This film presents an account of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activities that had previously been covert, including actions in Iran, Vietnam, Laos, the Congo, Cuba, and Guatemala. The film includes interviews with CIA director Allen Dulles and Dick Bissel.
Now it has come to light that British spies looked at an even more audacious way of derailing the man behind the German war machine – by giving him female sex hormones.
Agents planned to smuggle doses of oestrogen into his food to make him less aggressive and more like his docile younger sister Paula, who worked as a secretary.
Spies working for the British were close enough to Hitler to have access to his food, said Professor Brian Ford, who discovered the plot.
He explained that oestrogen was chosen because it was tasteless and would have a slow and subtle effect, meaning it would pass Hitler’s food testers unnoticed.
Speaking about the scheme, Prof Ford, a science writer and fellow of Cardiff University, said: “There was an Allied plan that they would smuggle oestrogen into Hitler’s food and change his sex so he would become more feminine and less aggressive.
U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role.
Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.
Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.
The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.
One advantage of using “secret” forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.
Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed “things that the previous administration did not.”
‘More access’
Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush‘s administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“We have a lot more access,” a second military official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”
The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’ ”
The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, “we are doing all three,” the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss them on the record.
The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States “will not merely respond after the fact” of a terrorist attack but will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.”
That rhetoric is not much different than Bush’s pledge to “take the battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four branches of the armed forces, became a frontline counterterrorism weapon for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Read the rest of the story at: Washington Post
This latest drone, developed by researchers at University of Pennsylvania, can perform precision flying maneuvers that would deliver a payload into the open window of house. The payload could potentially consist of a CCTV camera or a small bomb.
Source: cbs4.com
A CBS4 I-Team investigation into your safety and security raises troubling questions about your cell phone and how it might be used against you. We’re not talking about how a cell phone and its records could be used in a court of law, although that’s a possibility too, but how it can be used as a tool to spy on your life by people meant to do you harm.
What’s worse, the technology is so advanced that experts say people can spy on you using your cell phone and you will have no idea it’s even happening.
I-Team investigator Stephen Stock spent the last six months researching how this technology works.
Talking, texting and tweeting you see it all the time.
If they appear to be everywhere, the US Census bureau says they truly are. In a nation of 309 Million people officials estimate there are as many as 200 million cell phones.
The majority of Americans use all these cell phones to talk, text or tweet.
But all this high tech communication hides a dark and troubling danger.
“I don’t think the general public is aware how insidious this can be,” said private investigator and cell phone spyware expert Tim Wilcox.
Wilcox owns and runs one of the premier private investigative companies in the country, International Investigators, Inc. International Investigators does a lot of things. But one the company’s specialties and expertise is uncovering and exposing hidden spy tools like bugs in cell phones and other appliances.
Click here to go to the International Investigators’ website.
“It takes about 90 seconds to download the spyware and you’re in business,” said Wilcox of some versions of this software that can be loaded onto someone’s cell phone.
The spyware is a lurking danger that turns your cell phone into a secret listening device, an instrument used to spy against you. Worse yet, you’ll likely never know it is on your phone.
“There could be anywhere from three to five or six million cell phones that are infected with spyware (at any one time),” said Wilcox.
This spyware, otherwise called malware, can be found through a simple search on the Internet. The software can be loaded onto your phone in a matter of minutes or even seconds. Once it is on your phone and operating it can turn your cell phone against you.
“I put $70 malware onto a phone (for demonstration) through blue tooth and then onto this computer,” said Daniel Smith, an expert in uncovering and defeating this type of spyware.
Smith, a recent graduate of Purdue University’s College of Technology, is an expert at finding and getting rid of malware on all kinds of computers and cell phones. Smith works for International Investigators, Inc. And he travels the country investigating complaints of people who believe their cell phones are being used to spy on them.
“That’s the file name that’s controlling my phone,” Smith said as he showed the I-Team a small piece of computer code, four short lines, hidden among millions of lines of computer programming language that run his cell phone and all its applicatons.
Smith demonstrated for the CBS4 I-Team how easy it can be to install and listen in and how hard it is to detect that the malware is even present.
“This is what we’re looking for?” asked I-Team investigator Stephen Stock pointing to the computer screen. “Four lines of code?”
“Four lines of code,” said Smith. “That is the file in the computer, the spyware.”
