Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Gates to Step Down Next Year. One of the driving forces behind the war in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has flagged that he intends to step down next year.

The former CIA director was appointed by George W Bush four years ago to replace the controversial Donald Rumsfeld.

The widely respected Republican stayed on under Barack Obama, but now says he will depart next year, when it is clear whether the administration's Afghanistan strategy is working.

On the weekend General David Petraeus said a troop drawdown next year would depend on security conditions, and he might advise the president to delay.

But Mr. Gates has told the Los Angeles Times there is no question that the US will begin reducing troop levels next July. [McMurtrie/ABC/17August2010] 

Terrorist Tapes Found Under CIA Desk. The CIA has videotapes of 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison.

The recordings, discovered under a desk, could provide an unparalleled look at how foreign governments aided the U.S. in holding and questioning suspected terrorists.

Several current and former U.S. officials said that the tapes depict Binalshibh's interrogation sessions at a Moroccan-run facility the CIA used near Rabat in 2002. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the videos remain a closely guarded secret.

The tapes could complicate U.S. efforts to prosecute Binalshibh, who has been described as a "key facilitator" in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. [Goldman&Apuzzo/AP/17August2010] 

Russia Expels Romanian Diplomat for Spying. Russia's FSB security agency detained a Romanian diplomat for spying, and he was ordered to leave the country within 48 hours.

"Gabriel Grecu... was detained by FSB in Moscow on August 16 during an attempt to receive secret information of a military nature from a Russian citizen," a spokesman said, claiming that Grecu worked for a Romanian intelligence agency.

"Items of spying equipment that fully reveal his hostile activity against Russia have been confiscated from the intelligence officer," according to the spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

He added that the FSB, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB, was currently conducting an investigation.

Grecu was working under cover as the first secretary of the political department at the Romanian embassy in Moscow, the spokesman charged.

Russia has declared the senior Romanian diplomat "persona non grata" and ordered him to leave the country, the FSB said.

"The foreigner has been declared persona non grata and should leave the territory of our country within the next 48 hours," the FSB said in a statement, referring to a decision by the country's foreign ministry.

Grecu's work was incompatible with his diplomatic status, the FSB statement said.

Romania's foreign ministry refused to make any immediate comment Monday.

"All I can say to you is that the ministry of foreign affairs is not commenting on this subject," ministry spokesman Doris Mircea was quoted as telling private Realitatea TV by telephone.

The report comes on the heels of the biggest spy swap between Russia and the United States since the Cold War in July, after Washington busted a group of 10 Kremlin spies and deported them in return for four Russians accused of spying for the West. [AP/17August2010] 

Pentagon Report: Chinese Military Growing in Strength, Secrecy. China's military might and intentions remain largely a mystery to the U.S. as the Asian power continues to rebuff the Obama administration's efforts to spark an open military relationship, according to a Pentagon report to Congress released on Monday.

"The pace and scope of China's military modernization have increased over the past decade," the Pentagon says in the detailed report.

But Beijing's continued refusal to let U.S. officials know of their military's intentions "increases the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation."

The annual report is supposed to be Defense Secretary Robert Gates' best estimate of Chinese military engagements, spending and strategy, including an assessment of its arms buildup.

China has "the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world," the report said.

The People's Liberation Army is acquiring "large numbers of highly-accurate cruise missiles," built in China and Russia, and is moving the more deadly and accurate arsenal to the Taiwan strait.

In 2009, the Pentagon estimates China deployed between 1,050 and 1,150 short-range missiles near the strait.

But the Pentagon's top concern, as the mainland develops and tests new offensive missiles, is with anti-ship, medium-range ballistic missiles the U.S. believes are designed to strike aircraft carriers more than 900 miles off its coast in the western Pacific.

China's military totals 1.25 million people, with an additional 500,000 in reserves, the Pentagon said. While China publicly claimed this year an annual defense spending total of $78.6 billion, a senior U.S. defense official said the Pentagon's estimate is closer to $150 billion.

This year, Congress required the Pentagon to report on several new areas, including what new weapons platforms would extend Chinese power, details of U.S.-Chinese military engagements and an assessment of what each side stands to gain from them.

The U.S. continued to blame China's political leaders for the freeze in relations between the countries.

"Only when China determines that it is in its own interest to sustain engagement through periods of turbulence will it be possible to build a more solid foundation for military-to-military relations," the report states.

Defense officials complained Monday that China's unwillingness to meet with U.S. military officials has left them few options other than waiting for a friendlier response from Beijing. China has shut out U.S. officials since Washington announced a $6 billion arms sale to Taiwan earlier this year. The U.S. has said the sale was not a surprise and is consistent with its international agreements.

"It only does us so much good to show up to a meeting if we're the only ones that are there," said a senior defense official the Pentagon made available to brief reporters but who was unauthorized to speak on the record.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a Democrat, largely repeated the Pentagon's concerns, warning of "unintended consequences" from Beijing's continued silence.

"We clearly still have a long way to go in U.S.-China security relations," he said.

Also new to this year's report is a detailed organizational chart of China's military leadership structure. The U.S. believes there is internal debate among Chinese leaders about how much to reveal to the world.

"Extreme secrecy is increasingly difficult to reconcile with China's role in the integrated global economy, which depends on transparency," the report said.

Yet, as the Pentagon report was released, China was named the world's second-largest economy.

What is clear is that China is beginning, if slowly, to push beyond its normal territorial concerns. The PLA has 12,000 personnel in United Nations peacekeeping missions worldwide and is participating in global aid missions. In 2009, China projected its force further than ever, cooperating with the multi-nation anti-piracy effort in the Gulf of Aden off the east coast of Africa.

But China's ability to sustain such military power far from the mainland "remains limited," the report stated. [Baron/Stripes/17August2010] 

Espionage Claim: Cambodian "Spy" Still in Thai Prison. A Cambodian migrant worker who was arrested by Thai military police after he was suspected of spying on a military installation remains in custody pending investigation, Cambodian officials said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong said Yean Vuth, 46, was arrested in Thailand's Sa Kaeo province on Saturday while he was walking past a military base. He was due to be released yesterday, but Thai authorities told Cambodian consular officials in Sa Kaeo that they wanted to question the suspect further.

"He is still in detention for further investigations from the Thai military," Koy Kuong said. He said he had instructed consular officials to monitor the prisoner's case closely. Ly Then, chief of the Thai-Cambodian Border Relations Office in Poipet, said police had agreed to release Yean Vuth but had reneged at the last minute.

"We have assured them that Yean Vuth is not a spy," he said. "We hope he will be released very soon." He said that the prisoner had worked in Sa Kaeo for "many years" and had never been charged with a crime. [Sokha/PhnomPenPost/18August2010] 

N.C. Man Tied To Jihad Magazine Faces Charges. A federal grand jury in Charlotte, N.C., convened to consider evidence against Samir Khan, a 24-year-old North Carolina man who is thought to be the editor of Inspire, a new al-Qaida online magazine.

The 67-page publication created a frisson through the U.S. intelligence community earlier this summer because of how very American it seemed to be. It was written in colloquial English. It had jazzy headlines and articles that made the publication sound like a kind of Cosmopolitan for Jihadis.

"Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," read one headline.

Unsure what to pack when you leave for jihad? The magazine helpfully provided a list. Officials became convinced that it was Khan's work, and now they want to hold him accountable for it.

Late last summer, Khan began telling people at a local mosque that he intended to go to Yemen.

"He told me he had the prospect of going to Yemen to teach English at a university there while simultaneously learning Arabic," said Adam Azad, who attended the same mosque and had known Khan. "He was more of an acquaintance than a friend and I didn't think anything of it when he said he was going there."

Muslims in Charlotte are careful when they talk about Khan. That's because over the past several weeks FBI agents have been showing up on doorsteps all over town asking questions. Six young men from the Charlotte area told NPR that agents interviewed them, and several of them received grand jury subpoenas. They say there are others in the crosshairs, too. It all appears to be a part of the case the FBI is building against Khan. Among the questions asked: whether Khan ever mentioned going to Yemen so he could join a terrorist group and target Americans.

"They were asking for more information than would be reasonable for anyone to know about this guy," Azad said. "First of all, if Samir was going to go overseas to harm Americans overseas, he certainly wouldn't make those intentions public."

Sources close to the case tell NPR the grand jury convened Tuesday to see if there was evidence enough to charge Khan with terrorism offenses. Among the charges people close to the case said the grand jury is considering: material support to a terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit murder overseas. The FBI, for its part, declined to confirm or deny there is an investigation. And the grand jury is unlikely to come out with any decision in the case for weeks. Grand jury deliberations are secret until indictments are announced.

Khan first came to the attention of U.S. law enforcement as a blogger. For years, he ran "Inshallah Shaheed" - or "a martyr soon, if it is God's will" - a pro-al-Qaida website, out of his parents' basement. It praised Osama bin Laden. It provided links to violent jihadi videos and footage of U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan. He helped his followers find violent productions of Islamic groups on the Web, all the while staying on the right side of this country's First Amendment protections.

The content of Khan's blog clearly rattled local Muslims.

"Samir was more infamous than famous in the Muslim community," Azad said. "People didn't really follow all the stuff he was putting up on the website but I just remember people saying, 'Oh my God, I can't believe he has that on his blog.'"

People in the Charlotte Muslim community who did not want to be quoted for fear of attracting the attention of the FBI said that they were curious about the blog but had been told by mosque elders and their parents to stay away from it. They didn't want law enforcement officials tracking their computers if they logged on and looked at the site.

"Samir had very few friends around here, maybe one or two friends," says Jamil Hough, a spokesman for the Islamic Center in Charlotte. "So it wasn't as if he had a following here locally. The consensus here was that he was clearly going down the wrong path. And we tried to talk to him about that."

There were two meetings at Hough's Charlotte home with Khan, his father and a circle of elders in the Muslim community in late 2007 and 2008. They spent hours talking to Khan, trying to disabuse him of his beliefs that injustices against Muslims around the world needed to be corrected with violence. They talked to him about bin Laden. They tried to convince him that terrorism was wrong. According to two people at the meeting, and Hough, Khan was quiet and respectful. But it was hard to know if the elders were getting through. Two more meetings were scheduled to track his progress. Only one more took place.

"We were actively involved trying to correct him, not encourage him," Hough said.

But those community efforts had little effect. Intelligence sources say Khan was radicalized before he arrived in North Carolina. They believed it happened in New York, when he was a in his early teens. FBI investigators are tracking down those leads to try to pull together a timeline and see who might have held such sway over the young man. What is certain is that Khan flew to Yemen last October and then disappeared. Then, months later, al-Qaida in Yemen released Inspire magazine.

Congresswoman Sue Myrick (R-NC) says she warned the FBI about Khan years ago. She thinks the bureau missed a key moment in Khan's radicalization - the moment he contacted al-Qaida in Yemen to offer himself up as a recruit.

"My concern has been that you just don't go over there and be accepted immediately," she told NPR. "It is like a closed group, a closed society. Al-Qaida doesn't just take you into their midst if they don't know who you are."

Intelligence officials now say they believe Khan's al-Qaida patron was Anwar al-Awlaki, the same U.S.-born radical cleric linked to the Fort Hood shootings and the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. They say he invited Khan to Yemen and Khan packed his bags and went. [Temple-Raston/NPR/17August2010]

Army Spy Planes Not Used to Track New York Bomb Suspect. The U.S. did not use military surveillance planes to siphon the cell phone calls of the Times Square car bomb suspect earlier this year, according to responses to FOIA requests by Threat Level.

In May, Faisal Shahzad was arrested for allegedly attempting to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The local CBS affiliate in New York reported that U.S. Army intelligence planes had been used to spy on Shahzad and help authorities capture him.

"In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did [Shahzad] in," wrote WCBS correspondent Marcia Kramer. "Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport."

The detail intrigued Threat Level, as it did a number of other people who raised questions about the spy tactic and the source for the news story - WCBS didn't attribute the information to anyone.

