Tag: espionage

Israeli actor Chaim Topol lived a double life as a Mossad agent using his VIP status to gain entry to sensitive sites on daring missions around the world, his family reveals after his death aged 87

Fiddler on the Roof star Chaim Topol was actually a Mossad agent who went on daring missions around the world, his family have revealed weeks after his death. 

The Israeli actor, who died last month aged 87, lived a secret double life of ‘adventure and courage’ in between stints on the stage.

Although he gained fame for his depiction of Tevye in Shalom Aleichem’s stage musical, and then later in the 1971 film adaptation, his life off-stage was even more extraordinary.

His family say he used his London home as a base to welcome Mossad spies sent from Israel, who he plotted with to use his VIP status to gain entry to sensitive locations. 

The trips usually targeted the embassies, airports and airlines of Israel’s Arab enemies, as revealed by his widow Galia, and children Adi and Omer in an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 

Omer told the publication: ‘I don’t know exactly what the appropriate definition is for the missions and duties he performed. But what is clear is that Dad was involved in secret missions on behalf of the Mossad.

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WSJ Reporter Arrested in Russia Sought Classified Information From Government Official

The Wall Street Journal reporter who was recently arrested in Russia for espionage sought classified information from a Russian government official in the period of time leading up to his arrest.

American-born Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whose parents fled the Soviet Union due to rumors that Jewish citizens would be exiled to Siberia, formerly worked for The New York Times and The Moscow Times. He was arrested in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on March 29th, prompting a massive outcry from American corporate media publications, which have accused Russia of waging war on the free press.

Despite the narrative being presented to the American People and the wider NATO world, Gershkovich wasn’t arrested for merely reporting the news, but for attempting to gain classified information regarding “military enterprises” from a Russian government official – something that Russia claims he was doing on behalf of the US government.

According to a Russian legislator who Gerschkovich was trying to extract information from under the guise of conducting an interview, the Wall Street Journal reporter was looking for details on the “military-industrial complex of Yekaterinburg,” and was even trying to gain information on the Wagner Group, the Russian private military company that’s conducting military operations in Ukraine, perhaps most notably in the besieged Donbass city of Bakhmut.

“What the employee of the American publication The Wall Street Journal was doing in Yekaterinburg had nothing to do with journalism,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote in a statement defending the arrest that was published on her Telegram channel.

“Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the status of a ‘foreign correspondent’, a journalist visa, and accreditation have been used by foreign nationals in our country to cover up activities that are not journalism. This is not the first famous Western individual who has been caught red-handed,” Zakharova explained.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) echoed Zakharova’s claims in a public statement of its own, reporting that an investigation had “established that Gershkovich, acting as an agent for the American side, collected top-secret data about the activity of an enterprise of the Russian military-industrial complex.”

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US spy stabbed in terrorist attack – media

A woman injured in a knife attack in Gloucestershire, UK, last week, was an American intelligence operative seconded to British intelligence, the Daily Mail reported on Tuesday. Last Thursday’s incident, initially described as attempted murder but later upgraded to terrorism, has led to rampant speculation in the UK as neither the victim nor the attacker have been publicly named.

The attack happened at around 9pm local time in a parking lot in the town of Cheltenham, less than five kilometers away from the UK’s secretive Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) surveillance center. Officials at GCHQ have declined requests for comment.

Within hours of the attack, police had arrested a 29-year-old man and charged him with attempted murder. On Friday, he was re-arrested under the Terrorism Act, and the investigation was handed over to Counter Terrorism Policing South East “due to some specific details of this incident,” according to the state broadcaster BBC.

According to local residents interviewed by the Daily Mail, the woman and her attacker were inside the car, arguing, before the stabbing.

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Who Corrupted a Top FBI Spyhunter?

IN THE FINAL days of the Cold War, a young diplomat arrived at the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Agents in the FBI’s San Francisco field office kept a close eye on the personnel coming and going from the consulate. The six-story building in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods long served as a hub of espionage activity. The newly-arrived Soviet diplomat in his twenties, Evgeny Fokin, soon raised suspicions that he was a KGB officer operating under diplomatic cover on his first overseas posting. “I do remember he was an intelligence officer. He was KGB at the time,” says Rick Smith, a retired veteran of the FBI’s counterintelligence squad in San Francisco.

Three decades later, that young diplomat is now at the center of another spy story. This one involves Charles McGonigal, a former senior FBI counterintelligence officer who was indicted last month for taking money illegally from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence services. Fokin was the mysterious “Agent-1” described in court papers, an executive working for Deripaska who slowly corrupted the veteran FBI agent over a three-year period, according to sources and documents reviewed by Rolling Stone.

Arrested last month, McGonigal faces federal charges in New York of violating federal sanctions laws that prohibited him from taking money from Deripaska and laundering those ill-gotten gains. He is also accused in a separate case filed in Washington, D.C., of accepting nearly a quarter of a million dollars in secret payments from a former Albanian intelligence officer, including $80,000 that was handed over gangland-style in a car parked outside a New York City restaurant. “His arrest is a sorry day for the FBI,” a retired senior FBI official tells Rolling Stone. “The bureau has taken a beating the last few years with Trump and others attacking it. His arrest is all we need.” 

The damage to the bureau may go deeper than previously understood. In 2020, McGonigal took part in an Atlantic Council panel discussion titled “How Did Russia’s Security Services Capture the Kremlin?” A better question might be: Did Russia’s security services compromise a top FBI counterintelligence agent, here in America? How was one of the FBI’s top spyhunters so easily ensnared? “And how exposed is the FBI, given that it was Fokin, a suspected Russian spy, who snared him?”

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‘Good’ Fellas: The History of US Covert Actions at Home and Abroad

Long before the attack on the Nord Stream, the United States has gained a reputation for blowing things up, spying and staging coups in foreign countries, all the while trying to portray itself as a stereotypical “good guy.”

US investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh has dropped a bombshell this week when he named the United States as the party responsible for the destruction of three of the four Nord Stream pipelines that used to supply Russian natural gas to Germany.

While the United States feigned ignorance in the wake of the pipeline’s destruction in September last year, Hersh claimed that it was US Navy divers who planted explosive charges on the Nord Stream during a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea last summer.

The explosives were triggered remotely weeks after they were planted, the journalist wrote, citing a source familiar with the planning of this operation.

And though the White House officially denied the United States’ involvement, the US government and secret services have a long history of advancing Washington’s interests through espionage and sabotage, all the while claiming that they didn’t do it.

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The Real-Life Spy Who Inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond—and Ran Assassination Teams in the US During World War II

In his 1987 memoir Spycatcher, former British counter-intelligence agent Peter Wright recalled a conversation he had with two legendary counterintelligence officers of the CIA—James Jesus Angleton and William K. Harvey—some time after the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba.

Harvey, a squat bald man who looked like a heavier version of Heinrich Himmler sans spectacles, said he was seeking input on British interests in the Caribbean, but Wright sensed he was after something else. Harvey was known to operate a group of assassins plucked from the ranks of criminal organizations in Europe, and the MI5 agent worried that anything he said would soon be “quoted around Washington by the CIA as the considered British view of things.”

After a bit of back-and-forth, it became clear to Wright that Harvey was looking for someone who might be tapped to eliminate Fidel Castro.

“They don’t freelance, Bill,” Wright said bluntly. “You could try to pick them up retired, but you’d have to see Six about that.”

The response irritated Harvey, who seemed to believe Wright was being deliberately unhelpful. Wright decided to throw Harvey a bone.

“Have you thought of approaching Stephenson?” Wright asked. “A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of thing in New York during the war.”

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Who Was Aleister Crowley…Occultist, Satanist, and British Spy?

An otherwise auspicious birth in 1875 brought forth into the world Aleister Crowley who defied all acceptable standards of his time. His arrogance matched his defiance and bordered on grandiose. He founded the religion of Thelema, practiced sex magic, and may have worked as a double agent for the British. Based on the legends about Crowley, it would be easy to sum him up as the perverse, drug-addicted, satanic, wickedest man in the world. However, it seems that he was much more than any one of those things. Exactly who was Aleister Crowley – the person who could evoke respect and devotion in some people but disgust, hatred, and fear in others?

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Former NSA Staffer Charged With Espionage After Trying to Sell Information to Undercover FBI Agent

A former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) was charged with espionage for allegedly trying to sell classified national defense information to an undercover agent he believed to be working for a foreign government, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said.

Jareh Sebastian Dalke, a 30-year-old Army veteran of Colorado Springs, Colorado, worked at the NSA as an information systems security designer from June 6 to July 1, 2022. According to the DOJ, Dalke used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents he had obtained during his employment to an undercover FBI agent disguised as a representative of a foreign government.

Dalke was arrested on Sept. 28, after he arrived at a public location in Denver, expecting to meet the undercover agent and transfer one additional classified document. He allegedly told the agent that he has a debt of $237,000, and asked for a “specific type of cryptocurrency” in exchange for the “highly sensitive information” he possessed. The FBI ended up sending him about $4,600 worth of cryptocurrency as a “good faith payment” to help with his financial problems.

The information, according to an affidavit (pdf) supporting the criminal complaint, involves topics such as the threat assessment of the foreign country’s military offensive capabilities, a cryptographic program used by the U.S. government, and the threat assessment of U.S. defense capabilities, a portion of which relates to that foreign country.

While the foreign government is not identified, the affidavit states that Dalke claimed to have reached out to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, to make that he was actually communicating with a foreign government entity “rather than Americans trying to stifle a patriot.”

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First Openly Trans US Army Officer and Wife Arrested in Plot to Give Medical Records to Russia

U.S. Army Major Dr. Jamie Lee Henry, who came out as the first openly trans officer on 2015, is accused of betraying the military and country he serves by working with his wife Dr. Anna Gabrielian, an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, to give medical records to Russia on patients at Fort Bragg and Hopkins, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday by the Department of Justice. The couple was dealing with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian embassy staffer after Gabrielien had allegedly reached out to the Russian embassy. Gabrielian reportedly calimed she was motivated by patriotism for Russia. Gabrielian’s profile at Hopkins says she speaks Russian and English.

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US defense contractor and his wife who lived for decades using the stolen IDs of dead Texas babies are charged with identity theft but deny claims they are spies after photos of them in KGB uniforms are found

Walter Glenn Primrose and Gwynn Darle Morrison, both in their 60s, allegedly lived for decades under the names Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague – the stolen names of infants who died decades ago – according to federal court records unsealed in Honolulu.

The couple face charges of aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit an offense against the US and false statement in an application for a passport after they were arrested Friday in Kapolei on the island of Oahu.

Prosecutors are seeking to have the couple held without bail, which could indicate the case is about more than fraudulently obtaining drivers’ licenses, passports and Defense Department credentials.

Those documents helped Primrose get secret security clearance with the US Coast Guard and as a defense contractor and old photos show the couple wearing uniforms of the KGB, the former Russian spy agency, Assistant US Attorney Thomas Muehleck said in court papers.

Faded Polaroids of each in uniform were included in the motion to have them held.

A ‘close associate’ said Morrison lived in Romania while it was a Soviet bloc country, Muehleck said.

Morrison’s attorney said her client never lived in Romania and that she and Primrose tried the same jacket on as a joke and posed for photos in it.

Even if the couple used new identities, attorney Megan Kau told The Associated Press, they have lived law-abiding lives for three decades.

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