Swiss Counterintelligence Increased & Consolidated

November 8, 2009
Secret Service Chief Calls for More Swiss Spies

The head of the newly unified Swiss foreign and domestic intelligence services, Markus Seiler, has called for more counterintelligence personnel.

In an interview published in the newspapers SonntagsZeitung and Le Matin Dimanche, Seiler revealed that the intelligence services also plan a greater presence in Swiss embassies.

"As an open country with an open economy and many international organisations, Switzerland is a stomping ground for secret services," Seiler said, adding that the growing number of spying cases worried him greatly.

"This is why more [Swiss] personnel have to be put in place for counterintelligence," he said.

Seiler has been in charge of unifying the foreign and domestic services under one ministry following a decision by parliament last year.

From the beginning of 2010 both units will pool data for evaluation, but information gathering will still be carried out separately.

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Russia Nukes Poland (Sort of)

Comment: Some things never change. I get the feeling this is material for a forthcoming book by Pat Buchanan.

Russia "Simulates" Nuclear Attack on Poland
Russia has provoked outrage in Poland by simulating an air and sea attack on the country during military exercises.

By Matthew Day in Warsaw
Published: 4:37PM GMT 01 Nov 2009
Telegraph.co.uk

The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on the country's coast.

Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.

The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about 13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.

Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the "potential aggressor".

The documents state the exercises, code-named "West", were officially classified as "defensive" but many of the operations appeared to have an offensive nature.

The Russian air force practised using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which neighbours Poland, Red Army forces stormed a "Polish" beach and attacked a gas pipeline.

The operation also involved the simulated suppression of an uprising by a national minority in Belarus – the country has a significant Polish population which has a strained relationship with authoritarian government of Belarus.

Karol Karski, an MP from Poland's Law and Justice, is to table parliamentary questions on Russia's war games and has protested to the European Commission.

His colleague, Marek Opiola MP, said: "It's an attempt to put us in our place. Don't forget all this happened on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland."

Ordinary Poles were outraged by news of the exercise and demanded a firm response from the government.

One man, identified only as Ted, told Polskie Radio: "Russia has laid bare its real intentions with respect to Poland. Every Pole most now get of the off the fence and be counted as a patriot or a traitor."

Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, has tried to build a pragmatic relationship with the Kremlin despite widespread and vocal calls in Poland for him to cool ties with Moscow.

After spending 40 years under Soviet domination few in Poland trust Russia, and many Poles have become increasingly wary of a country they consider as possessing a neo-imperialistic agenda.

Bogdan Klich, Poland’s defence minister, said: “It is a demonstration of strength. We are monitoring the exercises to see what has been planned.

Wladyslaw Stasiak, chief of President Lech Kaczynski’s office, and a former head of Poland’s National Security Council, added: “We didn’t like the appearance of the exercises and the name harked back to the days of the Warsaw Pact.”

The Russian troop exercises will come as an unwelcome sight to the states nestling on Russia’s western border who have deep-rooted anxieties over any Russian show of strength.

With a resurgent Moscow now more willing to flex its muscles, Central and Eastern Europeans have warned of Russia adopting a neo-imperialistic attitude to an area of the world it still regards as its sphere of influence.

In July, the region’s most famed and influential political figures, including Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, wrote an open letter Barack Obama warning him that Russia “is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods.”

Moscow and Minsk have insisted that Operation West was to help "ensure the strategic stability in the East European region".

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Mossad? Nope, FBI. Oops.

Scientist Pleads Not Guilty to Espionage
Published: Oct. 30, 2009 at 4:49 PM

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- A former U.S. government scientist with a top secret clearance was held without bond Friday after pleading not guilty to attempted espionage, authorities said.

Stewart David Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Md., was accused of trying to deliver classified information to someone he thought was an Israeli intelligence official but who was actually an FBI undercover agent, CNN reported.

Asstistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Asuncion said evidence will show Nozette disclosed to investigators information that was "top secret, related to our national defense, that would cause exceptionally grave damage to national security" if revealed to a foreign country.

In arguing against bond, prosecutors played what they call an undercover videotape of a conversation 10 days ago between Nozette and an agent.

Nozette is heard negotiating for a false passport and a means to get to a country with no extradition policy with the United States and suggested his wife would not accompany him, the FBI said.

Nozette had a top secret clearance and served at the White House on the National Space Council for President George H.W. Bush, an FBI affidavit said.

The document says Nozette also acted as a technical consultant from 1998 until early 2008 "for an aerospace company that was wholly owned by the government of the state of Israel."

The company reportedly consulted with Nozette monthly, getting answers to questions and he received total payments of $225,000.Sphere: Related Content

"Schild und Schwert der Partei"

'Puzzlers' reassemble shredded Stasi files, bit by bit -- latimes.com

East German documents provide a crucial piece of history, supporters of the project say, but putting them back together could take hundreds of years. A computerized system would help, but it's costly.

By Kate Connolly

November 1, 2009

EXCERPT: Reporting from Berlin and Zirndorf, Germany, - Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together.

"Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing.

Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Two decades after the heady days when crowds danced atop the Berlin Wall, Germany has reunited and many of its people have moved on. But historians say it is important to establish the truth about the Communist era, and the work of the puzzlers has unmasked prominent figures in the former East Germany as Stasi agents. In addition, about 100,000 people annually apply to see their own files.

The Stasi, which is said to have had more than 170,000 informers, succeeded in destroying thousands of files, shredding them in machines called "ripping wolves" until the equipment broke down under the weight of the task, then through burning and pulping (the contents, held in buckets in the archive, are known as "Stasi porridge"). At the end, agents tore them by bare hand as the teeming crowds smashed down their doors.

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Obama's Predator Drone Strikes in AfPak

As you consider Obama's decisions and actions concerning the Predator strikes and how he decides to move forward (or not) in Afghanistan, a little perspective is called for -- so let's remember what Candidate Obama said on 13 Aug 07. [". . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians."]

The Predator War

Jane Mayer

The New Yorker

October 26, 2009

Excerpt: On August 5th, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley, Virginia, watched a live video feed relaying closeup footage of one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house, in Zanghara, a hamlet in South Waziristan. It was a hot summer night, and he was joined outside by his wife and his uncle, a medic; at one point, the remarkably crisp images showed that Mehsud, who suffered from diabetes and a kidney ailment, was receiving an intravenous drip.

The video was being captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone, a remotely controlled, unmanned plane that had been hovering, undetected, two miles or so above the house. Pakistan’s Interior Minister, A. Rehman Malik, told me recently that Mehsud was resting on his back. Malik, using his hands to make a picture frame, explained that the Predator’s targeters could see Mehsud’s entire body, not just the top of his head. “It was a perfect picture,” Malik, who watched the videotape later, said. “We used to see James Bond movies where he talked into his shoe or his watch. We thought it was a fairy tale. But this was fact!” The image remained just as stable when the C.I.A. remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. Authorities watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: his wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant, and seven bodyguards.

Pakistan’s government considered Mehsud its top enemy, holding him responsible for the vast majority of recent terrorist attacks inside the country, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in December, 2007, and the bombing, last September, of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than fifty people. Mehsud was also thought to have helped his Afghan confederates attack American and coalition troops across the border. Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council, who is now a partner at Good Harbor, a consulting firm, told me, “Mehsud was someone both we and Pakistan were happy to see go up in smoke.” Indeed, there was no controversy when, a few days after the missile strike, CNN reported that President Barack Obama had authorized it.

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