Alan Cowell – Shortly after the radiation poisoning in London of a former K.G.B. officer, Alexander V. Litvinenko, a senior Russian official asserted that Moscow had been tailing his killers before he died but had been waved off by Britain’s security services, according to a cable in the trove of secret American documents released by WikiLeaks.

The Russian assertion, denied by British officials, seemed to revive a theory that the British intelligence services played a murky role in the killing — a notion voiced at the time by some in Moscow to deflect allegations of the Kremlin’s involvement in the murder.

The cable, dated Dec. 26, 2006, and marked “secret,” was one of several in the WikiLeaks trove that tried to examine the still unanswered question of who exactly ordered the use of a rare radioactive isotope, polonium 210, to poison Mr. Litvinenko, leading to his death on Nov. 23, 2006. Russia produces polonium commercially, but the process is closely guarded and British investigators have concluded that the isotope could not have been easily diverted without high-level intervention.

In a telephone interview, Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the former K.G.B. officer, called the Russian assertion “disinformation.”

“When they prepared this, they never expected polonium would be known as a murder weapon,” she said. “But after Nov. 23, they needed some kind of disinformation.” She said that “polonium could not be used without very high level” involvement of the security services.

A separate cable from Paris suggested that at least one senior American official, Daniel Fried, seemed skeptical of statements by Vladimir V. Putin — then Russia’s president and now prime minister — that he was unaware of the events leading to the killing, which Britain has blamed on another former K.G.B. officer, Andrei K. Lugovoi.

Mr. Lugovoi, now a member of the Russian Parliament, has denied British charges that he murdered Mr. Litvinenko by slipping polonium into a teapot at a British hotel where the two men met on Nov. 1, 2006. Russia has refused a British request for Mr. Lugovoi’s extradition and the relationship between two countries has not fully recovered from deep strains after Mr. Litvinenko’s death.

Among several cables mentioning the affair, perhaps the most sensitive covers a meeting in Paris on Dec. 7, 2006, between an American ambassador at large, Henry Crumpton, and Anatoly Safonov, at the time a special representative of Mr. Putin. That encounter had a whiff of an espionage film script. The two met over a dinner described as “amicable.” Both men were veterans of their countries’ intelligence services, and were now assigned by their governments to cooperate in counterterrorism.

Mr. Crumpton had led the C.I.A.’s operation in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Safonov was a former K.G.B. colonel-general who had risen to high office as deputy director in its successor organization, the F.S.B., in the 1990s, according to Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who has just published a study of that organization called “The New Nobility.”

One of Mr. Safonov’s subsequent assignments in the 2000s was to head a joint British-Russian counterterrorism group, which was dissolved in the diplomatic freeze provoked by Mr. Litvinenko’s death, Mr. Soldatov said in a telephone interview.

According to the leaked cable, “Safonov claimed that Russian authorities in London had known about and followed individuals moving radioactive substances into the city, but were told by the British that they were under control before the poisoning took place.”

The cable did not identify the people carrying the material. Mr. Safonov’s comments reflected allegations by Mr. Lugovoi who, at the time, accused Mr. Litvinenko of being in the pay of British intelligence. But Mr. Safonov’s remarks seemed likely to be taken by British officials as an accusation of incompetence, with the poisoning happening under their eyes. If confirmed, they would also raise the question of how Britain reacted to the idea of Russian spies tailing their citizens on British soil.

The question of who ordered the killing surfaced in a separate leaked cable, also marked “secret,” about a meeting in Paris — on the same day as the former spies’ dinner — between a French presidential adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne and Mr. Fried, then the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Bush administration. Mr. Fried is now the Guantánamo special envoy, appointed by President Obama and charged with persuading other countries to take detainees held at the prison in Cuba.

The French official, the cable said, ascribed the killing to “rogue elements” in the Russian security services. But Mr. Fried “commented that the short-term trend inside Russia was negative, noting increasing indications that the U.K. investigation into the murder of Litvinenko could well point to some sort of Russian involvement.”

Later, it said: “Fried, noting Putin’s attention to detail, questioned whether rogue security elements could operate, in the U.K. no less, without Putin’s knowledge. Describing the current atmosphere as strange, he described the Russians as increasingly self-confident, to the point of arrogance.”

Mr. Fried’s reported remark was the first time that such a suggestion by a serving American officer was made public.

That remark reflected some suspicions about high-level Kremlin involvement in the period after Mr. Litvinenko’s death, when conspiracy theories blossomed relating to Mr. Litvinenko’s activities as a visceral public enemy of Mr. Putin and as a whistle-blower on Russian organized crime. Mr. Litvinenko fled Russia in 2000 and sought asylum in Britain, where he acquired British citizenship shortly before his death. Mr. Fried declined to comment publicly on the content of the cable.