These four lines of instructions hide a program that allows the person who installed it on your phone to take every bit of information from your cell phone, your pictures, your personal addresses, your data, your life.
“Now you have a list of everything that’s on my phone,” said Smith as he showed how the spyware quickly downloaded everything from his cell phone for the I-Team to view on another, disconnected computer.
To find out exactly how this all works, the CBS4 I-Team bought and installed several versions of spyware on anchor Jawan Strader’s blackberry. We did all of this with his knowledge and participation.
During the installation and running of some versions of the software the I-Team ran into several glitches. Sometimes the software allowed us to “spy” and sometimes it didn’t.
The I-Team discovered this type of spyware doesn’t always work on all cell phones. The older and less sophisticated the phone, apparently the harder it is to use them to “spy.”
But once the I-Team got the software working, the capability was scary. The I-Team could read all of Jawan’s e-mails. The I-Team read all of his text messages.
I-Team investigator Stephen Stock also got alerts on his cell phone every time Jawan got a call, an e-mail or a text. That way Stock could monitor Jawan’s incoming communication at all times.
And even though Jawan met meeting behind closed doors with news director Cesar Aldama and assistant news director Nick Bourne, even with the blackberry turned off, investigator Stock could still dial in and listen to the conversation while standing several miles away.
And the closed-door meetings’ participants would never have known that Stock was listening had the I-Team not told them. Remember the cell phone was off. Despite that, Stock was able to use the spyware to dial in and listen using the Blackberry’s speaker feature. Experts say that same thing can be done using a cell phone’s camera feature.
The spyware also allows someone to listen in on cell phone calls in real time, as they are happening.
The I-Team also used the spyware to track our expert, Daniel Smith’s, movements in real time. All while he was in Indiana, as the I-Team sat in Miami.
All of this is illegal in the United States without a court warrant. However, this spyware software is sold on the Internet by offshore companies.
Our experts say as many as 5 to 6% of all cell phones in the US may have once had or now have this spyware on them.
“This is a stack of the complaints we get from people worried about their phones being infected with spyware,” said Tim Wilcox as he showed the I-Team a thick folder filled with e-mails and letters from people complaining that someone apparently is spying on them.
“And you get three or four of these a week?” asked I-Team investigator Stock.
“We get three to four every day,” replied Wilcox.
To learn more about the risks associated with spyware on your cell phone the I-Team also traveled to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, to talk to one of the world’s experts on cyber-security, Richard Mislan.
“It (the cell phone) becomes a monitor of you and the use of your phone,” said Mislan, Assistant Professor at Purdue’s College of Technology.
For more on Purdue’s College of Technology’s click here.
Assistant Professor Mislan also serves on the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Task Force, is Editor of Small Scale Digital Device Forensics Journal and is director of Mobile Forensics World.
Mislan and his students at Purdue’s College of Technology research just about anything you can think of when it comes to cell phones.
Mislan says this spyware technology ability to spy is limited only by your phone’s capabilities.
“The phones are getting more advanced,” said Mislan. “And so when that happens obviously there to be had on those phone. And so say we added a video at this point or a video camera option on this phone. Well maybe now there’s an exploit that allows me to say ‘open up that video camera and let me record everything happening right now.’”
Mislan’s office is filled with old, used phones used in his research. Some of the old phones date back to the beginning of cell phones. Others are the most advanced, high tech mobile tools on the market.
Mislan said he worries that the public and even government regulators don’t realize the safety and security risks this spyware poses to the public.
“Eventually something is going to happen for us to really step back (and assess and do something about this),” said Mislan.
While he doesn’t like to talk about his clients and said there are things he is prohibited from saying, research papers published by Mislan show he and his team have done work for the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and military intelligence.
As for the risk to the public posed by this technology, Mislan speaks freely and unequivocally.
“The more high profile phones you go, the smarter they are, the more data that can be exploited,” said Mislan.
In fact, the federal government is using this technology to check out American citizens without a warrant.
The I-Team learned of a half dozen cases across the country in states as varied as New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania, where federal magistrates were asked to throw out cases because federal agents had tracked people in real time through their cell phone. In these cases this cell phone monitoring took place without a hearing, without a warrant without even legal probable cause.
One of the cases has now gone to a Federal Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania.
“It’s an incredibly intrusive thing for the government to be able to track you,” said Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stanley heads the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Libertiesheadquarters in Washington, D.C. The ACLU has joined some of the court cases listed above in fighting some of the federal prosecutors’ actions.
