Tag: Spies

Spies To The Left……

From the desk of the Scriptorium

Have you seen the hottie that is being accused of spying for Russia?  Of course you have.  Come on…let’s be honest…..she could get your ATM pin number without much effort…..that is okay, I would be smiling as I called my bank to change the number….I like red heads!

Sorry about that….I just had to digress for a moment….

The Economist is reporting:

According to the documents provided by the FBI to the courts, the suspects were “illegal” agents of the Russian Foreign Intelligence agency (SVR), a descendant of the KGB, who had mostly lived in “deep cover” since the 1990s in sleepy suburbs of New York, Boston and Washington, DC.

In fact, the spies were not even successful enough to have espionage charges brought against them. Their task, it seems, was to infiltrate influential political circles in America and find out their thinking on Russia and Barack Obama’s intentions for last year’s summit in Moscow, but there is no sign that they succeeded beyond what could have been gleaned from reading the better papers. (One of the alleged moles, Vicky Pelaez, was, in fact, a left-leaning columnist for El Diario, New York’s largest Spanish language newspaper.)

By now the whole country is talking and even laughing at the Russian spies now in US custody…..yes, I said laughing…why?  Some think that they were just silly exercising some lame Cold War tactic that could not have gleamed much intel at all….

The media is STUPID!  They were doing what “real” spies do…..in the days before the emphasis on the techno geek side of intel gathering….a spy went into the culture and society to pin point people that could be used to gather the intel for them….people with lavish lifestyles or vulnerable in other ways…..these people were doing what spies use to do…..work on the ground building relationships and NOT staring at some monitor at Langley…..

All I am saying is that it is great to see spies working like spies and not some techno geek that only speaks computer-ese….okay, technology is a wonderful thing, but like in war….you cannot win without troops on the ground….and so it is with espionage…..

Spies Like Them

Have you heard about the spies that were recently arrested in the US?  They were deep cover moles for Russia….and you thought the Cold War was over…silly Americans!

Anyway, there is a story on the Newser website about one of the spies….she is a red head and as anyone who visits Info Ink regularly knows I have a soft spot for red heads….and this “spy” could have got me to divulge anything she wanted to…….damn!

Read it and see what I mean….

http://bit.ly/cDtkNG

The Spy Game

Recently the CIA had a brain fart and let 7 of their best people in Afghanistan get popped…..this in my opinion was a STUPID mistake…I mean last year one of the many princes of Saudi Arabia was almost killed by a “butt bomb”….a bomb canceled in the rectum of a suicide bomber…..these people are ingenious and yet they let a double agent waltz into a meeting with the top Afghan analysts and blow his ass up taking the CIA operatives with him……

Let’s ask…..other than that professor how is the CIA doing in Afghanistan?

CNN reported on the testimony of CIA:

U.S. spies “can do little but shrug” when commanders ask for the information they need to fight the Taliban insurgency, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan said in a blistering report.U.S. military intelligence officers in Afghanistan spend too much time focusing on enemy groups and tactics and not enough on trying to understand Afghanistan’s culture, people and networks, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a report published Monday.

American military intelligence gathering is “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers,”

The report said some good work is being done on the ground, and that local intelligence officers “know a great deal about their local Afghan districts.” But, the report said, they “are generally too understaffed to gather, store, disseminate and digest” information.

And, critically, they do not have the resources to gather information which could give Americans a better understanding of Afghanistan, such as census data, patrol debriefs, minutes from councils with local farmers and tribal leaders, polling data, translated summaries of radio broadcasts that influence local farmers and the like.

I would say that it is a bit of a critical report on the CIA operations in Afghanistan…….the people on the ground SUCK and then the only ones that have experience they allow to be killed…..sounds like an agency that has its head up some bureaucrats ass…..and does not sound like a way to win the war for minds and hearts…..if they cannot deal with trivial info, how can they handle important stuff?

The French Chef Was A Spy

Where do you look when you want to recruit spies? Just about everywhere, judging from the formerly top-secret records of the World War II agency that became today’s CIA.

There was the young woman who became TV chef Julia Child. And labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg who became a Supreme Court justice. And young scholar Arthur Schlesinger who became a presidential adviser.

The legendary chef is one of several high-profile figures who were involved with the undercover World War II intelligence agency, called the Office of Strategic Services.

Yesterday, the National Archives released the names of Americans who worked as civilian and military spies for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Along with Child, other spies for the OSS include former Chicago White Socks catcher Moe Berg, Godfather actor Sterling Hayden, and author Thomas Braden who penned Eight is Enough, the book that inspired the popular 1970s television series.

Where have you people been?  This is common knowledge.  Julia even spoke about it in many interviews over the years before her death.  May I suggest that you people learn to pay attention and little will surprise you.

Peace!  Out!

Blackwater Enters The World Of James Bond

Jeremy Scahill is worried about the giant mercenary firm’s latest foray into private intelligence. “They’re marketing their services to not only foreign governments, but to Fortune 500 corporations,” he recently told an interviewer.

The forthcoming paperback edition of Scahill’s book on Blackwater, which appeared in hardcover in February 2007, will include 100 pages of new material, including a discussion of last September’s shooting spree in Baghdad by Blackwater operatives — which killed 17 Iraqi civilians but for which nobody has ever been charged.

This is a company that has been accused of murdering Iraqi civilians,” Scahill pointed out, “of shooting the bodyguard to the Iraqi vice-president, of causing blowback attacks on United States troops, of hurting the morale of the United States military — that has cost United States taxpayers over a billion dollars for its operations in Iraq.”

However, Scahill’s greatest concern at present appears to be Blackwater’s venture into the private intelligence business.

“Blackwater started a private intelligence company,” he explained, “a private CIA essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. And the man running Total Intelligence Solutions is J. Cofer Black. He’s a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also was the guy who ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap-and-torture program.”

Is the governemtn out sourcing our intel?  Is that why we need and Intel Czar?  Someone to co-ordinate the info furnished by private companies??