The documentary Putin, Russia and the West, which aired on the BBC the 19th of this month, incorporates the admission by former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, that the seemingly farfetched Russian allegations dating to 2006 of British use of a fake rock in a Moscow park for espionage, were indeed true.…

March 22 was set by an Indian court this week as the start date for the trial of Madhuri Gupta, an erstwhile Second Secretary grade diplomat at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, on espionage and conspiracy charges related to allegations she had turned over classified information to Pakistani intelligence. The espionage charges against the officer…

In the wake of the December 18th release of two Kuwaitis from a 36 day detention by Iranian authorities, Kuwait denied that a deal had been reached for it to release two Iranians found guilty of spying. The two detained Kuwaitis, lawyer and journalist Adel Al Yahya, and TV cameraman Raed Al Majid, first were accused…

Ilir Nazmi Kumbaro, who was once the spy chief in Albania, did not show up earlier this month at Westminster magistrates’ court in London, for his extradition hearing related to six counts of torture and kidnapping brought against him in his homeland, and has disappeared. Among the charges, an accusation of abduction was leveled in the…

GCHQ, the British spy agency known for signal intelligence, posted a puzzle online earlier this month in an effort to not only drum up recruits but assess the code cracking capabilities and measure the technical expertise of these would be agents of the computer age. Visitors to the website, which made no mention of the espionage…

By Daria Carmon

Two people were placed into government custody in Taiwan early this week as Taiwanese investigators probe the most recent espionage attack on Taiwan’s defense system. One is a military intelligence officer from Taiwan who allegedly transferred classified data to another Taiwanese man with business interests in China. This business man then allegedly passed the…

Within the last week, came word from Iran of the arrests of 12 purported CIA “assets” or local recruits, who stand accused of espionage targeting that country’s nuclear program and industrial sector. Reports surfaced that Iran, in conjunction with Hezbollah, had uncovered supposed CIA informants, including a ring operating out of a Pizza Hut. Heydar Moslehi,…

By Daria Carmon

The trial of Hanjuan Jin, an American woman who held the position of senior software engineer at Motorola, Inc., and who is suspected of appropriating trade secrets that would in all likelihood been used by the Chinese military, commenced earlier this month. While Beth Gaus, counsel for the Chinese-born Jin, admitted Jin had breached…

Formal charges of attempted espionage were brought against U.S. Army Specialist William Colton Millay earlier this month, subsequent to his arrest last month at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, located in the Anchorage area of Alaska. Millay, a military policeman, had been the subject of a joint investigation by the FBI and Army Counterintelligence special agents. It is…

Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an ex Marine Arabic translator, was found guilty of being a CIA agent by an Iranian court, which handed down a death sentence, according to a state radio account last week. Specifically, the conviction entailed charges of spying for an enemy nation, serving as a CIA operative, and attempting to cast Iran as…

Convicted Russian spy Chris Vaneker, an ex F-16 pilot in the Dutch Air Force, last month received a five year prison term from a court in The Hague. Specifically, his espionage conviction entailed the transmission of classified information to a Russian diplomat. According to the court, Vaneker initiated contact with the Russian delegation’s military attaché at…

Iran divulged the arrest this past week of an Iranian national it claimed was working for American intelligence, specifically, the CIA. State TV reported the Intelligence Ministry account that the purported operative had been furnished with weapons instruction at American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, and whose assignment entailed supplying false information to the Iranians. The…

A conference was held last month in Ottawa for the express purpose of combating the annual losses in billions of dollars inflicted on Canadian industry by corporate spies. The title of the forum that took place over two days was CISC 2011: Protecting Your Company Against Corporate Espionage, and had at its helm Michel Juneau-Katsuya, onetime…

A recent series of articles penned by reporter Sean Naylor for the Virginia-based publication Army Times, recounts the repeated espionage and counterterrorism activities in which the CIA and American military special operations teams were engaged in Somalia, dating back eight years. The sources for the revelations were predominantly anonymous and are now or were at one…

Kexue Huang, a scientist who pled guilty in October of last year to industrial espionage carried out while an employee of Dow Chemical Co. and Cargill Inc., received a prison term of seven years and three months at his sentencing on December 21 in Indianapolis before United States District Judge William T. Lawrence. The landmark action…

A series of mysterious explosions that have plagued Iran, along with the slayings of several of its nuclear scientists, have caused the supposition by some in the intelligence community of a campaign of destruction by the U.S. and Israel directed at Iranian nuclear and missile programs, according to a Los Angeles Times report earlier this month.…

By Daria Carmon

The CIA spy network in Lebanon has sustained severe blows in recent months, according to accounts given to the Associated Press by current and onetime U.S. officials, commencing with Hezbollah’s apprehension of two American spies. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who has led Hezbollah for many years, took to the airwaves in June to brag on…