Operation Mincemeat and Spycraft in World War Two

Pandora’s Briefcase
It was a dazzling feat of wartime espionage. But does it argue for or against spying?
by Malcolm Gladwell

On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The body was of an adult male dressed in a trenchcoat, a uniform, and boots, with a black attaché case chained to his waist. His wallet identified him as Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines. The Spanish authorities called in the local British vice-consul, Francis Haselden, and in his presence opened the attaché case, revealing an official-looking military envelope. The Spaniards offered the case and its contents to Haselden. But Haselden declined, requesting that the handover go through formal channels—an odd decision, in retrospect, since, in the days that followed, British authorities in London sent a series of increasingly frantic messages to Spain asking the whereabouts of Major Martin’s briefcase.

It did not take long for word of the downed officer to make its way to German intelligence agents in the region. Spain was a neutral country, but much of its military was pro-German, and the Nazis found an officer in the Spanish general staff who was willing to help. A thin metal rod was inserted into the envelope; the documents were then wound around it and slid out through a gap, without disturbing the envelope’s seals. What the officer discovered was astounding. Major Martin was a courier, carrying a personal letter from Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, in London, to General Harold Alexander, the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. Nye’s letter spelled out what Allied intentions were in southern Europe. American and British forces planned to cross the Mediterranean from their positions in North Africa, and launch an attack on German-held Greece and Sardinia. Hitler transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese, in Greece, and the German military command sent an urgent message to the head of its forces in the region: “The measures to be taken in Sardinia and the Peloponnese have priority over any others.”

The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The man they took to be a high-level courier was a mentally ill vagrant who had eaten rat poison; his body had been liberated from a London morgue and dressed up in officer’s clothing. The letter was a fake, and the frantic messages between London and Madrid a carefully choreographed act. When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history.

The story of Major William Martin is the subject of the British journalist Ben Macintyre’s brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining “Operation Mincemeat” (Harmony; $25.99). The cast of characters involved in Mincemeat, as the caper was called, was extraordinary, and Macintyre tells their stories with gusto. The ringleader was Ewen Montagu, the son of a wealthy Jewish banker and the brother of Ivor Montagu, a pioneer of table tennis and also, in one of the many strange footnotes to the Mincemeat case, a Soviet spy. Ewen Montagu served on the so-called Twenty Committee of the British intelligence services, and carried a briefcase full of classified documents on his bicycle as he rode to work each morning.

MORE . . .
Operation Mincemeat and spycraft in World War Two: newyorker.comSphere: Related Content

Cui Bono? ~ The Unasked Q of the Anthrax Attacks

The Wrong Man - Magazine - The Atlantic
By David Freed
May 2010

In the fall of 2001, a nation reeling from the horror of 9/11 was rocked by a series of deadly anthrax attacks. As the pressure to find a culprit mounted, the FBI, abetted by the media, found one. The wrong one. This is the story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—and nearly destroyed an innocent man. Here, for the first time, the falsely accused, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, speaks out about his ordeal.Sphere: Related Content

America's Third War Front: Mexico

The unacknowledged Third War Front that America faces . . . Mexico.

Sheriff To Texas Border Town: 'Arm Yourselves'

AP Exclusive: Sinaloa cartel wins Juarez turf war

As agents clear out Mexican gangs, more brutal ones move in Drug cartels warn: 'Shut up,' or heads will rollSphere: Related Content

Israel's EMP Weapon Over Iran?

Friday, April 9, 2010
DEBORCHGRAVE: Of Arms and Armchair Warriors

Arnaud de Borchgrave

It is becoming increasingly difficult to sort fact from fiction between legacy media and the new media of libel-proof blogs sans editors. Blogomocracy is a time-consuming exercise in democracy. Media-watchers say to be well-informed and up to speed, one must scan at least 100 blogs. There's also Wikileaks, a Web-based investigative journalism outfit that recently released a video showing a U.S. Apache helicopter opening fire on a group of men, killing 12, including two Reuters news agency employees on July 12, 2007. The Apache carried a gun camera. WikiLeaks posted 38 minutes of what the gun was doing.

Few have time to keep up with more than one or two blogs. Thus, the one-paragraph scan of the print media online, coupled with the television news scroll, is how many stay "informed."

