James Fondren, 62, was sentenced today to 3 years in prison and a subsequent 2 years of supervised release. Once a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Fondren got into “consulting” after retiring from the military. And by that we mean that he got involved in espionage by sharing classified intel on U.S.-China military relations with Tai Shen Kuo, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Taiwan.

In March 1999, Kuo and Fondren travelled to China together, where Fondren met Kuo’s Chinese government contact. Fondren and the government official proceeded to exchange emails over the course of the next year. Hired into the civilian role of Deputy Director of the U.S. Pacific Command’s Washington Liaison Office, Fondren continued to associate with Kuo, providing him with so-called opinion papers in exchange for payment.

According to Fondren, the papers were a mix of publicly accessible news and his own personal opinion, but the court obviously found otherwise. At the Pacific Command, Fondren had top-secret clearance and access to a classified computer. He certainly had the means to provide Kuo with more than just personal opinion, and it didn’t help his case that Kuo testified against him.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton decided to issue a milder sentence than the 6.5 years requested by the prosecution because the information Fondren shared didn’t really compromise U.S. national security. Only convicted of 3 of the 8 counts brought against him, Fondren still plans to appeal the decision. His lawyer argues that Fondren did not realize Kuo was a spy.

Given the recent hubbub in the news about China’s aggressive cyber espionage – many say that the Google attack was neither the first nor the last – Fondren’s not likely to get much sympathy in the public eye.

In 1986, he blabbed details and shared photos of Israel’s nuclear weapons program (which Israel neither acknowledges nor denies) to the British media. The British Sunday Times went on to publish the first evidence that Israel had the capacity to make nuclear bombs. Israel was obviously not pleased about the leak, and a Mossad sting subsequently lured Vanunu to Rome, where he was captured and forced to return to Israel by intelligence operatives.

In Israel, the whistleblower was tried and convicted for espionage and treason. He served 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement. Released in 2004, he has been taken into custody numerous times since for breaking the terms of his parole, as he did on Monday, by meeting with a Norwegian national in a hotel. He has now been put under house arrest, where he is awaiting an indictment.

According to his lawyer, Vanunu is only interested romantically in the Norwegian woman he met.

Vanunu feels that he’s been mistreated in Israel largely due to his conversion to Christianity. During a recent court hearing, he made a plea to President Obama, with the hopes of being able to live under less scrutiny: “Obama wants a world free of nuclear weapons, and he should push for my release.”

Vanunu’s been campaigning to be allowed to leave Israel, which doesn’t seem like a possibility, given the recent arrest for meeting with a foreigner. While some think that Israel has gone too far with Vanunu (cartoons protesting the length and severity of his punishment abound), Israeli authorities are concerned that he is privy to and will reveal more nuclear secrets, so they’re unlikely to loosen their grip…

Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by a Hamas raid into Israel in June 2006 (a few months before his 20th birthday), is still being held in Gaza. Hamas has requested the release of 980 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit. The almost-1000 Palestinians include many who have been convicted of involvement in deadly terrorist attacks against Israel.

Pollard, who is rumored to have refused such prisoner swap deals that would have secured his own release (he’s stuck in jail until 2015), thinks the trade abhorrent, indeed – he calls it an act against God.

He made his view crystal clear to a couple visitors he recently had at Butner prison in North Carolina, both from Israel’s Likud Party. Instead of agreeing to the swap, Pollard said, Israel should kill one of the 980 requested prisoners every day until Shalit is released.

Definitely an incendiary remark, but Pollard’s got an interesting perspective. He is a prisoner himself, he feels abandoned by Israel, and yet he would not welcome his own early freedom if it meant the simultaneous release of a terrorist from prison.

Prime Minister Netanyahu “should not free terrorists, no matter what,” Pollard concluded. Mr. Feiglin, one of the men who visited Pollard in prison recently, said of him: “Just as he was ready to sacrifice his life rather than live knowing that one Jew died because of information that the US did not give to Israel, even after 25 years in prison, Jonathan is not ready for terrorists to be released from jail in exchange for him.”

