A thread to discuss espionage (both international and corporate) and its impact on world affairs.
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NOTE: The Israel and Palestine thread
- Posts about espionage related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine are prohibited.
- Any posts about espionage involving Israel or Palestine and unrelated to the conflict are permitted as long as they stay on topic for the thread.
For starters, I have (still do when possible) some interest in Mossad/Shin Bet/Israeli Police's use of informant within the Palestinian populace to root out militants and help Israeli commando identify HVTs. Although their recruitment comes at a heavy price.
- This article is a good read since it talks about one Palestinian member of Fatah who abandoned it after its members accuse him of being an Israeli mole.
- This one mentions an arrest made by Palestinian police on a man who's been working with Israeli police for some time and was found to have a pistol for protection.
Edited by Mrph1 on May 28th 2024 at 9:14:18 AM
Lansing Institute article about the Service for Operational Information and International Communications aka the Fifth Service. Said that this unit could be tasked to take out undesirable VI Ps, including (maybe) defectors.
PS - I thought SVR would do foreign ops 'cause they got Zaslon.
Slovakia announced that Slovak intelligence agents busted a pro-Russian spy network:
As reported by the Washington Post.
Stefan Hamran, the country’s chief police officer said four Slovak nationals have been detained in the case with two of them facing spying and bribery charges.
Prosecutor Daniel Lipsic said the two face up to 13 years in prison if tried and convicted.
“We’re talking about serious cases,” Lipsic said. “It’s about a long term, paid cooperation with the Russian military intelligence service” (known as GRU).
The two are accused of seeking out and gathering highly sensitive, strategic and classified information about Slovakia, its armed forces and NATO and handed them over to undercover GRU officers who were based at the Russian Embassy in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, in exchange for money, Hamran said. He said such a case has not been known in Slovakia before. Advertisement
Lipsic said the suspects received tens of thousands euros (dollars) from the Russian spies.
“The information the Russian intelligence service was looking for also involved Ukraine,” Lipsic said. He didn’t elaborate at a news conference in Bratislava.
Officers from Slovakia’s National Criminal Agency and the country’s Military Intelligence service joined forces to investigate the case.
Tuesday’s move came a day Slovakia’s Foreign Ministry announced it was expelling three Russian diplomats following its assessment of information from the country’s intelligence services on possible spying and bribery.
The ministry said the diplomats have 72 hours to leave the country. It said their activities violated the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations.
The ministry said it has also strongly urged the Russian Embassy to make sure the activities of its diplomats were in line with the convention, which both countries are obliged to do. Advertisement
One of the two charged men was pro-rector and the head of the Security and Defense Department at the Armed Forces Academy in the northern town of Liptovsky Mikulas. The officials identified him as Pavel B., and said he had secret contacts with four GRU officers dating to 2013.
The other one, identified as Bohus G., was working for a leading pro-Russian conspiracy website known as Hlavne spravy. He cooperated with the Russians at least from April 2021 and was using his contacts with a former assistant of a lawmaker in the Slovak Parliament and a former member of the Slovak spy service known as SIS, officials said.
The officials said the two confessed their guilt. The investigation is continuing.
Yahoo News: Five charged with spying on U.S. residents for Chinese secret police
- U.S. Justice Department officials announced Wednesday that federal prosecutors have charged five people for allegedly stalking, harassing and spying on U.S. residents on behalf of China's secret police. According to a press release issued by the Justice Department, three of the defendants were arrested this week and were scheduled to appear before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday afternoon, while the other two remain at large.
- In one of the alleged schemes, the defendant allegedly worked for the Ministry of State Security, China’s civilian intelligence and secret police agency, and conspired to sabotage the congressional campaign of a U.S. military veteran who, as a student in Beijing in 1989, was a leader of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.
- Another case accuses three defendants of acting as agents of the Chinese government by spying on and conspiring to disseminate negative information about a number of pro-democracy Chinese dissidents living in New York City, California, Indiana and other parts of the U.S. One of the alleged victims is a Chinese dissident artist living in Los Angeles whose sculpture depicting Chinese President Xi Jinping as a coronavirus molecule was destroyed by the defendants, prosecutors say.