Debka, a news agency plugged in to Israeli intelligence, with a mixed track record of information frequently coupled with disinformation, reported last month that 387 supersmart bunker-busters originally earmarked for the Israeli air force were diverted en route to Israel to Diego Garcia, a U.S. coral atoll base in the Indian Ocean. This supposedly reflected President Obama's tetchiness over continued Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories, which he sees, correctly, as a major roadblock to the erection of a Palestinian state.

In Israel, and among American Jews, a large segment of opinion sees Iran's nuclear ambitions as an existential threat and would favor pre-emptive air strikes by the Israeli air force. But the leading armchair strategists among them are now saying the U.S. Air Force and Navy are best-equipped to bring the military mullahs to heel. There was a slight hiccup in the facile patter of the warriors who have never heard a weapon fired in anger.

Mr. Obama is dead set against starting something that almost inevitably triggers another war, even though most Gulf Arab leaders would secretly welcome anything that would deprive archrival Iran from becoming a de facto member of the nuclear club. For Mr. Obama, the Iraq war cost the U.S. $1 trillion, and the Afghan war, by the time we're done, another $1 trillion. A military showdown with Iran, and coping with the Revolutionary Guards' retaliatory capabilities up and down the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle Eastern region, would easily cost another trillion.

Three former U.S. Central Command chiefs, now retired, with expert knowledge of the Middle East and all the key players, have said that learning to live with Iran as a nuclear power is wiser than bombing Iran. In their view, it would have to be part of a regional geopolitical deal that would involve the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany.

The former commanders also echo current chief Gen. David H. Petraeus' statement to a Senate hearing that the Arab-Israeli conflict "foments anti-American sentiment" because of the "perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel." Israel's Yediot Aharonot reported Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., angry over the announcement of 1,600 more housing units in Arab East Jerusalem, saying to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops now fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Islamist extremists, from al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden to radical imams in Pakistan's madrassas and in mosques throughout the world, invariably couple the U.S. and Israel in the same sentence.

Mr. Obama already has more problems with Afghanistan than he anticipated when he came out in favor of the war during the presidential campaign. He told us that's where al Qaeda is hiding, so we are still threatened by another Sept. 11. Al Qaeda's Arabs and Pakistanis bugged out of Afghanistan to Pakistan during the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. Their Uzbek and Tajik fellow terrorists went straight home.

Clearly, Mr. Obama didn't anticipate that America's client-president of the client-state of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, would turn against the United States rather than clean house of embarrassingly rampant corruption.

No sooner had Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates left Kabul than Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flew in to a warm welcome by Mr. Karzai. Two days later, Mr. Obama flew all the way to Kabul and back (26 hours of flying) for a six-hour visit designed to take Mr. Karzai to the woodshed. The time for cracking down hard on massive corruption in his government was long overdue. For Mr. Karzai, that would be mission impossible. Corruption is an integral part of the Afghan body politic. A backlash was inevitable.

No sooner was Mr. Obama back in the U.S. than Mr. Karzai went so far as to suggest he was prepared to join forces with the Taliban, the enemy, reborn as a resistance movement fighting U.S.-NATO occupation. That, he said, would be preferable to the yoke of American imperialism. He accused the U.S., U.N. and NATO countries of committing fraud in the presidential primary in August and described the Western coalition as "invaders" who are giving the Taliban legitimacy as a "resistance movement." Before week's end, he denied everything. Wow!

Welcome to the high-stakes game of geopolitical poker. As there is no institutional memory in the capital of the world's most powerful nation, no one remembers that throughout the Vietnam War, various presidents, selected covertly by the United States and totally dependent on it, turned on their protector to demonstrate their mythical independence.

The United States and Russia signed a new "landmark" nuclear arms treaty on Thursday designed to create an incentive for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and for Iran not to produce any. Both America and Russia will still possess several thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and bombs, and neither Pyongyang nor Tehran is likely to scrap their nuclear plans.

This leaves the Obama administration with a pledged military withdrawal from Iraq this summer as suicide bombers return to sectarian and ethnic bloodletting, threatening to destroy a U.S.-engineered experiment in democracy; an Afghan ally threatening to join forces with the Taliban enemy; and the painful dilemma of Iran, against which draconian sanctions are no longer possible.

