Free Republic

KNOXVILLE, TN—On Wednesday, July 1, 2009, John Reece Roth, 72, of Knoxville, Tennessee, was sentenced to 48 months in prison for violating the Arms Export Control Act by conspiring to illegally export, and actually exporting, technical information relating to a U.S. Air Force (USAF) research and development contract. The sentencing, announced today by United States Attorney Russ Dedrick, took place in U.S. District Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, by the Honorable Thomas A. Varlan, Jr., United States District Court Judge. Upon his release from prison, Roth will serve a term of two years supervised release. These illegal exports by Dr. Roth...

De Sousa, 53, insists she is not a CIA agent and was not involved in the kidnappingAn Indian American former consular official at the U.S. consulate in Milan is suing the U.S. government for protection under diplomatic immunity against charges by Italian prosecutors of involvement in the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan in February 2003. Italian prosecutors accuse Sabrina De Sousa of being a C.I.A. officer, covertly operating under a diplomatic guise, who, with 24 other CIA officers, kidnapped the cleric Abu Omar off a Milan Street for rendition to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured. De...

CHICAGO—A former northwest suburban man who was arrested in March was indicted this week on federal charges for stealing trade secrets from his former employer, Valspar Corp., in Wheeling, federal law enforcement officials announced today. The defendant, David Yen Lee, was charged with five counts of theft of trade secrets in violation of the federal Economic Espionage Act in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday, announced Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and Robert D. Grant, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lee, 52,...

A reproduction of a page of ROK newspaper Munhwa Ilbo shows stories and pictures of Kim Jong-un, the DPRK leader Kim Jong-il's third son. [Agencies] SEOUL, South Korea: Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Il has put his youngest son in charge of the country's spy agency as a prelude to handing over control of the country, a news report said Wednesday. Kim visited the headquarters of the State Security Department in March, along with his 26-year-old son, Kim Jong Un, and told agency leaders to "uphold" his third son as head of the department,...

SNIPPET: "Frontpage Interview's guest today is Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy, a former KGB agent who became one of the KGB’s harshest critics. He is the author of seven books about the KGB and Japan. His new book is KGB/FSB's New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent." SNIPPET: "My work in Tokyo as a spy from 1980-85, was very successful. I was covered as a correspondent of the Soviet TASS Agency. But it was not a cover for me. It was my actual job, because I am a born author. My KGB colleagues in Tokyo called me, with a grin, “An author covered...

KNOXVILLE, TN—On Thursday, June 18, 2009, in U.S. District Court in Knoxville,Tenn., U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan, Jr., sentenced Roy Lynn Oakley, 67, of Harriman, Tenn., to six years in prison for trying to sell parts of uranium enrichment equipment that he had stolen from a U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) facility in Oak Ridge. Oakley had illegally taken this equipment while employed at a building formerly known as the K-25 plant. The K-25 building, now known as the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP), was operated by DOE as a facility to produce highly enriched uranium used in the...

The CIA has just released a memo that reveals details of a highly sophisticated spy effort by a foreign government to obtain information from within the White House. Kim Jung Il, it has been learned, has funded the development of a tiny, remote controlled airborne vehicle that contains a camera and highly sensitive listening devise. The devise would literally be a “fly on the wall” within the White House. Unfortunately, to the horror of its operators, during an interview in the White House earlier this week, as the fly was seeking out a better listening position, President Obama, with ninja...

The arrest of Walter Kendall Myers and his wife demonstrates the extent to which the Cuban Intelligence Service has penetrated and manipulated American academic institutions. Myers...worked as instructor and chairman for West European Studies at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. Myers received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. The same institution in 1988 awarded a master's degree to Ana Belen Montes, the key Pentagon intelligence analyst on Cuba pleaded guilty to working for Cuban intelligence...Cuban intelligence has targeted American colleges and universities for nearly half a century. The FBI debriefed DGI Capt....

In the first hour, investigative reporter Peter Lance will talk about the attempts by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to kill his book, Triple Cross http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060886889/ctoc . Then, former KGB agent and intelligence expert Oleg Kalugin ( http://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Espionage-Against/dp/0465014453/ctoc ) will discuss Soviet propaganda, including mysterious disappearances and cover-ups, and give us an insider account of what it was like to be a spy working behind the Iron Curtain.

