Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Sutyagin, Sentenced on Espionage Charges, Denied Parole. An Arkhangelsk regional court has rejected a parole appeal from Igor Sutyagin, a military analyst who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for espionage in 2000, saying he "has not mended his ways."

Friday's ruling upholds a lower court's denial of parole because of five minor reprimands Sutyagin has received from prison officials during his incarceration, Sutyagin's lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said by phone Monday.

One of the reprimands was administered for crumbs on Sutyagin's bedside table and another for his sole cell phone conversation with his wife, Stavitskaya said.

"I do not think it is the kind of violations that makes him hopeless, particularly since I believe he is not guilty of espionage," she said.

An arms-control analyst at the USA and Canada Institute, Sutyagin was found guilty of treason for selling a research paper on Russian nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that the Federal Security Service has linked to the CIA.

Sutyagin maintained that his research used only publicly available information.

Sutyagin is allowed to file another parole petition in six months and will do so, Stavitskaya said.

He has received 10 formal commendations in prison, including some for tutoring inmates and issuing an in-house newspaper, his lawyer said.

Sutyagin has also completed three courses for new professions in prison, Stavitskaya said, without elaborating.

This year, the European Court of Human Rights is expected to hear Sutyagin's appeal to be cleared of espionage charges, Stavitskaya said.

Sutyagin, who is serving the longest prison term for espionage charges since Soviet times, has been named a political prisoner by Amnesty International. Human rights activists have called his case the start of an FSB-orchestrated campaign against researchers, which began early in Vladimir Putin's first term as president.

Several scientists, including TsNIIMash-Export head Igor Reshetin and physicists Valentin Danilov and Oskar Kaibyshev, were subsequently convicted on espionage charges in recent years.

In 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called on Russian authorities to release Sutyagin.

Sutyagin had filed pardon petitions to Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, but the pleas were rejected.

The case against Sutyagin was based on the Defense Ministry's secret order No. 055, which lists military state secrets.

A 1996 presidential decree explicitly permits secret orders to be used in criminal prosecution.

In April 2002, Alexander Nikitin, an environmental and human rights activist, appealed the 1996 decree, saying it violated the Constitution, which prohibits limiting civil rights by secret laws.

The Supreme Court rejected Nikitin's case on a technicality, ruling that private citizens have no right to challenge presidential decrees in court. [Krainova/MoscowTimes/4May2010] 

Egypt's Espionage on the Algerian nuclear Reactor for the Benefit of the US. A secret U.S. document reveals espionage by the Egyptian government through its Minister of Foreign Affairs in the early nineties, with the complicity of the United States of America, on the Algerian nuclear reactor in southern Algeria.

The document reveals the content of discussions between the U.S. official Richard A. Clarke, during his visit to Cairo in May 1991 and his meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister of the time.

According to the content of the document, classified top secret, sent by the U.S. embassy in Cairo, in May 1991, about the visit of the American delegation in Cairo and the meeting between Egyptian and American officials have turned around the regional armament of the Middle East, before turning around the case of the Algerian nuclear reactor in Ain Oussera, in the province of Djelfa. The U.S. official had asked for the help of Egyptian Foreign Minister by providing additional information on the reactor, which, according to the paper, was in progress.

The U.S. official who served as Deputy Secretary of State for political and military affairs at that time had asked the Egyptian foreign minister, whose name was hidden on the document, to provide Washington with information on the nuclear reactor built by Algeria with the help of China. [Fellah/Ennahara/4May2010] 

Three in Court After MI5 Sting Operation. Three County Armagh men arrested after a two-year operation directed by "role playing Security Service officers" have gone on trial in Belfast.

Appearing were Paul McCaughey, 43, from Beech Court and Desmond Kearns from Tannaghmore Green, both in Lurgan.

Joining them in the dock is Dermot Gregory also known as Michael Dermot from Concession Road, Crossmaglen.

A judge at an earlier hearing was told the case involved an MI5 sting operation against the IRA.

Between them, they face a total of seven charges.

Mr. McCaugherty faces all seven including conspiring to possess firearms and explosives, using almost 46,000 euros for terrorist purposes, membership of the IRA, and making the deeds of a Portuguese restaurant available for the purposes of terrorism.

Mr. Kearns is accused of conspiring to possess firearms and explosives, while Mr. Gregory is accused of making the deeds of the Alvor restaurant in Portugal available for the purposes of terrorism.

During his hour-long opening, prosecuting QC Gordon Kerr said the operation began in August 2004 and ended with the arrest of the trio in June 2006.

The operation, which the court previously heard related to what police believe was an international gun smuggling operation, involved numerous meetings throughout Europe and even Istanbul in Turkey.

Various conversations during numerous meetings were secretly taped and in some cases videoed. At an earlier hearing, Mr. Justice Hart was told that there were 90 hours of bugged conversations.

The trial is expected to last up to five weeks. [BBC/05May2010]

Obama Gets Weekly Tutorials in Terrorism. After a car bomb nearly detonated in Times Square on Saturday night, White House officials convened a series of impromptu briefings to keep President Obama updated as the suspect was identified, located and caught trying to flee the country.

But for the bigger questions on the global terrorist threat and how the administration can prevent an attack on U.S. soil, there is already a meeting on the books.

Call it the terrorism tutorial.

Almost every week, often on a Tuesday, Obama heads into the White House Situation Room for a meeting that explores terrorism-related subjects in depth. Rarely discussed in public, the hour-long briefings have become one of the most significant gatherings in the West Wing, bringing together Cabinet-level intelligence and security officials "to make sure everybody hears the same information and is updated on the threats," one participant said.

Several weeks ago, the terrorist-threat briefing was about al-Qaeda's bomb-making capabilities. Obama listened as FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III reviewed the forensics test results of an explosive used in an attempted airline attack on Christmas Day. Senior intelligence officials discussed the man in Yemen thought to have made the device, who is now a top target of U.S. surveillance, said four people who were present. Participants also talked about the "broader context," including "what we know about the explosives al-Qaeda uses and what we are doing to screen for them," one said.

Other weeks, the topics have been airport screening measures or specific al-Qaeda members being watched.

A three- or four-page briefing packet, stamped "Secret," is prepared for the president before each meeting. It includes background material on the day's topic as well as a list of the top U.S. terrorism hot spots around the globe, with photographs of suspected terrorists.

For Obama, the meetings are an opportunity not only to get updates on threats and the latest prevention tactics, several participants said, but also for discussing broader anti-terrorism strategies. The president often raises questions about what causes someone to become a terrorist. That topic was especially relevant this week, with the news that a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Pakistan, with no previous history of extremist tendencies, was implicated in the Times Square incident.

Even before this week, Obama had brought up the subject of radicalization on several occasions, regular participants in the meetings said, in part because it is a complex problem that falls under no single agency's jurisdiction. "We don't have a Department to Dry Up Pools of Candidates Who Want to Kill Themselves," one senior administration official said.

Eight administration officials who have attended the meetings agreed to describe them on the condition of anonymity.

Referred to by staff members during the Bush years as "Terror Tuesdays," the meetings began as an outgrowth of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Once a daily occurrence, they originally lasted 20 to 30 minutes and were added on at the end of the presidential daily briefing - the security update that the president receives from the CIA each morning - and focused largely on threats and incidents.

During the transition, outgoing Bush administration officials strongly urged the Obama team to retain the practice, current administration officials said. Today, they are led by John O. Brennan, the top terrorism adviser at the White House.

Brennan and the National Security Council's senior director for counterterrorism, Nick Rasmussen, set the agenda a week or two ahead of time. Sometimes the discussions more fully explore threads that have emerged in prior sessions; other times, they focus on a specific case, such as that of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan native living in Colorado who was arrested as part of an alleged explosives plot last fall, the participants interviewed said.

Among the regular attendees are Mueller; Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center; CIA Director Leon Panetta; National Security Agency Director Keith B. Alexander; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Vice President Biden also attends, as do National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones, deputy NSC director Tom Donilon and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Numerous deputies sit against the wall in the Situation Room, the secure West Wing conference facility where most national security and war-related meetings are held.

That makes it a larger meeting than during the Bush years. And to a degree, the purpose has shifted in the past year: After his inauguration, Obama's top advisers wanted to quickly educate him. "In its original conceptualization, this meeting was an effort to get the president knowledgeable about various parts and pieces of our counterterrorism effort - so it was, 'These are some FBI programs, these are some CIA programs, these are some DHS programs,' " one regular participant said.

After the Christmas Day incident, the participant said, the meetings "became much more focused on the specific details of counterterrorism operations." On Tuesday, the briefing focused largely on a single incident, as officials gave Obama an extended "walk-through" of the events of the previous 48 hours.

The sessions have included some "uncomfortable moments," one person said, "when an individual's unpreparedness or lack of ability to articulate exactly what their agency or department is doing becomes apparent." In those instances, Obama has been "sharp" in ordering changes, the person said.

Sometimes the participants conclude that it is Obama who needs to take action. This was the case recently when intelligence officials reported having problems gaining cooperation from Canada on potential cross-border terrorism threats. After the meeting, Obama called Canadian officials to demand greater information-sharing, participants said.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the administration hasn't publicized the sessions. Frances Fragos Townsend, the former Bush homeland security adviser, said they could serve a vital purpose substantively and politically, showing the public that the president is mindful of terrorist threats even when they are not imminent.

"If you're paying attention and something happens, the American people are pretty forgiving, even if the political environment is not," Townsend said. "They won't forgive if they think you took your eye off the ball." [Kornblut/WashingtonPost/5May2010] 

'Possible' That Canada Received Intel Obtained by Torture. The average Canadian would not object to the use of intelligence potentially obtained by torture if it means saving Canadian lives, a senior official at the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service suggested Wednesday.

Speaking to a parliamentary committee, Michel Coulombe said CSIS has received intelligence gathered by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's intelligence service, that has been flagged as possibly obtained by torture.

He said "it is possible" some NDS intelligence came from detainees interrogated by the NDS after they were captured by Canadians and transferred to Afghan custody.

The guiding principle is that CSIS must not rely on information suspected of being obtained by torture and the procedure is that such information is flagged with a caveat, he said. The agency then tries to find additional or corroborating information.

When asked by Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh about the difficulty when information obtained by torture cannot be corroborated elsewhere, Coulombe said he believes the average Canadian would not accept it if Canadians die "because we did nothing."

Intelligence gathered in Afghanistan, he said, has been used to disrupt bomb attacks by Afghan insurgents against Canadians and to support Canada's strategic goals in fighting al-Qaida terrorism.

Coulombe is assistant director of foreign intelligence collection at CSIS, Canada's spy agency. He gave a rare glimpse Wednesday into CSIS operations in Afghanistan at the House of Commons special committee on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, saying the agency wants Canadians to be as informed as possible about Canada's No. 1 foreign policy.

The committee is examining assertions that Canadian soldiers transferred captives to Afghan custody knowing they could or would be tortured.

Coulombe said CSIS has been in Afghanistan since 2002 and has no role in detainee transfers. However, up until 2007, he said CSIS officers assisted Canadian forces in interrogating detainees before they were transferred.

He would not disclose how many interrogations had taken place on grounds that could jeopardize the safety of Canadians in Afghanistan.

CSIS stopped interrogating detainees in the fall of 2007, around the same time Canada halted detainee transfers to the NDS for three months after Canadian foreign affairs monitors found tools of torture that corroborated a detainee's claim he had been beaten unconscious.

Since then, he said, the Canadian military has built up its own capacity to interrogate detainees.