If Israel decided to explode an electromagnetic pulse weapon over Iran, the latest hot rumor in the blogosphere, and fry all electric appliances, including those at 27 nuclear sites, would Mr. Obama disown America's closest ally? Such a high-altitude nuclear explosion would, inevitably, cause collateral electrical damage in neighboring countries, e.g., Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The answer: a loud yes.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

Sphere: Related Content

Israeli Espionage Charges Over Targeted Killings of Palestinians

Israel Lifts Gag Order in Ex-Soldier Spy Case
Associated Press

JERUSALEM—Israel lifted a months-long gag order on a military espionage case Thursday, confirming the house arrest of a former female soldier charged with leaking more than 2,000 military documents to a newspaper.

Anat Kamm, 23 years old, has been under house arrest since December, but the case was kept under wraps by a court-imposed gag order. The restrictions were eased Thursday after details of the case were reported by foreign media, including The Associated Press.

The indictment was released with some parts still censored and it revealed new details on the case, including allegations that Ms. Kamm copied more than 2,000 classified military documents and relayed them to the Haaretz newspaper. Some 700 were classified as "top secret."

The indictment charges Ms. Kamm with passing information with the intent of harming national security. Her lawyer, Eitan Lehman, denied this.

"At no stage of this affair was Israel's security damaged. Certainly, there was no intent to do so," he said.

The Justice Ministry said the gag order was necessary for security reasons and to allow officials to try to recover the classified documents. Only some of the documents were recovered, it said, in part because the Haaretz journalist who allegedly got them has left the country.

The gag order drew harsh criticism from local media because the foreign reports were easily accessible over the Internet. In some cases, local newspapers published Web sites with the reports, or even copies of foreign reports, with all relevant names and details blacked out.

Prosecutors allege Ms. Kamm was the source for a Haaretz story accusing the military of killing Palestinian militants in violation of a Supreme Court ruling.

Israel's targeted killing policy was one of its most contentious in its years of bloody battle against a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000. Critics charged it to be illegal extrajudicial killing, while supporters credit it with quashing the Palestinian campaign of suicide bombings and shooting attacks.

In late 2006, Israel's Supreme Court set strict restrictions on assassinations in the West Bank, limiting them to extraordinary cases. Officially, the military stopped the practice following the ruling.

The Haaretz report cited a document from March 2007 that included an order from Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, then the top Israeli commander in the West Bank, permitting firing upon three top Palestinian militants even if they didn't pose clear and present dangers.

That summer, one of the men, Ziad Malaisha of Islamic Jihad, was killed in Jenin. Experts interviewed by Haaretz said the order was illegal. Gen. Naveh told Haaretz at the time that the killing was justified and didn't violate the court ruling. Gen. Naveh is now retired and refused comment.

At the time of the memos, Ms. Kamm served in Gen. Naveh's office. "All the newspaper stories were published with the consent of the (military) censor. If she posed a threat to national security, she would not have been allowed to stay home and continue working," Ms. Kamm's lawyer Mr. Lehman said.

Israel requires reporters to submit stories to a military censor that can block publication of information deemed damaging to national security. The gag order in the case was issued by a court, not the military censor.

The Haaretz reporter who wrote the story, Uri Blau, recently was assigned to London and believed to be in possession of some of the sensitive documents. Neither Mr. Blau nor Haaretz officials were immediately available for comment.

Ms. Kamm became a media columnist for the Walla Web site after completing her mandatory military service. The charges against her don't relate to her journalistic activities.

Sphere: Related Content

PENTAGON: Replace HUMINT with "GuardDog"

By Katie Drummond

March 29, 2010 |

2:15 pm |

Categories: DarpaWatch

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/pentagon-replace-human-intel-with-high-tech-guard-dog/#ixzz0jfOe2eac

U.S troops operating overseas face insurgent threats and affiliations that are constantly changing. Not to mention the language barriers and cultural differences that can make even minor interactions — let alone intelligence and interrogation — more difficult.

Now Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, wants to develop a foolproof system that analyzes social networks and cultural tendencies using graphs, complex algorithms and new advances in computing, to interpret and predict human actions.

