Counterintelligence

...were sometimes seen in the past, when their intelligence agency MOIS tracked down dissidents. The last incident showed their still ongoing efforts, including sleeper cell agents and one diplomat from the Iranian embassy in Vienna. This diplomat was charged by German authorities with planning an assault against a meeting of the exile group National Council of Resistance of Iran. The Federal Prosecutor General was a little bit shy and named the suspect Assadollah A. But a simple check of the Vienna embassy staff shows more details. Using an explosive device for political reasons is a strong signal, but it is one instrument of influencing the political situation in a country. Accidentally I published a new paper today which looks into covert and clandestine operations of some states, which are extremely active in countries as Germany - often supposed by officials who are on their payroll or just think this is the right way to do politics. These operations can be aggressive and...

... was a public diplomacy publication of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which provided an estimate of the military strategy and capabilities of the Soviet Union during the final years of the Cold War, ostensibly to alert the U.S. public to the significant military capabilities of the Soviet Armed Forces . The single publications were not classified and can be downloaded easily. A few days ago I found three of them in a box, hidden in an dusty bookstore in Dublin. Inside were a few old articles from newspapers of the 80s and one - Volume 1987 - was stamped presumably by the US Embassy in Dublin. More interesting is a document, made with a good old typewriter, which I found inside. It seems to be - more or less - a compilation, written 1987 by the Unites States Information Service (USIS), the former name of the today's United States Information Agency. Nothing Top Secret, but anyway its a nice historical piece. Due to the dusty place I found it I decided to publi...

...wasn't so open to Iran as he seems  to be in the last years - regarding Israels Shin Bet, charging him with spying for Iran, giving Israel’s arch-foe sensitive information about locations of security centers and the country’s energy industry.  His position in 1995:               (Source: The Nonproliferation Review/Fall 1995, p. 103) Other sources say he is a classic type [to be targeted] because he is greedy and readily gets involved in dubious transactions.  But why all this anger by Shin Bet and other " institutes " about him? Can it be that there are other reasons for his arrest? Maybe his connection to a security company with a "special" background? Some powerful dark figures in the ecstasy trade? Or is it a revenge of Yossi Beilins network for Segevs pressure in 1994  - when he was a Knesset member - to reveal some details about secret cooperation between Israel and two not named cou...

Recentlly I drank a beer in Brussels named Illegaal. The label showed a well known person: The taste did not remind me of the alleged poisoning of Arafat by the Mossad - the beer was ok - but: I read a new book, in which, among other things, Arafat's role in terrorism is presented. So I reflected on new business ideas. I suspect that the biggest problem will be the export to individual countries.

...is the title of a new brief paper I published, subtitle: "Infiltration of Western police and intelligence agencies". It can be downloaded on my website . Originally I planned a much more extensive paper with a lot more case studies, but finally I ended up with a brief overview. Due to sheer number of cases, persons and the frightening development in Western countries maybe next time more.

One of the last cases in espionage conducted by Chinese intelligence shows again a few interesting details. As far as I understand the arrested person is not finally convicted and so I will not give his or her name away. Anyway: The person I am talking about is one of the latest in a long line of former US intelligence officers, many of them working now as a private contractor, accused to be a spy for China. Regarding the documents related to this case the person worked – beside other functions – here (I did all the blackening because I don’t think that every detail should be posted online): The interesting detail is about the commercialisation of promoting „friendship“ between China and the US. There are similar business models in Germany as well and it is necessary to investigate them – due to their harmless appearance and their honorable goal they represent a great challenge for counterintelligence. They can rely on a mass of mostly local...

Ich las im Qualitätsmedium T-Online vor ein paar Tagen über Mateusz Piskorski. Dieser sei in in Polen inhaftiert „wegen Spionage für russische und chinesische Geheimdienste an – er pflegt auch enge Kontakte zu deutschen Politikern“. T-Online habe auch kürzlich „ enthüllt“, dass Piskorski kurz vor seiner Verhaftung „einen Verein mit mehrerenAfD-Politikern in Berlin“ gegründet habe… Ziel des Vereins war es, sogenannte "Wahlbeobachtungsmissionen" in völkerrechtlich umstrittene, aber kremltreue Separatistengebiete zu organisieren und damit russische Außenpolitik zu legitimieren.“ Über diese Berichterstattung kann ich nur müde lächeln: Was hier als tolle Story verkauft wird, ist jedem, der sich ernsthaft und nicht nur je nach politischem Windchen damit beschäftigt, in den meisten Details längst bekannt. Natürlich bedarf es einer gewissen Intensität und Tiefe, was die Recherchen dazu angeht, aber möglicherweise haben die dafür zuständigen Leute etwas verschlafen oder das...

