WASHINGTON (AP) — Unaware the FBI has her under surveillance, Russian spy Anna Chapman buys leggings and tries on hats at a Macy’s department store. A few months later, cameras watch her in a New York coffee shop where she meets with someone she thinks is her Russian handler. It is really an undercover FBI agent.
Tapes, documents and photos released Monday describe and sometimes show how Chapman, now a celebrity back in Russia, and other members of a ring of sleeper spies passed instructions, information and cash. The ring was shut down in June 2010 after a decade-long counterintelligence probe that led to the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.
The FBI released the material to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The investigation was code-named “Ghost Stories,” the release of documents on Halloween a coincidence.
While the deep-cover agents did not steal any secrets, an FBI counterintelligence official told the AP they were making progress.
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BERLIN, Oct. 24 (UPI) — U.S. spies have been spying on their counterparts in East Germany and West Germany, recently released documents indicate.
The CIA was expected to monitor East German spies during the Cold War, but U.S. documents indicated Americans were spying on their allies in West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst as well, The Local reported Monday.
The German magazine Focus said documents indicated office alliances, personal peccadilloes and health information were noted.
The spying continued into the 1990s, even after the fall of communism, with BND agents with a Nazi past drawing attention, the magazine reported.
Focus said the documents indicated telephone calls with Germany’s domestic intelligence and security authority were tapped, as were conversations with other security services in Paris and London.
BND said they weren’t surprised by the news they were being spied on by the CIA.
A former BND counterintelligence expert told Focus he and colleagues often thought such clandestine operations were undertaken.
“The cat does not let the mouse free,” the former spy said when asked if he thought the CIA were still spying on the BND.
French spy chief Bernard Squarcini. (Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images)
Investigators have launched an inquiry targeting Bernard Squarcini, the powerful head of France’s domestic intelligence agency, who is facing allegations that he may have illegally spied on journalists.
Squarcini, the chief of the Direction Central du Renseignement IntĂ©rieur, is alleged to have “obtained the Le Monde reporter’s telephone records to uncover a mole feeding the newspaper information about a political scandal,” Kim Willsher of the UK Guardian reported Tuesday.
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Some technology flaws don’t go away—they just get a Band-Aid applied to them that eventually falls off. Adobe says it is working on a fix to an Adobe Flash vulnerability that enables attackers to trick Flash users into turning on their microphone and/or webcams, potentially enabling attackers to visually spy on them, overhear and record conversations, and obtain sensitive information. However, unlike most zero-day Flash exploits, this one doesn’t involve the Flash plug-in itself: instead, it uses interface obfuscation techniques to get users to unwittingly change their Flash player settings using a Shockwave Flash file hosted by Adobe itself.
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BERLIN (Reuters) – German authorities have arrested two Russians suspected of espionage since the closing days of the Cold War, according to a report to be published in Der Spiegel news magazine on Monday.
Germany‘s Federal Prosecutor confirmed that two people suspected of espionage activities for a foreign country had been arrested on Tuesday in the states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Hesse by Germany’s elite GSG-9 special operations commando.
The prosecutor’s office, based in the southwestern town of Karlsruhe, did not identify the suspects as Russian spies.
“The accused are suspected of having worked in Germany over a long period of time for a foreign intelligence agency,” the federal prosecutor said in a statement. “The Federal Crime Office (BKA) is investigating.”
Der Spiegel magazine reported that the GSG-9 commandos arrested a Russian couple, who were identified as Heidrun A. and Andreas A.. It said authorities believe the two have worked for Russia‘s intelligence agency since 1988.
The report, in an advance released on Saturday, said the two suspects have denied the accusations.
West and East Germany were hotbeds of espionage during the Cold War with governments and industry on both sides of the Iron Curtain infiltrated by spies. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was a former KGB spy who was stationed in Dresden, in Communist East Germany from 1985 to 1990.
But the intensity of spying abated after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and German unification.
The arrests, which Der Spiegel said was the first such case since German unification in 1990, could cause tensions in relations between Germany and Russia, which have become close over the last two decades.
The magazine said that Heidrun was caught listening to a coded radio message when the commandos swooped in. They were arrested in separate locations, in the towns of Marburg and Balingen.
The authorities also confiscated Austrian passports that contained false information. The documents showed that Andreas was born in Argentina and Heidrun in Peru. But German investigations in South America determined those claims were not accurate.
Der Spiegel said that German authorities believed the two began spying on West Germany near the end of the Cold War in 1988.
Another German magazine, Focus, reported on Saturday that Andreas had been working undercover at a car parts supplier and had been gathering intelligence on the company.
In a 2010 government report, German authorities said they believed Russia and China are engaged in massive espionage activities against Germany. Their focus was in the fields of industry, science and technology.
It said they were particularly interested in obtaining information about modern drive systems as well as satellite and IT technology.
(Editing by Rosalind Russell)
