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Beijing will pay Havana several billion dollars for eavesdropping facilityChina and Cuba have reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, in a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S., according to U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence. An eavesdropping facility in Cuba, roughly 100 miles from Florida, would allow Chinese intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic. [Snip] “While I cannot speak to this specific report, we are well aware of—and have spoken many...

A senior State Department official with the Biden administration to CNN that the Chinese surveillance balloon, which was shot down by an F-22 Raptor on Saturday, was operating with electronic surveillance technology capable of ‘monitoring’ US communications. The balloon “was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations” and was part of a fleet that had flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents.”

The potential intelligence windfall from the electronic warfare battle in Ukraine continues, with the first confirmed capture of a vehicle from the Russian Taran-M signals intelligence, or SIGINT, system. The vehicle, captured by Ukrainian forces in the ongoing counter-offensive in the east of the country, is the latest addition to a growing collection of seized modern Russian electronic warfare (EW) equipment, which ranges from containerized components of vehicle-borne systems to airborne jamming pods. The vehicle in question was reportedly captured by the Ukrainian Army in Kharkiv Oblast, from where Russian forces have recently retreated en masse, as you can read...

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from the turmoil in Libya in 2011. The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the same time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on information from private sources connected to Democrats that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier. ... Why...

Update: In response to a question Tuesday from NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, former Obama White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice denied that she “prepared” spreadsheets of surveilled telephone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, however, reported that Rice “ordered” the spreadsheets to be produced. In addition, former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova, one of TheDCNF’s sources, said Tuesday in response to Rice that her denial “would come as quite a surprise to the government officials who have reviewed dozens of those spreadsheets.” Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice...

A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling...

Last night, radio talk show host and former US Justice Department official Mark Levin shocked many listeners when he reported that President Bill Clinton gave nuclear technology to the Iranians in a harebrained scheme. He said that the transfer of classified data to Iran was personally approved by then-President Clinton and that the CIA deliberately gave Iranian physicists blueprints for part of a nuclear bomb that likely helped Tehran advance its nuclear weapons development program. The CIA, using a double-agent Russian scientist, handed a blueprint for a nuclear bomb to Iran, according to a new book "State of War" by...

All Eyes on North Korea Intelligence agencies are surging resources to focus on the Korean Peninsula. With talk of a “bloody nose” strike against North Korea being debated in Washington, public attention has focused on conventional military preparations for a U.S. attack on Pyongyang. Less noticed, but possibly even more telling, is the surge in recent months of intelligence resources. Senior officials have made no secret of the fact that the administration is ramping up its intelligence capabilities to focus on the Korean Peninsula, but six sources familiar with U.S. planning described a nearly unprecedented scramble inside the agencies responsible...

EXCLUSIVE: Tech company which maintained Hillary's secret server was sued for 'illegally accessing' database and 'stealing White House military advisers' phone numbers' The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House. Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers. It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government. Among the phone numbers which the company took - which all suddenly stopped working - were lines...

Saboteurs in the U.S. intelligence community posing as patriots have been working hard to drive President Donald Trump from the White House. Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and former War College professor John R. Schindler bragged on Twitter last week about the spy-led plot his friends are conducting against the president. “Now we go nuclear,” he tweeted. “IC [intelligence community] war [is] going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior IC friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.'” “US intelligence is not the problem here,” Schindler added. “The President’s collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details,...

In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the...

Washington is abuzz with the saga of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation, the Russia connection, and the melodrama of who knew what, when, and what they did about it. There are, to be sure, myriad aspects of this story that will consume the media, the Hill, civil society, and the like for a while. We want to highlight one—and only one—serious aspect of this story that has been underreported: the unauthorized (and criminal) leaks of highly classified information to the media by a person or persons in the government. We will not weigh in on the panoply of...

The clandestine cargo carried into polar orbit Thursday aboard the first California-launched Delta 4-Heavy rocket was a crucial replacement satellite for the nation's surveillance and security network, amateur sky-watchers say.The sophisticated imaging bird follows a long line of Keyhole-type spacecraft that provide ultra-high resolution imagery for the U.S. intelligence community, according to hobbyists who track orbiting satellites with remarkable precision. Ever since the Delta 4-Heavy rocket fired away from Space Launch Complex 6 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the amateur observers have been hunting for the new satellite to figure out its identity. The conventional wisdom before the launch said...

A bombshell article by John Solomon, Editor of The Washington Times, reported Tuesday evening that top secret spy satellite information about North Korea’s nuclear assets was found in an email from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s home brew server.

In August 1968, Soviet forces invaded their captive ally Czechoslovakia. The invasion began with an intense electronic warfare campaign against the Czech air defense network. A declassified secret US Defense Intelligence Agency report, titled “Soviet Electronic Countermeasures During Invasion of Czechoslovakia” and produced in October 1968, provided substantial detail on Soviet electronic warfare actions. It stated, “Electronic countermeasure activity was concentrated southeast and east of Prague to screen and protect Soviet air movements.” It added, “Jamming apparently was not targeted in the radio frequency range of NATO radars; the locations of chaff seeding suggests that it was not intended to...

By early 1968, the United States military was involved in an escalating ground and air war in Vietnam. American aircraft were being shot down at the rate of nearly one a day, and Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing of North Vietnam, was in full swing as B-52s unloaded racks of bombs over the jungle. The US Air Force was engaged in a constant battle against Vietnamese SA-2 surface to air missiles (SAMs), jamming them and spoofing them, electrons dueling invisibly in the air. American airmen with the job of physically destroying the missiles, going by the name Wild Weasels, went...

Tales of espionage are filled with lanky men in trenchcoats walking through cold Berlin streets at the height of the Cold War. But the most important intelligence—in terms of volume and reliability—was gathered by reconnaissance satellites far overhead. These satellites were precise, they collected vast amounts of information, and unlike spies, they did not forget, embellish, lie, or go rogue. Photographic reconnaissance satellites like CORONA, GAMBIT, HEXAGON, and KENNEN were in many ways the most prolific spooks. But they were also accompanied by other satellites, signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellites that listened for the electronic whispers of radars and radios,...

... The first report on the incident, released Monday, noted the loss. “A post-recovery inventory of the boats found that all weapons, ammunition, and communication gear are accounted for minus two SIM cards that appear to have been removed from two handheld satellite phones,” said the report from the U.S. Central Command. ... “Those SIM cards don’t just contain the satellite links,” he said. “They also include encryption codes, and otherwise unpublished data relating to specific orders and personnel,” he added. The former naval officer said those SIM cards should not have been allowed to fall into Iranian hands. .......

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in...

Insurgents Used Cell Phone Geotags to Destroy AH-64s in Iraq Here’s a battlefield safety issue that some people have been warning about—and others have been ignoring—for a while now; an enemy using social media and cellphone geotagging to identify the precise location of troops on a battlefield. When you take a photo with your cellphone, the gps coordinates of the location you took the picture is embedded into the image. When you upload said photo onto the internet for all to see, people can pull the location data from that picture. If you think this is just people being paranoid...