“It’s not that hard if you’re a bad guy then they can get a warrant on you. If you’re not a bad guy then why do they want to track you?” said Stanley.
Stanley, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have joined efforts in at least two federal cases trying to stop this use of spying on citizens through cell phones without a court order.
“The government is trying to claim they should be able to get location information about your phone both where you’ve been in the past and also in some cases tracking you in real time without going through the Fourth Amendment,” said Stanley. “And without showing a probable cause that you’re involved in wrongdoing and getting a warrant.”
Click here for a link to the Electronic Frontier’s Foundation and a listing of the cases in question.
So far, in all but one case the federal magistrates, judges, even an appeals court, have ruled against the federal investigators and for requiring proof of probable cause.
“If I told somebody back in 1975, ‘You know what, in 30 years every American practically is going to be carrying a tracking device with them that tells the government everywhere they go live and in real time,’” said Stanley. “That person would have said I guess that means the Soviet Union is going to win the Cold War.”
While the country was embroiled in a national debate over excessive government surveillance in 1974, President Gerald Ford authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance, according to a classified memo recently obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The memo, signed Dec. 19, 1974, was issued just one month before the Senate established an 11-member panel, known as the Church Committee, to investigate government surveillance programs. The Church Committee would ultimately uncover other unconstitutional spying activities, such as that conducted by the National Security Agency under the rubric of Operation Shamrock. Two days after the memo was signed, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, writing in The New York Times, disclosed a covert government spying program that focused on monitoring political activists in the U.S.
Ford became president after Richard Nixon’s resignation in the wake of the Watergate spying scandal, and he later supported passage of the pro-privacy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which placed restrictions on wiretapping and required law enforcement to obtain permission from a special court to conduct domestic intelligence surveillance.
But according to the recently released top-secret memo, just two years earlier, Ford had secretly authorized Attorney General William B. Saxbe “to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Ford wrote in the memo to Saxbe that he had “been advised by you [Saxbe] and by the Department of State that such surveillance is consistent with the Constitution, laws and treaties of the United States.”
“This could be Bush after 9/11 or Obama after becoming president, but it’s President Ford 35 years ago, coping with Cold War struggles,” John Laprise, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, told the center. “It’s really a stunning document that raises all sorts of questions.”
Ford’s order authorized surveillance for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, and would have involved spying on Americans or foreigners in the U. S. who were suspected of spying for foreign countries or foreign-based political groups. The open-ended surveillance authority could only be revoked by Ford or by order of a future president.
It’s not known to what extent the surveillance might have involved U.S. citizens or whether there was a specific incident or investigation that prompted the memo. In the memo, Ford writes that he “carefully reviewed the issues raised in your request for confirmation of authority and delegation with respect to warrantless electronic surveillance within the United States.”
The surveillance had to be in service of several objectives — to protect the United States against attacks by a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence that was deemed to be essential to national security, or to obtain information that the secretary of state or the national security adviser deemed necessary to foreign affairs.
Ford wrote that the warrantless surveillance would only be authorized with the personal approval of the attorney general “upon submission of a written request by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation providing complete justification for the conduct of such surveillance, including identification of the agency and presidential appointee initiating the request” and that only “the minimum physical intrusion necessary to obtain the information sought will be used.”
The National Archives obtained the memo, which it shared with the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in California. A previous, slightly redacted version of the memo was released in 2006.
A federal judge ruled last week that the George W. Bush administration violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act when the NSA eavesdropped on the telephone conversations of two American lawyers who represented a now-defunct Saudi charity.
Source: Wired
Canadian researchers have uncovered a vast “Shadow Network” of online espionage based in China that used seemingly harmless means such as e-mail and Twitter to extract highly sensitive data from computers around the world.
Stolen documents recovered in a year-long investigation show the hackers have breached the servers of dozens of countries and organizations, taking everything from top-secret files on missile systems in India to confidential visa applications, including those of Canadians travelling abroad.
The findings, which are part of a report that will be made public today in Toronto, will expose one of the biggest online spy rings ever cracked. Written by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, the Ottawa-based security firm SecDev Group and a U.S. cyber sleuthing organization known as the Shadowserver Foundation, the report is expected to be controversial.
