: “Grab your passport and money and run like hell!”

He did not need to be told twice.

“I left all my clothes, grabbed my money and passport and ran across the square to the train station,” Forsyth recalled. “There was a train pulling out so I vaulted the ticket barrier and did a parachute roll through the window, landing on a bewildered businessman. The ticket conductor asked me where I was going. I asked him where the train was going and he said Amsterdam. ‘So am I,’ I said.”

Exactly who the “friend” was who warned him of the arms dealer’s henchmen coming to exact their revenge, he has never said, though one possibility must surely be that it was an MI6 agent who had infiltrated the arms dealer’s inner circle, thus knowing that Forsyth was in imminent danger.

Forsyth, now 76, cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War, where he was routinely bugged and tailed by the Stasi, the Communist state’s infamous secret police. He quickly found himself sleeping with the enemy.

During one excursion to Czechoslovakia, where he was used to being followed by the StB, their version of the Stasi, 25-year-old Forsyth made eye contact with a beautiful young girl called Jana in a bar.

They had a drink together, then dinner, and Forsyth suggested a night-time drive on what was a hot August night.

“I suggested we go out to some lakes north of the city and have a swim,” he said. “So we did. We parked the car, walked down the meadow to the lake, stripped off and had a swim. Then I spread a blanket out and we made love. Afterwards, I was lying down staring up at the stars, and I just murmured - I wondered what happened to my StB escort tonight? And she said: ‘You've just made love to it’.”

Another romantic liaison led to Forsyth’s swift retreat from East Germany a few months later.

“I had been having a torrid affair with a stunning East German girl,” he later said. “She explained she was the wife of a People’s Army corporal, based in the garrison at faraway Cottbus on the Czech border. She was an amazing lover and rather mysterious.

“She was immaculately dressed and after our almost-all-night love sessions at my place refused to be driven home, insisting on a taxi from the railway station. I wondered about the clothes, and the money for taxis. One day I spotted one of the drivers at the station whom I had seen at my door picking up Siggi. He said he had taken her to Pankow. That was a very upscale address, the Belgravia of East Berlin. On a corporal’s salary?

“It was in a bar in West Berlin that two buzz-cut Americans who screamed CIA slid over to offer me a drink. As we clinked they murmured that I had a certain nerve to be sleeping with the mistress of the East German Defence Minister.”

Realising how much trouble he was in, a week later, having made excuses to his employers at Reuters, he walked through Checkpoint Charlie with a single holdall and flew back to London.

His next posting was to Biafra, where he reported from the Biafran side, highlighting the growing humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of children died from malnutrition.

Whilst there he was strafed by a MiG fighter jet, leaving a dent from a bullet in his typewriter.

Even in his 70s he refused to allow danger to get in the way of his research. For his 2010 novel, The Cobra, he needed to find out about drugs cartels, and flew to Guineau-Bissau in West Africa.

While he was flying into the country, the army’s chief of staff was assassinated, then he was woken in his hotel room by the army’s revenge, a bomb exploding at the nearby presidential villa. The president was then shot and finally hacked to death with machetes.

“I spent the night hanging out of my hotel window watching the military avenge their leader, with rocket-propelled grenades going off everywhere,” he said. For his trouble, he developed cellulitis and almost lost his leg.

“It is a bit drug-like, journalism,” he once said. “Even in your seventies, I don’t think that instinct ever dies. But my wife worries all the time. She rails at me.”

Sandy Forsyth might now rail at him even more if, as expected, he reveals that for years he was also risking his life by spying for MI6.

[Philip]

The Litvinenko affair.The inquiry.

The curious case of the alleged assassination of Litvinenko,small-time Russian defector by polonium poisoning in a London tea room gripped the globe when it happened a few years ago. Various theories have been put forward as to " who dun it?" From Vlad-the-bad Putin,Russian oligarchs,Russian mafia,rogue Russian intel agents,Russian oligarchs in exile,Western intel agencies,et al. The West/UK has tried to lay the blame at the door of the Kremlin but the Kremlin has vociferously denied any responsibility and responded in kind. Another prominent world leader who has allegedly been bumped off in similar manner,using polonium, was the late Palestinian leader,Yasser Arafat.

The only established facts are that Litvinenko was a low-level defector,someone whose defection happened a few years before his death,and was too insignificant a figure to give Vlad-the-bad a sleepless night.That Litvi was an agent for Western intel agencies is also acknowledged. His connections with disgraced anti-Putin Russian oligarchs in exile in the UK is also a known fact.Some of these individuals were openly plotting and calling for Vlad's overthrow.
Some have even theorised that he was allegedly bumped off by the oligarch's in exile as a "false flag" op,whose aim was to besmirch the reputation of Vlad. Others even accuse Brit/Western intel agencies.

With a key witness now hesitating to give evidence,and the animosity between the British and Russian govts.,as bad as it was during the Cold War,will the truth ever be known? We have seen only the tip of the iceberg in the Litvi affair.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr ... 14902.html

Alexander Litvinenko murder inquiry: Suspect Dimitry Kovtun unsure over whether to give evidence

Dimitry Kovtun may have had late change of heart over testifying to inquiry, reports Mary Dejevsky

Mary Dejevsky
Friday 24 July 2015

Dmitry Kovtun, one of the two Russians accused of killing Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive poison in London eight years ago, may be about to reverse his 11th-hour decision to give evidence to the inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice .

Four months almost to the day after throwing the inquiry timetable into disarray by suddenly communicating through intermediaries that he wanted to testify, Kovtun created havoc all over again by sending word that he might not be prepared to give evidence after all.

The Russian government, which had declined an invitation to take part in the inquiry, also effectively withdrew even the limited cooperation it had given in the early stages of the Metropolitan Police’s investigation.

Businessman Dmitry Kovtun, a suspect in the murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, speaks during a press conference in Moscow (Getty) Businessman Dmitry Kovtun, a suspect in the murder of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, speaks during a press conference in Moscow (Getty)

In a response sent 10 days ago, it was revealed that Moscow has said that it wants to exercise its right to have statements and other documents supplied by the Russian police excluded from evidence to the inquiry.

The judge, Sir Robert Owen, said he had little choice but to agree, or risk jeopardising agreements on international police cooperation.

When the inquiry resumed, having being adjourned in March to accommodate Kovtun’s application, the scene was set for three days of high drama in the coming week.

Arrangements were in place for the Russian to testify via video-link from Moscow, starting at 9am on Monday morning. The link had been arranged through a commercial company, to circumvent official the Russians’ non-cooperation.

The inquiry will now reconvene at midday on 27 July. The video-link will be retained, but there is now profound scepticism about whether Kovtun will turn up.

He informed the inquiry by email that he needed clearance from the Russian authorities to testify, and that he could expose himself to prosecution in Russia if he gave evidence without that. The inquiry judge, Sir Robert Owen, and counsel for Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, suggested along with other participants that they were not holding their breath.

Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB spy and author of the book Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB spy and author of the book "Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within" back in 2002 (AP)

All of this casts doubt on why Kovtun ever asked to give evidence. One theory being debated last night was that his last-minute application was always intended as a provocation, designed to sow chaos and confusion in an inquiry that was not going Moscow’s way.

As part of his request, he had also asked for, and been granted, the status of a “core participant”, which entitles him to legal representation at the inquiry and access to all documents. It was speculated on 24 July that his offer to testify had been a ploy to give Moscow access to this.

Richard Horwell QC, for the Met, said: “None of this comes as any surprise. It appears that Kovtun’s request to give evidence was nothing more than an attempt to become a core participant and obtain as much information about these proceedings as he could.”

Given that his initial approaches were through intermediaries, however, it is also possible that Kovtun was acting on his own volition, in a genuine effort to clear his name, or out of pique. While his co-accused, the former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoy, has been feted by the Russian authorities and given a parliamentary seat that affords immunity from prosecution, Kovtun is not reported to have received any honours, and was in hospital for a while suffering from radiation poisoning.

In this event, it would appear that the Russian authorities got cold feet and, decided, at a typically late stage, to put the heavy hand on Kovtun, and threaten him with legal action (for preparing to divulge confidential information). Clearance could yet be granted – this is why Sir Robert Owen, though clearly infuriated by the latest turn of events, has delayed the opening of proceedings on 27 July in the hope of clarity from Moscow. But then it has to be asked under what conditions Kovtun would be testifying, and what price the veracity of anything he said.

Robin Tam QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: “We may have to wait until Monday morning to find if Kovtun is able and willing to give evidence at that time – or we could say, enough is enough, and cancel that.”

The discrediting of Kovtun, which is effectively what has happened, for whatever reason, is likely to leave the inquiry without the answers to the questions that perhaps only he, and Andrei Lugovoi, can answer. One mystery barely touched on in the proceedings is how the polonium-210 that killed Litvinenko was brought to the UK.

Read more: • Litvinenko ‘thought Putin wasn’t up to the job’
• What happened to the other man who took tea with Litvinenko?
• Accused may give evidence to inquiry

Did Kovtun – who was himself contaminated – have anything to do with this, and if he did, was he aware that he was carrying a lethal substance? If he was, did he intend to use it to kill an enemy of the Kremlin (as Litvinenko was by then), or might there have been some other purpose, such as for use as a sample in some illicit trade?

According to one witness, codenamed D2, Kovtun had turned up out of the blue en route to London and vouchsafed to him that he regarded Litvinenko as a “traitor” who had “blood on his hands”.

Kovtun, said D2, then said that he wanted to find a compliant chef in a London restaurant who would be prepared to put some “very expensive poison” in Litvinenko’s food. D3 said he had dismissed Kovtun’s words as just another of his fantastic ideas – until he saw reports of Litvinenko’s death in the papers.

Kovtun: A life in the shadows

Dmitry Vladimirovich Kovtun was born in 1965 into an army family and attended a military academy in Moscow.
Although he is often described as a former KGB officer turned businessman, much about his past is murky.

He moved to Germany in the late 1990s, and told colleagues at the Hamburg restaurant where he worked for a while that he had deserted from the Russian army. They said he was always short of money and full of ideas for business ventures that never came off, though some said he was also brilliant with computers.

He returned to Moscow in the early 2000s, working in the private security sector.
Mary Dejevsky

[Philip]

Finally!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... arole.html
US to free Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard on parole
Release of navy intelligence analyst, convicted of passing Cold War secrets, will remove thorn in side of US-Israeli relations but his lawyers say move is unconnected with Iranian nuclear deal. ( )

Release of navy intelligence analyst, convicted of passing Cold War secrets, will remove thorn in side of US-Israeli relations but his lawyers say move is unconnected with Iranian nuclear deal

Jonathan Pollard pictured six years after his 1985 arrest Photo: Reuters
By Rob Crilly, New York
28 Jul 2015

An Israeli spy held in an American prison for 30 years is to be released in November, according to his lawyers who insist the decision is unrelated to the Iran nuclear deal.

Last week, several US officials reportedly said they were considering freeing Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew, as part of an effort to smooth difficult relations with Israel whcih fears a resurgent Tehran.

The 60-year-old has been the source of tension between the two countries ever since he was arrested in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison for passing on thousands of classified documents.

His lawyers, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, said the decision was taken after a long-scheduled parole hearing on July 7, independently of any other government institutions.

Israeli activists during a protest calling for Pollard's release in Jerusalem in 2011 (AFP)

"The decision is not connected to recent developments in the Middle East," they said. "Had parole been denied, Mr Pollard would have been required to serve an additional fifteen years in prison."

They passed on Mr Pollard's thanks to campaigners in the US and Israel who had attended rallies and prayed for his welfare.

“We look forward to seeing our client on the outside in less than four months,” they added.

Pollard was a civilian analyst for the US Navy at the time of his arrest and had been recruited by the Israelis to pass secrets including satellite photos and data on Soviet weaponry.

His secret life unravelled when a colleague wondered why he was taking away documents on a Friday, when most people were winding down for the weekend.

Successive Israeli prime ministers – including Benjamin Netanyahu - have called for the release of Pollard, who was given Israeli citizenship in prison.

Deliberately or not, his release removes one thorn in US-Israeli relations at a time when Washington is trying to placate Mr Netanyahu and a government that accuses the West of being soft on Iran and its nuclear programme.

And Mr Pollard's fate stands in contrast to other Cold War-era spies, such as John Walker, head of a family spy ring for the Soviet Union, who died in a prison hospital last year.

[Philip]

Litvinenko case,latest:
http://www.rferl.org/content/british-ju ... 58275.html

British Judge Accuses Russia Of Interfering In Litvinenko Case
July 29, 2015
The British judge investigating the radioactive poisoning death of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko accused Russian authorities of interfering with his inquiry July 28.

Robert Owen spoke after suspect Dmitry Kovtun failed to give evidence by video link, saying he was bound by confidentiality obligations to an ongoing Russian inquiry.

Owen said that either Kovtun's offer of participation had been "a charade" or "obstacles have been put in the way of his doing so."

Kovtun and a second Russian, Andrei Lugovoi, are wanted by British police for allegedly poisoning KGB officer-turned Kremlin critic Litvinenko at London's Millennium Hotel on November 1, 2006 using tea laced with the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

Litvinenko died three weeks later and on his deathbed blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for ordering his assassination — a claim Moscow denies.

Kovtun has denied murdering Litvinenko, contending he accidentally poisoned himself. Russia refuses to extradite either suspect.

British authorities say they have found evidence of Russian state involvement in the incident.

Owen plans to wrap up inquiry hearings this week and issue his findings by the end of the year.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP

[Austin]

British court are know into protect Indian criminals including Iqbal Mirchi , Nadeem Shravan ...... they are just an extension of British Raj of bygone era

[Philip]

"Hamid-the-Ghoul" has passed on to meet his 72 demons "downstairs".The landlord of the underworld had better watch out! Gul was consistent in his hatred of India and in his latter years the US.

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries ... story.html

Hamid Gul dies at 78; former Pakistan intelligence chief

Hamid Gul in Islamabad in 2014. Gul became the chief of the Inter-Services Agency in 1987, at a time when the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were using the spy agency to funnel billions of dollars to militants fighting the Soviets during their occupation of neighboring Afghanistan.

