AFIO Weekly Intelligence Notes #09-10 dated 9 March 2010

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CONTENTS

Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Section III - COMMENTARY

Section IV - BOOKS, OBITUARIES, JOBS  AND COMING EVENTS

Books

Obituaries

Jobs/Careers/Training

Coming Events

Current Calendar New and/or Next Two Months ONLY

Events at the International Spy Museum in March, April and May with full details

  • Thursday, 18 March 2010, 12 noon – 1 pm - Washington, DC - Author John Kiriakou speaks on his new book: The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror
  • Monday, 5 April 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "An Evening with Nigel West: Secrets from the Cambridge Spies" at the International Spy Museum
  • Wednesday, 14 April 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Striking Remotely: Predator Drones" at the International Spy Museum
  • Thursday, 15 April 2010; noon - 1 pm - Washington, DC - "Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy" at the International Spy Museum
  • Wednesday, 5 May 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Abduction, Black Site Prisons, and the CIA: Extraordinary Rendition Today" at the International Spy Museum
  • Thursday, 6 May 2010; 12 noon – 1 pm - Washington, DC - "On the Front Lines of Cyber War with Richard A. Clarke" at the International Spy Museum
  • Monday, 10 May 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Our Man in Havana" at the International Spy Museum
  • Thursday, 13 May 2010; 10 am - 2:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Codebreaking in World War II: The Inside Story" at the International Spy Museum
  • Thursday, 20 May 2010; 6 pm - Washington, DC - "Goldfinger" at the International Spy Museum

AFIO SPRING LUNCHEON

THURSDAY, 1 April 2010

1 p.m. speaker: Seymour M. Hersh, Controversial, Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist/author who writes on intelligence issues, author of

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

and

11 a.m. speaker: Marc A. Thiessen, Equally Controversial Washington Post reporter, Writer/Commentator, Former Bush White House & Pentagon Chief Speechwriter, author of the acclaimed, newly released

Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack

Crowne Plaza Hotel, Tysons Corner, VA

Check-in for badge pickup at 10:30 a.m.
Marc Thiessen address is at 11 a.m.
Lunch at Noon
Seymour Hersh address at 1 p.m.
Event closes at 2 p.m.

Register securely here.

Registration limited

Hold the date for three CIA co-hosted conferences

16 April 2010 - Austin, Texas - CIA/LBJ Library Co-Host Conference on STRATEGIC WARNING and The ROLE OF INTELLIGENCE
Lessons Learned from the 1968 Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Reception follows event.

16 June 2010 - Independence, Missouri - CIA/Harry S. Truman Library/Woodrow Wilson Center Co-Host Conference "The Korean War, the Armistice, and the Search for Peace on the Korean Peninsula" Event falls on 60th Anniversary of The Korean War. Registration on AFIO website will open in mid-April. Announcement of CIA document release including special booklet/CD handouts to attendees, includes roundtable discussion – chaired by Clayton Laurie, with 3 other historians; Reception at Truman Library. CD-ROMs containing the newly released documents will be distributed at the press conference and the conference.

Late October 2010 - Fairfax, Virginia - CIA/George Mason University Co-Host a "Directors of Central Intelligence" Conference. Event will feature just released papers of the early DCIs, will include special panels, speakers, and special reception.

For all three events above, current AFIO members
will receive special invitations. Registration on AFIO website.
Details to follow.

WIN CREDITS FOR THIS ISSUE: The WIN editors thank the following special contributors to this issue:  pjk, cjlc, th, and fwr.  

They have contributed one or more stories used in this issue.

For Additional Events two+ months or more....
view our online Calendar of Events

Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Former British Spy Arrested for Selling Secrets. A former MI6 spy stole top secret files on intelligence gathering techniques and offered to sell them for 2 million pounds ($2.9 million) to an unspecified foreign government, a prosecutor told the court Wednesday.

Prosecutor Piers Arnold told a London court that Daniel Houghton, 25, tried to sell the highly classified documents but was arrested Monday after British intelligence posed as the potential buyer.

Arnold said Houghton, who is a dual Dutch and British national, had copied top secret files from the domestic agency MI5 while working overseas for the MI6 foreign intelligence service between September 2007 and May 2009.

He did not specify what job Houghton had, but said the attempted sale came after he left the agency.

Houghton faces two charges, one for theft and another for violating Britain's official secrets act - the confidentiality law that all intelligence officers are expected to abide by.

He was remanded in custody to return March 11 for a hearing at City of Westminster magistrates court. [AP/2March2010] 

NSA, Cryptoexperts Jab at RSA Conference Cryptographers' Panel. The annual Cryptographers' Panel at the RSA Conference is part state of the union on cryptography and security, and part homage to the pioneers of encryption. It can be a dizzying discussion on hash functions and broken encryption algorithms; a nirvana for nerds. But this year, however, the Shamirs, Rivests and Diffies and Hellmans of the cryptoworld were joined on stage by the National Security Agency, making for a bit of good natured contention as well.

Brian Snow, former NSA technical director of information assurance, took his share of jabs from the heavyweight panel and connected with a couple of roundhouses of his own about the agency's capabilities compared to those of the commercial world. The result was an entertaining 50 minutes that left an overflowing hall of attendees wanting more.

Moderator Ari Juels, chief scientist and director of RSA Labs, prodded Snow with a question about the NSA's interests and advantages over the private sector, which sparked a lively back-and-forth with notable cryptographers Whitfield Diffie and Adi Shamir. Snow said the NSA has a "more nuanced posture" and works on a range of areas that likely has little overlap with the corporate America, such as nuclear command and control (C&C) systems.

"Where we do overlap, we cheat," Snow said. "We read what you publish, but we do not publish what we study. We have good budget and an aggressive, talented staff. We have PhDs doing nothing but cryptography; that's a nice department. We have a better knowledge base and more stuff than what you have. The NSA is still ahead, a small handful of years, on average."

The comment rankled Diffie, best known for his groundbreaking work with public-key cryptography, who countered, for example, that nuclear C&C is not out of bounds for cryptographers.

Shamir, one of the creators of the RSA public-key encryption system, also challenged Snow by pointing out that in a few recently declassified NSA technical journal titles, there was no mention of public key cryptography. "Doesn't that demonstrate that the NSA would have been way behind?" Shamir asked.

Snow answered: "People invent things in parallel, and sometimes don't always use the same terminology."

Spirited disagreements aside, the panel touched on its usual wide array of security topics, such as the recent deaths of PKI innovator Shaun Wiley and Ned Neuberg, a former NSA agent who tried to recruit Diffie during the 1980s; renewed interest in Suite B cryptography; a tribute to the work of Ralph Merkle, another public key cryptography pioneer; and David Chaum, inventor of many cryptoprotocols for his work on voting system security.

The panel, which also included Ron Rivest and Diffie-Hellman protocol co-inventor Martin Hellman, closed out its annual session with a discussion on whether any of them had ever done anything foolish that turned out to be a wise decision.

Rivest, co-inventor of the RSA algorithm with Shamir and Len Adelman, said it was foolish to assume what we know now is the best that can be done. "Foolishness is having the merit to step out there and draw the line and say that's the best I can do," Rivest said.

Shamir, meanwhile, was a little less philosophical.

"I'm about 99% fool," he said. "Every morning, I go to my office as a scientist, and work on problems that I've been looking at for a years with no success. It's a long shot and about once every three months, I have a good idea. In the other 99 days, I work on something and make no headway whatsoever. That is normal in our profession. My employer could have hired someone who would be 100% successful because they have set out simple tasks to achieve; for some reason, they picked me over the other guy."

And Diffie was a little more direct: "I've rarely done anything else [but be foolish]." [SecuritySearch/2March2010] 

Iranian 'Spies' Held in Italian Arms Trafficking Operation. Italian police have arrested five Italians and two suspected Iranian secret agents on suspicion of illegally trafficking arms and explosives to Iran through Eastern Europe in breach of an international embargo. Reports said two further alleged Iranian agents were on the run and were being sought by police.

Police in Milan said the operation had been conducted with the help of British, Swiss and Romanian authorities. They said in a statement that they had intercepted optical-precision equipment, scuba-diving jackets and oxygen tanks bound for Iran as well as tracer bullets, incendiary bombs and other "explosive materials".

The investigation, dubbed Operation Sniper, was led by Armando Spataro, the Milan prosecutor who also investigated the 2003 kidnapping and "extraordinary rendition " of Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric suspected of abetting terrorism, by CIA agents in Milan. Last November an Italian judge convicted 22 CIA agents and an American military official in absentia of the kidnapping. They are appealing.

Police said Operation Sniper had begun in June 2009. One of the Italians arrested was a lawyer from Turin who also ran an "import export business", Mr. Spataro told a news conference. He said the other arrested Italians were from Monza, Brescia and Cadeo in the province of Piacenza, and Switzerland.

The arrests come as the Western powers push for tougher United Nations sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear programme following a report by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month that Iran had enriched uranium to 19.8 percent, 0.2 percentage points below the threshold needed to start the chain reaction seen in a nuclear bomb.

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, incurred the wrath of Tehran last month by comparing President Ahmadinejad to Hitler during a visit to Israel and calling for tougher trade sanctions. State-controlled Iranian radio and television accused Mr. Berlusconi of being "a servant of Israel".

Mr. Spataro said that the tapping of phones had played a "crucial role" in the Iranian arms smuggling investigation. Mr. Berlusconi, who currently faces two trials for alleged bribery and tax fraud and has been repeatedly investigated for alleged corruption, is pushing through Parliament a bill which would restrict the use of phone tapping in criminal investigations.

Police said some of the equipment seized in the operation was military and some was "dual use". The Italian news agency ANSA said the "optical equipment" had been seized at Heathrow airport. The two Iranians arrested were named as Nejad Hamid Masoumi, 51, accredited as a journalist in Italy, who was arrested at the Foreign Press Club in Rome, and Ali Damirchiloo, 55, who was arrested in Turin.

Mr. Masoumi is accredited for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (RTV), member of the Foreign Press Association in Rome since 1993. [Owen/TimesOnline/1Mach2010] 

Your Help Needed in Analyzing FBI Docs. Lacking something to read at the beach this summer? Problem solved: There are 1,138 pages detailing FBI activity that need to be pored over by good citizens so as to ferret out abuse of power.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking for people to scrutinize once-secret files.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has requested that people "dive into the docs," all of which are freely downloadable, with searchable text, from the nonprofit groups Web site.

The documents were released after the EFF sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act in April. At that time, the EFF asked a judge to issue an emergency order requiring the FBI to immediately release agency records about its abuse of NSLs (National Security Letters). The FBI used NSLs to collect personal information on U.S. citizens after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

Before the passage of the Patriot Act, the FBI was restricted to using the NSLs to secure the records of suspected terrorists or spies. Under the Patriot Act, the FBI gained the power to use NSLs to get telephone, Internet, financial, credit and other personal records about anybody without any court approval, as long as the information might be relevant to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation.

The EFF has tracked more than 8,000 downloads of the documents so far and plans to post a new batch every month.

"The whole point of sunshine laws like FOIA is to help the public hold the government accountable, and its great to see individuals exercising their right to know," the EFF said on its site.

The EFF needs to show that its work on this and other projects is important and relevant and - in order to justify this projects funding - requests that people mention EFF if they use the documents in any way. [Vaas/Eweek/3March2010] 

Key Taliban Political Mastermind Arrested in Pakistan. Pakistan security forces arrested a suspected Taliban mastermind on Thursday.

Mohtasim Agha Jan is thought to be a chief Taliban political strategist in Karachi.

"He is a close aide of spiritual leader Mullah Omar and ranked number seven on the post 9/11 watch list," a U.S. intelligence official said.

His arrest may be due in part to the CIA's interrogation of suspected terrorist Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was arrested in early February.

After the arrest of Ghani Baradar, Mohtasim Agha Jan's name surfaced in discussions about who might replace the Afghan Taliban's No. 2.

He is a former Taliban finance minister who is reported to have family links to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. As a government official, he had the power to control the flow of money and appoint deputy ministers. He was born in the late 1960s in Kandahar city.

The arrests have been hailed by U.S. officials and many analysts as a major blow to the Taliban in Afghanistan, though they caution that the group has rebounded from the death or detention of previous leaders.

Opinion is divided on whether the crackdown signals that the country's powerful intelligence forces are adopting a harder line against the militants.

The United States has long demanded Pakistan take action against the group, which critics say have long enjoyed relative sanctuary in Pakistan.

Some experts say the arrests may be aimed at removing moderates within the Taliban who were considering taking part in possible reconciliation talks with the Afghan government.

Earlier, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said he had no information on the arrest of Mohtasim. Afghan Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi denied he had been arrested.

There had been speculation that Mohtasim was in the running to replace Baradar, who was reportedly arrested in a joint raid with American intelligence officials.

Born in the late 60s, Mohtasim was considered close to Taliban leader Mullah Omar. He was not known to be among the most hardline group within the Taliban.

Earlier Thursday, dozens of militants attacked a security checkpoint in the northwest close to the Afghan border, sparking a gunbattle that left 30 insurgents and one soldier dead, officials said.

The battle occurred overnight in the Chamarkand area of the Mohmand tribal region, said government and military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Chamarkand borders the Bajur tribal region, where the army said Tuesday it had finally defeated Taliban and Al Qaeda militants after more than a year and a half of fighting.

Washington has praised Pakistan for its recent military operations but wants the government to do even more to target militants using its territory to stage cross-border attacks against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. [FoxNews/5March2010]

Judge Orders Convicted Spy Extradited to Philippines for Murder Trial. A federal judge in Newark has ordered the extradition of a convicted spy and former Philippines police official accused of murder in his homeland.

Michael Ray Aquino, who served nearly four years for possessing classified U.S. military documents, is charged in the 2000 murder of a high-profile Filipino publicist, Salvador Dacer, and his driver, Emmanuel Corbito. Authorities say the two men were killed by rogue members of the national police loyal former president Joseph Estrada.

On Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Esther Salas ruled Aquino should be turned over to authorities in the Philippines to face trial.