Another cable, from the American Embassy in Madrid, marked “confidential” and dated Aug. 31, 2009, cited an article in the newspaper El País. The article said that Mr. Litvinenko had tipped off Spanish security officials about Russian organized crime figures in Spain and had provided information about four suspected gangsters at a previously unrecorded meeting with Spanish officials in May 2006.

That report added one more layer to the debate about the motives of his killers — could the killing have been done in revenge for his disclosures about the mob?

Perhaps the most tantalizing item in the cables was related to Dmitri Kovtun, a business associate of Mr. Lugovoi, who passed through Hamburg on his way to London on Nov. 1 and was, by his own account, present when Mr. Lugovoi met Mr. Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel in the Mayfair district of London on Nov. 1, 2006.

According to a confidential cable from the American consulate in Hamburg, dated Dec. 19, 2006 — about a month after Mr. Litvinenko’s death — a senior German counterterrorism official, Gerhard Schindler, “said Kovtun left polonium traces on everything he touched” in Hamburg. That much had been publicly reported.
But, the cable said, “German investigators concluded Kovtun did not have polonium traces on his skin or clothes; Schindler said the polonium was coming out of his body, for example through his pores.”

That suggested that the exposure took place during an earlier visit to London by Mr. Lugovoi and Mr. Kovtun in October 2006, during which they had met Mr. Litvinenko; they claimed later that they themselves had been victims of a poisoning attempt. Mr. Litvinenko’s supporters and British investigators, however, have long described the earlier visit as a part of the conspiracy against Mr. Litvinenko.

The cable from Hamburg said no traces of polonium were found on the Germanwings plane Mr. Kovtun took to London, and German authorities had been preparing to ground the Aeroflot plane that took him to Hamburg from Moscow to test it for traces of the isotope. “Schindler said Russian authorities must have found out about German plans because ‘at the last minute’ Aeroflot swapped planes,” the cable said. “Schindler said he did not expect Aeroflot to fly the other plane to Germany any time soon.”

All articles about the case

Stephan Fuchs – Der amerikanische Geheimdienst hat im Fall Tinner in der Schweiz viel mehr interveniert als bislang bekannt war. Dazu gehörte auch ein Hacker Angriff auf das Computerzentrum der Bundespolizei. Diese ist mit dem Fall Tinner betreut. Ein damals involvierter Beamter bestätigt gegenüber der Schweizerischen Sonntagszeitung den Angriff.

Im Jahr 2006 – Mitten in den Ermittlungen gegen Vater und Söhne Tinner – habe die Bundespolizei einen Hacker-Angriff auf ihr IT-Center in Zürich festgestellt. Im IT-Center lagerten zu dieser Zeit auf gesicherten Servern unzählige Daten, die man bei den Tinners sichergestellt hatte. Darunter waren auch Pläne zur Herstellung von Atomwaffen.

Die Techniker der Bundespolizei hätten den Angriff zurückverfolgt und seien auf eine Firma im Irak gestossen, die in Verbindung mit dem US-Verteidigungsministerium stand. Der Hackerangriff fiel in eine Phase, in der die USA mit allen Mitteln versuchten, ein Verfahren gegen die Tinners in der Schweiz zu stoppen. Grund: Die Schweizer Mitglieder des Khan-Netzwerks hatten ab spätestens Sommer 2003 mit der CIA kooperiert und dem Geheimdienst Informationen über das Netzwerk geliefert.

Beamter im Schweizer Nachrichtendienst wird verdächtig ein Maulwurf zu sein
Ein „leitender Mitarbeiter des Schweizer Geheimdienstes“ soll die US-Behörden laufend über alle Schritte der Schweiz informiert haben. Dieser Verdacht sei 2006 unter den Ermittlern aufgekommen. Der verdächtigte Beamte hatte eine langjährige Verbindung zur CIA und galt als Freund der Bush-Regierung. Laut Insidern ist es plausibel, dass damals ein Schweizer Beamter die USA mit Informationen versorgt hat. Offiziell sagt eine Sprecherin der Bundesanwaltschaft aber, man habe keine Kenntnis von einem Informationsleck.

Der Fall Tinner

Prozess in Suedafrika und Banditen im Nuklearbereich

Brian Michael Jenkins – A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani scientist, created a global network to secretly obtain and sell the capability to go nuclear. Two journalists sniff out the efforts of U.S. and British intelligence to penetrate and dismantle that network.

Anyone concerned about nuclear proliferation or interested in the world of espionage will want to read Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz’s provocative new book, „Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking,“ which tells a fascinating story whose characters come straight out of a spy novel.