The agency is hosting a proposal workshop for Graph Understanding and Analysis for Rapid Detection - Deployed on the Ground (priceless acronym: GUARD-DOG). Ideally, Darpa wants a replacement for current war-zone human intelligence, called HUMINT, which involves putting trained interrogators on the ground, identifying and tracking sources, and compiling data on relevant social networks. HUMINT is effective, but it can be dogged by slow turnaround: As Darpa notes, the lag between data collection and analysis can be 48 hours. And that means more than 80 percent of information may be irrelevant by the time troops take action.

A computerized intel analysis system, however, could rapidly grasp the size and complexity of the “human terrain,” and create new scenarios based on constantly-updated inputs. The real-world social networks in which troops operate have thousands of variables: people, locations, social affiliations, and organizations, to name a few. Spotting one small, hard-to-detect change in that landscape can be significant.

And Darpa wants more than just mind-bendingly fast analysis: the new programs should also be able to fill in the blanks. “Real-world social networks are likely to contain conflicting information and have missing data,” the agency’s proposal reads. “Patrols are also likely to be given false or misleading information.” So where human intel collectors might not pick up on inconsistencies, algorithmic interpreters somehow will. (Good luck with that — Ed.)

Having real-time access to the ins-and-outs of communities, whether friendly or hostile — not to mention accurate predictions of how those communities are apt to evolve — would be invaluable to troops operating among foreign cultures. Not to mention that it might teach them how to win friends and influence people.

“GUARD DOG will provid[e] dismounted soldiers with real-time assessments of the human networks relevant to their local battlespace, including threats, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties; and cues on engaging the people they encounter.”

Sphere: Related Content

China Exposes US Power Grid Vulnerability

Academic Paper in China Sets Off Alarms in U.S.
By JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID BARBOZA
The New York Times
March 20, 2010

It came as a surprise this month to Wang Jianwei, a graduate engineering student in Liaoning, China, that he had been described as a potential cyberwarrior before the United States Congress.

Larry M. Wortzel, a military strategist and China specialist, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10 that it should be concerned because “Chinese researchers at the Institute of Systems Engineering of Dalian University of Technology published a paper on how to attack a small U.S. power grid sub-network in a way that would cause a cascading failure of the entire U.S.”

When reached by telephone, Mr. Wang said he and his professor had indeed published “Cascade-Based Attack Vulnerability on the U.S. Power Grid” in an international journal called Safety Science last spring. But Mr. Wang said he had simply been trying to find ways to enhance the stability of power grids by exploring potential vulnerabilities.

“We usually say ‘attack’ so you can see what would happen,” he said. “My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.” And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.

The difference between Mr. Wang’s explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction.

“Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the U.S. power grid,” said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group. “Once you start interpreting every move that a country makes as hostile, it builds paranoia into the system.”

Mr. Wortzel’s presentation at the House hearing got a particularly strong reaction from Representative Ed Royce, Republican of California, who called the flagging of the Wang paper “one thing I think jumps out to all of these Californians here today, or should.”

He was alluding to concerns that arose in 2001 when The Los Angeles Times reported that intrusions into the network that controlled the electrical grid were traced to someone in Guangdong Province, China. Later reports of other attacks often included allegations that the break-ins were orchestrated by the Chinese, although no proof has been produced.

In an interview last week about the Wang paper and his testimony, Mr. Wortzel said that the intention of these particular researchers almost did not matter.

“My point is that now that vulnerability is out there all over China for anybody to take advantage of,” he said.

But specialists in the field of network science, which explores the stability of networks like power grids and the Internet, said that was not the case.

“Neither the authors of this article, nor any other prior article, has had information on the identity of the power grid components represented as nodes of the network,” Reka Albert, a University of Pennsylvania physicist who has conducted similar studies, said in an e-mail interview. “Thus no practical scenarios of an attack on the real power grid can be derived from such work.”

The issue of Mr. Wang’s paper aside, experts in computer security say there are genuine reasons for American officials to be wary of China, and they generally tend to dismiss disclaimers by China that it has neither the expertise nor the intention to carry out the kind of attacks that bombard American government and computer systems by the thousands every week.

