Polish rail line blown up in suspected sabotage

WARSAW, Nov 17 (Reuters) - An explosion that damaged a Polish railway track on a route to Ukraine was an "unprecedented act of sabotage", Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Monday as he vowed to catch those responsible for an incident he said could have ended in tragedy.

The blast on the Warsaw-Lublin line that connects the capital to the Ukrainian border followed a wave of arson, sabotage and cyberattacks in Poland and other European countries since the start of the war in Ukraine.

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Warsaw has in the past held Russia responsible, saying Poland has become one of Moscow's biggest targets due to its role as a hub for aid to Kyiv. Russia has repeatedly denied being responsible for acts of sabotage.

"The blowing up of the railway track on the Warsaw-Lublin route is an unprecedented act of sabotage aimed at the security of the Polish state and its citizens," Tusk wrote on X.

"An investigation is underway. Just like in previous cases of this kind, we will catch the perpetrators, regardless of who their backers are."

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Father Dimitrios: The Orthodox Monk Who was a British Spy

A fascinating and somewhat disturbing story.

Read it here.

My thoughts on L'Affair Khashoggi

This whole thing looks less like an orchestrated murder than a planned snatch op (kidnapping) gone bad. If they wanted him dead it could have been done anywhere under circumstances that would have given the Kingdom plausible deniability. Any competent intelligence service knows how to make problems go away in a manner that can be passed off as a robbery gone bad, a suicide or even death by natural causes. The Russians are very good at this sort of thing. I'd ask Vlad for some confirmation but I don't want to spend the rest of my life checking my food and drinks with a geiger counter.

Back to Mr. Khashoggi. Assassinating someone in their consulate would have been bone crushingly stupid. No government or intelligence service with more than two brain cells in operation would do that. I think they planned to grab him, probably drug him, and smuggle him back to Saudi Arabia where they could put him on ice for a while until he agreed to play nice and/or they decided what to do with him long term.

Clearly something went wrong. A purely educated guess is he put up a fight and the subsequent interrogation got ugly. Maybe he had a heart attack. Maybe he had a bad reaction to a drug. Maybe he said somethings that ticked off people in the snatch team and somebody overreacted. We will probably never know.

But my gut says this did not start out as a planned hit.

And now for something a bit different...

A World War II training film for spies produced by the OSS.

Obama looking to avoid Waldorf hotel in New York after Chinese purchase

Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has stayed in the presidential suite on the 35th floor of the Waldorf Astoria New York in Manhattan. The accommodations run $4,000-$6,000 per night, hotel officials say, and feature souvenirs collected from past commanders in chief and security measures like bulletproof glass windows. Current and former White House officials have long considered the hotel and its staff as the best in the world at hosting the most powerful man in the world.

That may all be about to change. President Barack Obama is on track to skip the Waldorf this fall when he heads to New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, several officials told Yahoo News.

While the officials would not say so explicitly, they strongly indicated that the decision to reevaluate the historic relationship with the Waldorf was tied to the hotel’s sale to China’s Anbang Insurance Group, approved by U.S. regulators earlier this year. While Hilton will continue to operate the property for 100 years, one U.S. official linked the American decision to relocate the president to worries about Chinese espionage and to the announcement of an upcoming “major renovation” at the hotel that could provide an opportunity to install surveillance gear. The recent theft of millions of federal workers’ personal information, pinned on China, has fed the sense of alarm in Washington. China denies responsibility for the breach.

Read the rest here.

A sad, but probably necessary decision.

China is main suspect in massive hack

Investigators suspect Chinese hackers may be responsible for a breach of health insurer Anthem, one of the largest medical-related cyberattacks in history and a harbinger of a growing threat facing the health care industry, said an individual briefed on some aspects of the probe. 

Anthem, the country’s second largest health insurer, said hackers gained access to the sensitive data of 80 million former and current members and employees, including Social Security numbers, income data, birthdays, street and e-mail addresses. 

There are some indications that other health care companies may have been targeted, said the individual said, who declined to be named because the investigation is ongoing.

Read the rest here.

CIA Admits it Spied on Congress

CIA employees improperly searched computers used by Senate investigators involved in a multiyear probe of the agency’s use of harsh interrogation measures on terrorism suspects, according to the findings of an internal agency inquiry that prompted CIA Director John Brennan to apologize to lawmakers this week.

Ten agency employees, including two lawyers and three computer specialists, surreptitiously searched Senate Intelligence Committee files and reviewed some committee staff members’ e-mails on computers that were supposed to be exclusively for congressional investigators, according to a summary of the CIA inspector general’s report released Thursday.