By Zarar Khan
August 16, 2015, 6:44 PM

Hamid Gul, who led Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency as it funneled U.S. and Saudi cash and weapons to Afghan jihadis fighting against the Soviets and later publicly supported Islamic militants, died Saturday at the hill resort of Murree near the capital Islamabad. He was 78..
His daughter, Uzma Gul, said Gul suffered a brain hemorrhage.

Gul's tenure at the ISI and his outspoken backing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other extremists highlighted the murky loyalties at play in later years when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath tested the U.S.-Pakistani alliance.

Gul came to be seen as increasingly out of touch later in life, appearing on Pakistani television warning of conspiracies and demanding his country militarily confront its nuclear-armed neighbor India.

"The unruly mujahedeen commanders obeyed and respected him like no one else," Gul's online autobiography reads. "Later on, with the advent of the Taliban's rise he was equally admired and respected."

Funeral prayers were offered at an army base in the garrison city of Rawalpindi near Islamabad. Pakistani army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif attended alongside other serving and retired military officers.

Born Nov. 20, 1936, near Sargodha in eastern Pakistan, Gul served in the army and fought in two wars against India. He viewed India with suspicion for the rest of his life, claiming it wanted to seize Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. Many believe he helped shape Pakistan's policy of funding Islamic militant groups to attack India's interests in the disputed Kashmir region.

Gul became the chief of the ISI in 1987, at a time when the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were using the spy agency to funnel billions of dollars to militants fighting the Soviets during their occupation of neighboring Afghanistan.

Those militants later became the backbone of the Taliban and included a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden.
The government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto forced Gul out in 1989. He later acknowledged having forged an alliance of Islamist political parties to challenge Bhutto in the 1988 elections that brought her to power.

Despite being removed from office, Gul remained influential. Though unnamed in the 9/11 Commission report, U.S. officials at the time said they suspected Gul of tipping Bin Laden off to a failed 1998 cruise missile attack targeting him in Afghanistan. The operation came in response to Al Qaeda attacks on embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. The officials said he contacted Taliban leaders and assured them that he would provide three or four hours' warning before any U.S. missile launch.

Gul also was a close ally of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received U.S. assistance during the Soviet occupation and was a bitter rival of Taliban figurehead Mullah Mohammad Omar. The U.S. declared Hekmatyar a "global terrorist" in 2003 because of alleged links to Al Qaeda and froze all assets he may have had in the United States.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Gul became an outspoken opponent of the U.S. while cheering the Taliban. There were allegations, however, that Gul had a more hands-on role. U.S. intelligence reports later released by WikiLeaks allege he dispatched three men in December 2006 to carry out attacks in Afghanistan's capital.

Gul at the time described the documents as "fiction and nothing else." Some of the reports, generated by junior intelligence officers, included farfetched claims such as an allegation that militants teamed up with the ISI to kill Afghan and NATO forces in 2007 with poisoned alcohol bought in Pakistan.

But Gul's anti-Americanism was by then well known. At one point in 2003, Gul said Pakistani officials would "turn a blind eye" to any Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters who escaped Afghanistan.

"The intelligence and security agencies are a part of the ethos of the country, and the national ethos today is a hatred of America," he said.

When U.S. special forces killed Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Gul helped spread a rumor that U.S. forces actually killed the Al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan and brought his body to Pakistan to humiliate the country.

"My feeling is that it was all a hoax, a drama which has been crafted, and badly scripted I would say," he said.

In conspiracy-minded Pakistan, many believed him. As the last line of his online autobiography reads: "People wait to listen to his direction before forming their own opinions."

Khan writes for the Associated Press.

[Philip]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/s ... rwan[quote]
Who killed the 20th century’s greatest spy?

When Ashraf Marwan fell to his death from the balcony of a London flat, he took his secrets with him. Was he working for Egypt or Israel? And did the revelation of his identity lead to his murder?

Ashraf Marwan and the block of flats from which he fell to his death in 2007
Ashraf Marwan and the block of flats from which he fell to his death in 2007. Photograph: Guardian
Simon Parkin
Tuesday 15 September 2015

This much is certain: Ashraf Marwan, a man some describe as the 20th century’s greatest spy, was alive when he tumbled from the fifth-floor balcony of his £4.4m London flat. The Egyptian businessman landed, shortly after 1.30pm on 27 June 2007, in the private rose garden at number 24 Carlton House Terrace, a street whose former occupants include three prime ministers (Palmerston, Earl Grey and Gladstone) and which lies a few hundred metres from Piccadilly Circus. Overhead, the lunchtime sky was obnoxious with helicopters, swarming above Tony Blair’s Teflon-plated convoy as it carried the prime minister to Buckingham Palace, where he would hand in his resignation. A woman screamed. Someone called the police. The paramedics arrived too late. Marwan died from a ruptured aorta.

The details of the final minutes of Marwan’s life are much more opaque. Not that there weren’t witnesses: on the morning of his death, four men were meeting on the third floor of an adjacent building, 116 Pall Mall, in a room with a clear view of Marwan’s balcony. In a curious twist, these men – József Répási, Essam Shawki, Michael Parkhurst and John Roberts – worked for one of Marwan’s companies, Ubichem PLC; they were waiting for their boss to join them. He was late. When they called around midday to find out why, he assured the group that he would be with them shortly.

Répási, who was sitting with the window to his left, recalled that he was startled by one of his colleagues crying out, “Look what Dr Marwan is doing!” Two of the other witnesses claimed at the time that they saw Marwan leap from the balcony. By the time Répási had moved to see out of the window he saw “Dr Marwan falling”. Shawki, who was then the director of Ubichem, ran downstairs to help. The other three men remained in the room, shocked and bewildered. After a moment, Répási looked out of the window again, straining to see the spot where Marwan had landed. “I saw two Middle Eastern-looking persons looking down from the balcony of one of the apartments,” he told me via email – although neither he nor his colleagues knew whether or not the men were standing on the balcony of apartment number 10, Marwan’s address.

Did Marwan jump or was he pushed? The postmortem examination found traces of antidepressants in Dr Marwan’s blood. A report from his doctor said that he had been “under considerable stress of late”, and had lost 10kg in two months. But there are reasons to believe suicide was unlikely. There was no note. Marwan was due to fly to the US that evening for a meeting with his lawyer. He had just been accepted into the Reform Club, whose members include Prince Charles and former MI5 boss Dame Stella Rimington. A few days earlier he had bought his grandson a PlayStation 3 for his birthday. Marwan and his wife, Mona Nasser, the daughter of the former Egyptian president, were due to take their five grandchildren on holiday. Marwan had plans. He had appointments. He had reasons to live. “There is no evidence of mental or psychiatric disorder,” the coroner William Dolman said, after a 2010 inquest into Marwan’s death, which did not reach a verdict. There was “no evidence of any intention to commit suicide”, Dolman concluded. But paradoxically, he also declared there was “absolutely no evidence” to support claims that Marwan was murdered.

But while Marwan may not have intended to take his life, he certainly feared for it. The last time he was alone in his apartment with his wife, he told her that he “might be killed”. He added, portentously: “I have a lot of different enemies.” In the months leading up to his death, Nasser recalled that her husband checked the door and locks every night before bed, a new habit unseen during their 38 previous years of marriage.

According to Marwan’s family, there was another clue at the scene – or, more precisely, the absence of a clue. The only known copy of his memoirs, which he was close to completing, allegedly disappeared from his bookshelves on the day of his death. The three volumes, each around 200 pages, as well as the tapes on which Marwan had dictated the text, have never been recovered.





Mossad agents murdered my husband, says widow of billionaire arms dealer

According to one scholar, Marwan had worked, over the years, for Egyptian, Israeli, Italian, American and British intelligence; was he preparing to spill secrets that could embarrass kings and nations? Who took the documents, if indeed they existed? And was his death part of a pattern? Marwan was the third Egyptian living in London to die in similar circumstances. (June 2001: the actor Soad Hosny fell from the balcony of Stuart Tower, a block of flats in Maida Vale, after she approached a publisher offering to write her memoirs. August 1973: El-Leithy Nassif, former head of the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s presidential guard, fell from a balcony in the very same tower. He too was writing his memoirs.) All three victims had links to the Egyptian security services.

The inquest into Marwan’s death failed to provide many answers. “We simply don’t know the facts, despite careful investigation,” Dolman, the coroner, told the court in 2010. Indeed, after three years of examination by two separate murder squads, including Scotland Yard’s elite Specialist Crime Directorate, there remain, as Dolman put it, “many unanswered questions”. The story is alluring because its mysteries jar with the circumstances of the day – a death at lunchtime, in central London, with witnesses. The scene is littered with clues, but there is apparently no evidence to settle the story. And yet Marwan’s tale continues to itch at the curious. The doorman at 24 Carlton House Terrace told me that journalists drop by at a rate of “around one a year”, seeking answers about what happened that day. File a freedom of information request on the subject of Ashraf Marwan and you’ll receive an exhaustive list that outlines the many exemptions protecting the British intelligence agencies’ files on the matter. Both Marwan’s life and death remain opaque, composed of fuzzy details that sent obituary writers glumly reaching for the ifs and maybes.

At the precise moment that Ashraf Marwan tumbled from his balcony, Ahron Bregman was sitting in his office in the war studies department at King’s College London, waiting for a call from the spy that never came. After a few hours, Bregman left to return to Wimbledon, where he took his family to lunch at Nando’s. As he left the restaurant, his mobile phone rang. It was his sister, calling from Israel: Marwan was dead. The news disoriented Bregman, but, in the context of their missed appointment, it was not entirely unexpected. Marwan had also left him a string of stricken answerphone messages in the preceding days. Bregman knew that his friend feared his life was in danger. Moreover, Bregman knew that he was partly responsible for this state of affairs.

Bregman’s relationship with Marwan was complicated. They had met only once before in person, four years earlier, at the InterContinental hotel in London. (“I approached carefully through small streets to ensure I was not followed,” Bregman said. “I was late. He was already there. Tall. Wearing a red scarf.”) Nevertheless, their lives had become entwined. Before Bregman entered Marwan’s life, the Egyptian was known, if he was known at all, as a wealthy businessman and an avid Chelsea fan (he owned a 3.2% stake in the club and, at one point, one of his property companies took over both Chelsea and Fulham’s football grounds, before selling them at a vast profit). All that changed when Bregman came along.

Marwan was born in Egypt in 1944. His father was a military officer who served in the presidential guard brigade. At the age of 21, Marwan graduated with a first-class honours degree in chemical engineering from Cairo University, and was conscripted into the army. In 1965, Marwan was playing a game of tennis in Heliopolis, a suburb of Egypt’s capital, when he spied an attractive young girl, Mona Nasser, the president’s third and favourite daughter, who was 17 at the time. Love flowered, and the pair married the following year, drawing Marwan into the circles of the elite. The young man continued his military service for two more years, before moving to London to begin studying for an MA in chemistry.


President Nasser of Egypt (left), shakes hands with Ashraf Marwan (right), during Marwan’s wedding to Nasser’s daughter, Mona (centre), on 7 July 1966.

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President Nasser of Egypt (left), shakes hands with Ashraf Marwan (right), during Marwan’s wedding to Nasser’s daughter, Mona (centre), on 7 July 1966. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

There, some sources claim that Marwan became dissatisfied with the family allowance he had been given. (Marwan was financially ambitious throughout his life; his eventual fortune exceeded £400m. Cabra Investments, the name given to Marwan’s property umbrella company, means “to grow large” in Arabic.) To supplement his student income – according to one historian – he charmed the wife of a Kuwaiti sheikh, who provided him with additional financial support. When President Nasser learned of the arrangement from the Egyptian embassy in London a few months later, he ordered his son-in-law to return to Cairo and summarily demanded that Marwan divorce his daughter. The pair refused and over time Nasser cooled. He ordered instead that Marwan remain in Cairo, flying to London only to submit his course papers and sit his exams.




In the spring of 1969, while the Beatles’ White Album was still clinging to the charts, Marwan visited London, ostensibly to consult a Harley Street doctor about a stomach ailment. According to the rather theatrical account presented by the historian Howard Blum in his 2003 book The Eve of Destruction, a history of the Yom Kippur war, Marwan handed the doctor his x-rays along with a file fat with official Egyptian state documents. He demanded that they be delivered to the Israeli embassy in London. Three days later, an agent from Mossad, the Israeli equivalent of MI6, contacted Marwan as he strolled through Harrods, the London department store (with whose future owner, Mohamed al-Fayed, he would later feud).

Not so, say senior Mossad agents – who narrated their own equally vivid version of the story to the former IDF intelligence analyst Uri Bar-Joseph for his 2010 book, Hamalach (The Angel). Marwan, they claim, called in on the Israeli embassy and requested to speak to a member of the security team. He was turned away – at least twice – before he was finally permitted to leave a message. Marwan identified himself by name and stated that he wished to work for Israeli intelligence. He chose not to leave a phone number but, as he was due to return to Egypt the next day, said that he would call again later that afternoon. When he did there was no response. This time Marwan left the phone number of his hotel.

Shmuel Goren, the European head of Mossad, was in London at the time. Goren picked up Marwan’s message and immediately recognised the name. Thanks to Marwan’s proximity to Egypt’s leaders, Mossad had already opened a file on him as a potential recruit. They even had a photograph of Marwan to hand, one taken on his wedding day four years earlier. Goren called the number that Marwan had left and, knowing that time was short, told him to remain in his hotel room. The phone rang again. Marwan was to go to a cafe close to the hotel.

Inside the cafe, a man sat at one of the tables reading a newspaper. He glanced down at the photograph next to his coffee cup and compared it to the rakish man who had just walked through the front door. Then he looked out of the window and nodded to a second figure waiting outside, who entered the cafe, strode up to Marwan and said: “Mr Marwan? I’m pleased to meet you. My name is Misha.” Marwan rose to shake his hand. The man with the newspaper, Shmuel Goren himself, left the building, unnoticed. As they talked, Marwan told Misha (whose real first name was Dubi) about his connections and what he might offer the Israelis. Marwan pushed an envelope across the table. “Here’s a sample of what I can give you,” he said. “I’m not asking for anything now, but I expect to be compensated at our next meeting.” His fee? $100,000.

