Latest news with #Espionage
Al Bawaba
2 days ago
- Politics
- Al Bawaba
Putin's next target after Ukraine exposed by spy ring bust
Published July 19th, 2025 - 11:39 GMT ALBAWABA - A major British newspaper, The Telegraph, has warned that after the war in Ukraine ends, Russian President Vladimir Putin could turn his attention to the UK as his next main target. This comes after British intelligence agencies said they knew about Russian spy networks in the UK. The study says that the Kremlin wants to stop the UK's armed support for Ukraine, cause more disagreements within the UK, and carry out acts of mischief and hacking to make things more expensive for London on the home front. Recent events, like a warehouse fire in London and an arson attack on a DHL center in Birmingham, may have something to do with Russian military intelligence agents, the story says. The Telegraph makes it clear that Moscow's main tool for political fighting is spying and spreading false information. Recently, six Bulgarians were found guilty of spying for Russian intelligence in the UK and across Europe. This case brings to mind that case. The newspaper also talked about at least six proven or attempted murders that have happened in the UK since Vladimir Putin took office. These crimes are thought to have been planned by Russia's GRU. — The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 19, 2025 The study says that Russia took advantage of the war in Gaza, which got worse in 2023, by using fake social media accounts to boost support for the Palestinians in the UK. It is said that the goal of this effort was to stir up public anger and change government choices. As threats from Russia and other unfriendly states have grown, British authorities have had to reorganize their intelligence resources. MI5 Director Ken McCallum has admitted that terrorist efforts have been slashed in order to focus on these new threats. The piece says that the UK needs to do more than just defend itself, even with these problems. The Telegraph says, "Defense alone is not enough—we must fight fire with fire," which means taking tougher steps against the Russian spy services that go beyond economic penalties. The report uses a comment from the UK Foreign Office to prove that Russia is still attacking but in secret. It suggests that Britain should change its policy to quietly counter Moscow's efforts to undermine the country. The paper sees this recognition as a good sign that people in Britain are starting to stand up to Russian invasion on their land. © 2000 - 2025 Al Bawaba (
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Moment 'Russian spy offers sensitive information about Grant Shapps to undercover British agents posing as Putin's cronies' is shown to jury
This is the moment a man accused of being a Russian agent appears to offer sensitive information about a former defence secretary to UK spooks posing as Putin 's spies. Howard Phillips, 65, is on trial accused of assisting a foreign intelligence service after he allegedly passed a USB stick containing information about Grant Shapps to British undercover police - who he believed were agents working for Russia. Phillips, of Harlow in Essex, denies the charge, claiming he had initially written to the Russian embassy to 'expose Russian agents' to help the Ukrainian war effort. Video shown to the jury at Winchester Crown Court today appears to show the moment Phillips greets the fake spies outside a Costa coffee shop in May 2024. Jurors also saw video of an April 2024 meeting at the London Bridge Hotel in which he allegedly 'offered his services' to foreign spooks. Father-of-four Phillips, described by his ex-wife as 'dream(ing) about being like James Bond ', is alleged to have forked over a digital storage device to his 'handlers'. This contained Mr Shapps' personal information, including his home address, telephone number and the location of his private plane, prosecutors say. He had allegedly teased the faux Russians with the promise of 'something interesting' about the ex-defence secretary, who was in the hot-seat from August 2023 until the end of the most recent Tory government last July. Footage of the conversation shows Phillips telling them that he retired from insolvency five years prior and went travelling, visiting cities including Moscow. Phillips said that he then found himself in a position 'where now I need to be earning money'. He told the 'agents': 'I do not want and cannot for myself go back into the normal nine-to-five office. It's not for me, it never was for me, but I did it.' Describing how he first decided he would like to work with the Russian Intelligence Service, he said: 'I was thinking, I have to do something, I have to earn money, what can I do and I came up with all the things I don't want to do. 'I was thinking about, funnily enough, I was thinking about maybe, going away on holiday. I thought about Moscow. 'Its just a thought process and I suddenly thought, maybe I can offer services. I get what I want and you get what you want.' Phillips told the agents: 'We all help each other and we look after each other, we become a family.' On May 9, 2024, Phillips met with 'Dima' at a Costa Coffee in a retail park in West Thurrock, Essex. Footage from the meeting shows him asking: 'What do you know about the, um, Secretary of Defence in the United Kingdom?' Phillips had told the officer 'I have something, I don't know if you want it or don't want it'. He continued: 'Because, I have personal information which may be useful. 'So I know his home address, I know his home telephone number and I know where he has his private plane. Maybe it's of interest, maybe not.' When asked by 'Dima' how he knew this information, Phillips said: 'Because, about five years ago, I was invited to his house with a lot of other people. 'He was the MP for Welwyn Hatfield. The local MP. And then, he became chairman of the Conservative Party and now he's Secretary of Defence.' Phillips was asked if he 'knew' Shapps, and in response he said: 'Just a little, you know, we've met three times, I think.' In the clip, Phillips also encourages using the code word 'mother' to replace 'Moscow'. The court has heard Phillips was due to start a job with Border Force at the time. His ex-wife, Amanda Phillips, said he had fantasised about being a spy, and once wrote to Arsenal saying he wanted to be manager, despite being unqualified. She told the court he was "kind, caring man, a good friend, a good dad" - but 'not a great husband'. On Thursday afternoon the jury retired to begin considering its verdict. Phillips denies the offence of engaging in conduct to assist a foreign intelligence service, in breach of the National Security Act.