THIRTY years after Britain's notorious winter of discontent, it has become clear that the election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government not only ended a long period of Labour rule but also defeated the Left's attempt, led from the trade unions, to transfigure British parliamentary democracy into a form of Soviet state. The leading figure in this story was the general secretary of Britain's largest union, the Transport and General Workers Union, and chairman of the Trades Union Congress's international committee, Jack Jones. In 1977, more than half the respondents to a Gallup poll named him the most powerful man in...

Instead of Zen Dens, Starwood Builds an Espionage Case Against Hilton By Michael S. Rosenwald Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, June 13, 2009 Earlier this year, Hilton Hotels shipped eight boxes to Starwood Hotels and Resorts. Companies don't typically send much mail to their competitors, and Starwood's general counsel discovered something odd in the boxes: thousands of Starwood documents and electronic files. Lawyers from Hilton, which is moving to Tysons Corner from Beverly Hills this summer, included a letter saying they found the material in the homes and offices of star employees the firm had recruited from Starwood. The material,...

Chinese TV host accused of spying By Jamil Anderlini and Kathrin Hille in Beijing Published: June 12 2009 17:55 | Last updated: June 12 2009 17:55 The host of a military affairs show on Chinese state television has been thrust into the centre of an espionage scandal after a report in a state newspaper said she was suspected of spying for Taiwan. Fang Jing, a 38-year-old veteran of China Central Television, denied the allegations from The China Daily, the English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese government, including suggestions that she had been seduced by a Taiwanese man eight years her junior....

WASHINGTON—A federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia has indicted James Wilbur Fondren Jr., on one count of conspiracy to communicate classified information to an agent of a foreign government and act as an illegal foreign agent; four counts of unlawfully communicating classified information to an agent of a foreign government; and three counts of making false statements to the FBI. If convicted on all charges, Fondren would face a maximum of 60 years in prison. David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Dana Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; and Joseph Persichini, Jr.,...

Walter Kendall Myers, the State Department analyst accused of spying for Havana for 30 years, made me lose my innocence soon after I started working at the department in late 2006. I learned because of him that...there is a substratum of officials whose personal ideology permits them to tolerate the unforgivable... This epiphany came because of remarks Mr. Myers made to an audience at Johns Hopkins University...about our closest ally, the United Kingdom. Mr. Myers' comments were indiscreet, contemptible and may have even broken the law. They should by all rights have gotten Mr. Myers fired and earned him rebuke...Instead,...

DAYTON—A federal grand jury here has indicted Hing Shing Lau, also known as Victor Lau, a foreign national living in Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China, charging him with trying to buy 12 infrared thermal imaging cameras from a Dayton-area company in order to illegally export the cameras to Hong Kong and China. Gregory G. Lockhart, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, Keith L. Bennett, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, announced the indictment returned yesterday. The indictment alleges that Lau tried to buy 12 thermal imaging cameras manufactured in Texas by contacting a company...

A magistrate judge denied bail yesterday to a retired State Department analyst and his wife who are accused of spying for Cuba, saying that there is a "very strong" case against them and that the couple would be tempted to flee. The judge also noted that Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, had marked on their calendar a yacht trip to the Caribbean in November with no return date... "To put it bluntly, the government's case seems at this point insuperable," wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola... Myers and his wife were arrested last week and...

LONDON: Secret files have at last revealed the identity of the top spy who transferred Britain's atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union and paved the way for the nuclear standoff with the west, triggering the Cold War for nearly five decades. Though the MI5 suspected him, trailed him and monitored his every move, they were never able to get the man, codenamed "Eric" by the KGB, whose espionage campaign to steal the Allies nuclear bomb plans was codenamed Enormous. Declassified MI5 files have confirmed that the master spy, described as the "main source", was a Soviet mole at the...

SPY UNIVERSITIES: EX-FOREIGN ESPIONAGE OPERATIVE REVEALS HOW PROFS., STUDENTS, AND OTHERS, ARE RECRUITED TO UNDERMINE AMERICA International News Analysis Today Updated June 10, 2009 By Toby Westerman U.S. universities are important recruiting grounds for foreign spies, according to a former intelligence operative who has defected to the United States, and issued a report giving a rare glimpse into the intelligence operations of one of America's most determined espionage foes. Jose Cohen Valdes was a Cuban intelligence officer employed in several areas of information acquisition and analysis in Havana, and has documented his nation's penetration of U.S. universities in a report...