Mossad doubted Marwan’s intentions. Was he planning to become a double agent in order to feed Israel incorrect information, or to pass secrets back to his father-in-law? Marwan had an answer for this. He was, he told Misha, dismayed with the fact that Egypt had been defeated in the six-day war in 1967. He simply wanted to be on the winning side. After the meeting, Misha reconvened with Goren in a taxi. The pair went over Marwan’s documents as they rode to the embassy. The papers seemed to be genuine. “Material like this from a source like this is something that happens once in a thousand years,” Goren said that day, according to the Jerusalem Post. According to Blum, another Mossad agent described the situation “as if we had someone sleeping in Nasser’s bed”. Marwan’s nickname within Mossad shows the near-celestial regard with which he would come to be regarded: Angel.

Marwan continued to gain trust in Egypt. Following his father-in-law’s death in September 1970, he supposedly passed secret Israeli documents to Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, and as a result gained more influence. Any doubts that Mossad might still have harboured about Marwan were complicated three years later when, in April 1973, he sent a message to the Israelis warning of an imminent Egyptian attack. Israel sent tens of thousands of reservists and several brigades to the Sinai. No attack came. The state of alert reportedly cost Israel around $35m. On 4 October 1973, the spy again warned Israel of a looming Egyptian assault (Marwan called his case officer from Paris, where he was on a visit with an Egyptian delegation. He said that he wanted to discuss “lots of chemicals” – the agreed-upon code phrase to warn of impending war). At 8am the next morning the Israeli cabinet met in an emergency session. They decided to act upon Marwan’s information and began to mobilise their tanks. This time the information was correct, albeit four hours out: Marwan warned that the Egyptians would strike at sunset. The invasion began four hours earlier, at 2pm.





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Why did Marwan enter the London cafe that afternoon? He certainly knew that his services would be in demand. At the time, Israel’s population numbered less than three million. The country’s military relied upon reservists, and the government needed informants to help them know when to mobilise those reservists. Marwan’s motivation almost certainly holds the key to decoding his true loyalties, as well as, perhaps, the identity of his eventual killers. Did he, cash-strapped and fuming at his father-in-law, decide to sell his services to Israel in order to become rich? (One source claims that over the course of his career, he received more than $3m from the Israelis.) Or did he, as an impeccable patriot, simply hope to provide Mossad with ruinous information in the role of a double agent?

That Marwan worked with the Israelis is not contested. His wife, Mona, has said that, in the early 2000s, she confronted her husband. At first he denied passing information to the Israelis. Later, he admitted he passed information, but claimed that it had been false. What is the truth? Bregman believes he knows the answer. But he is tortured by another question: was he responsible for the spy’s death?

* * *





“It’s a big mistake to expose living spies,” Bregman told me, with professorial gravitas. “Never do it. Don’t do it. Even if you get the chance.” Then, to sugar the counsel with flattery: “I can see you are clever. Don’t do it.”

We met on a grey February afternoon at his office in King’s College London, an old university full of warren-like corridors and fussy masonry. It was here that Bregman sat on 27 June 2007, awaiting a call from the spy to tell him where the pair could meet later that day. The call never came. Bregman was not unduly concerned. During their five-year relationship, he had grown used to Marwan’s capriciousness – a spy’s habit born of paranoia and precaution.

Clean-shaven, dimpled, with a smiling, half-whisper of a voice that caused me to lean in conspiratorially, Bregman was fidgety and excitable, eager to tell the story and his role in it. (Bregman’s meticulously kept papers on the affair, including transcripts of his conversations with Marwan, are held in the college’s archives; the author of A History of Israel seems keen to have his own place in some future edition.)

Bregman is one of the leading historians of Israel’s 20th-century wars (he has written more than 10 books on the subject, and acted as an adviser to the BBC on two related documentaries). But he described himself to me as an “academic with the soul of a journalist”. His talent for investigative work is clear in the story of how he came to identify Marwan as the renowned agent “Angel” – the details of which he has never revealed before. “I believed that it was possible to take all of the literature on the Yom Kippur war and triangulate their identity,” he says. As he pored over the documents and memoirs, Bregman’s suspicions grew. Marwan became his white whale. “I needed some kind of confirmation,” he says. “You can’t just accuse someone of being a spy. Marwan was a very rich man; he could have taken me to court.”


historian Ahron Bregman

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‘It’s a big mistake to expose living spies. Never do it, even if you get the chance’ … historian Ahron Bregman. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

From 1999, Bregman began to send Marwan his articles, hoping to bait the spy into an admission. None came. Finally, the academic devised a plan. He would travel to Israel and meet the book editor who had published the memoirs of General Eli Zeira, the former director of Israel’s military intelligence, a few years earlier. Zeira, who was fired for acting on the spy’s incorrect information in April 1973, made numerous references in the book to Angel. “My assumption was that, even if Zeira would never confirm the name, his editor might.”

The pair met in a Tel Aviv cafe in 2000. “I planned my meeting very carefully,” says Bregman. The academic sat down and made small talk. “Ten minutes into the conversation, when he was warm to me but not tired of me, I asked the question.” Bregman could not have been more direct: “Is Marwan the spy?” The editor looked away and smiled. “This was my confirmation,” says Bregman. “Marwan was Angel.”




In London and in print, Bregman remained cautious. In his first book on the subject, Israel’s Wars, published later in 2000, he referred to Angel elliptically as “Nasser’s right-hand man”. He sent Marwan a copy. No response. Emboldened by the snub, Bregman went further in his second book, History of Israel, which was published in September 2002. “I wrote that Angel was one of Nasser’s relatives,” Bregman said. “And I claimed that he was sometimes code-named the ‘son-in-law’.” It was a lie, designed to provoke Marwan and tip off other journalists. Again, Bregman sent Marwan a copy of his book, this time bearing the inscription: “To Ashraf Marwan, hero of Egypt.” Still nothing. Nevertheless, the plan worked. In Egypt, another journalist arranged an interview with Marwan and asked him directly what he thought of Bregman’s claim. “Bregman’s book is a stupid detective story,” Marwan replied.

“I was hurt,” Bregman recalled. “I worked on that book for four years. How dare he?” Not only that, Bregman believed that Marwan had “blinked”. By dismissing the book as fiction, rather than threatening to take its author to court for libel, Marwan had, Bregman believed, given him further confirmation. “The journalist in me knew that I had a scoop. To not expose … it made no sense.” With a mixture of indignation and triumph, the following week Bregman gave an interview to the Egyptian weekly magazine Al-Ahram Al-Arabi. He met the paper’s journalist in a Starbucks in Wimbledon (close to the Nando’s where, years later, he would hear of Marwan’s death) and, during the course of the conversation, explicitly named Marwan as the spy. In the interview he said: “I have to defend my good name as a historian.”

On 29 December 2002, seven days after Bregman’s interview was published in Israel, he was in his garden, sweeping the winter leaves, when his wife called him into the house. There was a phone call. Bregman picked up the receiver. A voice on the other end of the line said, through a thick Arabic accent: “I’m the man that you have written about.” Bregman replied: “How can I be sure?” The voice said, simply: “You sent me the book with the dedication … ”

The two began a stuttering relationship. Bregman would call Marwan’s secretary in Cairo whenever he wanted to talk. “I would have to send her a fax to verify my identity. She would then pass that on to Marwan, in London, who would call me two minutes later.” Often Marwan would call, say nothing, hang up and call again minutes later – “spy stuff”, Bregman said. He’d identify himself only as “the subject of your book”. He warned Bregman that all of his calls were recorded by both the Egyptian and British intelligence services. Contrary to Bregman’s expectations, Marwan was not angry. “I had confused him, I think,” he says. “An academic, out of the blue, saying things … He was logical. He understood that his secret was out. He was clever. He turned me. He was charming, but also someone who could be very cruel. You could see. He used his charm. He turned me into his defender. All of a sudden I saw not the elusive spy, but the person with heart problems. The person with stress and all of the rest.” Bregman recalls that many of the calls were long. “He had nobody to talk to about all of this. You can’t discuss [espionage] with your wife or kids.”

Eventually Bregman asked whether he could write Marwan’s biography. Marwan declined. “He wanted the story to die. No biography.” This is puzzling in the light of the alleged missing memoir. Why would Marwan begin to write his autobiography if he wanted the story to go away? “The billion-dollar question,” Bregman told me. “Did he actually ever work on the book? Perhaps it was his way to stop me from writing mine.” As the months passed and Marwan asked Bregman’s advice on the writing process – he even asked Bregman to edit the book when he was finished with it – the academic became increasingly suspicious. “I’d ask him from time to time: what’s the name of the book? When will it be ready? Is it in English or Arabic? He told me it was in English because Arabs don’t read books.”

After Marwan’s death, finding proof of the memoir’s existence became an obsession for Bregman. He contacted every archive in the UK and the US to see if Marwan had left any copies. Only one respondent got back to him: Mary Curry, a librarian from the national archives in Washington. In a long email, Curry confirmed that Marwan had visited the archives twice, in January and March 2007, both times unannounced. Curry helped Marwan to search for his name on a database of declassified US government documents. It turned up in a transcript of a conversation between Henry Kissinger and Ismail Fahmi, the Egyptian foreign minister, from the mid-1970s, in which the three men discussed an arms deal. Marwan walked with a cane. He never mentioned a memoir. After he left the second time, Marwan sent Curry two boxes of Godiva chocolates. He never returned. Bregman told the police that he believed there was a book, but now he is unconvinced. Despite repeated requests, he never saw a word.


Ashraf Marwan (left) with the late President Nasser’s sons Abdel Hakim Nasser (centre) and Abdel Hamid Nasser (right) in Cairo in 2000.

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Ashraf Marwan (left) with the late President Nasser’s sons Abdel Hakim Nasser (centre) and Abdel Hamid Nasser (right) in Cairo in 2000. Photograph: Marwan Naamani/EPA

The pair met only once in person, in October 2003. Marwan initially invited Bregman to meet at the Dorchester hotel. “For Israelis like me, the Dorchester is a nightmare,” said Bregman. (It was at the Dorchester, in June 1982, that members of a Palestinian splinter group shot the Israeli ambassador to the UK, triggering the Lebanon war, in which Bregman fought as an artillery officer.) Bregman asked that the men meet, instead, at the InterContinental in Park Lane. Marwan was already fearful for his life. He told Bregman that Howard Blum’s 2003 book on the Yom Kippur war, which explicitly named him as Angel and outlined in detail how the spy began working for the Israelis, was “an invitation to assassinate me”. Their relationship was remote but persistent; Bregman believes Marwan wanted him to tell the version of the story that the spy wanted out there. Nevertheless, their friendship had strands of affection. Marwan was also lonely, Bregman said. Then, in 2007, the relationship became, as Bregman puts it, “much more dramatic”, with the panicked answerphone messages.




While Bregman had placed Marwan in some danger by exposing him as Angel, this was still only the word of a historian. No higher power had offered confirmation of the fact. This was to come soon enough. In Israel, Marwan had become the subject of a high-profile court case between two senior Israeli officers, General Zeira (whose book editor had tipped off Bregman to Marwan’s identity) and Zvi Zamir, the former head of Mossad. Zamir accused Zeira of leaking Marwan’s identity to the press. Zeira sued Zamir for libel. The case dragged on until, finally, the judge, Theodore Or (“a very tough guy”, according to Bregman), ruled on 25 March 2007 that Zeira had leaked the identity of Angel to unauthorised persons. The verdict became public three months later, on 14 June. Within 13 days, Marwan was dead.

When Bregman saw the reports of the verdict, in which a judge officially named Marwan as “Angel” for the first time, he immediately wrote to Marwan, to warn him that his life might be in danger. By mistake, Bregman, who had been warned by Marwan not to call any more, sent the letter to the spy’s old address. “Usually he would get back to me within 48 hours,” he says. “I heard nothing for a week.” When Marwan eventually received the letter, he left a trio of panicked messages on Bregman’s answerphone, all within the space of an hour. “It was unheard-of,” Bregman says. “The first time this had happened in five years.”

This was how Ahron Bregman came to be waiting in his office for a call from Ashraf Marwan on the day of the spy’s death. And this is how Bregman came to feel tremendous guilt. “I was a big hero when I exposed him,” Bregman later wrote. “But a very small one after he died.”

“Look,” Bregman said, quietly now. “With journalists, we are sometimes so determined to crack the nut that we forget that there are things around us. Your family. His family. We are human beings. And then you hear a voice. You hear him breathing. You hear him tell you about his heart problems. And this person that you’ve seen all this time as a superhero spy, someone made of gold and all the rest? That is not true. He is a human being.”

Did Marwan jump or was he pushed? “Killing him didn’t have to be a physical push,” Bregman told me. “You can say to a person: you have two sons. If you want us to leave them alone, you should jump … Maybe something like that. But the inquest couldn’t decide.” As to which nation or organisation might have been behind the push, be it physical or psychological?

“I don’t know,” he says. “The British, maybe they know something. It’s here somewhere.”


* * *

If the British do know something, then they have not blinked. The police identified the two men who were standing on Marwan’s balcony when he fell to his death, but have never made their names public. All information pertaining to Marwan’s life or death is, as of 30 July 2015, subject to no fewer than six freedom of information exemptions, including:


Section 23(5) – Information relating to Security Bodies
Section 24(2) – National Security
Section 27(4) – International Relations

Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt at the time of Marwan’s death, is the only national leader to have publicly suggested a culprit (curveball: Libyans). If Egypt was behind Marwan’s murder, they certainly made it look otherwise. The spy’s funeral in Cairo was stately: the Egyptian flag and Marwan’s military decorations adorned the coffin. Mubarak’s son, Gamal, was in attendance, and the president even issued a statement saying: “I do not doubt his loyalty.”

But neither does Zvi Zamir, the former head of Mossad. Marwan spied loyally for the Israelis for reasons of “money and ego”, Zamir told me, in an interview from his apartment in Tel Aviv arranged by Uri Bar-Joseph. Now 90, Zamir is also haunted by his former agent’s death. “Not a single day passes without my torturing myself over the question of whether I could have protected him better,” he wrote, in his own memoir, With Open Eyes.


Ashraf Marwan’s funeral in Cairo on 1 Jul 2007.

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Ashraf Marwan’s funeral in Cairo on 1 Jul 2007. Photograph: Nasser Nuri/Reuters/Corbis

At the time of the inquest, Marwan’s wife, Mona, said that she believed Mossad agents murdered her husband. But this seems unlikely. For one thing, killing a former agent after his name is revealed would seem to be a major disincentive for new recruits. Even if Israel believed that Marwan was a double agent, working for the Egyptians, better to do nothing and, through their silence, imply he was faithful to their cause. And in all this talk of whom Marwan worked for, the question of who Marwan was has been lost.