Illustration of A.Q. Khan for the review of „Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking“ (Shonagh Rae / For The Times / January 9, 2011)

The emergence of Pakistan, North Korea and potentially Iran as nuclear states owes much to the work of one man, A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani scientist who created a clandestine global network to secretly obtain and sell the capability to go nuclear. At first, his efforts were devoted exclusively to making Pakistan a nuclear power, but driven by greed and intense hatred of the United States, he soon became a global supplier of nuclear weapons know-how and the specialized equipment required to make atomic bombs. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, described Khan’s clandestine network as a nuclear “ Wal-Mart.“

The efforts of the CIA and British intelligence to penetrate and dismantle the Khan network are the subject of „Fallout,“ which serves as a kind of sequel to the authors‘ previous book, „The Nuclear Jihadist,“ and, of necessity, repeats some of the same material.

But their continuing investigations and interviews with sources in the intelligence community and their principal informants also offer additional details and observations as well as remarkable success stories, such as the CIA’s recruitment of the Tinner family (father and sons), Khan’s Swiss confederates. The information the Tinners provided enabled American and British intelligence to uncover Khan’s operations in Europe, Dubai and Malaysia, subtly alter blueprints and sabotage equipment destined for his customers, and intercept a shipment of vital nuclear components headed for Libya.

Books about contemporary espionage come with a warning label: No matter how much is leaked, authors never have all the facts. They know only what they are told by people who have an interest in contests yet to be resolved. No one speaks in the interest of truth; information is provided only to advance national, institutional or personal agendas.

Collins, a former foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and Frantz, a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and correspondent for the New York Times, describe what must have been a frustrating interview with the talented CIA agent who recruited the critical informants inside Khan’s network. He evaded all of the authors‘ questions, then left them with a slip of paper on which was written, „The most important part of the story is the piece of it you don’t know.“

Concerned that a well-written history, however interesting, might not suffice to attract readers, publishers too often push for a headline-grabbing angle. Government incompetence, a cover-up or imminent danger are reliable themes, but they can also distract from a solidly supported narrative such as „Fallout’s.“ Though they admire the CIA’s success, the authors remain critical of America’s failure to dismantle Khan’s network sooner. In their view, Khan was able to steal secrets and peddle his black-market connections far longer than was necessary. They are also critical of what they describe as a „cover-up“ subsequently engineered by Washington to prevent the public from finding out just how tarnished its intelligence victory was.

Many in the intelligence community would disagree with these assertions. There is often tension between the need to take action and the need to collect more information. It is a classic intelligence quandary. The Khan network was a complex enterprise that took decades to assemble. Thus it took time for outsiders to understand all of its dimensions. Acting prematurely might have only temporarily disrupted one tentacle of Khan’s operations rather than delivering a strategic blow. Networks are inherently resilient, hard to kill. Previous investigations and warnings to several of Khan’s confederates had not stopped them.

Read all at LA Times
Der Fall Tinner

WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER – A seven-year effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to hide its relationship with a Swiss family who once acted as moles inside the world’s most successful atomic black market hit a turning point on Thursday when a Swiss magistrate recommended charging the men with trafficking in technology and information for making nuclear arms.

The prospect of a prosecution, and a public trial, threatens to expose some of the C.I.A.’s deepest secrets if defense lawyers try to protect their clients by revealing how they operated on the agency’s behalf. It could also tarnish what the Bush administration once hailed as a resounding victory in breaking up the nuclear arms network by laying bare how much of it remained intact.

“It’s like a puzzle,” Andreas Müller, the Swiss magistrate, said at a news conference in Bern on Thursday. “If you put the puzzle together you get the whole picture.”

The three men — Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, Urs and Marco — helped run the atomic smuggling ring of A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program, officials in several countries have said. In return for millions of dollars, according to former Bush administration officials, the Tinners secretly worked for the C.I.A. as well, not only providing information about the Khan network’s manufacturing and sales efforts, which stretched from Iran to Libya to North Korea, but also helping the agency introduce flaws into the equipment sent to some of those countries.

The Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to protect the men from prosecution, even persuading Swiss authorities to destroy equipment and information found on their computers and in their homes and businesses — actions that may now imperil efforts to prosecute them.

While it has been clear since 2008 that the Tinners acted as American spies, the announcement by the Swiss magistrate on Thursday, recommending their prosecution for nuclear smuggling, is a turning point in the investigation. A trial would bring to the fore a case that Pakistan has insisted is closed. Prosecuting the case could also expose in court a tale of C.I.A. break-ins in Switzerland, and of a still unexplained decision by the agency not to seize electronic copies of a number of nuclear bomb designs found on the computers of the Tinner family.