National Security: Amid all the neighborly talk about new U.S. efforts to engage Cuba, the arrest of a State Department official as a Cuban spy ought to be a wake-up call about the intentions of the Castro dictatorship.Last Friday, federal agents arrested Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife Gwendolyn, 71, as unregistered Cuban agents. The Feds said the pair had been spying for Cuba since 1979 and, like other agents in service to the Castro regime, didn't do it for money, but out of sympathy for communism and a loathing of the United States. For that, they stole not...

“Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America,” by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Yale University Press, May 2009, 704 pages, $35. Joe McCarthy was right after all. There were Communists in the State Department. Maybe not the number Tail Gunner Joe claimed — or even the ones he suspected. However, Soviet spies were, indeed, employed by the U.S. government in the 1930s and ’40s. Documentation of these Soviet espionage efforts in the United States comes from KGB archives — as revealed in “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America.” After the...

MIAMI – Bernard Leon Barker, one of the five Watergate burglars whose break-in led to America's biggest political scandal, died Friday in suburban Miami. He was 92. The Cuban-born former CIA operative who also participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion died at his home after being taken to the Veteran's Administration Medical Center the night before, said his stepdaughter, Kelly Andrad. He appeared to have died from complications of lung cancer, and he had also suffered from heart problems. Barker was one of five men who broke into the Watergate building in Washington on June 17, 1972. A piece...

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. "We were all appalled by the Bush years," one said. What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a deep and long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades. "I have become so bitter these past few...

He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C. it was nothing out of the ordinary. "We were all appalled by the Bush years," one said.

Fidel Castro called the case of two Americans accused of spying for Cuba "strange" Saturday and questioned whether the timing of their arrests was politically motivated. In an essay read by a newscaster on state television, the former Cuban leader noted that the retired Washington couple were taken into custody just 24 hours after the Organization of American States voted to lift a decades-old suspension of Cuba's membership in that group. Though the U.S. ultimately supported the OAS vote Wednesday, the administration of President Barack Obama initially wanted to see more democratic reforms on the communist island before Cuba was...

Hunting spies is difficult, but Cuban spies are notoriously hard to detect, former senior intelligence officials said a day after an American husband and wife were indicted on charges of spying for Cuba. Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn of Washington were arrested Thursday after a three-year investigation that began before Myers' retirement from the State Department in 2007. They had been spying for Havana for 30 years, according to the U.S. government. Investigations like this typically take years to come together because they usually turn on small pieces of information, and Cuban spies often leave few traces. Cuban...

They wouldn't have looked out of place at a yacht club with him dressed in a blue blazer and khakis and her sporting a soft tan but federal authorities say the appearance of Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Myers, belied a darker truth: For three decades, the couple spied for the Cuban government. Mr. Myers, a 72-year-old former State Department analyst with a top-secret security clearance, and Mrs. Myers, 71, appeared in federal court to answer charges of conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government, passing classified information, and wire fraud. They each face 35...

Twenty years after China turned away from democratization, that nation has emerged as a fearsome competitor for world economic dominance. The playing field, however, is not exactly level. The anniversary this week of a major event, such as the brutal killing of the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese Red Army, presents a sobering opportunity to reflect on the impact of such a despotic act. Reporter Claudia Rosett was in the square that fateful day, and in a Wall Street Journal piece shares what she saw at Tiananmen. The question occurs, however, as to how many in today's...

SNIPS Two months ago, the Obama administration acted to relax a trade embargo imposed on the island nation in 1962. A senior State Department official described the potential for damage as great and the timing unfortunate, noting that it could affect congressional support for the administration's recent attempts to engage Cuba. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. Cuba is notorious for not paying its agents, said a former intelligence official speaking anonymously because of the highly sensitive matter. Indeed, court documents indicate the couple received little money for their efforts, but instead professed a...

When I heard this on the radio on the drive home the first thing I thought was, I’ll bet they’re democrats (socialist) and huge Obama supporters. Walter Kendall Myers, 72, aided by his wife Gwendolyn Myers, 71, used his Top Secret security clearance to pass on classified information to the Cuban government and at one point met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, according to court documents. The two were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and to communicate classified information to Cuba, the Justice Department said. They were also charged with wire fraud and...

SNIP Myers first began working for the State Department in 1977 as a lecturer at the department's Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia. But from 1988 to 1999 he began to work for its bureau of intelligence and research. In 1985, he was given top-secret security clearance which was then upgraded to a higher level in 1999. By the time he retired, Myers was working as a senior Europe analyst for the department's intelligence bureau and had daily access to classified information stored on computer databases, the Justice Department said. A scan of his computer showed that from August 2006...