But within an hour of posting its story, WCBS mysteriously revised the piece and posted a new version that was missing any mention of spy planes, as well as any indication that the story had been altered. The headline was changed from "Army Intelligence Planes Led To Suspect's Arrest" to "Total Time Of Investigation: 53 Hours, 20 Minutes: Faisal Shahzad In Custody After Nearly Fleeing United States." The story has since disappeared from the WCBS site entirely.

WCBS later said it had inadvertently included the information in its story before confirming it, and then removed it after determining it could not be confirmed. The response was curious, given that WCBS had touted the unconfirmed information in its headline.

So Threat Level filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the U.S. Army and the Justice Department seeking information about the use of spy planes to catch Shahzad. Both recently replied that they found no records related to our request.

Separately, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the U.S. Northern Command - which oversees domestic air operations for all branches of the military - also said his office was "not aware of any assets that were up in the air at the time - not from a NORAD or U.S. Northern Command perspective."

"By and large, if operations are being conducted here in the U.S., we're aware of it," added spokesman John Cornelio. [Zetter/Wired/17August2010] 

CIA Creates New Counter-Proliferation Center. The CIA announced plans to create a counter-proliferation center that would combine analysts and operatives in an effort to bolster the agency's work against the spread of dangerous weapons technology.

The new center would be modeled on the counter-terrorism office that the CIA created more than a decade ago, and expanded dramatically in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But a CIA-run counter-proliferation center could also overlap with a similar, multi-agency organization that was set up in 2005. The National Counterproliferation Center describes itself as "the primary organization within the intelligence community" for coordinating U.S. efforts against the spread of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said the agency's aim is to allow analysts and case officers to "work side-by-side," providing "precise, comprehensive" support to agency-led operations overseas.

The CIA has led covert U.S. efforts to disrupt Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons technology, and has also been involved in tracking al-Qaeda's efforts to acquire chemical and other banned weapons.

But the agency also played a major role in the erroneous assessments that Iraq had stockpiles of illicit weapons - judgments used by the Bush administration to make the case for the 2003 U.S. invasion of that country.

The agency's new center will combine two organizations that had until now functioned separately within the CIA's headquarters - the counter-proliferation division of the National Clandestine Service, which carries out overseas operations, as well as the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center, or WINPAC, which is part of the CIA's analytic branch.

"Our greatest achievements as an agency are the product of close collaboration among operations officers, analysts, targeters, technical specialists, and support officers," Panetta said. [Miller/WashingtonPost/18August2010]

Reports of Two Egyptians Imprisoned in Qatar for Espionage Remain Unconfirmed. Reports of two Egyptians receiving life sentences in Qatar for spying four months ago remain unconfirmed by both Egyptian and Qatari officials.

Al-Masry Al-Youm had reported that two Egyptians, one of whom was identified as Nabil Abdel-Basir, an employee at a Qatari newspaper, had been sentenced by a court in Doha for espionage on behalf of "foreign entities" and that Qatari authorities had been keeping the matter under wraps.

However, according to the sources in the article, the two Egyptians were sentenced for committing espionage on behalf of Asian nations and not Egypt.

The article also stated that Egyptian ambassador in Doha Abdel-Aziz Dawoud was aware of the allegations against the two Egyptians. It was claimed that Qatari authorities had been investigating Abdel-Basir and the other defendant for three years prior to their arrest.

Yet, the Assistant Foreign Minister for Egyptian Expatriates Mohamed Abdel-Hakam released a statement denying knowledge of the incident.

"We do not possess any information about this case and have not heard about it, but shall look into the matter and announce any information we receive," he said.

When contacted by Daily News Egypt, the Qatari Embassy in Cairo stated that it had no knowledge of the incident.

An Egyptian resident living in Doha who asked to remain anonymous told Daily News Egypt that the issue was never heard of in Doha, and that it first surfaced in reports from Egypt.

Diplomatic relations between Egypt and Qatar have deteriorated in recent years for reasons including Egyptian objections to the reporting of Qatari-based news service Al Jazeera. Additionally, Egypt has criticized what it perceives to be Qatari efforts to usurp its role in the region.  [Hussain/TheDailyNewsEgypt/18August2010] 

State Department Will Try to Take Up Slack After US Military Exits Iraq. As the U.S. military prepares to leave Iraq by the end of 2011, the Obama administration is planning a remarkable civilian effort, buttressed by a small army of contractors, to fill the void.

By October 2011, the State Department will assume responsibility for training the Iraqi police, a task that will largely be carried out by contractors. With no U.S. soldiers to defuse sectarian tensions in northern Iraq, it will be up to U.S. diplomats in two new $100 million outposts to head off potential confrontations between the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces.

To protect the civilians in a country that is still home to insurgents with al-Qaida and Iranian-backed militias, the State Department is planning to more than double its private security guards, up to about 7,000, according to administration officials who disclosed new details of the plan. Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said.

"I don't think State has ever operated on its own, independent of the U.S. military, in an environment that is quite as threatening on such a large scale," said James Dobbins, a former ambassador who has seen his share of trouble spots as a special envoy for Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Somalia. "It is unprecedented in scale."

White House officials expressed confidence that the transfer to civilians - about 2,400 people who would work at the Baghdad embassy and other diplomatic sites - would be carried out on schedule and that they could fulfill their mission of helping bring stability to Iraq.

"The really big picture that we have seen in Iraq over the last year and half to two years is this: The number of violent incidents is significantly down, the competence of Iraqi security forces is significantly up and politics has emerged as the basic way of doing business in Iraq," said Anthony J. Blinken, the national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. "If that trend continues, and I acknowledge it is an 'if,' that creates a much better context for dealing with the very significant and serious problems that remain in Iraq."

But the tiny military presence under the Obama administration's plan - limited to several dozen to several hundred officers in an embassy office who would help the Iraqis purchase and field new U.S. military equipment - and the civilians' growing portfolio have led some veteran Iraq hands to suggest that thousands of additional troops would be needed after 2011.

"We need strategic patience here," Ryan C. Crocker, who served as ambassador in Iraq in from 2007 until early 2009, said in an interview. "Our timetables are getting out ahead of Iraqi reality. We do have an Iraqi partner in this. We certainly are not the ones making unilateral decisions anymore. But if they come to us later on this year requesting that we jointly relook at the post-2011 period, it is going to be in our strategic interest to be responsive."

The array of tasks that military experts and some Iraqi officials believe U.S. troops likely will be needed for include training Iraqi forces to operate and support logistically new M-1 tanks, artillery and F-16s they intend to acquire from the Americans, protecting Iraq's airspace until the country can rebuild its air force and perhaps assisting Iraq's special operations units in carrying out counterterrorism operations.

Such an arrangement would need to be negotiated with Iraqi officials, who insisted on the 2011 deadline in the agreement with the Bush administration for removing U.S. forces. With the Obama administration in campaign mode for the coming midterm elections and Iraqi politicians yet to form a government, the question of what future military presence might be needed has been all but banished from public discussion.

"The administration does not want to touch this question right now," said one administration official involved in Iraq issues, adding that military officers had suggested that 5,000 to 10,000 troops might be needed. "It runs counter to their political argument that we are getting out these messy places," the official, speaking only on condition of anonymity, added. "And it would be quite counterproductive to talk this way in front of the Iraqis."

The Obama administration had already committed itself to reducing U.S. troops in Iraq to 50,000 by the end of August, a goal the White House on Wednesday said would be met. Administration officials and experts outside government say, however, that implementing the agreement that calls for removing all U.S. forces by the end of 2011 will be far more challenging.

The progress or difficulties in transferring responsibility to the civilians will not only influence events in Iraq but will provide something of a test case for the Obama administration's longer-term strategy in Afghanistan.

Preparations for the civilian mission have been under way for months. One U.S. official said that more than 1,200 specific tasks carried out by the U.S. military in Iraq had been identified to be handed over to the civilians, transferred to the Iraqis or phased out.

To move around Iraq without U.S. troops, the State Department plans to acquire 60 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, called MRAPs, from the Pentagon; expand its inventory of armored cars to 1,320; and create a mini-air fleet by buying three planes to add to its lone aircraft. Its helicopter fleet, which will be piloted by contractors, will grow to 29 choppers from 17.

The department's plans to rely on 6,000 to 7,000 security contractors, who are also expected to form "quick reaction forces" to rescue civilians in trouble, is a sensitive issue, given Iraqi fury about shootings of civilians by American private guards in recent years. Administration officials said that security contractors would have no special immunity and would be required to register with the Iraqi government. In addition, one of the State Department's regional security officers, agents who oversee security at diplomatic outposts, will be required to approve and accompany every civilian convoy, providing additional oversight.

The startup cost of building and sustaining two embassy branch offices, one in Kirkuk and the other in Mosul, of hiring security contractors, buying new equipment and setting up two consulates in Basra and Erbil, is about $1 billion. It will cost an additional $500 million or so to make the two consulates permanent. And getting the police training program under way will cost more than $800 million.

Among the trickiest missions for the civilians will be dealing with lingering Kurdish and Arab tensions. To tamp down potential conflicts in disputed areas, Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, established a series of checkpoints made up of U.S. soldiers, Iraqi army troops and Peshmerga fighters. But those checkpoints may be phased out when the U.S. troops leave. Instead, the United States is counting on the new embassy branch offices.

Administration officials initially considered building five such branch offices in Iraq, but abandoned those plans as cost estimates grew.

"They will be eyes and ears on the ground to see if progress is being made or problems are developing," Blinken said.

But Daniel Serwer, vice president of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally financed research center, questioned whether this would be sufficient.

"There is a risk it will open the door to real problems," he said. "Our soldiers have been out there in the field with the Kurds and Arabs. Now they are talking about two embassy branch offices, and the officials there may need to stay around the quad if it is not safe enough to be outside."

Another area that has prompted concern is police training, which the civilians are to take over by October 2011.

That will primarily be done by contractors with State Department oversight and is to be carried out at three main hubs with visits to other sites. Administration officials say that the program has been designed with input from the Iraqis and will help Iraqi police officers develop the skills to move from counterinsurgency operations to crime solving. The aim is "focus on the higher-end skill set," Colin Kahl, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, told reporters this week.

James M. Dubik, a retired Army three-star general who oversaw the training of Iraqi security forces in 2007 and 2008, questioned whether the State Department was fully up to the mission.

"The task is much more than just developing skills," he said. "It is developing the Ministry of Interior and law enforcement systems at the national to local levels, and the State Department has little experience in doing that."

Crocker said that however capable the State Department was in carrying out its tasks, it was important for the U.S. military to keep enough of a presence in Iraq to encourage Iraq's generals to stay out of politics.

"We need an intense, sustained military-to-military engagement," he said. "If military commanders start asking themselves, 'Why are we fighting and dying to hold this country together while the civilians fiddle away our future?' - that can get dangerous." [Grodon/Cleveland/17August2010] 

Iranian Tried For Espionage Collapses in Armenian Court. An Iranian citizen being tried in Armenia on charges of spying for Azerbaijan collapsed at a court hearing in Yerevan when he was delivering his defense speech on Thursday.

Behnam Bagheri's Armenian defense attorney Inesa Petrosyan told RFE/RL's Armenian service the same day that during the hearing held behind closed doors her client grew very nervous after the prosecution's continuous attempts to meddle in his testimony and eventually fainted "with symptoms of a heart attack".

"He had prepared a speech in Persian. When he began to read it out, the prosecutor unreasonably began to meddle in that process, and Behnan Bagheri got beside himself. He tore the sheets of paper with his written speech into pieces and tried to leave the dock in protest. When he was turned back, he was in a very difficult condition, was about to lose consciousness," said the attorney.

The Iranian citizen was taken to civil hospital in Yerevan and according to his attorney remained unconscious as of Thursday evening. His family in Iran had been kept aware of the development and, according to Petrosyan, they were on their way to Yerevan.

