Dan Gordon Spy Club

Pentagon Pushes For Greater Spy Powers

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…

Highly Secret SEAL Mission in N. Vietnam Declassified After 36 Years

Operation Thunderhead was so highly classified it took 36 years to release the story of a SEAL mission on the North Vietnamese coast on June 3, 1972. Several 4-man SEAL teams were sent to facilitate the escape of American POWs from a prison in Hanoi. One team, led by Philip “Moki” Martin and Lt. Dry, two…

CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow its Spies’ Cover

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…

M16 Officer Inquest Hears Claim of Third Party Role

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…

Inside the Secret World of America’s Top Eavesdropping Spies

Officially, the Special Collection Service, a secret joint program with the CIA codenamed F6, doesn’t exist. Unofficially, its snoops travel the world intercepting private messages and cracking high-tech encryption. SCS is responsible for placing super-high-tech bugs in unbelievably hard-to-reach places. Data collected is then transmitted to the National Security Agency. The Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, the…

Finnish-Born Political Scientist Faces Espionage Charges in Denmark

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.

Russian Spy Agency Linked to Dead Laywer

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…

RUSSIAN SAILOR SUSPECTED OF SPYING ARRESTED IN NORTH CYPRUS

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…

NORTH KOREAN DEFECTOR SENTENCED IN MURDER PLOT AGAINST FELLOW DEFECTOR AMID CLAIMS SOUTH KOREAN INTELLIGENCE IGNORED HIS TIPOFF

The North Korean defector designated solely in the Seoul Central District Court by his last name of Ahn, drew a four year prison sentence earlier this month for conspiring to murder Park Sang-hak, another North Korean defector who has become a high profile anti-Pyongyang activist. When arrested in September of 2011, Ahn, known to have served…

RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE PRESENCE IN BRITAIN APPROACHING OR POSSIBLY EVEN EXCEEDING THAT OF THE COLD WAR ERA

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…