Category Archives: CIA

Trump will give Israel ‘blank check’ which may mean all-out war with Iran, says ex-CIA chief

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Leon Panetta says he also expects US president-elect to favor letting Russia retain control of areas of Ukraine

Donald Trump will as president give Benjamin Netanyahu a “blank check” in the Middle East, possibly opening the way for all-out war between Israel and Iran, the former CIA director and US defense secretary Leon Panetta predicted.

“With regards to the Middle East, I think he’s basically going to give Netanyahu a blank check,” Panetta said of Trump, who won the presidential election this week and will take office again in January.

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Former CIA officer sentenced to 30 years for sexually assaulting scores of women

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Brian Jeffrey Raymond of California was found guilty of drugging and raping women in his government apartments

A former CIA officer who drugged and sexually assaulted dozens of women was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced.

Brian Jeffrey Raymond, 48, of La Mesa, California, drugged more than two dozen women and performed nonconsensual sexual acts or made sexual contact with at least 10 women, the justice department said in a press release.

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US rejects claims of CIA involvement in alleged plot to kill Maduro after Venezuela arrests six

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State department says allegations of American collusion are ‘categorically false’ as US navy member identified among foreign citizens detained

The US state department rejected wild allegations of CIA involvement in an alleged assassination plot against Nicolás Maduro after Venezuelan officials announced the arrest of three Americans, two Spaniards and a Czech on Saturday.

The claims of a plot against Maduro – the Venezuelan president, whose recent re-election is contested – were made on state television by Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister. Cabello said the foreign citizens including a US navy member were part of a CIA-led plot to overthrow the Venezuelan government and kill several members of its leadership. In the television programme, Cabello showed images of rifles that he said were confiscated from some of the alleged plotters.

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CIA boss says west should not be intimidated by Russia’s nuclear threats

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Bill Burns calls Vladimir Putin a ‘bully’ whose ‘sabre-rattling’ should not always be taken literally

Western leaders should not be intimidated by Kremlin threats of nuclear escalation, the head of the CIA said on Saturday, amid a debate over whether Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles should be used inside Russia.

Bill Burns, on a visit to London alongside the head of MI6, said the US had brushed off a previous Russian nuclear scare in autumn 2022, demonstrating that threats from Moscow should not always be taken literally.

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Ex-US ambassador sentenced to 15 years in prison for serving as secret agent for Cuba

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Manuel Rocha, 73, will also pay a $500,000 fine after pleading guilty to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government

A former career US diplomat was sentenced Friday to 15 years in federal prison after admitting he worked for decades as a secret agent for Cuba, in a plea agreement that leaves many unanswered questions about a betrayal that stunned the US foreign service.

Manuel Rocha, 73, will also pay a $500,000 fine and cooperate with authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed more than a dozen other counts, including wire fraud and making false statements.

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Officials say progress being made on Gaza ceasefire talks

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US national security spokesperson says talks in Cairo ‘constructive and moving in right direction’

Israel and Hamas are making progress towards a deal that would bring about a ceasefire and free hostages held in the Gaza Strip, officials with knowledge of the talks have said.

The US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, speaking as negotiations were held in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, said: “They’ve been constructive and moving in the right direction.”

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Ex-CIA software engineer sentenced to 40 years for giving secrets to WikiLeaks

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Joshua Schulte, who prosecutors said was responsible for agency’s largest data breach, also guilty of possessing child abuse images

A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) software engineer who was convicted for carrying out the largest theft of classified information in the agency’s history and of charges related to child abuse imagery was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday.

The 40-year sentence by US district judge Jesse Furman was for “crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography”, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The judge did not impose a life sentence as sought by prosecutors.

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Medical services at Gaza’s largest functioning health facility collapse amid intense fighting in Khan Younis, warns MSF – as it happened

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Snipers around the vicinity of al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, are shooting people as they try to leave the buildings, according to an Al Jazeera reporter.

Hani Mahmoud, a journalist reporting for the Qatari-state owned news organisation, said the hospital was under military siege. He writes:

This hospital has been under siege for the past few days and now it’s completely out of service.

But what’s really shocking right now is the fact that there are snipers around the vicinity of this hospital. The buildings of the hospital accommodate hundreds of displaced Palestinians. They’re being shot if they try to leave the buildings.”

We are very concerned that the attacks on Red Sea shipping are adding tensions to global trade, exacerbating [existing] trade disruptions due to geopolitics and climate change

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CIA chief to discuss fresh Gaza hostage deal and ceasefire with Israel and Qatar – reports

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William Burns and the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service will reportedly meet Qatari prime minister in Europe as part of efforts to broker a deal

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency and his Israeli counterpart will meet Qatari officials in coming days for talks on a second potential Gaza hostage deal and pause in fighting, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

William Burns and the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, David Barnea, will meet Qatari prime minister and foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Europe this weekend, one official briefed on the meeting told the news agency.

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Panel finds 9/11 defendant unfit for trial after CIA torture rendered him psychotic

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Ramzi bin al-Shibh was one of five defendants facing trial in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaida

A military judge at Guantánamo Bay has ruled a 9/11 defendant incompetent to stand trial after a military medical panel found that the man’s sustained abuse in CIA custody years earlier had rendered him lastingly psychotic.

A Guantánamo military commission spokesman, Ronald Flesvig, confirmed on Friday the ruling by Judge Col Matthew McCall. The ruling means Ramzi bin al-Shibh will not be tried together with his four 9/11 co-defendants, whose case will now proceed without him.