"There has been ample evidence presented to the court which supports the government's position that Aquino was directing others in the investigation, interrogation, and eventual murders of Dacer and Corbito," Salas wrote in her 24-page opinion.

Aquino has been in custody since his 2005 espionage arrest in New Jersey. His attorney, Mark Berman, has filed a petition that will trigger a review of Salas' opinion.

"The judge's decision was not totally unanticipated but disappointing," Berman said. "We are hopeful on review that the extradition order will be vacated."

Aquino, who headed an elite anti-organized crime task force for the Philippines National Police, moved to the United States after the killings. In New York, he met Leandro Aragoncillo, a fellow Estrada supporter who worked as a military analyst under Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney. In 2004, Aragoncillo took a job as an FBI intelligence analyst detailed to Fort Monmouth.

At some point, Aragoncillo began stealing classified and national security documents. Aquino's role was never fully made clear, but authorities said the espionage was part of a larger plot to overthrow Philippines President Gloria Arroyo.

Aquino and Aragoncillo were arrested in September 2005 and pleaded guilty the next year. Aragoncillo is serving 10 years in federal prison.

Aquino was initially sentenced to six years. But a federal appeals court panel ruled last year that a judge used the wrong guidelines, resulting in too lengthy a sentence. [Ryan/NJ/5March2010] 

Dutch Investigative Reporter Wins Freedom of Information Case. Investigative reporter Wil van der Schans has won a freedom of information case against the Dutch Intelligence Service. He had requested access to documents concerning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Initially he was denied access, but now he has successfully appealed the decision.

Mr. van der Schans is editor of OnJo, a cooperative venture which produces investigative reports for Dutch public television. His request to access information about the Iraq war was initially declined because the Davids commission was conducting an investigation on the role of the Dutch government at that time. The Davids commission, appointed by the cabinet, presented its findings last January, in which it criticized the Dutch government's decision to politically support the war.

The watchdog which oversees Freedom of Information Act requests on intelligence documents disagreed with the decision to withhold the information. It did not believe that the work of the Davids commission would be adversely affected if the documents were accessible to the press at the same time. This gave Mr. van der Schans grounds for an appeal.

The OnJo editor believes that his triumph sets an important legal precedent. "It means that an inquiry committee cannot interfere with the freedom of the press," he told the Dutch press agency ANP. [RadioNetherlands/6March2010] 

Canadian Intelligence Played Critical Role in Afghan Prisoner Interrogations. Officers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have played a crucial and long-standing role as interrogators of a vast swath of captured Taliban fighters, according to The Canadian Press.

The spies began working side-by-side with a unit of military police intelligence officers as the Afghan war spiraled out of control in 2006, according to heavily censored witness transcripts filed with the Military Police Complaints Commission.

The spy agency's previously unknown role in questioning detainees adds a new dimension to the controversy about the handling and possible torture of prisoners by Afghan security forces.

It also raises more questions about the critical early years in Kandahar when the Canadian military found itself mired in a guerrilla war it had not expected to fight.

CSIS acknowledged in 2006 that its members gathered intelligence in Afghanistan, but the spy service's precise role has remained in the shadows until now.

Maj. Kevin Rowcliffe, former staff adviser to Canada's overseas operations commander, told investigators with the complaints commission there were questions about how much experience the army's intelligence officers had in grilling prisoners.

"There was a lot of discussion in my headquarters about who was qualified to do interrogations, because we're not talking the normal police interview, we're talking interrogations, which (censored) were doing, not (military police)," says an edited transcript of the Dec. 6, 2007, interview.

Military police "were involved in that, but they weren't necessarily involved in interviewing or interrogation related issues; that would be (censored) or some other parade that had special training in interrogation."

Sources familiar with the unedited version say the blanked out references are to CSIS.

Intelligence expert Wesley Wark says the revelations are disturbing, partly because CSIS would have had no specialized knowledge of how to elicit information from Afghan prisoners.

"I find that stunning," said Wark, a historian at the University of Toronto.

But Defense Minister Peter MacKay said the threat to Canadian troops in Kandahar has been severe.

"Clearly it's in all our interest to have accurate information as we attempt to protect people," MacKay said late Sunday as he arrived in Haiti to visit Canadian troops conducting the earthquake relief mission there.

With all of the roadside bombings "the effort obviously to protect people - to protect the area around Kandahar province, which is our primary responsibility - does require intelligence and information-gathering."

MacKay acknowledged the military has "relied heavily on other departments, including CSIS."

The spy agency is legally permitted to gather intelligence anywhere in the world concerning threats to the security of Canada, and has increasingly operated abroad in recent years.

In Kandahar, CSIS officers conducted what's known as tactical field questioning, essentially the first interrogations of suspects, said another source familiar with the process.

They tried to sort out who was a bona fide insurgent commander - or a simple field soldier.

The spies would sometimes make recommendations on which Taliban prisoners to hand over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service, the sources said.

The final say on whether to transfer always rested with the military task force commander.

MacKay said Afghan officials and NATO were kept in the loop.

"We also, of course, exchange information with our international partners which is, obviously, a subject of some controversy back home, as you know," he said.

The Military Police Complaints Commission asked questions about the CSIS role in Kandahar, but abandoned the angle when it became bogged down in legal challenges about its authority to investigate Ottawa's overall prisoner transfer policy.

Diplomat-whistleblower Richard Colvin testified before a special House of Commons committee last November that the majority of prisoners Canada handed over to the Afghan intelligence service were tortured - a claim the Conservative government and military commanders, past and present, angrily denied.

Rowcliffe's interview transcript prompts questions about whether the military and CSIS officers had enough time to conduct proper interrogations early in the war, when newly arrived troops had little intelligence on the threats they were facing.

The military has 96 hours after capture to decided whether to hand over a prisoner to Afghan authorities, but Rowcliffe said there was pressure to turn them over sooner.

He said he took up the concerns with the commander of overseas operations, saying: "I understand the time sensitiveness of this issue to the Government of Canada, but we may have Osama bin Laden, yet you are trying to get me to give him over as quickly as possible."

But the answer was often "no." His boss, Lt.-Gen. Michel Gauthier, indicated his hands were tied and told Rowcliffe that the federal government's policy was firm.

Yet the concerns persisted.

"I said, we need to take the time to do a proper investigation, interview, interrogation, whatever you want to call it to confirm who we have and what has this guy done or gal done," Rowcliffe said in his statement.

He was asked by police commission investigators where he thought the intelligence would come from if the instructions were to get rid of detainees right away.

"My impression was they didn't seem to care about that," said Rowcliffe, who's retired from the military.

"I don't know if they didn't grasp the importance of it, or just that it was not important because the pressure was... to get rid of them because of the Government of Canada."

He said he wasn't sure whether there was pressure from the defence minister and the chief of defence staff.

"I have no idea, but I know from Gen. Gauthier's position that (it was): Get rid of them as quickly as you can and what's taking so long? That's the kind of questions I'd get."

Security expert Wark said it begs the question why Ottawa was so eager to transfer prisoners out of the controlled confines of Kandahar Airfield, where they are brought for initial interrogation.

It will likely fuel human-rights groups' fears that interrogation was being outsourced to the Afghans, he said.

Canada went into Kandahar thinking the Taliban and al-Qaida were simply "a nuisance" and there was a "ferocious under-estimation" of the kind of resistance troops would face, he said.

"The military simply had no expertise. It had been decades since they had to interrogate prisoners of war," Wark added. "And if the military lacked that expertise, you can be sure, CSIS lacked it in spades."

Moreover, Wark said, some hard questions need to be asked about how much knowledge CSIS had in 2006 of Afghanistan and its complex network of competing tribes.

"The answer would be very little," he said. "They didn't have a trained body of people with the language skills, knowledge of the country, knowledge of the tribal situation, who was in charge of which warlord group, what was the nature of the Taliban. Those are all issues they had to develop an expertise on after 2006."

In response to questions, CSIS spokeswoman Isabelle Scott said the agency does not discuss operations.

The activities in Kandahar caught the attention of the spy agency's inspector general, who investigated "policy gaps and inconsistencies."

The declassified version of Eva Plunkett's 2007 certificate, a top secret report card on CSIS prepared for the public safety minister, contained no suggestion that the spy service had done anything wrong - or illegal, for that matter.

She noted that Afghanistan was "a fundamental intelligence priority" and commended the spy service for impressive work "in an extremely challenging environment." But Plunkett warned that CSIS and National Defense lacked clear policies that would "guide future (censored) activities in this theatre."

Agreements between the spy service and military were out of date, said the annual certificate, made public in May 2008. "I do believe that those who serve in this environment deserve to be equipped with the policy framework to guide their work."

In May 2006, Jack Hooper, then CSIS deputy director of operations, said the spy service's efforts to help Canadian troops in Afghanistan were principally focused on acquiring intelligence to help soldiers defend themselves against attacks.

But he did not elaborate as to exactly how CSIS obtained the valuable information.

The Security Intelligence Review Committee, a CSIS watchdog that reports to Parliament, raised concerns about the intelligence service's interaction with detainees in foreign jurisdictions in its review of the Omar Khadr file.

It said last year that when CSIS interviewed Khadr at Guantanamo Bay in 2003, there was policy governing the spy service's investigative activities outside Canada, including operational interviews abroad.

Prior to undertaking such activities, CSIS employees were required to submit a request for approval - to whom, exactly, remains classified.

The review committee found briefing notes that had been submitted prior to each visit to Guantanamo Bay, but these requests fell short of meeting the requirements outlined in policy. [MetroNews/8March2010]

Obama to Nominate Ex-Army General to Head TSA. President Obama has tapped a former Army general to lead the Transportation Security Administration.

Obama plans to nominate Robert A. Harding, a retired major general with 33 years in the Army, to become the TSA administrator, sources said. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will announce the nomination with Harding by her side, according to one administration official.

"The TSA administrator is the most important unfilled post in the Obama administration," one administration official said. "Mr. Harding has the experience and perspective to make a real difference in carrying out the mission of the agency."

"If there was ever a nominee that warranted expedited, but detailed, consideration in the Senate, this is it," the official said.

In September, Obama nominated Erroll Southers, a Los Angeles airport police department official, to head the agency. But Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, spearheaded GOP efforts to block the nomination based on concerns Southers would unionize airport screeners.

Southers withdrew his nomination in January after lawmakers questioned his changing explanation about a personnel action taken against him decades ago.

Harding would be the TSA's first African-American administrator. Southers also is black.

Harding has served as CEO of Harding Security Associates, a defense and intelligence government contractor that he founded in 2003 and sold in July 2009.

From 1996 to 2000, Harding was director for operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he was the Defense Department's senior human intelligence officer.

Before that, he was director for intelligence for the Army's Southern Command.

The TSA was created in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and soon took over security at the nation's airports, including screening commercial airline passengers and luggage. [CNN/7March2010] 

Swedish Citizen Jailed for Spying for China. A 62-year-old Uighur living in Sweden for the past 13 years as a political refugee was on Monday sentenced to 16 months in prison for spying for China on Uighur expatriates, a Stockholm court said.

The man, identified in court documents as Swedish citizen Babur Maihesuti, was found guilty of "aggravated illegal espionage activity" and was sentenced to one year and four months behind bars, the Stockholm district court said in a statement.

Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Central Asian people residing in northwest China's Xinjiang region, have accused Beijing of decades of religious, cultural and political oppression.

From January 2008 until June 2009, Maihesuti had collected personal information about exiled Uighurs, including details on their health, travel and political involvement, and passed it on to Beijing, the court found.

He had given the information to a Chinese diplomat and a Chinese journalist who, on assignment from the Chinese intelligence service, carried out operations in Sweden for the Chinese state.

"The activity has taken place in secret through a special system of telephone calls, (and) was also deceptive since the man did not tell the Uighurs he was dealing with he was working for the Chinese state," the court said.

The court ruled that the espionage was especially serious since Maihesuti had infiltrated the World Uighur Congress and the information passed on "could cause significant damage to Uighurs in and outside China."

There was also a danger, the court said, that by opening the door for a large power like China to spy on its nationals in Sweden, Beijing could conceivably use the network in the future for other kinds of espionage as well.

"The crime is especially egregious due to the fact that the espionage served a large power that does not fully respect human rights," the court said.

Maihesuti had claimed he had been commissioned by the World Uighur Congress to contact the Chinese diplomat and journalist to conduct secret negotiations with China, and that he had also been trying to recuperate a large sum of money owed to him by the Chinese state.

The court however did not believe his account, instead basing its verdict on what it described as "strong" prosecution evidence, including wire-tapped phone conversations and witness accounts. [SwedishWire/8March2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Fort Worth Has Quietly Become a Hub for Military Intelligence. It is an unremarkable beige-brick building known by its military acronym, the JRIC.

Behind several secure doors requiring top-secret clearance sit analysts who conduct counterterrorism investigations in the Philippines, analyze military buildups in Venezuela, and dissect confrontations between China and Taiwan in the strait that separates them.

Hard to believe, perhaps, but beyond the rows of tactical aircraft and acres of runway at Naval Air Station Fort Worth is a rather small and publicity-shy unit of intelligence analysts overseen by the Navy Intelligence Reserve Command. "We've tended to like it that way," said Lt. Dan Eckles, who oversees the computers on-site for the Defense Intelligence Agency based at the Pentagon.

In fact, the Navy Reserve's entire world of intelligence is commanded by a one-star admiral, who has maintained the headquarters at NAS Fort Worth since the mid-1990s.

In addition to deploying people worldwide and year-round, the intelligence command has reservists in the JRIC conducting strategic and operational intelligence in the world's hot spots, all while never leaving Fort Worth. And none of it is done merely for training purposes.

Several years ago, the primary justification in establishing the Joint Reserve Intelligence Centers was to tap the expertise of reservists for immediate and consistent help, not just when they were mobilized on active duty. More than 40 percent of the Navy's intelligence personnel have civilian jobs and work for the military only part time, and the military could no longer afford to keep them idle.

"I can remember when the work we did came mailed in packages," said Rear Adm. Gordon Russell, who works at the University of Colorado in Boulder when not in uniform.

"We would do the work and send it back," Russell said. "You never knew if the work you had done was being utilized by anybody. But we're doing real-time work now. It's very relevant, and they know the value they're adding to the commands almost immediately."