- The third case involves the founder of a pro-democracy group in Queens, N.Y., who, according to prosecutors, was secretly working for the Ministry of State Security and allegedly used his position among New York City’s Chinese community to collect information about prominent dissidents, activists and human rights leaders.
New York Times: Israel, Fearing Russian Reaction, Blocked Spyware for Ukraine and Estonia.
Israel feared that selling the cyberweapon to adversaries of Russia would damage Israel’s relationship with the Kremlin, they said.
Both Ukraine and Estonia had hoped to buy Pegasus to gain access to Russian phones, presumably as part of intelligence operations targeting their increasingly menacing neighbor in the years before Russia carried out its invasion of Ukraine.
But Israel’s Ministry of Defense refused to grant licenses to NSO Group, the company that makes Pegasus, to sell to Estonia and Ukraine if the goal of those nations was to use the weapon against Russia. The decisions came after years of Israel providing licenses to foreign governments that used the spyware as a tool of domestic repression.
Pegasus is a so-called zero-click hacking tool, meaning that it can stealthily and remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, including photos, contacts, messages and video recordings, without the user having to click on a phishing link to give Pegasus remote access. It can also turn the mobile phone into a tracking and secret recording device, allowing the phone to spy on its owner.
In the case of Ukraine, the requests for Pegasus go back several years. Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the country has increasingly seen itself as a direct target of Russian aggression and espionage. Ukrainian officials have sought Israeli defense equipment to counter the Russian threat, but Israel has imposed a near-total embargo on selling weapons, including Pegasus, to Ukraine.
In the Estonian case, negotiations to purchase Pegasus began in 2018, and Israel at first authorized Estonia to have the system, apparently unaware that Estonia planned to use the system to attack Russian phones. The Estonian government made a large down payment on the $30 million it had pledged for the system.
The following year, however, a senior Russian defense official contacted Israel security agencies to notify them that Russia had learned of Estonia’s plans to use Pegasus against Russia. After a fierce debate among Israeli officials, Israel’s Ministry of Defense blocked Estonia from using the spyware on any Russian mobile numbers worldwide.
Israel’s relationship with Russia has come under close scrutiny since
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began several weeks ago, and Ukrainian officials have publicly called out Israel’s government for offering only limited support to Ukraine’s embattled government and bowing to Russian pressure.
During a virtual speech
to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine criticized Israel for not providing his country with the Iron Dome antimissile system and other defensive weapons, and for not joining other Western nations in imposing strict economic sanctions on Russia.
Invoking the Holocaust, Mr. Zelensky said that Russia’s war was aimed at destroying the Ukrainian people just as the Nazis had wanted destruction for the Jewish people. Mr. Zelensky, who is Jewish, said “mediation can be between states, but not between good and evil.”
The New York Times reported last month that Israeli officials in August rejected a request
by a Ukrainian delegation to purchase Pegasus, at a time when Russian troops were massing at the Ukrainian border. On Wednesday morning, The Washington Post
and The Guardian,
part of a consortium of news organizations called The Pegasus Project, reported that these discussions dated back to 2019, and first reported that Israel had blocked Estonia’s efforts to obtain Pegasus.
A senior Ukrainian official familiar with attempts to acquire the Pegasus system said that Ukrainian intelligence officials were disappointed when Israel declined to allow Ukraine to purchase the system, which could have proved critical for monitoring Russian military programs and assessing the country’s foreign policy goals.
The official said Ukraine’s view was that Israel, in making decisions about licensing Pegasus, gave more weight to a government’s relationship with the Kremlin than its human rights record.
Representatives of the Ukrainian embassy in Washington and the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment. In a statement, NSO said the company “can’t refer to alleged clients and won’t refer to hearsay and political innuendo.”
Both Ukraine and Estonia were once part of the Soviet Union, and since then have had to live in the long shadow of Russia’s military. Estonia is a member of NATO.
