Free Republic

A former FBI agent convicted of espionage for Russia and serving a life sentence in a Colorado Supermax prison has died at the age of 79. The bureau confirmed Monday that Robert Hanssen was found unresponsive in his supermax federal prison cell at the ADX in Florence, Colorado around 6.55am. A cause of death has not yet been released, but officials say there is no threat to the public. Hannsen became notorious in the United States when he was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling highly classified materials to the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than...

The lid of secrecy covering the Sept. 6 Israeli air strike into Syria remains tight but one new theory emerging amid the speculation is that the Israeli conducted an electronic warfare exercise in preparation for future strikes or an attack on Iran. Authoritative reports from the Middle East stated that the Israel operation included extensive electronic warfare jamming by aircraft. The Israeli were testing the capabilities of Russian-made air defenses, including both radar and missiles located near Damascus and south of Homs near the Lebanese northern border. The raid was unprecedented in the blanket of jamming and electronic disruption that...

WASHINGTON -- An obscure, ultra-sophisticated form of spying technology is expected to play a large role in ferreting out any suspected chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. Measurement and signatures intelligence, known in spy circles as "MASINT," identifies the production of weapons through computer analysis of infrared and radar sensors. Targets include, among other things, chemical contents of smokestack discharges from weapons factories."When this is all over and done, I think that MASINT will be very important in trying to determine where there are (weapons of mass destruction) caches," said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA Iraq analyst who is now...