Free Republic

A jury on Friday acquitted a former military translator of secretly working as an Iraqi agent in the US but convicted him of making false statements when he sought a security clearance. The split verdict offered some relief to Issam "Sam" Hamama, who claimed he was only passing along basic information about Iraqis in the US when he reached out to Iraqi officials in the 1990s during the regime of Saddam Hussein. "We've been vindicated. They were accusing him of voluntarily working as a spy," defense lawyer Haytham Faraj said. Hamama, 60, of El Cajon, California, was found not guilty...

Ex-CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Info to New York Slimes Reporter Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, was indicted today for leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. The indictment shows that the federal government had access to their e-mail and phone contacts going back several years. Sterling served on the Iran desk of the CIA in the 1990s, and oversaw a classified program aimed at sabotaging the development of its nuclear programming. He left the CIA in 2000 and sued for racial discrimination (he is African American) in a case that went all the way...

Vladimir Putin better set his digital recorder! Russian spy and Putin favourite Anna Chapman still shuns questions about her years undercover in the United States, but starting next week she'll uncover other mysteries on Russian television. A spokeswoman for REN-TV, a private nationwide channel, announced that Chapman will host a new weekly television show that allows her 'to use all her talents to solve the world's most complicated mysteries.'

"....Gaffney, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, is founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and co-author of the new book "Shariah: The Threat to America." He told WND that Islamism has infiltrated the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, in the person of Washington attorney and political activist Suhail Khan and a group called Muslims for America.

The Rules of War Can't Protect Al Qaeda By RUTH WEDGWOOD NEW HAVEN — It makes no sense to win a trial but lose the war. With this in mind, a majority of the American public favors giving President Bush the option to use military tribunals against the Qaeda terror network. The tribunals are designed to permit a "full and fair trial" of war crimes without compromising our ability to track the network's future plans. Al Qaeda's skill at countersurveillance has made plain the need to protect sensitive intelligence sources at trial. But some international-law scholars suggest that President Bush's ...

Iran has hanged one of seven suspected spies for supplying Israel with secrets on Iran’s missile programs, and the regime’s courts have sentenced a second man to death for “counter-revolutionary activities.” The regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrested seven people in October on charges of spying for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency. “These spies supplied the enemy with information on Iran's judiciary, military and space agencies, among other things, prior to their arrest,” trumpeted Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency. Ali Akbar Siadat was hanged in a Tehran prison after being convicted of receiving $60,000 dollars “to give classified information to...

Whistleblowing outfit Wikileaks has been flogging secret information which it has been collecting to make cash on the side. According to a co-founder, who left the organisation, John Young, Wikileaks has a lucrative sideline flogging intelligence information the site had obtained. Young said he left the site in 2007 because he was worried by the fact that the outfit was mismanaging its funds and that Wikileaks was engaged in the selling of documents. Speaking to WND senior reporter Aaron Klein on his radio program on New York's WABC Radio Young claimed that Wikileaks was a money-making operation and follows the...

The CIA has recalled it top officer from Pakistan after his cover was blown and his life threatened. The alleged name of the CIA's station chief in Islamabad was revealed by a Pakistani man, Kareem Khan, who has threatened to sue the intelligence agency over the death of his son and brother in a U.S. missile strike. Khan and his lawyers told a news conference in November that they would seek a $500 million payment for his family members' deaths and warned they may sue CIA director Leon Panetta, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the man they identified as...

Sexy Russian spy Anna Chapman's boss was working for us. The head of Russia's spy operations in America defected just before he betrayed Chapman and her nine fellow sleeper agents last summer -- and the Kremlin has ordered a hit team to kill him as revenge, according to a bombshell report yesterday. Senior officials in Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's government said the double agent -- identified only as "Colonel Shcherbakov" -- was a devastating blow to Russia's SVR intelligence agency and touched off a probe.

Top Russian spy defects after betraying U.S. ring By Thomas Grove Thomas Grove 21 mins ago MOSCOW (Reuters) – The head of Russia's deep cover U.S. spying operations has betrayed the network and defected, a Russian paper said on Thursday, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War. The newspaper, Kommersant, named the man as Colonel Shcherbakov, and said he was responsible for unmasking a Russian spy ring in the United States in June whose arrests humiliated Moscow and clouded a "reset" in ties with Washington. The betrayal would make Shcherbakov...

