Espionage

Former CIA officer charged with spying for China

A 15-year veteran of the CIA was charged Monday with selling U.S. secrets to China then unwittingly admitting his spying to the FBI.

The method prosecutors said they used to get him to reveal the nature of his espionage was worthy of a spy novel itself.

Court documents said 67-year-old Alexander Yuk Ching Ma of Honolulu was charged with violating U.S. espionage laws. Prosecutors said he joined the CIA in 1967 then served as a CIA officer until he retired from the agency in 1989. For part of that time he was assigned to work overseas in the East-Asia and Pacific region.

Twelve years after he retired, prosecutors said Monday that Ma met with at least five officers of China's Ministry of State Security in a Hong Kong hotel room, where he "disclosed a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information," including facts about the CIA's internal organization, methods for communicating covertly, and the identities of CIA officers and human assets.

Espionage

Former Austrian army colonel convicted of spying for Russia

A retired Austrian army colonel was convicted of spying for Russia for nearly three decades.

The 71-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was accused of giving Russia secret information about Austria's armed forces and their weapons systems from 1992 to 2018 in exchange for more than $300,000.

He was sentenced to three years in prison by a regional court in Salzburg on Tuesday. His trial took place behind closed doors over national security concerns.

The man denied he was a spy, saying he passed on publicly available information, but he did admit to being paid.

Austrian investigators suspected the colonel was recruited by Igor Zaitsev, a high-ranking Russian military intelligence officer for whom Vienna has issued an international arrest warrant.

Then-Austrian Defense Minister Mario Kunasek previously said the spying was exposed with the help of another European intelligence agency.

Espionage

Ex-CIA Officer Sentenced To 19 Years For Conspiracy To Spy For China

A former CIA officer was sentenced to nearly two decades in a federal prison Friday for conspiracy to spy for China.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Hawaii, was sentenced to 19 years for conspiracy to deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government.

There's nothing in the indictment claiming Lee handed over sensitive information to Chinese authorities. Prosecutors say Lee's actions, like retaining national defense materials and interactions with foreign officials, are clear links to a conspiracy.

In all, Lee received more than $840,000 from Chinese intelligence officers, according to court documents.

In response to Lee's sentencing, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia G. Zachary Terwilliger said, "Lee sold out his country."

Espionage

The Expanding Spectrum of Espionageby Americans, 1947 – 2015 


The Defense Personnel and Security Research Center (PERSEREC) dates from 1986. It was founded because of the espionage of John Walker and his ring of spies. Part of a record year for spies in 1985, when eleven Americans were arrested for espionage, Walker’s capture and the revelation that for 20 years he had betrayed the trust the U.S. Navy placed in him as a cryptographic radioman, provoked outrage. A commission to investigate security practices then formed under General Richard G. Stilwell. Among its recommendations for improvement was the creation of an organization to perform behavioral science research on personnel security policies and practices, so the Department of Defense (DoD) established PERSEREC a year later to ground those practices in objective research. For 30 years, PERSEREC has been working to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of the DoD personnel and industrial security systems. One consistent research focus has been the phenomenon of trust betrayal in crimes such as espionage. This report is the fourth in a series of unclassified reports on espionage based on information collected in a database maintained by PERSEREC.1 Materials on espionage and espionage-related offenses, including attempted espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, and theft or illegal collection of closely held national defense information with the intent to commit espionage, have been coded into the database. These reports are based on open sources in order to facilitate public access to them. A founding goal of PERSEREC’s is to improve security education and awareness; broad public distribution of unclassified analytical products about espionage furthers that goal.

Espionage

The Dangerous Business of Exfiltrating Spies – Part One

The New York Times described the Russian asset’s role as important in helping U.S. officials trace the source of election tampering by Russia in the 2016 election, all the way back to Putin himself. But according to the reporting, when the risks became too great that the spy would be discovered, the U.S. launched a risky extraction operation to move him to the U.S.

When that kind of thing happens in the real world, not in the movies, the spy has to make some tough choices that impact not only him or her, but their immediate family, their extended family and possibly close personal associates. All of it weighing on the final decision of whether to flee or not.

The spy in the Russian case was extracted and relocated to the U.S., choosing to live under his real name, which caused a fury of media coverage once information about his role had been leaked.

His case is in stark contrast to another U.S. asset, a Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA gather information to verify that Osama bin Laden was likely living in a secretive compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011. In that case, the asset, Dr. Shakil Afridi, decided not to take the CIA up on an offer to get him out of the country. Today, he remains in a Pakistani jail.

