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Pope Francis has demoted the leader of the conservative Opus Dei group from bishop to priest, revoking the structure ordained by Saint John Paul II. In an apostolic letter ironically titled “Ad Charisma Tuendum” (In defense of the charism), Pope Francis reversed measures enacted by Saint John Paul II in 1982 that ensured that the Opus Dei personal prelature would always be governed by a bishop, thus guaranteeing a certain degree of independence and flexibility. Francis has transferred the oversight of Opus Dei from the Congregation of Bishops to the Dicastery for the Clergy in a move widely interpreted as...

<p>Two years ago, Robert Philip Hanssen, 59, a former very senior FBI official with 27 years of service, was sentenced to life in prison. Hanssen had been spying for the Russians and betrayed American intelligence sources and electronics secrets from as early as 1979.</p>

Robert Hanssen was one of the most damaging spies in the history of the FBI. The former US agent, who has died in prison, leaked top secrets to Moscow for nearly 20 years - betrayals that the agency says cost lives. It took 300 agents to finally bring him down. Two of them who played a central part tell us how they did it. In December 2000, FBI agent Richard Garcia had a curious visit from a colleague overseeing the Russia desk. "He asked, 'Do you know a guy named Robert Hanssen?'" Mr Garcia recalled. "I said, 'No'." The official...

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...

On this date in 1987, a once-promising American intelligence asset was executed with a single gunshot to the head in Moscow — his treachery exposed by two of the most infamous Soviet moles in U.S. intelligence history. A Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB posted to the Soviets’ official Washington, D.C. offices in 1980, Martynov had turned in 1982 and begun funneling intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the cryptonym “Gentile”. Truth be told, he was a mediocre source, but he was a younger officer with the chance to grow into a more important asset in the years ahead. Fate...

At approximately 8 PM on Sunday, February 18, 2001, there was a knock on my front door. At the time I was a Special Agent (SA) with the FBI, so imagine my shock when I opened the door and found the two top officials in the Division on my doorstep. I knew this couldn't possibly be good news, but they quickly sought to reassure me. "Everything is all right, but Bob Hanssen has been arrested." All right? Bob Hanssen was my brother in law, and a longtime counterintelligence (CI) official at FBIHQ, privy to a vast range of sensitive intelligence...

The newly revealed exploits of spies who operated in underground tunnels The CIA dug a tunnel under the Kremlin and installed a hi-tech bugging system to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's most senior figures, according to the former US intelligence officer who executed the plan. The device was put in by a US agent who had to wear a protective suit and was guided by satellite and sonar images of Moscow's underground. The bugging formed part of audacious operations to rescue a key defector, a KGB officer with responsibility for eavesdropping, and to alert Boris Yeltsin to the attempted coup...

SAN DIEGO -- An Egyptian-born financial analyst charged in a nationwide stock swindle may have known about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and tried to profit from them, a federal prosecutor said Friday. Amr I. "Tony" Elgindy telephoned his broker on Sept. 10 and asked him to liquidate his children's $300,000 trust account, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ken Breen told a federal judge at Elgindy's detention hearing. "He made a comment predicting the market would drop to 3,000" at a time when the Dow Jones stock index was at 9,600, Breen said. "Perhaps Mr. Elgindy had pre-knowledge of the Sept....

“When did Mueller become God?” wondered Rudy Giuliani after release of the Mueller report. The Trump attorney and former New York mayor was not alone in such sentiments. On his Fox News program, Mark Levin blasted the Mueller report as a 400-page, $35 million op-ed that amounts to an “impeachment report.” And after the finding of “no collusion,” the Democrat-media axis quickly pivoted to the obstruction of justice narrative. “Was Robert Mueller Colluding with Russia?” wondered Christopher Roach at American Greatness. “What could possibly sow more discord,” Roach notes, “than suggesting the president broke the law and stole an election...

