One slept with several cabinet ministers. Another sold info to the Soviets to fund his expensive tastes. Take a look back at Canada’s other spies.
The Gouzenko Affair
Igor Gouzenko received intelligence training at the beginning of the Second World War, becoming a cipher clerk at the Soviet legation in Ottawa in 1943. Two years later, after he found out that he and his family were being sent to the USSR, he defected and went public with his knowledge of Soviet-operated spy networks on Canadian soil, armed with documents taken from the embassy to prove his assertions.
No one took Mr. Gouzenko seriously until a Soviet attempt to recapture him. Afterward, 12 suspects were arrested and put before a Royal Commission.
The commissioners, also using Mr. Gouzenko’s testimony and the documents he took, confirmed the existence of a spy ring in July of 1946, adding that the group targeted atomic secrets, among other goals.
Mr. Gouzenko was given a new identity. Even his death, which apparently occurred from natural causes, was kept secret.
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China-based hackers for months have been targeting federal agencies and contractors through infected emails apparently to spy on the Pentagon’s drone strategy and other intelligence matters, according to Internet security researchers.
The reported espionage employed a tactic known as spear-phishing where infiltrators, operating under the guise of a legitimate sender, email specific victims a virus-laden file or link. In this case, the hackers used email addresses from military and other government organizations, Jaime Blasco, manager of AlienVault Labs, said Tuesday.
Some emails went to employees at U.S. military contractors, he said, but declined to discuss any information related to specific victims.
The lab traced samples of the malicious software to network addresses in China, AlienVault disclosed last month.
Blasco has since discovered from the same spies separate malware that is capable of overriding Pentagon smart card credentials, known as the Common Access Card, to get into protected resources, he said Tuesday. In addition, the intruders have been pursuing other government organizations with information of interest to Chinese intelligence operations — including the General Services Administration, the U.S. government’s buying arm, and the Central Tibetan Administration.
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Spies working at the Government’s communications headquarters are being offered bonuses worth tens of thousands of pounds to stop them being poached by corporate giants such as Microsoft and Google.
The move follows complaints made by the head of GCHQ that he is losing top staff to companies that can afford to pay them £100,000 packages in salaries and generous perks.
Some of the staff being targeted by the private sector are vital to Britain’s intelligence services in the fight against cyber warfare.
GCHQ director Iain Lobban told MPs in July last year that he was struggling to recruit and retain key staff.
He warned the Intelligence and Security Committee: ‘They will be working for Microsoft or Google or Amazon or whoever.
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The CIA said Friday its internal watchdog found nothing wrong with the spy agency’s close partnership with the New York Police Department.
The agency’s inspector general concluded that no laws were broken and there was “no evidence that any part of the agency’s support to the NYPD constituted ‘domestic spying’,” CIA spokesperson Preston Golson said.
The inspector general decided to do a preliminary investigation after a series of stories by The Associated Press revealed how after the 9/11 attacks the CIA helped the NYPD build domestic intelligence programs that were used to spy on Muslims. The CIA also directed intelligence collection and reviewed reports, according to former NYPD officials involved.
The revelations troubled some members of Congress and even prompted the U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to remark that it did not look good for the CIA to be involved in any city police department. Thirty-four lawmakers have asked for the Justice Department to investigate but so far that request has gone nowhere.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has maintained the NYPD’s relationship with the CIA was proper. Under an executive order the CIA is allowed
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The intelligence operative sits in a leather club chair, laptop open, one floor below the Hilton Kuala Lumpur’s convention rooms, scanning the airwaves for spies.
In the salons above him, merchants of electronic interception demonstrate their gear to government agents who have descended on the Malaysian capital in early December for the Wiretapper’s Ball, as this surveillance industry trade show is called.
As he tries to detect hacker threats lurking in the wireless networks, the man who helps manage a Southeast Asian country’s Internet security says there’s reason for paranoia. The wares on offer include products that secretly access your Web cam, turn your cell phone into a location-tracking device, recognize your voice, mine your e-mail for anti-government sentiment and listen to supposedly secure Skype calls.