Each story of two valuable spies for the U.S. highlights the efforts that the CIA goes to in order to protect an asset once recruited. CIA assets who accept offers of help from the U.S. end up at the CIA’s National Resettlement Operations Center, a section of the Directorate of Operations that rarely appears in headlines, yet consistently interacts with the country’s most valuable spies.

Espionage

Senior Canadian police intelligence officer arrested on suspicion of espionage

A senior official of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police intelligence unit has been arrested and charged with multiple charges, including espionage with foreign powers.

The RCMP member, identified as Cameron Ortis, was arrested Thursday in Ottawa, Canada, following an extensive national security investigation, Global News reported.

The charges filed under the Security of Information Act relate to unauthorized leaking of sensitive information and breach of trust, as well as unauthorized use of a computer.

“The charges stem from activities alleged to have occurred during his tenure as an RCMP employee,” the police said in a statement, confirming the arrest. “As this investigation is ongoing, we will not be making any other comment on this time.”

Sources told Global News that Ortis is believed to have stolen “large quantities of information, which could compromise an untold number of investigations.”

Espionage

Ex-CIA officer sentenced to 20 years in prison over Chinese spying conspiracy

A former CIA officer was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Friday for a conspiracy to send national defense information to a Chinese intelligence operative.

Kevin Patrick Mallory, 62, was charged in 2017 and convicted last June under the Espionage Act. Officials said Mallory’s actions put intelligence assets in harm’s way as China continues to try to recruit former U.S. agents.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III issued the sentence in federal court in Alexandria, Va., on Friday.

“Mallory not only put our country at great risk, but he endangered the lives of specific human assets who put their own safety at risk for our national defense,” G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement.

“As the Chinese continue to attempt to identify and recruit current and former members of the United States intelligence community, those individuals should remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity to the appropriate security officials. This case should send a message to anyone considering violating the public’s trust and compromising our national security by disclosing classified information.” 

Espionage

Russia jails Norwegian Frode Berg for spying on submarines

A Moscow court has sentenced a 63-year-old Norwegian, Frode Berg, to 14 years in a strict-regime labour camp for spying on Russian navy submarines.

Berg, arrested in Moscow in 2017, denied the accusation.

He formerly worked as a guard on the Norwegian-Russian border, and had been actively promoting closer ties.

Berg admitted acting as a courier for Norwegian intelligence, but said he had little knowledge of the mission. The case remains shrouded in secrecy.

Berg's lawyer, Ilya Novikov, said his client would not appeal against the verdict but would seek a pardon from President Vladimir Putin.

Norway - a Nato member - shares an Arctic border with Russia and for decades their relations were amicable, even during the Cold War. But ties have worsened since 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula.

Espionage

Spying for China: Former US intel officer, Army vet pleads guilty to attempted espionage

A former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and U.S. Army veteran pleaded guilty Friday to attempting to steal and deliver military secrets to the Chinese government, Department of Justice officials announced.

Ron Rockwell Hansen, 59, was arrested by the FBI in June as he was trying to board a flight for China. The agency said he had been approached by Chinese intelligence agentsin 2014, and received not less than $800,000 in funds originating from China as compensation for transmitting U.S. national secrets.

“This case drives home the troubling reality of insider threats and that current and former clearance holders will be targeted by our adversaries," Special Agent in Charge Barnhart said in a statement after the arrest.

Hansen pleaded guilty before U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. He is a resident of Syracuse, Utah. The plea deal Hansen agreed to stipulated a 180-month sentence, pending court approval, DoJ officials said in their announcement.

Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 24.

Espionage

Spy Epic Unfolding: Why Did Ex-Israeli Minister Work for Iranian Intelligence?

Despite most media reports focusing on a former Israeli official being enlisted by Iranian intelligence, Israeli analysts stress the fact that the approach is a bit far-fetched and there is another side to the story.

Israel’s former minister of energy and infrastructure, Gonen Segev, was sentenced behind closed doors on 26 February to 11 years in prison for spying for Iran. The sentence is notably milder than it could have been, since Segev has agreed to a plea bargain on charges of espionage and transfer of information to Iran.

An Israeli court ruled the former top official guilty of “grave crimes of spying and providing information to an enemy with the intent of harming national security”, as had been stated by prosecutors.

