Tag: espionage

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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The CIA Is Trying to Recruit Gen Z—and Doesn’t Care If They’re All Over Social Media

When you pull up to the CIA headquarters in Langley, you have to shout your Social Security number out the window into a speaker, like when you’re ordering fries at a drive-through. Much like the Union that the Agency was formed to protect, the system, it seems, could be more perfect. But I am willing to do what it takes to get the inside story of how the CIA is recruiting and working with the next generation of spies.

One would think it’s basically impossible to get millennials and zoomers into covert jobs. The youngest of this bunch of young people have spent their entire lives online, some since their parents blasted out their first ultrasound picture as a pregnancy announcement, before they’d even gained sentience. If the whole point of being a spy is that nobody knows who you really are and no one can ever find out, how exactly are you supposed to achieve this level of anonymity when you’ve flung untold reams of identifiable content across the digital world? I intended to find out.

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Diplomat Found Dead Outside Berlin Embassy Believed To Be Russian Intelligence Agent

It’s been revealed for the first time in a bombshell Der Spiegel report on Friday that a man found dead just outside the Russian embassy in Berlin last month was a Russian intelligence agent. Though Russia has not disclosed this, the allegation as to his identity is being made by German intelligence officials after his death under mysterious circumstances.

“The 35-year-old man’s body was found early on Oct. 19, the magazine said. It said, citing security sources, that the man had fallen from an upper floor at the embassy,” Reuters summarizes of the German media report. 

He was officially considered a diplomat of the embassy, having been publicly listed in the position of second secretary. It’s common for countries, including the United States, to place covert operatives in undercover roles as diplomatic personnel at their foreign embassies and consulates.

The man, whose name has not been given, was found at approximately 7:20 am on 19 October 2021 by police that are assigned to guard the embassy compound. Emergency paramedics arrived on the scene but could not resuscitate him. 

Der Spiegel cited German intelligence sources to say that not only was the man “in fact” an undercover Federal Security Service (FSB) agent, but that he’s also believed related to a top ranking FSB general. It remains however that nothing in the way of specific evidence was offered in the publication – but that the Russian’s status appears to be the official view of German intelligence. 

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