The five men, each originally receiving sentences ranging from 15 years to life, were convicted of 26 counts of espionage. Later, an appeals court ruled that the sentences for three of the five men were too harsh, given that no U.S. secrets were actually discovered and shared with Cuba. So even though the men allegedly intended to uncover confidential military information and pass it on to Cuba, their failure to do so seems to have acted in their favor.

Antonio Guerrero managed to sneak his way into the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West, Florida but never got his hands on any classified information. The resulting reduced sentence means he has 11 more years to serve in prison. His attorney, Leonard Weinglass, reckons he’ll be out in seven, given that he can expect additional reductions for good behavior.

Prior to today’s sentencing, a 20-year-sentence deal was made between Guerrero and prosecutors, but Judge Joan Lenard issued a sentence of 21 years and 10 months, stating after the hearing that “Mr. Guerrero made no statement of contrition,” even though he was convicted of “very serious offenses.”

The re-sentencing of the other two men has been postponed.

The matter of the Cuban Five remains a contentious one in U.S.-Cuban relations. In Cuba, the five are venerated as heroes, and their full release is often called for.

The father – Harold Nicholson – was convicted and jailed in 1997; the son – Nathaniel Nicholson – appeared before District Judge Anna Brown last week and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Nate’s dad, on the other hand – half way through his 23-year prison term – has entered a plea of not guilty in response to charges of orchestrating and being involved in the activities to which his son has owned up.

The son now faces the possibility of having to serve his own two-decade prison term for the crimes his undertook on his father’s behalf from 2006 to 2008. Of course, he stood to gain from debt collection and intel sales as well; he wasn’t acting blindly upon his father’s wishes, though, according to the prosecutors, he had been recruited and trained by his father to distribute intel and collect money internationally.

Nathaniel Nicholson will be sentenced on January 25, 2010, about a year after he was first caught and accused of spying activities.

Mid-June, the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to review the case of the Cuban Five. The five spies were trying to get their convictions reviewed on the basis that their trial should never have been held in Miami, where anti-Cuban-regime sentiment is pretty strong.

By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court allowed the previous court’s ruling to stand, which meant the convictions would remain, but the length of sentence for three of the five spies would be changed.

So is the U.S. getting soft on Cuban spies? Depends whether you think spying on the U.S. should get you stuck in prison for life…

image courtesy of sun-sentinel.com

Her name is Clotilde Reiss, and she’s only 23. After being arrested by the Iranian police at the Tehran airport, she was taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. For the five months prior to her arrest, she had been working as a French-language teaching assistant at Esfahan University in Iran.

Bernard Poletti, France’s ambassador to Iran, was able to meet with Reiss in prison. He came bearing clothes and books for the detainee.

The Iranian authorities’ accusations of espionage seem to be rather flimsy, and French officials have said on numerous occasions that the charges are completely baseless. French President Sarkozy issued a statement that demanded Reiss’s release in no uncertain terms.

According to the Iranians, Reiss participated in the recent election protests and emailed a friend in Tehran with protest rally info. At the heart of the espionage charges are also pics she took of the protests with her mobile phone. Various sources have reported that Clotilde Reiss is not politically active and was only taking snapshots of the protests, not participating or recording the events for intelligence purposes.

Robert Seldon Lady, who gave the interview over the Internet from an undisclosed location, is one of 26 Americans suspected of being involved in the operation. They are all being tried in absentia by the Italian government.

One could argue that Lady has suffered particularly – his intention had always been to spend the rest of his days in Italy, but he had to escape the country to avoid prosecution and his retirement villa – with 10 hectares of vineyards to boot – was seized by the magistrate to pay court costs.

In the published interview, Lady pleads innocent: “I’m not guilty. I’m only responsible for carrying out orders that I received from my superiors. …I console myself by reminding myself that I was a soldier, that I was in a war against terrorism, that I couldn’t discuss orders given to me.”