The Navy intelligence command in Fort Worth, it should be noted, does not collect intelligence.

The 265 people who work there process and analyze intelligence already gathered, whether from humans inside foreign nations, satellite imagery, foreign newspapers, intercepted e-mail traffic or other means.

The military runs 28 joint intelligence centers - eight of them overseen by the Navy - that are staffed with reservists and some active-duty personnel and civilian contractors. Fort Worth is one of two Navy centers that are not on one of the coasts. (Chicago is the other.)

That means that they are largely Navy operations and led by Navy officers, but the teams in Fort Worth include small numbers of soldiers, airmen and Marines who do the same work but in different uniforms.

The largest team in Fort Worth works for the U.S. Pacific Command, one of the unified combatant commands, a system the military uses to divide the world into several theaters of operation. The Pacific Command, led by Adm. Robert Willard, is based in Hawaii and is responsible for overseeing U.S. military policy in Asia. [Vaughn/StarTelegram/3March2010] 

World's Greatest Spy Capers. From the moment Mahmoud al-Mabhouh stepped off a plane in Dubai on Jan. 20, his killers - probably from Israel's Mossad - had him in their sights. Al-Mabhouh, a senior Hamas official who had arrived from Damascus allegedly to arrange an arms shipment to Gaza, perished hours later in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel, electrocuted and strangled by the seven men who were waiting for him after a day following him around Dubai. The assassins covered their tracks well. They flew in from Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, and Zurich on forged passports. They wore disguises. They switched hotels multiple times. They carried cell phones but never called each other directly.

But they were being watched, and now the video of their exploits is available online. What remains is an old-fashioned international mystery, reminiscent of the notorious glory days of the CIA and MI6 from a half century ago. Even then, some of the cleverest, sneakiest, and strangest spy games were sometimes undone - by small mistakes, good counterintelligence, or dumb luck. To put the current caper in context, here are some of NEWSWEEK's favorite real-life espionage thrillers of yore (the ones we know about, anyway).

THE HOLLOW NICKEL CASE (1953). Perpetrator: U.S.S.R.
Target: U.S.A. On June 22, 1953, a Brooklyn Eagle delivery boy named Jimmy was making the rounds in Brooklyn to collect payments for his newspaper when he was handed a suspiciously lightweight coin. When he accidentally dropped it on the floor outside, it broke, revealing a microfilm of a series of numbers. He passed it on to a friend, who gave it to a cop, who then gave it to the FBI. But since the woman who had handed him the coin was equally surprised by the finding (she was an unwitting conduit), it wasn't until four years later that authorities got any closer to solving the mystery. As it turns out, the delivery boy had stumbled upon an extensive communication network used by the KGB in the United States, consisting of hollowed-out coins, pens, brushes, bolts, and various other tiny vessels. Only when a KGB officer defected to the U.S. Embassy in Paris in 1957 did Americans begin to crack the code and make arrests.

OPERATION TP-AJAX (1953). Perpetrators: U.K., U.S.A.
Target: Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. With hindsight, all the snags in Iran's Western-backed 1953 coup probably suggested it wouldn't end well. In 1952, British intelligence officials contacted the CIA about the prospect of a coup, disapproving of the leadership of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and his plans to nationalize the country's oil industry, which had previously been under British control. The plan was for Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh and replacing him with a royalist general, Fazlollah Zahedi. But the shah proved an unenthusiastic co-conspirator, wary of losing his throne and his own popularity. After months of cajoling (and a power grab by Mossadegh), he assented.

To set the stage, the CIA launched an anti-communist propaganda campaign against Mossadegh, including planted newspaper reports, bribes, street demonstrations, and even the bombing of a cleric's home to break the prime minister's coalition with Iran's religious community. Finally, on the night of Aug. 15, 1953, pro-shah soldiers fanned out across Tehran, snipping phone lines, arresting top Mossadegh officials, and stirring up anti-Mossadegh demonstrations. But they were unable to grab Mossadegh himself, who had been warned about TP-Ajax, as the mission was dubbed. The next morning there was no certain government - and also no shah, who had fled to Baghdad and then Rome amid the chaos.

But just when the operation seemed an utter flop, royalist officers took control of the radio and whipped up even more fervid street demonstrations, suddenly shifting the national mood against Mossadegh, paving the way for the coup's success and leaving 300 demonstrators dead in the process. Zahedi, who had been hiding just outside Tehran, was brought into the city to assume leadership, while Mossadegh and the rest of his supporters were rounded up; 22 were later executed, including the foreign minister. The following day the CIA wired $5 million to the new regime. The CIA's first-ever attempt at regime change was deemed so successful that it became a popular policy option, pulled out again the following year in Guatemala. But as the full extent of CIA involvement leaked out, the unequivocal victory for American spies began to seem awfully shallow. It created a friendly regime but also a half century of fierce anti-American and anti-British animosity among ordinary Iranians.

OPERATION SUSANNAH (1954). Perpetrator: Israel. Target: Egypt. On July 2, 1954, a firebomb rattled a post office in Alexandria, Egypt. The following week, bombs tore through a British theater and the U.S. Information Agency libraries in Cairo and Alexandria. As it turned out, they were surreptitiously carried out by Israel, which named the plot Operation Susannah. The idea was to blame the attacks on local insurgents, which would make Egypt look too unstable for British troops to withdraw from the Suez Canal inside two years, as planned. But Egyptian authorities traced the bombings back to nine Egyptian Jews who had been recruited by Israeli military intelligence to target sites frequented by Westerners. After confessing in public trials, two were hanged, one committed suicide, and the other six were jailed for more than a decade, ignored by Israel in multiple prisoner exchanges. The debacle became known as the Lavon Affair after Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, who, while denying involvement, quit after the plot became public.

PATRICE LUMUMBA (1961). Perpetrator: Belgium, with nods from U.S.A., U.K.
Target: Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Until government vaults in the West were opened 40 years later, the murder of Congo's first elected prime minister remained a mystery, blamed on errant villagers. Outspoken against the abuses of Belgian rule - and not shy about nurturing a potential Soviet friendship - Patrice Lumumba, who led Congo after its independence in 1960, made quick enemies in the West. Months after his election, a CIA-supported coup led by Col. Joseph Mobutu put him under house arrest, where he continued to protest and plan his restoration.

A CIA officer was sent with a tube of poison toothpaste to quiet him down, but Congolese and Belgian forces got to Lumumba first. After he attempted to escape his house arrest, he was chased down by Mobutu's soldiers, then beaten and humiliated in front of diplomats and journalists. The last photograph taken of him shows Lumumba in the back of an Army truck one day after his arrest. A month later, he and two colleagues were shuttled off into the bush by Congolese and Belgian soldiers and shot, execution style, one at a time. The following day a Belgian police officer went back to cover the tracks, exhuming the bodies, hacking them to pieces, and dissolving them in acid from the nearby Belgian mines. Mobutu later rechristened himself Mobutu Sese Seko and became a vicious autocrat animated by hatred of colonialism (understandably, after his role in Lumumba's demise), ruling the country (then called Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) from 1965 to 1997.

PROFUMO AFFAIR (1963). Perpetrator: U.S.S.R. Target: U.K. John Dennis Profumo didn't fit the profile of a man destined to shock and scandalize Britain. But in 1963, caught in an espionage-inspired love triangle, that's precisely what he did. Profumo, the secretary of war, had attended Oxford, climbed to cabinet rank, and married a film star, making him a fixture of London's high society. The object of his extramarital affections, Christine Keeler, was a showgirl at a cabaret club. Their rocky affair alone would have scandalized 1960s Britain, but it blew up into a full-fledged national-security crisis when it emerged that Keeler had also been sleeping with Eugene Ivanov, the naval attach� at the Soviet Embassy. The FBI opened a file (dubbed Operation Bowtie), Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government collapsed (in no small part due to the scandal), and Keeler did jail time for immoral earnings. She wasn't quite finished there; in an autobiography published in 2001, she alleged that other Soviet spies in her circle included the MI5 chief, Sir Roger Hollis, and the curator of the queen's artwork, Sir Anthony Blunt, reinforcing suspicions from decades earlier (though subsequent investigations have continued to clear Hollis of any guilt).

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MEHDI BEN BARKA (1965). Perpetrators: Very likely Morocco, likely France, possibly Israel and U.S.A. Target: Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka. As a friend of Che Guevara and Malcolm X - and an opponent of his own country's king - Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka was closely watched by the world's leading intelligence agencies. So when two men kidnapped him off the street in Paris, where he was living in exile, just before he was to chair the first international meeting of Third World liberation movements, everyone suspected that French and Moroccan agents, working together, had done it. Forty-five years later it still seems that way, though nobody is sure. Ben Barka is thought to have been killed shortly after his kidnapping, but neither a body nor definitive evidence has emerged. According to one former Moroccan agent, a Moroccan general and his assistant tortured Ben Barka, then brought his body back to Morocco and dissolved it in a tank of acid. Another former agent says the body was encased in cement. Just this past October a member of the French Navy came forward, claiming to have files showing that the body was burned and the ashes were thrown in a lake.

Arrest warrants were issued by Interpol for four suspects, including the current chief of Morocco's police, but they were mysteriously withdrawn the next day. Rumors that the plot was hatched by the CIA and Mossad agents still swirl.

THE FAMILY JEWELS (1960s). Perpetrator: U.S.A. Target: Cuban President Fidel Castro. It wasn't until the declassification of documents known as the "family jewels" in 1993 that the world learned the full extent of the CIA's ambitious - and often colorful - attempts to off Cuba's Fidel Castro. A congressional committee conducted hearings on the matter and concluded that the CIA had planned at least eight assassination plots between 1960 and 1965. Some schemes were actually attempted - like contaminated cigars, a fungus-laced diving suit, and depilatory salts bound for his shoes (which would, it was thought, emasculate him by making his beard fall out). Marita Lorenz claims she had an affair with Castro at age 19 and was involved in one of the poisoning attempts. Others plots, like a booby-trapped seashell and a plan to contaminate the air at Castro's radio station with an LSD-like drug, were simply dreamed up. Perhaps the most scandalous of the legitimate plots was an elaborate gambling syndicate planned with major Mafia figures who were given poison pills that, quite possibly, never made it out of Miami.

OPERATION BAYONET (1970s). Perpetrator: Israel. Targets: PLO murder suspects. 
Within days of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had authorized Mossad to take out those responsible for the killings. Her order launched a seven-year operation of hit-team assassinations of more than a dozen suspects throughout Europe and the Middle East, including a raid in Beirut that killed three PLO officers, for which Ehud Barak, later the prime minister of Israel, dressed as a woman. Internally, it was known as Operation Bayonet; in the media it became known as Operation Wrath of God. In total, assassinations took place in Cyprus, Beirut, Athens, Rome, and Paris, before ending in Norway in 1979. There the operation fell apart after a Mossad agent shot an innocent Moroccan-born waiter, mistaking him for Ali Hassan Salameh, the alleged Munich mastermind. Five Mossad officers were arrested for the mistake, then released.

LONDON'S UMBRELLA MURDER (1978). Perpetrators: Bulgaria, likely KGB. Target: Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov. A harsh critic of autocratic communist rule in his native Bulgaria, novelist and playwright Georgi Markov set up a new life for himself after fleeing to London in 1969, working as a journalist with the BBC World Service. Nearly a decade after his escape, his foes were not ready to let the defection go. In 1978, as he was standing at a bus stop in London, Markov was injected in the back of the right leg with a ricin-laced pellet, likely from the tip of an umbrella. Although he experienced a sudden stinging pain, he continued to work, only to fall sick later that evening and die three days later. In 1992 the former Bulgarian intelligence chief was jailed for destroying 10 volumes of files on Markov's death, but the killers have never been identified. Historians suggest KGB involvement.

THE DIKKO AFFAIR (1984). Perpetrator: Nigeria, possibly Israel. Target: Former transportation minister Umaru Dikko. Normally, diplomatic packages are completely immune from search and seizure. When one of those packages is a crate with the former transportation minister of Nigeria inside, however, exceptions can be made. Umaru Dikko, a notoriously dirty politician wanted on corruption charges in Nigeria, fled the country for London shortly after a 1984 coup unseated his government. Months later Dikko was abducted from his luxurious London home, drugged, stuffed into a crate, and loaded onto a Nigerian Airways cargo plane bound for Lagos, addressed to the Nigerian Foreign Ministry from its embassy in London. Beside Dikko in the crate was an Israeli with a syringe to keep him subdued; a nearby crate held two more Israeli men recruited by Nigerian officials to carry out the mission (Mossad connections were suspected but never established). Three Israelis and a Nigerian were eventually imprisoned in the case in London. Dikko himself was denied political asylum in the U.K., but he continued living in London, his status in limbo, until 1994, when he was invited home by the same government that had previously wanted him extradited. The same year, a Nigerian journalist published an account of the kidnapping, based off exclusive interviews with Dikko. Today Dikko is considered an elder statesman in Nigeria.

OPERATION SATANIC (1985). Perpetrator: France. Target: Greenpeace. Greenpeace named its ship Rainbow Warrior after a North American Indian prophecy that a mythical band of warriors will descend from a rainbow to save the world from human greed. But the French intelligence services had other plans for the ship, which Greenpeace had parked at a port in Auckland, New Zealand, en route to the tiny French Polynesian atoll of Mururoa, where the French atomic agency was conducting nuclear tests. Three teams of agents planted explosives on the vessel, planning to "neutralize" it to prevent the group's protest. A Portuguese photographer was killed in the attack. The ship itself was destroyed; it was towed out to the middle of a bay near New Zealand and allowed to sink. Although French President Fran�ois Mitterrand had denied any involvement in the decision to bomb the Rainbow Warrior (he allowed his defense minister and intelligence chief to resign over the issue), a report published in 2005 said he had authorized the attack.