Bagheri, 30, was arrested by Armenia's National Security Service (NSS) late last year on charges of spying in favor of Azerbaijan. The prosecutor demands 11 years in prison for the Iranian. According to the prosecutor, in September 2009 Bagheri received from a retired Armenian lieutenant-colonel a video record containing "materials of anti-Armenian propaganda that could be used to discredit Armenia's international prestige." The disc was found at the checkpoint when Bagheri was crossing the Armenian border into Iran.

The retired Armenian serviceman, Gevorg Hayrapetian, who is a Karabakh war veteran, is also a defendant in the same case. He is charged with high treason and faces up to 13 years in prison. Both Bagheri and Hayrapetian deny the charges.  [Sione/Azatutyun/19August2010] 

Section II - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Taiwan's Forgotten Amateur Spies. Sipping iced coffee and smoking a cigarette in a cafe in his hometown, Lin Yi-lin appears relaxed.

But the 41-year-old, locked up for nearly 14 years in China for spying, still suffers a roller coaster of emotions.

After his arrest in 1994, his wife divorced him. His father died of a stroke on a trip to see him in prison. Lin did not even recognize his hometown when he was released in 2008.

But he says: "My biggest regret is I wasn't there during my two sons' childhood. I couldn't play ball with them, or go to their graduation ceremonies. They are grown now. There's distance between us."

Unlike the spies of Russia and the US, Lin and many other Taiwanese spies were not professionals.

They were targeted by Taiwan's Military Intelligence Bureau in the 1980s, when Taiwan started allowing its people to visit mainland China.

Businessmen were the first to go into China - driven by their desire to trade and make money. They developed contacts, sometimes with high-ranking Chinese generals, who were eager to go into business.

"It started when an undercover agent approached me at a party. He introduced himself as a journalist and said his newspaper needed information on China," said Lin, who was running a tile-making business in China at the time.

"It wasn't until later that I realized I was working for the military."

Motivated by generous financial rewards and loyalty towards Taiwan, Lin and others gathered information about Chinese military affairs.

Some of their work was as simple as pretending to be tourists and taking pictures outside military compounds, or reporting a military drill when they saw tanks on the streets or airports temporarily closed.

And, as in Lin's case, it could be as risky as using his contacts to gain access to a military base and taking pictures of Chinese submarines.

"They paid me NT$50,000 (US$1,500; �960) a month, paid for my plane tickets and once gave me a bonus of US$5,000 when I found the submarine base," said Lin.

"After a while, I felt that this is fun. I'm pretty good at it. I can do some good for my country and it's challenging."

But Lin and the others were not trained, although he learned to decipher coded messages and send faxes using invisible ink.

Over the decades, many were arrested, and usually sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.

Taiwan's government refuses to reveal how many of the amateur spies have been jailed, but legislators contacted by desperate families believe several dozen are still serving time in China's prisons.

For the families, it has been a nightmare.

"They are not allowed to visit their jailed relatives often. Many of the families have given up on them," said legislator Justin Chou.

"Some of the people jailed are ill, and others have died in prison because the living standards and medical care are poor."

Many of the families, including Lin's, had no idea their loved one was spying.

When spies are arrested, no one is informed, because there are no official ties between Taiwan and China.

It is only when the spies are sentenced and Chinese newspapers report the cases that the families find out. Some cases are not carried in the media.

The sister of a woman who was arrested in 2007 with her husband said she thought the pair were doing business in China. Since their arrest, she has been taking care of her sister's youngest son.

"All I know is I promised her 10 years ago that I would look after her kids if anything happened to her," said the woman, who wished to remain anonymous, for fear of jeopardizing the possible early release of her sister and brother-in-law, who is in his 70s and seriously ill.

She has visited many government offices in Taiwan to seek help.

"What we can't accept is that we've been forgotten by the government. The government's attitude is to throw you away after using you," she said. "This is shameful."

In a statement, the Military Intelligence Bureau said it has tried to help the families with financial support, as those arrested are often the family breadwinner, and by working through unofficial channels to persuade China to release the spies.

"The families really want us to save their relatives, but our ability is limited," a Bureau spokesman said.

Mutual intelligence gathering still goes on but businessmen are no longer recruited, he said.

Tensions have run high between the two sides since 1949, when Taiwan was separated from China at the end of a civil war.

But an unprecedented warming in relations since Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008, has given the families new hope of formal talks for release on humanitarian grounds, or a spy swap.

But the timing is not right, said the Bureau official and the legislator Mr. Chou.

"Taiwan's government doesn't want to formally raise this issue [with China] because it's very sensitive... We don't want to harm cross-strait relations because of this issue," said Mr. Chou, who is from the ruling Kuomintang party.

When Taiwan's representatives tried to raise the issue in unofficial channels, China has not expressed interest, Chou and others said.

Still, he and others are working behind-the-scenes to secure early release for those who are seriously ill. A couple of spies were recently freed on medical parole.

Lin and the families of those in prison say they cannot understand why a group of ordinary people, who were simply caught up in the politics of the past, cannot be released.

"These people are not criminals. It's only because the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party had different political systems that there was spying going on. These people were not trying to overthrow the Chinese government," Lin said.

He is now fighting to help those still imprisoned.

"So many people helped me... I want to fight for the human rights of the others, so that my tragedy won't be repeated."

In the jail where he was detained in southern China's Fujian province, one of his eight fellow Taiwanese inmates has already died.

Lin was able to shorten his 20-year sentence by earning "points" for early release by working on the prison production line.

Fed mainly on rice and water, those older than him did not have the physical stamina.

"I told myself I have to get out alive," said Lin.

Besides lobbying human rights agencies and seeking reparation from the government, Lin is trying to get to know his sons. [Sui/BBC/17August2010] 

Looking Out: Nazis On The Harbor. Henry Kolm had an interesting job as a 21-year-old.

He smuggled Nazi scientists into Boston Harbor.

He'd meet most of them off Nixes Mate, the smallest of the Harbor Islands - no more than gravel shoals - where a beacon warns ships coming into the harbor. Then, he and a Boston whaler captain named Corky would scoot them out to Long Island and a secret hotel fashioned from the barracks of the old Civil War derelict known as Fort Strong.

The prize get, the leader of the pack and the star of the show at Fort Strong was Wernher von Braun, Germany's uber-engineer of rockets - most notoriously the V-2. Long after WWII ended, when the terror of the buzz bombs was well back in history, satirist Tom Lehrer could sing:

"Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi he won't even frown,
Nazi, Schmazi says Wernher von Braun."

But the ridicule would only come later - only after Walt Disney made him famous, Time Magazine put him on the cover and one of his rockets put America's first satellite in space.

And to think von Braun began his American career right here in Boston Harbor. And secretly at that.

"They all had to be smuggled into the country," Henry Kolm said the last time we spoke.

Kolm was a newly minted American, working as a U.S. Army intelligence officer at the end of WWII. At a secret installation near Washington, D.C., (an operation code-named "P.O. Box 1142") he'd had the job of interrogating Nazi prisoners, when he and a dozen others were assigned to Boston to set up "Project Paperclip."

Fort Strong may be only a few miles from downtown as the crow flies, but Kolm and the Project Paperclip team covered its tracks so well that practically no one knew then and no one knows now that von Braun and the technology stars of the Third Reich were ever here.

"We had a mess hall and the Germans gave each other lectures," Kolm remembered. "They called this place where they stayed 'the Haus der Deutschen Wissenschaft,' the House of German Science."

If it weren't such a secret, they could have put up a marquee and called it "Wernher von Braun's House of German Science."

Kolm's assignment was to repackage von Braun and his fellow engineers and scientists as Americans.

If von Braun's second act as an American was spectacular, his first act as a native German had been outrageous and spectacular. An early enthusiast of rocketry and a dreamer of space travel, von Braun led the team (from the age of 25) that designed and manufactured the V-2 rockets, the so-called "buzz bombs" that terrorized London and Antwerp.

Toward the end of the war, von Braun and his team were knighted by the Third Reich. Hitler fondly dubbed him "the professor." His V-2s were the world's first ballistic missiles.

"It was a breakthrough in liquid fuel rocket technology, which meant that it was also essentially the way to space," said Michael Neufeld, curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the author of "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War."

"And especially after the atomic bomb became known, the implication was that we could possibly build an ICBM with a nuclear warhead," Neufeld said.

No wonder that von Braun was the U.S.'s top draft choice in the first frost of the Cold War as the United States and the Soviet Union competed to capture and recruit German scientists and engineers.

And when he came to Boston Harbor, he brought his team from the missile program at Pennemunde, a site on the Baltic coast of Eastern Germany where his facility - but not his team - had been captured by the Russian Army.

It must have been heady stuff for the 21-year-old Kolm at "The House of German Science." Academic as they might be, these were also the Bombs 'R Us - inventors of missiles, jet engines, Mercedes Benz diesels for navy ships and death machines. It was a Strangelove world of science and theory, classical music and two seemingly apolitical mathematicians named Axter and Riedel.

"They were the brains behind the rocket program, basically," Kolm said. "They developed the mathematics for orbital calculations."

(As apolitical as it might seem, Axter would be sent back to Germany after it came to light that he and his wife, a prominent member of the Nazi women's association, had abused slave laborers on their German farm.)

They'd made a good team if you were rooting for Germany to win the war, but these Germans weren't prisoners of war. They were free agents. Literally. They had all signed one-year contracts with the Army. So they were working for us. Their families back home were being cared for by the Americans. And they were safe from the Soviet Army and the Russians, who they feared and disdained as barbarians.

But technically they were illegal aliens - and many of them, like von Braun, were Nazis to boot. So Project Paperclip had to smuggle them out to Long Island to keep Immigration, Customs and, more importantly, the State Department from finding out they were here, according to Kolm.

There were two ways to get the Germans into the States. There was only one way to get them onto Long Island, because there wasn't a bridge yet to connect it to the island. Kolm and Co. needed a boat. So the intelligence officers found an old Boston sea captain from a long line of whalers named Corkum and they hired him and his fishing boat, "a smelly old boat, but tough as can be."

They moved the Germans, who were flown into nearby Naval Air Station Squantum, to a dock, then ferried them over to Fort Strong under cover. But most of the German scientists were transported to Boston hidden aboard the troop ships returning American soldiers home from Europe. Kolm's team had the job of getting to the ships before the pilot boats did.

They retrieved the Germans in the worst weather and roughest seas, like a five-day storm in autumn of 1945. From the giant troop ship to the deck of the Boston whaler far below, each German had to be lowered by a bosun's chair, a little harness hanging by a rope from the davits and lowered like a lifeboat, swinging in the storm.

"We put them in the hold because the waves were washing over the bow, and they were all seasick as can be, as you can imagine," Kolm said.

As the lurching Boston whaler left Nixes Mate, Kolm recalls, one of the Germans in the hold started playing a piano accordion. That was Magnus von Braun, the younger brother of Wernher. Drenched and seasick as they were - which was too good for them, the people of London and Antwerp might think - the Germans were buoyed by a sense of value to the Americans. They knew they had something to trade: "our baby," as one on the rocket team called it.

Fort Strong had been built for the Civil War and used in World War I, but it had been a long time since anyone had cut the grass when Project Paperclip showed up. They renovated the barracks and turned it into a hotel. But once you have a hotel, you have to equip it. And more difficult yet, you have to order a couple hundred beds without drawing attention. And how do you staff and keep it secret?

Kolm said they made a decision to staff it with German prisoners of war. That way, Project Paperclip didn't have to worry about private employees or American servicemen going on shore leave and spilling the secrets. Then, it was a matter of pulling talent from a German prisoner of war camp. Kolm described it as an operation for Noah's Ark: "We picked two cooks, two bakers, two tailors...."

Soon enough, the German scientists and engineers dubbed the hotel "the House of German Science."

As an intelligence officer working as an Army talent scout, Kolm and his associates evaluated every German, then directed each one to the right U.S. military program, laboratory or defense contractor. The secret orders from the U.S. High Command in Europe had stated that, "upon completion of this duty the (Germans) named below will be returned to this theater." But it was evident early on, the Germans weren't going back.