He isn’t alone watching his back at this cyber-arms bazaar, whose real name is ISS World.
For three days, attendees digging into dim sum fret about losing trade secrets to hackers, or falling prey to phone interception by rival spies. They also get a tiny taste of what they’ve unleashed on the outside world, where their products have become weapons in the hands of regimes that use the gear to track and torture dissidents.
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A new guide to espionage in London unearths the secrets of what the spooks have got up to in the capital.
Among the nooks and crannies is a garage used by MI5 in the 1970s to get its cars suped-up and kitted out with surveillance equipment.
But the garage near Clapham in south London was later uncovered by the Russians, prompting the Security Service to move their specialist mechanics to ‘somewhere in west London’.
The Londonist Top 10 Spy Sites also features a warren of tunnels underneath Kingsway, near Holborn.
Originally used as air raid shelters, they were taken over by the Inter Services Research Bureau, which served as a front for the research arm of MI6 – aka Q Branch in the James Bond novels.
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It’s like the Cold War never ended: U.S. intelligence agencies see Russia and China as the most significant threats to the nation’s interests.
The difference this time is that the field of engagement isn’t proxy states in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, but in the vast digital reaches of cyberspace.
In a new report to Congress, titled “Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace,” the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX) points to “significant and growing threats to the nation’s prosperity and security” from other nation states, including historic foes and even some U.S. partners and allies.
But it’s those foes from the Cold War decades that followed World War II that draw the greatest attention in the report.
• Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage. US private sector firms and cybersecurity specialists have reported an onslaught of computer network intrusions that have originated in China, but the IC [intelligence community] cannot confirm who was responsible.
• Russia’s intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from US targets.
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Spying for Russia can be a hard life. The feds are on your trail, always trying to find out who you’re meeting with and talking to. That’s why it’s best to make sure your secret agent gear is top quality and working properly. Otherwise, the FBI’s IT department may end up “fixing” it for you.
That’s one of the many things you can see in a series of videos released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Monday. The FBI released a cache of cover surveillance videos, along with a handful of photos and heavily redacted documents from “Operation Ghost Stories,” the FBI’s years-long investigation of the infamous Russian sleeper spy ring. We’ve known for a while that the Russians were felled in part because of their technical goofs, but the videos show more clearly just how the network unraveled.
Tech problems loomed large for the sleeper network, leading the FBI to secretly record the Russian intelligence version of Geek Squad. Their laptops, modified at Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) headquarters in Moscow, created private wireless networks designed to only communicate with the computers of other spy ring members when in close proximity. They also used steganography software to hide messages in image files. Unfortunately for the spooks, their equipment wasn’t always up to snuff.
In one surveillance video from the spring of 2010 (above), FBI agents sidled up next to spy ring members Richard Murphy and Michael Zottoli at a Brooklyn coffee shop. Their camera catches Murphy handing a laptop recently brought back from SVR headquarters in Moscow over to Zottoli. According to the criminal complaint against the sleeper network, the new gear was intended for later delivery to spy ring members in Seattle. The spies had a “hanging/freezing” problem with their communications software, which the new computer was supposed to address.
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The lawyer of a Syrian national accused by the United States of spying for Syria has accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of resorting to Google to prepare the case against his client. Mohamad Anas Haitham Soueid was arrested last summer and charged with conducting political espionage against Syrian and American citizens participating in demonstrations against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The alleged espionage appears to have been organized by members of the Syrian embassy in Washington, DC. A few weeks prior to Soueid’s arrest, the US Department of State had communicated to Syria’s ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha, “a number of [...] concerns with [...] reported actions of certain Syrian embassy staff in the United States”. The concerns centered on confirmed sightings of Syrian diplomats conducting technical surveillance against Syrian opposition activists in several US cities. Soueid was subsequently arrested for allegedly gathering intelligence on protesters and planning an extensive intimidation campaign. But Soueid’s lawyer, Haytham Faraj, told the court last week that his client’s name, as transcribed in the FBI indictment, had been wrongly transliterated into English using Google Translate. He also wrote in a court filing that the prosecution had “demonstrated a serious deficit in its ability to translate recorded conversations from Arabic into English”. Soueid’s defense also argues that federal prosecutors appear “to have taken extensive liberties with a playful [telephone] conversation” between the accused and his wife back in Syria, eventually producing an English-language translation “that has no basis in fact”. In one case highlighted by the defense, the accused allegedly told his wife that the Syrian intelligence agency was monitoring telephone calls; but in English, the phrase was changed to say “this phone belongs to intelligence agency”. When Soueid was first interviewed by the FBI back in August, he denied having been in contact with Syrian government officials. He later changed his statement, after being shown photographs of himself meeting with President al-Assad.