Earlier, Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, gave the committee her legal opinion that Canada is violating the Convention on Torture and other international humanitarian laws by transferring detainees to the custody of the NDS because of credible evidence they face a substantial risk of torture.

"Canada should immediately cease transferring detainees to Afghan custody," Prasow testified.

She said the violation of humanitarian law is not mitigated by the federal government's detainee-transfer agreement with Afghanistan, which allows Canadian officials to make unannounced visits to monitor Canadian-transferred detainees at detention centres.

She said Human Rights Watch has warned Canadian government and NATO officials since 2002 about the prevalence of the practice of torture by the NDS and has obtained detailed recent information that makes clear the problem of torture persists.

She exempted two U.S.-run facilities in Afghanistan from that observation. [O'Neill/MontrealGazette/6May2010] 

Army Major Caught Spying for Pakistan, Tip-Off Came From US. Around the time last month when the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was alerted about the possibility of one of their officers being involved in espionage, another sensitive counter-intelligence operation involving the Ministry of Defense (MoD) was in progress.

For over two weeks now, top Government sources say, an Army Major has been kept in "safe custody" of the Military Intelligence (MI). The officer - posted in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands - is alleged to have passed on classified information to Pakistan.

The first tip-off in what could develop into another espionage scandal, according to sources, came from American authorities. Suspicious internet traffic first came to the notice of American intelligence agencies when intercepts showed a user in Andaman and Nicobar Islands had dispatched a picture of a serving Indian Brigadier, who was attending a training program in the US, to Pakistan.

Indian agencies quickly zeroed in on the officer and a quiet operation was planned to call him to New Delhi. Sources say the officer pleaded ignorance of the traffic from his computer to Pakistan saying it could have been generated by some virus or unknown software.

However, suspicion persisted since the Major's computer had been recently formatted and cleaned of all contents. An early forensic examination done in New Delhi revealed the dispatch of classified military information, some of which should not have been in the officer's possession. The hard disk of the officer's computer has since been sent by military authorities to a Hyderabad laboratory for accessing the erased contents.

"I do not have any information yet. I will have to find the details and then can get back to you," Army spokesperson Col S Om Singh said when contacted for a reaction.

Both Defence Minister A.K. Antony and Home Minister P. Chidambaram are learnt to be aware of the developments in the case, given the serious implications involved. [Philip/IndianExpress/6May2010] 

Captured Leader Offers Insight Into the Taliban. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most senior Afghan Taliban leader in custody in Pakistan, is providing important information to American officials on the inner workings of the Taliban, pivotal insights as the United States looks ahead to negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan, according to senior American intelligence and military officials.

Mullah Baradar, the second-ranking Taliban leader, was arrested in January outside Karachi, Pakistan, in an operation by American and Pakistani intelligence agents. His Pakistani captors initially limited American interrogators' access to him, but American officials say they have had regular, direct contact with Mullah Baradar for several weeks.

For now, officials say, Mullah Baradar is not revealing details of Taliban combat operations, yielding little that American commanders would like to know as they prepare for a military operation around Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual base and Afghanistan's second largest city.

But the officials said he had provided American interrogators with a much more nuanced understanding of the strategy that the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, is developing for negotiations with the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who is visiting Washington next week.

Mullah Baradar is describing in detail how members of the Afghan Taliban's leadership council, or shura, based in Pakistan, interact, and how senior members fit into the organization's broader leadership, officials said.

He is also offering a more detailed understanding of what prompted Mullah Omar to issue a new code of conduct for militants last year that directed fighters to avoid civilian casualties. American officials say the code was meant to project a softer image to the Afghan people.

"He's provided very useful but not decisive information," an American counterterrorism official said on Wednesday.

Four American military, intelligence and diplomatic officials provided details of Mullah Baradar's cooperation, but requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the delicate intelligence interrogations.

Mullah Baradar, in his early 40s and said by most officials to belong to the same Popalzai tribe as Mr. Karzai, is believed to be one of a handful of Taliban leaders who were in periodic contact with Mullah Omar, the reclusive founder of the Taliban.

Mullah Baradar's capture was followed by arrests of two Taliban "shadow governors" in Pakistan. While the arrests showed a degree of cooperation between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., they also illustrated how the Afghan Taliban leadership has relied on Pakistan as a rear base.

Many questions remain about Mullah Baradar's capture and Pakistan's motivations. It appears, for instance, that Pakistani authorities did not realize at first their captive's significance. But they have tried to turn his arrest to their advantage and are poised to use him as a chip in bargaining between the Afghan government and the Taliban and, conceivably, even as a negotiator.

"The key issue is, we should decide jointly how we are going to benefit from his presence," a senior Pakistani intelligence official in Islamabad said recently. "When we agree on how we can use him for peace talks in Afghanistan then we would not hesitate a second, but there has to be some negotiations."

Conspiracy theories abound as to who may have tipped off American and Pakistani spies about Mullah Baradar's location at a house outside Karachi. One theory is that he ran afoul of more hard-line elements in the Taliban. Another is that the Pakistani military seized him because he was freelancing negotiations with Afghan interlocutors, a theory senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials reject.

Initially, some American military officials said that taking Mullah Baradar off the battlefield, and exploiting information he might provide, could deal a blow to Taliban military capacity.

But Mullah Omar has replaced Mullah Baradar, his top deputy, with Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, a former detainee at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba, who is believed to be in his mid-30s and has a reputation as a tough fighter with few political skills.

"In general, operations in the south, except perhaps for the more spectacular ones, don't need much outside directions," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former South Asia intelligence analyst for the State Department.

And senior Taliban officials have sought to discount the impact of Mullah Baradar's detention on their bargaining position.

"The Taliban would be ready to negotiate but under our own conditions," a member of the Afghan Taliban's supreme command said in an interview. "To assume that they would hold the Taliban leadership hostage because of Mullah Baradar's arrest is not something that would cross our mind." [Schmitt/NYTimes/6May2010]

Iran Spy Cells Operate in Gulf States. A spy network Kuwait busted for allegedly working for Iran's Revolutionary Guards is operating in other Gulf Arab states, according to hardline Islamist lawmaker.

"Investigations have indicated that the network is active and present in most other Gulf states," MP Mohammad Hayef told reporters outside the parliament.

"High-level (security) meetings are taking place between Gulf Arab states to follow up on the latest developments of the spy cell. Gulf states must take a united decisive position toward Iran," Hayef said.

The lawmaker, who did not elaborate on the source of the information, called on Gulf states to review their relations with Iran to force it to halt such practices.

Hayef urged the Kuwaiti government to reveal the identity of the spy cell members and those backing it inside and outside Kuwait. He also reiterated calls for Kuwait to expel the Iranian ambassador.

Hayef, who is from the ultra-conservative Salafi sect of Islam, is well known for his anti-Iranian stance.

A government spokesman said on Monday that Kuwaiti security agencies have been questioning a number of suspects in connection with the spy cell.

But Mohammed al-Baseeri declined to give details on the number of suspects, their nationalities or the charges against them. He also declined to say if the spy cell was linked to Iran.

Newspapers reported on Tuesday that the number of people detained rose to 11 after security forces arrested four new suspects.

The reports said members of the network were asked to monitor and take pictures of Kuwaiti and US military sites for the Revolutionary Guards.

Iran has categorically denied any link to the Kuwaiti cell. [France24/4May2010] 

Fiji Gets Spy Agency. Fiji is to set up its own national spy agency.

Defense Minister Ratu Epeli Ganilau says a National Intelligence Agency is vital for the protection of Fiji's borders.

The Fiji Times reports the functions of the agency will be similar to the disbanded Fiji Intelligence Services and National Security Council.

The paper says the units were first established by the Sitiveni Rabuka-led government in 1988 but were disbanded in 1999 by Labor Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. [RadioAustralia/4May2010] 

Lebanon Officer Charged as Israel Spy May Get Death Penalty. A Lebanese prosecutor has requested the death penalty for an army colonel charged with spying for Israel, judicial officials said.

Security sources said Colonel Gazwan Shahin, the fourth officer to be arrested on suspicion of espionage since last year, was arrested a few months ago and charged on Friday.

A security source said Shahin provided Israel's spying agency with pictures, information and coordinates of civil and military posts during and after a 34-day war in 2006 between Hezbollah and Israel.

An investigation into spying for Israel has led to more than 50 arrests since last year, including holding a former brigadier general of the General Security directorate. More than 20 have been formally charged.

Lebanon, which is in a state of war with Israel, has described the arrests as a major blow to Israel's spying networks in the country. Hezbollah has called for the death penalty for all suspects convicted of spying for Israel.

One of the suspects held had confessed to having helped in the assassination of a Hezbollah commander in 2004.

Israel has not commented on the arrests.

Lebanese courts have handed down what were widely seen as light sentences against nationals who have worked with the Israeli occupation and its local militias after Israeli forces ended a 22-year occupation of mainly Shi'ite south Lebanon in May 2000. [Haaretz/9May2010] 

Lawmakers: Revoke Citizenship of Terrorists. Americans working for foreign terrorist organizations and lone wolf terrorists could lose their citizenship under bipartisan legislation introduced in both houses of Congress.

The proposal is a reaction to Times Square bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad, a native of Pakistan who became a U.S. citizen a year ago.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the proposal "sounds like a good idea," but the State Department urged that legislation only apply to those convicted of crimes.

U.S. law identifies seven categories of acts that could result in loss of citizenship. They include serving in the armed forces of a foreign state at war with the United States, renouncing nationality when the United States is at war, and treason. Sponsors said the law needs to be updated to combat terrorism.

The bill would expand the revocation law to anyone who provides material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, as designated by the secretary of state. It also would apply to anyone who engages in, or supports, hostilities against the U.S. or its allies.

As in current law, the State Department would make a determination that an individual has lost his or her U.S. nationality. The target of the action could seek a State Department review and also challenge the decision in U.S. district court.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he was not aware of the details, but he said any new law should have restrictions.

"It's important ... that we make sure that any action, any legislation that Congress might consider would make sure that we have due process, that we are talking about people who are actually convicted of crimes as opposed to people who are just suspected of crimes," Crowley told reporters. "I think the American people would be concerned if you took prospective actions, certainly one as serious as revoking citizenship, just for someone who is suspected of committing crimes."

Sponsors of the bill are Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Scott Brown, R-Mass., and Reps. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., and Charlie Dent, R-Pa. [AP/5May2010] 

FBI in Pakistan Investigating Possible Shahzad Ties. A law enforcement source tells CBS News that FBI agents are on the ground in Islamabad, Pakistan, as part of their investigation into the botched car bombing of New York's Times Square last week.

Agents are there to assist the Pakistani Intelligence Service and Pakistani law enforcement, while investigating possible links in that country to Faisil Shahzad, a Pakistani-American charged in the case.

The FBI agents, who need the cooperation of the Pakstanis in their investigation into Shahzad, are there to coordinate and pass along information gathered by Pakistani Intelligence, according to the source, and to share with them appropriate leads gathered by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement for follow-up.

"It's a professional partnership,'' the source tells CBS News. "The FBI has to be respectful of the host country, and will not be spreading out talking to people on its own on their soil."

The FBI has full-time legal attaches assigned in Pakistan to develop information that may have investigative value in the U.S.

The source said that the focus of the investigation continues to be who may be connected to the bombing attempt, including how it was financed, and to try to identify others who may have been coached into similar activity.

The sources suggests Shahzad, a 30-year-old naturalized American citizen and Connecticut resident, may have been trying to prove his worth for a future in the Jihadist community.