"Project Paperclip was really important," concluded Smithsonian curator and von Braun biographer Neufeld. "I think there was a really major transfer of knowledge that took place in 1945 and the years immediately after.

"And the real question is really not whether we should have done it. It's really a question of whether we had a good enough filter to figure out the people who shouldn't have come here or not."

Half the Germans who were smuggled over belonged to the Nazi party and about half of them were enthusiastic Nazis, Neufeld says.

Wernher von Braun had not only joined the Nazis; he'd also joined the Waffen-SS, which was the elite armed wing of the party. (A damning photo, in which he's partly obscured, apparently showed him in Nazi uniform alongside the notorious Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo and the overseer of the concentration camps.)

The rocket program von Braun presided over in Germany had used slave labor from the nearby concentration camp. But the Americans were inclined to assume that men of science weren't to blame. "A convenient assumption if you want to use these people: you don't want to think of them as war criminals," Neufeld said.

The American high command was less interested in crimes than in the tools of technology the Germans could transfer.

No one knew this better than von Braun, who reacted in surprise when an interviewer from The New Yorker asked him in 1951 whether he ever thought he might be arrested and punished as a war criminal.

"Why, no," he answered. "I wasn't afraid. It all made sense. The V-2 was something we had and you didn't have. Naturally, you wanted to know all about it."

(Even having written a biography of von Braun, Neufeld still found himself undecided about the extent of von Braun's moral culpability. He and his fellow German scientists had shown expediency, careerism and tone-deaf indifference to be sure, Neufeld concludes, but he is undecided about the depth of von Braun's moral responsibility.)

Kolm had reason to hate the Nazis. He was an Austrian Jew who'd seen the Germans march into both Vienna and Prague. His family had lost everything. And believing early on that their family would be killed, his father tried to get them out. Their first attempt failed when they were turned back by the Belgians. But finally the family managed to escape the Holocaust on the last ship to leave Europe, in 1939. Uncles, aunts and cousins who didn't or couldn't get out were murdered.

"Of course I was angry," Kolm said. "But I found it more satisfying to appeal to their conscience. 'How could you be part of this?' "

Kolm was clearly drawn to von Braun's jovial, beer-drinking academic enthusiasm and space dreaming. He said von Braun was merely expedient in belonging to the Nazi Party.

What motivated von Braun's actions during the war, Kolm believed, was his dream of using rockets to travel in space, even if he had to put bombs on them first to pay his dues.

"He would have (gone along with the Nazis) to be able to work on his rockets," Kolm said. "Yes, his beloved rockets. He said, 'Wars come and wars go and they'll be gone tomorrow and so forth but what really counts is what we've done toward the future.' "

And the future, to von Braun, meant going into space. He'd subverted everything else to that. In America, when he started to understand the need to be guarded, he portrayed himself as apolitical and at worst naive.

As a movie based upon von Braun's life would later pronounce, "I Aim At The Stars." To which the satirist Mort Sahl noted, "But sometimes he hit London."

Von Braun's expediency, his easy, almost genial indifference to the fate of the Jews or the victims of his V-2 rockets and his denials of responsibility would later lead to public ridicule from satirist Lehrer. In a putdown that has never died, he sang:

"Once the rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down.
That's not my department
Says Wernher von Braun."

The idea that Nazi scientists could have hidden out in Boston Harbor while the city slept seems wildly implausible now. Yet the times themselves were implausible. Go figure that during the arc of his career, von Braun would have his picture taken at different times with Hitler, Himmler, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Walt Disney and the first Apollo astronauts who went to the moon on one of the updated descendants of his V-2 rockets that buzzed London.

Kolm had had a dockside seat for the launch of von Braun's American career - and the careers of some 600 others. Project Paperclip was over and Fort Strong closed after nine months. And Kolm went on to his own brilliant career as a physicist and MIT professor.

But he never said a word in public until the Army chief of counterintelligence freed him three years ago from the oath he took in WWII.

"So you'd never talked to anyone about this?" I asked him.

"Well I talked to my wife about it, of course," he replied with a laugh. [Boeri/WBUR/19August2010] 

The Republic of Spies. On a sunny afternoon earlier this summer in the garden of a freshly renovated resort overlooking the Black Sea, a group of Russian security-service and Interior Ministry officers on holiday were raising their vodka glasses. The toast: to their future summers in the separatist republic of Abkhazia, once a favorite holiday spot for Stalin's elite and now, despite its nominal independence from Georgia, Russia's newest colony. After a war in 2008 to help Abkhazia and South Ossetia partition themselves from Georgia, Russia is making itself right at home.

The party's host, Alexander Tsyshba - the head of the privatization and investments department for the seaside city of Gagra - looked satisfied. After over 15 years of economic blockade by Georgia, investment in Abkhazia was almost nonexistent, the resorts were empty, and the economy was stagnant except for a trickle of business controlled by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Now, with 3,000 Russian troops stationed in the republic, Tsyshba's old FSB friends have begun to buy up prime property across the breakaway republic. "To buy property in Abkhazia, the FSB officers use the special relationship of their long-term contacts with us," he explains with a smile.

The Russian special services' "special relationship" with Abkhazia began well before the region's break from Georgia in 1991, in the days of the Soviet KGB. From Stalin's era on, every other Abkhaz family had a KGB officer, a secret agent, or an informer among their relatives. Former agents told NEWSWEEK that Moscow gave the tiny South Caucasus republic a special status - of an autonomous republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic - in order for the KGB to have a pleasant headquarters in the palm-lined seaside boulevards of Sukhumi. Locals like to boast that "Abkhazia used to beat the world record on the number of secret agents per capita," says Lavrik Mikvabia, a colonel in the Abkhaz border guard. And Vladimir Rubanov, a three-star general who ran the old KGB's analytical department, told NEWSWEEK that "the KGB always had its special power in Abkhazia. When I came for vacation and went out for a beer with my friend, a senior Abkhaz KGB commander, we did not have to pay for our beers or a plate of crabs. We just showed our KGB IDs."

Traditions are respected in the Caucasus. So nobody was surprised when the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, inherited the Mayak sanitarium, a former KGB rehabilitation center for agents, after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Or when officers of the Federal Protection Service, the agency guarding the president and other top officials, brought their families to spend summers at the dacha that Khrushchev once used - a strictly guarded, enormous resort covering more than 10 square kilometers of seafront property in Pitsunda. Now a rotating cast of former and current FSB officers has arrived to rent and privatize luxury hotels, sanitariums, and dachas on prestigious bits of land.

In the two years since Russia went to war to "liberate" Abkhazia and South Ossetia from the Republic of Georgia, the Russification in those provinces has accelerated. Almost all the best Abkhaz architectural monuments have ended up in the hands of Russian investors: the 19th-century palace of the Prince of Oldenburg; Olga's Tower; another graceful palace in the Mauritanian style in the hills overlooking the city; and Gagra's oldest landmark, the ancient Persian Attaba Fortress, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries. Luxurious real-estate developments like the Dolfin Hotel, which opened last January, have emerged along the seafront, waking Pitsunda's tourist industry from years of comatose postwar decay. Tsyshba, the Gagra privatization guru, proudly boasts that the city is "the best FSB resort."

The Dolfin Hotel's manager, Alexander Chukbar, agrees, but he adds warily that the new owners "are not the kind of people one can just go up to and chat with." In Soviet days, the KGB was a state within a state. Now, with former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and his circle of former spooks still very much in control of the country, the FSB's hand extends into almost every major Russian business. Former KGB officers turned businessmen are warmly welcomed in their old Abkhaz stomping grounds - and have brought billions of dollars of investment. Rosneft, Russia's state oil company famous for its ties to the Russian security establishment, arrived this year to open an office in Sukhumi and begin a $32 million geological-research program offshore in the Black Sea, considered a prospective oil-rich region.

Other groups in the Russian elite have also followed the spooks' lead. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has lost no time grabbing a massive piece of land outside Gagra for a $70 million resort complex the locals call "Project Moscow." Luzhkov is also constructing a gigantic office in Sukhumi to coordinate investments from Moscow, to be called the Moscow Center. Russia's Ministries of Defense, Agriculture, and the Interior have reclaimed state dachas in Sukhumi, Gagra, and Gudauta so that their employees can vacation there. Alexander Tkachev, the governor of Krasnodar region in southern Russia, has spent the last two summers in the dacha built by Stalin's secret police chief; he rents it from the local government, which can't afford to renovate it. And Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia's nuclear-energy agency, owns a winery in Abkhazia, according to the local administration.

But the biggest investor of all is Prime Minister Putin, who visited Abkhazia last summer for the war's first anniversary, and pledged $500 million in state aid to strengthen Abkhaz defense. He has also promised millions for a huge project to redevelop the town of Pitsunda, famous for its enormous old pine trees - beloved by the tsars, the Soviets, and the new Russian elites alike. The Russian government is planning to build what Astamur Ketsba, head of the regional administration, calls "Putin City" - a lavish luxury resort with a port for yachts, health clubs, and private beaches. It is expected to be ready in time for the 2014 Winter Olympics in nearby Sochi. In the meantime, Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh told NEWSWEEK that he has already received 300 million rubles of 9 billion offered, and that he has reached an agreement with Putin that will allow Russian citizens to own private property in Abkhazia. He boasted that the airport Sukhumi will open next month is better than the one in Sochi, and that soon, Russian S-300 surface-to-air missiles will be stationed in his breakaway republic.

Not all the locals are happy about the invasion of Russian money, fearing an assault on their newly won independence. Tomara Lakrba, the main architect of the towns of Gagra and Pitsunda, says she was "astonished" when she saw the proposed designs for Putin City, which - with more than 10 stories (where three or four are normal) - she considered tall and ugly. "I realized that Russian security services gave us our independence in order to be able to decide what to buy and build in our cities," she says.

Many young Abkhaz also feel concerned about the Russian elite buying up their proud, small state. "I do not think Russians understand that we are different; we do not want to be a KGB state again. We would never give our land back to Georgia, but to be independent, we mean from Russia as well," says Akhra Smyr, a youth community activist in Sukhumi. He and other irritated young activists shared with NEWSWEEK their frustration about how Russian tanks destroyed the roads in the Gali region and how their international phone code has become +7, the same as Russia's.

Abkhazia's tiny military also feels steamrollered by the FSB, which has taken over controlling the border with Georgia. There are only two checkpoints (of more than a dozen) left under Abkhaz control, and some 120 Abkhaz officers have lost their jobs. Sixty were fired outright and 60 were turned into customs agents. "We are all war veterans," says the commander of Abkhaz border troops, Col. Lavrik Mikvabia. "We spilled blood for our freedom. The FSB border officers should remember that when they treat us as if we were their colony."

It seems too late, though, for the Abkhaz to reconsider their pact with their powerful northern neighbor. Abkhazia's border with Georgia is secured by a full division of Russia's border guards, who answer to the FSB. Bright orange trucks - with the double-headed-eagle logo of the Russian Federal Construction Co. - crawl along the coastal roads, carrying sand and gravel for the seven-story buildings the FSB is building for the border guards and their families in Gali, a regional center on the border with Georgia.

With so much Russian money being poured into Abkhazia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's calls for the Russian military's immediate withdrawal ring a little hollow. Never mind the ceasefire terms that ended the war, under which Moscow promised to withdraw. "Russia has just arrived," President Bagapsh told NEWSWEEK. The West should "stop having any illusions about what they call Russian occupiers leaving any time soon." [Maytisin/Newsweek/18August2010]

Section III - COMMENTARY

Guns of August? by Arnaud de Borchgrave. For the first two weeks of August, the Internet buzzed with "inside knowledge" of an Israeli airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities before the end of the month. One of most quoted warnings came from Philip Giraldi, a polyglot former CIA operative who writes for the American Conservative and is no friend of Israel.

"We spend $100 billion on intelligence annually and then ignore the best judgments on what is taking place," Giraldi wrote on his blog recently and "might as well use an Ouija board. Not only would we save a lot of money but with an Ouija board there is always the chance you could arrive at the right decision."

