Category: Spooks
India to join NSA's eavesdropping program?
India and the U.S. will sign an intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism pact, The Times of India reports as PM Manmohan Singh begins his three-day state visit to Washington on Monday.
Details of the pact are not being disclosed yet, but such was the importance of the agreement that CIA Director Leon Panetta flew down to New Delhi last week to discuss details with his Indian counterparts before the fine print could be drawn up. The agreement could involve exchanging and stationing more intelligence personnel in the two countries, including mobile units, to facilitate better interaction.
The Times describes this as an “intelligence upgrade” involving unspecified ”technical means” supplied by the US.
An unnamed Indian official tells India’s DNA News:
“We are looking at an agreement that could involve exchanging and stationing more intelligence personnel in the two countries. We are also seeking technology to counter terrorism, the National Investigation Agency is looking at US equipment to trace the location of mobile phone calls,” he added.
America’s National Security Agency has an expensive programme that analyses calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity. It has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.
Anwar al-Awlaki, infidel
An insightful post on Jihadica reveals that Anwar al-Awlaki, a former San Diego imam who ministered to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was once denounced as an infidel (kafir) and part of a CIA plot.
Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who is said to live in Yemen, has been in the news lately because he was in e-mail contact with suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, whom he recently praised as a “hero.”
As I wrote earlier, Awlaki was the imam at the Rabat mosque in San Diego until mid-2000. Two future hijackers also attended the Rabat mosque. The Sept. 11 Commission reported the two hijackers “reportedly respected Awlaki as a religious figure and developed a close relationship with him.”
One of Awlaki’s sermons at the Rabat mosque came to the attention of London-based jihadi Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, a radical imam who was imprisoned in 2003 for soliciting murder and eventually deported from the UK for his links to one of the London Tube bombers.
This San Diego sermon so outraged al-Faisal that he devoted an entire sermon to it and ultimately declared Awlaki an infidel. One of al-Faisal’s followers can be heard in the recording suggesting that Awlaki should be killed.
Al-Faisal’s complaint about al-Awlaki is basically twofold: First, that al-Awlaki’s criteria for declaring takfir (unbeliever) was overly restrictive—someone would have to directly refute the Quran or blatantly denounce central tenets of Islam in order to receive that designation. And, second, that al-Awlaki argued that only God should judge Muslims. Al-Faisal argues that this non-judgmental understanding of Islam is pushed by the CIA in order to limit violent activism.
Al-Faisal’s sermon is titled “CIA Islam – Sheikh Faisal’s Takfeer of Anwar Awlaki.” It’s available here.
For a would-be jihadi, this sermon should been a devastating blow. Yet, today it’s Awlaki who’s seen as the dangerous radical warping Muslim winds.
The lesson, Brian Fishman says, is not that Awlaki is a moderate but that “the world of jihadi ideologues is never as simple as it seems.”
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)
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.)
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