Beim Lesen alter Ausgaben von "Horch & Guck" fiel mir der Name Andrei Mironow auf - jenem Russen, der am 24. Mai 2014 bei Gefechten zwischen ukrainischen Streitkräften und prorussischen Kräften in Slowjansk getötet wurde. Das Foto, das in der Ausgabe von "Horch & Guck" - wer kennt diese Reihe überhaupt noch? - von ihm abgedruckt war, sieht ein wenig anders als die letzen Aufnahmen von ihm aus: [Quelle: Horch & Guck, Heft 17 (4/95), S. 53] Interessant fand ich in dem Artikel dieser Ausgabe den Satz: Und wenn er gerade mal nicht an der Front ist, sammelt er fieberhaft geheime Informationen über die neue chemische Waffe Nowitschok , an deren Produktion Rußland arbeite. Ich werde wohl nie erfahren, was er zu Nowitschok alles gesammelt hatte. Mein letzter Besuch in London zeigte mir zumindest erneut, dass die politische Bedeutung der russischen Organisierten Kriminalität im Zusammenhang mit solchen Fällen unterschätzt wird. Und wer weiss, was ...

...or: The rise of Frankenstein's Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats .  Discussing this with a few people from the counterproliferation branch I recognized that I have to learn something new regarding Weapons of Mass destruction (WMD): Who knows anything about CRISPR? But a lot more people read about Genetic Engineering - which is a good starter to understand CRISPR -  and I remember a case, many years ago, when a North Korean scientist disappeared in Australia. He was suspected of having developed a weapon based on genetic experiments. This case is still shrouded in secrecy and rumours, but it was one of the first cases ever appeared in the public. I plan to write a brief paper about it in the near future. Genetic Engineering was already in the seventies subject of e.g. a meeting about INFORMAL MEETINGS ON NEW MASS DESTRUCTION WEAPONS : Combining various search operators - which include CRISPR and WMD - I was surprised by my own data I o...

In the last days a lot of media reports referred to a UN Report not published yet, describing that " North Korea has been sending equipment to Syria that could be used to make chemical weapons ". In a few reports one responsible Syrian institution is mentioned: The Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC). Hundreds of people working for this Center are sanctioned since last April 2017. Interesting for me is that organisations which are connected to this Center and which are playing a crucial role, are not sanctioned. First of all I think about the Network of Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators Abroad (NOSSTIA), which is working somehow under the radar. I came across a brief notice about a meeting on "environment projects", which was described by the Syrian Arab News Agency in April 2016. This was the first time ever I read about NOSSTIA and so I tried to take a look at their website. Today they seem to operate two Facebook accounts which I w...

The last months a lot of paper about the CPEC were produced - regarding the Chinese political-economic agenda in South East Asia. Beside the official and more or less transparent economic relations between both countries Jens Rosenke and me are, as always, more interested in the shady corners of economic projects, especially when it comes to sanctioned or in general security related technology. Therefore we worked a while on a paper, which is mainly about the research in proliferation and illegal procurement issues. But of course we also found a lot of smaller and bigger entities somehow connected in interesting ways and sometimes busy in disguising their intentions. The good thing is: "Investigating proliferation activities between China and Pakistan" is free for download ! Recently, I had put a part of my archive online as a searchable version , where o ne can find also various entries on proliferation, China or Pakistan. The paper, which is now available fo...

... can look for a T-Shirt here: One can also buy it as a "Braunhemd" which means here a brown coloured T-Shirt: Who is behind Abarcshop? But this time no Chinese company, but a German contact: Boring....

Funny to see: Since months one can read about the so-called Reichsbürger movement, sometimes about really alarming incidents, e.g. German anti-terror police uncover hidden paramilitary training camps for far-right extremists . But there are always smart people who see the opportunity: I found this on 25th January 2018 and it doesn't look like fake : Everything is possible and I remember the Hitler-cups sold in Germany by the Chinese in 2014. So I took a brief look into this company. The section "Über uns" ( "About us") is in pretty horrible German, looks like a foreign background. There we go: It's so obvious: China doesn't like political uproar in it's own country, but it doesn't care for others: The registrar is http://www.bizcn.com/ which is a Chinese company, you can call them and complain about double standards:

...reminds me of something... Reading that the Egypt President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issued a presidential decree on Thursday afternoon appointing his office director General Abbas Kamel as acting director of Egypt’s General Intelligence Directorate let me think about the past. I wonder if the Abbas Kamel mentioned in an unclassified cable about IRAQI MEDIA OUTLETS BASED IN JORDAN: PROFILES is the one who is now the acting director of the Mukhabarat: In 2015 my old friend Nizar Manek wrote - together with Jeremy Hodge - an excellent paper about Opening the black  box of Egypt's slush funds and there Abbas Kamel appeared again. Nizar wrote: So Abbas Kamel, who is named by Intelligence Online  the eminence grise of Egyptian President , is somehow famous. It is obvious that a few people getting bad-tempered about this.

...is also maintained by vessels, but obviously it is not so easy to detect every single entity. Actually it is reported that South Korean authorities have seized a Panama-flagged vessel suspected of transferring oil products to North Korea . The vessel named KOTI is the former SEMUA SEJATI. The IMO number of a vessel remains linked to the hull for its lifetime, regardless of a change in name, flag, or owner . Due to the ongoing reflagging and renaming of vessels one must look for the shipping company, the owner etc. In this case owner and manager of the KOTI resp. the SEMUA SEJATI in former times was SEMUA SHIPPING in Malaysia. This is a company with a rich history of details, documents, addresses etc. Information: I do not suggest that any of the companies, agencies and persons I mention in this Post are engaged in illicit activity. SEMUA SHIPPING is a subsidiary of Hoe Leong Corporation Ltd. , a company holding stake in various industries and which already gained experien...