Five years ago, Giraldi wrote, "it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration that brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran."

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, he wrote, had tasked the Strategic Command with drawing up a contingency plan in response to another Sept. 11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan was for a large-scale air assault on Iran (never mind if Iran wasn't involved) employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. More than 450 major strategic targets were listed in the plan - evidently leaked to Giraldi by "appalled" senior U.S. Air Force officers.

Tehran's propaganda machine has taken a leaf out of Bush 43's lexicon - "bring 'em on." The Pasdaran, or Revolutionary Guards, trotted out their latest acquisition - the 51-foot "Bladerunner," the world's "fastest warship," capable of 82 mph.

The Iran Times, published in Washington in both English and Farsi, reported only two such "high-tech" speedboats had been built and that Iran was now planning to mass-produce them. The one acquired by Iran was purchased in South Africa and loaded onto a container ship. The Financial Times said the United States was prepared to board it but the operation was called off without explanation.

One Bladerunner was used to set a record for circumnavigating the British Isles in 2005, when it averaged 61.5 mph over 27 hours.

For the past 20 years, Iran's seagoing Republican Guards have been accumulating small, swift boats with a view to swarming U.S. warships going in and out of the Hormuz Strait, and to mining the narrow waterway used by supertankers that move 40 percent of all seaborne traded oil (which is 20 percent of all oil traded worldwide). Moving through the mile-wide exit channel is also three-quarters of all of Japan's oil needs.

Iran also has an endless supply of seagoing suicide "volunteers." Hundreds were used to walk across minefields during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-88).

Hormuz is the world's most important chokepoint and Iran's principal naval base, Bandar Abbas, is smack in the middle. The Defense Intelligence Agency knows from a former Iranian naval intelligence officer that there are detailed plans to close the strait to supertankers that move some 17 million barrels a day to the rest of the world. Oil would then quickly shoot up from $80 a barrel where it is today to $400 or $500.

In January 2008, five Iranian speedboats darted in and out of a line of three U.S. warships as they entered the Persian Gulf through the Strait, dropping white boxes ahead of the vessels, forcing them to take evasive action.

The USS Port Royal, a 9,600-ton cruiser, the 8,300-ton guided missile destroyer USS Hopper and the 4,100-ton frigate USS Ingraham were prepared to blast the Iranian boats out of the water with close-range, rapid-fire Phalanx Gatlings but word came from the Pentagon to hold their fire.

The white boxes were designed to simulate mines. There is little doubt one or two U.S. warships could have been damaged and the United States would have found itself involved in a third war in the region.

The suicide boat attack against the 8,600-ton USS Cole, at anchor in Aden Harbor in October 2000, which killed 17 U.S. sailors and immobilized a $1 billion warship for two years of repairs, demonstrated vulnerability to small craft laden with explosives.

To demonstrate that fresh international sanctions won't weaken Iranian resolve, Tehran published a new law mandating the production of higher-enriched uranium and further limiting cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

At the same time, Iran and Russia announced they would begin loading "before the end of August" Russian-supplied fuel into Iran's first nuclear power plant. A cacophony of tweets amplified Giraldi's Guns of August scenario.

If Israel has decided to strike against what most Israelis see as an existential threat, it would presumably wait until the U.S. Congress' return from vacation Sept. 10. A resolution (HR 1553) is winding its way through Congress that endorses an Israeli attack on Iran, which, writes Giraldi, "would be going to war by proxy as the U.S. would almost immediately be drawn into conflict when Tehran retaliates."

Leading neo-conservatives pooh-pooh Iran's asymmetrical retaliatory capabilities as overblown anti-Israeli rhetoric. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a neo-con commentator, predicts Iran's response would be minimal and recommends Israel attack Iran to "rock the system" to make the regime "lose face" and suffer a military defeat from which its recovery would be doubtful.

This reporter first began covering Iran in August 1953 when the shah fled a revolutionary upheaval (returning 10 days later after a military crackdown and covert CIA assistance).

There is little doubt that an Israeli attack on Iran would trigger mayhem up and down the Persian Gulf and trigger a third war that would be yet another force multiplier for the U.S. deficit: Federal spending is now at $3.6 trillion; the national debt, $13.4 trillion; cost per citizen $43,000; cost per taxpayer $120,000. Check the debt clock online - in real time.

Gulf and other Arab rulers who wish secretly for aerial bombing action against Iran's nuclear facilities will be the first to denounce Israel and its only ally when and if the first Iranian target is hit. [Borchgrave/UPI/17August2010] 

Why Gates Seems Set on a 2011 Departure, by Jim Watson. So Robert Gates is set on retiring from government - for the second time. Or so he says. In an interview with ForeignPolicy.com, he has repeated more firmly than ever his desire to resign as secretary of defense sometime in 2011.

Why would he decide on 2011, and not 2010 or 2012? Strange but true: the arcane workings of the Pentagon budget process are one of the key factors behind his timing. Drawing up the annual defense budget - especially one now totaling $719 billion - is so complex that each exercise actually takes close to two years. Thus, the defense budget for 2012, the last year of President Obama's term in office, is already taking shape. Its unveiling in February of next year will place a capstone on Gates's extraordinary career.

The first time Gates retired was in 1993, when he stepped down as CIA director. He was called back to service by President George W. Bush at the end of 2006, to rescue an Iraq war on the brink of defeat. He thought he would be in the Pentagon only for the two years remaining in Bush's presidency. To his real surprise, Obama asked Gates to stay on - the first time an incoming president had ever made that request of a defense secretary. Now Gates seems to have decided, in effect, to see Obama through the midterms.

Each defense budget takes so long to prepare that a defense secretary coming into office with a new president finds his hands all but tied: the Pentagon budgets for the next two years have already been laid down by his predecessor. But Gates was, as he sometimes remarks, his own predecessor. His two years under Bush meant that he will be only the second defense secretary - the first was Robert McNamara in the Kennedy/LBJ years - to have shaped all four defense budgets of a presidential term. In the first of his budgets under Obama, Gates took an ax to multiple big-ticket weapons systems; preparing his last, he has announced his intent to hack away at the bloated defense bureaucracies.

That battle - to slim down a defense establishment far bigger than it was during the Cold War - is going to consume every gram of political capital Gates has built up in Congress. Legislators, however much they say they support defense cuts in principle, oppose them when their own constituents are affected. Gates will probably win the coming battles - he's won almost every skirmish so far - but he'll emerge as damaged goods, and he knows it. For that reason alone, it may be time to let Obama choose a new defense secretary who can smooth ruffled feelings on Capitol Hill, and to prepare for a second term if Obama wins one in 2012. Quitting in 2011 will leave enough time to avoid what would inevitably be savagely partisan confirmation hearings for Gates's successor in the preelection frenzy. 

Policy reasons also argue for a 2011 departure. Next year Obama will be confronted with big decisions on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. He'll have to decide whether to begin a substantial drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in midyear, as he has pledged to do. He also needs to decide whether to agree to an expected request from Baghdad to keep forces in Iraq beyond the currently agreed-upon deadline of the end of 2011. Having been through multiple reviews of both wars under Bush and Obama, Gates should be forgiven if he decides to leave yet further reviews to someone else. As a firm believer that if America is in a war, then America must win it - a conviction that may argue next year for extended commitments in Afghanistan and perhaps in Iraq - Gates may also wonder whether his views would collide with Obama's political necessities.

Supporters and cynics unite in casting doubt on Gates's determination to quit. His press secretary, Geoff Morrell, issued a brisk reminder: "Bob Gates has proven to be a miserable failure at retirement. It remains to be seen whether his sense of responsibility trumps his desires as in the past." Cynics within the Pentagon point out that his coming battles with Congress will need the unflinching support of the White House. How better to ensure that, they ask, than for Gates to play hard to keep - requiring Obama to appeal to him to stay on? 

Certainly, Gates is conscious of tasks yet to be done. He is also mindful of the perils of being a lame duck. The defense establishment pins its hopes on outlasting him, assuming that any successor will back away from his sweeping plans for reform. Gates knows that too. On the other hand, he has given the job his best shot. He has set strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan that give at least a promise of success, begun to set the military on a new course for the challenges of a new century, and seen to the promotion of like-minded officers within the services. He thinks what he has set in train has a good chance of surviving his departure.

Meanwhile, the job is exhausting and emotionally painful. He spends most evenings writing personal notes to the families of those killed in the wars he runs.

Gates knows the maxim that graveyards are full of indispensable men. He has already had one of the most remarkable careers in the history of American government, a career that began 44 years ago, when he joined the CIA in 1966 as a junior analyst on the Soviet desk. He ended his CIA career at the top, as agency director - and on the way he served a spell as deputy national-security adviser in the White House. That service has now been capped by four years as defense secretary. In that time, he is proud of saying, he's served eight presidents. 

As he relaxes on two weeks' vacation at his home on an island off the coast of Washington state, he may believe he has served enough - and that, at 66, other challenges beckon. 

But who could take his place? Replacing Gates would be hard for Obama, and not merely because of the secretary's unique across-the-aisle appeal as a Republican appointee in a Democratic administration. If there is a suitable candidate within the Defense Department, it's probably Ashton Carter, who as undersecretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics - a vast portfolio - has been an indefatigable point man on many of Gates's initiatives. But Carter lacks a political base, and he would have to relinquish a tenured position at Harvard from which he is currently on leave. That might not be prudent, given Obama's uncertain chances of reelection in 2012.

That uncertainty also likely rules out any candidate from Congress, such as Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), an Army veteran who is on everyone's list as a potential future defense secretary. One or two candidates talked about back in 2008 have already taken themselves out of the running - for example, Richard Danzig, who was Navy secretary under President Clinton.

The likeliest course, or so insiders reckon, is that Obama would choose a veteran Democratic politician who could be relied on to foster good relations with Democrats on the Hill and in the party at large. The name most often mentioned is Leon Panetta. Currently CIA director, where he's reckoned to have done a first-rate job healing the scars of the Bush years, Panetta has perfect political credentials for the Pentagon: he was a 15-year congressman from a California district with significant defense industries; then, as White House chief of staff from 1994 to 1997, he was critical in keeping the Clinton administration on track after Gingrich Republicans won control of the House. 

And Gates's own plans? After he retired the first time he ran Texas A&M University, and also wrote a volume of memoirs, From the Shadows, praised for its nonpartisan observations on successive presidencies. This time, Gates has told friends, he plans two books. The first will be a memoir of his spell as defense secretary. The second will be an instructional volume on a topic he thinks his years at the CIA, Texas A&M, and now the Pentagon have uniquely fitted him to address: how to force change on large organizations. [Watson/NewsWeek/17August2010]

Investor's Business Daily: China's Spy Games. Forget about the Russian spy ring the FBI broke up that stole mostly headlines (as opposed to U.S. secrets) for their amateurish methods. This is no joke. These Chinese moles mean business. And they're stealing highly sensitive military secrets.

At least 44 of them have been quietly prosecuted in the last two years alone - a figure that dwarfs the number of Russian spies expelled last month. And those are just the ones we've caught.

The Chinese agents are serving time in federal prison on espionage-related charges. They stole sensitive weapons technology, trade secrets and other classified information bound for China. Some of the cases involve agents operating on behalf of the Chinese government or intelligence.

Earlier this month, a former B-2 stealth bomber engineer in Hawaii was convicted of selling military secrets to China. He sold stealth cruise missile technology to Beijing during trips there.

The growing espionage threat comes on the heels of the administration's decision last year to downgrade our own intelligence gathering on China from "Priority 1" status, alongside Iran and North Korea, to "Priority 2." The decision sent shock waves throughout the U.S. intelligence community, according to China expert Bill Gertz.

So while China has deployed an army of agents to spy on us, we've reined in our spooks. That means our intelligence about China's military buildup will only suffer, adding to an already dangerous gap there.