He may have wanted to go back and say "Hey, look what I did, make me one of you," the source said. [CBSNews/10May2010] 

5 More Suspects Identified in Dubai Killing. The Dubai police have identified five more suspects in the killing of a Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel in January, bringing the total number of suspects to 32, a person familiar with the investigation said.

The new suspects carried passports from Britain, Australia and France.

The case has put an unwelcome spotlight on Israel, whose intelligence service, the Mossad, is widely believed to have ordered the killing. The Dubai police released extraordinary security video of the killers in February, along with their passport information, which in many cases was obtained fraudulently from dual citizens living in Israel. The suspects can be seen on the videotape disguising themselves as tourists, and following the Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, to his hotel room. Some of the killers used more than one alias, including one man believed to be Zev Barkan, an Israeli being sought by New Zealand authorities in a 2004 passport fraud case, the person familiar with the investigation said. [Worth/NYTimes/7May2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Songster, Poet, Soldier, Spy Served the Rifles. Sometimes, as they say in Hollywood, some of the good stuff ends up on the cutting-room floor. It can be a bit like that in the newspaper business, when the finite space on a page dictates enough is enough and interesting crumbs of information fall victim to the delete button.

It was that way a couple of weeks back when we helped celebrate the 150th anniversary of The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, but didn't have room for two or three tales which merit attention.

There was the story of Maj. John Doerksen, the last Queen's Own Rifleman standing when the 2nd Battalion left its Gordon Head army camp for Germany in 1957. Maj. Doerksen had one final duty to perform before catching up with the 900 men of the 2nd already en route to Europe for a spell of NATO duty; he had to ceremoniously hand "the keys to the barracks" to the appropriate civic authorities.

Born in Laird, Sask., on April 24, 1917, Doerksen, who retired from the military with the rank of colonel, now resides at The Victorian at McKenzie seniors residence and recalls the brief ceremony well - although he can't remember the name or rank of the man to whom he handed the keys. "I think it was a major," he says. "I just gave him the keys, we shook hands and I was off to Germany."

Now in his 90s, he had no idea that he was taking part in a historic event which in short order would result in the first students at the University of Victoria's newly created campus occupying the old Queen's Own army huts. When told several of his old huts were still in service on campus, he laughs in delight and disbelief.

Doerksen ended his army career in the 1980s and he's reluctant to provide details of one of his final missions. All he will say is that it involved "gathering intelligence" in communist East Germany - "just a few reports and photographs and stuff." Like John le Carre's fictional spy, he says he came in from the cold "just before the Berlin Wall came down."

Squeezed out of the frame two Sundays back was a note that, since formed in 1866, the ranks of the Queen's Own Rifles have been enhanced by many famous men. One of them was Alexander Muir, a name only vaguely remembered but whose words still stir the Canadian soul when a military band strikes up and choir or crowd belt out The Maple Leaf For Ever.

Muir wrote the piece in 1867 and, while the words have a jingoistic ring in these cynical and politically correct days, Canadians are not averse to a little flag-waving as witnessed during the recent winter Olympics when patriotism took an upswing coast to coast to coast and Muir's lyrics - "The maple leaf, our emblem dear, the maple leaf forever, God save our Queen and heaven bless; the maple leaf forever. Our fair dominion now extends, from Cape Race to Nootka Sound... and may those ties of love be ours which discord cannot sever, and flourish green for freedom's home; the maple leaf forever" - didn't sound too bad at all.

A few wars after Muir's piece, on the road to Vimy Ridge, came the words we hear recited every Nov. 11 in Remembrance Day ceremonies around the world:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

John McCrae was the writer. He joined the Queen's Own Rifles when he was a student at the University of Toronto.

And a final note to clean the cutting-room floor: The Queen's Own Rifles boasts two mottos. The official in Latin "In Pace Paratus" (In Peace Prepared) is on the regimental badge. The second - the one that stiffens veterans' shoulders and brings a sparkle to the eye - is just spoken with crisp pride: "Second to None." [Hume/TimesColonist/3May2010] 

My Secret Life in Winston Churchill's Spy School. To friends and family Noreen Baxter was a young wartime secretary but in reality, she was part of an elite group who used honeytraps, convicted criminals and advanced gadgets to train agents who would cause havoc behind the Nazi lines. 

She told no one what she did... even Noreen Baxter's closest family thought she was spending the war quietly in an office job.

All the time, she was one of Winston Churchill's secret army.

The pretty, vivacious teenager had been recruited to the ranks of the cloak-and-dagger Special Operations Executive.

Her role there - to help in the training of undercover agents before they were sent on dangerous missions behind enemy lines.

"They were the bravest of the brave, but we could never talk about them," Noreen said. "No one on the outside ever knew that we existed.

"When my mother asked I told her I was a civil servant. She used to think I was a secretary with the Ministry of Ag and Fisheries."

For decades, it has remained veiled in the deepest secrecy. But now the amazing story of the SOE, and its base in one of Britain's most famous stately homes, is being told for the first time in a TV documentary next month.

Some 3,000 agents, the James Bonds of their generation - 007 author Ian Fleming based his novels on some of their exploits - trained there as spies and saboteurs.

Then they were sent into occupied Europe. Nearly half never returned.

Noreen, now 87 and a great-grandmother, is one of the few survivors left to recall, first-hand, the SOE's training centre in the grounds of the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire.

In wartime, it was a top-secret location. A finishing school for spies. The recruits who successfully made it through Beaulieu were taught by a motley group of instructors in the skills of fighting a "dirty war".

A professional bank-robber from Glasgow showed them how to blow safes. A career burglar, released early from jail, schooled them in the skills of lock-picking.

They were now deadly fighters, able to kill with their bare hands, fluent in using codes and invisible ink, experts in explosives.

One veteran recalls how he blew up seven bridges in one day, causing mayhem among enemy troops.

They were landed in France with false papers and fake identities that had been created down to the very last detail.

Even the fillings in their teeth were replaced to match European-style dentistry in case they were killed or captured. And they were equipped with the latest in spying gadgetry, specially designed for them. A pipe, with space below the tobacco bowl to hide messages, shoelaces that contained razor wire and could be used as a garotte, and miniature cameras, years ahead of their time, that could take 50 images.

Each agent carried one other essential piece of kit. It was called an Lwas-tablet, it often sewn into their clothing, and it contained a dose of arsenic - enough to kill them within two minutes if they were caught.

Being taken alive inevitably meant torture and a brutal death at the hands of the SS.

Swallowing the suicide pill was the merciful option - otherwise they were ordered to hold out under torture for at least 48 hours, to give their undercover contacts time to flee.

In one morning, in the Flossenburg concentration camp, 15 SOE agents were hanged together, suspended by piano wire from meat hooks. To test their ability to face such difficult and dangerous missions before they were sent out into the field, Noreen and other like her were used as honeytraps - attractive lures sent to try to tempt them into letting slip potentially deadly secrets.

Just 18 and straight out of college, she was officially a secretary, but she was also used in the honeytrap training exercises.

Her job was to test whether an agent could be tempted into revealing vital secrets to a young woman with a pretty face.

"I must have seemed like a sweet young thing, the kind of girl they could talk to about anything," Noreen says.

"And that was the trick, of course. To make them tell me information they shouldn't. They were all very brave men, and it was a wretched job to have to do.

"One young man - a Danish guy, very handsome, a real Adonis - rather fell for me, I'm afraid, and after a few drinks he told me all about himself and how he would soon be heading behind enemy lines on a top-secret mission, and no one knew when he would be back. The next day he was called in to see the commanding officers at Beaulieu, a door opened and I walked in. He looked startled, then horrified, then a look of pure bitterness flashed across his face and he sneered 'You bitch!' I was truly upset. I thought he's right, my whole life is a lie, have I become so hardened? "But then it was explained to me. If he was so ready to talk to a friendly, pretty face here then he would be all the more likely to do the same when he was alone in a strange country. He would be a liability. He would be risking not just his own life but countless others in the field. It was better to find out now, and that was the job I had to do."

Other times, Noreen would be used as a decoy, in surveillance training. An agent would be sent to the seaside, with the description of a young woman he had to track down and keep under observation.

Noreen soon learned to spot anyone following her - she would disappear into the lingerie department of Bournemouth's biggest department store, to shake him off. It was a world that she entered without even knowing. She had been studying languages at a French college in London and when she reached her 18th birthday had to decide what she would do for the war effort.

Working in a munitions factory wasn't for her. She opted instead to join the Wrens. "I rather liked the hat, I thought it very coquettish," she admits.

In fact, she never had the chance to wear uniform. Because of her language skills she was selected for special duties and told to report to an anonymous office in London's Baker Street.

It was the headquarters of the SOE, newly formed on Churchill's own instructions.

She worked for the French section, which sent more than 400 agents into the country after it was overrun by the Germans. Thirty-nine of them were women. Noreen was too young to become an agent herself, but she often heard of their heart-stopping stories behind enemy lines.

"One girl told me how she was stopped at a level crossing on her bicycle when a German staff car pulled alongside and the officer wound down the window," Noreen said.

"He wanted to know what she was carrying in her basket. She smiled at him and said 'It's a wireless transmitter - I contact London every day!' "He laughed and said: 'I know you're joking, you're far too lovely to be a spy...' "But in her lipstick, she kept her suicide pill."

At Beaulieu Noreen worked alongside the men arriving from various Allied countries to begin their training.

Not surprisingly, she fell in love. He was a British agent, 12 years older than her. And in the turmoil of war they were destined to have just three months together.

"He was my first real love - and love then was very intense because you knew the time you had together was so short," she said. "But in a way that made it all the more romantic.

"The time was bound to come, we both knew, when he had to leave Beaulieu and go overseas. He promised he would come back. He told me we would be together one day."

"Our story ended in the worst possible way. I never saw him again. Wireless contact with him was lost and after four or five days, as was the routine, any hope for him was abandoned. I never did find out what became of him. I will never know how he died. But I confess - rather silly I know - that even after all these years, I still carry his photograph in my wallet."

After the war, the SOE was rapidly disbanded.

Every trace of its presence at Beaulieu was removed. It's only in recent years that official papers have acknowledged that it ever existed.

As for Noreen, she met French journalist Jacques Riols, they married 55 years ago and now live near Paris. She became a writer and had a modestly successful career as a novelist.

Her best-seller was Katherine... the story of a young woman in wartime Britain, her work for a secret organization, and her romance with a dashing spy who goes behind enemy lines and never returns. [Ellam/Mirror/2May2010] 

In Pakistan, Ex-Spy Khalid Khawaja's Killing is Surrounded by Mystery. Shrouded in white, the spy's bullet-riddled body was buried, and with it clues to a cloak-and-dagger mystery gripping Pakistan.

The funeral was for Khalid Khawaja, 58, a former Pakistani intelligence agent who journeyed last month to the militant-controlled borderlands of North Waziristan, only to be killed by a little-known insurgent group that accused him of working for the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart.

That is where this whodunit becomes more of a why-done-it. Khawaja placed himself solidly in the anti-American, pro-Taliban camp. So did his traveling companion, a fellow ex-spy and U.S- trained Taliban architect with the nom de guerre Colonel Imam.

"How could the mujaheddin kill their supporter?" asked Mohammed Zahid, 45, an engineer who was among a modest crowd standing under a baking mid-morning sun at the funeral.

The answer, according to emerging clues and security analysts, is that North Waziristan, once a hub of Taliban fighters with links to Pakistan's military, has evolved into a stewpot of militant groups, each with different loyalties. Old Taliban ties may have meant little to the Asian Tigers, the group that said it killed Khawaja and is thought to be a Punjab-rooted organization battling the Pakistani state.