In late June, six months after my first attempt at making contact with Marwan’s family, a reply arrived from Ahmed, the late spy’s younger son. (The family’s British lawyer, John Harding, was copied in.) Ahmed agreed to meet me during a visit to London from his home in Cairo in early July. Just after midnight one Sunday morning I received an email, telling me to be in a hotel lobby in Green Park the following day.

I arrived on time; 15 minutes later, Ahmed entered through the sliding doors, and beckoned me outside. Charming and stubbled, handsome at 44, with the resonant voice of a chain smoker (he drags, with Gallic commitment, on a Philip Morris cigarette between each equally deliberate sentence). We sat outside, in a neighbouring cafe. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to record our conversation, concerned that we wouldn’t be heard over the ambient timpani of pneumatic drills and car horns. “I guess we’re both going to record this,” Ahmed replied, placing his identical phone next to mine.

He remembers his father in superlatives. Marwan was “the kindest man”, “the most human individual”, “full of life”, “very funny”. He “hardly ever lost his temper” and was “a very deliberate” individual. Ahmed moved with his father to London at the age of nine, the year before President Sadat’s assassination (contrary to many reports). All he remembers of his father in those early years was that he travelled and read a great deal. Ahmed and his father were close. They spoke most days, sometimes more than once. They’d talk about football. “He was a wise individual,” he says. “I enjoyed talking to him.”

Ahmed was in a meeting in Cairo when his father died. His secretary rang to ask if he was OK, not realising that he didn’t know yet. Ahmed told her that he was in a meeting and put the phone down. Eventually, the message came through from Ahmed’s older brother, Gamal: “Pappy is in the hands of God.” He arrived in London the following day at 6am.

I asked him about his mental state in all of the confusion. Did he want to know what happened? “We know what happened,” he said, quickly. “It’s very clear what happened.” It’s a strange response in a case that remains notorious for its lack of clarity.

“What happened?” I asked. “It is imperative that I am very careful and choosy of my words,” he said, after a moment. “There was an inquest. And in the inquest a lot of evidence was presented. And the judge said he rejects the possibility that my late father took his own life. There is no evidence to support that whatsoever. So it’s clear what did not happen.

“Now, to talk in terms of what did happen, you need certain amounts of evidence. The way things developed meant there was no single individual that a finger could be pointed towards. But it’s very clear what did not happen. It was important to get that settled. For my faith. For our family. For history.”

Surely, the knowledge that his father did not commit suicide only opens up fresh questions, I said. Those questions niggle at me. Has he made his peace with the mystery?

“I wouldn’t say I’m at peace,” he says. “But I accept what happened. I accept … ”

A long and difficult pause.

“I accept that my father is no longer here. It’s a fact. Do I miss him? Yes. Do I wish we spent more time together? Yes. He was young. Very young. It’s what happened. What else can you do? We’re never going to find a name to say who did this. Sometimes one has to accept the limitations of what one can do.”


Mona Marwan (centre) and Ahmed Marwan (centre right), widow and son of Ashraf Marwan, leaving court in London after the 2010 inquest into his death returned no verdict.

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Mona Marwan (centre) and Ahmed Marwan (centre right), widow and son of Ashraf Marwan, leaving court in London after the 2010 inquest into his death returned no verdict. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty

“Why do you think he was killed?” I asked.




“I have to be very choosy … ”

“Why?”

“Because we are talking about … I am a father.”

“Are you worried there would be repercussions, even now?”

“There are always consequences for what people say and do. However, things are settled in court. Things are settled internally. Things are settled in society. History just unfolds. That’s why I choose to be careful.”

“Who killed your father?”

Another pause.

“Someone saw it in their interest,” he said. “They had a reason to do it. It’s very easy to look at: who was this individual? What did he do? Then you can start seeing a bunch of possibilities.

“As the saying goes,” he continued, “if you don’t see the sun at noon, it’s because you don’t want to see it. It’s right there.”

* * *

Midway through our conversation, the phone rings: it’s Mona. The incoming call paused Ahmed’s recording, and he frantically sent his mother to answerphone. Soon, she called again; apologising, Ahmed answered in Arabic, and stood and walked to the end of the street, out of earshot. I sat wondering why Ahmed had met with me, a foreign journalist; I imagined that Mona, who surely knew of our meeting, was checking in to see how things were going, to make sure he hadn’t said anything that might put them in danger. And then I remembered something Bregman had told me months earlier, about the sense of peace he felt after his secret was out. “You are only in danger when you have the information inside you,” he said. “As soon as it’s released, you’re not important any more.” Perhaps.

When Ahmed returned to the table, I asked him whether all of this had spoiled London. Until recently, he said, wherever he walked, he would see his father: the tailors in which they bought their suits, the shop where they bought chocolate bars, the pizza place where he would always order the same thing, decade in, decade out. Then, as sudden as it was gradual, Ahmed said that he felt settled when he visited the city. “London is London and the memories are there,” he said. “I can be sad that he is not here with me any more. I can also be full of joy and fondness remembering all these times together. Eight years … is enough time for wounds to start healing.”

I asked Ahmed what he had learned from his father.

“He once told me: ‘Ahmed. Everything you want to know in the world is public. You just have to look at it and research it and put the dots together. Anything and everything you want to know is there for us to see.’”

A few weeks after I met Marwan’s youngest son, I contacted Bregman again. I asked him why he thinks Ahmed was so careful with his words. “Because he believes it is a murder,” he replied. “Better to shut up. It’s too dangerous otherwise. This world is extremely murky.”

I recall that Bregman dedicated his book to Marwan, a “hero of Egypt”. And yet, after spending so much time considering the case, it was hard not to conclude that Egypt had the most to gain through Marwan’s death, just as they had the most to lose from a formal admission in a memoir that Marwan had double-crossed them. Then there are those other Egyptian bodies, thrown from high-rise London buildings. Marwan’s murder is another stitch in a pattern that’s difficult to ignore. I asked Bregman bluntly what he would say to refute my impression that the Egyptians had a hand in Marwan’s death. He answered, plainly: “I would not.”

Bregman patiently answered my final questions while he was supposed to be relaxing on a holiday in Wyoming. The symbolism is clear; this is a story that won’t leave the historian alone. Eight years on, and still he cannot flee the questions. And yet he chooses to reply, even when he has no answers – no doubt because they are the same questions he continues to ask of himself. “I don’t know whether Marwan died because of me,” Bregman said, “but what I do know is that it was not a good idea to unmask a living spy. It was a big mistake.”

“I have never put the matter to rest,” he tells me, before we finally say goodbye. “It is just too big.”
[/quote]

[Philip]

Split in Israel intel establishment over Iran N-deal.

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comme ... us-on-iran

Jeffrey Collins: Israeli intelligence increasingly worried about Netanyahu’s focus on Iran
Republish Reprint

Jeffrey Collins, National Post | September 20, 2015

Now in his fourth term of office, Israeli prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has spent years carefully crafting a public image as the embodiment of Israel’s national security. As a wedge issue, this positioning has played well to the Israeli centre-right, ensuring electoral success for Netanyahu’s Likud party over the last three parliamentary elections. Given the post-Arab Spring chaos surrounding Israel, it is easy to see why a security-heavy message resonates with voters.

However, Netanyahu’s ballot box achievements as his country’s defender may be coming undone. The 65-year old prime minister is very likely on the precipice of being outmanoeuvred on the security file by retired members of the military elite.

The most prominent of these critics include Netanyahu’s own former defence minister, Ehud Barak (a former prime minister himself and Israel’s most decorated officer) and former top solider, Chief of the General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi. Both men are being courted to fill a leadership vacuum on Israel’s centre-left, currently occupied by lawyer Isaac Herzog of the Zionist Camp, an alliance between the Labor and Hatnuah parties.

At the heart of the issue is Netanyahu’s continued opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. While hardly perfect, there is a sense that delaying Tehran’s nuclear ambitions for a decade is a worthwhile effort. Many in the security establishment think the prime minister’s outspoken efforts to scuttle the deal are undermining the U.S.-Israel defence relationship. In early March, before his speech to Congress, a half-dozen prominent former military leaders, speaking under the name “Commanders for Israel’s Security,” held a press conference in Tel Aviv blasting Netanyahu for doing “irreparable harm to the country’s relations with the U.S.”

Such stringent comments reflect a growing unease among military brass about the stridently partisan tone of Netanyahu’s opposition, actions that conflict with the longstanding position of non-partisan relations between Israel, the U.S. State Department and the presidency. By aligning largely with Congressional Republicans and antagonizing the Obama White House, there is a perception that the prime minister could possibly jeopardize what is seen as a close defence relationship based around intelligence sharing and access to advanced weapons technology. Accordingly, they see Bibi’s rejection of U.S. military compensation, in the form of more cash and technology, as bordering on reckless: a point captured by ex-National Security Council head Uzi Arad when he claimed that Netanyahu “is gambling with Israel’s security when he has an opportunity and Israel has a need for renewed strategic assurances from the administration.”

At the heart of the issue is Netanyahu’s continued opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.

Just as damaging, though, is the criticism that Netanyahu’s posturing toward an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is, at best, strategically misguided, and, at worse, dangerous. During a speech at Hebrew University, former Mossad director Meir Dagan called Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran the “stupidest thing I have ever heard.” Ehud Barak, in particular, has been busily tearing apart Netanyahu’s strongman persona through the use of leaked audio recordings, in which he posits the Likud leader as weak and indecisive during ministerial discussions on attacking Iran.

Moreover, there is a feeling that the attention on Iran is coming at the expense of dealing with the longstanding problems on Israel’s borders, chiefly a need to restart the Palestinian peace process, end the occupation, and contain Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal pointed at the country’s north, a view echoed by current Mossad director Tamir Pardo. Last November, some 105 retired Israel Defence Force officers, senior cops and ex-Mossad directors published a letter calling on Netanyahu to refrain from joining “the ranks of those who use threats as an excuse for resting on our laurels, and to initiate a political process” on the Palestinian issue.
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In this light, it is somewhat telling that the IDF released publicly, for the first time, its official strategy in August. In what can be interpreted as a silent rebuke of Netanyahu, the 33-page document, written by current IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, does not even identify Iran’s nuclear program as a concern, with the Shia theocracy getting only one mention. Instead, the IDF strategy views the terror threat alongside Israel’s borders, which the prime minister has done little to address after six consecutive years in office, as the central issue needing to be addressed.

Of course, compounding these concerns has been the annual budget battle between the military and the government. Financial constraints have the left the IDF with fewer helicopter squadrons, fewer career officers, and reduced reserve training time, leaving the country in the same precarious situation in which it found itself before the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006. All told, Netanyahu’s fourth term in office may end up being his last.

National Post

Jeffrey F. Collins is a PhD candidate in political science at Carleton University and co-editor of the book, Reassessing The Revolution in Military Affairs: Transformation, Evolution and Lessons Learnt.

If you don't pay for info,will you get anything worthwhile either?
http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-new ... 91896.aspx
UK spy agency paying Muslims to snoop on terror suspects: Report
HT Correspondent, Hindustan Times, New Delhi| Updated: Sep 20, 2015

The United Kingdom's spy agency, MI5, is paying Muslims across the country to snoop on homegrown Islamist extremists in short-term missions to avert terror strikes, The Guardian has reported.

"Individuals across the UK, including in Manchester and London, are being employed on temporary assignments to acquire intelligence on specific targets, according to sources within the Muslim community. One said that they knew of an informant recently paid £2,000 by the British security services to spy on activities relating to a mosque over a six-week period," the newspaper reported.

The use of payments to gather intelligence prompted warnings that the system risked producing information "corrupted" by the money on offer, according to the report.

The initiative is being co-ordinated under the UK government's official post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategy.

Last year, Britain raised its terrorism threat level to 'severe', the second highest category which means a militant attack is considered highly likely. It was largely due to the danger the authorities say is posed by Islamic State (IS) fighters and the hundreds of Britons who have joined them.

The Security Service, commonly known as MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), is Britain's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency - part of the intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS; also known as MI6) focused on foreign threats, Defence Intelligence (DI) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The programme is "driven by the (intelligence) agencies, it's a network of human resources across the country engaged to effectively spy on specific targets. It's decent money," said another source.

The sources did not divulge the number of informants receiving government funding or how much of the agency's national security budget is allocated to such transactions.

However, the use of payments to gather information prompted calls for caution from senior figures in the Muslim community, who warned that such transactions could produce tainted intelligence.

Salman Farsi, spokesman for the East London Mosque, the largest in the UK, said: "We want our national security protected but, as with everything, there needs to be due scrutiny and we need to ensure things are done properly.

"If there's money on the table, where's the scrutiny or the oversight to ensure whether someone has not just come up with some fabricated information? Money can corrupt."

Lessons should be learned from the government's central counter-radicalisation programme, called Prevent, which was introduced following the July 7 bombings, but despite tens of millions of pounds spent and hundreds of initiatives has been criticised for failing to achieve its goals, Farsi said.

He added: "When they started dishing out money, everyone was willing for a bit of money to dish the dirt, make up stuff. There's good work to be done, but quite frankly you don't need to send in informants to mosques to find out what's going on. We need a fresh approach, genuine community engagement."

[Multatuli]

From Radio to *****, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities

HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.”

Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to *****, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.

The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.

Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.

One system builds profiles showing people’s web browsing histories. Another analyzes instant messenger communications, emails, Skype calls, text messages, cell phone locations, and social media interactions. Separate programs were built to keep tabs on “suspicious” Google searches and usage of Google Maps.

The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant.

Metadata reveals information about a communication — such as the sender and recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and at what time — but not the written content of the message or the audio of the call.

As of 2012, GCHQ was storing about 50 billion metadata records about online communications and Web browsing activity every day, with plans in place to boost capacity to 100 billion daily by the end of that year. The agency, under cover of secrecy, was working to create what it said would soon be the biggest government surveillance system anywhere in the world.
Radio radicalization

The power of KARMA POLICE was illustrated in 2009, when GCHQ launched a top-secret operation to collect intelligence about people using the Internet to listen to radio shows.

