CIA

Ottawa declassifies new details about CIA’s role in resettling Nazi war criminals in Canada

Ottawa declassifies new details about CIA’s role in resettling Nazi war criminals in Canada

The government has declassified portions of a report on the resettlement of Nazi war criminals that reveal new details of how dozens of people, including those suspected of collaboration with the Third Reich, were helped to come to Canada after the Second World War through a secret CIA program.

The newly declassified information sheds more light on the role American intelligence agencies played in facilitating the settlement of Nazi collaborators in Canada, in some cases by providing false identity papers. Sections of the report kept secret for decades also reveal new specifics about the number of people thought to have entered the country with U.S. covert help.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, CIA

Ex-US spy who stashed gold bars in his home admits to $200m scam

Ex-US spy who stashed gold bars in his home admits to $200m scam

A former CIA officer who was arrested after authorities found hundreds of gold bars stashed in his home has admitted to defrauding the US government in a sprawling $200m (£151m) scam involving fake contracts and real estate.

David Rush, 49, is required to pay restitution to the government and forfeit luxury real estate, cars, watches and other assets tied to his crime as part of the plea deal.

Rush also confessed to providing secrets to a foreign government, which could have caused “grave damage” to national security.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, USA

CIA Files Raise New Questions About Smartmatic and Venezuela’s Elections

CIA Files Raise New Questions About Smartmatic and Venezuela’s Elections

The CIA has declassified its files on the Venezuelan electronic voting machine company, Smartmatic, appearing to confirm widely held suspicions that the company used complex algorithms to fix election results that helped keep Venezuela’s leftist regime in power for two decades. The firm that’s been newly based in the UK now provides election machines for California’s populous Orange County.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, Venezuela

The CIA Operative Who Spied on the U.A.E.—and Played a Role in Its AI Win

The CIA Operative Who Spied on the U.A.E.—and Played a Role in Its AI Win

Jonny Gannon had one final mission.

The longtime CIA operative had exfiltrated the families of spies from the most repressive of Middle Eastern regimes and tattooed the word “ARGONAUT,” an homage to seafaring heroes from Greek mythology, across his right forearm. By 2023 he had a Washington desk job with a rank equivalent to an Army two-star general.

That’s when the director tapped him to return to the field.

His assignment: Find out whether the “spy sheikh” could be trusted with some of America’s most cutting-edge technology.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, Espionage, UAE

CIA officer who had millions in gold bars accused of creating fake spy program

CIA officer who had millions in gold bars accused of creating fake spy program

The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.

David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, Crime, WTF?

CIA denies reports of secret cartel war in Mexico

CIA denies reports of secret cartel war in Mexico

The Central Intelligence Agency vehemently denied reports of its participation in deadly operations against drug cartels in Mexico.

On Tuesday, CNN published a report alleging that the CIA had vastly expanded its operations in Mexico against drug cartels, including getting directly involved in assassinations of cartel figures. The most notable was its alleged facilitation of a car bombing on a busy Mexican highway that killed Francisco “El Payin” Beltran on March 28. CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyons denied the report in strong terms, accusing the outlet of endangering American lives.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, Mexican drug cartels, Mexico, USA

Eulogy for the CIA Factbook: The free standard for world facts is gone

Eulogy for the CIA Factbook: The free standard for world facts is gone

If you attended school any time after the Nixon administration, then you likely beheld at some point the CIA World Factbook, a map and reference manual of Planet Earth and its inhabitants upon which nearly everyone could agree.

Maybe you read parts of it from a floppy disk or a CD-ROM for that social studies project due tomorrow. Or scanned its list of countries for Latvia, because that is the country you are representing next week in Model U.N. Even better, you wandered the earth in your imagination as you held the physical Factbook in your own hands, unfolding its maps and understanding, perhaps for the first time, that the thumbs-up gesture your friends flash each other is considered an obscene insult in parts of the Middle East, Europe and Argentina.

A pity, as a blogger I have relied on it on many occasions.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, USA, WTF?

Biased Spies: CIA rescinds or revises 19 intelligence reports over political bias, bad tradecraft

In a dramatic repudiation, CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Friday rescinded or revised 19 intelligence reports the agency produced dating back to the Obama era because they were politically biased or used poor spy tradecraft, including one analysis suggesting that women who pursue traditional motherhood were at danger of becoming violent extremists.

A senior CIA official told Just The News the reports were initially flagged during a review by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, then reviewed by career agency officials before being retracted, recalled or revised.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Deep State", CIA, WTF?

Inside the CIA’s secret mission to sabotage Afghanistan’s opium

In a decade-long covert operation, the U.S. spy agency dropped modified poppy seeds in an attempt to degrade the potency of Afghanistan’s billion-dollar opium crop.

In 20 years of grinding war in Afghanistan, the United States dropped a multitude of weapons from the skies: Millions of tons of ordnance. Hellfire missiles launched from Predator drones. Even the “Mother of All Bombs,” the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in existence. And, amid the more conventional projectiles, tiny poppy seeds. By the billions.

On and off for over a decade, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an audacious highly classified program to covertly manipulate Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop, blanketing Afghan farmers’ fields with specially modified seeds that germinated plants containing almost none of the chemicals that are refined into heroin, The Washington Post has learned.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inAfghanistan, CIA, USA

CIA playing ‘most important part’ in US strikes in the Caribbean, sources say

The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations. Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.

The agency’s central role in the boat strikes has not previously been disclosed. Donald Trump confirmed last Wednesday that he had authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela, but not what the agency would be doing.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA

The CIA’s Epstein problem: The agency almost certainly contacted him

By law, the Central Intelligence Agency isn’t allowed to operate domestically in the United States. But that reassuring civic factoid has long come with a big asterisk: going back to its earliest years, the agency has, in fact, interfered in homeland affairs to combat dissident movements (historically, from the Left), to defend its institutional prerogatives — and, increasingly, to recruit assets among the financial elite.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA

The CIA’s Most Dangerous Weapon: Books

Forget James Bond. George Minden was the real thing. A Romanian aristocrat by birth, he could have spent his days in manor houses, sipping brandy and debating politics. Instead, he entered the world of espionage. A CIA operative, with a mind like a dagger, he moved without drawing attention, deliberate and invisible. In 1983, while the world braced for nuclear war, Minden was planning something truly subversive. He would flood communist Poland with forbidden literature. Not leaflets. Not propaganda. Real stories. The kind that rattled regimes. The kind that made people think.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA

How Aldrich Ames became the US’s most damaging double agent

Aldrich Ames spent nearly a decade selling secret information to the Soviet Union, compromising more than 100 clandestine operations, and leading to the deaths of at least 10 Western intelligence assets. On 28 April 1994, the double agent was jailed for life. In February of that year, the BBC spoke to one of the spies who was betrayed by Ames, but who lived to tell the tale.

In 1985, Soviet agents working for the CIA suddenly began to disappear. One by one, these Western intelligence sources were picked up by the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, interrogated and, very often, executed.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCIA, USA