THE MARINE SPY SCANDAL (1987). Perpetrator: U.S.S.R. Target: U.S.A. Violetta Seina, a receptionist at the residence of the American ambassador to Moscow, had long blonde hair and large eyes. When she wore a long, elegant black dress to the annual Marine ball in 1986, she made quite the impression - especially on 25-year-old Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, a guard at the U.S. Embassy whom Seina, a KGB agent, persuaded to share documents and diplomatic secrets. He also opened the embassy at night for Seina, allowing the Soviets to plant bugs in some of the building's most sensitive communications and reconnaissance areas. The first Marine in history to be convicted of espionage, Lonetree was originally sentenced to 30 years in prison, but ultimately served nine. Seina was later said to worked for the Irish Embassy in Moscow, but she fell off the grid after leaving that job in 1987. Lonetree reportedly kept in touch with her throughout his prison term.

BUGS AT THE U.N. (2003). Perpetrators: U.S.A., U.K. Targets: United Nations officials. "Dirty Tricks," screamed a British newspaper headline, announcing that the paper had obtained a leaked document showing that the U.S. National Security Agency had been spying on top U.N. officials. It was March 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War. The Observer reported that the NSA had bugged the homes and offices and read the e-mails of delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea, and Pakistan.

Charges were brought against Katherine Gun, a translator at the British equivalent of the NSA, for leaking the document - which she openly admitted to doing - but the government ultimately dropped the case. At the U.N., on the other hand, the news was greeted with a collective shrug. "We've always done it," one U.S. government official with experience at Turtle Bay told the Los Angeles Times. "It's routine." Bulgaria's ambassador said he would have taken it as an insult if he wasn't being watched. Other intelligence officials said they thought the memo was a forgery, planted to embarrass American officials at a sensitive time. The scandal never reached a fever pitch, but it never quite died out either. A former aide to Tony Blair revealed in 2004 that British intelligence services had spied on Kofi Annan in the weeks before the Iraq War, a claim Blair denied. Another bug turned up in a room used for high-level meetings at the U.N. office in Geneva at the end of 2004; the culprit remains unknown.

THE POLONIUM TRAIL (2006). Perpetrator: Russia. Target: Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Before Alexander Litvinenko, a onetime KGB officer and critic of the Kremlin, died in London in 2006, he had something to say to the person responsible for his "present condition": "You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price." Litvinenko was poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope, polonium 210, which had been planted in his teapot at London's Millennium Hotel; the murderer is still at large. Litvinenko and his family had become British citizens after fleeing Russia in 2000, when they chose exile for his outspoken criticism of Vladimir Putin - whom Litvinenko implicated in his final statement. But while British prosecutors have identified a suspect, another KGB alumnus, they have been unable to secure the man's extradition from Russia to face murder charges - indicative of Putin's iron grip on Russian justice. Litvinenko was right about the price Russia would pay, though: the U.K. expelled four Russian diplomats after the murder, which has left an enduring chill in Russian relations with Western Europe.

OPERATION TITAN RAIN (2005-10). Perpetrator: China. Targets: U.S.A., Germany, Google, capitalism. As China has risen to global power, so too has the sophistication of its intelligence - but in markedly different forms than the spy capers of yesteryear. The computer attacks exposed by Google in early 2010 revealed a concerted political and corporate espionage program targeting major financial, defense, and technology companies in the United States, as well as human-rights activists and political dissidents within China. Months earlier, a German counterintelligence agent said that Chinese spies were stealing industrial secrets using phone tapping and hacking tools, and that they were likely capable of "sabotaging whole chunks of infrastructure" in his country. In 2005 American officials identified Chinese hacking successes at hundreds of computer networks throughout the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, in an operation investigators code-named Titan Rain; none of the breaches was believed to have accessed classified materials.

AL-MABHOUH ASSASSINATION (2010). Perpetrator: probably Israel
Target: Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. In the video from the CCTV footage of the events leading up to the 2010 murder of Hamas militant Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the victim is shown being followed out of the elevator at his hotel by two of his attackers, who are disguised in tennis gear. Later their colleagues returned to finish the business by electrocuting and strangling al-Mabhouh in his hotel room. The assassination team seemed to have planned for everything: wigs, passports, costumes, surveillance, and what was originally thought to be an unsuspicious cause of death. What they probably didn't count on was the tenacity of Dubai's investigative team. Dubai authorities have implicated 26 people in the killing based on false passports (their true identities are not known) and show little sign of backing down. Investigators working on the case have already found traces of the DNA of one suspect and several fingerprints of others. [Newsweek/4March2010] 

The Sandman Cometh. Tehran's master of clandestine operations, Qassem Suleimani, could hold the key to Iraq's future - if he were not so busy back in Iran. 

The text message was cryptic and sent through an intermediary, but its spookiness has become legendary among the Americans tasked with trying to stabilize Iraq. The moment was May 2008, and once again all hell was breaking loose. Shiite militias had gone to battle against each other. The fighting threatened to spread to Baghdad. Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were scrambling to find somebody to broker a truce. Then the text message was passed to the American commander. "General Petraeus," it began, "you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan." Within days it was Suleimani who brokered the truce.

What surprised Petraeus and Crocker was not the Iranian's role. They knew that already. It was the blunt confidence with which Suleimani stated it. As the head of the infamous Quds Force, he commands all the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operations outside Iran's borders - whether covert, overt, or outright terrorist. In the fractious politicking almost certain to follow Iraq's parliamentary elections on Sunday, this 53-year-old Iranian general could pull the strings that make or break the new government in Baghdad.

Long before America's troops occupied Iraq, Suleimani's forces occupied the shadows. In the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion, he was the go-to guy for much of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite opposition to Saddam Hussein. Suleimani's networks of agents, collaborators, military advisers, client militias, and secret informers give him a degree of power that is difficult to gauge, but it often seems proconsular: "I, Qassem Suleimani," his text read, like an emperor's decree. And his real message in 2008 was that he could turn up the heat, or turn it down, at will.

Crocker often used to tell his colleagues that what Suleimani probably wanted to do in Iraq was to "Lebanonize" it. The idea would be to build up as many networks and agents in Baghdad as Iran has in, say, Beirut, so that it could create a crisis - and then solve it, at a political price. As Petraeus described it, Suleimani might say, "We'll stop the crisis immediately, but of course, you know, we'd like to have one more vote in the council of this and that." A talented extortionist knows how to set a price that will be met. Through the accretion of such little victories, the Iranians can eventually gain a veto over everything from economic policy to foreign alliances. In the case of Iraq, they also want to make sure that Baghdad will never again challenge them as a regional power.

But today Suleimani doesn't seem to be paying as much attention to Iraq as he once did. For the last nine months, ever since apparent election fraud in Iran sparked mass protests and continuing unrest, the head of the Quds Force has been drawn back into the treacherous politics of his own country. And what he tries to do in Iraq - indeed, the success or failure of its democratic experiment - may well be a factor of his success or failure in Iran.

Petraeus, who painted this picture when speaking in January to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said the unrest following "the hijacked elections" in Iran last year has forced Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to rely on the IRGC and its Quds Force internally as well as externally. "That has enabled them to then expand their already considerable influence beyond just the security arena, but ever more greatly into the economic arena and even into the diplomatic arena," said Petraeus, who now heads the U.S. Central Command, the military body focused on the region.

According to people who have followed Suleimani closely and prefer to remain anonymous, the spymaster and many other senior figures in the Quds Force actually supported the presidential challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, against incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Supreme Leader's anointed favorite. But because of Suleimani's record fighting the regime's enemies abroad, he still has Khamenei's confidence, and he has a demonstrated range of skills, whether persuasive or coercive, that are useful in squelching protests and more subtle kinds of dissent.

When senior American military officers and diplomats in Baghdad talk about Suleimani, it's with something of the same hint of awe that George Smiley, the hero of John le Carr� spy novels, had when he spoke about the East German spymaster Karla, who was nicknamed "the Sandman" because "anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep."

Suleimani's agents were deemed directly responsible for equipping and training Shiite militias in Iraq whose explosives had a devastating impact on American vehicles and the soldiers in them in the middle of the last decade. When U.S. forces captured the leader of one of those militias, Qais al-Khazali, in 2007, kidnappers took five British hostages and demanded his release. Not until al-Khazali was handed over to the Iraqis late last year was the last of the Britons let go. Then al-Khazali was released. Although London and Washington adamantly denied a deal, in Baghdad Suleimani got credit for getting his guy out.

In Lebanon, the Quds Force created Hizbullah in the 1980s and remains its armorer to this day. In recent years Suleimani's covert financial and material support for Hamas in Gaza has been vital, and he reportedly played a direct role building up both forces before and after their wars with Israel in 2006.

In 2007, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1747 cited Suleimani by name - along with several other officials from the IRGC and apparatchiks tied to Iran's ballistic-missile program - as a target of the sanctions imposed in the failed effort to stop Iran from enriching uranium and developing nuclear weapons. (The penalties weren't so tough as to stop him from doing his job.)

But dangerous as Suleimani may be, his style is notably different from that of his predecessor at the Quds Force, Ahmad Vahidi, who is now Ahmadinejad's minister of defense. Vahidi's list of alleged links to horrific terrorist incidents stretches from Beirut to Buenos Aires. During the late 1980s and early 1990s his agents waged a ferocious assassination campaign in Europe to wipe out leading dissidents and political opponents. Suleimani, appointed in 2000 when the reformist president Mohammad Khatami was in office, has concentrated on events closer to home and played more subtle political games.

Petraeus said Suleimani and the Quds Force continue to provide "all kinds of resources and weaponry and advanced technology" to Hizbullah, to Hamas, "and to a much lesser degree... to the Taliban in western Afghanistan." But at the same time they use "soft power wherever they can, as well, to complement the various activities of hard power."

Late last year, The Economist reported that the current American ambassador in Baghdad, Christopher Hill, and the current commander, Gen. Raymond Odierno, actually went so far as to meet with Suleimani in the office of an Iraqi official to try to stabilize the country and the region. But the Americans' denials were so vehement that The Economist retracted its story.

For the moment, Qassem Suleimani may not be so much in evidence. But in the world of shadows that is at the heart of Middle East politics, the Sandman is always likely to return. [Dickey/Newsweek/6March2010]

Spyclists: How Hitler Youth's Cycling Tours Caused Panic in Prewar Britain. Cycling tours by Hitler Youth groups and Nazi attempts to establish close links with the Boy Scout movement caused a security panic in prewar Britain, according to newly released MI5 files.

Police officers were alerted to monitor German students on bicycle holidays in the late 1930s as they stopped at schools, Rotary clubs, factories and church services.

An effusively amicable meeting between Lord Baden-Powell, head of the Scout movement, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador, rang even louder alarm bells in Whitehall.

Fears that these "spyclists" were on clandestine reconnaissance rides first emerged in spring 1937, triggering concern at the highest levels of the security service as the arms race with Nazi Germany intensified.

Many of the letters requesting surveillance that have now been released to the National Archives at Kew are by Sir Vernon Kell, who was director-general of MI5 at the time.

Anxiety about the activities of the Hitler Youth movement coincided with the appearance in Britain of one of its most senior figures, Jochen Benemann, who had been sent to London in 1937, ostensibly to study English. His post was routinely opened and copied by British intelligence officers.

The term "spyclists" was initially coined in an excitable Daily Herald article. Delving into its source, intelligence officers discovered it came from an anti-fascist freelance writer in Prague who based his story on an item in the German Cyclist magazine.

"Impress on your memory the roads and paths, villages and towns, outstanding church towers and other landmarks so that you will not forget them," the magazine item suggested. "Make a note of the names of places, rivers, seas and mountains. Perhaps you should be able to utilise these sometime for the benefit of the Fatherland - Wade through fords so that you will be able to find them in the dark."

An MI5 officer described these as "alleged instructions to Nazi parties cycling in foreign countries". Requests went out to chief constables asking police officers to report on any German cycling parties.

One of Kell's letters, sent to Grimsby, said: "We have received information that a party of young Germans [are] due to arrive [and] are intending to bicycle to London by easy stages. Should they pass through your area we should be interested in any details you can let us have about the route they follow."

Police superintendent T. Dawson informed the security service from Spalding, Lincolnshire, that: "At about 4pm on Friday the 16th July, I saw a party of seven young men cycling along the Bolton to Spalding main road.... These young men were dressed in shorts with jackets, each off them had what appeared to be a food can strapped on the carriers at the rear of their cycles. I feel confident they were German subjects. I did not speak to any of them."

A newspaper story from the Boston and Spalding Free Press, included in the MI5 files, recorded the party's reception at a Rotary club dinner. Other cycling parties were monitored.

The Home Office also informed MI5 it was worried about "Nazi youths foregathering with Boy Scouts". Kell wrote back that he had learned that "the Tamworth Boy Scout troop is to take part in a Hitler Jugend [Youth] camp near Hamburg".

There were reports of German students carrying cameras on visits to steelworks in Sheffield and singing German songs in a church in Dalston.

The arrival of Hartmann Lauterbacher, deputy leader of the Hitler Youth movement, in November 1937 raised the level of anxiety. Lauterbacher and Benemann were present when Baden-Powell was invited to the German embassy. The chief scout's gushing letter of thanks and a report to the Scout movement were handed to MI5 - presumably by another Scouting official - and are preserved in the files. Baden-Powell's letter to Ribbentrop said: "I sincerely hope that we shall be able to give expression to [co-operation] through the youth on both sides."

In his letter to Scouting colleagues, Baden-Powell revealed he had been invited to visit Hitler in Germany and added: "Both Lauterbacher and Benemann are most anxious that the Scouts should come into closer touch with the youth movement in Germany.

"I had a long talk with the ambassador who was very insistent that the true peace between the two nations will depend on the youth being brought up on friendly terms together in forgetfulness of past differences... Ribbentrop seemed very much in earnest and was a charming man to talk to. I knew his uncle in India who was head of the woods and forests there."

A ban on Scouts wearing uniforms on visits to Germany would be lifted, the chief scout added. It had been imposed because the "Socialist press" made difficulties about a scout troop being present at "a fascist demonstration in Germany".

Shortly afterwards Baden-Powell left to visit South Africa and an MI5 officer went to talk to the Scouting movement. He advised that they might want to "discuss the issues with someone in the government". Lord Cranborne, then a Dominions Office minister, subsequently discouraged the idea of closer links between the Hitler Youth and Boy Scout movements.