Lady also said some pretty revealing things about careers in intelligence:

“I worked in intelligence for 25 years and almost no activity I did in those 25 years was legal in the country where it happened. When you work in intelligence, you do things in the country in which you work that are not legal. It’s a life of illegality … But state institutions in the whole world have professionals in my sector, and it’s up to us to do our duty.”

Regarding the actual rendition, Lady confirmed that the one Italian involved was a police officer who’s already confessed and who received a suspended sentence. “I wasn’t at the scene and I didn’t organize the thing, the rendition, the arrest, the kidnapping, however we want to call it…but my belief is that at that moment there weren’t other Italians.”

Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister at the time, and he maintains that the Italian government knew absolutely nothing about the CIA’s plot. Of course, he also arranged that no classified testimony or documents relating to Italy’s potential cooperation would make an appearance at the trial.

In the interview, Lady also voiced his regret and frustration about the trail that the American operatives had left behind in the 2003 kidnapping. They had been careless, had made “too many mistakes,” had left evidence in the form of cell phone records, wiretap transcripts and an Italian police officer with a guilty conscience.

“How could we have been so unprofessional?” asks Lady. “The answer I’ve given is that there were too many people involved. In these operations, there should be few.”

image courtesy of indybay.org

It is said that Mr. Janko – the name by which he is now known – was eager to share his nightmarish stories of Al Qaeda with the Americans, but he wasn’t given much of a chance. Instead, he was shipped off to Guantanamo because the Americans had him pegged as an Al Qaeda operative. At Guantanamo, he went through another round of severe interrogations, this time at the hands of the very folk he was previously accused of spying for.

But after 7+ years in Guantanamo, Mr. Janko may finally be released from the nightmare in which he’s been accused of being an enemy of both Al Qaeda and the U.S. – not an enviable position.

Last Monday, a Washington federal judge ruled in favor of Mr. Janko’s release, stating that the U.S. government should “take all necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps to facilitate his release forthwith.”

It was unclear whether Mr. Janko had gotten word of the ruling as even though he was supposed to be listening to it in real-time via telephone, the line apparently went dead just before the crucial news was delivered.

Janko is originally from Syria but was living with his family in the UAE when an argument with his dad prompted him towards Afghanistan, where he spent 18 days in an Al Qaeda training camp before having the misfortune of being taken for a U.S. spy. But if this twist of fate hadn’t occurred, wouldn’t he now be a bona fide anti-American member of Al Qaeda…?

The battle to win his freedom from Guantanamo has been a long one, and his lawyers have argued that he cannot be an enemy combatant of both the U.S. and Al Qaeda. U.S. government lawyers, meanwhile,  maintain that the 2.5 weeks spent in an Al Qaeda training camp constitute sufficient reason for Janko’s continued detention.

Given that these 18 days were followed by 18 months of torture at the hands of Al Qaeda, the judge said that the government’s argument “defies common sense.” Ouch.

In fact, in a 13-page order, the judge wrote that the evidence “overwhelmingly leads this court to conclude that the relationship that existed in 2000 – such as it was – no longer existed whatsoever in 2002 when Janko was taken into [US] custody.”

image courtesy of cagle cartoons

The U.S. Magistrate judge on the case, John Facciola, said that there appeared to be unquestionable evidence against the couple and that the flight risk under the circumstances prevented him from granting bail. Cuba, of course, has a strong motive to help the spies escape from the States, not only as a thank-you to them for 30 years of loyal service, but also to instill other Cuban spies with faith in Cuba and to prevent the Myers couple from changing their allegiance and cooperating with the U.S. authorities.

Facciola said in support of his ruling: “The defendants’ hostility to the United States and their admiration for Cuba is well documented. It is hard to imagine, with so much at stake, that they would feel any compunction to fleeing prosecution in a country to which they seem to feel such little loyalty.”

Ouch. But it certainly rings true, especially given the following, which Judge Facciola wrote after hearing a summary of the evidence against the couple: “To put it bluntly, the government’s case seems at this point insuperable.”