Russia plays a powerful role throughout the Middle East, particularly in Syria, and Israel is wary of crossing Moscow
on critical security issues. In particular, Russia has generally allowed Israel to strike Iranian and Lebanese targets inside Syria — raids the Israeli military sees as essential to stemming the flow of arms that Iran sends to proxy forces stationed close to Israel’s northern border.
Israel’s government has long seen Pegasus as a critical tool for its foreign policy. A New York Times Magazine article
this year revealed how, for more than a decade, Israel has made strategic decisions about which countries it allows to obtain licenses for Pegasus, and which countries to withhold them from.
Israel’s government has authorized Pegasus to be purchased by authoritarian governments, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that have used the weapon to spy on dissidents, human rights activists and journalists in those countries. Democratically elected leaders in India, Hungary, Mexico, Panama and other countries also abused Pegasus to spy on their political opponents.
Israel has used the tool as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations, most notably in the secret talks that led to the so-called Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several of its historic Arab adversaries.
“Policy decisions regarding export controls, take into account security and strategic considerations, which include adherence to international arrangements,” the Israeli defense ministry said in a statement in response to questions from The Times. “As a matter of policy, the State of Israel approves the export of cyber products exclusively to governmental entities, for lawful use, and only for the purpose of preventing and investigating crime and counter terrorism, under end use/end user declarations provided by the acquiring government.”
Since NSO first sold Pegasus to the government of Mexico more than a decade ago, the spyware has been used by dozens of countries to track criminals, terrorists and drug traffickers. But the abuse of the tool has also been extensive, from Saudi Arabia’s use of Pegasus as part of a brutal crackdown on dissents inside the kingdom, to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary authorizing his intelligence and law enforcement services to deploy the spyware against his political opponents.
Last November, the Biden administration put NSO and another Israeli cyberfirm on a “blacklist” of firms
that are barred from doing business with American companies. The Commerce Department said the companies’ tools “have enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent.”
https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1511769524395253773
Two Belarusians living in Poland arrested for spying on behalf of Minsk (aka Belarusian KGB).
According to the police, the cryptocurrency exchange CEO met the North Korean agent at an online community for crypto investors. The CEO was recruited by the North Koreans after receiving USD 600,000 worth of bitcoin. They received orders to recruit active-duty military officers. The CEO approached a military captain through an acquaintance. The captain received 48 million KRW (around USD 40,000) worth of Bitcoin from the North Koreans. The captain used a smartphone registered with someone else's name to take pictures of secret documents. They also attempted to hack into KJCCS (Korea Joint Command and Control System), the C 4 I system used by the ROK military. The police arrested the two after a tip from military counterintelligence. After being arrested, the two said that they thought that they were selling secrets to a North Korean agent, judging by the way the agent spoke, but did not know any details. The police said that they do not know the identity of the agent, except that they were sent by North Korea.
Edited by minseok42 on Apr 28th 2022 at 5:49:31 PM
"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory DoctorowThey did a similar stunt in Japan last year (I think).
Except the RGB recruited South Koreans who used their travel privileges to Japan to set up an illegal business and fork the money to Pyongyang.
Edited by Ominae on Apr 28th 2022 at 12:16:00 PM
Coca-cola chemist is arrested for passing trade secrets to China.
This is from Bloomberg.
A chemist who worked at Coca-Cola Co. was sentenced Monday to 14 years in prison for stealing trade secrets related to a BPA-free coating for the inside of cans and passing them to a Chinese company.
Xiaorong You, a Pennsylvania woman also known as Shannon You, was convicted by a Tennessee jury in April 2021 of stealing eight trade secrets owned by various entities, economic espionage, and wire fraud. She sold the stolen confidential information to Weihai Jinhong Group, which was backed by the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents program to recruit leading experts in research and innovation.
Evidence showed that You, who has a Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering, intended to benefit not only Weihai Jinhong Group but its city Weihai, its province Shandong, and the Chinese Communist party, according to the release. The Thousand Talents program, launched in 2008, has been implicated in various cases of intellectual property theft from US companies and research institutions.
