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Written on June 12th, 2009 by adminno shouts
The West German cop whose shooting of an unarmed protester in 1967 changed the country forever has been unmasked as an East German spy by historians going through Stasi files, the New York Times reports. The shooting sparked a wide, sometimes violent left-wing protest movement many believe spawned Germany’s current liberal disposition. The revelation that the “fascist cop” was a socialist spy has rocked the country.
Many now ask whether the policeman was ordered to shoot a protester by Stasi agents hoping to spark dissent. “The biggest milestone on the road toward violence was not what people thought it was,” said a former editor of Der Spiegel. “The pure fact that he was an agent from the East changes a lot, whether he acted on orders or not.” The policeman, now 81, acknowledges belonging to the East German Communist Party but maintains the shooting was accidental.
Written on June 12th, 2009 by adminno shouts
The American traitor John Walker Jr. once said the best way to hide a lie is by wrapping it in layers of truth. It’s a trick that not only serves spies, but also clever Hollywood scriptwriters. Such is the case with The Good Shepherd, a cloak-and-dagger thriller that purports to tell the story of the Central Intelligence Agency’s early days as seen through the eyes and career of Edward Wilson, the movie’s main character. Played by Matt Damon, Wilson is patterned after the legendary spy-catcher, James Jesus Angleton.
But how much of the movie is true and how much is Hollywood sizzle?
Few CIA spooks have received as much attention as Angleton. None has ever been as controversial. His critics claim his paranoid-fueled hunt for a Soviet KGB mole burrowed inside the CIA almost destroyed the agency when Angleton ran its counter-intelligence operations from 1948 until he was forced to resign in 1975. His admirers insist Angleton’s unflinching eye kept the CIA from being penetrated by skilled KGB agents during the height of the Cold War.
A tall, stooped chain-smoker, who usually dressed in black and whose hobbies were writing poetry and growing orchids, Angleton was known by the codename “Mother” and has been the inspiration behind characters in numerous spy novels. His controversial career has been recounted in a half dozen nonfiction books too, so it is not surprising that veteran scriptwriter, Eric Roth, turned to Angleton’s life story when penning The Good Shepherd.
READ THE REST OF THE STORY AT truTV.com
Written on June 12th, 2009 by adminno shouts
The Middle East’s espionage wars are heating up after Lebanon’s arrest of more than a dozen alleged Israeli spies, and dire warnings from Jerusalem that Arab groups are trying to use the Internet to infiltrate the Jewish state.
Officials in Beirut say they struck a strategic blow against Israel with the recent arrests of 15 people — 13 Lebanese and two Palestinians — who they contend were gathering intelligence on Hezbollah positions, leaders’ movements and infrastructure targets. Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants and Israeli forces fought an inconclusive war in 2006 along the Lebanese-Israeli border and both sides have since been preparing for the possibility of another.
(more…)
Written on June 9th, 2009 by adminno shouts
Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, of Washington, were charged a few days ago with having spied for Cuba for the past 30 years. Until his retirement in 2007, Walter was a high-ranking analyst for the U.S. State Department with top-secret clearance. Gwendolyn, who worked in a local bank, allegedly passed along secret documents to other Cuban agents by exchanging shopping carts in supermarkets.
Both have pleaded not guilty. The Justice Department says the information they passed along was “incredibly serious.” (more…)
Written on May 24th, 2009 by adminno shouts
John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell) (born 19 October 1931) is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
The son of Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–1975) and Olive (Gassy) Cornwell, John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset, England on 19 October 1931. He has a brother Tony, a retired advertising executive, who is 2 years older. The actress Charlotte Cornwell is his younger sister, and the former Washington bureau chief of the Independent newspaper, Rupert Cornwell, is his younger half-brother. Le Carré states he did not know his mother, who abandoned him at the age of five, until he was reacquainted with her at the age of 21. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who had been jailed for insurance fraud and was constantly in debt. According to one biography:
His father, Ronnie, made and lost his fortune a number of times due to elaborate confidence tricks and schemes which landed him in prison on at least one occasion. This was one of the factors that led to his fascination with secrets. His father was also the inspiration for the lead character in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977). (more…)
Written on May 24th, 2009 by adminno shouts
Robert Ludlum (May 25, 1927 New York City – March 12, 2001 Naples, Florida) was an American author of 25 thriller novels. There are more than 290 million copies of his books in print, and they have been translated into 32 languages. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.