From Wikipedia: Robert Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB which detailed U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. counterintelligence program.[3] He was spying at the same time as Aldrich Ames in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Both Ames and Hanssen compromised the names of KGB agents working secretly for the United States, some of whom were executed for their betrayal. Hanssen also revealed a multimillion dollar eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet Embassy in Washington. After Ames' arrest in 1994, some of these...

Victor Davis Hanson: Russian spy? Who would have suspected that one of America's leading conservative intellectuals, a prominent historian who is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, was selling us out to the Russkies? Actually, no one would suspect it because it isn't true. But on today's AM Joy, MSNBC terrorism expert Malcolm Nance bragged: "I know some of the spy-catchers in FBI counter-intelligence, guys who have taken down big names, like Aldrich Ames and Victor Davis Hanson." Nance presumably had in mind Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI agent who was convicted in 2001 of spying for...

(JPost) — Israel’s Mossad is responsible for training and paying the assassins of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists over the past two years, TIME magazine reported Saturday citing unnamed Western intelligence sources. In addition to the assassinations of the scientists, all of which were carried out using nearly identical magnetic bombs attached to the side of their cars, the intelligence sources claimed Israel was responsible for an explosion at an Iranian missile base outside Tehran late last year. Majid Jamali Fashi, one of several suspects arrested, tried and sentenced to death by the Islamic Republic in the past two...

<p>The head of a computer firm wants the independent commission named to investigate September 11 intelligence failures to review accusations that his software-tracking program, which he says the Justice Department stole, was diverted to Osama bin Laden.</p> <p>William H. Hamilton, president of Inslaw Inc., said the commission — headed by former New Jersey Gov. David H. Kean — should focus on the validity of published reports saying bin Laden penetrated classified computer files before the attacks to evade detection and monitor the activities of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.</p>

I'll get the C-SPAN link in a moment.

DID SADDAM HUSSEIN and Osama bin Laden have access to a U.S. computer tracking program that enabled them to monitor our intelligence-gathering efforts and financial transactions? If so, who is responsible for allowing the program to fall into their hands? And who else among America's enemies might have access to the tracking system? It's an explosive spy software scandal that no one in official Washington wants to investigate. This complex, tangled story began two decades ago, when a tiny private company called Inslaw Inc. developed a software package to help U.S. attorneys' offices in large urban districts keep tabs on...

Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen August 14, 2003 Office of the Inspector General -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNCLASSIFIED EXECUTIVE SUMMARY I. Introduction In this report, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) examines the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in deterring, detecting, and investigating the espionage of Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent. Hanssen's espionage began in November 1979 - three years after he joined the FBI - and continued intermittently until his arrest in February 2001, just two...

<p>WASHINGTON — Robert Hanssen, whom the FBI calls the most damaging spy in its history, was a "mediocre" agent who escaped detection because he was loosely supervised by a bureau that fooled itself into believing it had no spies in its ranks, the Justice Department's inspector general said Thursday.</p>

<p>"While Hanssen escaped detection for more than 20 years, we found that this was not because he was a master spy or because of any expert knowledge of espionage tradecraft.</p> <p>Much of Hanssen's conduct while committing espionage was reckless.</p> <p>We found that significant deficiencies in the FBI's internal security program played a major role in Hanssen's willingness and ability to commit espionage over such a lengthy period of time."</p>

<p>Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen became the most damaging spy in bureau history not because of his espionage abilities but because of a 20-year lapse in the FBI's ability to deter or detect spies in the agency and a lack of supervision by its officials, a report said yesterday.</p>

WASHINGTON - One of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history was more the result of poor oversight by the FBI than master spying by Robert Hanssen, said a Justice Department report released Thursday. The FBI's deficiencies, including an almost blind trust in its own agents, enabled Hanssen to spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than two decades, according to the investigation by inspector general Glenn A. Fine. The report concluded that Hanssen, a top FBI counterespionage official, received little supervision and the bureau had few checks in place that would deter him from spying or...