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MOSCOW (AP) - Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA agent who defected to Moscow, was killed as a result of a head injury, a former KGB agent told a newspaper in a report Thursday. Confusion has surrounded the circumstances of Howard's July 12 death, with earlier reports saying the 50-year-old either fell down stairs or possibly died in a car crash in the exclusive Moscow suburb of Zhukovka. His body was cremated before reports of his death became public. Viktor Andrianov, a former KGB agent who said he got to know Howard well after being appointed one of his contacts...

Kibbutznik tipped to head the Mossad By Amir Oren A slender, pleasant, 48-year-old kibbutznik, with light-colored eyes - newly retired from the Mossad, and totally unknown to the public and even to many senior officers in other security agencies - appears to be leading a pack of four contenders to become the next head of the Mossad. The contender, born and raised at Kibbutz Bet Alfa, left the Mossad a year ago at the end of a successful term as head of an operational unit. His identity should be made public, but for a variety of controversial security reasons,...

Overdue recognition for a Cold War hero Arnold Beichman Hoover Institution Published 8/4/2002 The Canadian government has just honored - belatedly - a Soviet intelligence agent, Igor Gouzenko, who defected in Ottawa 57 years ago and revealed to the world the existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada and the United States. Few at the time realized his defection signaled the beginning of the Cold War, Josef Stalin´s drive to conquer the Western democracies. Our own government ought to honor the memory of this man, too, because his revelations startled America into a grim realization that the Soviet wartime...

Spate of issues confront lawmakers upon return State senators had been on extended recess * GUN CONTROL: Perata has a constitutional amendment that would put a five-cent tax on each bullet sold in California to raise money for hospital emergency rooms. Perata is also one of the authors of twin bills that would allow gun manufacturers to be sued for damage caused by their weapons. * SMOKING: A bill that would raise the legal smoking age from 18 to 21 is moving through the Senate. Assemblyman Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood, says his proposal would make it tougher for minors to...

<p>July 21, 2002 -- Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA case officer who escaped to Moscow in September 1985 after coming under suspicion as a spy for the Soviet Union, died there July 12, according to a family friend.</p>

ASHINGTON, July 18 — The Central Intelligence Agency today rescinded its seven-year-old guidelines requiring case officers in the field to obtain approval from top management before trying to recruit informers with questionable backgrounds, officials said.The agency acted in the face of complaints from leading lawmakers that it had failed to drop the guidelines earlier, even after Congress had directed it to do so. The agency's action came one day after a report released by a House intelligence subcommittee on terrorism criticized its 1995 guidelines requiring its case officers to obtain headquarters approval before trying to recruit "dirty" informers, individuals...

<p>LONDON — Britain and the United States have begun sending spies into Iraq to stir up rebellion in advance of a prospective invasion next year aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein, according to British military sources and leading British newspapers.</p> <p>The task of the agents, along with CIA operatives, is to make contact with opponents of Saddam and capitalize on what one military analyst described to the Times of London as a "popular loathing" of the regime.</p>

Chinese Espionage and the Department of Energy By Frederick Wettering From July 1994 to July 1996 I was detailed by CIA's Operations Directorate to the Counterintelligence Office at DOE (and for a time served as its deputy head). The following is my analysis of the recent counterintelligence problems caused by Chinese intelligence targeting of our three major national laboratories (Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia) responsible for advanced weapons research and nuclear weapons. Two Quotes: There are two quotes that directly bear on this problem. First, during his historic visit to Washington on 31 January 1979, Deng Shao-ping stated to the...

Eco - LogicOn - Line 7/15/2002 The smoking gun... How Environmentalists Intend to Rule the World By Ron Arnold Critics have long believed environmentalists were planning global domination. The problem with making a credible case against such an ambitious plan was simple: no environmental leader had published one. Yet conflicts over global warming, world trade, multinational corporations, population control, sustainable futures, and transnational government left little doubt that environmentalists in fact shared the unspoken aim of wielding supreme power over a green future. But there was no proof. For years, critics, lacking hard evidence, were reduced to piecing together a...

'Corrupt' CIA Ensures US Vulnerability to TerrorismJessica Cantelon, CNSNews.comJuly 15, 2002 CNSNews.com - The Central Intelligence Agency is "politicized" and "corrupt," the idea of a cabinet level Department of Homeland Security is a "ridiculous notion," and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were "not an act of war," but "a terrible criminal act," according to a former CIA Soviet analyst. Melvin Goodman, a current professor of international studies at the National War College in Washington, D.C., spoke recently at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in the nation's capital. According to Goodman, it's "unbelievable" the U.S. wasn't better prepared for...

