Alleged spy fed false info in sting to hurt credibility

vancouversun.com

Authorities fed an alleged Canadian naval spy fabricated information as part of a classic "sour milk" counter-intelligence ploy to taint the credibility of secrets the man is suspected of passing to Russia, Postmedia has learned.

"This was done by the book - sour the milk so that you con-fuse the other side," Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former spy service counter-intelligence officer with sources close to the Halifax case, revealed in an interview Friday.

Once naval officials suspected there was a spy in their midst, deliberately flawed information was baited and designed to eventually be discovered by its foreign recipients, casting doubt on the usefulness of any other classified data related to the case.

Juneau-Katsuya said the deception is believed to have worked, and now "they don't know what is true and what is not [and] will have to be suspicious of pretty much everything [given to] them."

While military and RCMP investigators are still gathering details, Juneau-Katsuya said he believes Russia may have been after North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] secrets.

"When you talk about Halifax, you talk about the Atlantic and the Arctic. And when you talk about the Atlantic and Arctic, you talk NATO. And when you talk NATO, you talk Russia," he said.

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How the FBI Busted Anna Chapman and the Russian Spy Ring

abcnews.go.com


Anna Chapman is a television star and lingere model back in Moscow now, but before she and other Russian spies were caught by the FBI last year, they came dangerously close to accomplishing a portion of their undercover mission in the United States.

“This group was well on their way to penetrating foreign policy circles.  They had befriended a friend of a sitting Cabinet official,” FBI Counter Intelligence Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi said. “They wanted to get their hands on the most sensitive data they could get their hands on, but we took this thing down before classified information changed hands.”

In a wide-ranging interview with ABC News, Figliuzzi said the red-headed Chapman was much more than a seductive “femme fatale.”

“This is a highly-trained intelligence officer — Chapman is new breed of illegal operative,”  Figliuzzi said, describing her as “tech savvy” and capable of spying in plain sight. Chapman and her comrades were “the cream of the crop, handpicked out of the Russian intelligence academy, because of their fluency in languages, and their ability to acclimate into another society,” he said.

FBI hidden camera surveillance videos of the spies’ operations give a fascinating look into Russian spy tradecraft as employed by Chapman and the other Russian agents.   The videos show, among other things,  the Russian infiltrators hiding messages under bridges, secretly trading information, money and contact information via “brush passes,” and digging for buried payoff money in the woods.

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FBI releases video, papers on Russian spy ring

WSJ

WASHINGTON — FBI surveillance tapes, photos and documents released Monday show members of a ring of Russian sleeper spies secretly exchanging information and money during a counterintelligence probe that lasted about a decade and ended in the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.

The tapes show a January 2010 shopping trip to Macy's in New York City's Herald Square by former New York real estate agent Anna Chapman, whose role in the spy saga turned her into an international celebrity. She bought leggings and tried on hats at the New York department store, investigators wrote in a document, and transmitted coded messages while sitting in a coffee shop.

On another occasion, Chapman is visible in a video setting up her laptop computer at a Barnes and Noble. "Technical coverage indicated that a computer signal began broadcasting at the same time," noted part of a heavily redacted FBI report on the incident, apparently showing an effort by Chapman to communicate with her handlers.

Other photos and video from the surveillance operation, which the FBI called "Ghost Stories," show some of the 10 other conspirators burying money in a patch of weeds, handing off documents in what looks like a subway tunnel, meeting during a stroll around Columbus Circle or just taking their kids for a walk.

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Protecting Your Country While Protecting Your Clients

channelinsider.com

Think your small business customers are too small to be of interest to international spies looking to steal trade secrets and intellectual property? Think again. Corporate espionage is a real threat. Here's how you can help.

Recently I was surprised to learn how far espionage has moved from the traditional Cold War spying that focused on the Russians stealing our government secrets, to a new type of espionage designed to steal trade secrets and intellectual property. The targets aren’t all multi-national corporations, but include small businesses like the ones we service. Most of the threats come from China.

Brett Kingstone’s 80-person fiber-optic lighting company, Super Vision, was targeted by a Chinese government shell company which bribed one of Kingstone’s key employees to steal designs and process secrets. The Chinese then set up a company to duplicate Super Vision’s products and offer them at low prices, since the cost of stealing was a fraction of the cost of Super Vision’s research and development.

In his book, The Real War Against America (Specialty Publishing Company, 2005) Kingstone describes how he was challenged by his distributors when they found his company’s products being offered for much lower prices. Kingstone was confused until he was able to get samples, which matched Super Vision’s products in every way. Through a spy-thriller ordeal that included bribes, threats, shredded evidence, stolen equipment, fraudulent bankruptcy filings, an FBI investigation, and private investigators posing as Arab sheiks, Kingstone was able to get a $33.1 million civil judgment even though the culprits avoided criminal prosecution.

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China and Russia fingered in German industrial espionage alert

monstersandcritics.com

Berlin - Industrial espionage by China and Russia is becoming easier thanks to computer hacking, officials warned German business leaders on Thursday, adding that police need data logs to track computer break-ins.

A conference heard that the annual cost to German companies of data theft was at least 20 billion euros (nearly 30 billion dollars).

However it is often easier to simply buy corporate secrets from disloyal employees.

Ole Schroeder, a senior Interior Ministry official, said that in 70 per cent of known cases, staff who hated their employer or were angry that they were likely to lose their jobs were behind the leaks.

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‘My colleague was a Russian spy’

ft.com

For eight years I worked with one of the Russian spies arrested in the US last summer. I am an investigative journalist, and yet I had no clue.

I met Vicky Peláez in 2002 when, according to the FBI, she was already working for the Russian Federation. She had emigrated from Peru to the US in the mid-1980s with her husband, and got a job on El Diario La Prensa, New York’s largest Spanish-language newspaper. That’s where we met, after I started work there as a reporter. She was a columnist, well-known for her anti-American views and her support of radical movements in Latin America – some colleagues nicknamed her la Talibana.

But apart from her political activism, she just looked like a typical New York suburban mom in her fifties. When she wasn’t talking about politics, we chatted about her two sons, one of whom was a classical pianist; her two schnauzers; how expensive the city was or how to lose weight. She was a terrific cook who loved to make ceviche.

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Moscow raps British restrictions on Russian spy suspect

cnn.com

Moscow (CNN) -- Russia expressed concern Friday over restrictions by British authorities on Russian national Yekaterina Zatuliveter, who was arrested in Britain several weeks ago on suspicion of spying and faces possible deportation.

Zatuliveter, 25, a parliamentary assistant to Liberal Democrat Mike Hancock, has been questioned several times about her possible connections with Russian intelligence. She was detained in London early last month as a suspected "sleeper" agent spying in British Parliament.

"We are seriously concerned about the situation around Russian citizen Y. Zatuliveter, whose freedom has been restricted by the British authorities for six weeks now," the Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday in a posting on its website.

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