The trouble is that it is so easy to mask the true source of a computer network attack that any retaliation is fraught with uncertainty. This is why a war of words, like the high-pitched one going on these past months between the United States and China, holds special peril, said John Arquilla, director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

“What we know from network science is that dense communications across many different links and many different kinds of links can have effects that are highly unpredictable,” Mr. Arquilla said. Cyberwarfare is in some ways “analogous to the way people think about biological weapons — that once you set loose such a weapon it may be very hard to control where it goes,” he added.

Tension between China and the United States intensified earlier this year after Google threatened to withdraw from doing business in China, saying that it had evidence of Chinese involvement in a sophisticated Internet intrusion. A number of reports, including one last October by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, of which Mr. Wortzel is vice chairman, have used strong language about the worsening threat of computer attacks, particularly from China.

“A large body of both circumstantial and forensic evidence strongly indicates Chinese state involvement in such activities, whether through the direct actions of state entities or through the actions of third-party groups sponsored by the state,” that report stated.

Mr. Wang’s research subject was particularly unfortunate because of the widespread perception, particularly among American military contractors and high-technology firms, that adversaries are likely to attack critical infrastructure like the United States electric grid.

Mr. Wang said in the interview that he chose the United States grid for his study basically because it was the easiest way to go. China does not publish data on power grids, he said. The United States does and had had several major blackouts; and, as he reads English, it was the only country he could find with accessible, useful data. He said that he was an “emergency events management” expert and that he was “mainly studying when a point in a network becomes ineffective.”

“I chose the electricity system because the grid can best represent how power currents flow through a network,” he said. “I just wanted to do theoretical research.”

The paper notes the vulnerability of different types of computer networks to “intentional” attacks. The authors suggest that certain types of attacks may generate a domino-style cascading collapse of an entire network. “It is expected that our findings will be helpful for real-life networks to protect the key nodes selected effectively and avoid cascading-failure-induced disasters,” the authors wrote.

Mr. Wang’s paper cites the network science research of Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at Northeastern University. Dr. Barabasi has written widely on the potential vulnerability of networks to so-called engineered attacks.

“I am not well vested in conspiracy theories,” Dr. Barabasi said in an interview, “but this is a rather mainstream topic that is done for a wide range of networks, and, even in the area of power transmission, is not limited to the U.S. system — there are similar studies for power grids all over the world.”

Sphere: Related Content

NATO's New HUMINT Center in Romania

Inauguration of NATO HUMINT Centre in Oradea
Date: 17-03-2010
Posted: http://www.actmedia.eu/2010/03/17/top+story/inauguration+of+nato+humint+centre+in+oradea/26263

Romania's President Traian Basescu on Tuesday told the opening ceremony in the western city of Oradea of a HUMINT human intelligence Excellence Centre that the emergence of this institution will significantly contribute toward the development of the operational capabilities and the grounding of the NATO policy in the area of human intelligence gathering.

Basescu said the establishment of the centre is supporting the process of transformation which the Alliance has pledged to carry through, a process that is deemed vital to its adjusting to the new security threats, which, given the complex and modern profile of it, is generating real interest among the future beneficiaries, that is the NATO structures and the allies.

'I want to voice satisfaction over the fact that during all this time Romania has enjoyed the partnership of Greece, Hungary, Slovenia and Turkey. They will be joined in by the US and Slovakia, both countries where internal procedures for accession are at a final stage now. The contribution of all these allies underscores the world profile and the idea of joint efforts being put to the service of achieving the NATO's objectives,' the President said.

President Basescu on Tuesday cut the ribbon to the NATO HUMINT Centre of Excellence, an elite institution dealing with training NATO intelligence and counterintelligence officers. Also attending the opening ceremony were Defence Minister Gabriel Oprea; Chief of the Romanian Army Staff Gheorghe Marin and officials of the sponsor countries - Greece, Slovenia, Turkey and Hungary - all of which have contributed toward the opening of the centre.

The NATO Excellence Centre in Oradea has 80 military staff, 16 of whom come from the four sponsor nations. They are expected to move in to Oradea with their family in the near future. The centre will offer various courses of between five and 3-4 weeks , according to the educational models to be adopted by the Alliance. Commander Simion mentioned that the number of the non-commissioned and commissioned officers that will attend the training courses in Oradea will run into hundreds and even thousands in one year.

