The Spy Who Conned Me

Must read Sunday Times (of London) story on Kevin R. Halligen, a British security consultant who conned the Washington defense and security establishment.

Halligen was indicted earlier this month in Washington on fraud charges. Apparently, everything about Halligen was a con. He passed himself off as a former British secret agent. Even his 2007 wedding to a Washington lawyer was a scam; according to the Times, the “priest” was really the caterer.

One of the guests was Andre Hollis, a lobbyist who became chief executive of Halligen’s Washington company. “It was like a global intelligence debutante ball,” he said. “And nobody knew it was fake.”

Not even the best man, Colonel John Garrett, a defence lobbyist for the blue-chip Washington law firm Patton Boggs, was let in on the secret. Nor was the most powerful guest in the room, Noel Koch, a security expert who has now become a deputy undersecretary in the defence department.

He said: “We found out later that it was not a real wedding. The priest was an actor.”

Halligen’s firm, Oakley International Group was paid $2.1 million to secure the release of two executives of Trafigura, a Dutch oil trading firm.

The executives were held in an Ivory Coast jail after a ship chartered by Trafigura dumped tons of toxic sludge in the Ivorian port of Abidjan that was blamed in 17 deaths and thousands of injuries.

Instead of freeing the Trafigura executives, the money went toward the purchase of Halligen’s mansion in Great Falls, Va.

Update: Halligen was arrested at a hotel in Oxford, England where he had been staying for months under the name Richard Hall. He is being held without bail and is awaiting extradition to the US.

Jihadis have learned from Internet pirates

AP has a story out reporting that the number of Arabic-language jihadi websites has declined markedly since the Sept. 11 attacks from 1,000 to around 50. Meanwhile, the number of English language sites sympathetic to al-Qaida has grown.

This article may fuel the growing hysteria over the Fort Hood shootings. The suspected shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, had e-mail contact with a Yemeni preacher who ran an English-language Website and called Hassan a “hero” on his blog.

It is easy to get the wrong impression from the AP story. The jihadis are much more sophisticated than this article implies.

It’s true that radical websites such as al-Qaida’s official site, alneda.com, have been shut down, but Osama bin Laden’s followers have figured out new ways to communicate with audiences in the Arabic-speaking world, which — let’s face it — supplies the overwhelming majority of recruits.

Jihadis have adopted the tools of Internet pirates who illegally share music, movies, software and porn, according to a report from West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center:

 The process works as follows. When a new official jihadist group notice, video or audio file is released, multiple users upload the file to various file-hosting websites, creating hundreds of URL links to where that file can be downloaded. A large list of links, or virtual library of hyperlinks, is then posted on multiple jihadist web forums. Once a user reads the post, they then duplicate the forum posting on another forum. This practice is welcomed and encouraged by the rest of the readers, which allows the original user to gain prestige and continue ascending in the forum’s “roster.”

These files can be easily and anonymously uploaded from Internet cafes to file-sharing sites like Rapidshare. Many of these links expire quickly or are disabled by the file-hosting company, yet the sheer number of hyperlinks uploaded makes it almost impossible to stop the message from spreading.

Read the latest issue of the CTC Sentinel here (.pdf)

Rhetoric of Rage: Limbaugh + North Korea

“We’re becoming like North Korea,” is something you often hear on talk radio in the United States.

The conservatives who dominate the AM airwaves are, of course, referring to the Democratic administration of President Obama.

To me, however, these fire-breathing conservatives echo the incendiary rhetoric issued daily by the Korean Central News Agency of DPRK, the official state news agency of the communist dictatorship:

  • North Korea: “The present approach of the Japanese government towards the past crimes is very prejudiced, narrow-minded and wicked.”
  • Rush Limbaugh: “This is a diabolical intricately woven web of deceit that is being executed and woven here, and you have been sucked right into it.”
  • North Korea: “The plan is a despicable product of the anti-DPRK policy pursued by the above-said forces that are running amuck (sic) with bloodshot eyes to find a pretext for a war of aggression on the DPRK and an extension of their strategy for a war against it.”
  • Rush Limbaugh: “The American people are being awakened, and they’re being awakened because they are finally seeing the real Barack Obama, and it’s nothing like the man they thought they elected. This is an utter, cold, mean-spirited partisan liar.”
  • North Korea: “The imperialists are driven into an uncontrollable crisis at present and the fact that the popular masses are getting awakened in a revolutionary manner is a clear proof that the doom of imperialism is coming nearer.”
  • Rush Limbaugh: “Whether Obama is diabolical, deceitful or just plainly incompetent doesn’t matter. The end result is the same: rotten.”
  • North Korea: “The U.S., in particular, is whipping together pro-American conservative forces forsaken by history in a desperate bid to help them wrest ‘power’ through the forthcoming ‘presidential election’ at any cost and thus tide over the crisis of its colonial rule and revive the rotten politics.”

The Story of Semtex

The BBC is airing a fascinating radio documentary on Semtex, one of the world’s most lethal explosives.

Extremely powerful and easily concealed, Semtex is a favorite weapon of terrorists. It was Semtex that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 residents of  Lockerbie, Scotland.

Semtex takes its name from the town of Semtin in the Czech Republic where it is still produced today.

Tons of it were shipped — at Moscow’s approval — to the North Vietnamese Army. When the Vietnam War ended, a new customer was found: Libya.

No more than 11 ounces of the yellowish explosive brought down Pan Am 103, yet Czech President Vaclav Havel revealed that 1,000 tons of it was shipped to Libya — a claim the company disputes.

Libya, in turn, supplied Semtex to terrorist groups like Black September and the IRA. The IRA began receiving significant quantities of Semtex after the 1984 murder of a policewoman in London led to a breakdown in UK-Libya relations.

The “Semtex families” are a group of 147 British families who lost relatives and loved ones in the 1970s and 1980s to IRA bombs packed with the plastic explosive. They are now seeking $1 billion in compensation from Qadaffi’s regime.

The BBC finds the Explosia company that produces Semtex and is very touchy about what it calls the “hysteria” that surrounds Semtex. (Read Explosia’s 10 myths about Semtex.)

Listen to the documentary here.

Are Embedded Journalists Lawful Targets?

Browsing the Internets, I came across an article by Douglas W. Moore in the July issue of Army Lawyer that tackles the difficult question of whether embedded journalists can be considered lawful enemy targets.

To help clarify when an embedded journalist’s activities will result in a loss of protections, this paper recommends three criteria to aid in this evaluation: (1) the integration of war correspondents into military information operations, (2) the eroding distinction between PAO [Public Affairs Office] and war correspondents, and (3) the loss of reporter objectivity on the battlefield.

The Geneva Conventions declare that journalists covering armed conflicts should be treated as civilians, whether they are accredited by the military or not, assuming “they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians.”

According to Army Lawyer, embedded journalists run the risk of losing protections because they are increasingly becoming part of military “information operations” or IO.

Overall, IO seeks to use war correspondent news coverage to support positive public relations, build public support, and support successful information operations against the enemy….

Under “operational security” or OPSEC rules, the military controls what embedded reporters can or can’t report. It uses them for “psychological operations” (PSYOP) targeting foreign audiences, particularly during combat operations. Finally, public affairs officers use embedded press to reach targets back home.

The integrated nature of the embedded press system, combined with this military function, dramatically increases the likelihood that a journalist’s activities will be defined as directly supporting combat operations.

The full article is available here (.pdf).