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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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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 …
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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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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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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 …
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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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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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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 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 …
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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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Formal espionage charges were filed last week against Vladimir Lazar, a retired colonel, for allegedly providing classified topographical maps to the Pentagon. Investigators asserted said information could be employed in organizing military operations against Russia and was applicable in coordinating missile strikes. According to the prosecution, Lazar, a former member of the topography service, bought a …
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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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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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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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Greek authorities filed formal charges earlier this month against “persons unknown” for purportedly plotting to assassinate Kostas Karamanlis, the Prime Minister at the time of the conspiracy dating from 2007-2009, in order to undermine the government. An anonymous court official disclosed that the initial inquiry entailed interviews of Greek police, Secret Service members, and the Karamanlis’ …
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