Espionage

Sweden confirms arrest of second person on spying charges

The Swedish public prosecutor’s office has confirmed media reports that a second espionage-related arrest took place in Stockholm this week. The latest arrest came just 24 hours after a man was arrested in the Swedish capital on Tuesday, allegedly for spying on behalf of Russia. As intelNews reported yesterday, a man was apprehended on Tuesday while meeting with a foreign diplomat in central Stockholm. The diplomat is allegedly a member of staff at the Russian embassy in Sweden. He is believed to be a Russian intelligence officer operating under official cover. A representative of the Swedish Security Service, known as SÄPO, later said that the man who was meeting with the Russian diplomat had been recruited by Russian intelligence in 2017 or earlier, and had been in regular contact with his Russian handlers. His name has not been revealed to the media, but he is believed to be working for an unnamed technology company in Sweden.

On Thursday, the Stockholm-based newspaper Dagens Nyheter said that it had seen court papers involving the arrest of a second individual on Wednesday, reportedly in connection with espionage for a foreign power. The paper said that the arrest took place in the Swedish capital and the individual in question remained in detention. It added that Hans-Jorgen Hanstrom, of the public prosecutor’s office, had confirmed the arrest and that the main suspect had been charged with spying against Swedish interests for a foreign power.

Espionage

Spies in the Media

Facebook and Twitter have acquired reputations as the Boris and Natasha of our day, spreading fake news the way British colonists handed out smallpox-infested blankets to Indians. Yet disinformation is a lot older than social media.

Modern Americans could also be forgiven for thinking the 2016 election was the first time a foreign country made an organized attempt to affect a stateside political outcome. But in fact, we've spent decades swimming in false stories spread by governments from Moscow to London (and, for that matter, Washington). Journalists have frequently served as those governments' partners in their propaganda and espionage efforts—sometimes unwittingly and other times with full intent.

Bits and pieces of this reality have emerged via news reports, particularly some 1970s stories by John Crewdson in The New York Times and Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone. Last year, just before Thanksgiving, the Louisville Courier-Journalhad an unusual scoop: One of its own reporters in the mid-1960s had been a full-time CIA officer, hired by a newsroom boss with full knowledge that his new city desk inkslinger had a secret identity. But nobody has pried as many horrifying, hilarious details out of Washington journalism's secret cloak-and-dagger side as Steven T. Usdin in his new book, Bureau of Spies: The Secret Connections Between Espionage and Journalism in Washington (Prometheus Books).

It turns out American reporters spied for the CIA. They spied for the Soviets. And they spied for the British—boy, did they spy for the British, helping them nudge us into World War II, unseat an isolationist congressman, and riddle the U.S. media with fake news.

Espionage

Air Force Defector to Iran Severely Damaged U.S. Intelligence Efforts, Ex-Officials Say

A former Air Force sergeant who defected to Iran did severe damage to American intelligence operations, and is suspected of revealing the names of double agents run by United States military intelligence, some of whom had their cover blown after her defection, according to former counterintelligence officials.

Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, the former Air Force counterintelligence agent, is also accused of exposing the names of eight American military counterespionage agents, and she had knowledge of how the United States intercepted foreign communications, the government’s most important stream of intelligence. She also knew the inner workings of American military operations across the Middle East.

Ms. Witt’s indictment on charges of providing American secrets to Tehran was made public this week. Her alleged activities came at a time when American intelligence operations were already plagued by the penetration of a top-secret communications network by China and Iran that had deeply damaged spying operations abroad.

Espionage

The UAE’s covert web of spies, hackers and mercenary death squads

Ex-NSA operatives reveal how they spied for the UAE amidst increasing global scrutiny over illegal espionage, shady defence deals and mercenaries in the Yemen war. To what end will the UAE pursue its regional ambitions?

In a groundbreaking report, Reuters details a sweeping spy and surveillance programme, codenamed Project Raven, which made use of ex-NSA employees to spy on and hack governments, human rights activists, and American citizens. 

After leaving the NSA in 2014, following the blowback from the Edward Snowden leaks, former intelligence analyst Lori Stroud,  was approached by a former NSA colleague Marc Baier to work for Cyberpoint, a US cybersecurity firm that ran Project Raven for the UAE.

The UAE would eventually replace Cyberpoint with DarkMatter, an Emirati-run company, giving American contractors the choice to leave or sign on with the new company.

Espionage

Accused Novi spy no stranger to setbacks, squabbles

Paul Whelan, the Michigan man detained in Moscow on suspicion of spying, launched a successful security career in the auto industry despite quitting one of his first law enforcement jobs under pressure, public records show.