A former U.S. State Department official and his wife have been arrested for spying for the Cuban government for nearly 30 years, the Justice Department said on Friday. Walter Kendall Myers, 72, aided by his wife Gwendolyn Myers, 71, used his Top Secret security clearance to pass on classified information to the Cuban government and at one point met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, according to court documents. The two were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and to communicate classified information to Cuba, the Justice Department said. They were also charged with wire...

A 72-year-old former State Department employee and his 71-year-old wife have been arrested and charged with illegally aiding the government of Cuba for nearly 30 years, the Department of Justice announced Friday. Walter Kendall Myers retired from the State Department in October 2007. Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Myers, were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government, providing classified information to that government, and wire fraud, according to court documents unsealed in Washington. The couple appeared briefly Friday before a federal magistrate in Washington, who ordered them held without bail pending a detention...

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department charged Friday that a former State Department analyst and his wife worked as spies for Cuba for nearly 30 years, using a short-wave radio to pass secret diplomatic information to their Cuban handlers. Officials said the couple, Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and Gwendolyn S. Myers, 71, received little in the way of compensation from the Cubans except for the short-wave radio and some travel expenses. Rather, the officials said, the couple appears to have been driven by their strong affinity for Cuba and their bitterness toward “American imperialism.” “We think they did it because they...

Note: The following text is a quote: Former State Department Official and Wife Arrested for Serving as Illegal Agents of Cuba for Nearly 30 Years Couple Allegedly Conspired to Provide Classified Information to Cuban Government A former State Department official and his wife have been arrested on charges of serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government for nearly 30 years and conspiring to provide classified U.S. information to the Cuban government. The arrests were announced today by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; Channing D. Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia; Joseph Persichini, Jr.,...

Federal officials say a Washington, D.C.-area couple has been arrested and accused of spying for Cuba. Officials say both are former U.S. government employees -- he from the State Department, she as a Congressional aide. One official says the spying went on for more than two decades. We expect to learn more details later today when a federal indictment is unsealed. For now, officials will not disclose the names or any other details....

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation’s civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons. The publication of the document was revealed Monday in an on-line newsletter devoted to issues of federal secrecy. That publicity set off a debate among nuclear experts about what dangers, if any, the disclosures posed. It also prompted a flurry of investigations in Washington into why the document was made public. On Tuesday evening, after inquiries from The New...

"Who's next?" The question is on everyone's mind in southern Lebanon where dozens of people have been detained in recent weeks on suspicion of spying for neighbouring Israel. "If someone falls ill and doesn't show up to work, we all wonder whether he's been arrested for spying," Mohammed, who owns a garage in the town of Marjayoun, located near the border with Israel, told AFP. "Two policemen showed up at someone's house recently for a minor offence and rumour quickly spread that he was a collaborator," added Mohammed, who gave only his first name. So far, 21 people have been...

SNIPPET: "The Shin Bet security service warned Monday that hostile elements may try to contact Israelis through online social networks, such as Facebook, in order to gather intelligence and maybe even lure them abroad for the purpose of abduction. Recently the Shin Bet was informed of a number of cases in which terrorist elements approached Israelis through the various online social networks and tried to either recruit them or ask that they disclose classified information for a fee." SNIPPET: "The past few years have seen a number of Israelis detained after they had been recruited by terror groups through the...

Murder and Spies: A Spy Catcher's Warning May 20, 2009 International News Analysis Today By Toby Westerman The national security of the United States is for sale, and every American is in danger as a result, according to a counterintelligence expert who was central to the interrogation and conviction of a spy considered to be one of the most grave threats to national security ever apprehended in the United States. Chris Simmons, currently a Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army Reserve counterintelligence services and founder of the online Cuban Intelligence Research Center, gave an exclusive interview to International News Analysis...

A Defense Department official was charged Wednesday with feeding classified information to an agent for the Chinese government.

With the news that MI5 is looking for a Chief Scientific Adviser, spy novelist Jeremy Duns reveals his ten favourite real espionage inventions 1. Poison-tipped umbrella Probably the most infamous real-life spy gadget is the umbrella used by the Bulgarian secret services – with KGB help – to kill dissident writer and broadcaster Georgi Markov. KGB technicians converted the tip of an ordinary umbrella into a silenced gun that could fire a pellet containing a lethal dose of ricin. On September 7 1978, Markov felt himself being jabbed in the thigh as he walked across Waterloo Bridge. A man behind...