At court, the couple sat beside each other and neither spoke nor showed any emotion. Their lawyer – Thomas Green – did try to argue that his clients should be allowed to go home, so they could be with their four kids, but the attempt to convince the judge to grant bail was brief and futile.

Of course, the U.S. has no diplomatic relations with Cuba, so if the couple were to flee to their beloved adoptive country, the U.S. would have no hope of extraditing them. Add to this the fact that the FBI found evidence that the two spies intended to make their permanent home in Cuba in the not too distant future – it seems they had plans to sail to Cuba in November and never return – and it makes perfect sense that they’ll be stuck in jail until their next court date on June 17.

Assistant US Attorney Gordon Michael Harvey said the Myerses face up to 17 years in jail – and possibly more as the federal investigation is still in progress and more charges could arise.

image courtesy of washingtonpost.com (sketch by William J. Hennessy Jr.)

The sentences were issued by Korea’s highest court and cannot be appealed. Within 10 days, Laura Ling and Euna Kim Lee, who were investigating the trafficking of North Korean women at the time of their arrest, will be relocated to the prison facilities where they are to spend the next 12 years of their lives. It is unclear whether they had actually crossed the China/North Korea border – as Korean news outlets report – or whether they were seized by Korean guards in China.

The U.S. does not have a diplomatic presence in North Korea, but they have pledged to “engage in all possible channels” to get the two American reporters released. Many believe the arrest, trial and subsequent sentencing are all part of a ploy by the Koreans to gain bargaining chips. North Korea’s been launching missiles and testing nuclear weapons – against the express requests of the international community – and the United Nations is currently figuring out how best to punish the country. It seems that the Koreans might use the journalists to enter into direct negotiations with the U.S. and to lighten the U.N.’s castigation.

The good news of this perspective is that North Korea fully intends to release the two women, but of course we have yet to know the price – what will they ask for in return? Obama said over the weekend that his administration has no intention of continuing a “policy of rewarding provocation,” with respect to North Korea’s nuclear program. Indeed, the U.S. has been threatening sanctions and ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ designation. This, along with the U.N.’s censure of North Korea’s rocket tests, clearly angered the country. Nuclear disarmament talks have stopped, and North Korea ran its second-ever atomic test on May 25 because the U.N. was not forthcoming with a public apology.

Lisa Ling, a well known correspondent, has been urging for the release of her sister (Laura) and her sister’s colleague, who has a 4-year-old daughter.

German spy chief Ernst Uhrlau did not want to lose his spy (whose identity has remained a secret) and argued not to have him arrested last year, but Chief Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms won that battle.

The German intelligence agency BND regarded Sinbad as an important source of information on the Iranian arms program, and according to Der Spiegel, Sinbad received over $1.4 million from BND over the 10+ years during which they employed his services.

It turns out that at the same time, the spy was also selling high-tech equipment to a company allegedly helping Iran manufacture Shahab missiles (long-range missiles modeled on Scud-B missiles…shahab means meteor in Arabic). The company is on Germany’s no-export list.

After Sinbad’s arrest, it was agreed by all parties involved that the trial be conducted efficiently and away from the public eye. The spy likely assumed his actions would be pardoned given his undercover work for the BND, but no such luck. He has now been ordered to leave Germany and serve his sentence abroad. Although where and how has not been specified – chances are he’ll serve his time in Canada, under a mutual prisoner exchange agreement.

It is still unclear whether the agent was working as a double – funneling ‘intel’ to Germany on Iran, while keeping Iran abreast of what he was doing.

photo courtesy of www.welt.de

Obama has been approaching the U.S.’s allies in Europe to take in the prisoners who are not believed to pose a threat to national security. They can’t be sent to their home countries as it is likely their welcome back party will involve torture.