Court records and interviews portray Whelan as an unpopular whistle blower embroiled in small-town squabbles and suffering petty indignities while working as a $7-an-hour, part-time police officer in Chelsea. The records provide a snapshot of Whelan's early career and chronicle another red flag in the past of a man with financial issues who was kicked out of the Marines.

"On the surface, it sounds like he was successful at working hard to overcome setbacks," brother David Whelan wrote in an email to The Detroit News on Tuesday.

The portrait is emerging amid questions about Whelan's past and whether the 48-year-old Novi man is a spy or an unwitting pawn entangled in an international incident. He's jailed in Russia and facing a possible 20-year prison sentence.

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have granted requests to visit Whelan made by representatives of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada, three countries in which he holds citizenship along with the United States, his brother said Tuesday.

Espionage

Former CIA officers doubt American arrested in Russia was a spy

Two former CIA officers with decades of experience spying overseas told NBC News it is inconceivable to them that the former Marine was spying for the United States.

"We operate in Russia in the strictest, most careful way," said one of the former officers, who focused for many years on operations in Russia. "Just to meet someone requires weeks of planning."

In fact, he said, spying in the Russian police state is so risky that there are many Russian CIA assets whom the agency will only meet outside of the country.

He added, "We cannot justify using an American without diplomatic immunity, because if they get arrested, they are just trade bait."

Spies working under diplomatic cover simply get sent home if arrested, while those working without it can face decades in prison unless they are traded for a Russian spy in jail in the U.S.

Espionage

Paul Whelan, American Accused of Spying by Russia, Thrown in Moscow’s Most Infamous Dungeon

Lefortovo Prison is one of the oldest, most notorious jails in this city. During the Great Purge in the 1930s, Josef Stalin’s NKVD agents tortured inmates there to prepare them for the kind of show trials Arthur Koestler wrote about in his famous novel Darkness at Noon. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, spent some very grim time at Lefortovo.

Given its past, one might think Lefortovo is an historical relic like Alcatraz in the United States, but it is still in use. And independent prison observers tell The Daily Beast that a retired U.S. Marine named Paul Whelan is being held there on charges of espionage.

“Lefortovo has not seen an American accused of espionage for ages,” according to Zoya Svetova, a senior independent observer of prison conditions with the Public Monitoring Commission of Moscow, a non-government organization.

If the treatment Whelan receives follows tradition for foreigners accused of spying, he will be kept in a single cell for the first 10 days of his time behind the bars. At Lefortovo they call this “quarantine time”; all prisoners accused of espionage get stripped of their clothes and belongings, dressed in identical blue robes and locked in tiny single cells without any television or radio.

Espionage

Meet Putin’s American Prisoner, Paul Whelan

The American arrested in Russia and accused of being a spy is a former cop and retired Marine, who once described having contacts in law enforcement agencies around the world through his work as a global security chief for private companies

Paul Whelan, 48, of Michigan, is also an avowed Russophile who first visited Moscow over a decade ago, when he made a point of befriending Russian soldiers, calling them on his website “the sneaky Russians who had kept the western world at bay for so long.”

Whelan’s brother, David, confirmed to the Daily Beast on Tuesday that he was the man in custody on espionage charges. In a statement first issued to CNN, David Whelan said the family lost contact with Paul on Dec. 28, “which was very much out of character for him even when he was traveling.”

Espionage

US citizen detained in Moscow on suspicion of espionage - FSB

Russia’s Federal Security Service has detained US citizen Paul Whelan in Moscow on suspicion of espionage, the public relations center said on Monday.

"On December 28, 2018 staff members of the Russian Federal Security Service detained US citizen Paul Whelan in Moscow while on a spy mission," the center said.

A criminal investigation into espionage has been launched against the US citizen.

If found guilty, he faces between 10 and 20 years in jail.

Espionage

Russian space industry scientist allegedly shared top-secret data with NATO — lawyer

A Russian scientist from the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building, Viktor Kudryavtsev, who was detained last month in Russia on high treason charges, was allegedly involved in sharing top-secret data with a NATO member state, his lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov told TASS citing investigation case materials.

Last Wednesday, investigators pressed high treason charges against Kudryavtsev, a scientist with the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building (TsNIImash, the parent research institute of Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos).

"According to the investigation case materials that we have, Kudryavtsev had been allegedly handing over classified information to one of the NATO member-states," his lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov told TASS.

Smirnov said, however, that the case materials at the issue mentioned "neither the country, where Kudryavtsev had been allegedly surrendering the [classified] data, nor the type of this information."