The document criticizes members of the computer team for a “lack of candor about their activities” when they were questioned by investigators working for CIA Inspector General David Buckley.

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Spy Agencies Scour Phone Apps for Personal Data

When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies may be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.

In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.

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Pot, meet kettle

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s government acknowledged on Monday that its top intelligence agency had spied on diplomatic targets from countries including the United States, Iran and Russia, putting Brazilian authorities in the uncomfortable position of defending their own surveillance practices after repeatedly criticizing American spying operations. 

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Bottom line here is that it's no fair because we are better at it than they are. Look, countries spy on each other. It's been going on since the days of the Old Testament and frankly, it's probably for the good. World leaders sleep better and are less twitchy if they think they have a clue what the other guy is up to.

Manning: Guilty of Espionage Act - Not Guilty of Aiding the Enemy

An Army judge on Tuesday acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy by disclosing a trove of secret U.S. government documents, a striking rebuke to military prosecutors who argued that the largest leak in U.S. history had assisted al-Qaeda.

The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with, including several counts of violating the Espionage Act. She also acquitted him of one count of violating the Espionage Act that stemmed from his leak of a video that depicted a fatal U.S. military airstrike in Farah, Afghanistan.

Read the rest here.

While I empathize with his motives the problem is that he is a soldier and he raised his right and and took the oath. The military by its very nature can't have people deciding when they will and will not obey orders. You might just as well disband the armed forces. As for the law, the press is (what a surprise!) wrong when they characterize this as a government defeat. They won big time. While the media is focusing on the "Aiding the Enemy" charge," they are missing a huge legal point. He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act. That's going to carry a lot of weight in prosecuting other leakers.

Manning may not be looking at the proverbial blindfold and cigarette, or a mandatory life without parole, but he is going down hard. I would be stunned if he gets less than 20 years in prison.

Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Resigns in Spy Scandal

BRUSSELS — The longest-serving government leader in the European Union, Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, resigned as prime minister on Thursday amid a ballooning intelligence service scandal that began with revelations that the duchy’s former spy chief taped official meetings with a recorder disguised as a wristwatch. 

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OK. I normally don't regard minor political news from the EU's smallest member state as blog worthy. (No offense to any readers from the Grand Duchy.) But... Luxembourg has a secret spy service? Really? This sounds like the plot of a Peter Sellers comedy.

Maybe we need to keep a closer eye on Rhode Island.

Europe Furious Over Alleged US Spying

BERLIN — European leaders reacted with fury Sunday to allegations in a German newsmagazine that the United States had conducted a wide-ranging effort to monitor European Union diplomatic offices and computer networks, with some saying that they expected such surveillance from enemies, not their closest economic partner.

It was the latest fallout from National Security Agency information apparently leaked by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor whose detailing of classified information on the agency’s programs has shined a rare light on U.S. surveillance efforts that range far wider than previously understood.

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China Hacked Obama and McCain Campaigns

The U.S. secretly traced a massive cyberespionage operation against the 2008 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain to hacking  units backed by the People’s Republic of China, prompting  high level warnings to Chinese officials to stop such activities,  U.S. intelligence officials tell NBC News.

The disclosure on the eve of a two-day summit between the U.S. and Chinese presidents highlights what has become a persistent source of tension between the two global powers: Beijing’s aggressive, orchestrated campaign to pierce America’s national security armor at any weak point – in this case the computers and laptops of top campaign aides and advisers who received high-level briefings.

Read the rest here.

Chinese Hackers Steal Secret Plane and Weapons Designs

Designs for many of the nation’s most sensitive advanced weapons systems have been compromised by Chinese hackers, according to a report prepared for the Pentagon and to officials from government and the defense industry.

Among more than two dozen major weapons systems whose designs were breached were programs critical to U.S. missile defenses and combat aircraft and ships, according to a previously undisclosed section of a confidential report prepared by the Defense Science Board for Pentagon leaders.

Read the rest here.

This is outrageous and a very serious threat to national security. I would prefer to be left alone and at peace with the world, but if China is determined to continue these provocations and aggressive assaults on our security we need to respond. The US Ambassador to Beijing should be recalled and our national defenses need to be reoriented to treat China as the principal danger to our country.

Experts: China has hacked most of Washington

Start asking security experts which powerful Washington institutions have been penetrated by Chinese cyberspies, and this is the usual answer: almost all of them.