The main mission of the centre in Oradea is to provide a one-stop reference point that will take care of the trainingtg, policy making and standardisation of the intelligence expertise of NATO and help the Alliance prefigure the future developments in its HUMINT capabilities.

Besides Romania, which is a founding country, Greece, Slovenia, Turkey and Hungary have signed a memorandum of understanding with Romania, will provide its own staff to the centre until mid-year. Two more nations, the US and Slovakia, are expected to sign the documents that will allow them to join the project as soon as possible.

The centre was accredited this February by a NATO board. The establishment of the HUMINT&CI Centre in Oradea was unanimously approved by the Romanian Parliament at a plenary session of its two chambers in June 2008.There are currently 18 NATO centres of excellence, five of which are now undergoing accreditation.Sphere: Related Content

US Army Re: Wikileaks & Secrets

U.S. Army Worried about Wikileaks in Secret Report
by Declan Mccullagh
CNET
March 15, 2010 11:43 AM PDT

A leaked US Army intelligence report, classified as secret, says the Wikileaks Web site poses a significant "operational security and information security" threat to military operations.

Classified U.S. military information appearing on Wikileaks could "influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors," says the report, prepared in 2008 by the Army Counterintelligence Center and apparently disclosed in its entirety on Monday.

The embarrassing twist: It was Wikileaks that published the 32-page document, but not before editor Julian Assange prepended a critique saying some details in the Army report were inaccurate and its recommendations flawed.

One section of the original document says "criminal prosecution" of anyone leaking sensitive information could "deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site." Another speculates that Wikileaks--which boasts that it is "uncensorable"--is "knowingly encouraging criminal activities," including violation of national security laws regarding sedition and espionage.

Lt. Col Lee Packnett, a spokesman for the U.S. Army on intelligence topics, said he was not familiar with the Wikileaks disclosure and would not immediately be able to comment. The National Ground Intelligence Center, which provides the Army with information about enemy weapons system and was mentioned in the report, did not immediately respond to a query from CNET.

Under the federal Espionage Act, it is a crime to disclose "information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States" (18 USC 793(e)). Another section says even indirect disclosures of national defense information to foreign citizens can be punished, in certain cases, by death (18 USC 794(a)).

Some First Amendment scholars have argued that those portions of the federal code cannot survive legal scrutiny--otherwise, as a few conservative commentators have claimed, The New York Times' disclosure of Bush-era warrantless wiretapping would have been a crime. In a since-abandoned prosecution of two former pro-Israel lobbyists charged with disclosing classified U.S. defense information, however, a federal judge had ruled that the balance struck by the Espionage Act "is constitutionally permissible."

Wikileaks has disclosed classified U.S. Defense Department information before. A 2004 report about Fallujah also marked secret was highlighted repeatedly as an example of damaging disclosure in the document released Monday.

The document no longer appears to exist on Wikileaks' Web site. A previous location now returns the error message: "The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable." (Wikileaks' Assange did not immediately reply when asked for an explanation.)

Wikileaks previously disclosed thousands of pages of pager logs from September 11, 2001, and won a case in federal court in San Francisco, after a Swiss bank attempted to pull the plug on the entire Web site. It shut down briefly last month because of lack of funds.

"While we will not comment on whether this is, in fact, an official document, we do consider the deliberate release of what Wikileaks believes to be a classified document is irresponsible and, if valid, could put U.S. military personnel at risk," Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, a spokesman for American military command in Baghdad, told The New York Times after Wikileaks posted a classified 2005 document about rules of engagement in that country.Sphere: Related Content

Sex & Spies

The History of the Honey Trap
Five lessons for would-be James Bonds and Bond girls -- and the men and women who would resist them.
Foreign Policy
BY PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY | MARCH 12, 2010

MI5 is worried about sex. In a 14-page document distributed last year to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, titled "The Threat from Chinese Espionage," the famed British security service described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. The document, as the London Times reported in January, explicitly warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate "long-term relationships" and have been known to "exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships ... to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them."This latest report on Chinese corporate espionage tactics is only the most recent installment in a long and sordid history of spies and sex. For millennia, spymasters of all sorts have trained their spies to use the amorous arts to obtain secret information.