The agency used a sample of nearly 7 million metadata records, gathered over a period of three months, to observe the listening habits of more than 200,000 people across 185 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany.

Read further: https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gch ... dentities/

[Philip]

"The truth will out".famous old saying and as the years pass on and more classified files are eleased,history very often has to be rewritten.In this case the infamous Zinoviev letter-a CWar scandal. Here,a classic case of Brit intel manipulating a gen. election.

In years to come we will know the truth about the so-called "colour revolutions" informer E.Europe Sov. bloc countries and the real; forces behind the "Arab Spring".The Telegraph UK carried a front page report a few years ago about how the CIA had allegedly plotted Mubarak's downfall for over a year.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/o ... arde[quote]
Revealed: the dark past of ‘Outcast’, MI6’s top wartime double agent
Secret files name man who spied on Nazis as Alexis Bellegarde, Russian émigré linked to the infamous Zinoviev letter
Lenin's Successors
Grigory Zinoviev, right, with, from left, Joseph Stalin and leading Bolsheviks Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev in 1925. Photograph: Corbis

Richard Orange
Saturday 10 October 2015

Documents from a secret Swedish archive have identified “Outcast”, the double agent judged by MI6 as “one of the most successful spies against Germany that the 1939-45 war produced”, as a White Russian émigré previously involved in the most notorious smear in British political history.

The documents reveal him as Alexis Bellegarde, one of four White Russian aristocrats believed to have been behind an infamous forgery 15 years before the war began. The revelations of Bellegarde’s importance to MI6 will increase suspicions that British agents had a hand in the production of the “Zinoviev letter”; its leak to the Daily Mail many believe cost Labour the 1924 general election.

The letter, a message supposedly from Grigory Zinoviev, leader of the Communist International in Moscow, to the Communist party of Great Britain, predicted that a trade deal soon to be concluded between the Labour government and the Soviet Union would open the way to radicalising the British proletariat. It was leaked to the Daily Mail just days before the election, which the Conservatives won resoundingly.

Professor Tore Pryser, an expert on second world war espionage in Scandinavia, said documents obtained by a Swedish researcher, Anders Thunberg, from the archive of Sweden’s immigration department, revealed today in the Observer for the first time, confirmed Outcast’s identity beyond all doubt. “After Thunberg’s research, I am 100% convinced that Outcast and Bellegarde are the same person,” he said.

In MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, an officially sanctioned history by Professor Keith Jeffery, Outcast is not named but is described as “a Russian émigré, formerly living in Berlin” who “escaped from Tallinn with German help, but at the price of agreeing to work for the Abwehr [German military intelligence] Russian section”.

“When in late 1943 Outcast, ill with tuberculosis, wanted to move with his family from Berlin to Stockholm,” Jeffery adds, “SIS [the Secret Intelligence Service] was supportive, and he managed it early in 1944. But the Swedes refused to let him stay and he was evacuated to Britain, where he died the following year.”

The documents Thunberg found last month show every aspect of the story also to be true of Bellegarde. “The most important thing was the document about the British secret service chief in Stockholm,” he said.

According to records in Sweden’s foreign ministry archives, on 3 February 1944, two weeks before Bellegarde arrived at the Swedish port of Malmö, Cyril Cheshire, the head of MI6’s Stockholm station, told Sweden’s foreign ministry of his impending arrival, promising that the British would take care of him and be able to secure space on a flight to England for the family within two weeks.

“He was afraid that if Bellegarde came to Sweden he would be refused entry,” Thunberg said. “That’s why he contacted them in advance. Only important people could find a seat on a plane over the North Sea to Great Britain.”

Michael Bellegarde, a retired property executive living in Suffolk, Bellegarde’s sole surviving child, said he was also in no doubt that his father was the agent Outcast described in Jeffery’s book: “MI6 just will not, as a matter of the Official Secrets Act, disclose the name, but there are so many similarities.”

He added that his father was already “a tremendous anglophile” at the time of the Russian revolution, having learned to speak and write flawless English in St Petersburg from an Englishman his father had employed as his tutor.

By the time Bellegarde offered his services to MI6’s Helsinki station in September 1940, he had been working for the Abwehr for a little over a month. According to Jeffery’s history, by November Outcast had told the British that “German command was preparing a June campaign against the USSR, which would begin in spring 1941, possibly earlier”. Throughout 1942 and 1943, he provided detailed reports on the impact of RAF bombing campaigns in Berlin and other German cities, and fed MI6 disinformation to the Abwehr.

“By the end of 1942 he had begun to include information on the power struggle between Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst [the Nazi SS intelligence service], a subject of great interest as well to London, since he belonged to a circle of officers regarded as close to [Abwehr chief] Admiral Canaris,” Jeffery writes. “In early 1943, he was evaluated as ‘the best source of information on the German interior produced so far in the war’.”

According to Jeffery, Outcast “had been an important source on Soviet matters” for MI6 before the war started, raising the possibility that he already had links to British spies in 1924 when, according to his widow, he had a hand in forging the Zinoviev letter.

Irina Bellegarde told the Sunday Times in 1966 that her husband had drafted the letter after being contacted by another émigré, Alexander Gumansky, who told him a request to forge the letter had come from “a person in authority in London”.

The two secured a sheet of official Third International notepaper through a Mr Druzhelovsky, whom Irina Bellegarde described as “a little man, badly in need of some real money”. A fourth man, Edward Friede, whose party trick was forging signatures, then copied Zinoviev’s sign-off.

Supporting Irina Bellegarde’s story is the fact that both Gurmansky and Bellegarde were sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet court, while Druzhelovsky was captured, put on trial in 1928 and shot.

Pryser goes so far as to suggest that Jeffery kept Bellegarde anonymous in his book to conceal his links to MI6 at the time of the forgery. “Jeffery mentions the names of many officers and agents working for SIS. Why has he forgotten Outcast?” he asks. “Obviously, Jeffery wants to hide that Bellegarde/Outcast worked for SIS on the Zinoviev forgery.”

However, Jeffery denied the affair had affected his decision not to name Outcast. “There were stringent restrictions on naming SIS/MI6 agents, which was only possible if authoritative confirmation existed in publicly available materials,” he wrote. “At the time of writing, no such confirmation was available relating to agent Outcast. The material found by your Scandinavian researchers may constitute such material, but I am not in a position now retrospectively to confirm this. All I can say is that the non-identification of Outcast had nothing to do with the Zinoviev letter affair.”

Michael Bellegarde believes his father forged the letter on his own initiative rather than on London’s orders, aiming to prevent an Anglo-Soviet trade deal.
[/quote]

[Austin]

Leaked: 'New Snowden' releases Obama's drone program papers

Drone Papers https://theintercept.com/drone-papers

[Philip]

In recent times two UK spy cases have gripped the media with their sensational details.The Litvinenko "polonium" hit,and the mysterious death in a hold-all of GCHQ spook ,Gareth Williams.Livinenko's death has been attributed to several entities,ranging from "Vlad the Bad" Putin.,to Russian oligarchs in exile and even the Brit secret services.While the Brits blame the Russians,the Russians blame the Brits saying that the event was an attempt to besmirch Russia and Putin.

The Gareth Williams mystery is even more intriguing.He was found in a locked holdall,with the initial suggestion that he was engaged in a kinky sexual activity which went wrong! Despite the fact that he was working for the ultra-secret GCHQ,Britain's equiv of the NSA, the obvious assumption that he was murdered was scotched by the authorities.Why? Now we have a theory put forward by yet another Russian defector,that he was bumped off by the Russians. The details would make a great film,but why would a covert double-agent ensconced in GCHQ ,the mecca of commns intel risk being blown by engaging in a crude blackmail attempt of Williams? It doesn't ring true. Any intel org. worth its salt would use entities unknown to the agent,not risking his cover. Williams could've easily have telephoned his bosses and told them about the attempt. Was it more likely that Williams was the double agent,or suspected double agent and in interrogating him by Brit intel,something horribly went wrong? Or he could've been blackmailed by another intel outfit,not necessarily the Russians who botched the job.
These days Russia bashing is the staple food of the West,badly bruised by Russia and Putin's gambits in the UKR/Crimea and Syria.

The yarn also makes a mockery of MI-5,as coupled with the Litvinenko affair,it gives the impression that Russian spooks are running amok in the UK with gay abandon,and that the kinkiness and deviant behavior of Brit agents remains std. practice!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... -plot.html

'Spy in bag' Gareth Williams was 'murdered by Russian hitmen after sexual photo blackmail plot'

Former major and intelligence officer Boris Karpichkov claims he knows the truth behind the MI6 spy's death

British code breaker Gareth Williams Photo: PA
By Lucy Clarke-Billings
24 Oct 2015

Gareth Williams, the MI6 spy whose body was found in a bag, was murdered by Russian hitmen who blackmailed him with compromising sexual photographs, according to a former KGB major.

The former major and intelligence officer Boris Karpichkov, who was exiled from Russia and now lives in the UK with a new identity, claimed Mr Williams was given a lethal injection in the ear and put into the holdall by Russian operatives.

Mr Williams' naked, decomposing body was found in the bath of his flat in Pimlico, London, in August 2010, after colleagues noticed he had not turned up for work.

The locked handles of the holdall had been fastened with Velcro and there was no sign of him struggling to escape.

No finger, foot, palm prints or DNA belonging to Mr Williams were found on the rim of the bath, padlock or zipper and he was not wearing any gloves.

The key to the padlock was underneath his body, which was curled into a foetal position inside the bag, and the heating in the flat had been turned up, even though it was the middle of the summer.

"Most of the fundamental questions in relation to how Gareth died remain unanswered,"
Coroner Fiona Wilcox, in 2012

There were also no signs of a break in and what followed was a gruelling and fundamentally inconclusive three-year investigation into his death.

A coroner ruled in 2012 that the spy was “probably killed unlawfully”, but also ruled it unlikely his death will ever be “satisfactorily explained”.

But despite the result of the inquest and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, the police concluded in 2012 that Mr Williams most likely got into the bag by himself and died after failing to get out again.

However, William MacKay, a confined spaces expert who gave evidence at the inquest, disagreed, and Nr Williams’ family have maintained that he was murdered.

The interior of Gareth Willaims' flat on Alderney Street, London

At the same time as his inquest, there were reports that he died in a solo sex game gone wrong, while £20,000 worth of women’s clothing had been found in his flat.

Mr Williams was also reported to have visited bondage sex websites and was seen browsing for ladies’ clothes at exclusive stores in central London.

Mr Karpichkov, 56, who claims to have a source high up in Russian intelligence services, told the Daily Mail a Russian double agent working at GCHQ set his sights on recruiting Mr Williams to work for the SVR, formerly known as the KGB.

The GCHQ double agent, known as Orion, befriended Mr Williams and introduced him to a third party named Lukas, according to Mr Karpichkov.

A representation of the lock on the red sports bag that Gareth Willaims body was discovered in at his flat

Allegedly, Mr Williams drink was spiked on a night out with Lukas and he passed out.

Photographs were then taken of him in bed next to a man and woman and were used in an attempt to force Mr Williams to cooperate, otherwise his friends and family would see them, says Mr Karpichkov.

"What we are left with is a lack of such evidence that can logically support one of a number of hypotheses,"
Detective Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt, in 2013

Fearing Orion's role as a mole inside GCHQ would be exposed when Williams returned from leave to MI6 the following day, a plan was hatched to deal with the ‘imminent threat’ posed by Williams.

According to Mr Karpichkov, Lukas returned later that evening to Williams’s flat, bringing a bottle of wine and saying he wanted to apologise for the ‘confusion’ about his earlier visit.

But the wine had been spiked with drugs and shortly after he lost consciousness, he was injected inside the ear with a poison mixed with plant extracts and a chemical called diphenhydramine, a fatal compound which breaks down quickly and is difficult to detect.

Mr Karpichkov served in Russian intelligence for more than a decade, reaching the rank of KGB major where he was privy to Kremlin secrets at the highest level.

[Philip]

Finally free!

Jonathan Pollard,the Israeli spy in the US who was imprisoned for 30 years has been finally released.
Why the US hated him so much has never been fully revealed,but that it has taken 3 decades for the US's closest ally to get him freed indicates how serious the US took his spying.Few spies have been treated as such.If he was a US citizen and spying for the Soviets, he may even have been executed like the Rosenbergs! This is a big coup for Bibi N,succeeding where other Israeli leaders have failed.It also underscores the immense support Israel gives to its agents who are caught and troops captured. Something that we in India must emulate.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/n ... raeli-ties

Spy Jonathan Pollard freed after 30 years but still a thorn in US-Israeli ties
Opinions about the 61-year-old who passed secrets to US ally are sharply divided – a hero to the Israeli right but to others a traitor who did untold damage

Israelis hold placards demanding Jonathan Pollard’s release during a protest in Jerusalem in 2014. Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

Jessica Glenza in New York and Peter Beaumont
Friday 20 November 2015

After 30 years in prison Jonathan Pollard, a former US civilian naval intelligence clerk convicted of spying for Israel, has been released from prison on parole at the age of 61.

Pollard, who sold US secrets for money, was released on Friday morning from the US federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, after serving his minimum recommended sentence. He is the only person to have received a life sentence for spying on the US for an ally.

Despite his release he will be subjected to rigorous bail conditions that confine him to living in the New York area, bans him from access to the internet and forbids him from giving interviews.

Pollard will also not be allowed to travel abroad for at least five years despite efforts by Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to persuade Barack Obama that he should be allowed to travel to Israel.

Welcoming his release, Netanyahu, one of the most prominent advocates for a pardon for Pollard over the years, said in a statement: “The people in Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard. As someone who has raised the issue for many years with American presidents, I have dreamt of this day. After three long and hard decades, Jonathan is finally reunited with his family.”

Pollard’s case was seen in strikingly different terms in Israel and the US – even when the possibility of his release was being discussed as a quid pro quo for progress on Middle East peace, a deal that never came to pass.

For US officials he was seen as an unreliable Walter Mitty figure who had betrayed his country for financial gain, and American politicians, particularly those with intelligence interests, have lobbied against his release. He is seen as a traitor by many Americans, one who damaged trust between the US and its Jewish citizens.

However, in Israel – which gave him citizenship while he was in prison – he was ultimately embraced by officials after initially being left to his fate.

Since his arrest, Pollard has been described as intelligent, but having an “extreme and unstable personality”, making his very acceptance in the intelligence community shocking.