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The group of Russian spies that was arrested last year after living undercover in the United States was using technology used by terrorist groups to pass covert information, according to FBI documents released on Monday.
Using false documents, the 10 spies lived and worked in the country leading normal lives on the outside, while gathering information and working to make connections with people in policymaking circles or sources with access to sensitive information.
The FBI released hundreds of documents relating to its surveillance of the group Monday morning in response to a FOIA request. The counter surveillance operation, dubbed Operation Ghost Stories, lasted for years while the FBI gathered information on the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) operatives’ methods of information collection and distribution.
According to the FBI’s criminal complaint against “Donald Healthfield,” the alias of one of the operatives, a search of his house revealed evidence of steganography, using photographic images to hide text.
After searching the home of two other spies who had been living as a couple, authorities discovered an electronic storage device with a password-protected computer program on it. Along with the device they found a photographed piece of paper that said “alt,” “ctrl,” and “e” and a 27-character sequence. Using the 27 letters as a password, technicians were able to open a steganography program that was used to encrypt messages in images. Later after visiting Web sites found on one of the computer hard drives, they were able to find images that contained hidden messages.
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Canada’s spy agency needs to share more information with the Department of Foreign Affairs so the department is better prepared for negative reactions to Canadian intelligence work overseas, a report says.
The Security Intelligence Review Committee, which reports to Parliament on the work of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, found the organization had “limited exchanges” with Canada’s diplomats on its operations.
“SIRC recommended that CSIS adopt a broader interpretation of its disclosure commitments to DFAIT, to allow the department to prepare itself in the event of an adverse development arising from CSIS’s foreign operations,” according to the latest report, released Wednesday.
It also asks for “retooled” powers to assess national security beyond CSIS, including related departments and agencies. It would take a slight adjustment to its mandate, the report says. SIRC could also take on a review of other agencies at the request of the public safety minister if there was a minor amendment to the CSIS Act.
The SIRC report refers to its review of CSIS’s role in interviewing Afghan detainees, arguing it could have reviewed the actions of other involved departments, meaning a “more comprehensive examination,” it says.
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Kexue Huang, a scientist and native of China, pleaded guilty last week in a federal court to swiping millions of dollars worth of trade secrets from Dow Chemical Co. and Cargill Inc. for other people doing research in Germany and China.
A federal jury last month ordered South Korea’s Kolon Industries to pay DuPont Co. $920 million for stealing trade secrets regarding synthetic fibers used in such products as Kevlar body armor. A former DuPont engineer hired by Kolon, Michael Mitchell of Virginia, was sentenced in March last year to 18 months in prison for theft of trade secrets for passing on key DuPont data to Kolon.
And area technology companies are likely fooling themselves if they think they’re not in the cross-hairs of such spy efforts, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“If you haven’t been a victim yet, it’s because you have been and you don’t know it, or you will be,” Barry W. Couch, a special agent with FBI’s Buffalo division, told a conference room full of area optics industry executives last week. “Don’t be blindsided.”
Chili’s Sydor Optics played host as the FBI spent a handful of hours talking about counterintelligence and economic espionage issues, with handouts and a video presentation all revolving around the message that companies are under siege by foreign economic competitors, often with explicit help from foreign governments.
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