The trade name for this type of spying is the "honey trap." And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one -- and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. "No, that's not true," she insisted. "He really loved me."

Those who aim to perfect the art of the honey trap in the future, as well as those who seek to insulate themselves, would do well to learn from honey trap history. Of course, there are far too many stories -- too many dramas, too many rumpled bedsheets, rattled spouses, purloined letters, and ruined lives -- to do that history justice here. Yet one could begin with five famous stories and the lessons they offer for honey-trappers, and honey-trappees, everywhere.

1. Don't Follow That Girl

In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician who had worked in Israel's Dimona nuclear facility, went to the British newspapers with his claim that Israel had developed atomic bombs. His statement was starkly at odds with Israel's official policy of nuclear ambiguity -- and he had photos to prove it.

The period of negotiation among the newspapers was tense, and at one point the London Sunday Times was keeping Vanunu hidden in a secret location in suburban London while it attempted to verify his story. But Vanunu got restless. He announced to his minders at the paper that he had met a young woman while visiting tourist attractions in London and that they were planning a romantic weekend in Rome.

The newspaper felt it had no right to prevent Vanunu from leaving. It was a huge mistake: Soon after arriving in Rome with his lady friend, Vanunu was seized by Mossad officers, forcibly drugged, and smuggled out of Italy by ship to Israel, where he was eventually put on trial for treason. Vanunu served 18 years in jail, 11 years of it in solitary confinement. Released in 2004, he is still confined to Israel under tight restrictions, which include not being allowed to meet with foreigners or talk about his experiences. Britain has never held an inquiry into the affair.

The woman who set the honey trap was a Mossad officer, Cheryl Ben Tov, code-named "Cindy." Born in Orlando, Fla., she was married to an officer of the Israeli security service. After the operation, she was given a new identity to prevent reprisals, and eventually she left Israel to return to the United States. But her role in the Vanunu affair was vital. The Mossad could not have risked a diplomatic incident by kidnapping Vanunu from British soil, so he had to be lured abroad -- an audacious undertaking, but in this case a successful one.

2. Take Favors from No One

One of the best-known honey traps in spy history involves Mata Hari, a Dutch woman who had spent some years as an erotic dancer in Java. (Greta Garbo played her in a famous 1931 film.) During World War I, the French arrested her on charges of spying for the Germans, based on their discovery through intercepted telegrams that the German military attaché in Spain was sending her money. The French claimed that the German was her control officer and she was passing French secrets to him, secrets she had obtained by seducing prominent French politicians and officers.

During the trial, Mata Hari defended herself vigorously, claiming that she was the attaché's mistress and he was sending her gifts. But her arguments did not convince her judges. She died by firing squad on Oct. 15, 1917, refusing a blindfold.

After the war, the French admitted that they had no real evidence against her. The conclusion by most modern historians has been that she was shot not because she was running a honey trap operation, but to send a powerful message to any women who might be tempted to follow her example. The lesson here, perhaps, is that resembling a honey trap can be as dangerous as actually being one.

3. Beware the Media

Sometimes a country's entire journalism corps can fall into an apparent honey trap. Yevgeny Ivanov was a Soviet attaché in London in the early 1960s. He was a handsome, personable officer and a popular figure on the British diplomatic and social scene, a frequent guest at parties given by society osteopath Stephen Ward.

Ward was famous for inviting the pick of London's beautiful young women to his gatherings. One of them was Christine Keeler, a scatterbrained '60s "good-time girl" who supposedly became Ivanov's mistress. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Keeler was the lover of the married British MP and Secretary of State for War John Profumo, who was then working on plans with the United States to station cruise missiles in Germany.

In 1963, Profumo's affair with Keeler was exposed in the press. Britain's famed scandal sheets also blew up the Soviet spy/honey trap angle, for which there was no evidence. Profumo was forced to resign for lying about the affair to the House of Commons. His wife forgave him, but his career was ruined.