"Fiefdoms have been formed," said Saad Muhammad, a retired general based in the northwestern city of Peshawar. "It's an area which is almost totally out of control of the state, and even the local Taliban leaders."

Those messy alliances make it increasingly difficult to decipher who is on whose side.

Khawaja, a onetime squadron leader in Pakistan's air force who claimed ties to Osama bin Laden, was long a go-between for militants and military. Recently, he became a legal adviser to five Virginia men accused of terrorism in Pakistan; in a March interview, he said they had been framed by the U.S. government.

Still, many Pakistani militants loathed Khawaja for his role during a 2007 military siege of an Islamabad mosque, during which he allegedly set up a radical cleric's arrest by convincing him to try to escape while disguised in a burqa.

But that same cleric, Abdul Aziz, said the prayer at the funeral on Sunday, and then said in an interview that Khawaja was "a person who always fought for his religion."

Deepening the ambiguity is the involvement of Colonel Imam, whose real name is Sultan Amir Tarar and who boasts even stronger militant credentials than Khawaja. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tarar ran CIA-funded camps for fighters resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Among his backers was the late U.S. congressman Charlie Wilson (D-Tex.) and among his charges was Mohammad Omar, who in the mid-1990s became leader of the Taliban.

Trained in guerrilla tactics at Fort Bragg, N.C., Tarar is now among the retired Pakistani intelligence agents suspected by Western officials of continuing to assist the Afghan Taliban. He denied that in a recent interview with the Times of London, but said he was "happy with the current situation because the Americans are trapped there."

Omar, he said, "is a very reasonable man."

But Omar, who still leads the Afghan Taliban, is not based in North Waziristan. That has long been the domain of the Afghan Taliban's Sirajuddin Haqqani and the Pakistani Taliban's Hafiz Gul Bahadur, both of whom have tacit peace deals with the Pakistani army. Recently, however, a military operation in neighboring South Waziristan pushed fighters who attack state forces to the north, and Punjab-based splinter factions have also set up shop in North Waziristan.

Accounts vary wildly about what Khawaja and Tarar - who also were accompanied by a filmmaker - intended to do in that thorny region. Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, a former Pakistani Army chief, said at Khawaja's funeral that they wanted to make a documentary. Khawaja's son told Pakistani television that his father intended to broker a peace deal between the military and Pakistani Taliban forces that attack inside the country.

The killers, however, said Khawaja was a spy. Tarar and the filmmaker, meanwhile, remain captives.

"There was a time when you could take the name of Colonel Imam and go anywhere," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said in an interview. "That was a long time back."

With much of the case still a mystery, Pakistanis are filling in the blanks themselves. As often happens, many point fingers far beyond the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

At the funeral, Beg said Islamist militants could not possibly be the killers. The name "Asian Tigers," he said, "smells of the south of India." At the same time, he said, the United States wants Pakistan to take on militants in North Waziristan, which gives them a motive to instigate turmoil there.

Usama Khawaja, the ex-spy's son, simply said it was "surely a conspiracy." Beyond that, he was stumped.

"My father," he said, "had many secrets in his chest." [Brulliard&Hussain&Khan/WashingtonPost/2May2010] 

Local Men Kept Area 51 Secrets. Lewis Nelson had no idea where he was going when the colonel told him to get aboard the C-47.

It was February 1957. Nelson, an Air Force welder with a security clearance to work on classified aircraft at MacDill Air Force Base, had been ordered on a circuitous route that took him from Tampa's MacDill to bases in Georgia and California.

After crossing the Sierra Nevada, Nelson says he looked out the window and saw "nothing but desert."

The plane landed at a 60-square-mile base carved out of a former atomic bomb testing site.

It would soon be known as Area 51.

Even today, the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't acknowledge its existence.

But with the programs they worked on now declassified, Nelson and other men can talk publicly about what it was like to live at the secret base a few hours north of Las Vegas made infamous by conspiracy theorists who think it was where the government kept captured alien spacecraft.

Sitting in the sunroom of his house in Hudson, Nelson, 82, laughs at the notion. So do James Janowski and Alva McMillion, local men who also worked at Area 51.

But spacemen or no spacemen, there were some amazing things to see at Area 51, they say.

On his first day, Nelson toured the facility. Save for one of the world's largest runways, it was sparse, he says.

Hangars. Machine shops. Rows of narrow buildings. A bunkhouse where four men slept in two bunk beds per room and paid a dollar a night to the Atomic Energy Commission for the privilege.

The next day, a man he knew from a previous assignment took Nelson to a hangar.

"What in the world is this?" Nelson asked as he gaped at the odd aircraft with an enormous wingspan.

"'I said the same thing,'" Nelson's friend told him. "'That is called the U-2.'"

He couldn't tell anyone - not even his wife - what he saw.

"It was so top secret you didn't talk about it," he says. "This outfit, called Dragonlady, this had more security than the Manhattan Project."

At first, Nelson says he didn't know what the men - called drivers at the base, not pilots - were supposed to do when they got airborne.

Nelson says his job was to help the drivers get suited up and ready.

It was a complex process. They had to don pressure suits that were so tight the drivers had to wear long underwear inside out, lest the seams dig into their skin. Then they entered a room to breathe pure oxygen for 90 minutes to get the carbon dioxide out of their systems. Next they went out to the tarmac, breathing bottled oxygen while they were hooked up to the U-2's systems.

Eventually, Nelson got to know the drivers. He heard scuttlebutt. The U-2s, he learned, flew high-altitude reconnaissance missions, taking pictures over hostile territory, namely the Soviet Union. But there were other missions as well. Because they could fly so high - about 60,000 feet - the U-2s were used to test radiation levels from nuclear tests - theirs and ours.

One time, a driver came back from a run over a Nevada nuclear test and his radiation level was so high that when Nelson helped him out of the plane, he, too, was exposed.

"The Geiger counter was going crazy. I stripped down, put on a flying suit and went home," he says.

Nelson enjoyed his time on the base, but took a transfer after three years.

The U-2 program ended after a driver was shot down over the Soviet Union.

"We always knew that would happen one day," Nelson says.

In 1966, James Janowski was a young hotshot engineer with Honeywell, recently married and looking to make a few extra bucks.

"Honeywell was looking for crazy people that would move to California and spend the week in this unknown part of Nevada and leave their wives and families at home," the 70-year-old Largo resident says.

Janowski had no idea what he would be working on or where he would be, but he jumped at the chance.

"After we were cleared for the program, we were brought in and told we were working on the A-12. And I said, 'Gosh, what's an A-12?'"

The A-12, dubbed Archangel, could fly above 85,000 feet at about 2,500 mph. It was designed to replace the U-2. Its cameras were so sensitive, he says, "They could count the hairs on your chin from 100,000 feet.

"To see this aircraft take off and fly was just unreal," he says. "It was something out of the future. The engineers at Lockheed built something that, to this day, as far as we know nothing has flown that could surpass it."

Honeywell had designed the A-12 navigation systems. As an engineer, it was Janowski's job to help maintain the systems, at the time the most accurate in the world.

Area 51, he says, was no resort.

The men lived and worked in old Navy barracks that had holes in the walls.

"It was very primitive," he says, "but the customer made up for it with a fantastic chow hall. We ate better than I ever ate in my life."

The customer, he would later learn, was the CIA. Despite the deprivations it was a great time, Janowski says.

"I had no idea it would lead to an almost three-year period that I still think of as the highlight of my engineering career because of the excitement," he says. "You are working in a classified area. You are working on classified aircraft like the world has never seen."

Even though he can't talk about the location, as chief historian for the CIA, David Robarge knows a lot about what went on at Area 51.

He wrote the book on it.

"Archangel: CIA's Supersonic Reconnaissance Aircraft" outlines the history of the program. The men who worked at the place he cannot mention were important to U.S. security, Robarge says.

There were no spies, and conventional aircraft at the time were unsuited for the job, so the U-2 and A-12 provided critical intelligence, Robarge says. They flew missions that wouldn't have gotten off the ground if not for people such as Nelson, Janowski and Bradenton resident Alva McMillion, now 71.

Contrary to the ideas of conspiracy theorists, however, none of those missions uncovered space aliens, Robarge says. Nor did any other mission.

Not that the CIA wasn't concerned about such things, Robarge says.

The unclassified history of the agency's involvement in such matters was published in a report called "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90."

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union coincided with the first reports of flying saucers, according to the study.

The first U.S. sighting was reported by a reputable private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, on June 24, 1947, who said he saw nine disk-shaped objects near Mount Rainier flying faster than 1,000 mph.

That set off a national security concern that the Soviet Union would use the flying saucer scare to sow panic here.

The CIA eventually estimated that more than half of all UFO sightings of that period were the reconnaissance aircraft such as those Nelson, Janowski and McMillion worked with at the time.

And that, according to the 23-page report that never mentions Area 51, made people think that the truth, indeed, was out there.

The Air Force made "misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the cover-up controversies of the 1970s," according to the report.

McMillion spent hours patrolling Area 51 with his dog, Caesar, as a member of base security.

He says he never once saw a little green man, a flying saucer or anything from another planet.

McMillion agrees with the findings of the CIA study. The drivers, he says, wore big helmets and silver pressure suits "similar to the ones that travelers into space wore," he says. People who saw that, and saw the U-2s and A-12s in flight, mistook those for flying saucers, he says.

Janowski agrees that people seeing the A-12 could mistake it for a spacecraft. "When it would take off at night, it was the most awe-inspiring sight that humans had ever seen," he says.

Janowski knows there is no escaping the connection between Area 51 and UFOs in pop culture, so he tries to enjoy movies such as "Independence Day," in which survivors of an alien attack fight back at Area 51. In the movie, alien spacecraft were kept in a hangar basement.

"The hangar looked like that engineering hangar, and I thought, 'Damn, I never got down to the basement there.' Maybe they really did have a basement and we didn't know about it."

Nelson has no time for such nonsense.

"I personally don't believe in UFOs," he says. "The UFOs started to come to light from this U-2 outfit years and years ago. In my opinion, that's what these people saw."

Nelson has a message for those who persist in trying to find space aliens at Area 51.

"Leave it alone. Let Uncle Sam do his thing under secrecy stuff because that's what keeps us out of trouble." [Altman/TBO/2May2010] 

A Spy Has No Friend. The most memorable image from the gamut of spy fiction, trumping even more arresting facts of real-life espionage, is Alec Leamas atop the Berlin Wall, clinging to Liz Gold below as she is shot by the East German border guards. John le Carr�'s novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published and set shortly after the Wall's erection punctured the popular romanticizing of espionage (although it wasn't the first and the last to do so).

Le Carr� as the anti-Fleming, and Alec Leamas or George Smiley as the anti-Bond, legitimized the spy as an ambivalent exile, in no-man's land, seeing through not merely his own delusions (as Czeslaw Milosz would say) but those of an entire state edifice, with the possibility of being disowned by all.

Leamas and Gold in this book, Smiley in the le Carr� canon, questioned the mismatch between the West's democratic ideals and the operational methods of its intelligence machineries at a very difficult moment in the Cold War - showing there wasn't a hair's breadth between them and the KGB. But in portraying that machinery as a law unto itself and the moral dilemmas of those giving and obeying orders, writers like le Carr� were also humanizing the spy through psychological and circumstantial realism. The judgment? Real-life, big-time spies professing admiration (albeit qualified) for sometime colleague le Carr�, including the most (in)famous of them all - Kim Philby.