Despite the high profile campaign to secure a pardon, including a recent personal appeal to Obama by Netanyahu, in recent weeks it has become clear that Israeli politicians and Pollard’s supporters have changed tack.

Netanyahu this week asked ministers to refrain from commenting on the Pollard case, while his supporters have become increasingly tight-lipped amid speculation that a less aggressive approach might see his parole conditions lifted.

Pollard’s case played out in the 1980s. After his graduation from Stanford University, Pollard attempted to realise dreams of becoming a spy for Israel’s intelligence apparatus, Mossad.

He started working for the US navy as an intelligence officer and by 1984 offered to pass secrets to an Israeli air force veteran.

He and his wife, Anne Henderson, were arrested in 1985 after Pollard passed “suitcases” of classified documents to Israeli intelligence in exchange for $10,000 and jewels, Haaretz reported. He pleaded guilty in 1986 in hopes of avoiding a life sentence, but in 1987 the plea agreement was rejected by federal court judge Caspar W Weinberger.

Some contend Pollard passed thousands more documents to Israel. A former deputy general counsel for national security at the FBI, ME Bowman, maintained in an editorial in the New York Times that Pollard passed enough documents to “occupy 360 cubic feet”.

Pollard’s supporters have long argued that documents he stole were intelligence that should have been passed to Israel anyway – they were vital to security and should have been shared as part of a memorandum of agreement between the countries.

“Pollard was painfully aware that Israeli lives were being put in jeopardy as a result of this undeclared intelligence embargo,” attorneys argue on a website dedicated to his cause. “He did everything he possibly could to stop this covert policy and to have the legal flow of information to Israel restored. When his efforts met no success, he began to give the information to Israel directly.”

But many in American intelligence believe far more sensitive documents were lost, some of which could continue to affect operations today. One in particular was a document that would have revealed how the US government collects intelligence in Russia, and where it believes signal bases are.

“Both during the cold war and in counter-terrorism today, intercepting enemy communication is vital,” Bowman wrote. “Disclosing our methods is an even greater danger than releasing what we have collected.”

Over the course of decades, Pollard’s prison cell became a kind of pilgrimage site for conservative Israeli politicians, who elevated Pollard’s case rather than helping him keep a low profile. The Israeli government even paid for his attorneys and later granted him citizenship. Public support in Israel is widespread, and appears to surge every few years. Thousands have signed online petitions demanding Pollard’s release.

And from one US president to the next, Pollard served as a kind of bargaining chip.

In 1998 Bill Clinton agreed to review the case to satisfy the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, during peace talks. In 2013 Israeli parliamentarians demanded Pollard’s release after the Guardian published surveillance revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. In 2014 many in the Israeli media speculated about a deal between the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and Netanyahu that would free Pollard in exchange for a freeze on contentious Israeli settlements. His release was also seen as a bargaining chip to quiet Israeli criticism of the United States’ nuclear deal with Iran.

His life sentence was called antisemitic and overly harsh by supporters while opponents saw it as just. Some argued that statutes allowing prosecution of espionage to neutral or allied countries only allowed a 10-year sentence.

Opponents argue Pollard is the only American-born spy to pass such a volume of documents to another country, and that he would have faced the death penalty had it not been illegal at the federal level at the time. Opponents have also said that Israel wasn’t the only place he was looking to pawn off intelligence. He reportedly also passed classified information to a South African attache.

Even with his release, clemency remains a contentious political football.

Two New York congressmen have asked the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to allow Pollard to renounce his US citizenship and move to Israel immediately. Conservative representatives in Israel’s Knesset, the country’s legislative body, have proposed bills that would give Pollard a lifetime salary, healthcare and housing upon his arrival in Israel.

“Mr Pollard understands that, as a condition of being permitted to move to Israel, he may need to renounce his American citizenship,” wrote congressmen Eliot Engel and Jerry Nadler. “Despite the serious consequences that may follow such a decision, including being permanently barred from returning to the United States, he is willing to undertake this extraordinary measure.”

Pollard’s attorney did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.

It still goes on,ally or not!
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/a ... ort-report
Israel spied on John Kerry during failed peace talks – report
Der Spiegel says Israelis eavesdropped on phone calls
State Department offers no comment

[Philip]

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/322968-legat ... applebaum/

Don’t agree with Legatum? You must be a ‘KGB’ agent!
RT Editorial
Published time: 21 Nov, 2015 08:48

Federal Security Service, formerly NKVD and KGB, building in Lubyanka Square, Moscow © Str

During the Cold War, western intelligence agencies devoted millions of dollars and endless hours of manpower in their attempts to uncover Russian intelligence operatives. Nowadays, this task is apparently much simpler.

“We don't see things as they are, but as we are” - Anaïs Nin

According to the Legatum Institute, anybody who doesn’t agree with them is under the control of Moscow’s security services. The notion that an individual might have an honest personal opinion that differs from their worldview is unfathomable for these intrepid, self-appointed defenders of freedom.

You’ve read this correctly. A think-tank which claims to be devoted to “revitalising” democracy is smearing its opponents as ‘spooks’. Not just any old sort either - KGB agents.

Yes, the same KGB that was disbanded in 1991. While many Western commentators on Russia are stuck in a Cold War mentality, Legatum’s top brass actually seem to believe that era never ended.

Legatum’s boreal conflict with imagined Russian functionaries turned febrile on Sunday night. Wikileaks, the well-known whistle-blowing organization, tweeted a profile of Anne Applebaum to its 2.8 million Twitter followers. Wikileaks is perhaps best known for releasing US State department diplomatic "cables" and publishing the "Guantanamo Files".

The November 2014 piece, by the veteran Moscow reporter John Helmer, provided evidence, from Polish state records that Anne Applebaum, the director of Legatum’s ‘Transitions Forum’ earned around $800,000 in 2013. For a journalist, this is mega money.

Interestingly, while the £140,000 she received from the UK probably mostly reflects her work at Legatum, the $565,000 she was paid from American sources can’t be explained, according to Helmer. Notably, it was up from a mere $20,000 the previous year

“In the absence of an explanation of where so much money has suddenly come from, Polish sources say they suspect that in 2012 the US Government restarted the financing of think-tanks, academics, books and journalism to produce anti-Russian material, which was once a feature of psychological warfare campaigns during the Cold War,” Helmer wrote.

As an example, Helmer cited “a publishing conduit in Amsterdam which was funded by the CIA for thirty years, called the Alexander Herzen Foundation. Its task was to assist in the smuggling out of the Soviet Union of manuscripts from dissidents, and to publish and promote them in both Russian and English.” He added: “The foundation started in 1969, and reportedly closed down in 1998. Fifteen years later, a foundation of the same name has begun handing out fresh money for the same regime-change purpose.”

In fact, the rebooted Herzen Foundation provided a “seed grant” for the foundation of The Interpreter, an American anti-Russia blog whose non-Russian speaking editor, Michael Weiss, has close connections to Legatum.
Back in the USSR

At the time the article was first published, Applebaum’s husband, the former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was embroiled in numerous scandals. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian conflict was still dominating headlines. Thus, with most media professionals covering on the former Soviet bloc distracted, Helmer’s investigation into Applebaum got somewhat buried, making few waves.

However, Wikileaks decision to re-visit the matter gave the allegations a new lease of life. Applebaum and her associates were not amused. After Wikileaks’ original Tweet, Legatum’s “Visiting Senior Fellow" (they love to give each other grandiose sounding titles) Anton Shekhovstov was straight out to bat for his boss. “WikiLeaks now seems to be fully under control of Russia's security/intelligince (sic) services,” he alleged.

Wikileaks fought back, countering “Is this the kind of nonsense the world can expect from Legatum? Everyone's KGB? No surprise.” The high-profile portal also linked to Mark Ames’ expose on Legatum’s twisted web of hypocrisy.

Shekhovstov, apparently unaware that the 21th century is already 15 years old, appeared to also associate Ames with “KGB” membership. Ames has previously pointed out that he's had personal difficulties with the Russian authorities. The only logical takeaway then is that Ames’ willingness to tackle Legatum chicanery and falsehoods is more likely to be based on journalistic integrity than Shekhovstov’s catch-all smears.

Sikorski was also invoking the "KGB" and Applebaum herself too.

Interestingly, while the dynamic duo were liberally throwing around "KGB" mud, neither attempted to deny the original allegation – that Applebaum had received around $800,000 in one year. Nor did either of them attempt to explain where it came from. They played the man, not the ball. People with nothing to hide rarely, if ever, resort to such tactics.
Smears and jeers

This isn’t the first time “Senior Fellow” Shekhovstov has attempted to taint writers and commentators who oppose his views as being beholden to Russia’s intelligence services. His blog is chockablock with conspiracy theories and denouncements. In one post, he attempts to link a number of prominent journalists to a putative “pro-Eurasian network”. They include RT contributors Neil Clark and Eric Draitser, The Guardian Moscow correspondent Alec Luhn, and Seumas Milne, who is now the press-secretary to British opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Read more
Air force B-52 © Revealed: US NeoCons, military contractors sponsoring anti-RT propaganda

In the same piece, Shekhovstov stoutly defends Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups, attempting to mislead readers into believing that they are figments of Russian imagination. Indeed, Shekhovstov’s trademark seems to be whitewashing Ukrainian extremists while lambasting similar Greek, French and other European constituencies.

His obsession with the “KGB,” which exists inside his own head, is played out in numerous Interpreter posts. Also, in the conspiracy theory to beat them all, Shekhovstov once accused Russia of provoking the Euromaidan. His views on how turkeys feel about Thanksgiving are not known.

Legatums’s associates use their influence to scratch each other’s backs and promote one another. In April 2014, Michael Weiss pitched up on the Council on Foreign Relations blog asking “Can Radek Sikorski save Europe.” At the time, the EU foreign-policy chief position (which later went to Fedrica Mogherini) was up for grabs. It's fairly evident that Weiss was trying to persuade US policy-makers to back Applebaum’s husband for the post.

A few months later, Weiss, with Legatum fellow Peter Pomerantsev, published a think-tank report on Russian media. To publicize it, they appeared at a Legatum event in London alongside Applebaum, US ambassador to Kiev Geoff Pyatt and John Herbst of the Atlantic Council. Their own website admitted that the evening was “hosted in cooperation with the US Department of State and the US Embassy in London”. Later Weiss spoke alongside Janis Karklins, Director of the Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence of NATO, on a Legatum podcast.

Imagine Legatum’s reaction if a group of journalists spoke at an event sponsored by the Russian Foreign Ministry in London in conjunction with appearances on podcasts with Russian military personnel? The volume of “KGB” smears would reach 11 on a scale of 1-10, and any reference to journalism or editorial independence surely would be ridiculed.
Help from their friends

Before Pomeranstev became the poster child of Legatum, the well-known anti-Russia journalists and activists, Oliver Bullough and Ben Judah, were employed by the institute. They published a number of reports and spoke at various fora during their association.

However, Judah appears to have fallen foul of the Legatum inner-circle after his calamitous Politico interview in late 2014, which helped to accelerate Sikorski’s exit from Polish power-circles. The absurd piece suggested that Vladimir Putin had proposed to current European Council President Donald Tusk a dastardly plan to divide Ukraine between Russia and the EU. Of course, the article was total nonsense and Judah was hung out to dry by his ‘friends’.

In a Tweet to RT’s social media editor, Ivor Crotty, he admitted as much. And Judah hasn’t been employed by Legatum since.

For his part, Sikorski's implosion is practically unprecedented in European politics. In the space of a few months, he went from being mentioned as Catherine Ashton's replacement in Brussels to absolutely nowhere. Instead of promoting American values at the top of Europe's power structures, he is now reduced to tweeting "KGB" smears against journalists.

While Applebaum appears to be Legatum’s top dog, there are a few other interesting characters on its payroll. Christina Odone is the wife of notorious Economist Editor, Edward Lucas who is now an “e-resident” of Estonia. Estonian taxation rates are half the rate of the UK, where he lives and works. Applebaum is so close to Lucas and Odone that she introduced them. She found the time to do that when she wasn't busy reviewing Lucas' books and co-writing articles with him.

Lucas is also fond of branding people as Russian spies, like the time he alleged that Edward Snowden is a Russian operative. Who does he choose to reveal his concerns to? One Michael Weiss.

Pomerantsev, another Legatum “star" and arguably RT’s number one “fan,” has built an entire career (if the stops on his world tour of anti-Russian demagoguery are anything to go by) purely by using words “Russian”, “propaganda” and “psy-ops” in the same sentence and repeating it hundreds of times.
What they want

As for what Legatum wants? We will leave that to Ames. In his thorough Pando exposé he wrote: “Legatum turns out to be a project of the most secretive billionaire vulture capital investor you’ve (and I’d) never heard of: Christopher Chandler, a New Zealander who, along with his billionaire brother Richard Chandler, ran one of the world’s most successful vulture capital funds—Sovereign Global/Sovereign Asset Management. That family of funds, based in the offshore haven of Monaco, operated until 2004, when the Chandler brothers, Richard and Chris, divided their billions into two separate funds. Brother Christopher Chandler took his billions to Dubai, where he launched Legatum Capital, and, in 2007, the Legatum Institute, where Peter Pomerantsev serves as a Senior Fellow.”

“The Chandler brothers were the largest foreign portfolio investors in Russia throughout the 1990s into the first half of the 2000s, including the largest foreign investors in natural gas behemoth Gazprom. The Chandler brothers reportedly were the single biggest foreign beneficiaries of one of the greatest privatization scams in history: Russia’s voucher program in the early 1990s, when each Russian citizen was given a voucher that represented a share in a state concern to be privatized . . . and most naive Russians were fooled or coerced into dumping their vouchers for next to nothing, snapped up by clever vulture capitalists and factory directors from the inside. Institutional Investor magazine described how the Chandlers benefited by snapping up Russians' vouchers and converting them into stakes in some of the largest and most lucrative companies in the world,” he explained.

The Legatum team and their associates seem to pine for a time when Russians were impoverished and Oligarchs ran wild in the country. A period when the state effectively collapsed. They hate Vladimir Putin for strengthening Russia's vitality domestically and influence internationally. Anybody who doesn't agree with their position is a "KGB" agent. Meanwhile, they are laughing all the way to the bank.