"China has exceeded most of our intelligence estimates of their military capability and capacity every year," said Adm. Robert Willard, the new commander of U.S. Pacific Command. "They've grown at an unprecedented rate in those capabilities."

Added GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee: "China is aggressively pursuing military capabilities and aggressively conducting cyberattacks" against the United States.

Gertz says the downgrade came after Beijing lobbied Obama's intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, who once called Taiwan the "turd in the punch bowl" of U.S.-China relations.

Let's hope this administration's soft China policy doesn't produce the kind of mass transfer of secrets to Beijing and security breakdown we witnessed under the Clinton administration. [InvestorsBusinessDaily/17August2010] 

Section IV - OBITUARIES, BOOKS AND COMING EVENTS

Obituaries

Richard X. Larkin. Army Major General (Ret.) Richard Xavier Larkin, age 80, an Army Major General (Ret.), who served in Korea and Vietnam, died on August 14, 2010 in the Fairfax Nursing Center.

MG Larkin was a native of Omaha, NE and after graduating from West Point in 1952, immediately entered into the Korean War as a platoon leader and then company commander. MG Larkin later served as commander of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968-1969, and as commander of the 2nd Brigade and Assistant Division Commander of the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) at Fort Carson, Colorado.

MG Larkin also served as the Defense Attach� to the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 1977 to 1979, followed by assignment as the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the position he held until retiring from active duty in 1981.

MG Larkin held masters degrees in Russian from Columbia University and in Industrial Engineering from George Washington University. He also graduated from the U.S. Army War College in 1971.

Following his military career, he held several positions with defense contractors before starting his own defense consulting company, where he continued his life's work of protecting our nation. During his second career, he remained active in national security, including serving as President of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, and as an expert witness in espionage cases. He also served as his West Point class President for 20 years.

His awards and decorations include the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Army Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star, Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, Distinguished Flying Cross, Soldier's Medal, Bronze Star with "V" with Oak Leaf Cluster, Air Medal with ten Oak Leaf Clusters, Meritorious Service Medal, Joint Services Commendation Medal, Army Commendation Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Gold Star and two awards of the Combat Infantryman Badge. He was a parishioner of St. Leo the Great Catholic Church in Fairfax and remained a devoted Catholic his entire life.

He is survived by his wife, Donna; their five children, Colleen Tuddenham, Richard (Donna O'Bryan), Maureen, Michael and Mark; and their six grandchildren, Michael, Jennifer, Scott, Kelly, Laura and Patrick.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial contributions be made to INOVA Fairfax Hospital, 3300 Gallows Road, Falls Church, VA 22042 or to a charity of your choice.  [WashingtonPost/13August2010] 

Amin al-Hindi, 70, Former Palestinian Intelligence Chief.  Amin al-Hindi, an associate of the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and a former Palestinian Authority intelligence chief who was widely suspected of having played an organizing role in the deadly attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, died Tuesday in Amman, Jordan. He was 70.

His death was reported by the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, which did not list the cause. However, the Palestinian ambassador in Amman, Atallah Kheiry, told Agence France-Presse that Mr. Hindi had been treated for cancer.

Mr. Hindi was born in Gaza in 1940 but spent many years in exile as a security officer for Fatah, the Palestinian national liberation movement that was founded by Mr. Arafat in the late 1950s, and that became the dominant force in the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Palestinian umbrella group.

If Mr. Hindi was involved in the Munich attack - he never acknowledged any responsibility - he may have been the last of the plotters and perpetrators to survive. Several were tracked down and killed by Israeli counter-terrorist squads abroad. The self-declared mastermind of the attack, Mohammed Oudeh, better known by his guerrilla name, Abu Daoud, died in early July in Damascus at the age of 73.

The Munich attack, carried out by Black September, a shadowy terrorist apparatus associated with Fatah and the P.L.O., shocked people around the world. Eight Palestinians broke into a dormitory at the Olympic village where Israeli athletes were sleeping and took them hostage in the early morning of Sept. 5, 1972. Two of the athletes tried to overpower the militants, and were shot and killed.

Israel refused to accede to the terrorists' demands to release Palestinian prisoners, and the nine remaining hostages and their captors were eventually transported by helicopters to a military airfield, where they had been promised to be flown to Cairo. Instead, West German sharpshooters tried to rescue the Israelis, setting off a gun battle in which five Palestinians, a German police officer and the nine hostages were killed.

Mr. Hindi's possible involvement was never made clear, and in the mid-1990s he was allowed by Israel to return home to the territories that Israel conquered in 1967. He then assumed a senior position in Mr. Arafat's Palestinian Authority, established as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace accords.

He became the commander of the Palestinian General Security and Intelligence Service, a position he held until 2005, with the rank of general. In his capacity as security chief he had frequent contact with Israeli security officials who forgave his past in the interest of trying to forge stability and peace.

Mr. Hindi's body was brought overland from Jordan to the West Bank on Wednesday morning, and Mr. Arafat's successor, President Mahmoud Abbas, and other Palestinian leaders held a ceremony with military honors at the presidential headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Mr. Hindi's body was expected to be taken for burial to his native Gaza, the Palestinian coastal territory now controlled by Fatah's main rival, the Islamic militant group Hamas. [Kershner/NYTimes/19August2010] 

Bernard Knox, 95, One of World's Foremost Scholars of Classical Literature. After two years of fighting in Europe during World War II, a swashbuckling U.S. Army captain named Bernard Knox took momentary refuge in a bombed-out farmhouse in Italy. There, peeking from beneath the rubble, was a gilt-edged volume by the ancient Roman poet Virgil.

Capt. Knox had studied Latin in college and remembered enough to translate a bit: "Here right and wrong are reversed," began a passage about war that served as an epiphany for the young soldier.

"These lines, written some thirty years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked mine-infested fields, the shattered cities," he later recalled.

"I thought to myself: 'If I ever get out of this, I'm going back to the classics and study them seriously.' "

After the war, Bernard Knox became one of the world's foremost scholars of classical literature and served as the founding director of the Harvard University-affiliated Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington.

Dr. Knox died July 22 at his home in Bethesda of a heart ailment. He was 95.

A British-born expert in the works of Sophocles, he was known for his ability to brush the cobwebs off ancient texts and illuminate their enduring relevance in the modern world. He wrote and spoke widely, often seeking out popular audiences to argue that buried beneath the classics' dead languages are durable truths about the human experience.

He said the brilliance of Homer's "Iliad," for example, was the epic's ability to show that war is at once horrifying and magnetic - that it "has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice which peace time, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command.

"Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect," he said in a 1979 speech.

"He was a great light in our profession," said Deborah Boedeker, a Brown University professor who succeeded Dr. Knox as director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. "He was a great philologist - and I think that is where his appreciation of literature started, with his real knowledge of and nuanced appreciation of the language. But he was able to translate that into terms that could be of great interest to any lay person."

Dr. Knox established himself as a force in classical scholarship with his first book, "Oedipus at Thebes" (1957), which examined Sophocles' tragic hero in the context of 5th-century Athenean civilization and won praise for its lucid prose. The volume was reissued in 1998 by Yale University Press.

He edited the "Norton Book of Classical Literature" (1993) and wrote frequently for popular publications including The Washington Post and the New York Review of Books. He wrote critically acclaimed introductions for modern translations by his one-time student Robert Fagles of Sophocles' "Three Theban Plays" (1982), the Homeric epics "The Iliad" (1990) and "The Odyssey" (1996) and Virgil's "The Aeneid" (2006).

Later in his career, Dr. Knox argued frequently and forcefully against those he called "advocates of multiculturalism and militant feminists" who criticized the classical canon as racist and classist and pushed for universities to teach a wider range of literature. His essays and talks were collected in books including "The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics" (1993) and "Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal" (1994).

The Greeks "have stood the test of time, more than 2,000 years of it, and have become a basic element of our character, of our nature," he wrote. "And, as the Roman poet Horace remarked, you may toss nature out with a pitchfork, but it will still come running back in."

Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was born Nov. 24, 1914, in West Yorkshire, England. He grew up in London and received a scholarship to study the classics at St. John's College at Cambridge. But the country was mired in economic depression, Hitler had come to power in Germany and the young Dr. Knox spent more time planning protests with left-wing student groups than he did studying.

"I didn't do any work. All I did was go to demonstrations and study Karl Marx, though I must say, I never did read 'Das Kapital,' " he told the Washington Times in 1989. "The world situation was so menacing that I didn't think I'd live very long. I thought that war was coming and studying Latin and Greek didn't seem relevant."

He received a bachelor's degree in 1936 and then volunteered to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. After he was shot and severely wounded, he returned to London and immigrated to the United States to marry Betty Baur, an American woman he had met while she was studying at Cambridge.

They were married from 1939 until her death in 2006. Survivors include their son, MacGregor Knox of London; a sister; and two grandchildren.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Dr. Knox joined the U.S. Army and took the oath of American citizenship while stationed in England in 1943. Not long afterward, he went to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's wartime predecessor.

Noting Dr. Knox's command of French, the OSS assigned him to parachute into German-occupied France, arm citizens and prepare them to rise up against Hitler's troops. Later, Dr. Knox was sent on a similar mission to aid the underground resistance in Italy. He was slated to go next to the Pacific when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, effectively ending the war.

His military decorations included two Bronze Star Medals and the French Croix de Guerre.

After the war, he studied at Yale University. He received a doctorate in classics and served on Yale's faculty from 1948 until 1961, when he was named director of the new Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington. Dr. Knox served until his retirement in 1985 as director of the center, which offers year-long residential fellowships for junior scholars. In that job, he mentored many of his field's prominent thinkers.

He was the recipient of numerous awards and was chosen in 1992 to give the National Endowment of the Humanities' prestigious Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor bestowed by the federal government for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

He was a member of the Cosmos Club in Washington and was a founder of the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage.

"It was the Greeks who started it all," he said, receiving an award from the Cosmos Club in 1979. "They are not just our roots, they are our sinews, our flesh and blood; they are what makes the West different from Islam, from India, from China," he said. "In fact, to be a professor of ancient Greek is to be a professor of modernity." [Brown/WashingtonPost/20August2010]

Joseph Culver Evans. Joseph Culver Evans, 83, passed away Aug. 9, 2010, at CarolinaEast Medical Center. He was born on March 8, 1927 to the late Roscoe Goetchius and Josephine Gori Evans.

A native of Sayre, Bradford County, Pa., and a Bucknell University graduate, Joe Evans was a journalist before he enlisted in the CIA. During the Cold War, he specialized in clandestine service of counterintelligence in the Soviet theater of operations. Afterwards, he worked in the computer industry, and part of that period as a partner in a software company in Arlington, Va.

He was a member of the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers and the CIA Retirees Association as well as the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He was the ghost writer of a book "Inside Stalin's Kremlin" for the Soviet defector, Peter S. Deriabin, the only member of Stalin's bodyguards ever to defect the U.S.A.

He is survived by his devoted wife of 24 years, Rieko Suganami Evans of New Bern; loving twin daughters, Amy Josephine Hunt (James) of Annapolis, Md. and Margo Ruth Evans of Springfield, Va.; his sister, MaryLou Evans Givens (Harrison "Huck" C) of Lancaster, Pa.; one granddaughter, Christine Darnell Burke (Thomas) and a great-granddaughter, Kaylie Moen Burke, all of Brick, N.J.; his aunt, Gracemary Evans Alger of Asheville; his cousins, Donald H. Evans (Anna Mae) of Fuquay-Varina, Roxanna Evans Lynch of Horseheads, N.Y., John Alger of Asheville, and his sister in-law, Natsuko Suganami Fritts (Ron) of Benson, Ariz.

To honor Joe's wishes, a celebration of life will be held at a later date.

Online condolences may be made to the Evans family at www.cottenfuneralhome.com. [SunJournal/10August2010]

Books

Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mossadeq Revisited, by Darioush Bayandor, Reviewed by Joseph Goulden. Engrained in the legend of the CIA is that its officers, working with the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) organized the 1953 coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and restored Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi to power. The CIA's clandestine services took credit in a 1954 study by officer Donald Wilber that bore a secret classification when leaked in 2000.