Philby, as the enormity of his identity and role - some years after he escaped to the Soviet Union in 1963 - gradually unraveled, was an enigma. Those who knew Philby, those who studied him, knew the paradox - a man on the Russian payroll long before he joined British intelligence, who apparently never suffered the guilt of betrayal because he didn't believe he betrayed anybody, who was always ideologically loyal to the Soviets but never appeared to be a believing/ committed Marxist, who was the "epitome of Britishness", subscribing to the London Times in Moscow, perhaps pining for Test cricket scores and "a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door".

Phillip Knightley, the only Western journalist Philby ever saw in his Moscow apartment, shortly before his death in 1988, describes in Philby: KGB Masterspy (1988) how Philby lived in style, tastefully, with a library of 12,000 books. Knightley came away with the impression of an "Establishment Englishman who betrayed the West, who decided to go against his class and his upbringing for what he believed to the last were impeccable motives, and who then spent most of his life cultivating two separate sides to his head." Even Knightley couldn't ultimately answer why. There's no last word on Philby. But the contradictions, or opposing truths, paint him as the archetype of the spy as an exile.

Reported details from Madhuri Gupta's interrogation repeatedly point to her "disgruntlement" with the IFS officialdom. However, real-life espionage stories often, also, bust the synthetic loneliness of fictional spies. Gupta may have borne a grudge against an institution of the country her passport claims she swears allegiance to. But she has been anything but an exile in a real or metaphoric foreign land, or unwelcome in her own.

Our ambivalence about espionage is caught in a phrase (attributed to Murray Sayle) in Knightley's book: the spy is a "semi-criminal but with official backing". With our own spies, although our moral ambivalence is often repressed by a pragmatic code of imperatives, the inability to wholeheartedly embrace them (partly also because s/he will not have a face or name) remains. But what of the semi-criminals working for the other side? Why is condemnation so quick when one of our own defects or goes rogue? Is the set of imperatives (national security, continuity of life as we know it), no matter how tenuously linked to the traitor/ infiltrator, automatically dominant in the latter case?

Nevertheless, the impulse to condemn the traitor/ infiltrator is understandable. But that we don't, or can't, go out of our way to call our own unnamed spies on foreign soil "heroes" (no matter how readily we laud counter-espionage success against foreign spies or terrorists on our own soil) is the socio-psychology behind the spy's loneliness.

The morality of espionage received greater philosophical depth and literary engineering in, say, Conrad's The Secret Agent or the spy oeuvre of Graham Greene (incidentally, a friend of Philby). But le Carr�'s image of Leamas climbing down the eastern face of the Wall to be shot at the command of the Stasi officer-British double agent who oversaw his escape, collapses at once all layers of deceit, double lives, inhuman unconcern characterising espionage machineries. The chaos is closure for the spy who finally comes in from the cold.

Setting aside the involuntary or "trapped" spy, voluntary spies are, broadly, either ideological or mercenary. If the traitors among our midst are mere mercenaries, it's a relief since it's easier to explain away. But if ideology motivates them, are they worthy of an ounce of respect as, say, Klaus Fuchs or Richard Sorge would be from those they betrayed? [Paul/IndianExpress/5May2010]

Spooks Spill, to Each Other. This book will never sit on the shelf next to Ian Fleming or John le Carre, or even trouble the bestseller lists - though the contents will undoubtedly rank as a great thriller.

Australia's overseas spy agency - the Australian Secret Intelligence Service - has commissioned a history of its operations.

But only a chosen few will have a chance to snare a copy and read this intriguing story. ASIS did not officially exist until the late 1970s, and the clandestine work of the service remains jealously protected.

Nearing its 60th birthday, the nation's spooks have decided to put their story on the record. Well, so-to-speak.

The Age believes the history will delve into all the service's dirty laundry, starting with recent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to battles with people smugglers closer to home, and stretching all the way back to the Cold War.

Taxpayers won't get a peek between the covers, despite shelling out $300 million in funding to the organization each year. The history will be stamped at the highest classification level, intended only as a teaching tool for the service's new recruits and old hands to learn from the past.

A heavily sanitized version may be considered for public release, but a final decision won't be taken until the classified history is completed.

ASIS is believed to have sought out prominent military historian Peter Edwards for advice on how to best go about the project. Professor Edwards - the official historian of the Vietnam War for the Australian War Memorial - declined to comment when contacted yesterday by The Age.

But it is believed Professor Edwards provided initial expert advice, with the history now to be written in-house.

ASIS posts its officers in embassies around the world to collect secrets for the Australian government.

With headquarters in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade building in Canberra, the spy outfit reports to Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

Asked about the ASIS history, a foreign affairs spokesman said ''the Australian government does not comment on intelligence matters''.

Need-to-know, old chap - wink, wink. [Flinter/7May2010] 

Section III - COMMENTARY

Counterterrorism and the Press, by Gabriel Schoenfeld. A terrible disaster in Times Square was averted thanks to the quick action of New York residents and police and also, perhaps, the incompetence of the terrorist bomb maker. But the stark fact remains that Faisal Shahzad, the alleged perpetrator, seems to have been part of a plot that involved contacts and training in Pakistan. Did our intelligence agencies - the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI - have a clue? And if not, why were they in the dark?

Gaining advance knowledge of a terrorist plot is an intrinsically difficult endeavor. Millions of people cross our borders every year and identifying terrorists, as we have learned on many occasions, will obviously not always be possible. Ferreting out treasonous American citizens like Mr. Shahzad is an even harder problem.

But we should not lose sight of one key factor. Some of our primary tools of counterterrorism have been severely compromised by the American press. Consider two major counterterrorism initiatives launched by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration.

The first is the so-called warrantless wiretapping of international calls by the National Security Agency. The New York Times disclosed critical details of the program in December 2005, alerting al Qaeda to our ability to monitor a high volume of phone calls and emails, not only from points in the United States to points abroad or vice versa, but also between foreign cities. Even calls or emails from a city like, say, Karachi to Islamabad might in some instances be vulnerable, the terrorists learned, to NSA interception. Would it be at all surprising, in light of the attention the New York Times brought to our surveillance capabilities, if a significant fraction of al Qaeda email and telephone communication dried up?

The same obtains for the revelation, published in the New York Times in June 2006 and followed immediately by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA and the Treasury Department, in the search for the movement of al Qaeda funds, were tapping into the enormous database of financial transactions operated by the Belgian clearinghouse known as SWIFT.

The Times story disclosing the SWIFT program itself noted that the monitoring had achieved significant successes, including providing information leading to the arrest of Hambali, the top operative in the al Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, who was behind the Bali bombing of 2002. In this instance even the Times's own ombudsman, Byron Calame, concluded that the paper should not have run the story. Would it be surprising, once again, if, in light of the attention drawn to U.S. financial monitoring capabilities, al Qaeda began to move money in ways less likely to be caught in our surveillance sieve?

Both of these stories were published by newspapers against the strenuous objections of high-ranking officials in government, including straight-shooting intelligence professionals like CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden and, in the case of the SWIFT story, even leading Democrats, like former Congressman Lee Hamilton. President Bush himself warned the Times's top editors that if they went forward with the NSA wiretapping story, they might one day have blood on their hands.

One interesting question that will now therefore arise is how Faisal Shahzad communicated with his contacts in Pakistan and how he obtained the funds he used to carry out his attack. In particular, did he take measures to evade our surveillance?

We are an open society that cannot be hardened against attacks like the one we just saw in Times Square. But a press that regards the First Amendment as a suicide pact and recklessly divulges operational counterterrorism secrets takes a very difficult problem and makes it far worse, placing us all at risk. [Schoenfeld/WashingtonPost/5May2010] 

North Waziristan: Terrorism's New Hub? by Ahmed Rashid. Information is still emerging about suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen who apparently spent time here from July until February. Court documents indicate that Shahzad received bomb-making training in Waziristan, the known haven of numerous groups and extremists.

Over the past 18 months, Pakistan's army has conducted major offensives in six of the seven tribal agencies that border Afghanistan. But the seventh agency - North Waziristan - has been left alone. In part, that is because it is home to the Afghan Taliban networks of Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who have close relations with the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). It has also been left alone for good tactical, if poor strategic, reasons - the army has struck deals with the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan not to attack Pakistani forces. Until recently, these deals have held.

But Pakistan's counterterrorism strategy, which has been extensively praised by American generals, is now coming apart at the seams - all because of North Waziristan.

A sense of despair and helplessness has come to grip the Pakistani public, which faces more suicide bomb attacks each day than even the Afghans next door. Major cities like Peshawar, where more than 100 police officers have been killed this year, are under siege by the Pakistani Taliban. Now it seems Pakistani militants are also involved in global jihad.

North Waziristan is the hub of so many terrorist groups and so much terrorist plotting and planning that neither the CIA nor the ISI seems to have much clue about what is going on there. A year ago, the Pakistan Taliban under Baitullah Mehsud ran a semi-disciplined terrorist movement from the tribal areas that bombed and killed Pakistanis with dastardly methodicalness. Mehsud was killed last year in a U.S. drone strike. What is left is anarchy, as groups and splinter groups and splinters of splinters operate from North Waziristan with no overall control by anyone, not even Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Hakimullah Mehsud, a ruthless leader of the Pakistani Taliban pronounced dead by authorities after a U.S. drone strike in January, has turned up alive and well. He was probably hiding out in North Waziristan all these months and nobody knew. In videos released Monday, he promises that "the time is very near when our fedayeen will attack the American states in the major cities." He is ominously flanked by two armed and masked men.

Punjabi extremist groups that were once trained by the military to fight Indian forces in Kashmir have splintered from their mother groups and operate out of North Waziristan in alliance with the Pashtun Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda. Inexplicably, one of these Punjabi groups last week executed Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI officer known for his sympathy for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Who killed Khawaja and why is still a huge mystery. Was it a case of terror eating its own?

Other militant groups operating out of North Waziristan include vehemently anti-Shiite groups, several Central Asian and Chechen groups, and, by some accounts, Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for the deadly 2008 attack in Mumbai. Training is available for Pakistanis and foreigners who come and go at will. Five young Americans are on trial in Pakistan for trying to reach North Waziristan.

Pakistan's army says it cannot open another front in North Waziristan because it is overstretched and is focusing on its offensives in other agencies. Yet the army just held exercises with 50,000 troops on the Indian border to signal to the international community that it still considers India its main enemy.

In the tribal agencies, the army is also dealing with a quarter-million internal refugees and is engaged in humanitarian relief, reconstruction and the maintenance of supply lines that are regularly ambushed by militants. The tragedy is that the civilian government hasn't offered to take over these tasks - which it should - and the army isn't encouraging it to do so. Counterterrorism without a civilian "hold and build" component is meaningless.