The trade secrets in this case—owned by companies including Dow Chemical Co., PPG Industries Inc., Sherwin-Williams Co. and Eastman Chemical Co.—collectively cost about $120 million to develop, according to the indictment in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. You gained access to the proprietary information on various chemicals, formulas, and processes through work at Coca-Cola in Atlanta and Eastman in Kingsport, Tennessee.
The secrets all related to a bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) coating for the inside of cans. BPA, an industrial chemical long used to make certain plastic and resins to preserve flavor, has been shown to leach into food or beverages and tied to a range of health problems.
Two alleged co-conspirators, Hongmei Fan and Xiangchen Liu, had their cases severed from You’s during prosecution.
“Stealing trade secrets of U.S. companies for the benefit of the Chinese government will be vigorously prosecuted in the Eastern District of Tennessee, and today’s 14-year sentence reflects the seriousness of this defendant’s crimes,” said Francis M. Hamilton III, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, in a Justice Department press release. “The corporate vigilance and subsequent cooperation with federal law enforcement that brought this defendant to justice is to be commended; our national security depends on it.”
Acting Assistant Director Bradley S. Benavides of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in the release called technology theft “a crime against American workers whose jobs and livelihoods are impacted.”
Bellingcat has details on the Russian spy arrested in the Netherlands.
NIS reports that they're filing charges against Park Jie-won and Suh Hoon for violating the NIS Act for intervening into an NIS investigation on the death of a South Korean offiical who got killed near North Korean waters.
Finally read the article on the phone. Not paywalled.
South Korea’s spy agency announced Wednesday that it is filing charges against former Moon administration security officials for violating the National Intelligence Service Act, alleging they abused their power to undermine investigations into North Korea’s killing of a fisheries official and the forced repatriation of two DPRK fishermen.
Former National Intelligence Service (NIS) chief Park Ji-won allegedly deleted intelligence reports related to the 2020 shooting of a South Korean official in North Korean waters without authorization, according to a statement from the spy agency.
The NIS also alleges that Suh Hoon, former director of the National Security Office Suh Hoon, forced the premature end of a government investigation into the repatriation of two DPRK fishermen suspected of murder who sought to defect in 2019.
Other allegations levied against Park and Suh include damaging public electronic records and writing false official documents, respectively, according to the NIS statement.
Controversies over the Moon administration’s actions in both cases have flared up again in recent weeks, after the defense ministry concluded there is no evidence to support the military’s initial conclusion that the ROK official Lee Dae-jun attempted to defect.
After the government’s announcement, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol reportedly said he would handle the case “fairly in accordance with the law and principles,” and some politicians and media have since renewed criticism of Seoul’s decision to repatriate the two North Korean fishermen, calling for investigation into whether the government did so at Pyongyang’s request.
During a visit to Seoul last week, the U.N. special rapporteur for North Korean human rights Tomás Ojea Quintana called for the South Korean government to release information about the fishery official’s case and criticized the government’s decision to send back the North Koreans.
“The Republic of Korea had an obligation to respect the principle of non-refoulement and keep these two persons here and bring them to whatever justice process that corresponds,” he said in a press conference. “But the action of right away repatriating them did not comply with this principle of non-refoulement.”
Experts told NK News last week that the Moon government likely had political reasons for wanting to frame the fisheries official as a defector to avoid derailing engagement with Pyongyang, though some also raised concerns that the new conservative government is using the case to pursue political retribution against its predecessor.
Edited by Ominae on Jul 13th 2022 at 12:58:30 PM
Because the economy isn't doing well and inflation is out of control, president Yoon is trying to make the news talk about North Korea all the time, and he's siccing his dogs in the prosecution service on the NIS' former chiefs. It is not above Yoon to leak classified info to the media for political gain.
South Korean conservative administrations have a habit of using the intelligence agencies on illegal jobs for domestic political gain, such as running pro-ruling party online propaganda trolls after all.
Edited by minseok42 on Jul 13th 2022 at 11:16:27 PM
"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory Doctorow

Cool.