While in Britain Lauterbacher also toured Eton and the army school of physical training in Aldershot. Lieutenant Colonel TH Wand-Tetley, its commander, submitted a report to "Box 500", the old term for MI5.

"I piloted the party around the school myself and showed them our normal work and later gave them lunch at the officers' club," Wand‑Tetley said.

"They expressed no opinions in regard to youth movements but seemed very interested in the technique of our training. I noted that their party smoked and drank double whiskies and I wondered whether they did this with the Hitler Youth."

The bibulous Irish playwright Brendan Behan, banned from entering Britain for a solo IRA wartime bombing mission, was monitored by MI5 for several decades.

More than 45 years after his death from excessive drinking and burial with an IRA military salute over his grave, the security service's files, finally released, include a remark from 1956 that one "source considers that as an individual he is too unstable and too drunken to be particularly dangerous".

He had tried to blow up Liverpool Docks during an unauthorized raid, was caught and sent to prison for offences under the Explosive Substances Act.

In October 1941 he was deported back to Ireland and a notice circulated to passport offices that he should be refused entry. Back in Dublin, Behan was soon in trouble. After shooting at several Gardai officers, following a republican commemoration, he was arrested and sent to the city's Mountjoy Prison.

Correspondence with his stepbrother, Sean Furlong, who worked at the Royal Ordnance factory in Sellafield, was monitored by the intelligence services. "It's the futility of it all that's getting me down," Behan admitted from his cell in Mountjoy.

"Personally I think the Irish people are just about browned off with all this bloody game of private armies... Sean, I am firmly convinced that republicanism (God almighty it's not even republicanism with the half of them) of this particular brand is defunct.

"So far as I can see the time has come when if anything is achieved it will be by political action. There is some sense in physical force if the people so loud in its praise and so anxious for its application would try a little of it. But they won't - I have come to believe that my sojourn here is doing neither the Irish people nor myself the slightest damn bit of good."

Behan was eventually freed, in 1946, by government amnesty. In November 1952 he was arrested in Newhaven, Sussex, on his way to France.

A police account reveals: "When told that he would be arrested for contravening the [expulsion] order, [Behan] said: 'I will explain everything but not now as I am suffering from a hangover'". He was fined �15 and put on a boat to Dieppe the next day.

One of the last entries in his MI5 file is the text of an intercepted call he made in 1957 to Barbara Niven at the Communist Party offices in London. Mistranscribed as "Brandon Behan", the Irish writer tried to arrange see her at '5pm in Soho'.

"Brandon said he was where he always was - he was not an Englishman, he was a communist," the report states. "He asked how he got to Barbara. [She] told him to take a bus. He said he was going in a cab - 'he was a working class man...'"

The listening intelligence officer noted: "I assumed from the above conversation that Brandon was either a little mad or a little drunk." [Guardian/8March2010]

Blonde Nazi Spy Captivated Two British Secret Agents. A glamorous Nazi spy became amorously entangled with two British secret agents in wartime Cairo, previously classified files show.

Sophie Kukralova - codenamed R 37 49 by her German bosses - developed a 'most undesirable familiarity' with the two intelligence officers.

One already married agent offered to leave his wife and marry the blonde while the second threatened to blow her cover unless she slept with him.

Kukralova's arrival in Cairo in 1941 immediately aroused suspicion due to her inexplicable wealth, expensive taste in clothes, and her claims of high-level links to the Nazi regime.

She was arrested and interned.

While British intelligence said they had no definite proof she was spying for the Nazis, it said: 'With her cosmopolitan and unscrupulous character, her interest in espionage, her unusual knowledge of armaments and military affairs, Sophie would, if released, be a potential menace to security wherever she was.'

The file adds she 'acquired a most undesirable familiarity with British military personnel, including at least one NCO (non-commissioned officer) engaged on most secret work'.

A further note said: 'Her contacts and behavior were generally suspicious and there seems to have been some scandal in Cairo in connection with a Bob Sewell of the Intelligence Corps and an unexplained individual named Flett who got drunk, tried to seduce her, and then threatened to have her arrested as a spy.'

Under interrogation Kukralova said she met a man in Cairo called Alfred Flett who said he was Norwegian, but she believed he was a German agent because he kept trying to get stories out of her.

One night Flett got very drunk and tried to come into her room at 1am. When she refused to let him, he became very angry and reportedly told her: 'I am a British Intelligence Officer. If you want to stay in Egypt you can, but if you won't do what I want I will have you arrested.'

Kukralova described Bob Sewell as a friend and admitted he asked her to marry him, but added: 'I told him I liked him and he was very nice, but he was married and married men to me were taboo. He said he loved his wife very much.'

Kukralova was born in Litomerice in the former Czechoslovakia in May 1911 to Georgian exiles, her MI5 file released by the National Archives shows.

She married a Czech man called Havel Hama Kukraloff in 1936. They lived in Prague and then London, where she was also employed in an arms factory, before divorcing in 1937.

She was jailed five times by the Germans before turning up in the Hungarian capital Budapest in 1941, where she befriended a London-born British engineer called Maxwell Clapham and his wife Josephine.

Kukralova persuaded the Claphams to adopt her in May 1941, although she did not get British nationality.

Later that year, she and Josephine Clapham left Budapest and travelled via Turkey and Syria to Cairo in Egypt, where they aroused 'considerable suspicion'.

German documents uncovered by UK intelligence after the war suggested that Kukralova was indeed a spy who had planned to get herself adopted by UK citizens to acquire a British passport so she could travel to Bombay to arrange contacts for another Nazi agent.

After she was released in 1946, MI5 expressed no objection when she applied to visit Britain in March 1951. [Fernandez/DailyMail/8March2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

The Spy Who Loved Me: Charlotte Philby Returns to Moscow in Search of Her Grandfather Kim Philby. The shiny black 4x4 rumbles slowly through the graveyard. Heavy blankets of snow have settled across the plains of Moscow, and either side of our track, the ground is a brilliant white. The two men in the front seat - my guards of honor - peer out in silence, squinting their eyes against the sunlight as it pours in through the canopy of trees above.

Finally the car grinds to a halt, and the driver, catching my eye in his rear-view mirror, gives a nod. Without a word, he steps out in his long dark trench coat and buffed-leather shoes, opening the back door for me to follow. As the icy breeze hits our cheeks, he points towards a raised tomb set forward slightly from the rest: "Yeltsin's mama," he explains. We walk on in silence; the others hold back, bowing their heads, as I take my place in front of another plot a few feet away.

This is the first time I've ever stood at the foot of my grandfather's grave, but I know it instantly. Many times I've pored over images of the tall, polished tombstone with the Cyrillic script, and the image of his face etched on its surface, in newspaper cuttings and family photos. So, too, have I seen images of his cold body - decorated with medals - in an open coffin, armed guards at either side, as the lavish funeral procession made its way through Kuntsevo Cemetery to this very spot.

It was seeing those photos as a six-year-old child which helped first alert me to the fact that there was something a bit different about grandpa Kimsky. Today, standing at last at his final resting place, surrounded by ex-prime ministers and national heroes in an isolated cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow, with two perfect strangers looming behind me, I'm once again reminded of quite how different he was.

As well as being my grandfather - whom I remember from childhood trips to Russia as a funny old man with a beaming smile, who dressed almost exclusively in white vests and braces - Kim Philby, to this day, remains one of the most significant double agents in modern history. In 1963, having been exposed in Britain as the notorious "Third Man" in the Cambridge Spy Ring, Kim fled to Moscow, never again to set foot from behind the Iron Curtain.

In the intervening years, there have been endless attempts to understand how this gregarious, public-school educated English chap and his fellow Cambridge spies - Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross - could have been persuaded to betray their country, and dupe their family and their friends. And at every turn, the story is slightly different, the answer ever less clear: the more his character has come under scrutiny, the more elusive he has become.

Now, in an attempt to impose some order on my own understanding of my grandfather, to clarify the kaleidoscopic image of him which has formed in my mind, I have returned for the first time as an adult to the country where, in political exile, he lived out the last 25 years of his life.

It's my third day in Russia. Mid-morning, wrapped against the cold in Kim's old bear hat and a matching coat (it's too cold here for animal rights), I set off from my hotel with a map and enough money for the metro and taxi I'll need to take me from the station to the cemetery off the Mozhaisk highway.

Two hours later, wind-battered and almost frozen solid, I finally arrive at the gates of the busy cemetery, where, hoping the guard might be able to point me in the right direction, I scrawl down my grandfather's name and the word "Communist" on an old tissue, and flash my driving license.

When it's finally made clear that I've come from England to visit the grave of my grandfather, Kim Philby, a Soviet agent who was given a hero's burial somewhere on this land in the late 1980s, the old security man at the gate starts shouting, and shoos me through a private door, into the office where he regales the story to a tall man in a dark trench coat - referred to as "boss" - who in turn ushers me outside towards a brand new Range Rover with blackened windows.

Seconds later, we're hurtling at break-neck speed out of the cemetery, along the motorway, the driver making various calls en route, each consisting of just a few short sentences, before turning into a different burial ground up the road, manned with armed guards. At the sight of our car, the men leap from their posts, saluting and buzzing the electric gates; one jumps into the front seat and calls out instructions as we roll off again.

Five minutes later, I'm watching the shadow of a tall, leafless tree falling against the snow on the path in front of my grandfather's tombstone, wondering who it was who'd been here in the past few hours and placed a bunch of brightly colored flowers at the foot of his grave.

There are things I know for certain about my grandfather. The basic facts, after all, are well-documented. Kim was won over by the Communist cause while a student at Cambridge University, and upon graduation in 1933, traveled to Vienna to serve the international Communist organization Comintern - which was illegal in Austria - with �100 in his pocket given to him by his father, St John, who was also a Cambridge graduate.

St John, who had joined the British Foreign Service in 1917, when his only son was five years old, was also a non-conformist. An Indian Civil Service officer turned Arabist and explorer, he spent 20 years traveling across the desert on camelback charting Saudi's unexplored Empty Quarter, crossing paths with Lawrence of Arabia, and eventually marrying a slave-girl given to him by his friend King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, to whom he spent many years as personal advisor. Feeling a strong dissatisfaction with British policy in the Middle East, Kim's father resigned from the Foreign Service in 1930, converting to Islam and taking the name Hajj Abdullah.

It was a few years after this, in 1933, that Kim went to Vienna. There, he volunteered for the refugee committee, fundraising, secretly writing and disseminating propaganda, raising funds and distributing clothes and money to those who'd escaped Fascist Germany. He married Litzi Friedman, a fellow activist and an Austrian Jew, to help her escape persecution. The pair returned to England in May and, by this point already an appointed Soviet agent, Kim found work as a foreign correspondent. He traveled extensively, while also making his way up the ranks of the British intelligence services - by 1944, Kim was appointed head of a newly formed anti-Soviet section, and was later sent to Washington where, as the top Secret Intelligence Service representative, he worked for several years in liaison with the CIA and FBI. And all along he was handing information straight back into the hands of the Russians.

Kim went to great efforts upon his return to England to cover the traces of his Communist background - joining the Anglo-German fellowship in 1934, and editing its pro-Hitler magazine; making repeated visits to Berlin for talks with the German propaganda ministry; even being personally presented with the Red Cross of Military Merit award by Franco in 1938. Slowly but surely, he was turning himself into one of the most cunning and treacherous double agents of all time.

Agent "Stanley", as he was known, was ruthless without doubt. According to a recent piece in the Daily Telegraph: "For years Philby had sabotaged Allied missions behind the Iron Curtain and had calculatedly sent dozens of agents to their deaths." Most famously, he was almost certainly responsible for the tip-off which led to the deaths of the first British-sponsored Albanians who parachuted in to remove Enver Hoxha's Communist regime. Understandably, as a consequence, he is loathed by many. Next to articles about him online, readers routinely describe him as "evil" and "a cancer on society". Just five years ago, my mum and I were refused service in a shop in Arizona on account of the name on our credit cards.

But as the author Graham Greene - my grandfather's close friend and a fellow British intelligence officer, who worked under him at MI6 - wrote in the introduction to Kim's autobiography, My Silent War: "The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson.

"'He betrayed his country' - yes, perhaps he did," Greene continues, "but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? In Philby's own eyes he was working for the shape of things to come from which his country would benefit."

In his lifetime, Kim married four times, and had five children by his second wife Aileen Furse. His eldest son was my father, John - who was himself a 19-year-old art student in 1963 when he first learnt of Kim's espionage; stepping off a ferry on the Isle of Wight, he was met by a billboard stating that Kim was a wanted man. It had been a long time coming. In 1951, Kim tipped off his fellow Cambridge spy Donald Maclean that Britain had caught wind of Maclean's spying activities and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. When Burgess and Maclean fled to Moscow, avoiding capture, Kim was the chief suspect for having given them the heads-up. But at the famous "Secret Trial" in 1952, he convinced his MI5 interrogator Buster Milmo that he was not a Soviet agent. He achieved the deception by employing his occasional stutter, so as to buy himself time to think before telling another bare-faced lie. In 1955, Harold Macmillan, then Foreign Secretary, issued a statement confirming that there was no evidence that Kim Philby was a Soviet agent. Macmillan was, of course, Prime Minister by 1962, when the Soviet double agent George Blake was caught, and Kim could no longer hide the truth.

Those are the facts - but there are plenty of question marks too. And it is to these that my mind turns as I make my way from my hotel, across Red Square, the following day towards Kim's flat, following the route marked out in pencil on a rather vague map drawn up from the combined memories of various family members, none of whom has been here in more than 20 years.

Despite the number of times we visited Kim in Moscow, no one in the family was ever allowed to have his address. In those days, correspondence had to be sent to a PO Box; and in his reply, Kim would sign off under a special code name, "Panina" (a combination of Pa and Nina, the alias used for Kim's wife). And whenever we went to stay, we'd be picked up from the airport and driven to his flat via a purposefully circuitous route in a KGB car so that no one could quite remember how we got there.