What is happening in North Waziristan is having a global impact. Something has to be done about a region that has become an even greater terrorist hub than Afghanistan was before 2001. Pakistan's leaders - both civil and military - should take the lead in finding solutions to the problem, as the international community helps Islamabad implement a policy that will clear out this lethal terrorism central. [Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy, is most recently the author of "Descent Into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia."] [Rashid/WashingtonPost/4May2010] 

Section IV - NOTICES, OBITUARIES, BOOKS AND COMING EVENTS

Notices

Fund-Raising Bicycle Ride for CIA Patriots - "We are soliciting AFIO support for an upcoming transnational bicycle ride in support of the Central Intelligence Agency Memorial Fund. Full details of the ride, its focus, intent and the riders themselves are contained on our website, www.pedalingforpatriots.com. Any support AFIO members could provide in terms of advertising the ride and its purpose would be deeply appreciated. As the AFIO is aware, public events in support of the CIA and its personnel are few, if any. As a retired officer of the CIA (bio on the website), I would welcome the opportunity to speak to AFIO Chapters about the ride. Our route will include 8 states and we've allocated sufficient time to speak to local AFIO chapters during the ride (route is outlined on the website). Thank you for your consideration. Rob Richer"
Questions to Robert Richer, 703.992.3530, www.pedalingforpatriots.com, rgricher@hotmail.com

Obituaries

Marguerite Garden: Schoolgirl Spy for the Resistance who Fooled the Gestapo and Saved a Group of 40 Allied Airmen. Marguerite Garden, who died on May 5 aged 84, was a Scottish grandmother who, as a 14-year-old schoolgirl in occupied Brittany, risked her life daily to work as a courier for British military intelligence and helped Allied airmen escape across the sea.

In August 1940 Marguerite Vourc'h, as she then was, returned home from boarding school in Paris to find her home village of Plomodiern, in western Brittany, occupied by German troops. Though the Resistance was virtually non-existent at the time, her father, Antoine, the local doctor, sought out sympathizers on his rounds; meanwhile Marguerite, in pretended innocence, established from her friends where their families' sympathies lay.

When her brother Jean returned home from the war, she helped him and some friends escape to England disguised as fishermen. They soon returned to Brittany, trained and with a couple of radios.

Perched on a hillside, about three miles from the coast, Plomodiern was the perfect spot from which to track the movements of German boats in the Bay of Dournenez, and Marguerite soon showed her true potential.

For days on end she would cycle round the local coastline, gathering intelligence on soldiers, boats and mines, which was duly relayed to MI6. Increasingly, her work brought her into contact with the Resistance as she helped deliver false identity cards to the networks. No one took a 14-year-old schoolgirl on holiday for a spy, and she managed to continue her work even after part of the family home was commandeered to billet Gestapo and Wehrmacht officers in January 1941.

One day she was going to collect eggs and spotted a tall mast with strange wires in a local field. The farmer's wife, assuming she was just a nosy child, told her it was for sending messages to the German submarines. Within three days the RAF had destroyed the mast.

During term time Marguerite continued to study in Paris, but at half-term and holidays she would resume her spying. School provided her with perfect cover for carrying messages and parcels between her local Resistance network and another in Paris. When she returned to Paris, hidden among her school books were folders bulging with military information. "There was no reason to suspect me," she recalled. "I was a young girl, traveling to my school. I was never arrested."

As the war progressed, Marguerite became involved in helping Allied airmen escape to Britain by hiding them in lobster boats. She also passed on information about German ship positions which a family friend, a Madame Le Roux, managed to extract from an unsuspecting harbormaster.

When Madame Le Roux was arrested at the Vourc'h family home, the Germans at first failed to make any connection. But, fearful of what she might say under interrogation, Marguerite's father made his escape, eventually finding his way to North Africa. When the Gestapo eventually turned up on the family doorstep Marguerite's mother informed them that he had abandoned his family. They believed her and Marguerite did not come under suspicion.

As the war approached its denouement Marguerite and her mother were joined by Jean-Claude Camors (code-named Raoll), a Resistance friend of her brother.

Together they planned an operation to repatriate some 40 Allied airmen who were then hiding in Brittany.

The airmen were duly assembled, but before they could put the plan into action, Raoll was recognized by a German double agent and shot. His death meant Marguerite and her mother had to find a place to hide the airmen and a way to feed them. They approached the local priest, who agreed to hide them in his church. The men hid there for days, while the Resistance waited for a chance to get them home.

The successful escape of the airmen, however, was to be the undoing of Marguerite as, when the men arrived in Britain, the BBC broadcast a coded message that the "fourth son of a doctor of Brittany" had arrived. It was too obviously a reference to Marguerite's family, and the Gestapo soon came calling once again.

Marguerite was at school at the time and her mother was visiting the Breton town of Quimper. Warned by friends not to come home, they hid in a run-down apartment in Paris.

But Marguerite's younger sisters, aged four, six and eight, were left behind and had to face the wrath of the Gestapo: "They'd wake the girls up in the middle of the night, holding their rifles to the girls' faces," Marguerite recalled. "They would do anything they could to terrify them into saying where mother was. But it didn't work."

A few months later Paris was liberated.

The sixth of nine children, Marguerite Vourc'h was born on January 25 1926 at Plomodiern, in the Finist�re department, where her father was both the village doctor and a local councilor. A veteran of the First World War, he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the L�gion d'honneur. Marguerite was educated locally and at the Maison d'education de la L�gion d'honneur at St Denis, just outside Paris.

After emerging from hiding during the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Marguerite had the harrowing task of locating and bringing back to her mother the body of her brother Jean, who had been mortally wounded at Versailles during the battle for Paris.

After the war she went on to study Architecture at the Beaux Arts in Paris, but cut her studies short when she met James Garden, a Scottish army surgeon visiting Paris on holiday. She followed him to Scotland against the wishes of her father, and they married in 1949, eventually settling in Lanark, where her husband became a prominent orthopedic surgeon.

A keen amateur naturalist, Marguerite Garden was a prime mover in founding the Corehouse Nature Reserve, which is now run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, and supported many other conservation projects in South Lanarkshire. She served for many years in the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in collecting funds each year for the Poppy Appeal for the Royal British Legion.

After the war she received a handwritten letter of thanks from the Air Chief Marshal for her help in securing the freedom of many of his men, but for many decades her story went untold for the simple reason that she had remained true to her orders to remain silent.

In 2003, however, her contribution was recognized belatedly by the French government and she was appointed a Chevalier de la L�gion d'honneur. In the same year she was nominated for a "Woman of the Year" award, and in 2004 her story formed part of a BBC2 documentary, Crafty Tricks of War. "It wasn't bravery, it was necessity," she recalled. "It was sad and frightening. But there was something about those days, maybe it was the adrenalin. I have never been so alive."

Marguerite Garden's husband predeceased her in 1992, and she is survived by her seven children. [Telegraph/8May2010] 

Angus Thuermer; Former Journalist, CIA Official. As a top CIA public affairs official, Angus Thuermer described himself as the agency's "spooksman" who officially gave "no comment" to inquiring reporters.

But that didn't mean Mr. Thuermer, 92, who died of pneumonia April 14 at Inova Loudoun Hospital, lacked for stories to tell. Just out of college in the late 1930s, he reported on the eve of World War II from Berlin before being interned by the Germans.

In the mid-1940s, Mr. Thuermer served in the U.S. Navy interrogating German U-boat engineers. He then joined the CIA for a 26-year career that included postings as station chief in New Delhi and Berlin during the Cold War.

Part of his expertise as a clandestine agent, his family said, was helping sources get out of tight spaces, or occasionally into them.

In one instance, Mr. Thuermer smuggled a source out of India by putting him and a bottle of oxygen in a box, which was boarded onto the cargo bay of a Pan Am flight out of New Delhi.

For another mission, he arranged to have Chinese dissidents carried over the mountains of Nepal into India on the back of an elephant.

Then, there was Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, whom he helped spirit out of New Delhi to the United States, in part by hiding her in a luggage cart at an airport.

Before retiring in 1978, Mr. Thuermer served as the CIA station chief in Berlin for two years. Because of his high position, the East German Stasi secret police covertly recorded many of Mr. Thuermer's moves around the city.

After the end of the Cold War, Mr. Thuermer requested his Stasi file and noted, in a 1998 essay for the Christian Science Monitor, that he felt somewhat let down about how much of the material was mundane. It stated, for example, the time he drove his Volkswagen bus the wrong direction on a one-way street.

Angus MacLean Thuermer was born in Quincy, Ill., on July 17, 1917. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1938, he moved to Berlin to study German.

Through a family friend, Mr. Thuermer secured a job with the Associated Press as a reporter to make extra spending money during his time abroad. He quickly made a name for himself as a witness to some of the most traumatic events leading up to the war that engulfed Europe and later the world.

He filed firsthand reports on the anti-Semitic riots of Kristallnacht, when he watched a synagogue burn to the ground and saw a piano crash through a second-story window. He was one of the first to cover Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939.

For one widely played story, Mr. Thuermer negotiated with German officials to interview British author P.G. Wodehouse, "the imperturbable creator of the unexampled Jeeves," who in a series of beloved stories is personal valet to the foppish Bertie Wooster.

Wodehouse was arrested at his villa in Le Touquet, France, and taken by German soldiers to a prison camp in eastern Germany that had once been an insane asylum. There, as Mr. Thuermer wrote in his dispatch on Dec. 26, 1940, Wodehouse was "cheerfully writing a book" in an old padded cell. "Well, my, my," Wodehouse told Mr. Thuermer. "It certainly is grand of you to come down to see me."

A year later, Mr. Thuermer himself was interned shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war. He and 135 journalists, diplomats and American officials still in Germany were detained for five months in Bad Nauheim, a resort town in the lush countryside north of Frankfurt.

To bide time, Mr. Thuermer, wire service reporter Glen Stadler and George Kennan, a U.S. embassy official who later became a chief architect of U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union, formed the "Bad Nauheim Wurlitzer Cup Series," a four-team baseball league.

They used a whittled-down tree branch for a bat and made a baseball out of a champagne cork wrapped in old pajamas and socks and bound by U.S. Public Health Service adhesive tape. Bases were fashioned from diplomatic pouches, and home plate was crafted from the end of a commissary box.

They went to such lengths, he later told The Washington Post, because "it's unconstitutional not to play baseball."

When they were released in 1942 through an exchange for prisoners, Mr. Thuermer took the baseball bat home and later kept it in his garage in Middleburg, where he had lived since the 1950s with his wife of 62 years, the former Alice Alexander.

She survives, along with three children, Tina Thuermer of Arlington County, Kitty Thuermer of Washington and Angus M. Thuermer Jr. of Jackson, Wyo.; and one granddaughter.

Nearly 50 years after his release from Bad Nauheim, Mr. Thuermer decided to wrap his old bat in newspaper and mail it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., where it is now part of the museum's World War II collection. [Shapiro/WashingtonPost/8May2010] 

Charles W. Roades Air Force, Defense Officer. Charles W. Roades, 79, a retired Air Force colonel who later served with the Defense Intelligence Agency as a human intelligence expert, died of cardiac arrest April 26 at his home in Colorado Springs.

He was a Washington area resident for many years until retiring to Colorado in 2005.

In the late 1940s, Col. Roades enlisted in the Air Force and was trained as a Russian linguist. He later served for a few months in Korea before attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he graduated in 1955 with a degree in military engineering. He was trained as a pilot and accumulated more than 7,000 hours of flight time, specializing in heavy-lift aircraft.

After a short stint teaching in the English department at the Air Force Academy, Col. Roades served as a pilot in Thailand and Vietnam and was selected for intelligence training.

From 1977 to 1979, he served as an Air Force attach� in Moscow, where he earned commendations for saving classified documents from destruction after a fire gutted the U.S. Embassy.

He retired from the Air Force in 1985 as the special assistant to the director of attaches at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then, as a civilian with the DIA, he joined the Senior Executive Service and served as a human intelligence collection expert. He retired again in 1997.

Charles Walton Roades was born in Evansville, Ind. He received a master's degree in English literature from the University of Washington in 1963 and a master's degree in counseling psychology in 1973 from what is now Troy University in Alabama.

His marriages to Dorothy Roades and Margaret Lowe Roades ended in divorce. His third wife, Viviane Tanton Roades, died in 2003.

