PI Newswire

The mysterious cloak and dagger world of international espionage and its real-life heros and villains are exposed in a new exhibition, the first to be sanctioned by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Spy, the Secret World of Espionage,” which opens at the Discovery Times Square on Friday, includes hundreds of artifacts, some from the vaults of the CIA and FBI and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

They range from a World War Two-era collapsible motorbike that could be dropped by parachute and deployed in 10 seconds and a German ENIGMA machine to create secret messages to a camel saddle used by one of the first CIA agents in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks to bugging devices, microdots and surveillance equipment.

“This is the first and only time these items will ever travel. It is kind of an unparalleled cooperation and collaboration with the CIA and FBI,” said H. Keith Melton, an author, intelligence historian and expert on spy technology who contributed items from his own collection.

The interactive exhibit, which will travel to 10 U.S. cities, offers a glimpse into a part of history and a secret world peopled with real-life agents, who Melton says are often completely misdefined by Hollywood and are nothing like James Bond.

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We interviewed Mark Birdsall – editor of Eye Spy magazine, on how the magazine came about, what his background is – and we asked him for his take on the biggest issues facing espionage, intelligence, and security right in 2012 – and about where the industry is heading.

How did Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine come about?

The idea of a magazine containing intelligence-only content came about from my previous newsstand title – The Unopened Files. This popular magazine carried features on intelligence and espionage, but also other content on incidents such as the shooting of John F. Kennedy, government issues and airline mysteries ect. I was an “intelligence enthusiast” and thought there might be a public market for a magazine which was devoted to the subject matter. However, for it to work in an open-source arena, I had the challenging task of “demystifying” the work of the intelligence services; in other words explaining many parts and components in simple terminology which were most complex. I also understood there was (and would always be) a constant flow of material – a crucial issue in terms of providing new stories for readers. Launching a newsstand publication that can function properly is not easy, so there was a definite requirement that its copy was both factual and interesting. Yes, it was a massive gamble that required a six figure sum, but since its conception in 2000, Eye Spy has become not only popular with the public, but with those who work in the intelligence industry. However, it was a decision that received terrific public backing in terms of its agenda. I was determined to keep politics, religion and other “managerial factors” from its editorial. And I would like to think we have at least managed to open the door, so to speak, in terms of allowing ordinary people a fleeting glimpse of a very secretive world.

The magazine’s sources are exceptional and in most cases, very, very accurate.

What is your experience in the industry?

I have worked in publishing, printing and investigative journalism for the best part of 35 years, thus I had a good idea of the industry in terms of its business potential. As for my background, I have no connections with intelligence (official level) whatsoever. However, I am a researcher and investigative author with experience in analysis. My interest in intelligence, espionage, its associated “tradecraft” and how it affects so many world (political/military/commerce and human) decisions was really the driving force in the creation of Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine. Now of course, I am surrounded by colleagues who work in the industry and can afford even more guidance. The magazine’s sources are exceptional and in most cases, very, very accurate. But securing these valuable “resources” has been tough and it has taken a decade of hard work for the title to get recognition in some intelligence circles.

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A former top CIA covert officer who ran one of the spy agency’s secret domestic networks says there are now more foreign spies on U.S. soil than at the peak of the Cold War. The former officer, Hank Crumpton, who also served as deputy director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center and led the U.S. response to 9/11, speaks candidly to Lara Logan about his life as a spy on 60Minutes, Sunday, May 13at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

As the chief of the CIA’s National Resources Division, the highly-sensitive, secret domestic operation, he conducted counter-intelligence within the U.S. “If you look at the threat that is imposed upon our nation every day, some of the major nation states — China in particular — [have] very sophisticated intelligence operations, very aggressive operations against the U.S.,” says Crumpton. “I would hazard to guess there are more foreign intelligence officers inside the U.S. working against U.S. interests now than even at the height of the Cold War,” he tells Logan. “It’s a critical issue.”

Also critical in Crumpton’s mind is the danger posed by al Qaeda, especially factions operating in North Africa. “I’m particularly concerned about al Qaeda in Yemen, which is fractured as a nation state,” he says. “The Sahel, if you look at al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, they pose a threat, and in Somalia. Those are the places I’d be concerned,” says Crumpton.