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UK should finally acknowledge role in 1953 Iran coup, says David Owen

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Former foreign secretary says doing so would benefit both reform movement in country and Britain’s credibility

The UK should finally acknowledge its leading role in the 1953 coup that toppled Iran’s last democratically elected leader, for the sake of Britain’s credibility and the Iranian reform movement, a former foreign secretary has said.

The US formally admitted its role 10 years ago with the declassification of a large volume of intelligence documents, which made clear that the ousting of the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosadegh, 70 years ago this week was a joint CIA-MI6 endeavour. The formal UK government position is to refuse to comment on an intelligence matter.

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Files reveal Nixon role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency

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President hosted rightwing mogul Agustín Edwards in September 1970 and discussed plans to foil socialist election-winner

Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed.

The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include Nixon’s agenda for 15 September 1970, which shows a meeting in the Oval Office with Agustín Edwards, the owner of the conservative El Mercurio media group.

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Russian spy chief confirms call to CIA director after Wagner revolt

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Sergei Naryshkin says he and Bill Burns discussed the mutiny and ‘what to do with Ukraine’ in phone call last month

Russia’s foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin has said that he and his CIA counterpart discussed the shortlived mutiny a week earlier by Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and “what to do with Ukraine” in a phone call late last month.

Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR foreign intelligence service, told Russia’s TASS new agency on Wednesday that Bill Burns had raised “the events of June 24” – when fighters from the Wagner mercenary group took control of a southern Russian city and advanced towards Moscow before reaching a deal with the Kremlin to end the revolt.

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Guantánamo detainee accuses UK agencies of complicity in his torture

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Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri wants to bring case examining alleged role of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ in his mistreatment by CIA

A Guantánamo Bay prisoner tortured by the CIA has accused British intelligence agencies of complicity in his mistreatment in a new case before one of UK’s most secretive courts.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is alleged by the US to have plotted al-Qaida’s bombing of an American naval ship, is seeking to persuade the court to consider his complaint against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

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‘The forever prisoner’: Abu Zubaydah’s drawings expose the US’s depraved torture policy

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Exclusive: For 21 years, the detainee has been in US custody without charge, tortured and sexually humiliated, with no prospect for release

• Warning: the images and descriptions of torture in this article are extremely graphic

A detainee held in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay who was used as a human guinea pig in the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program has produced the most comprehensive and detailed account yet seen of the brutal techniques to which he was subjected.

Abu Zubaydah has created a series of 40 drawings that chronicle the torture he endured in a number of CIA dark sites between 2002 and 2006 and at Guantánamo Bay. In the absence of a full official accounting of the torture program, which the CIA and the FBI have labored for years to keep secret, the images give a unique and searing insight into a grisly period in US history.

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Too many with access, too little vetting. Pentagon leaks were ‘a matter of time’

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Jack Teixeira’s arrest has exposed a system weakened by the legacy of 9/11 and caught off guard by an enemy that is increasingly within

Jack Teixeira, 21 years old, clean-shaven, with buzz-cut hair and proudly uniformed, is the face of America’s newest security threat, one it is struggling to resolve.

The formidable US counter-intelligence infrastructure is adept at finding spies and rooting out whistleblowers. Teixeira, charged on Friday on two counts of the Espionage Act, is neither spy nor whistleblower.

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‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by foreign adversary, US intelligence says

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The involvement of overseas foes in ‘anomalous health incidents’ suffered by US diplomats and spies was deemed ‘very unlikely’

The mysterious set of symptoms known as “Havana syndrome” was not caused by an energy weapon or foreign adversary, US intelligence has concluded.

The assessment concludes a multi-year investigation into approximately 1,000 “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) among US diplomats, spies and other employees in US embassies and missions around the world.

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Trump-Russia: ‘investigation of investigators’ leaves little but questions over bias

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Durham inquiry into origins of FBI’s Trump-Russia scrutiny has sparked allegations of a weaponization of justice department

When the Trump justice department tapped a US attorney to examine the origins of the FBI inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, conservatives and many Republicans hoped it would end the idea Donald Trump’s campaign was boosted by Moscow and back his charges that some FBI officials and others had conspired against him.

But instead, as the multi-year investigation winds down, it is ending with accusations that unethical actions by that special counsel – John Durham – and ex-attorney general William Barr “weaponized” the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to help Trump.

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Guantánamo detainee who was tortured by CIA released to Belize

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Al-Qaida courier turned informant Majid Khan to be permanently resettled after being held in US custody for nearly 20 years

The US has released Majid Khan, an al-Qaida courier turned informant who was tortured in secret CIA prisons and held in custody for nearly 20 years, marking the first time a “high-value detainee” has been freed from Guantánamo Bay.

Khan, a 42-year-old Pakistani born in Saudi Arabia, completed his jail term last March and landed in Belize on Thursday, where he is to be permanently resettled.

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CIA director meets Russian counterpart as US denies secret peace talks

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Bill Burns says US is not ‘discussing settlement of war’ in Ukraine as Zelenskiy visits Kherson

The CIA director, Bill Burns, met his Russian counterpart in Ankara on Monday in a rare high-level meeting, but the US insists it is not engaged in secret peace talks with Moscow without Ukrainian officials being present.

The meeting in the Turkish capital with the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, followed speculation that some senior US figures would like Ukraine to enter negotiations with the Kremlin to end the war.

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