The American journalist Roxana Saberi was jailed for espionage in Tehran after obtaining a confidential Iranian document about the American invasion of Iraq, it was claimed today. Saleh Nikbakht, one of Ms Saberi's Iranian lawyers, revealed that a document Ms Saberi had obtained while working as a translator for a powerful clerical lobby had been used as evidence to convict her on charges of espionage. Ms Saberi, 32, was released on Monday after an appeal court dismissed charges of spying and reduced her eight-year prison term to a two-year suspended sentence. Abdolsamad Khorramshahi, the lead defence counsel, said that she...

A PENTAGON official formerly of the US Air Force has been charged with conspiracy to pass classified information to an agent of China, the US Justice Department said. A criminal complaint said today that retired Lieutenant Colonel James Wilbur Fondren, a deputy director of the US Pacific Command's Washington Liaison Office, "unlawfully and knowingly conspired" to communicate secrets.

The recent launch of the spy satellite RISAT-2 by India’s PSLV-C12 emphasises the widening of strategic ties between India and Israel.      ISRO THE TECSAR SPY satellite at an unkown location.  THE charade put on by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) around its twin-satellite launch on April 20, aboard the 15th mission of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C12), was completely uncalled for and, not surprisingly, unsustainable. It was clear from reports worldwide that the main payload of the mission, a 300-kilogram radar imaging satellite called RISAT-2, was a microwave-based high-resolution imaging reconnaissance (or spy) satellite, which India...

After costing the named defendants their positions, subjecting them and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to unwarranted slander and speculation, and running up the defense legal tab to over four million dollars, the Department of Justice last Friday moved to dismiss the indictment against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, former officials of AIPAC. The language in the government’s motion to dismiss is dry and somewhat disingenuous (the motion can be found here in PDF). The motion suggests that it wasn’t obvious from the outset that the case would require some disclosure of classified information. It’s hard for me...

In spite of all the safeguards that democratic, freedom loving, human rights defending nations have built-in into their constitutions to stop such abuses the fact remains that those bent on advancing their own agenda or bent on stopping those they oppose will always find a way to trample on the constitutional rights of their opponents. The case against Rosen and Weissman (formerly of AIPAC) is a prime example of how power can be abused to stop certain ideas, while advancing the opposite ones. The case against them has just collapsed, why? Because the government failed to come up with convincing...

South Korea and the United States have agreed to cooperate in fighting cyber attacks against their defence networks from countries including China and North Korea, officials said Monday. The April 30 deal calls for an exchange of information on detecting and fighting cyber attacks against information systems used by the militaries of the two allies, the defence ministry said. At least once a year the two countries will hold a conference on joint readiness against computer hacking, it said. "The deal covers cyber attacks in general, including those from North Korea and China," a ministry official told AFP on condition...

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia - Federal prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss espionage-related charges against two former pro-Israel lobbyists accused of disclosing classified U.S. defense information, ending a tortuous inside-the-Beltway legal battle rife with national security intrigue. Critics of the prosecution of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee accused the federal government of trying to criminalize the sort of back-channel discussions between government officials, lobbyists and reporters that are commonplace in Washington. AIPAC is an influential pro-Israel lobbying group. The indictment had alleged that Rosen and Weissman conspired to obtain and then disclose to journalists and the...

Taliban militants in North Waziristan Monday killed a man they accused of spying for the US forces stationed across the border in Afghanistan, officials said. The mutilated body of a local tribesman was found in Kam Saroobi village near Miranshah, the main town in the tribal agency, local police officer Ghawas Khan told AFP. The man, identified as Mohammad Sadiq, 28, was kidnapped about three months ago, he said. ‘Sadiq’s body had several bullet wounds and his hands and legs were chopped off,’ another police official said. A note found with the body said he was ‘an important US spy,’...

AMERICA needs to pay a heckuva a lot more atten tion to the cyberthreat. Now. Sure, the Pentagon is refuting a Wall Street Journal report last week that hackers pinched loads of data on the military's newest, high-tech fighter aircraft from contractors' computer networks via the Internet. But even if the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program wasn't actually penetrated by cyberspies, it's still a chilling wake-up call for the United States. The computer systems of the F-35 Lightning were penetrated "repeatedly," according to the newspaper, allowing cyber cat burglars to "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to...