Picture this spy: A Syrian soldier, wearing mufti, dressed in a suit, fluent in Syrian and Iraqi Arabic. He’s in a rattletrap taxi in Syria going to meet an agent who says he can offer rebels the Syrian government’s order of battle. The spy, from Army intelligence, has spent 18 months cultivating this connection. The source…
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The body of Mr. Williams, from Anglesey, London, was dead a week before he was found in his flat in 2010, padlocked inside a holdall duffel bag in his bathtub. His inquest is now weighing the evidence that a third party was involved in the death. The inquest was shown footage of two experts’ struggling unsuccessfully…
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New papers show that Russia’s spy agency authorized a raid on a British investment firm in Moscow that led to a massive tax scam by allegedly corrupt officials and the death of a lawyer who tried to expose the fraud. Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based lawyer, died in November 2009 during pre-trial detention after he was arrested…
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A Daily Telegraph report earlier this month claimed that as much as fifty percent of the personnel staffing the Russian embassy in London might be engaged in espionage. A prominent KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, cautioned that the mid-1980s norm of 39 intelligence officers operating out of the embassy could have been surpassed. Mr. Gordievsky served as…
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ESET, a Slovakian security firm, claims that the Georgian government’s website figured in a botnet’s cyber-spying on denizens of that nation. Win32/Georbot infected a small number of computers, approximately 200, primarily in Georgia, with 30% located in the United States, Germany, and Russia. According to ESET researcher Righard Zwienenberg, the Georbot searched on the hard drives…
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Azerbaijani officials reported last week the arrests of 22 suspects charged with being Iranian agents, amid assertions of connections to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The National Security Ministry’s short announcement gave no indication of when the arrests occurred and, therefore, was ambiguous as to whether the referred to arrests had just taken place, or if the statement…
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Petty Officer 2nd Class Bryan Minkyu Martin was taken into custody by NCIS and FBI agents on December 1st of last year for various alleged espionage related offenses, and earlier this month Navy officials disclosed the formal charges filed against him. The complete tally entails four counts of attempted spying, with an additional 11 counts of
improper…
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Aleksei Dressen, a member of Estonia’s security police for almost two decades, and his wife, Viktoria Dressen, were taken into custody on February 22 at Tallinn Airport for purportedly turning over classified information and state secrets to Russia. According to prosecution spokeswoman Kadri Tammai, Mr. Dressen went to the airport to drop off a folder containing…
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A Lebanese military tribunal handed down the death penalty on February 24th to three Lebanese men convicted of espionage as Israeli agents. Lebanon and Israel are still technically at war and so a conviction on spying charges can carry a death sentence. According to Naharnet, a Lebanese news website, one of the men, Moussa Ali Moussa…
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The CIA fears that high-tech border checks will blow its spies’ cover. Iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels, and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities. “If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you…
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Nanec Hikov, a Russian crew member on the Russian cargo vessel Natali 1, was taken into custody in the North Cyprus port of Famagusta over a purported episode of espionage, as disclosed in Turkish Cypriot media accounts earlier this month. He was allegedly discovered photographing Turkish troopships, and occupation authorities expressly ban any and all photo…
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The British intelligence agency MI5 unmasked a murder plot against Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen politician living in exile in England, according to news reports last week. Mr. Zakayev fled his homeland, the rebel Russian republic engulfed in a brutal civil war, ten years ago, and thereafter received asylum from the British government. He serves as the…
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Earlier this month came word that the death sentence handed down by Iran’s Revolutionary Court upon the conviction of Amir Mirza Hekmati in January on charges of working for the CIA, had been overturned by that country’s Supreme Court. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei revealed at a news conference in the Iranian capital that the Supreme Court…
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Taiwan’s military was forced to contend once again with allegations of a spy for mainland China in their midst, amid reports at the end of February of an Air Force captain taken into custody on suspicion of handing over classified information to China, following as they do the highly publicized arrest of Army General Lo Hsien-che…
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A Finnish-born professor of international politics is being charged by Danish authorities with helping a Russian espionage organization. According to the Danish Security and Intelligence Service PET, the Russian diplomats whom Kivimäki met with were spies. Kivimäki said that the Russians he interacted with behaved like diplomats and not spies.
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Abdullah al-Senussi, Libya’s former head of intelligence and one of the most humted figures of the toppled Gadhafi regime, is now the subject of an extradition tug of war between Libya, France, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), following his arrest in Mauritania earlier this month. The late Moammar Gadhafi’s brother-in-law was taken into custody at…
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Tze Chao, an ex DuPont employee from Delaware, pled guilty to one count of economic espionage in United States District Court in San Francisco earlier this month, specifically confessing that in 2008 and 2009 he passed on DuPont trade secrets regarding titanium dioxide production to the Chinese government directed Pangang Group Company Ltd. Mr. Chao had…
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