[Philip]

One of the world's greatest ever spies has died. Marcus Klingsberg rarely made the media headlines like the infamous Cambridge 5,but he was an outstanding masterspy for the Soviets,who stole Israeli WMD secrets.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/d ... 7-in-paris

Marcus Klingberg, master Soviet spy against Israel, dies aged 97 in Paris

Jewish doctor who fled German invasion of Poland, then fought the Nazis, stole Israeli biological weapons secrets for decades out of gratitude to Red Army

Marcus Klingberg, shown in a file picture from September 1988, has died aged 97. Photograph: Alberto Benkberg/AFP/Getty Images

Agence France-Presse in Jerusalem
Wednesday 2 December 2015

The man considered the Soviet Union’s most successful spy in Israel before being unmasked more than 30 years ago has died in Paris at the age of 97, according to his daughter.

Israel sentenced Marcus Klingberg to 20 years in prison in 1983 for having passed information to Moscow on its biological weapons research.
Marcus Klingberg: the spy who knew too much

He had worked as deputy head of the Israeli Institute for Biological Research and managed to avoid detection for years before finally being found out with the help of a double agent.

His case was so sensitive that his arrest, trial and conviction were kept secret for more than a decade.

He was jailed under an alias and held in solitary confinement, while queries about his disappearance were met by claims that he was in a psychiatric hospital “somewhere in Europe”.

“He was a communist who acted out of conviction and gratitude to the Red Army for having allowed him to fight the Nazis who massacred his entire family in Poland,” said daughter Sylvia Klingberg.

Klingberg had always maintained that his motivation for spying was ideological and not financial.

Born in Warsaw into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, Klingberg fled Poland during the Nazi invasion in 1939 and made his way to the Soviet Union, where he studied medicine.

In 1941, after German troops entered the Soviet Union, he enlisted in the Soviet army.

He returned to Poland at the end of the war, where he discovered that his parents and brother had died in a concentration camp. He emigrated to Sweden, then to Israel shortly after the state was created in 1948.

He served in the Israeli army’s health services, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel and specialising in epidemiology. He joined the top-secret biological institute, located in Nes Ziona south of Tel Aviv, in 1957.

Israeli suspicions turned toward him in 1963 and there were suggestions that his spying began long before, but he was arrested only 20 years later in 1983 with the help of a double agent codenamed Samaritan.

Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency arranged for him to go on a foreign trip, but rather than being taken to the airport he ended up in an isolated apartment where he was interrogated for several days before signing a confession.

He was sentenced to 20 years but freed on house detention after serving around 15. In 2003 he was authorised to live with his daughter in Paris, where he died on Monday.

In memoirs published this year and entitled The Last Spy, Klingberg said: “What upset me the most was the shame and the regret. Not for having spied for the Soviet Union, no. My sense of humiliation came from the fact that they broke me.”

Marcus Klingberg: the spy who knew too much
In 1985, Observer journalist Peter Pringle travelled to Israel to interview scientist Marcus Klingberg about a new chemical weapon. But he had disappeared. Now, 28 years later, he finally catches up with the 95-year-old KGB master spy to find out why
Marcus Klingberg
'I am and always was a communist': Soviet spy Marcus Klingberg. 95. Photograph: Theo Chalmers Theo Chalmers/PR
Peter Pringle
Sunday 27 April 2014

The Paris address I had been given was on the Left Bank of the Seine, a fashionable 19th courtyard of balconies and a grey tiled roof. An elegant hideaway for a Cold War spy, I thought, as I stepped out of my taxi. I pressed the bell marked Klingberg. "Floor three," said a woman's voice on the intercom. Inside his one-room apartment, Marcus Klingberg, the 95-year-old KGB master spy, was waiting for me.

I recognised him from newspaper photos. Barely 5ft tall, with a bald, outsized head on a slender frame, he had finely rimmed spectacles, a trace of a goatee, and was wearing a pale blue shirt and grey trousers. He smiled as he greeted me with outstretched arms. "So pleased to meet you after all these years," he said. Twenty-eight years to be precise.

The last time I had tried to interview Klingberg was in Israel in 1985. I was a foreign correspondent for the Observer based in Washington DC. The Cold War raged. In a superpower confrontation, the Americans had accused the Soviets of violating arms-control treaties by using a new chemical weapon known as yellow rain. Samples of the weapon from the battlefields of southeast Asia and Afghanistan were said to contain a deadly toxin, a poisonous chemical produced by the common fungus Fusarium. The Soviets had vigorously denied the charge.

Government scientists in Britain, America's closest ally, discovered pollen in the samples and independent scientists in America discovered, bizarrely, that the yellow spots they had found were indistinguishable from pollen-laden bee faeces. The bewildering question was whether the US could have mistaken bee droppings for a new chemical weapon.

Klingberg was an expert in the effects of Fusarium toxin. A Polish Jew, he had fled, at his father's urging, to Russia at the start of the Second World War and served as a doctor in the Red Army. His family perished in Treblinka in 1943. Klingberg, by then an epidemiologist, had successfully traced an outbreak of food poisoning that killed thousands of Russians to the consumption of mouldy wheat infested with the Fusarium poison.

After the war, Klingberg emigrated to Israel where he became a high-ranking military officer, and a deputy scientific director of Israel's top-secret chemical and biological weapons laboratories at Ness Ziona, 12 miles from Tel Aviv. I had gone to Israel to interview him, hoping he could shed some light on the yellow rain affair. But instead of meeting Klingberg, I unwittingly became part of an east-west espionage drama.

Israeli officials told me Klingberg had "disappeared". They said he had suffered a mental breakdown and was in a clinic somewhere in Europe. But his colleagues at Ness Ziona and at Tel Aviv University, where he was also a professor of epidemiology, did not believe the official story. Knowing his admiration for the Red Army during the war, some of them wondered if he might have defected to Russia, taking with him western military secrets about chemical and biological weapons.
Klingberg with Wanda, his wife, at the beginning of the 1950s
Catch me if you can: Klingberg with his wife, Wanda, in the 1950s. PR

I interviewed Klingberg's wife, Wanda, who was still living in the couple's Tel Aviv apartment. Mysteriously, she said she knew where her husband was, but couldn't tell me. Immediately after the interview, someone smashed the rear window of my rental car and stole my passport and a satchel with my notebook and papers on Klingberg. My story for the Observer, published on 8 September 1985, suggested Klingberg's "disappearance" might have had something to do with his secret work at Ness Ziona, and also mentioned that his colleagues thought he might have defected to the Soviet Union.

The story was the first to link Klingberg to his secret weapons work, but the Israeli government censor prevented local journalists from following it up. For the next five years, only his wife and a handful of family members knew what had really happened, and the government swore them to secrecy.

Klingberg had not disappeared. In 1983, he was secretly arrested on charges of espionage – the highest-ranking Soviet spy caught in Israel. Then aged 64, Klingberg was sentenced to the maximum penalty of 20 years in jail. He served the first 10 years in solitary confinement and was given a false name, Abraham Grinberg, and a false profession – editor of a social-science journal.

In 1993, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Israeli government finally admitted Klingberg was in jail – and had another 10 years to serve. He had health problems and 39 members of the Israeli Knesset and Amnesty International, taking pity on him, launched separate appeals for his early release. But Israel's secret services claimed Klingberg still posed a security risk. In 2003, he was finally allowed to leave Israel for exile in Paris – on condition he never spoke about his secret work at Ness Ziona.

That is where the story might have ended, but, in 2007, Klingberg and his Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard, published a book in Hebrew about his life and how he became a spy. Israeli censors vetted the book before publication to protect Ness Ziona's secrets.

In a world before the internet and cyberspace, Klingberg described in gripping detail how he had "slipped into" a Le Carré world of espionage shortly after he arrived in Israel in 1948. He met his KGB contact every three months by drawing coded signs in chalk on a concrete wall in a street in Tel Aviv.

In the back room of a Russian Orthodox church, "Moscow Centre" provided vodka and caviar. His code name was "Rok" (fate or destiny in Russian). His KGB control was "Viktor". His Soviet minders offered him a variety of spy gadgets, including invisible ink and miniature cameras, although he never used them.
Klingberg meeting
Paper trail: Marcus Klingberg and his wife Wanda (right) meet the Israeli defence chief in 1953. PR

It is reasonable to assume that, at Ness Ziona, Klingberg had access to secrets the Soviets sought. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union lagged behind the US, Britain and France in the development of chemical and biological weapons. It is well known that Ness Ziona was one of the leading experimental weapons laboratories in the west. Ness Ziona scientists have published papers over the years revealing research into nerve gases, such as tabun, sarin and VX, and incapacitating agents and psychotropic drugs, such as LSD. Researchers also studied how insects could transmit plague, typhus and rabies – all diseases that became part of the US, and in some cases also the British, arsenals before the US unilaterally renounced the production of biological and toxin weapons in 1969. The ban became an international arms-control treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, but Israel has never signed it.

"I also knew about the [Israeli] co-operation with foreign institutes in the western world – the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom," wrote Klingberg. "They presented themselves as acting only for developing protective measures against chemical and biological warfare. Were they really limited to defence research? Blessed be the believers."

Moscow Centre showed its appreciation for such access. In one of his clandestine meetings, Klingberg was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Soviet Union's second-rank decoration after the Order of Lenin. But why did he become a spy?

In his book he wrote that, like some of the physicists who worked on the American atom bomb, he believed the secrets of weapons of mass destruction should be shared. Both sides in the Cold War would be less likely to use them and more likely to ban them. But he also had his personal reason, he told me. He felt he owed the Russians a debt for saving the world from the Nazis.

"I am and always was a communist," he said. His espionage had been entirely voluntary. Moscow Centre never paid him a penny, he said. He became a master spy, recruiting his wife Wanda, and two friends, one of whom would become a famous scientist.

The Israeli reviewers of his book were derisive. The newspaper Haaretz portrayed Klingberg as a self-deceiving actor in the "theatre real" of the espionage world and, in the end, as a "petty clerk, and mainly as a childish and pitiful person". Israel's Ynet, a news website, said Klingberg simply fooled himself. "An Israeli who supported the Russians at the beginning of the 1950s was naive. An Israeli who supplied them with secrets in the 60s and 70s was a scoundrel."

In Paris, Klingberg gave perfunctory interviews to the media and then went to ground, refusing to meet even academics writing Cold War histories, though he undoubtedly had much to contribute. But he made an exception for me, he said, because he had a special story to tell me about my attempts to find him in 1983.

Over a cup of tea, I sat down with Klingberg and his daughter Sylvia (now 66 and the person who had let me into his Paris apartment). In the small room there was a bed, a desk, a bookcase, an armchair and a few paintings – remnants of a long, intense, tragic life covering a wide swath of a violent century: from the Second World War through several Israeli-Arab wars, the Cold War, the build-up of the superpower arsenals of weapons of mass destruction and the fall of the Soviet Union. It is a wonder, frankly, that this frail-looking 95-year-old survived to tell his personal story at all. But he seemed to thrive on it and, remarkably, remembered it in detail.

"Your Observer article forced the Israelis to admit I was in jail," he said, his still-bright blue eyes glinting at the prospect of imparting yet another Cold War secret. "Here is the evidence," he said, holding up a photocopy of my story from the files of the East German Stasi secret police. By amusing coincidence, the file number on an accompanying explanation in Russian was 000007.

Klingberg said that the Israeli secret services had undoubtedly monitored my visit to his wife Wanda in 1985; they must have wondered why this foreign journalist was so interested in their secretly convicted spy. And the theft from my car does not seem to have been the work of a common thief. Several months after my visit to Israel, my satchel, minus key papers and my passport, was returned anonymously to the Observer offices in London.

Sylvia fearlessly used the newspaper article to organise an elaborate east-west spy swap that included her father. Growing up in Israel, Sylvia had always been politically active on the left, becoming a member of Matzpen, a group that united dozens of left-wing anti-Zionists. By the 1960s she was a Trotskyist, joining French students at the barricades in Paris in 1968. She married Alain Brossat, a French philosophy professor. Their son, Ian, is now a member of the French Communist Party and an elected member of the Council of Paris – the city's governing body.

In Israel, Sylvia had always suspected her father was working on chemical and biological weapons – despite his denials – and she told him how strongly she disapproved. But after she learned of his arrest, she objected even more strongly to his secret trial and imprisonment – the Israeli practice of creating an anonymous "Prisoner X" in the name of state security. Knowing she would be banned from visiting him in jail, Sylvia launched a campaign for his release.

In 1986, she contacted Antoine Comte, a well-known human rights lawyer in Paris. "We didn't know where to start," Comte told me in a separate interview. "We were so naive. We went to see the cultural attaché at the Russian embassy and he threw up his hands in horror at being involved in anything to do with spies."

Comte then contacted Wolfgang Vogel, the flamboyant East German lawyer famous for brokering spy swaps – including the much-publicised 1962 exchange in Berlin of the downed American U-2 pilot Gary Powers for the Soviet intelligence agent, Rudolf Abel, who had been caught and convicted in the US in 1957.

Comte flew to East Berlin and told Vogel about Klingberg's story, showing him a copy of my Observer article as evidence – the evidence that would make its way into the Stasi files. Vogel was astonished he had never heard of Klingberg's imprisonment. "A man who worked for the KGB in the west has been arrested and I know nothing of it?" he exclaimed. "Impossible. Maybe Professor Klingberg went crazy and gave himself up." He promised to investigate the matter.

Several months later, Comte received word from Vogel that Moscow Centre needed to verify Klingberg's story. Sylvia should go alone to Leningrad, where she would be contacted. She went during Christmas 1986. Shortly after checking into her hotel she received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as "Peter". He was staying in the same hotel. "You should come to my room," he told her.

"He was a tall, very handsome man of about 65 or 70," Sylvia recalled. They met twice for about four hours. Peter showed her photos and documents, astonishing Sylvia with how much he knew of her private life. He asked her to identify the author of a handwritten letter. It was from her mother.

Peter apologised for the interrogation, saying it was necessary to make sure there were "no contradictions" in her story. He even offered to help Sylvia pay for her legal expenses, but she declined, sternly reminding him why she had come.

"My father did a lot for you. Now, it's your turn. Get him out of prison."

"We will do all we can," Peter promised.