The list of those hacked in recent years includes law firms, think tanks, news organizations, human rights groups, contractors, congressional offices, embassies and federal agencies.

The information compromised by such intrusions, security experts say, would be enough to map how power is exercised in Washington to a remarkably nuanced degree. The only question, they say, is whether the Chinese have the analytical resources to sort through the massive troves of data they steal every day.

Read the rest here.

U.S. Plans Base for Surveillance Drones in Northwest Africa

WASHINGTON — The United States military command in Africa is preparing plans to establish a drone base in northwest Africa to increase unarmed surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

Read the rest here.

Congress again broadens the power to spy

WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Friday to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects, after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.

The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 73 to 23, clearing it for approval by President Obama, who strongly supports it. Intelligence agencies said the bill was their highest legislative priority.

Critics of the bill, including Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican, expressed concern that electronic surveillance, though directed at noncitizens, inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well.

“The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless,” Mr. Paul said, referring to the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. “Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance. Digital records seem to get less protection than paper records.”

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Real Life Spying Aint James Bond

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a fan of the Bond movies. I go to see them for the same reasons everyone else does: the gorgeous women, the most beautiful places on Earth and, of course, the roller-coaster ride of a plot. I delight in Bond’s complete defiance of gravity. His suits never wrinkle, his Aston Martin is never in the garage for repairs, the girls never say no.

But as a former spy, what I like most about the Bond movies is the way good always triumphs over evil. His cases end neatly, with the villain dispatched and the world safe for the good guys.

Real-life espionage is a lot less sexy — and a lot messier.

... While occasionally I found myself in a Bond-like setting during my spying career, the story inevitably unfolded with a lot less panache.

One time, in pursuit of an elusive informant, the agency sent me to Monaco to troll the Casino de Monte-Carlo. The problems started before I even got on the plane. The CIA scoffed at the idea of buying me a tuxedo, and the dragon lady who did our accounting refused to give me a cent to put on the roulette table. Not surprisingly, as soon as I walked into the casino in my penny loafers, the security goons spotted me as an impostor and pulled me over for a polite interrogation. I never found our would-be informant, but I did come away with the certainty that I wasn’t James Bond.

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Strictly for Conspiracy Buffs

Normally I have little use for the modern fetish with conspiracy. But this is so bizarre that even I am wondering...

LONDON — Britain, home to the MI6 spy agency that inspired the James Bond stories and the billion-dollar film franchise, has been wrestling this week with one of the country’s strangest real-life spy mysteries in a generation, one that has become known popularly as the case of the spy in the bag.

An inquest held just across the Thames from MI6’s headquarters here has brought forth details of the bizarre and lonely death in August 2010 of Gareth Williams, a 31-year-old rising star in supersecret counterterrorism work. He was found in a fetal position, arms crossed on his chest, locked inside a duffel bag resting in an unfilled bathtub at the government flat assigned to him in the upscale Pimlico district of London.

His naked body had been in the bag for a week before it was discovered, so badly decomposed that the police and pathologists have been unable to determine whether he was murdered in what his family’s lawyer has suggested to the court was a plot by others skilled in the “dark arts” of spy work.

That theory has played prominently here, with Mr. Williams depicted alternately as a victim of Russian secret service hit men, extremists with Al Qaeda, or a multitude of other potential assassins working in the murky world of espionage who poisoned him with potassium cyanide or an overdose of a powerful sedative drug, GHB, a theory pathologists said could not be effectively tested because of the advanced decomposition.

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What makes a perfect spy tick?

On a rainy day in the spring of 1967, I shuffled into a classroom at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Md., in a grimy industrial area of East Baltimore. There were about 30 of us, mostly college graduates, including newly minted lawyers and a few erstwhile hippies who had received draft notices. It was the first day of a seven-month course blandly titled “Area Studies.”

In fact, we were going to learn to be spies.

Truth be told, few of us expected to be turned into James Bonds. Most of us had volunteered for an extra year’s enlistment in intelligence to avoid being shipped off to South Vietnam with a rifle.

Of course, intelligence did sound exciting, and only vaguely dangerous. I doubt that any of us knew exactly what to expect. A cross between “Mission: Impossible” and “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” maybe.

The shades were drawn. A rectangular red sign, “SECRET,” was slid into a bracket on the front wall. An instructor stepped to the podium.

I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.” That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.

It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but “case officers” — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.

He looked around. One man got up and left. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.

Read the rest here.