Some of Ludlum’s novels have been made into films and mini-series, including The Osterman Weekend, The Holcroft Covenant, The Apocalypse Watch, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. A non-Ludlum book supposedly inspired by his unused notes, Covert One: The Hades Factor, has also been made into a mini-series. The Bourne movies, starring Matt Damon in the title role, have been commercially and critically successful (The Bourne Ultimatum won three Academy Awards in 2008), although the story lines depart significantly from the source material.
Ludlum died in 2001 of a subdural hematoma. (more…)
Written on May 24th, 2009 by adminno shouts
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was born in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States. He attended Loyola Blakefield in Towson, Maryland, graduating with the class of 1965. He studied English Literature at Loyola College in Baltimore, graduating in 1969. Though he wanted to serve in the United States military, he was rejected after failing a required eye exam in the ROTC. Before making his literary debut, he spent some time running an independent insurance agency.
In 1993, Tom Clancy joined a group of investors that included Peter Angelos and bought the Baltimore Orioles from Eli Jacobs. In 1998, he reached an agreement to purchase the Minnesota Vikings, but had to abandon the deal due to the cost of his divorce settlement.
On June 26, 1999, Clancy, at age 53, married freelance journalist Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, who at 32 years of age was 21 years his junior.”Llewellyn is the first cousin of Colin Powell, who originally introduced the couple to each other. (more…)
Written on May 21st, 2009 by adminno shouts
As a gifted Oxford university student, Jenifer Hart was determined to succeed in the male dominated world of Whitehall’s top civil servants. In 1933, just a few years before coming third from the top of the Civil Service entrance exam — the first woman to do so — she joined the Communist Party. Student friends promptly advised her to drop her official membership and go underground as a “sleeper”.
In her biography, Ask Me No More, published in 1998, she wrote: “I was unclear what, if anything, I as a civil servant would do for the British Communist Party, but I think I supposed that I would occasionally pass them useful information.”
In those days there were no security checks on those joining the Civil Service and her political allegiance was never discovered. However, she admitted having six meetings in just her first few years with shady party members who refused to reveal their true identity.
She had served as private secretary to a Permanent-Under Secretary and in the Home Office where she worked on telephone intercepts, invariably of suspected communists. But it was while at that department she was twice interviewed by Peter Wright, the MI5 agent and later author of Spycatcher, about the company she kept. In 1947, she left the Civil Service. Four years later she wrote The British Police, an account of the history and structure of the force. (more…)
Written on May 21st, 2009 by adminno shouts
An enormous electronic espionage programme run from servers in China has been used to spy on computers in more than 100 countries, according to two reports published at the weekend.
The reports, published by the universities of Cambridge and Toronto, detail a “murky realm” where cyber spooks infiltrate email, take over humble desktop computers and use them to spy on organisations, individuals and governments.
The reports name the system GhostNet, and claim that it has been used to attack governments in south and south-east Asia as well as the offices of the Dalai Lama. In two years, the reports suggest, the operation infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries. (more…)
Written on May 21st, 2009 by adminno shouts
The Duquesne Spy Ring is the largest espionage case in United States history that ended in convictions. On January 2, 1942, 33 members of a German spy ring headed by Frederick or Fritz Joubert Duquesne were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison. They were brought to justice after a lengthy espionage investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Of those arrested on the charge of espionage, 19 pleaded guilty. The 14 men who entered pleas of not guilty were brought to jury trial in Federal District Court, Brooklyn, New York, on September 3, 1941; and they were all found guilty on December 13, 1941.
The German spies that formed the Duquesne spy ring were placed in key jobs in the United States to get information that could be used in the event of war and to carry out acts of sabotage: one person opened a restaurant and used his position to get information from his customers; another person worked on an airline so that he could report allied ships that were crossing the Atlantic Ocean; others in the ring worked as delivery people so that they could deliver secret messages alongside normal messages. (more…)
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