The researchers have found a global network of “botnets,” computers controlled remotely and made to report to servers in China. Along with those servers, the investigators located where the hackers stashed their stolen files, allowing a glimpse into what the spy ring is looking for.
“Essentially we went behind the backs of the attackers and picked their pockets,” said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, which investigated the spy ring.
The report, titled Shadows in the Cloud, comes one year after the same team discovered a spy ring with links to China that it dubbed GhostNet. Using information gleaned from that investigation, investigators followed a trail of websites that led to a much larger operation, also with links to China.
“Is the buyer paying the thief to go after this stuff, or is the thief doing it themselves because they know they can find a buyer? ”— Rafal Rohozinski, co-author of the report
The report is careful not to conclude the Chinese government is behind the operation, since it is difficult to tell who is orchestrating the attacks. Last year, the Chinese government denied any involvement in GhostNet after the researchers uncovered nearly 1,300 infected computers in 103 countries linked to servers in China.
But computers belonging to exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, who is denounced by China, have been the most compromised.
Almost every e-mail sent to or from the Dalai Lama’s offices in 2009 has shown up in the files, the report says. Nearby India has also taken the brunt of the cyber attacks, with numerous secret government documents recovered by the Canadian researchers. They include 78 documents related to the financing of military projects in India, details of live fire exercises and missile projects, and two documents marked “secret” belonging to the national security council.
Sensitive data from 16 countries, such as visa applications by Canadian citizens, were also recovered. It is believed the hackers accessed those files through computers at India’s embassies in Kabul, Dubai, Nigeria and Moscow, which were corrupted.
Rafal Rohozinski, a principal of the SecDev Group and a principal investigator and co-author of the report, said such a collection of sensitive information represents a new era in online spying. A decade ago, hackers generally looked for quick paydays – for example, by blocking access to a gambling site and demanding a ransom. But the Shadow Network operation exposes much bigger game: information that, if it isn’t being collected by governments, could be sold to the state.
“It’s like the world of art theft, where you steal things that have a very high value, so long as you can find a buyer,” Mr. Rohozinski said.
“So the question of course is, who’s the buyer? Is the buyer paying the thief to go after this stuff, or is the thief doing it themselves because they know they can find a buyer? That’s one of those things that we don’t really have a good answer for.”
A small number of computers at the University of Western Ontario were also found to be connected to the network, and potentially used to surrender files, although it is not clear how they were affected. Similarly, computers at New York University and Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania were also linked to the infected network.
The Shadow Network structure was ingenious for its simplicity. Command servers, which are used to issue instructions to computers – such as “send me all of your documents” – connected to victims through a variety of seemingly innocent networks such as Google groups, Yahoo e-mail and Twitter accounts. Those intermediaries were used to relay links or files to a recipient in a target organization. Once the user clicks on the link or opens an attachment in an infected e-mail, the computer relays a beacon to the command server, which instructs it to start sending files to a dump zone.
The revelations are a warning to governments, Mr. Deibert said, since countries are only as strong as their weakest link in a global data network. So while files may be safe in paper form in a locked cabinet, as soon as nations begin exchanging data electronically, cracks can be exploited, as they appear to have been with India.
“Unfortunately, Canada has no cyber security strategy, although one’s been promised for many years,” Mr. Deibert said. “We have no foreign policy for cyberspace either, which is mind boggling, considering how important this domain is for us.”
Source: The Globe and Mail
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a study of US “information operations” after a Pentagon official allegedly set up a spy network with private contractors, a spokesman said on Tuesday.
A small team of senior military and defense officials will “conduct a quick look assessment” and report their findings within 15 days, press secretary Geoff Morrell told a news conference.
He said the assessment would look at the role of private contractors in what the military calls information operations, which covers a range of efforts including psychological warfare and public relations.
The study was “designed to provide the secretary with a factual baseline from which to determine whether or not systematic problems exist and if so, proper scope and focus of subsequent corrective action,” Morrell said.
He said a separate Pentagon investigation was examining allegations that a Defense Department official had hired private contractors in an unofficial spy ring to help with manhunts of militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The official reportedly set up the network under the guise of an information-gathering program.
“There is an ongoing investigation by investigative bodies in this building including the IG (Inspector General) in the particulars of that case,” Morrell said.
The allegations were reported first in The New York Times.