Now comes forth a former Iranian diplomat from the pre-Khomeini government, Darioush Bayandor, who claims that the perceived story is wrong. To the contrary, he argues, the CIA operation failed in midcourse, and it was anti-Mosaddeq military officers who stepped in and brought the coup to fruition. The swashbuckling CIA officer on the ground, Kim Roosevelt, played only a bystander's role, according to Mr. Bayandor.

A careful reading of Mr. Bayandor's book, along with the CIA history and Mr. Roosevelt's memoir, shows that there is a very thin element of truth in his revisionist theory. In fact, TPAJAX, the agency name for the operation, did suffer a blip when officers loyal to Mosaddeq arrested a group of dissident officers who stormed his house with the aim of forcing him to retire. A nervous shah, age 34, had been a reluctant plotter from the beginning; indeed, his twin sister shamed him into authorizing the operation. Now he fled to Baghdad and then London.

Fearing that total failure was imminent, CIA headquarters ordered Roosevelt to call things off and leave Iran. He refused, feeling that events he and the Brits had set into motion had created a momentum of their own. In a decision tantamount to insubordination, he stopped reporting or responding to cables. Instead, he busied himself urging Gen. Fazolla Zahedi, the agency's choice to lead the coup, to continue.

Using Iranian newspapers that the CIA considered to be "assets," the agency gave wide circulation to decrees signed by the shah before he fled, dismissing Mosaddeq, as he had the authority to do, and appointing Zahedi to head the armed forces.

After some indecision, and encouraged by swirling street mobs - the core of which was paid by the CIA but soon included thousands of people who detested Mosaddeq - Zahedi accepted the challenge. And it was CIA officer Howard "Rocky" Stone who helped Zahedi don his tunic as he set out to put the operation back on track. "In all my years with the agency," Stone told me before his death, "that was my proudest moment. A roll of the dice for everyone, to be sure, and especially Zahedi. But he gutted up and did what was expected of him."

The late John Waller, who coordinated the Washington end of the plan, remembered the dilemma facing the officers in Tehran: "Kim had a choice: either keep sending reports, or go ahead and do the job and pray for the best. Lucky for Kim - and for [the] CIA - he succeeded." Another officer with long experience in covert operations - but not Iran - said AJAX went pretty much as planned and expected.

"We [CIA agents] were not about to do the deal on our own. Kim's role was to get the Iranian military off its duff and depose Mosaddeq. In such a situation, what an on-the-ground officer can do - and should do - is limited. You are certainly not going to bring in the U.S. Marines!"

Mr. Bayandor contends that pro-shah elements of the Iranian military were already planning to move against Mosaddeq months before the CIA and SIS action. As his source, he cites a document in British Foreign Officer archives - of unknown provenance - dated several weeks after the coup. But he glides over the fact that the military did not stir until the CIA/SIS action. Leftist critics, both in the United States and abroad, have long viewed the Iranian coup as one staged to protect British oil interests rather than the people. And, to be sure, a primary goal was to stop Mosaddeq from confiscating the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., which paid meager royalties. Months of negotiations were futile.

To American planners, however, the growing influence of the Soviets in Iran, fostered by Mosaddeq, was more important than oil. The Tudeh Party, initially hostile to Mosaddeq, began cozying up to domestic communists, and Moscow started a flow of funds to friendly politicians. So CIA and SIS officers convened in Nicosia, Cyprus, to draft an action plan relying heavily on subversion and propaganda. They set a budget of $285,000, with the United States contributing $147,000 and the Brits $137,000. President Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill approved AJAX, which meant the CIA and SIS acted with authority from the highest levels of government.

With the Cold War at a frosty moment, neither nation was about to permit a Soviet inroad into Iran. In the view of the left-leaning journalist Stephen Kinzer, "it is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation AJAX through the shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York." More dispassionate historians dismiss such an analogy as strained.

Nonetheless, in 1980, Madeleine K. Albright, President Clinton's secretary of state, came close to apologizing for AJAX, admitting that the United States "played a significant role" in the ouster of Mosaddeq and noting "that many Iranians continue to resent the intervention."

But not Richard Helms, former director of central intelligence. I was once in a group when someone baited him about Iran. Eyes flashing, Helms shot back, "AJAX gave us 25 years in Iran, and in Cold War terms, that was an eternity!" And, in the meanwhile, the clandestine services continue to use the Wilber history in training courses. [Goulden/WashingtonTimes/16August2010] 

Coming Events

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

MANY Spy Museum Events in August with full details are listed on the AFIO Website at www.afio.com. The titles for some of these are in detail below and online.

Wednesday, 1 September 2010, 6 pm - Las Vegas, NV - The Roger E. McCarthy AFIO Las Vegas Chapter Meets to hear "Just War: Dealing with Counterterrorism"

Speaker Cathy Hanks, Ph.D. discusses "Just War: Dealing with Counterterrorism" at Nellis Air Force Base Officers' Club.
(Guest names must be submitted along with their birthdate to me by 4:00 p.m., Monday, August 23rd. Please join us at 5 p.m. in the "Robin's Roost" bar area for liaison and beverages
Dr. Hanks is a visiting Assistant Professor to UNLV and is a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science from the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. She is an expert in National Security Policy and Intelligence.
The Nellis AFB has just changed their visitor access rules and we now have to include each guest's birthdate on the visitor roster. If you are planning to attend the AFIO meeting on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, please provide your birthdate to me as soon as possible. I need to have it sent to me by 4:00p.m., Monday August 23, 2010 in order to have your name included on the access list for Nellis AFB. Also, if you have a guest, please provide a birthdate for them as well. Entrance to the Base for you and your guest(s) cannot be guaranteed if I don't have their names and birthdates.
Place: 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.
Dinner: You are welcome to arrive early and join us in the "Robin's Roost" bar area, inside the Officer's Club. The Robin's Roost 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 before the stated deadline above.
Email or call Mary Bentley at BentleyM@nv.doe.gov or 702-295-1024 if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you!

8 September 2010, 11:30 a.m. - Scottsdale, AZ - The Arizona Chapter of AFIO hosts Dr. Robert H. Reuss who will speak on "Novel electronics technologies being explored and developed for the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community."

Prior to joining the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, in Washington, DC, Dr. Robert Reuss spent twenty years in technology and research management positions with Motorola Corporation in the Phoenix area. Prior to that he had worked for a U.S. government agency for seven years as a research and development manager. For three years he was a professor conducting research at the University of Colorado. Dr. Reuss received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Drexel University in 1971. He has published over 50 papers and has been awarded 13 U.S. patents. His technology interests lie in the area of materials and electrochemistry technologies for advanced microelectronic applications and microsystems integration as well as large area electronics. The presentation will discuss novel electronics technologies being explored and developed for the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Presentation will be unclassified. This 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. Arthur Kerns, President of the AFIO AZ Chapter, president@afioaz.org

13 September 2010 - Portsmouth, NH - CIRA New England chapter luncheon meeting
For further information phone 207-374-2169. Inquiries to raguay@roadrunner.com

Tuesday 14 September 2010, 5:30-6:30 pm - Washington, DC - AFIO Hampton Roads Chapter hosts Membership Meeting

Location: Tabb Library in York County, Main Meeting Room. Members will discuss chapter plans for the year and other business matters. RSVP: Melissa Saunders mwsaunders@cox.net

15 September 2010, 8 am - Washington, DC - The ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security hosts breakfast at University Club

The speaker at the breakfast is Congresswoman Jane Harman on "The Authorization for Use of Military Force" To register contact Holly McMahon, Staff Director, at 202-662-1035 or at hmcmahon@staff.abanet.org More information at www.abanet.org/natsecurity

16 September 2010 – San Francisco, CA – The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts Lt. Col. Roger Dong on the People's Liberation Army and Chinese military strategy.

Lt Col Roger Dong is Chairman, American Legion War Memorial Commission and Immediate Past President, AFIO SF chapter. The presentation will be on the People's Liberation Army and will cover historical recap of the PLA and discuss Chinese military strategic concepts, vis-a-vis the US military. The advances of the PLA Navy will be a special focus during the presentation. RSVP and pre-payment required. The meeting will be held at UICC, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco (between Sloat/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, 16 September 2010, 11:30 am - Colorado Springs, CO – The Rocky Mountain Chapter features speaker on terrorism.

The Rocky Mountain Chapter presents Sheriff Terry Maketa who will speak on legal issues involving El Paso County, crime statistics and give an update on terrorism. To be held at a new location the AFA... Eisenhower Golf Course Club House. Please RSVP to Tom VanWormer at robsmom@pcisys.net

21 September 2010, 7 pm – Center Valley, PA – DeSales University National Security Program hosts AFIO member Dr. John Behling on “The Evolution of Standard Overt Jihad into Covert Stealth Jihad.”

Dr. John Behling served in the Office of Strategic Services and Military Intelligence during and after WWII.  He was a member of the Office of Intelligence and Research with the State Department, a Foreign Service officer, a free lance contract agent for the CIA, and a university professor.  He has numerous publications dealing with language studies, the USSR, and terrorism.  AFIO members are invited to join us as Dr. Behling shares a chapter from his forthcoming book The DNA of Terrorism.  The event takes place in the Commonwealth Room in the DeSales University Center on the DeSales University campus (2755 Station Avenue, Center Valley, PA 18034).  For questions please email Dr. Andrew Essig at Andrew.Essig@desales.edu  or call 610-282-1100 x1632.  No RSVP is required.   This event is open to the public and free of charge.

Wednesday, 22 September 2010, 7:30 pm - Fairfax, VA - Stalling For Time: My Life As An FBI Hostage Negotiator by Gary Noesner

Gary Noesner, the founding chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit shares a firsthand account of many dramatic cases -- the D.C. Sniper, Waco and Montana Freemen -- highlighting successes, failures and lessons for resolving all types of crises. Event being held in Research I, Room 163 on Fairfax campus of George Mason University. For more information visit www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library

Thursday, 23 September 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - The A-12 Oxcart - an event at the International Spy Museum

"Forty-five years ago…a group of young Air Force pilots volunteered to be 'sheepdipped' from the Air Force to the CIA to fly an unidentified aircraft at an undisclosed venue to replace the U-2." --Frank Murray, A-12 pilot The Air Force's high-flying SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, which literally flew faster than a speeding bullet, is legendary. Much less well known is the CIA's version, the A-12, which first flew two years before the SR-71 under the OXCART program. Built by Lockheed's famous "Skunk Works," the plane was an engineering marvel. It made repeated flights over Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, providing photographs to commanders in less than 24 hours from the end of a mission. In 1968, in a ten minute mission that photographed all of North Korea without being detected, an A-12 located the captured American spy ship, Pueblo. Only recently has the veil of secrecy been lifted from this amazing aircraft, allowing the full story to be told, including its enduring legacy. Now the program's pioneers gather to share its history: from sky-high successes to fiery crashes. CIA chief historian David Robarge will be joined by program veterans Robert B. Abernethy, inventor of the J-58 engines used in the A-12, Thornton D. Barnes, hypersonic flight specialist, and AFIO's President S. Eugene Poteat, the CIA officer who assessed threats to the A-12, and others. Kenneth Collins, an A-12 pilot who flew six missions over Vietnam, will also tell his story, along with other test pilots. Tickets: $12.50 per person Register at www.spymuseum.org

23 September 2010 - Reston, VA - "Intelligence and the Law" - Instructor: W. George Jameson, former CIA lawyer, 33 years.