Crumpton says al Qaeda could make a comeback in Afghanistan if the U.S. withdraws too quickly. The current situation there reminds him of a “Greek tragedy,” he tells Logan. “You’ve got so many mistakes on the U.S. side, and you’ve got a feckless, corrupt government on the Afghan side. I am really more pessimistic now than I’ve been in a long time,” says Crumpton.

The retired spy also tells Logan about the early months in Afghanistan after 9/11, when the U.S. effort to topple the Taliban was led by the CIA and about how two administrations’ failure to let CIA assets kill Osama bin Laden led to the development of predator drones.

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Were you watching closely when the man in the blue blazer brushed by Henry R. Schlesinger, turned and started up the stairs in Grand Central Terminal?

“If that didn’t go well, I’d be sitting in prison,” Mr. Schlesinger said, fingering the rolled-up sheet of paper the other man had slipped him as they passed.

He left out another important if: If he and the other guy were real spies.

As it was, the paper that changed hands was a list of places in New York that figured in famous espionage cases. It is a long list.

“There are more spies in New York City than any other city,” said the other man, H. Keith Melton, an intelligence historian and the author of “The Ultimate Spy: Inside the Secret World of Espionage” (DK Publishing, updated 2009). “They could be the person next to you on the subway, or standing on the corner.”

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San Francisco civil rights advocates who are concerned about what they call domestic spying on the city’s Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities are celebrating new legislation signed into law on May 9 by Mayor Ed Lee.

The Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance requires San Francisco Police Department officers working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to be bound by local and state laws strictly governing intelligence gathering of First Amendment-protected activities like religious worship.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to pass the final version of the legislation May 8. Although the board does not have the jurisdiction to influence FBI activity, the ordinance targeting local police participation in the task force is seen by activists as an important step in tackling the much larger issue of unlawful federal surveillance. Advocates are also hopeful that the law will begin to repair the icy relationship between San Francisco’s police department and AMEMSA communities.

“This is a first step in a long way to go for this issue our community is facing,” Yemen-born Arab-American civil rights activist Adel Somaha said. “We want to see these agents stay away from our mosques, which are places of worship, not spy stations. They turn our community environment into a war zone for no reason.”

Revised Ordinance

San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim resubmitted the ordinance to the city’s board of supervisors on April 10 after the mayor vetoed a more detailed version of the policy. The revised version will be implemented by mid-summer.

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When the Olympic bandwagon rolls into the UK, the eyes of the world will focus on the Olympic Park in east London. But as up to 4 billion people tune in to watch the world’s best athletes, Dan Brown’s team will have a very different focus.

Hidden away in a warren of underground passages below Piccadilly Circus, they will be monitoring 47 flickering and changing screens – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – in one of the most extensive CCTV operations the UK has seen.

“The Olympics is going to be a massive challenge for us,” says Brown, the manager of Westminster’s CCTV control centre. “We are expecting a million extra people a day to come into Westminster during the Olympics – more than double the usual number – and that means a lot more potential problems.”

The system, run by Westminster council, has just had a £500,000 “Olympic revamp” and can now survey large parts of central London in high definition.

For civil liberty campaigners, it is a symbol of the UK’s burgeoning surveillance society. But for Brown, the new system, with its wireless cameras and high-quality images, is a key part of an Olympic security operation that will see tens of thousands of troops and private security guards working alongside police officers and the security services.

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Matthew Taylor walks down Regent Street in central London to test the new network of CCTV cameras put in place by Westminster council ahead of the Olympics.

The Olympic security operation will see tens of thousands of troops and private security guards working alongside police officers and the security services.

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Hand-held devices such as smartphones and tablets could be the next frontier for cyber-spies and other rogue players in the digital world, warns a newly declassified assessment from Canada’s intelligence agency.

Opportunities for malicious hackers are growing as computer systems move from the back rooms of corporations and government agencies into the palms and laptops of employees, says the Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment.

“New cyber attack tools and techniques will be developed in efforts to compromise Canadian public- and private-sector systems,” says the report, perhaps the agency’s most ominous forecast to date on the perils of cyberspace.

“The cyber-related threat environment will evolve and become more complex, creating ever greater challenges for Canada within the context of national security.”

The 18-page CSIS report, Cyber Threats and Security: An Overview, was obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act. Though heavily edited, the November 2011 assessment, originally classified top secret, is another sign of the intelligence service’s growing interest in the dangers emerging from cyberspace.

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The nation’s six spook agencies have been dealt a collective budget hit of $81 million over four years including a freeze on plans to increase personnel levels at the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.

