Times of London, 19 Nov 09: When the wife of a German secret agent found out that he had a male lover she stormed into the headquarters of the country’s foreign intelligence service and demanded an explanation. The result is a court case that has shut down an entire spy network, blown another hole in the accident-prone German intelligence mission in Kosovo and severely embarrassed the country’s spy agency.
In 2005 Anton K, 42, a former army officer, was sent on attachment to the German Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia. His brief was to carry out a risk assessment in neighbouring Kosovo and to investigate the links between organised crime and the troubled province’s political establishment.
He rented a house in Pristina, the Kosovar capital, and hired a Macedonian: an ethnic Albanian. known as Murat A, now 29, as his interpreter. Soon the relationship went considerably farther but they neglected to tell the German intelligence service, the BND, that they were lovers.
It was only when Anton K’s wife discovered that her name had been removed from a life insurance policy and replaced with that of Murat A that news of the affair was revealed to his controllers. Anton K is now in the dock of a Munich court, accused of betraying state secrets — including passing on a classified document from British Intelligence — via his lover. “Murat A intended to pass this information either to people involved in organised crime in Macedonia or to foreign intelligence agencies,” the charge reads.
Murat A, the state prosecutor alleged, copied information from his lover’s laptop on to a memory stick. As a result, a network of 19 agents has been compromised and closed down. . . . . . .
Express Buzz, 17 Nov 09: India’s spies at the Research and Analysis Wing, dread their next chief, Avdesh Bihari Mathur, a protégé of National Security Advisor M K Narayanan for whom mountains are being moved so that he can take over when incumbent K C Verma demits office in January 2011. . . . . .
. . . . . Theoretically, the next RAW chief could be chosen from Mathur, Arni or Kapoor. Narayanan’s speeding up of the paperwork for Mathur’s promotion makes it clear that the choice will be no contest.
This will drive the low morale that has plagued RAW ever since the NSA began planting “outsiders” as chiefs (in the guise of fixing the organisation) to rock bottom, say a number of officers. Verma tried to stem the damage by calling a meeting of officers and telling them bluntly not to go on a protest leave. At the same time, however, he declared his “hands are tied” and claimed he was only implementing a “government order”. This assuaged no one; they saw a glass ceiling being put in place for the foreseeable future.
What galled them was not that officers who spent over 25 years serving the nation were being overlooked, but that Mathur’s blotched career, including his proximity to a section of a divided business house with great reach inside government, was being ignored. . . .
Threat Matrix, 18 Nov 09: As more clues emerge and investigations continue in the Fort Hood shootings, the debate rages as to what Major Nidal Hasan’s motives were. The facts that are already known, however, seem to paint a pretty clear picture of how these events unfolded, and what Hasan’s intentions were. . . . .
. . . . .The morning of the shooting, Hasan had given away some of his belongings; he had given away a Koran the day before. He phoned one neighbor to say goodbye and told another “I am ready,” which she interpreted as “I figured, he’s with God. He’s ready to go fight.” Hasan then made a stop to pray at the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen mosque, where he had attended services for the previous three months. After entering the Soldier Readiness Center, Hasan sat at an empty table, bowing his head for a moment. He then shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire with two handguns. . . . . .
US News and World Report, 18 Nov 09: More than two dozen professional hackers have set up operations in exurban Virginia beside a mock military headquarters made of plywood. Huddled over laptops, they are preparing to launch a vicious barrage of cyberattacks. Once they break into their targets’ computer networks, the nefarious possibilities are myriad: shutting off phone lines, overloading citywide emergency response systems, or simply slinking around to pilfer passwords.
Not far away, the defenders prepare for the onslaught they know is coming during the two-day “Cyberdawn” exercise, one of the country’s premier electronic war games. It is run with the help of volunteers by the private firm White Wolf Security, which also arranges closed war games for some federal agencies. The chance to test their cyberskills has attracted groups from private companies as well as the U.S. military. Ten teams, including those from West Point and the Air Force Academy, have traveled across the country to take part in the game in the hopes of protecting a simulated digital network linking phone systems, Social Security numbers, and power grids on which 10,000 fictitious citizens rely.
The exercise pits teams from the U.S. military, the military’s service academies, corporations, and even teenage computer savants against live hackers who look surprisingly innocuous. Most could easily be mistaken for middle-aged accountants, in neat khaki slacks and button-up shirts. Others are sporting Puma training jackets and baseball caps. The de facto leader of the group has donned a stylish black bowling shirt with a name patch that reads, simply, “Hacker.” They have been instructed to use any means short of causing physical damage to exploit the vulnerabilities of their prey, placing them on the front line of what is an increasingly vital area of national security—the art and practice of offensive cyberwar. . . . . .
NPR, 18 Nov 09: Investigators are still trying to determine whether Maj. Nidal Hasan’s alleged deadly rampage at Fort Hood was a calculated act of radical Islamist ideology or the deranged act of an alienated loner.
But even as military and law enforcement officials continue their probe, the incident has sparked a renewed focus on how Islamic extremists and al-Qaida sympathizers become radicalized in the first place.
The U.S. government has focused significant intelligence resources on the question of radicalization in recent years, but they admit the dynamics are still not well understood.
“We haven’t completely figured out why some people are susceptible to that and some aren’t,” says a senior U.S. intelligence official. “There are people who argue it’s cultural or economic or political or psychological, but it depends.” . . . . .
CI Centre Course 361: The Global Jihadist Threat Doctrine