It was, in fact, those journeys to Kim's flat which form some of my strongest early memories: flying down the third lane of the motorway in an unmarked car. Occasionally, the driver would draw a curtain around the inside of the windows, and attach a flashing blue light to the roof before setting off. If we were really lucky, sometimes - and this was still the 1980s - there'd be a distant ringing, and from a compartment near the gear stick, our escort would pull out a telephone attached to a spiral cord, which he'd talk into in a low voice, repeating the same two words, "horosho" and "da", again and again before hanging up.

In any case, even if an address had been known for grandpa, it may not have been much use in 2010. Many of the street names have changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But no matter; allowing myself plenty of time to get lost, I'm soon heading towards the apartment where my grandfather lived out the final 25 years of his life under the watchful eye of Moscow - and where his widow Rufa is currently preparing an enormous spread for our afternoon tea.

En route, I pass some of Kim's old haunts, and heeding his advice to visitors - "If you can no longer feel your nose, go inside" - stop off briefly for coffee at that famous Soviet hangout the Hotel Metropole. Entering through the front doors and under a rickety, freestanding metal detector, it's like walking through a time-warp.

In a secluded area next to the domed restaurant (one of Kim's favorites), the dimly lit bar is serviced by grey-skinned waiters; faux-marble columns run between clusters of heavy red and gold chairs, frequented by groups of men in out-dated suits, briefcases and thick-rimmed glasses, knocking back glasses of vodka, under a thick circle of cigarette smoke. Everything has seen better days.

Today, Moscow's main strip, Tverskaya Ryad - which I remember from childhood holidays as a drab grey stretch clotted with queues of people who looked like they didn't know what they were waiting for (though it was usually oranges or ice cream) - is barely recognizable: a knot of designer stores and mobile-phone shops, interspersed with garish billboards hanging between the buildings above the busy main road.

The central post office, where Kim would come every morning to pick up his mail and a stack of British and American newspapers, stands halfway up on the left. Inside, the atrium leading to the main sorting office and collection point is now dotted with stalls selling electronic goods, pricey mobile-phone accessories and flowers at �3 a stem. There are two more mobile-phone shops inside the post-office building, and on the steps, a babushka swathed in heavy furs and surrounded by plastic bags counts out a handful of pennies.

I'm reminded of a brief phone conversation I had earlier this morning with one of Kim's old KGB comrades, whom I'd been in contact with during the course of my research for this article, who told me that a gang of five or six of Kim's former colleagues still meet up every month and raise a toast in his honor. "No doubt your grandfather would have disapproved of the sharp contrasts in present-day Russia," he said.

The extent of these contrasts can be seen by comparing two articles appearing on consecutive days in the Moscow Times. The first reports that Russia ranks 143rd in a list of the world's freest economies, "just one spot higher than countries with 'repressed' economies like Vietnam, Ecuador, Belarus and Ukraine", while the next tells how oligarch Roman Abramovich, whose wealth is valued at �7 billion, has just snapped up 35 notable artworks to decorate his 560ft private yacht.

Just beyond the crossroads which dominates Pushkin Square - the spot where it's said dissidents would meet, acknowledging each other by removing their hats - is the former site of the Hotel Minsk (like much of the city, now under a lengthy reconstruction process), where Kim first met the journalist Murray Sayle in 1967. Having secured Kim's first meeting with the Western press since his arrival in Moscow, Sayle says he finds him "a courteous man [who] smiles a great deal, and his well-cut grey hair and ruddy complexion suggests vitality and enjoyment of life".

The reporter adds that Kim demonstrated an "iron head" for drink during the course of their subsequent meetings, which took place over a series of long, boozy meals: "I could detect no change in his alertness or joviality as the waiter arrived with relays of 300 grams of vodka or 600 grams of Armenian brandy." Like my father, Kim had amazing stamina for drink; the pair of them would knock it back over games of chess at the flat in Moscow (while I ran around wreaking havoc in the living room) and on the long trips to Siberia and Bulgaria they took together. But neither was entirely impervious. On one occasion, when dropping us off at the airport, Kim and my dad were so sloshed they were shoved into a cupboard under the stairs with a bottle of vodka by staff to keep them quiet, while the British ambassador ambled around the main terminal building waiting for the same flight to London.

When I asked my dad, shortly before he died late last year, how he'd felt about his own father's betrayal, he told me exactly what Kim had told Sayle during that interview in 1963: "To betray, you must first belong." And as Kim said himself: "I never belonged." My dad always had great respect for my grandfather; he told me that even when he was a child, he always knew he was up to something - he just didn't know what. The pair got on well in those later years - they were very similar in many ways - and my father said he never felt any resentment, not even when he unfairly came under fire by virtue of his name.

At one stage, in the program for his play Single Spies, the writer Alan Bennett printed a claim that my dad - John - had turned up late to his own father's funeral, straight from the airport, and stood swaying behind a gravestone clutching bags of booze. In fact, he had arrived in Moscow days earlier, and can be seen on film standing just back from his father's coffin. When Bennett was pulled up on the matter, he wrote my father a note explaining that he stood by what he'd said as the information had come from a reliable source - a BBC journalist. After reading it briefly, my dad had simply shrugged and tossed the note in the bin. He wasn't one to care what others thought: "Never be boring, and don't be afraid of offending people" was one of the last things he told me before he died.

While I was researching this article, Bennett - also the author of An Englishman Abroad, in which he imagines Guy Burgess's final years in Moscow: lonely, pathetic and wholly unfulfilled - responded to a shorter opinion piece I wrote for this paper last July in which I defended my grandfather's decision not to apologize publicly for his actions. In his diary for the London Review of Books, Bennett wrote: "Philby does seem to have been responsible for the betrayal and presumed torture and death of a network of agents in a way that's never been proved of Blunt. What counted though against Blunt, and Burgess too, was that they weren't journo-friendly. Journalists look after their own and Philby masqueraded as a devil-may-care drunken newspaperman and so was treated more indulgently by those in his profession."

Bennett concludes: "Charlotte Philby thinks her grandfather was more honest, but it's a saloon-bar honesty. Philby was a chap. 'Let's have another drink on it, old man.' Good old Kim." I would like to have drawn Bennett further on his comments, but unfortunately, when I contacted his agent to request a meeting, my invitation was declined.

I turn left, according to my map, away from Kim's local grocery, where - a creature of habit - he'd collect his daily supply of bread and whatever fruit and vegetables were available. He liked the fact that you could only buy seasonal goods in Moscow, but asked family members to bring out the non-perishables he loved and couldn't get there - marmalade, Marmite and Worcestershire sauce.

To the very end, as I find out when I set foot into his flat, Kim surrounded himself with things pertaining to British culture and life on the other side of the Iron Curtain: from PG Wodehouse novels to the Indian spices he used for his legendary curries.

For some, details like this have fuelled the question of whether - arriving for the first time ever in the country for which he'd sacrificed everything, which was supposed to represent everything he'd fought for, and where he would live out the rest of his days in exile - he became disillusioned and embittered, and longed instead for the land he'd betrayed.

But I don't think my grandfather ever questioned a single decision he made. For one thing, like all the men in the Philby family, he was bloody-minded. But more importantly, every decision he made was done consciously. Kim sacrificed everything he had: he risked his life and the lives of others, he betrayed his colleagues and duped his family and friends (even spying on his own father at one stage, as will be explained shortly) because he genuinely believed - from the point when he joined the movement and set his sights against the seemingly irrepressible rise of Fascism - that Communism was a cause worth holding dear above all else.

Of course, he made bold and hugely controversial decisions, some of which had fatal consequences, but he didn't do so lightly. As Kim told my mother when she asked him if he felt any remorse, he believed he was a soldier, fighting a bloody war in the bloodiest century in history. And if a soldier is fighting for a cause he believes in, which he believes is worth sacrificing single human lives for, but then in the end his side loses the war, does that mean that he was wrong to have stood up and fought in the first place?

Kim even duped his own children, and left them behind when he fled to Moscow. Was that a selfish decision? Perhaps. But again, it was justifiable in his mind. In his own words: "I am really two people. I am a private person and a political person. Of course, if there is a conflict, the political person comes first."

In 1983, a month or so after my parents took me as a baby to meet him for the first time, Kim sent a copy of Lenin's On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, with a long, beautifully written letter to my maternal grandfather, whom he was unlikely ever to meet. Inside he wrote: "Herewith a few extracts from our bible. Like your own Holy Writ, it is open to many different (and often conflicting) interpretations, according to the tastes and prejudices of the reader."

In the accompanying letter, he adds: "The difficulty is that [Lenin] was always writing at white-heat on burning questions of the day (or even hour); and naturally his strategy and tactics changed to meet changing circumstances... My Russian edition has 55 large volumes, so there is ample room for selective quotation and even spurious interpolation. Who is going to check 55 volumes for the odd sentence? Doubtless Jeremiah faced similar problems."

Kim was not na�ve; he knew that his ideal, like any other, was susceptible to corruption. But that didn't mean the ideal itself was corrupt or not worth pursuing. Perhaps he hadn't always been right. As Kim's former KGB colleague also reiterated on the phone: "Kim was a Communist idealist. He believed in freedom of speech and thought that Stalinism and all that were temporary" - and obviously, the outcome proved otherwise.

So, perhaps, by the time he died, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall - and knowing what he must have known by then - he did feel disappointed. But even then, having made calculated decisions based on deeply-felt political ideals, I still don't think he would have done things any differently.

Kim's flat is several floors up, in an apartment block not far from Pushkin Square, marked out from the rest by a tiny balcony. Today, this pedestrianised street is only accessible by a coded gate, and the fa�ade of the building has been tarted up almost beyond recognition. Inside, however, the lift is as temperamental as it ever was, so I make the journey to his flat by foot, instantly recognizing the strange studded-leather front door as I emerge from the stairwell.

The last time I arrived at this flat, aged six, it was just a few days after Kim's death, and my parents and I were met by a sea of swollen eyes. During our stay, more mourners piled in, their cries and moans ricocheting off the walls. Today, as Kim's widow greets me at the door, offering me a pair of woolen slippers, the atmosphere is quiet and calm.

Grandpa's flat is almost exactly as he left it: "After Kim left, I didn't want to change anything," Rufa says. "It is an old-fashioned home, not like the homes of new Russia, where everything is modern and imported." She cannot imagine what Kim would have made of this new world, where a minority have benefited so enormously while many - outside the capital, the vast majority - live in abject poverty with little support from the state.

In the living room, the same furs hang above the sofa, alongside a pair of Afghan guns - a gift from the KGB colleague whom I spoke to earlier. Kim's chair, on which no one else, under any circumstances, was ever allowed to sit while he was alive - and for many years thereafter, Rufa adds - remains just where it was, at the head of a low table.

The gramophone, in front of which Kim would take a seat to listen to the World Service at 7pm every evening with a cup of coffee, makes a tremendous groan as it comes to life, but it's still very much in working nick. The kitchen where he would ritualistically make his daily breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast (another English habit he never broke), and spent hours cooking every evening, is now rich with the smell of the savory pancakes Rufa is preparing for our five-hour feast.

But the place where Kim's presence looms largest from every corner is in his study. Here, surrounded by an extensive library, he would sit for hours. The only change I can note is a computer on his desk where an old type-writer once stood. The view from one of the windows is notably different, too. Standing on the balcony, you can see the same school playground, where children in heavy ski jackets are involved in a timeless game - launching themselves from the top of a flight of concrete stairs to the ground below, cushioned with thick blankets of snow. But out of a smaller window, in front of the door, the view of Moscow is interrupted by a throbbing neon Samsung advert. Later, I notice the same sign above a statue of Lenin near the former KGB headquarters.

Kim's library, which he had shipped over soon after he emerged in the Soviet Union, is testimony to his complexities and to his contradictions: across four walls of bookshelves, Russian classics and key Communist texts stand side by side with Raymond Chandler and PG Wodehouse novels; there are 19 volumes of Cambridge Modern History and a Sherlock Holmes scrapbook. One can hardly overlook the irony of a man who so resolutely betrayed his country, surrounding himself in his Soviet apartment with British condiments, newspapers and light-hearted English classics.

As previously noted, this has been taken as a sign - along with his heavy drinking - that in the end, Kim was left a broken man, disillusioned and dejected, having arrived in Moscow expecting to be given important assignments and a high-ranking role in the KGB, only to be left with very little to do, and plied with booze to keep him compliant. Indeed, when the leading Russian writer Genrikh Borovik was given access to Kim's unseen KGB file in 1994 - six years after his death - the extent to which the Russians mistrusted him became clear.

Philby was recruited, it reveals, because it was mistakenly believed that his father, St John, was a British intelligence officer. One of the first tasks he was given was to spy on his own father, which he did, without question - digging up very little, because, though the Russians failed to believe it, there was nothing to dig up.

Over the years he did everything that was asked of him: he gave everything he had to the cause, and yet still Moscow was deeply suspicious of a man who has been described as their finest and most loyal servant.

Discussing the reasons for this in the introduction to Borovik's book, The Philby Files, the journalist and biographer Phillip Knightley - who interviewed my grandfather at length during his final years in Moscow - writes: "Could the British intelligence service really be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow?... that Philby, with his Communist views in Vienna and his Austrian Communist wife, had been recruited for SIS and had sailed through its vetting procedures?"

Kim's case was not helped by the fact that several of his Soviet controllers - including "Mar", the man who recruited him - had later been executed as "enemies of the people". But above all, the problem was that Kim's intelligence was too good, and - to their detriment - intelligence services are geared to believe that the better information is, the more it should be questioned.

But so it was. In the end - despite having been what Allen Dulles (de facto head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961) once reluctantly described as "the best spy Russia ever had" - Kim was watched over as much as looked after by his masters, and he was not used to his full potential. And perhaps he felt that - he certainly resented having to be escorted pretty much wherever he went for his first years in Moscow, as Rufa attests. But whether that came with any sense of self-pity is something else entirely.

For one thing, Kim's life behind the Iron Curtain wasn't bad. He had friends, a wife; he indulged himself in a culture he loved - the concerts, the ballet, the galleries; he traveled to Cuba, East Berlin, around the Soviet Union, and spent weekends at his beloved dacha.