In 2006-2007, ASIO was slated for a big ramp-up in staff numbers but had trouble meeting personnel targets and the plan has been put on hold, an official from the Attorney-General’s Department said yesterday.

Agencies affected by the staff cuts are ASIO, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Office of National Assessments, the Defence Intelligence Organisation, the Defence Signals Directorate and Defence Imaging and Geospatial Organisation.

Under the measure — which has been designed to help in Labor’s effort to return the federal budget to a modest surplus — the intelligence community will be hit by annual across-the-board cuts of $20.4m until 2015-16.

Savings will be redirected to support other national intelligence priorities.

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Surprise, or maybe not so much, counterintelligence surveillance increased in 2011 according to the new annual Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) report [PDF]. The Justice Department filed 1,676 applications to conduct electronic surveillance in 2011, which is up from the 1,579 filed in 2010. In total, the DOJ submitted 1,745 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) seeking authorization to conduct electronic surveillance or physical searches, jumping up 10.5% from 2010. Would you care to guess how many surveillance applications were denied by FISC? Zero, zippy, none . . . although the Court did modify 30 before approval.

As if someone had added Miracle Grow, or perhaps a truckload of horse manure, the applications for what the government calls “business records (including the production of tangible things)” grew like crazy in 2011. The government filed 205 business record applications, up from a total of 96 during 2010 [PDF]. The EFF pointed out that these records are one in the same as the government using the infamous Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

When the Patriot Act was reauthorized and granted the government even more domestic spy power on citizens, we learned about the “secret law” which prompted Senator Mark Udall to say, “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” At the time, Cato @ Liberty’s Julian Sanchez suggested that the Patriot Act’s Section 215 most likely included unfettered government access to geolocation data from your smartphone. It is interesting to note at this point that recently the Justice Department said that “requiring a search warrant to obtain cell phone location tracking information would ‘cripple’ prosecutors and law enforcement.” The ACLU received official confirmation that there are indeed “secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over ‘any tangible things’.”

There was a tiny bit of less-depressing news in the 2011 FISA report, since the FBI’s request for National Security Letters (NSLs) actually decreased to 16,511, down from 24,287 FBI NSL requests in 2010. Even though the numbers went down, by its very secretive nature the 7,201 different citizens listed in those NSLs will most likely never know about it. The FBI can write its own NSLs as they are only administrative subpoenas that require no signature from a judge and that come with a gag order forbidding the recipient from telling the person about whom it was requested. With an NSL, the government can demand banking and credit information or phone and email records as in finding out just exactly who the target talks to or interacts with financially. Wikipedia notes that the FBI is not alone in issuing NSLs since they are also reportedly issued by the CIA and the Department of Defense.

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The Queen has confirmed UK governmental plans to increase the surveillance of its citizens in her speech to Parliament this morning, headlining it instead as something that will “maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data.”

The plan she is referring to is the Communications Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP), which allows the government to force ISPs to store customer data relating to who they communicated with and what information they’ve been accessing, allowing authorities to view this in real time. The only caveat is that to be monitored you need to be suspected of the criminal activity of terrorism – two activities that cover a massive number of situations.

The Queen did however say as part of the speech that the measures would only be brought forward under “strict safeguards to protect the public.” This will be a mild relief to privacy advocates, many who oppose the CCDP.

Her Majesty also said that increased scrutiny of intelligence agencies was important. “My government will introduce legislation to strengthen oversight of the security and intelligence agencies. This will allow courts, through the limited use of closed proceedings, to hear a greater range of evidence in national security cases.”

While the Queen has little active power in government, hopefully this speech will at least allow some minor modifications of the CCDP, as its inception in its current form, could bring about real infringements of the privacy of individuals.

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Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said the force was considering a mass screening programme among the spy’s colleagues at the Secret Intelligence Service.

But he stressed that without an official suspect in the case, they could not compel anyone to take part in a DNA screening programme.

Last week the coroner at Mr Williams’ inquest said the 31-year-old, whose naked, decomposing remains were found in a locked sports holdall, had probably been killed unlawfully by a mystery third party.

Dr Fiona Wilcox also raised the prospect that another spy may have been involved in his death, remarking that it was a “legitimate line of inquiry” for police.

Asked if he expected MI6 personnel to co-operate in the investigation, Mr Hogan-Howe said: “It’s called the law.”

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