Some US officials told the paper they were concerned that the Defense Department employee, Michael Furlong, was running an “off-the-books” spy operation, and were not sure who condoned and supervised his work.
It was possible that Furlong?s network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to gather information about the region, according to the paper.
Gates on Monday said the role of private contractors in collecting intelligence in the field was “something I need to know more about.”
Congress approved about 520 million dollars for “information operations” for fiscal 2010 and takes “a great deal of interest” in the subject, Morrell said.
A declassified Pentagon document written in 2003 stressed the importance of information operations, referring to efforts to plant stories in foreign media and plans to destroy enemy computer networks if necessary.
The document, “Information Operations Roadmap,” was signed by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and released in 2006.
MI5 is worried about sex. In a 14-page document distributed last year to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions, titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” the famed British security service described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businesspeople over sexual relationships. The document, as the London Times reported in January, explicitly warns that Chinese intelligence services are trying to cultivate “long-term relationships” and have been known to “exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships … to pressurise individuals to co-operate with them.”
This latest report on Chinese corporate espionage tactics is only the most recent installment in a long and sordid history of spies and sex. For millennia, spymasters of all sorts have trained their spies to use the amorous arts to obtain secret information.
The trade name for this type of spying is the “honey trap.” And it turns out that both men and women are equally adept at setting one — and equally vulnerable to tumbling in. Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap. And as in normal life, no planning can take into account that a romance begun in deceit might actually turn into a genuine, passionate affair. In fact, when an East German honey trap was exposed in 1997, one of the women involved refused to believe she had been deceived, even when presented with the evidence. “No, that’s not true,” she insisted. “He really loved me.”
Those who aim to perfect the art of the honey trap in the future, as well as those who seek to insulate themselves, would do well to learn from honey trap history. Of course, there are far too many stories — too many dramas, too many rumpled bedsheets, rattled spouses, purloined letters, and ruined lives — to do that history justice here. Yet one could begin with five famous stories and the lessons they offer for honey-trappers, and honey-trappees, everywhere.
1. Don’t Follow That Girl
In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli technician who had worked in Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, went to the British newspapers with his claim that Israel had developed atomic bombs. His statement was starkly at odds with Israel’s official policy of nuclear ambiguity — and he had photos to prove it.
The period of negotiation among the newspapers was tense, and at one point the London Sunday Times was keeping Vanunu hidden in a secret location in suburban London while it attempted to verify his story. But Vanunu got restless. He announced to his minders at the paper that he had met a young woman while visiting tourist attractions in London and that they were planning a romantic weekend in Rome.
The newspaper felt it had no right to prevent Vanunu from leaving. It was a huge mistake: Soon after arriving in Rome with his lady friend, Vanunu was seized by Mossad officers, forcibly drugged, and smuggled out of Italy by ship to Israel, where he was eventually put on trial for treason. Vanunu served 18 years in jail, 11 years of it in solitary confinement. Released in 2004, he is still confined to Israel under tight restrictions, which include not being allowed to meet with foreigners or talk about his experiences. Britain has never held an inquiry into the affair.
The woman who set the honey trap was a Mossad officer, Cheryl Ben Tov, code-named “Cindy.” Born in Orlando, Fla., she was married to an officer of the Israeli security service. After the operation, she was given a new identity to prevent reprisals, and eventually she left Israel to return to the United States. But her role in the Vanunu affair was vital. The Mossad could not have risked a diplomatic incident by kidnapping Vanunu from British soil, so he had to be lured abroad — an audacious undertaking, but in this case a successful one.
2. Take Favors from No One
One of the best-known honey traps in spy history involves Mata Hari, a Dutch woman who had spent some years as an erotic dancer in Java. (Greta Garbo played her in a famous 1931 film.) During World War I, the French arrested her on charges of spying for the Germans, based on their discovery through intercepted telegrams that the German military attaché in Spain was sending her money. The French claimed that the German was her control officer and she was passing French secrets to him, secrets she had obtained by seducing prominent French politicians and officers.
During the trial, Mata Hari defended herself vigorously, claiming that she was the attaché’s mistress and he was sending her gifts. But her arguments did not convince her judges. She died by firing squad on Oct. 15, 1917, refusing a blindfold.
After the war, the French admitted that they had no real evidence against her. The conclusion by most modern historians has been that she was shot not because she was running a honey trap operation, but to send a powerful message to any women who might be tempted to follow her example. The lesson here, perhaps, is that resembling a honey trap can be as dangerous as actually being one.