Survivors include a son from his second marriage, Christopher Roades of Long Beach, Calif.; a son from his third marriage, Charles W. Roades Jr. of Vienna; a brother; and five grandchildren. [Shapiro/WashingtonPost/6May2010]

Books/Reading

The German Connection: How the Muslim Brotherhood Found a Haven in Europe. As we know too well by now, sometime in the past century the religion of Muhammad was weaponized - that is, there was a coupling of terrorism and Islam among its militant believers. This development didn't take place in isolation, however. Islamism, as we now call a radical version of the faith, emerged in close contact with the West. In the decades before 9/11 Western governments often turned a blind eye to Islamist agitation or, in a few cases, na�vely nurtured the very people who today inspire or lead terrorist attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and other parts of the world - even, as we were reminded by last week's attempted bombing in Times Square, in the U.S.

As a practical philosophy, Islamism can be traced back to an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hasan al-Banna. In 1928 he founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a group devoted to restoring a fundamentalist idea of Islam to government and society alike. At the time, thinkers in the Muslim world were obsessed by the West's colonial dominance and by their own civilization's decline. Banna was a populist who aimed his idea of Islamic revival at a wide audience by putting his thoughts - and his rigid interpretation of the Koran - into plain words. The movement tried to broaden its appeal still further by emphasizing social justice and providing welfare services. The Muslim Brotherhood's methods have inspired Islamists ever since, including, today, the members of al Qaeda and Hamas.

Banna was assassinated in 1949; his group was banned in Egypt and hounded out of other Arab states. But the Brotherhood found safe haven in postwar Europe. This sanctuary was essential to the Brotherhood's future but attracted little attention until the attacks of 9/11, for which Europe was the staging ground. As a Journal reporter (who, incidentally, left the newspaper earlier this year), Ian Johnson spent a good part of the years following 9/11 untangling Europe's webs of radical Islam. The result is "A Mosque in Munich," an impeccably researched and eye-opening work of social and political history.

Mr. Johnson brings to life a previously overlooked episode in the Muslim Brotherhood's story and thus in the story of Islamism as a whole: How a radical European beachhead came to be established in Munich. It should be said that the story takes some confusing turns; even alert readers may find themselves flipping to the list of characters at the back of the book, or to the index, to help them follow the narrative. But many of the details are astonishing and the larger implications for our own time disturbing.

As religious fervor took on a political cast in the 20th century, intelligence agencies and policy wonks, at various times, sought to exploit Islamists for their own purposes. In the 1980s, for instance, America supported Osama bin Laden and the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets, inadvertently giving force to the "blowback" that followed. But Mr. Johnson says that the roots of the "blowback" extend all the way to Nazi Germany. During the 1930s, the German government saw the Muslim Brotherhood, with its anti-Semitism and its anti-communist views, as a useful ally. The Germans bankrolled the group's quasi-military wing. At the same time, the Nazis recruited religious Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus to fight the Soviets. Some of these Nazi-allied Muslims later found refuge in postwar Germany, more than a few ending up in Munich.

By then the Cold War was starting up, and America was seeking ways to counter the Soviet Union. A CIA-backed outfit called the American Committee for Liberation recruited the expatriate Soviet Muslims for Radio Liberty, a broadcast arm of the U.S. government that, among other things, was trying to stir up Soviet minorities against Stalin's rule. The U.S. (and the British) also decided to back the Muslim Brotherhood; as the sworn enemy of Egyptian ruler Gamel Nasser, the group looked like a useful friend.

The principal contact between the Western agents and the Muslim Brotherhood was Said Ramadan, a prominent "brother" who had fled from Egypt to Europe in the 1950s and went on to write a classic work on Islamic law. In 1953 he even met with President Dwight Eisenhower at the White House. A CIA analyst wrote: "Ramadan seems to be a Fascist, interested in the grouping of individuals for power." It was an astute reading of the man and his organization. It was also ignored. Though the CIA files for this period are closed and Mr. Johnson can't say "definitively" whether Ramadan was on the agency's payroll, the U.S., he claims, used "financial and political leverage to give the Brotherhood's man in Europe a leg up."

The mosque in the title of Mr. Johnson's book is the Islamic Center of Munich. It was founded in 1958 and became a hub of radical Islam in Europe. As Mr. Johnson tells it, American and German governments and several prominent Muslims brought the center to life and competed to control it, playing each off against the other. As Germany and America lost interest, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged triumphant, and Munich turned into a Continental mecca for Muslim activists. The Brotherhood's recently retired "supreme guide," Mahdy Akef, ran the center in the 1980s and, writes Mr. Johnson, "helped drive an unprecedented surge in the organizing of Islam throughout Europe." A planner of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Mahmoud Abouhalima, frequented the mosque. German terrorist investigators have raided the mosque in more recent years, but never pressed charges.

"A Mosque in Munich" makes clear that the West for too long misjudged militant Islam's threat and may have unwittingly facilitated the rise of a movement that, Mr. Johnson says, "creates a mental preconditioning for terrorism." The challenge for the U.S. and for Europe - now home to 20 million Muslims, four times the number in America - will be how to uproot radical Islam while integrating recent Muslim arrivals and their children. [Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.] [Kaminski/WallStreetJournal/6May2010] 

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

MANY Spy Museum Events in May with full details are listed on the AFIO Website at www.afio.com. The titles for some of these are as follows:

• Thursday, 13 May 2010; 10 am - 2:30 pm - Washington, DC - "Codebreaking in World War II: The Inside Story" at the International Spy Museum
• Thursday, 20 May 2010; 6 pm - Washington, DC - "Goldfinger" at the International Spy Museum

Wednesday, 12 May 2010, 11:30 a.m. - Scottsdale, AZ - Arizona Chapter of AFIO on "State of Arizona's Finances." TOPIC: The State of Arizona's Finances: What’s Really Going On With The Budget.
Hon. Dean Martin was elected in 2006 as State Treasurer, Arizona’s Chief Financial Officer and is responsible for the prudent custody and management of state and local monies. The Treasurer also serves as the Chairman of the State Board of Investment, and State Loan Commission, as the State Surveyor General, and on the State Land Selection Board. Treasurer Martin is currently second in line of succession to the Governor. He previously served six years as a State Senator and Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
Event is being held at: McCormick Ranch Golf Club (7505 McCormick Parkway, Scottsdale AZ 85258 ~ Phone 480.948.0260). Our meeting fees will be as follows: • $20.00 for AFIO members• $22.00 for guests. For reservations or questions, please email Simone sl@4smartphone.net or simone@afioaz.org or call and leave a message on 602.570.6016.

Saturday 15 May 2010, 2 p.m. - Kennebunk, ME - The AFIO Maine Chapter hosts Dr. Hayat Alvi , specialist on the Middle East, South Asia, and Islamic Studies. Dr. Alvi, who is an Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, will speak on two subject areas:  (1)  President Obama's policy towards Iran and (2) attempted terrorist attacks and linkage to South East Asia.
Dr. Alvi holds a doctorate in political science from Howard University, a Masters in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree in international studies and journalism from the University of South Florida, Tampa.  She is proficient in Arabic and Urdu and has a working knowledge of Persian.  She is currently working toward a graduate certificate in remote sensing at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Alvi is the author of numerous articles and studies including several on the status of women in Afghanistan.  Her books include:  "Regional Integration in the Middle East: An Analysis of Inter-Arab Cooperation", "An Introduction to International Studies: Exploring Frontiers", and "The Arabian Nights Reader".  She is co-editor of the 11th and 12th editions of "Case Studies in Policy Making".
The meeting will be held at the Kennebunk Free Library, 112 Main Street, Kennebunk.  The public is invited.  For information call 207-967-4298

Sunday, 16 May 2010, 11:30 – 1:30 - Cleveland, OH - The AFIO N Ohio Chapter features James Robenalt on "Sex, Espionage and the First World War." Mr. Robenalt is a litigation attorney with Thompson Hine LLP in Cleveland. In 1997 he began representing Avery Dennison Corporation in connection with a major theft of its intellectual property by a Taiwanese scientist. Jim assisted the Department of Justice and the FBI in helping the company to set up a “sting” operation in which the Taiwanese CEO was filmed in a hotel in Cleveland taking trade secrets from the scientist who had confessed and was cooperating. The case drew international attention as it was the first prosecution under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996. The prosecution led to the first convictions under the Act, and the company received a jury verdict of $81 million in a related civil case. Jim also represented the company in retaliation suits and proceedings brought by the Taiwanese company in Taiwan and China. The FBI made a training video using the case as its example, and Jim appears in the video.
Jim is the author of The Harding Affair, recounting the story of a future President, his love affair with a woman accused of being a German spy, and the Great War. The Harding Affair tells the previously unexamined and unknown stories of Harding's personal and political life, including his passionate and politically complicated romance. Jim explores the reasons that the United States became involved in the Great War, and explains why so many Americans at the time supported Germany, even after the U.S. entered conflict in the spring of 1917 on the side of Britain and France. The comprehensive revelations are set in a suspenseful narrative that interweaves a real-life romance/spy drama with the story of Harding's rise to the presidency.
For more information on AFIO and our mission of educating the public on the need to support a strong intelligence community in defense of the nation, please visit www.afio.com.
WHERE: Cleveland Yachting Club, 200 Yacht Club Dr., Cleveland, OH 44116-1736, (440) 333-1155
RSVP: Email or phone to Dianne Mueller to her at mueller@afioohio.org or phone at 440) 424-4071. Mail check by May 9th or call..
Cost: AFIO National & Chapter Members: $23 per person. National AFIO Non-Chapter Members: $25 per person. Non-members of AFIO: $30 per person
Mail reservation form and check by May 9, 2010 to: AFIO N Ohio Chapter, Solon Business Campus, 31300 Solon Road, Suite 6, Solon, OH 44139

17 - 21 May 2010 - Chantilly, VA - the GEOINT Community Week. AFIO members are invited. 17 May is the USGIF Invitational, Pleasant Valley Golf Club, 4715 Pleasant Valley Road, Chantilly, VA 20151; 18-21 MAY: Army Geospatial and Imagery Conference, Heritage Conference Center, Chantilly, VA; 19 MAY: NGA Technology Day (SI//TK), HQ NGA, Bethesda, MD; 20 May: USGIF Technology Day (U), Hyatt Regency Reston, Reston, VA; and 21 May: Motion Imagery Workshop, Hyatt Regency Reston, Reston, VA
Questions to Jordan N. Fuhr, Director of Marketing & Strategic Communications, 703.793.0109 x101 or visit http://usgif.org/events/GEOINTCommWeek

20 May 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO - AFIO Rocky Mountain Chapter at the Air Force Academy, Falcon Club features Mark Pfoff of the El Paso Sheriff Office, "Computer Forensics and all things Digital." RSVP to Tom Van Wormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

20 May 2010 - San Francisco, CA - The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts Andr� Le Gallo, former CIA Chief of Station and Senior National Intelligence Officer for Counterterrorism. Le Gallo will be speaking about Intelligence: Past and Present, comparing the Cold War CIA with today’s. RSVP and pre-payment required. The meeting will be held at United Irish Cultural Center, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco (between Sloat and Wawona). 11:30 AM no host cocktails; noon - luncheon. $25 member rate with advance reservation and payment; $35 non-member. E-mail RSVP to Mariko Kawaguchi (please indicate chicken or fish): afiosf@aol.com and mail check made out to "AFIO" to: Mariko Kawaguchi, P.O. Box 117578 Burlingame, CA 94011