RUSSIAN President Dmitry Medvedev has handed top state honours to the Russian spies deported from the US in July in the biggest spy scandal since the Cold War, the Kremlin says. "A ceremony took place in the Kremlin today to hand top state honours to a number of Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) employees, including the spies who were working in the United States and returned to Russia in July," Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said in a statement on Russian news agencies. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who served as a KGB agent in East Germany, has said that he has met...

Obama File 110 hereStanley Kurtz's new book "Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism", finally proves that Barack Obama attended the Democratic Socialists of America - run Socialist Scholars Conferences in 1983 and 1984. He also reveals how some of the marxists participating in those conferences would influence Obama's career in later years. In this post I look at the 10th annual Socialist Scholars Conference held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in April 1992. One panel in particular was important: "Towards a New Party", with Elaine Bernard, Arthur Lipow, Kurt Stand and Judy Page. The...

An Israeli rabbi has blessed the use of female spies in "honeytrap" or "honeypot" stings against terrorists, according to a study called "Illicit Sex for the Sake of National Security." The ruling by Rabbi Ari Schvat, contained in a study published by the Zomet Institute, was first reported by the news agency DPA and published by Haaretz.com. Israeli officials confirmed the rabbinical ruling and the gist of the study for ABC News.

Sidney Reilly, nicknamed the 'Ace of Spies,' planned to kill the whole of the Soviet leadership during a meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1918 An MI6 agent became a serial killer as he used pretty young women to lure Russians to their deaths with the promise of sex, new documents reveal. A Cossack colonel called Mohammed Bek Hadji Lashet, and his gang used the women to attract communists to a lakeside villa where they were tortured and then killed, according to a new history of the intelligence service. The book, Six, by former military intelligence officer Michael Smith, reveals...

A scientist and his wife who both worked at the leading US nuclear research facility were arrested Friday and charged with trying to pass nuclear arms secrets to Venezuela, the US Department of Justice said. The pair, both Americans, "have been indicted on charges of communicating classified nuclear weapons data to a person they believed to be a Venezuelan government official and conspiring to participate in the development of an atomic weapon for Venezuela," the department said in a statement. The defendants, Pedro Mascheroni, 75, and Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 67, could face life in prison if convicted on all charges.

<p>London, England (CNN) -- Metropolitan police in London, England, appealed Monday for further information about last month's death of a man who worked for a British intelligence agency and whose naked body was found in a padlocked duffel bag in his bathroom.</p>

NOTE The following text is a quote: Chinese National Charged with Economic Espionage Involving Theft of Trade Secrets from Leading Agricultural Company Based in Indianapolis WASHINGTON—Kexue Huang, aka John, 45, has been arrested and charged in a 17-count indictment with economic espionage intended to benefit a foreign government and instrumentalities, and interstate and foreign transportation of stolen property, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Timothy M. Morrison for the Southern District of Indiana. Huang was arrested on July 13, 2010, in Westborough, Massachusetts by FBI agents, and today made his initial appearance...

For years after 9/11, the U.S. did little to fight cyber-attacks by Islamic terrorists and others. For eight years, George “Faux-Counterterrorism” Bush and for nearly two years of Obama, we went through useless, incompetent cyber-terrorism officials who did nothing. For most of the last nine years after the attacks, the FBI didn’t even have e-mail, despite a bloated budget for computers and other cyber-activity. And, as I told you in March, a TSA employee was allowed to remain at his computer–and inserted a virus–after he knew his TSA employment was terminated. We simply do not take cyber-security seriously. Last week,...

Asking you to say something if you happen to see something is a modest request. But what might induce you to adopt a disguise and spy on your fellow citizens? How about a generous proliferation of vice, combined with a healthy dose of corrupt law enforcement, and some strong encouragement (including a small stipend) from morally minded civic leaders?Out of just such fertile soil, a wide-ranging program of amateur surveillance flourished in early 20th century New York City. Ordinary folks — settlement house workers, off-duty state Excise Department employees, dry-goods jobbers — moonlighted as denizens of the demimonde, going undercover...

SNIPPET: "The oldest son of two Russian spies bagged in a summer sweep of undercover moles may have known his folks were working for the other side while they all lived the good life in Cambridge. “I’d say it’s logical to presume, and we suspect that he knew something, yes, toward the end,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers said yesterday. The feds believe the Cambridge couple - going by the names Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Foley - hid their secret life from their two boys, 16 and 20 years old. The oldest, however, may have caught on...