For two years, Sylvia and Comte heard nothing. In early 1988, as Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing his glasnost reforms in the Soviet Union, Vogel called for a meeting in Paris with a lawyer representing the Israeli government, Comte and Sylvia.

Vogel's initial proposal was to swap Klingberg for unnamed "American spies" in Russia. But the Israeli lawyer insisted Israel had to get "our flesh" – an Israeli. He wanted Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator who was forced to bail out of his crippled F-4 Phantom jet on a bombing mission during Israel's 1986 invasion of Lebanon, and was now in the hands of Hezbollah. If Israel let Klingberg go to Moscow, Israel wanted Moscow to negotiate Arad's release.

Vogel suggested extending the swap to include Jonathan Pollard, the US Navy intelligence officer who was convicted in 1986 for passing military secrets to Israel and sentenced to life in prison. Pollard never faced trial – at the request of both the US and the Israeli governments he entered a plea and the details of his case remain unknown. All appeals for his early release have been rejected, but are apparently being considered again by Washington as part of the Middle East peace talks. Then the Israeli lawyer made a new demand: for the remains of two Israeli soldiers who had been killed during the Lebanon invasion. Vogel said he could arrange this – apparently through Soviet contacts with Hezbollah.

In his jail cell, Klingberg found out about the secret negotiations from his Israeli interrogator, who turned up one day in a furious temper. "Your daughter consulted a French lawyer without our authorisation," he shouted. "She violated the ban on family members talking about your arrest with an unauthorised person."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Klingberg protested – which was true.

"You won't be released. You won't be transferred to Russia," the interrogator raged. "And if Sylvia arrives in Israel, she'll be arrested." Israel eventually approved the swap, but Klingberg told his jailers he wasn't interested. "Not interested," they shot back. "You'll be a hero of the Soviet Union… You will have an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the countryside, and when you die, they'll bury you next to Philby." (Kim Philby was the British double agent who fled to Moscow in 1963).

In the end, Hezbollah backed out of the deal. On 28 July 1989, Israeli commandos kidnapped the Lebanese Shia leader, Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid, from his home village of Jibchit in southern Lebanon, and the sheikh would spend the next 15 years in an Israeli jail. Klingberg remained in jail, Pollard continued to serve his life sentence in the US and Arad died in Lebanon, either executed by his captors or killed while trying to escape.

"But you see," said Klingberg holding up a copy of the Stasi file that included a 1988 leaked story of the proposed swap in the German newspaper, Die Welt, "Your Observer story forced the Israelis to admit, five years after I had 'disappeared', that I was in jail." He beamed at the thought. "Now you can ask me about yellow rain." He knew no secrets, he said, but he had opinions, and he proceeded to introduce a tantalising new clue to the lingering Cold War mystery.

Israel's security services had objected vigorously to Klingberg's release. He spent the last four years of his prison term – from the end of 1998 to 2003 – under house arrest but, sadly, without his wife, Wanda, who had died of heart failure in 1990. Even as he became eligible for full release, Israel's defence security service, Malmab, demanded that Klingberg be kept under close scrutiny. In a submission to the court, Malmab claimed Klingberg's "mind contains information he is not aware of". Klingberg's lawyers were stumped: there was no defence against charges about things he did not know that he knew.

Malmab eventually relented and Klingberg was allowed to leave for exile in Paris as long as he did not talk about his secret work at Ness Ziona. Haaretz said Malmab's objection "was, of course, an absurd and baseless claim". But was it? This is where the Klingberg story intriguingly intersects with yellow rain. Three decades later, the US stands by its accusation against the Soviets, and the Russians continue to dismiss the charge. The CIA has written up its official history of yellow rain, but refuses to declassify it, a move the New York Times called "preposterous" after so long. The agency apparently still has something to hide.

Asked whether the fungal poisons had ever been on Moscow's shopping lists presented by his KGB minders in Israel, Klingberg answered definitively: "Never." Had Moscow Centre ever expressed the slightest interest in the military application of fungal poisons? "Never."

Using Fusarium toxins as a biological weapon had never been discussed when he was in the Soviet Union, he said, and, like the sceptical independent scientists in America and Britain, he could not see the point of putting a fungal toxin into a mix of pollen grains for spraying on a battlefield. He had always assumed yellow rain was American disinformation.

In 1985, had I been able to interview Klingberg he would have added an authoritative voice to the growing number of yellow-rain sceptics. Since then, former Soviet officials, familiar with the Soviet chemical and biological programme through the 70s and 80s, have reported they never knew of any effort to turn Fusarium toxins into a weapon. In the 90s, the new Russian government said that in the opinion of its military experts fungal toxins "have no military significance".

Before his arrest, Klingberg had been interrogated twice on suspicion of spying for Moscow: once in 1965 and again in 1976. He was released each time. In 1981, a month after the US yellow-rain charges, Klingberg told me he suddenly felt the Israeli security noose "tightening around my neck". Israeli agents, he learned, had moved into an apartment opposite in Tel Aviv, and his phone made strange clicking noises. The surveillance continued through 1982.

In 1983, Klingberg was due to go on sabbatical to Europe. He planned to lecture at universities, quite openly, on his special subject of epidemiology of congenital malformations. However, given his expertise in Fusarium poisoning in the USSR and the European interest in America's yellow-rain charges, Klingberg was bound to be asked his opinion about the alleged weapon. And he would have concluded publicly that yellow rain seemed like it might be, well, bee faeces, thus adding to the growing embarrassment over the US charge. Washington must have been relieved when Klingberg, instead of going on sabbatical, simply disappeared.

He was arrested on 19 January 1983. He never found out why the Israelis chose that date. And today, he is no closer to unravelling Malmab's security riddle of the things he does not know that he knows.

During one of my visits in Paris, Klingberg celebrated his 95th birthday with a dinner given by Sylvia. Two dozen people turned up to the small Left Bank restaurant: family members and academic friends from Britain and Europe, the lawyer, Antoine Comte, and Klingberg's Israeli lawyer during his release from prison, Avigdor Feldman. After a birthday cake and a chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow", Feldman leaned his formidable frame across the dinner table like a prosecutor, pressing Klingberg: "Come on Marek [his preferred Polish version of Marcus], what is it you know that you don't know that you know? Tell us.'' Klingberg smiled and shook his head. "I am just very happy all of you are here today and I thank you for coming," he said. And then, as bright as ever, he chatted with his guests until almost midnight and walked the two blocks home.

Might the things he is supposed to have known be connected to his knowledge of Fusarium and, therefore, to the yellow-rain mystery? I asked. "It's possible," he said, again smiling at the thought. "I simply don't know what I'm supposed to know that I don't know."

Peter Pringle was a foreign correspondent for the Observer from 1981 to 1985. He is currently writing a book about the yellow-rain affair

[Philip]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 61186.html

Bridge of Spies: Stasi prisoner portrayed in Steven Spielberg film brands depiction 'totally false'

Frederic Pryor has been left frustrated at the critically-acclaimed movie’s portrayal of events
Katie Grant

In ‘Bridge of Spies’ Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, enlisted to negotiate the release of a US pilot ©DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. †All Rights Reserved.

“Consummately crafted”, “perfectly directed”, with a “terrifically good” script, Steven Spielberg’s new Cold War film, Bridge of Spies, has attracted plenty of praise from film critics.

One octogenarian has been less impressed at the movie’s historical inaccuracy, however, branding its depiction of the principal characters as “totally false”. And Frederic Pryor should know, as he is one of them.

Bridge of Spies is based on the true story of how US lawyer James Donovan, played by Tom Hanks, was enlisted to negotiate the release of US pilot Gary Powers, whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. This would be achieved in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a captive Soviet KGB spy held by the US. Boldly, Donovan insisted on a two-for-one deal by demanding the additional release of Mr Pryor, who was then an economics graduate student who had been arrested and held without charge by East Germany, too.

The true story behind Bridge of Spies

Mr Pryor has been left frustrated at the film’s portrayal of events – and also revealed to The Independent that Powers failed to thank Donovan for his troubles in securing the pair’s release in 1962.

Now 82 and living in Pennsylvania, Mr Pryor went on to become a respected economics professor and senior research scholar in the US following his six-month incarceration and subsequent release. The academic spent more than half a century “trying to forget” his ordeal. But this summer, he was informed by his son that a multimillion-pound film based on the events surrounding the spy swap had been developed and was due for release.

Mr Pryor was not given an opportunity to offer his input or even look over the script, co-written by the Coen Brothers and the British newcomer Matt Charman. In fact, he didn’t see the film until recently, after queuing with his family to purchase tickets. “Almost everything the movie showed about me was fiction,” Mr Pryor told The Independent. “I would have preferred if [Spielberg] had called me. He took the movie from the book of the same name – which was quite accurate – by a British author who took the pains to talk to me. But Spielberg just wanted to make it more exciting.”

Frederic Pryor, now aged 82

Mr Pryor said his East German lawyer, Wolfgang Vogel, played by Sebastian Koch in the film, is portrayed as “a loudmouth ideologue” trying to get the US publicly to recognise the East German government. “That was totally false. Vogel was a very quiet, well-spoken man. He was working for me,” he insisted.

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“They had me being arrested by trying to help some beautiful blonde through the Berlin Wall while it was being constructed. I was in Denmark at the time it was being built – and I didn’t know any beautiful blondes in East Berlin.”

However, despite his disappointment, Mr Pryor claims it is “no big deal” – he has coped with real hardship, after all.

He attributes his arrest in 1961 to being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” after he travelled to Berlin to listen to Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the Communist Party, give a speech, and to visit the sister of a friend to check if she had any messages for him. “I didn’t know that she had escaped and [the Stasi] had her house staked out. They looked in my car and found a copy of my dissertation on the foreign trade system of the Communist bloc. I was arrested on a fluke.”

During his six-month prison stint, Mr Pryor was subjected to intense interrogation for six hours per day. His captors became fixated on a Yale library card he had on his person at the time of his arrest. The card read “special student, only room 413”, and his interrogator spent a week on determining the apparent secret behind his “special” status. “I didn’t know why it said that, until I remembered I hadn’t paid my tuition fees on time,” Mr Pryor said.

Speaking about his gratitude for the work to release him, he said: “After I got back to the US, I visited Donovan to thank him – he told me Powers never thanked him... Powers was not the world’s most cultured person.”

Surprisingly, given how strongly he contests the accuracy of the film, Mr Pryor said he “enjoyed” Bridge of Spies.

“It wasn’t really about me, it was a character with my name,” he said. “I don’t like to have such a fuss made about me. I live a very simple life now.”

[Philip]

Israel's new spymaster chief.

Yossi Cohen: The Israeli spymaster straight out of Le Carré and Ian Fleming takes charge of Mossad
National security adviser takes top post after being credited with attempts to thwart Iran’s nuclear programme
Ben Lynfield Jerusalem

As national security adviser Yossi Cohen kept a line open to the Obama administration Reuters

A spymaster with a reputation for activating and managing secret agents all over the world, including reported efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme, has been appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the new head of the Mossad espionage agency.

The Israeli press likened the incoming top spy, Yossi Cohen, 54, who has served in the agency for more than three decades and has been the Prime Minister’s national security adviser for the past two years, to a character from Le Carré or Ian Fleming.

Nicknamed “the Model” for his dapper appearance and neatly combed hairstyle, Mr Cohen speaks English, French and Arabic but perhaps more importantly succeeded in forging common language with the Israeli Prime Minister, a trait that occasionally eluded his predecessor as Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo.

The latter was famously reported last year to have told a closed meeting that the conflict with the Palestinians posed a greater threat to Israel than did Iran, a statement that according to Haaretz newspaper angered Mr Netanyahu. Mr Cohen’s appointment was praised by Mr Pardo, while press profiles described him as able to inspire the confidence of his charges.

But he will need more than that to succeed. He takes up his new post next month at a particularly challenging time that will demand his oversight of the Israeli efforts to scrutinise Iran’s compliance with last summer’s nuclear deal.

He will be the key figure in efforts to thwart what Israel sees as Tehran’s efforts to establish hegemony in the region. Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper wrote that if it was true that Mossad had in recent years assassinated Iranian scientists, intercepted raw materials for Iran’s nuclear programme and planted viruses in its computers are true – as widely reported abroad – then that was in large measure due to Mr Cohen and the agents he recruited.
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Mr Cohen, whose father was a fighter in the right-wing Irgun underground group before Israel’s establishment, headed the largest wing of the Mossad, Tsomet, which manages agents worldwide. He later rose to become deputy head of the agency. While he is credited with being a brilliant tactician, critics say he has yet to prove himself as a strategic thinker about regional affairs.

“Cohen is intelligent, charming and was a legendary activator of agents but his horizons are narrow and his daring is limited,” wrote Ben Caspit, a commentator for Maariv newspaper. “That is exactly what Netanyahu wanted as chief: someone who will know how to identify the will of his masters, who will have a sensitive barometer to measure the spirit of the commander, who won’t be too adventurous.”

As national security adviser, Mr Cohen was credited with keeping a line open to the Obama administration even as US-Israeli relations underwent a turbulent period with Mr Netanyahu’s speech last March to Congress aimed at torpedoing US efforts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran.

In announcing Mr Cohen’s appointment, Mr Netanyahu said he expects Mossad to “continue to assist me, as Prime Minister, to develop diplomatic links around the world, including with Arab and Islamic states.
Mossad is hated by the regime in Iran, where posters depict its protagonists as targets (Getty)

In other words, Mr Netanyahu is counting on Mr Cohen to oversee Israeli efforts to encourage moderate Sunni Muslim states to forge ties with Israel based on a common perception of Iran and Isis as threats. “This kind of secret diplomacy is traditionally the domain of the Mossad,” said Yossi Alpher, the former director of the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies and himself a former Mossad agent.

“Any Sunni Arab country that like Israel perceives the twin dangers of militant Sunni and militant Shia Islam is a candidate for these kind of relations if Israel can succeed in developing them.”

He added: “This is clearly one of Netanyahu’s strategic goals in the region and it involves an attempt to bypass the traditional demand of moderate Sunni Arab countries for Israel to make progress on the Palestinian issue first.”

Meanwhile, the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian tensions continued to take a toll. Clashes broke out following the funeral in Dehaisheh refugee camp of a 19-year-old youth killed during an army raid. An army spokeswoman said troops faced pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails and “fired warning shots into the air ”.