One of those blueprints came from an early Chinese atomic bomb; two more advanced designs were from Pakistan’s program, investigators from several countries have said.

Ultimately, copies of those blueprints were found around the globe on the computers of members of the Khan network, leading investigators to suspect that they made their way to Iran, North Korea and perhaps other countries. In 2003, atomic investigators found one of the atomic blueprints in Libya and brought it back to the United States for safekeeping.

Mr. Müller, the Swiss magistrate, investigated the Tinner case for nearly two years. He said Thursday that his 174-page report recommended that the three men face charges for “supporting the development of atomic weapons” in violation of Swiss law.

Read all at New York Times
Der Fall Tinner

Sibel Edmonds – Last week John Young’s information site Cryptome.Org began publishing documents related to the interviews conducted by the 9/11 Commission which were released for the first time. On January 3, Cryptome posted the 9/11 Commission’s report on my interview (the infamous Sibel Edmonds Case), and aptly titled this particular file as “Sibel Edmonds Censored Yet Again.” Once you read the PDF document you’ll quickly see the reason for Cryptome’s appropriate label. The entire report, by that I mean the entire report, is blacked out (actually, whited-out;-). It took me less than one minute to scan the entire document; basically, scrolling down the white pages-one white page after another. Initially, I was not a bit surprised. Hey, I’ve been declared the most gagged and classified person in US history, after all- State Secrets Privilege invocation twice, gagging the entire Congress for the first (and only) time in US history, hundreds of pages of blacked out DOJ-IG report… So, as I said, I didn’t find it a bit surprising.  However, after the minute it took to go over these blank pages, I started clicking and scanning all the other files (interviews by the 9/11 Commission), and that’s where I was truly surprised:

Despite some redactions here and there, and in a few cases fairly extensive redaction, there were no interviews where the entire interview (and the report on the interview) was blacked out in its entirety. Mine was the only one privileged and honored to such degree! Why? I mean, come on, we are talking about interviews with: FBI Special Agent in Charge on Counterterrorism, CIA Officers with Directorate of Intelligence with a Specific Focus on Drugs & Thugs, The Chairman of National Intelligence Council, NSA Chief of Counterintelligence & SIGNIT Support, Senior CIA Analysts…Yet, none of these interviews was redacted in its entirety. None. Please be my guest and make your own comparison; My 9/11 Commission interview document here, and the rest, here, here, here, here, here…You can check out the rest published by Cryptome here, and if you want more here for thousands of them.

I e-mailed Mr. Young to get his opinion and ask whether he had noticed the same interesting phenomena. He confirmed my observation and we shared the exact same conclusion: This particular interview was ‘exceptionally’ redacted.

Next, I started all over again, and this time I checked for the location of these interviews conducted by the 9/11 Commission. Why? Because after checking with the DOJ/FBI/State Department/DOD, the 9/11 Commissioners insisted that my interview to be conducted in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility). I was stuck inside one of these almost airless highly claustrophobic dungeons for over three hours for my interview. I was told by the commission staff that this was due to the ‘extreme secret and sensitive nature of Ms. Edmonds’ information.’ Yet, none of the high-level counterterrorism officials, CIA operatives and agents, senior analysts…(at least all the ones I’ve scanned so far) were required to give their interviews inside a SCIF, or even a cleared room (they have specialists come and declare the room/facility clear & free of bugs). When you go to my interview document (here), look at the top of the page, find ‘location’ and see what it says. For mine it says: GSA SCIF. Now, if you were to go to all the other documents and check the interviewees’ location for the  interview, you’ll see No SCIF, and locations like: Commission’s K Street Office (regular meeting room), or, regular offices or meeting rooms within various government agencies & HQs.

Another interesting point that came to me later had to do with the length of the Commission’s redacted interview with me. I know I was in there for over three hours, and at the top of the report they actually confirm that. I know I didn’t waste time talking about the employment and whistle blowing aspects of my case, instead I asked them to get that info from the IG or various congressional offices. I spent over three hours talking, answering questions, and writing for the 9/11 Commission investigators, with no break, no interruptions, and not even a pause for side conversations. I have transcribed interviews, I have typed many pages of phone/recorded conversations at the FBI while a translator,  I have prepared many reports based on interviews, and I know that there is no way in this world you can transcribe or report on three hours of nonstop interview, especially mine, in less than 10-12 pages (single spaced!). Yet, the total number of redacted pages released by the 9/11 Commission totals about 5 pages. What else did they do with my interview besides redacting? This is what I call ‘sending it to a never-to-be retrieved Black Hole.’

I wonder what the US media has to say on this; especially the ones who’ve done their share of censoring and redacting on this particular case. Any ideas?

This article was published at Boiling Frog Post