Thursday 20 May 2010, 12:30 p.m. - Los Angeles, CA - AFIO L.A. holds chapter meeting featuring Secret Service Special Agents Greg Ligouri and Adam Kamann. These two members of the Los Angeles Counterfeit Squad will conduct a presentation on understanding counterfeit currency and the counterfeit trends surrounding the Los Angeles area. The presentation will begin at 1:00 PM. Lunch will be served at 12:30 PM at the LMU campus for a cost of $20. Please RSVP via email AFIO_LA@Yahoo.com by no later than May 14, 2010 if you would like to attend the meeting with or without lunch. If directions are needed please forward an email request. Inquiries to afio_la@yahoo.com

Monday, 24 May 2010 at 1:30 p.m. at Fort Meade, Maryland - NSA's Center for Cryptologic History hosts the 2010 Henry F. Schorreck Lecture featuring scholar Stephen Budiansky on "What's the Use of Cryptologic History?"
This year's Schorreck Memorial Lecturer will be Stephen Budiansky, who will deliver a talk entitled "What's the Use of Cryptologic History: Incorporating an Intelligence Perspective into Military and Diplomatic Studies." Budiansky is a leading scholar in this field who has also served as a Congressional fellow, was a national security correspondent for The Atlantic, and as a freelance journalist his articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Economist. As a cryptologic historian, he has written one of the most definitive accounts of cryptology in World War II, Battle of Wits: the Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II which includes insightful explanations of cryptologic concepts along with well-researched historical analysis. He is the author of numerous other books on military and intelligence history.
The Center for Cryptologic History's Henry F. Schorreck Memorial Lecture series is an annual historical presentation named in honor of the former NSA Historian. It brings in noted individuals in history or the social sciences to address cryptologic issues with an historical perspective.
This lecture is open to the public and will be delivered on 24 May 2010 beginning at 1330 at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Maryland. Those wishing to attend should send an email confirming their intent to kgsieg@nsa.gov (with history@nsa.gov in the 'cc' line). Directions to the Museum can be found here. 

25 May 2010 - Arlington, VA - The Defense Intelligence Forum meets to hear Allen Keiswetter on "Political Islam." The DIF meets at the Alpine Restaurant, 4770 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA 22207. Allen L. Keiswetter will speak on political Islam. Allen Keiswetter, a retired senior Foreign Service officer, is a scholar at the Middle East Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. He has also taught courses on Islam and the Middle East at the National Defense Intelligence College and the National War College. In the Department of State, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Director of Arabian Peninsula Affairs in the Near East Bureau, and Director of the Office of Intelligence Liaison in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His postings abroad include Riyadh, Sanaa, Khartoum, Baghdad, Tunis, Beirut, Brussels and Vietnam.
Make reservations by 18 May by email to diforum@verizon.net. Social hour starts at 1130, lunch at 1200. Give names telephone numbers, email addresses, and choice of chicken al limone, baked salmon, veal marsala, or pasta primavera. Pay at the door with a check for $29 per person payable to DIAA, Inc. They do NOT accept CASH!

25 - 27 May 2010 - Ottawa, CAN - The IAFIE hosts 6th conference on Intelligence Education. The International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE) hosts 6th Annual Conference at the Ottawa Marriott Hotel. Theme: Intelligence Education: A Global Phenomenon. For more information or to register.

27 May 2010, 11:30 a.m. - San Diego, CA - AFIO San Diego Chapter hosts Charles Wurster, USCG (Ret). Charles D. Wurster - President/CEO, The San Diego Port Authority, Retired U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Charles D. Wurster was appointed as the Port's President/CEO by the Board on January 5, 2009. Wurster is a three-star Admiral who served 37 years in the Coast Guard. Before serving as Coast Guard's Commander of the Pacific Area from 2006-2008, he served as Commander of the Fourteenth District in Honolulu. He also served as the Chief of Acquisition in Washington, DC; Chief of Staff for the Pacific Area in Alameda, CA; Commanding Officer of the Coast Guard base in Kodiak, Alaska; and Commanding Officer of the Facilities Design and Construction Center in Seattle, Washington. Wurster holds a Master's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois and graduated with honors from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut
Location: The Trellises Garden Grill, Town and Country Resort and Convention Center, 500 Hotel Circle North, San Diego, CA 92108
$20.00 per person including gratuity. RSVP for you and your guest required by Friday, May 21, 2010.
Calling Marjon at 619-297-9959 or by sending an Email to Darryl at darryl@pexis.com

Wednesday, 2 June 2010, 6:00 p.m. -- Las Vegas, NV - the AFIO Las Vegas Chapter meets to hear Fred Barber on "The Roman Empire & The New Rome"
Fred Eugene Barber's presentation takes the audience through 2700 years of history in about an hour, so hang on to your chairs. He starts with the founding of Rome, through its conquest of the Mediterranean world, its holding of power, its conversion to Christianity and its collapse into countries most often under new owners. As the vacuum is filled by former Roman colonies as Roman lands are leaving the empire, Mr. Barber gives a brief explanation of how and who filled the vacuum spots, concentrating a bit on the Byzantium and the world of the Arabs and Turks, and how this has affected us here in the New World. Spain, a former Roman province, becomes part of this story because the Arabic peoples controlled and lived in Spain for over 500 years.
Barber is not a professional speaker, but has a passion for history, especially as to how it has affected his America of today. He is a firm believer in the old adage: History repeats itself....and as Rome fell, so might....
Event location will be at The Officers' Club at Nellis Air Force Base. All guests must use the MAIN GATE located at the intersection on Craig Road and Las Vegas Blvd. Address: 5871 Fitzgerald Blvd., Nellis AFB, NV 89191 Phone: 702-644-2582. (Guest names must be submitted to BentleyM@nv.doe.gov or at afiolasvegas@gmail.com by 4:00 p.m., Monday, May 24th. Join us at 5 p.m. in the "Check Six" bar area for liaison and beverages.
If you plan to bring a guest(s), please RSVP with names by 4:00 p.m., Monday, May 24th. Entrance to the Base self and guests cannot be guaranteed if I don't have their names (unless they already have military ID to enter the base).
Dinner: You are welcome to arrive early and join us in the "Check Six" bar area, inside the Officer's Club. The Check Six has an excellent, informal dinner venue along with a selection of snacks. Water will be provided during the meeting, but you may also purchase beverages and food at the bar and bring them to the meeting. Once again, please feel free to bring your spouse and/or guest(s) to dinner as well as our meeting, but remember to submit your guest(s) names to me be the stated deadline above.
Questions? Email afiolasvegas@gmail.com or call 702-295-1024. We look forward to seeing you!

19 June 2010 - Kennebunk, ME - The AFIO Maine Chapter features lawyer Suzanne Spaulding speaking on "Solving Current National Security Issues." Suzanne Spaulding, who is currently Principal, Bingham Consulting Group, Bingham McCutchen LLP, is an authority on national security . She served as director of two congressionally mandated commissions, the National Commission on Terrorism, chaired by Amb. Paul Bremer, III, and the Commission to Assess the Organization of  the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction chaired by former CIA Director, John Deutch.  She has been quoted regularly in media outlets around the country.  She was minority staff director for the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.  Previous legislative experience includes legislative director and senior counsel for Sen. Arlen Specter.  She also worked for Rep. Jane Harman.  She was assistant counsel at CIA and  is immediate past chair, American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.  Ms. Spaulding is currently a member of AFIO's National Board. The meeting will be held at the Kennebunk Free Library, 112 Main St., Kennebunk at 2:00 p.m. The public is invited. For information call 967-4298.

Monday, 21 June 2010, 6 p.m. - New York, NY - The AFIO NY Chapter meets to hear Jack Devine discuss "The True Story of Charlie Wilson's War"
Former CIA Officer Jack Devine will discuss Wilson and Afghanistan. Hold the date. Further details to follow. Will be held at the University Club. Questions to Jerry Goodwin, Chapter President, 347-334-1503 or email him at afiometro@yahoo.com

HOLD THE DATE - 17 - 20 August 2010 - Cleveland, OH - AFIO National Symposium on the Great Lakes - "Intelligence and National Security on the Great Lakes"

Co-Hosted with the AFIO Northern Ohio Chapter at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cleveland, OH. Includes presentations by U.S. Coast Guard on Great Lakes security; Canadian counterparts to explain double-border issues; National Air/Space Intelligence Center; Air Force Technical Applications Center; Ohio Aerospace Institute, Tours of NASA Lewis-Brookpark and Plumbrook Stations. Cruise on Lake Erie .
Spies-in-Black-Ties Dinner and Cruise on Lake Erie. Online Reservations to be taken here, shortly.

6 - 7 October 2011 - Laurel, MD - The NSA's Center for Cryptologic History hosts their Biennial Cryptologic History Symposium with theme: Cryptology in War and Peace: Crisis Points in History.

Historians from the Center, the Intelligence Community, the defense establishment, and the military services, as well as distinguished scholars from American and foreign academic institutions, veterans of the profession, and the interested public all will gather for two days of reflection and debate on topics from the cryptologic past. The theme for the upcoming conference will be: “Cryptology in War and Peace: Crisis Points in History.” This topical approach is especially relevant as the year 2011 is an important anniversary marking the start of many seminal events in our nation’s military history. The events that can be commemorated are many.
Such historical episodes include the 1861 outbreak of the fratricidal Civil War between North and South. Nineteen forty-one saw a surprise attack wrench America into the Second World War. The year 1951 began with the fall of Seoul to Chinese Communist forces with United Nations troops retreating in the Korean War. In 1961, the United States began a commitment of advisory troops in Southeast Asia that would eventually escalate into the Vietnam War; that year also marked the height of the Cold War as epitomized by the physical division of Berlin. Twenty years later, a nascent democratic movement was suppressed by a declaration of martial law in Poland; bipolar confrontation would markedly resurge for much of the 1980s. In 1991, the United States intervened in the Persian Gulf to reverse Saddam Hussein’s aggression, all while the Soviet Union suffered through the throes of its final collapse. And in 2001, the nation came under siege by radical terrorism.
Participants will delve into the roles of signals intelligence and information assurance, and not just as these capabilities supported military operations. More cogently, observers will examine how these factors affected and shaped military tactics, operations, strategy, planning, and command and control throughout history. The role of cryptology in preventing conflict and supporting peaceful pursuits will also be examined. The panels will include presentations in a range of technological, operational, organizational, counterintelligence, policy, and international themes.
Past symposia have featured scholarship that set out new ways to consider out cryptologic heritage, and this one will be no exception. The mix of practitioners, scholars, and the public precipitates a lively debate that promotes an enhanced appreciation for the context of past events. Researchers on traditional and technological cryptologic topics, those whose work in any aspect touches upon the historical aspects of cryptology as defined in its broadest sense, as well as foreign scholars working in this field, are especially encouraged to participate.
The Symposium will be held at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Center, in Laurel, Maryland, a location central to the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., areas. As has been the case with previous symposia, the conference will provide unparalleled opportunities for interaction with leading historians and distinguished experts. So please make plans to join us for either one or both days of this intellectually stimulating conference.
Interested persons are invited to submit proposals for a potential presentation or even for a full panel. While the topics can relate to this year’s theme, all serious work on any aspect of cryptologic history will be considered. Proposals should include an abstract for each paper and/or a statement of session purpose for each panel, as well as biographical sketches for each presenter. To submit proposals or form more information on this conference, contact Dr. Kent Sieg, the Center’s Symposium Executive Director, at 301-688-2336 or via email at kgsieg@nsa.gov.

For Additional Events two+ months or greater....view our online Calendar of Events

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