W. George Jameson gives this one-day course examining the legal and policy framework that governs the U.S. Intelligence Community. It presents the core legal authorities and restrictions - derived from the Constitution, statutes, and Executive orders - and explores how and why they are applied to the conduct of U.S. intelligence today. Designed for a wide audience, the course reviews the history and evolution of intelligence law and policy and provides an in-depth look at selected laws that affect intelligence activities. Topics include: the National Security Act and establishment of the CIA and other intelligence elements; electronic surveillance and FISA; the role of the DNI; privacy, civil liberties, and restrictions on the conduct of intelligence; covert action; congressional oversight; protection of sources and methods, classification, and leaks; and the laws and relationships that govern the fight against terrorism. Finally, the course provides an introduction to how the laws are applied to emerging national security concerns such as cyber threats.
Fee: $750.
Location: The Intelligence & Security Academy, 1890 Preston White Dr Suite 250, Reston, VA 20191
To Register: https://www.regonline.com/intelligence_and_the_law

Thursday-Friday 23-24 September 2010 - Harrisburg, PA - First Annual Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence (IC CAE) Symposium "Intelligence and Homeland Security: Policy and Strategy Implications" - The symposium is by Penn State Harrisburg.

SAVE THE DATE! Potential topics: • Careers in the intelligence community; • Cyber security and information; assurance; • Border security; • Critical infrastructure protection (CIP);
• Intelligence and information sharing – domestic and international; • Fusion centers; • Ethical issues in intelligence; • Operations security (OPSEC); • Terrorism; • Drug cartels; • Private sector and NGOs; • Public health; • Geospatial information; • Counter-proliferation. Registration information and call for presentations/papers to follow.
Event location: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Hilton Hotel
Contact: Tom Arminio, tja12@psu.edu, tomarminio@gmail.com Mobile: 717-448-5377
or Kate Corbin Tompkins, katespa@psu.edu; Office: 717-948-6058; Mobile: 717-405-2022; Fax: 717-948-6484

24 September 2010 - Tysons Corner, VA - AFIO National Fall Luncheon features CIA Deputy Director, Michael J. Morell and Author/Lawyer Stewart Baker.

11 a.m. speaker - Stewart A. Baker, former General Counsel, NSA, 1st Undersecretary DHS, and author of the important new book: Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism .... and .... 1 p.m. speaker Deputy Director Michael J. Morell, CIA
Check in for badge pickup at 10:30 a.m., Stewart Baker gives address at 11 a.m., Lunch served at noon; Michael J. Morell gives address at 1 p.m., Event closes at 2 p.m. REGISTRATION Here. EVENT LOCATION: The Crowne Plaza, 1960 Chain Bridge Road • McLean, Virginia 22102
R E G I S T R A T I O N EVENT LOCATION: The Crowne Plaza, 1960 Chain Bridge Road • McLean, Virginia 22102. Driving directions here or use this link: http://tinyurl.com/8228kw Registration limited HERE

Saturday, 25 September 2010, 10:00 am - Coral Gables, FL - "Management of Kidnap and Extortion Incidents" the topic at the AFIO Miami Chapter event.This program is a seminar conducted by Bruce Kaplan and Elman Myers of Special Contingency Risks. Being held at the Courtyard Marriott, 2051 S LaJuene Rd, Coral Gables, FL. $10 for AFIO members, $25 for nonmember guests. RSVP to Tom Spencer at trsmiami@aol.com or send payment to him at 999 Ponce de Leon Blvd, Suite 510, Coral Gables, FL 33134.

29-30 September 2010 - Washington, DC - Conference on the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975 by the U.S. Department of State.

The U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian is pleased to invite AFIO members to a conference on the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975, which will be held in the George C. Marshall Conference Center at the State Dept. The conference will feature a number of key Department of State personnel, both past and present. Those speaking will include:
* Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger
* Former Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte
* Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard A. Holbrooke
The conference will include a panel composed of key print and television media personnel from the Vietnam period discussing the impact of the press on public opinion and United States policy. A number of scholarly panels featuring thought-provoking works by leading scholars will also take place. Registration information will be available at the State Dept website, http://history.state.gov, after August 1.

Thursday, 30 September 2010; 12 noon - 1 pm - Washington, DC - Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative - Event at the International Spy Museum.

Dmitri Bystrolyotov was a man out of the movies: dashingly handsome and fluent in many languages, he was a sailor, artist, doctor, lawyer, and artist. He was also a spy for Stalin's Soviet Union. By seducing women, including a French diplomat, the wife of a British official, and a Gestapo officer, he was able to deliver many secrets back to his masters in Moscow. His espionage career came to an end in 1938, however, when he was caught up in Stalin's purges. Sent to the Gulag for twenty years, he suffered tremendous physical hardship but he also came to see the reality of the regime for which he had spied. Join us for a fascinating talk about Bystrolyotov's rise to greatness and fall from Stalin's graces with author Emil Draitser, once a journalist in the Soviet Union and now a professor at Hunter College in New York. Free! No registration required! Join the author for an informal chat and book signing. More information at www.spymuseum.org

Saturday, 2 October 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - William J. Donovan Award Dinner Honoring Ross Perot by The OSS Society

The OSS Society celebrates the historical accomplishments of the OSS during WWII through a William J. Donovan Award Dinner. This year the annual dinner honors Ross Perot. Event includes special performance by humorist Mark Russell. Black Tie/Dress Mess. Location: Mandarin Oriental Hotel, 1330 Maryland Ave SW, Washington, DC. By invitation. Tables of ten: $25,000; Table of ten: $15,000; Table of eight: $10,000; Table of Six: $5000; Seating of four: $3,000; One guest: $1,000. Some tickets available for $175 pp. Donations welcomed. Inquiries to The OSS Society at oss@osssociety.org

Tuesday, 5 October 2010; 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - Russian Illegals: The Spies Next Door - an Event at the International Spy Museum

"It's pretty shocking. I didn't think stuff like this still went on." --Scott Inouye, neighbor to two Russian spies On 29 June, 2010 Americans were stunned and then bemused to learn of the arrest of ten Russian "deep-cover" spies who had lived among us for decades as neighbors and Facebook friends-while at the same time operating with secret mission: to meet influential Americans and exploit them for their knowledge of government policy. "Illegals," like these spies, have been a Moscow specialty for years, but traditionally are used sparingly-for only the most sensitive of operations. Seldom has the U.S. government been able to find and arrest "illegals," so Americans are generally not aware of this threat. Join H. Keith Melton, renowned intelligence historian, technical advisor to American intelligence agencies, author of Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, and International Spy Museum board member, and Brian Kelley, counterintelligence specialist with over forty years experience as a USAF and CIA case officer specializing in double agent and deception operations, a recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, and currently adjunct professor at several graduate schools on counterintelligence and national security issues, as they shine a spotlight on the murky world of illegals: what they are, how they operate, and the threat they pose. With access to never-before-seen images, Melton will demonstrate both the classis and up-to-date spycraft used by these "spies next door." Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin will also provide commentary based on his years running agents in the U.S. Tickets: $12.50 per person. Register at www.spymuseum.org

Wednesday, 20 October 2010, noon – 1 pm – Stealing Atomic Secrets: The Invisible Harry Gold - a program at the International Spy Museum.

Harry Gold was literally the man who handed the Soviets the plans for America's nuclear bomb. A Russian-Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, he became a spy for the Soviets while studying chemistry in the United States during the depths of the Great Depression. His KGB code names, such as "Goose" and "Mad," belied his importance as a liaison to important spies within the scientific and engineering communities. During World War II, he was entrusted to be the KGB's handler for physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had burrowed deep into the Manhattan Project, America's super-secret program to build an atom bomb. After Gold's arrest in 1950, his testimony helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. Journalist and historian Allen Hornblum will help us understand how a decent and well-intentioned man helped commit the greatest scientific theft of the twentieth century.
Free! No registration required! Join the author for an informal chat and book signing. More information at www.spymuseum.org

22 October 2010, Noon luncheon - - Washington, DC - The ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security luncheon at University Club
The luncheon features Richard Clarke on "Cyber Security." To register contact Holly McMahon, Staff Director, at 202-662-1035 or at hmcmahon@staff.abanet.org More information at www.abanet.org/natsecurity

Saturday, 23 October 2010, 10 am - Coral Gables, FL - "How We Know That You Are Lying: Explorations in the Science of Polygraphy" with John Palmatier, PhD -- at the AFIO Miami Chapter

Dr. John J. Palmatier of Slattery Associates/Dawn Associates [ www.polygraphexperts.com] speaks at this Saturday morning event hosted by the AFIO Ted Shackley Miami Chapter. The fee is $10 for AFIO member; $25 for guests. No charge for U.S. Government employees, military, students, faculty or law enforcement.
RSVP with check to Tom Spencer, 999 Ponce de Leon Blvd Ste 520, Coral Gables, FL 33134. Questions to 305 648-0940 or email TRSMiami@aol.com

28 October 2010, 0930- 1715 - Newport News, VA - AFIO Hampton Roads Chapter hosts 2nd Annual Workshop on National Security and Intelligence

Location: Christopher Newport University, Newport News. Theme: Maritime and Port Security
We seek sponsorship at all levels to help cover costs. Please advise if you know of a company or organization that might like to sponsor the event.
Sponsorships start at $250.
RSVP: Melissa Saunders mwsaunders@cox.net

29 October 2010, 11 a.m. - Tysons Corner, VA - Naval Intelligence Professionals (NIP) Fall Luncheon. To be held at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Tyson's Corner, VA Event ends at 2 p.m. Keynote speaker TBD.

29-31 October 2010 - Middletown, RI - The New England Chapter of the Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association (NCVA-NE) will hold a Fall Mini-Reunion. Event takes place at the Newport Beach Hotel and Suites. The registration cut-off date is September 29, 2010. For additional information, call (518) 664-8032 or visit http://web.meganet.net/kman/mr2010b.htm.

Tuesday, 2 November 2010, 6:30 pm - Washington, DC - Attack on Mumbai: A New Paradigm for Terrorism? - a program at the International Spy Museum.

"One of the gunmen seemed to be talking on a mobile phone even as he used his other hand to fire off rounds." — Nisar Suttar, eyewitness, November 2008
On 26 November 2008, ten highly trained and disciplined men used covert intelligence and off-the-shelf technology to terrorize and immobilize the city of Mumbai, killing 166 people and wounding over 300. The attackers were able to effectively overwhelm the Mumbai police and Indian security forces utilizing integrated tactics, superior weaponry, and sophisticated covert communications that provided their Pakistani handlers with "real time" command and control as events unfolded. This change in tactics has presented a challenge for the West: how can we find ways to defend against similar attacks in the future? H. Keith Melton, renowned intelligence historian, technical advisor to American intelligence agencies, author of Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda, and International Spy Museum board member, has thoroughly researched the planning and technology behind the attack. Using videotape of the surviving attacker's confession and intercepts of terrorist voice communications during the assault, he will offer a strategic overview of the attacks and explore the tactical phases, and the use by the terrorists of "commercial off-the-shelf" (COTS) technologies and the Internet. Tickets: $12.50 per person. Seating is limited. Register at www.spymuseum.org

13 - 20 November 2010 - Ft. Lauderdale, FL - SPYCRUISE to Grand Turks, Turks & Caicos; San Juan, PR; St. Thomas, USVI; and Half Moon Cay, Bahamas - with National Security Speakers Discussing "Current & Future Threats: Policies, Problems and Prescriptions."

SPYCRUISE®: A National Security Educational Lecture/Seminar Series. The CI Centre and Henley-Putnam University are sponsoring a new SpyCruise®, November 13-20, 2010. Join them on the Holland American MS Eurodam as they set sail from Ft. Lauderdale, FL to the Grand Turks, San Juan, St. Thomas and Half Moon Cay in the Caribbean. Speakers include former DCI’s Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden plus many others. AFIO member and retired CIA operations officer Bart Bechtel continues his role as the “SpySkipper.” For more information about this year’s SpyCruise®, go to: http://spytrek.com/spycruise.html. RESERVATIONS: www.DFunTravel.com or call 1-888-670-0008.
Fees for an eight day cruise: $1,199 inside cabin; $1269 Ocean View Cabin; $1449 Verandahs; $1979 Suites. Price includes program, taxes, port charges and gratuities. Colorful brochure here.

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

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