3. Beware the Media
Sometimes a country’s entire journalism corps can fall into an apparent honey trap. Yevgeny Ivanov was a Soviet attaché in London in the early 1960s. He was a handsome, personable officer and a popular figure on the British diplomatic and social scene, a frequent guest at parties given by society osteopath Stephen Ward.
Ward was famous for inviting the pick of London’s beautiful young women to his gatherings. One of them was Christine Keeler, a scatterbrained ’60s “good-time girl” who supposedly became Ivanov’s mistress. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Keeler was the lover of the married British MP and Secretary of State for War John Profumo, who was then working on plans with the United States to station cruise missiles in Germany.
In 1963, Profumo’s affair with Keeler was exposed in the press. Britain’s famed scandal sheets also blew up the Soviet spy/honey trap angle, for which there was no evidence. Profumo was forced to resign for lying about the affair to the House of Commons. His wife forgave him, but his career was ruined.
Ivanov was recalled to Moscow, where he lived out his days pouring ridicule on the whole story: “It is ludicrous to think that Christine Keeler could have said to John Profumo in bed one night, ‘Oh, by the way, darling, when are the cruise missiles going to arrive in Germany?’” He was probably right: When the media gets hold of a potential honey trap, the truth is easily lost.
4. The Deadliest of Honey Traps
Not all honey traps are heterosexual ones. In fact, during less tolerant eras, a homosexual honey trap with a goal of blackmail could be just as effective as using women as bait.
Take the tragic story of Jeremy Wolfenden, the London Daily Telegraph‘s correspondent in Moscow in the early 1960s. Wolfenden was doubly vulnerable to KGB infiltration: He spoke Russian, and he was gay. Seizing its opportunity, the KGB ordered the Ministry of Foreign Trade’s barber to seduce him and put a man with a camera in Wolfenden’s closet to take compromising photos. The KGB then blackmailed Wolfenden, threatening to pass on the photographs to his employer if he did not spy on the Western community in Moscow.
Wolfenden reported the incident to his embassy, but the official British reaction was not what he expected. On his next visit to London, he was called to see an officer from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) who asked him to work as a double agent, leading the KGB along but continuing to report back to SIS.
The stress led Wolfenden into alcoholism. He tried to end his career as a spy, marrying a British woman he had met in Moscow, arranging a transfer from Moscow to the Daily Telegraph‘s Washington bureau, and telling friends he had put his espionage days behind him.
But the spy life was not so easily left behind. After encountering his old SIS handler at a British Embassy party in Washington in 1965, Wolfenden was again pulled back into the association. His life fell into a blur of drunkenness. On Dec. 28, 1965, when he was 31, he died, apparently from a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a fall in the bathroom. His friends believed, no matter what the actual cause of death, that between them, the KGB and the SIS had sapped his will to live.
Ironically, his time as a spy probably produced little useful material for either side. His colleagues weren’t giving him any information because they were warned that he was talking to the KGB, and the Soviets weren’t likely to give him anything either. In this case, the honey pot proved deadly — with little purpose for anyone.
The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) is the intelligence agency of the People’s Republic of China. China’s MSS (like the CIA in the US or MI6 in the UK), is probably the country’s largest and most active foreign intelligence agency.
Former MSS agents say that the agency is engaged in counterintelligence and repressing internal dissent within China. The internal repression includes efforts against religious groups and Tibetan and Taiwanese independence movements as well as censoring the Internet to prevent China’s population from knowing what is going on outside the country.
The actual mission of the MSS is to ensure “the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system.” One of the primary missions of the MSS is undoubtedly to gather foreign intelligence from targets in various countries overseas. Many MSS agents are said to have operated in the Greater China region (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan) and to have integrated themselves into the world’s numerous overseas Chinese communities. At one point, nearly 120 agents who had been operating under non-official cover in the U.S., Canada, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan as businessmen, bankers, scholars, and journalists were recalled to China, a fact that demonstrates the broad geographical scope of MSS agent coverage.
60 Minutes has obtained an FBI videotape showing a Defense Department employee selling secrets to a Chinese spy that offers a rare glimpse into the secretive world of espionage.
See also: Chinese spy who defected tells all (Washington Times)
See Also: Four Chinese Espionage Investigations (PBS)