Making Sustainable Development Work: Governance, Finance and Public-Private Cooperation Secretary Colin L. Powell Remarks at State Department Conference, Meridian International Center Washington, DC July 12, 2002 (As Delivered) Well, thank you very much, Paula, for that warm introduction, and let me also take this opportunity to thank you as well for the superb leadership that you have been giving to this effort, especially as we prepare for next month's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. And I'm very pleased to follow my dear friend and fellow Vietnam vet Chuck Hagel. We are members of a mutual admiration society, and...

The CIA has been widely feared and despised - even since it supposedly cleaned up its act. But from the point of view of one insider who joined in the agency's old, free-booting days, it is not interventionist enough. Robert Baer, who recently left, disillusioned, argues that if the CIA had more on-the-ground agents and information, the disaster of September 11 might have been avertedAs a teenager in Aspen, Colorado, Robert Baer wanted to be a professional ski racer. His mother, dismayed at his low academic grades, packed him off to military school. Eight years later, in 1976, after graduating...

ONDONHow fare the espionage agencies? Who's hot and who's not? Most agents and spymasters resolutely refuse to talk about their own agencies, but cheerfully rat on each other's intelligence gathering, evaluation and tradecraft. Time now for the Golden Cloak & Dagger Awards, based on professional assessments by a half-dozen of my spooky sources around the world.America's C.I.A.-N.S.A. combine is rated by its peers as unrivaled in elint (electronic intelligence), shorthanded in humint (human ears in foreign ministries or terrorist organizations) and sometimes fatally weak on timely evaluation of data. Although it has some of the best analysts in the...

<p>When, in 333 B.C., Alexander the Great led his army into the town of Gordium in Phrygia (about 100 miles west of Ankara in present-day Turkey), he encountered in front of the temple of Zeus there an oxcart tied to a pole with an intricate knot. Legend had it that whoever could untie the knot would rule all of Asia. Many before Alexander tried. All failed. Alexander solved the problem by cutting the cord with his sword.</p>

MUMBAI: Just weeks after the subcontinent seemed a hair’s breadth away from nuclear war, it turns out that sweepings off the floor of Pakistani barber shops near the Kahuta nuclear facility gave Indian intelligence agencies the first proof that Islamabad had the capability of making nuclear weapons.   In the 1980s, the Indian department of atomic energy asked spooks to obtain samples of hair from workers at Kahuta in order to check the chemical composition, says a recently-released book, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security by defence analyst Bharat Karnad,who played a key role in framing India’s nuclear doctrine. The samples,which...

Ron Smith's Something to Say Weekday Mornings 6:50AM rsmith@wbal.com England and Gun Control -- What a Mess July 2, 2002 Ron Smith's Something to Say (July 2, 2002) Modern times have seen an ever-escalating effort on the part of Western governments to disarm their people. Gun control laws depriving individuals of their right to self-defense have gone terribly wrong if we are to believe that they have been enacted with public safety as their actual purpose. Armed crime has been skyrocketing in England and Wales ever since the government, with the Dunblane massacre as a rationale, virtually outlawed private ownership...

President Bush said he was "deeply concerned" about some of the accounting practices in corporate America and called "outrageous" the disclosure that WorldCom, which is $32 billion in debt, had hidden $3.8 billion in expenses. The president added, "We will fully investigate and hold people accountable for misleading not only shareholders but also employees." The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed fraud charges against the nation's No. 2 long-distance telephone company, as the company slid toward bankruptcy. WorldCom is being called the biggest case of crooked accounting in U.S. history, where it hid nearly $4 billion worth of expenses...

This best-selling recording was performed by the legendary John Wayne. It's finally available as Duke’s spoken-word CD of poetry. It's a must-have for all patriotic Americans... Track listings: 1. Why I Love Her 2. The Pledge of allegiance 3. The Hyphen 4. Mis Raices Estan Aqui 5. The People 6. An American Boy Grows Up 7. Face the Flag 8. The Good Things 9. Why Are You Marching, Son 10. Taps

[...]Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the threshhold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed. The new threat bears little resemblance to familiar financial disruptions by hackers responsible for viruses and worms. It comes instead at the meeting points between computers and the physical structures they control.By disabling or taking command of floodgates in a dam, for example, or of substations handling 300,000 volts of electric power, U.S. analysts believe an intruder could use virtual tools to destroy real-world lives and property....

June 26, 2002 C.I.A. Instructs Agencies to Use More Commercial Satellite PhotosBy JAMES RISEN ASHINGTON, June 25 — The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, has ordered American intelligence agencies to expand their use of satellite photography provided by private companies, freeing the government's own satellites for more specialized and secretive work, intelligence officials say. Mr. Tenet has ordered that imagery from commercial satellites become the "primary source of data used for government mapping" for the military and other agencies, and that the government's satellites be used only for such tasks in "exceptional circumstances," according to a letter he...