For another, he'd made his bed. He always knew what he was risking - his family, his friends, his reputation - and he made his choices accordingly. He did all he could do for a cause he believed in: what was there to regret? As for the drinking, Kim never needed an excuse to crack open a bottle; he was a drinker in good times and in bad.

Looking around Kim's study now, past the proud photo of him with the local ice-hockey team, below one of his father and another of various key Soviet politicians shaking hands, my eye is drawn to a large black-and-white print of Che Guevara, which looks out from above one of the bookshelves in the far right-hand corner, like an all-seeing eye. I remember Kim's words: "I have followed exactly the same line the whole of my adult life. The fight against Fascism and the fight against imperialism were fundamentally the same fight."

Was he wrong to have continued on the Communist path once so many others had stepped off? To see through to the end what he started? Was he lamentable for still believing that a Communist state could ultimately exist, free from the corruption which plagues all systems, to the benefit of a fair, just society? Whatever you believe, Kim felt history would prove him right: "I'll be remembered as a good man," he told my mum just two years before his death. Perhaps it's too early to judge; after all, Communism, according to its followers, is the final epoch, inevitable only once all other systems have eaten themselves - which, of course, they will.

As I step in from the balcony, my eyes settle on a single point. In the middle of the bookcase behind his desk, above his empty chair, just where Kim's head would have rested, a single book looms out, cover first. As I walk towards it, the title of the Anthony Trollope novel jumps out at me: He Knew He Was Right. [Philby/Independent/5March2010]

Section IV - BOOKS, OBITUARIES JOBS AND COMING EVENTS

Books

Hamas Spy Unafraid, Criticizes Islam. Mosab Hassan Yousef, who helped Israel's security forces kill and arrest members of the Islamic militant group Hamas, is probably marked for death.

He should be keeping silent. But he's got a story to tell, one he delivers in his new book published this week, "Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices."

"To be honest with you, being killed is not the worst thing that can happen," he said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press. "If they want to do kill me ... let them do it, and they will be responsible for my blood."

In his memoir, Yousef, the 32-year-old son of a Hamas founder, claims he was one of the Shin Bet security agency's best assets and was dubbed The Green Prince, a reference to his Hamas pedigree and the Islamists' signature green color.

During his 50-minute interview, for which he arrived with armed security, Yousef took shots at Hamas leaders including political chief Khaled Meshaal. He lashed out at Hamas, saying the organization lives in the Middle Ages.

And he hurled his most inflammatory comments at Islam, which he called a religion that teaches people to kill.

"It is not a religion of peace," said Yousef, who converted to Christianity. "The biggest terrorist is the God of the Quran. I know this is very dangerous and this will offend many people. The more you follow the steps of the prophet of Islam and the God of Islam, the more you get close to being a terrorist."

Yousef said he started working with the Shin Bet after he was arrested and witnessed Hamas brutalities inside prison. When he was released in 1997, he started meeting with the Shin Bet and gravitating toward Christianity.

Yousef thought he could do some good, preventing the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.

In his book, Yousef clearly relished his importance to Shin Bet and even designed his own missions, one involving duping Meshaal, who lives in Damascus.

"I love this spy stuff, especially with Israeli intelligence paving the way," he wrote. "In this way, a new communications channel was established with Damascus, even though Meshaal had no idea that he was actually on a party line with the Shin Bet listening in."

Yousef said Hamas has no idea how Shin Bet operates and accused Hamas of killing innocent people suspected of collaborating with Israel.

The U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist organization. Hamas says it provides schools and other social benefits to residents in the areas it controls.

Yousef declined to discuss certain aspects of his intelligence relationship with the Israeli security organization, saying he didn't want to hinder its operational capabilities and give Hamas a "free gift."

"They're facing a dirty, difficult war," he said, referring to the Shin Bet battles with Hamas. "I don't agree with everything that they do. But their job is very important."

His relationship with the Shin Bet lasted for more than a decade until he decided he'd had enough. He ended his lonely and dangerous existence as a spy in 2007.

Yousef said the Israelis allowed him to leave the region for a few months to take a break from his harrowing job and travel to America, where he stayed, working as a security guard at a grocery store.

When he told his story to his new friends in America, people didn't believe him. But folks seem to be believing him now. His father, a senior Hamas leader, disowned him Monday.

Sheik Hassan Yousef said in a letter that his family had renounced "the one who was once our eldest son, who is called Mosab."

The son "disbelieved in God" and "collaborated with our enemies," said the father, who's serving a six-year term in an Israeli prison.

Mosab Yousef said he didn't take it personally.

"I know his heart," Yousef said. "My dad is a loving person. He would never disown me. At some point we will be together again. I love my father, and he loves me."

Yousef blamed his father's decision on the Quran.

"The God of Quran is trying to unskin Muslims from their humanity," he said, later adding, "Muslims are good people. But their God is absolutely bad."

Yousef's claims have rocked Hamas and exposed its vulnerability. His book comes on the heels of the assassination of a top Hamas operative in Dubai in January. Yousef denounced this latest killing in which Israel has been blamed and said the timing of the book was just a coincidence, not some Israeli scheme to generate even more paranoia among the ranks of Hamas.

Israel has not commented on Yousef's claims or on widespread speculation that it carried out the Dubai assassination.

Asked about why people should believe his book, which was displayed at a Manhattan bookstore's Christian inspiration section, Yousef said: "I am not expecting everybody to believe this story. Some people will doubt it."

Yousef said Hamas had no idea how to govern and he hoped the violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis would end. He said he thinks his traitorous efforts will pay off.

"A change," he said, "will happen for the next generation." [Goldman/AP/4March2010]

Obituaries

Israeli Spy Kimche Dead at 82. David Kimche, the Israeli spy-turned-diplomat who played a key role in the Iran-contra scandal that rocked President Ronald Reagan's administration, has died. He was 82.

The British-born Kimche began his career with Israel's Mossad spy agency in the 1950s after emigrating to Israel, and rose to deputy director of the agency. He later served as director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

In the Iran-contra affair, Washington authorized Israel to sell U.S. weapons to Iran in violation of an international embargo. Some of the proceeds later went to fund anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Kimche also is said to have been a key proponent of Israel's failed attempt to set up a pro-Israeli government led by Christians in Lebanon. [AP/9March2010] 

Jobs/Careers/Training

American Military University: Instructors for Intelligence Studies Program. American Military University is seeking part-time instructors in our Intelligence Studies Program. Many of our students are young working adults and thousands of our students are active military and are currently deployed around the world! The students value your real life experience! A PhD is required for these positions.

The American Public University System (APUS) consists of two online accredited universities:
American Military University and American Public University.

The School of Security and Global Studies invites applications for online part-time faculty positions in the Graduate Intelligence Studies Program and the National Security Studies Program. In addition to teaching, faculty will assist in curriculum and program development, student mentoring, and engage in professional development activities.

Requirements:
- PhD in a discipline related to Intelligence or National Security Studies (International Relations, Political Science, etc) is required.
- Special attention will be given to those with practitioner experience in the Intelligence Community (e.g., collections, analysis, operations) or in a national security field.
- Teaching experience is preferred.
- Access to high speed internet

Location
- These positions are held remotely

Benefits
- Work From Home Office
- Retirement Savings Plan (401K)
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Professional Development Opportunities
- 50% Discount on Tuition

To Apply:
Visit http://www.apus.edu/hiring/

and complete the "Faculty Employment Application"

Please note:
our application allows only one attachment per application. Please make your cover letter the first page of your CV.

Thank you for your interest in APUS! We look forward to receiving your application.

Want to learn more about our Intelligence Programs? Please click here.

Questions? please contact aclayton@apus.edu
Annette Clayton| Faculty Recruiter
American Public University System
American Military University | American Public University
P.O. Box 947, Charles Town, WV 25414
T 304-724-2855 |F 703-334-4713| aclayton@apus.edu | www.apus.edu

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All-Source Analyst, Imagery/UAV Emphasis. McMunn Associates, Inc - a Parsons company - seeks to fill the following full-time position. Applicants must possess a current TS clearance with eligibility for SCI access with the U.S. Government. POC is Molly Ryan, mryan@mcmunn-associates, Inc. or 703-481-6100 ext. 103.

Imagery Analysis with experience in UAV/full-motion video exploitation. Provide in depth analysis support in one or more of the following disciplines: Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), Human Intelligence (HUMINT), Targeting, All Source Analysis. Provide assistance and training in the production of exploitation reports. Provide rapid-response on-site expertise in support of emerging operational requirements from U.S. Navy and other validated operational users. Provide on-the-job training and research support for military watch standers and analysts and support implementation of the existing FIST Training Plan, Job Qualification Requirements (JQR) and FIST Certification Plan. Develop standard operating procedures (SOP) for each discipline area in support of the FIST Training and Certification Plans.

Required Capabilities:

- Five to eight years experience in the IMINT discipline listed above, with thorough familiarity with UAV imagery systems and processing and exploitation of full motion video imagery as used in U.S. military operational support.
- Knowledge of national technical means and systems
- Demonstrated understanding of a wide variety of discipline-specific analysis tools and exploitation software as well as familiarity with other analysis tools widely used in the US Intelligence Community (MIDB, JWICS, JDISS) used to support tactical commands.
- Ability to express views clearly and succintly, both orally and in writing
- Strong interpersonal skills for the training, mentoring and guidance of junior personnel new to intelligence and intelligence support.

Desired Capabilities:

- Experience in more than one of the intelligence domains listed above
- Familiarity with current U.S. Navy tactical intelligence support doctrine, operations and products
- Direct experience or expertise in the provision of tactical intelligence support to operational commands
- Qualification or certification as a trainer or instructor (e.g., MTS).

Salary Range: Highly competitive total compensation package. Salary negotiable based on experience and qualifications.
Geographic Location: Washington/Metro, D.C.
Travel: Travel to conferences and meetings in the local Washington, DC area will be required. Some travel outside the Washington, DC area may be required.

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CI Centre Special Training Announcement: Special Opportunity to Attend a New Iran Training Program. The CI Centre announces a special opportunity for current US Government employees, active-duty military, and government contractors who directly support the US National Security Community to attend two (5-day) foundational courses studying Iran. 

The first course gives attendees an introductory and comprehensive understanding of Iranian Culture, History, Leadership, Geography, Military, Policy, and Security. 

The focus of the second course is on Iran's national security apparatus to include policy, strategic vision, planning, and operational methods. Additional Iranian contextual elements provided in this second course include knowledge of Irans government institutions to provide informed insight to US counterintelligence efforts.

The training is divided into two nonconsecutive 5-day sessions and will be held at the CI Centre training facility in Alexandria, VA. The first week course is a prerequisite in order to attend the second course. 

Attendance to this in-depth, ground-breaking foundational curriculum is possibly at no cost to the attendee or the US Government entity where they are employed. Register as soon as possible as class sizes are limited to 30 people.

If you are a current US Government employee, active-duty military or government contractor working in the US National Security Community and have a professional interest in or concern with Iran please complete this form: http://cicentre.com/training/1700.html. Once received, we'll let you know whether you may be eligible to attend and send you more information about each course and additional details (such as course dates).

If you have authorized access to the Intelink system, you can see additional details on this first of its kind training opportunity and register immediately by going to: http://www.intelink.ic.gov/mypage/Iran1700Registration.intel. (Link will not work outside Intelink system)

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone you know who works on issues dealing with Iran and may be interested in this training.
CI CENTRE
Advanced Education and Training in Counterintelligence, Counterterrorism, Security and Interviewing/Investigations
http://cicentre.com
703-642-7450 | 1-800-779-4007 | Contact Us
POB 11221, Alexandria, VA 22312

To discuss scheduling any of our training courses or briefings for your organization, please contact Kristina Scholze directly at 703-642-7453, kristina.scholze@cicentre.com or Adam Hahn, 703-642-7454, adam.hahn@cicentre.com.
See our new website: http://cicentre.com/ and our daily CI & CT News website: http://cicentre.net/wordpress/. 

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

MANY Spy Museum Events in March, April and May with full details are listed on the AFIO Website at www.afio.com. The titles for some of these are as follows:

10 March 2010 - Scottsdale, AZ - The Arizona Chapter of AFIO meets to hear Robert Parrish on "Private/Public Partnership Protecting the Homeland." Robert Parrish, Director of Corporate Security, the Arizona Public Service, will speak on "Private and Public Partnership in Protecting the Homeland."
Parrish is responsible for all APS physical security (except PaloVerde), all investigations including power diversions, site assessments, threat assessments response plans, security installations, security monitoring, and workplace violence. He is a retired Commander from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Phoenix AZ. Dates of service: 1983 to 2005.
This event is being held at: McCormick Ranch Golf Club (7505 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale AZ 85258 ~ Phone 480.948.0260) 
Our meeting fees will be as follows: • $20.00 for AFIO members• $22.00 for guests. 
For reservations or questions, please email Simone sl@4smartphone.net or simone@afioaz.org or call and leave a message on 602.570.6016.
Arthur Kerns, President of the AFIO AZ Chapter, president@afioaz.org.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010, 6:30 p.m. - Washington, DC - A "Weapons of Mass Disruption Program from Cold War to Cyber War" featuring Gail Harris, Naval Intelligence Officer - at the International Spy Museum

WHAT: “I decided to be unorthodox."—Gail Harris
When Gail Harris was assigned by the U.S. Navy to a combat intelligence job in 1973, she became the first woman to hold such a position. By the time of her retirement, she was the highest ranking African American female in the Navy. Her 28-year career included hands-on leadership in the intelligence community during every major conflict from the Cold War to Desert Storm to Kosovo. Captain Harris was at the forefront of one of the newest challenges: cyber warfare, developing intelligence policy for the Computer Network Defense and Computer Network Attack for the Department of Defense. Harris, author of A Woman's War: The Professional and Personal Journey of the Navy's First African American Female Intelligence Officer, will share her unique experience providing intelligence support to military operations while also battling the status quo, office bullies, and politics. She’ll also offer her perspective on the way intelligence is used and sometimes misused.
WHERE: International Spy Museum, 800 F St NW, Washington, DC, Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station. TICKETS: $12.50. Advance Registration required. Tickets are non-refundable. To register: order online; or purchase tickets in person at the International Spy Museum.