Ivanov was recalled to Moscow, where he lived out his days pouring ridicule on the whole story: "It is ludicrous to think that Christine Keeler could have said to John Profumo in bed one night, 'Oh, by the way, darling, when are the cruise missiles going to arrive in Germany?'" He was probably right: When the media gets hold of a potential honey trap, the truth is easily lost.

4. The Deadliest of Honey Traps

Not all honey traps are heterosexual ones. In fact, during less tolerant eras, a homosexual honey trap with a goal of blackmail could be just as effective as using women as bait.

Take the tragic story of Jeremy Wolfenden, the London Daily Telegraph's correspondent in Moscow in the early 1960s. Wolfenden was doubly vulnerable to KGB infiltration: He spoke Russian, and he was gay. Seizing its opportunity, the KGB ordered the Ministry of Foreign Trade's barber to seduce him and put a man with a camera in Wolfenden's closet to take compromising photos. The KGB then blackmailed Wolfenden, threatening to pass on the photographs to his employer if he did not spy on the Western community in Moscow.

Wolfenden reported the incident to his embassy, but the official British reaction was not what he expected. On his next visit to London, he was called to see an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) who asked him to work as a double agent, leading the KGB along but continuing to report back to SIS.

The stress led Wolfenden into alcoholism. He tried to end his career as a spy, marrying a British woman he had met in Moscow, arranging a transfer from Moscow to the Daily Telegraph's Washington bureau, and telling friends he had put his espionage days behind him.

But the spy life was not so easily left behind. After encountering his old SIS handler at a British Embassy party in Washington in 1965, Wolfenden was again pulled back into the association. His life fell into a blur of drunkenness. On Dec. 28, 1965, when he was 31, he died, apparently from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a fall in the bathroom. His friends believed, no matter what the actual cause of death, that between them, the KGB and the SIS had sapped his will to live.

Ironically, his time as a spy probably produced little useful material for either side. His colleagues weren't giving him any information because they were warned that he was talking to the KGB, and the Soviets weren't likely to give him anything either. In this case, the honey pot proved deadly -- with little purpose for anyone.

5. All the Single Ladies

The broadest honey trap in intelligence history was probably the creation of the notorious East German spymaster, Markus Wolf. In the early 1950s, Wolf recognized that, with marriageable German men killed in large numbers during World War II and more and more German women turning to careers, the higher echelons of German government, commerce, and industry were now stocked with lonely single women, ripe -- in his mind -- for the temptations of a honey trap.

Wolf set up a special department of the Stasi, East Germany's security service, and staffed it with his most handsome, intelligent officers. He called them "Romeo spies." Their assignment was to infiltrate West Germany, seek out powerful, unmarried women, romance them, and squeeze from them all their secrets.

Thanks to the Romeo spies and their honey traps, the Stasi penetrated most levels of the West German government and industry. At one stage, the East Germans even had a spy inside NATO who was able to give information on the West's deployment of nuclear weapons. Another used her connections to become a secretary in the office of the West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt.

The scheme lost its usefulness when the West German counterintelligence authorities devised a simple way of identifying the Stasi officers as soon as they arrived in West Germany: They sported distinctly different haircuts -- the practical "short back and sides" variety instead of the fashionable, elaborate West German style. Alerted by train guards, counterintelligence officers would follow the Romeo spies and arrest them at their first wrong move.

Three of the women were caught and tried, but in general the punishment was lenient. One woman who managed to penetrate West German intelligence was sentenced to only six and a half years in prison, probably because ordinary West Germans had some sympathy with the women. Wolf himself faced trial twice after the collapse of communism but received only a two-year suspended sentence, given the confusion of whether an East German citizen could be guilty of treachery to West Germany.

Unlike most spymasters, Wolf preserved his own thoughts on his experience for posterity in his autobiography, Man Without a Face. Wolf denied that he put pressure on his officers to use die Liebe to do their jobs; it was up to the officers themselves: "They were sharp operators who realized that a lot can be done with sex. This is true in business and espionage because it opens up channels of communication more quickly than other approaches."

How about the morality of it all? Wolf replied for all spymasters when he wrote, "As long as there is espionage, there will be Romeos seducing unsuspecting [targets] with access to secrets." Yet he maintains: "I was running an intelligence service, not a lonely-hearts club."

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