On Monday, Belgian Spy Chief Alain Winants (otherwise known as the Director of the Belgian State Security Service) cautioned European countries, in an interview with Reuters, to think very carefully about the request, as the prisoners could yield extreme influence in militant circles. In the eyes of radicals, folks coming from Guantanamo have a “special aura,” something akin to celebrity status.

Even though Europe has criticized the U.S. for the Guantanamo facility, saying it is a strike against human rights (most of the detainees have been held there without charge), they have been hesitant to participate in the solution to closing the place down. And can you blame them?

Some of the prisoners will be tried in the U.S., and others will be cleared for release, but either way – many Americans are adamant that they do not want these folks – whether incarcerated or not – on American soil. A NY Times article from January led with the chilling question: “Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed coming to a prison near you?”

If the Americans don’t want them, why would the Belgians? Or the Germans, for that matter? German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has asked the obvious questions: “First, are we sure that these people do not pose a threat, because this is a worry of many citizens here. Second, why can’t the United States take them on? And third, do they have a link to Germany?”

Winants elaborated in his interview that Guantanamo vets are “a big pole of attraction” to “other people who want to contact them, who want to hear what they have seen.” He spoke of Malika El Aroud, the widow of one of the two men who assassinated the anti-Taliban Afghan rebel leader Ahmad Shah Masood a couple days prior to 9/11. She’s being held in Belgium at the moment for suspected links to Al Qaeda, and according to Winants, she has that “special aura” among militants. She has been a frequent and influential rabble-rowser on militant Islamic websites.

As the HQ of both NATO and the EU, Belgium is, of course, hyper-aware of potential threats to its national security. And if their spy chief recommends “NO” to welcoming Guantanamo inmates, who in Europe’s gonna say “YES”??

images courtesy of www.dailymail.co.uk and www.demorgen.be

On Saturday, hundreds gathered on the Veterans Memorial Bridge that connects Fargo, North Dakota (Saberi’s hometown) to Moorhead, Minnesota (where she attended college). The crowds were there to rally for the journalist’s release and to hold a vigil in her honor. As North Dakota Governor John Hoeven put it, they were there to ask that the Saberi family “be allowed to return home.”

Those who came out to show their support of Saberi wore yellow ribbons, arm bands and clothing. Several people spoke, including Pamela Jolicoeur, the president of Concordia College, Saberi’s alma mater. Saberi was scheduled to deliver the college’s commencement address this past weekend. Jolicoeur called Saberi an “inspiration,” saying: ”She is a remarkable young woman who has quickly distinguished herself as the type of globally engaged citizen that we desire all our graduates to be.”

Both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have expressed disapproval of the way the situation has been handled by Iran. They believe Saberi is innocent and have requested her immediate release, but so far Iran’s response has not been accommodating. Word from Tehran is that Saberi is an Iranian citizen who will be subject to the legal process in Iran – without exceptions. Iranian President Ahmadinejad refuses to intervene. Not a great start to the soothing of US-Iranian relations that Obama has been alluding to…

photo courtesy of www.cpj.org

Her father Reza appeared before an Iranian court yesterday, where he was questioned about Roxana’s strike, but what he shared comes as no surprise. She is refusing to eat in protest of her incarceration. “She says she will continue the strike until she is free from prison,” he told the court.

Reza added that the last time he saw his daughter she looked significantly thinner – by at least ten pounds.

As Roxana’s predicament continues to unfold – with Obama standing by her innocence and demanding her release, and Iranian President Ahmadinejad telling George Stephanopoulos that his hands are tied with respect to the judicial rulings in his country – it will be interesting to see how Iran responds to the strike of the so-called spy.

Thus far the reaction has not been promising – an Iranian judge apparently told the state-run media that the hunger strike is not real.

Ahmadinejad, though refusing to intervene, has said, “I am sure she is not being mistreated.” When asked whether ABC News could visit Roxana to ascertain that she if safe, he responded evasively, “Let’s see. We’ll see if our judicial regulations allow for that, sure. But if they do not allow for that, no. I’m afraid not.”

photo courtesy of www.topnews.in