11-12 March 2010 - Washington, DC - 5th International Conference on the Ethics of National Security Intelligence by International Intelligence Ethics Association International Intelligence Ethics Association (IIEA) and Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies co-host this event featuring these two keynote speakers: Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize Recipient 1997, and John Inglis. Deputy Director, National Security Agency
Topics for the conference will include: * Ethics of CyberWarfare and Security; * Intelligence support for counterinsurgency operations; * Military Anthropology and the Ethics of Espionage; * Intelligence and the War Against Terror: The Israeli Experience; * A Case Study: A Course of "Ethics and Intelligence" with a Multi-Discipline Approach; * The Ethics of Human Intelligence Collection: Ethical Problems and Issues Involved in the Recruitment and Use of Informants by Foreign Intelligence Services; * Torture and Intelligence
* Justum Speculatum: Evaluating the September 2008 Attorney General's Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations through the Lenses of Just War, Just Peacemaking and Just Policing Theory; * A Case for Constraints: Deontic Moral Checks on the Unrestricted Right of Intelligence Gathering; * Human Rights and the CIA: The Case of the Assassination of Patrice
Lumumba; * The Ethics of Intelligence and The Just War Principle of Noncombatant Immunity; * Can We Ethically Communicate the Threat?; * Identifying and Managing Corruption and Other Misconduct Risks in Counter-Terrorism Policing: Case Study of New South Wales Police Counter Terrorist Coordination Command; * The Ethics of Intelligence Support to Military Operations; * Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace; * Challenges of The New Committee for the Oversight of The Kosovo Intelligence Agency; * Using Private Corporations to Conduct Intelligence Activities; * The Ethics Of Surveillance: Suspicious Activity Reporting and the Production; * of US Domestic Intelligence and * Privatized Information Gathering, Just War, and Morality.
-- Also available for preview/sale will be new publications on ethics, intelligence, and national security from several publishers.
-- Register for your hotel room at the Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center (on-line or by phone) and receive the Special Conference Rate.
Rate for event: $450.00 per person. AFIO members will receive $100 discount if they use discount code "eiic2010org" which brings price to $350.
Event location: 3800 Reservoir Street NW, Washington, DC 20007
Conference and Hotel Registration: http://scs.georgetown.edu/ethics
Conference Questions : conference2010@intelligence-ethics.org

Friday, 12 March 2010 – San Francisco, CA – The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts Michael Rinn, Vice President/Program Director for the Missile Defense Systems Division at The Boeing Company. He will be discussing the Airborne Laser Program. RSVP required. The meeting will be held at United Irish Cultural Center, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco (between Sloat and Wawona). 11:30 AM no host cocktails; noon - luncheon. $25 member rate with advance reservation and payment; $35 non-member. E-mail RSVP to Mariko Kawaguchi (please indicate chicken or fish): afiosf@aol.com and mail check made out to "AFIO" to: Mariko Kawaguchi, P.O. Box 117578 Burlingame, CA 94011

13 March 2010, 10 am to 1 pm - Coral Gables, FL - AFIO Miami Chapter hosts talk on FUTURE WARS by Dr. John Alexander.
Dr. John Alexander, author of Future Wars, will be leading a presentation and discussion.
Event to be held at the Hyatt Coral Gables. For further information contact chapter president Tom Spencer at trsmiami@aol.com

17-18 March 2010 - Fairfax, VA - The National Military Intelligence Association hosts Spring 2010 Symposium at the SECRET/NOFORN Level. Topic: Transformation of Military Department Intelligence and Their Service Intelligence Centers 
The intelligence agencies of the Military Departments - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, including the Coast Guard are making dramatic and significant changes to their capabilities, missions, organizational structure and future vision. Along with these Service intelligence agencies, their Service Intelligence Centers - NGIC, NMIC, NASIC, and the NCMIA are playing an increasing role in supporting not only their own services but the national intelligence community. Hear as the senior officers of those organizations highlight new developments and changes to the organizations as they undergo transformation.
Further event details and registration can be found: https://www.123signup.com/event?id=mqxhn
Location: Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.

Wednesday, 17 March 2010, 6:15 pm - Scottsdale, AZ - AFIO AZ Members at Keith Thomson Book Signing for "Once A Spy" novel
Keith is the author of the new novel, Once a Spy. He writes on intelligence matters for the Huffington Post in Alabama. A former semi-pro baseball player in France, he won an award for his short film at Sundance, is a cartoon artist for Newsday, and is a screenwriter.
The event is free of charge.
Poisoned Pen Press bookstore is located one block south of Indian School Road on the corner of Goldwater Boulevard and East 1st Avenue, Old Town Scottsdale. The address is 4014 N Goldwater Blvd. Suite 101, Scottsdale, AZ.
We would very much like to give Barbara Peters an idea of how many AFIO members intend to come, so please advise as soon as possible if you plan to attend. Send your RSVP to simone@afioaz.org.

18 March 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO - AFIO Rocky Mountain Chapter hears Bryan Cunningham on "National At Risk." Talk to occur at the Air Force Academy, Falcon Club. Markle Foundation's Bryan Cunningham speaks on "Nation at Risk." Cunningham is with the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. RSVP to Tom Van Wormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

Thursday, 18 March 2010, 12 noon – 1 pm - Washington, DC - Author John Kiriakou speaks on his new book: The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror
The CIA has come under sharp criticism for its handling of 9/11 and the enhanced interrogation techniques used in Afghanistan and the Iraq War. Former CIA operative John Kiriakou, who was involved in the capture of one of Osama Bin Laden’s closest aides, Abu Zubaydah, wrote The Reluctant Spy to set the record straight. Hear his often brutally honest account of firsthand experience with the controversy over waterboarding, the pressures from both inside and outside the agency, and the planning for the Iraq War. Now a senior investigator on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations focusing on the Middle East, South Asia, and international terrorism, Kiriakou will share his insider’s view of the weaknesses and the unsung strengths of the CIA. Free! No registration required! Join the author for an informal chat and book signing at the Spy Museum. Further information at www.spymuseum.org.

20 March 2010, 2:00 p.m. - Kennebunk, Maine - The AFIO Maine Chapter hosts Dr. Terence Roehrig speaking on ASIA-PACIFIC CHALLENGES AND THE U.S. Dr. Roehrig, Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, will address economic, political, and security issues in the region and how they will affect the U.S.  He will discuss the direction of China's rise, and the roles played by India, Japan, and the two Koreas.  Dr. Roehrig travels frequently to the region doing research and will travel to Japan later this spring in connection with work on a new book.  The meeting will be held at the Kennebunk Free Library, 112 Main Street, Kennebunk.  The public is invited.  For information call 207-985-2392

Thursday, 25 March 2010, 6 p.m. - New York, NY - AFIO Metro NY Chapter hosts U.S. Secret Agent who specialized in Explosives and Codes. The AFIO New York Metro Chapter Thursday evening meeting will feature Dr. John Behling, one of the last surviving members of the forerunner agency of CIA [the Office of Strategic Services], who will tell of his training in explosives and codes, his being dropped behind enemy lines, his work with the Resistance, and the post-war years in the Occupied Zones. Of special interest is his eyewitness account of his visit to the Mauthausen Extermination Camp, and his subsequent search for escaping Nazis, hidden assets and war criminals.
Many of these experiences will be in a yet-to-be-published memoir on his distinguished wartime service.  He also spent many years working for the U.S. Department of State.
This is a first-hand account with remarkable -- and chilling -- details that no film or printed work can convey in the same manner. Do not miss it.
Location: University Club, 9th Floor. $40 pp; $20 students/military
No reservations required.
For further information contact Jerry Goodwin, Chapter President, at 347-334-1503 or afiometro@yahoo.com  

Wednesday, 31 March 2010, 8 p.m. - Coral Gables, FL - AFIO Miami Chapter hosts Keith Thomson in special reading "Once A Spy" and a special presentation on Microdrones -- or did you think it was an ordinary insect on your ceiling? Thomson will read from his spy novel: Once A Spy, at Books & Books in Coral Gables. The Microdrones [professional unmanned aerial vehicles] have offered to debut their 2.5LB drones beforehand for AFIO members, as well. Microdrones have been used to extraordinary success by police in the UK (FAA regulations are thwarting their use in the U.S.; meanwhile radio-controlled helicopters and airplanes up to 55LBs have essentially no restraints). Clearly an event not to miss. For further information contact chapter President Tom Spencer at trsmiami@aol.com

THURSDAY, 1 April 2010 - Tysons Corner, VA - National AFIO Luncheon featuring Seymour Hersh and Marc Thiessen. Full details are here.

Tuesday, 13 April 2010, 5 p.m. - Hampton Roads, VA - The AFIO Norm Forde Hampton Roads Chapter - to hear Carl Finstrom on Stella Polaris. AFIO member Carl Finstrom will present, "Stella Polaris: The Exfiltration of Finnish COMINT Material"- The evacuation of the Finnish Intelligence Service from Finland to Sweden in Sep 1944.
Finstrom is an AFIO Member and Past President, Christopher Wren Association. Stella Polaris was the code name for a secret plan developed by the Finnish Intelligence Service for their evacuation to Sweden in the final phase of World War Two. The plan was coordinated with the Swedish counterpart intelligence organizations in June 1944 after the Soviets resumed a massive offensive. By the end of June there was a real danger of a Soviet breakthrough and Soviet occupation of Finland. The Finns sought to relocate their intelligence assets to neutral Sweden so that they could continue the fight working with a significant Finnish stay-behind force. Finns stored weapons and ammunition at hundreds of locations to support a stay-behind force of at least 50,000 resistance personnel. The Stella Polaris story is of great interest to cryptologic historians. The story of the evacuation of the Finnish Military Intelligence Branch from Finland to Sweden after the signing of the ceasefire with the USSR in Sept 1944 is perhaps the most extraordinary event in the history of communications intelligence
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. RSVP: Melissa Saunders at mwsaunders@cox.net
Location: Main meeting room at Tabb Library, York County. Directions: From Norfolk take I-64 West. Merge onto US-17 North via Exit 258B toward Yorktown. Follow US-17 North approximately 2.2 miles to Victory Blvd/VA-171 East. Turn right onto Victory Blvd/VA-171 East. Turn right at the next traffic light onto Hampton Hwy/VA-134 South. Turn right at the next traffic light onto Long Green Blvd. Tabb Library is on the immediate right. It is across the street from the Victory YMCA.
From Williamsburg take I-64 East. Merge onto Victory Blvd/VA-171 East via Exit 256B. Follow Victory Blvd/VA-171 East approximately 2 miles. Turn right onto Hampton Hwy/VA-134 South. Turn right at the next traffic light onto Long Green Blvd. Tabb Library is on the immediate right. It is across the street from the Victory YMCA.

15 April 2010, 12:30 p.m. - Las Angeles, CA - The AFIO L.A. luncheon hosts Marthe Cohn -- "Behind Enemy Lines: A French Spy Inside Nazi Germany." Marthe Cohn was a member of the French First Army intelligence service during World War II and made many covert trips inside Nazi Germany. During her presentation, she will recount her missions as a French Jewish spy and how she disguised herself as a young nurse to find information about German troop movements and alert Allied commanders. Her book, Behind Enemy Lines, an outstanding memoir, is the story of an ordinary human being who, under extraordinary circumstances, became the hero her country needed her to be. Nine years ago she was awarded the Medaille Militaire, a relatively rare medal awarded for outstanding military service and given, in the past, to the likes of Winston Churchill.
She has appeared at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. and on CSPAN2.
Lunch will be served at 12:30 PM at the LMU campus for a cost of $20. Please RSVP via email AFIO_LA@Yahoo.com by no later than April 9, 2010 if you would like to attend the meeting. If directions are needed please forward an email request.

30 April 2010, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m. - Washington, DC. "The Stasi and its Foreign Intelligence Service" - Workshop by CWIHP and GHI. The German Historical Institute and The Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars hosts one day workshop on the STASI. This CWIHP-GHI workshop will be held at the Woodrow Wilson Center, One Wilson Plaza/1300 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. in Washington. There will be four panels with leading American, German, British and Canadian historians working on the Stasi and HVA: Panel 1: The Stasi and East German Society; Panel 2: The Stasi and the East German State and the SED (communist party); Panel 3: The HVA and KGB; and Panel 4: The HVA and the West, which will deal mainly with East German espionage in West Germany.
PROGRAM: Friday, April 30 (Woodrow Wilson Center) The Stasi and East German Society, with Uwe Spiekermann, GHI; Jens Gieseke, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, and Gary Bruce, Waterloo University, Canada. David Bathrick gives commentary.
The Stasi, the SED, and the GDR State - a panel with Christian Ostermann, Woodrow Wilson Ctr, Walter Süß, Birthler Agency, Berlin, and Jefferson Adams, Sarah Lawrence College.
Keynote Address: “The Stasi Legacy in Germany’s History” by Professor Konrad Jarausch, University of North Carolina
The HVA and KGB panel with Mircea Munteanu, Woodrow Wilson Ctr, Benjamin Fischer, formerly CIA History Staff, Washington, DC and Paul Maddrell, Aberystwyth University. Comment by Oleg Kalugin, KGB (ret)
The HVA and the West panel with R. Gerald Livingston, GHI, Georg Herbstritt, Birthler Agency, Berlin and Kristie Macrakis, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dirk Doerrenberg, formerly Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz.
A luncheon keynote address on the Legacy of the Stasi in German History will be delivered by Professor Konrad Jarausch of the University of North Carolina's History Department.
AFIO members are invited to participate in the discussion following panelists' presentation. but asked to register with the Wilson Center in advance, identifying themselves as AFIO members. No fee for participation is required. REGISTER by e-mail at the following address: coldwar@wilsoncenter.org.
Contact persons at the Wilson Center: Mircea. Munteanu, CWIHP Deputy Director (Mircea.Munteanu@wilsoncenter.org), or Timothy McDonnell (Timothy.McDonnell@wilsoncenter.org).
A full program outline can be provided by the Wilson Center contact persons.

For Additional Events two+ months or greater....view our online Calendar of Events

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