Daily Mail
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Behind-the-scenes details on Israeli campaign of sabotage against Iran
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was driving to his holiday home in Absard, 50 miles east of Tehran, when Mossad caught up with him. The father of Iran 's nuclear programme since the 1990s was driving his Nissan Teana luxury saloon with his wife in the passenger seat beside him and his bodyguards travelling in cars ahead and behind them. As they passed a pickup truck on the Imam Khomeini Boulevard, a machine gun opened up – an M240C firing 7.62mm rounds, standard issue for the US army. But this was not an attack by American special forces. In fact, there was no one in the truck with the weapon at all. Fakhrizadeh was hit by multiple bullets. After his car veered to a halt, he fell out of the door and collapsed, dying in a pool of his own blood. At first the Iranian media had no idea how the assassination was carried out. Wild theories involving gunmen on motorcycles, a truck bomb and a platoon of special forces were aired. But the truth was more extraordinary than that. Over a period of eight months, the machine gun was smuggled into Iran in pieces, along with explosives, and secretly assembled by a 20-man team, who also tracked Fakhrizadeh's every move. As one agent put it, Mossad 'breathed with the guy, woke up with him, slept with him, travelled with him. They would have smelled his aftershave every morning if he had used aftershave.' On the day of the assassination, a truck fitted with cameras was placed at the roadside, apparently 'broken-down', about three-quarters of a mile before the kill site – a position selected because it offered a good line of sight. As Fakhrizadeh's Nissan came into range, the machine gun's telescopic sight used artificial intelligence to lock on to Fakhrizadeh's face, fired 13 times and hit its target with such accuracy that his wife was not injured. It then self-destructed, blowing up the truck too. Israeli sources later confirmed to me that this was not science fiction, a remote-controlled gun was indeed used – though they stopped short of taking credit for the kill. This episode occurred in November 2020 but is typical of the fiendishly ingenious tactics employed by Israel's intelligence agency, the most formidable service of its kind in the world. Its extraordinary power was on display once again this month in Operation Rising Lion, the campaign of mass sabotage, destruction and assassination against Iran launched on June 13, in the most complex opening to any war fought in human history. And it prepared the ground for an offensive that culminated in the surgical strike on Iran's nuclear sites by B-2 bombers of the US Air Force equipped with bunker-busters. The unofficial codename given to Israel's long-term policy for crippling Iran's military machine, wrecking its air defences and hampering its nuclear programme was 'Death by a thousand cuts'. The difference now is that all the cuts are coming at once. Apart from the 200 fighter-bomber jets flying sorties around the clock, hundreds of special forces soldiers have been operating secretly inside Iran, along with untold numbers of spies and double agents. With weapons and munitions smuggled across the border, they have set off numerous car bombs and generally wreaked havoc. Meanwhile, swarms of drones – operating from covert warehouses in Iran itself – have delivered their explosive payloads with pinpoint precision. Plus clusters of rockets, shells and ballistic missiles have hit targets the length and breadth of the country. Even civilians have got involved. On Thursday, it emerged an Israeli telecoms executive working in Europe had been asked to help design a device that looked like a low-tech mobile phone but which could transmit encrypted data disguised as social media traffic. And a techie working at an Israeli health start-up was asked to tweak an algorithm he had worked on during his military service, to enable a dedicated server to sift through satellite images of fuel trucks and identify which ones were carrying missile propellant rather than petrol. All this is ultimately the brainchild of one man – the head of Mossad since 2021, David Barnea. He's the same top-level espionage chief who masterminded the exploding pager attacks that wiped out the high command and middle-ranking officers of Lebanon's terrorist organisation Hezbollah last year. Little wonder that within Mossad he is known as 'a gadget-loving killing machine'. Indeed, the Iranians have become so paranoid that a hardline MP this week called for all 'commanders, senior officials, nuclear scientists — and even their families' to jettison their mobile phones. Barnea almost never speaks to journalists but, in the course of co-writing my book Target Tehran – which attracted global attention last week after Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pictured with a copy of it on his office desk – I found ways to build up a detailed portrait of him. In the process I built up a detailed portrait of the man who is masterminding the war against Iran – laying plans and launching operations so ingenious that sheer panic is now spreading throughout the Islamic Republic. The heads of Iran's government, its army and its nuclear facilities literally don't know what has hit them... nor what will hit them next. By taking out the linchpin of Iran's nuclear programme, Israel inflicted one of the deepest of its thousand cuts. Until then, perhaps the most damaging had been a heist executed by Mossad in southern Tehran, a blow as audacious as it was embarrassing to the Ayatollahs' regime – the theft of all their nuclear secrets. On January 31, 2018, two dozen Israeli spies and Iranian double agents broke into a drab warehouse with a corrugated iron roof in the industrial Shirobad district. They used blowtorches to break into a series of steel vaults before starting to remove files, both paper and electronic, that detailed every step of Iran's nuclear research going back 30 years. Over the next six-and-a-half hours, they loaded half a tonne of printouts and compact discs on to a truck before making their escape. By the time the Iranians discovered the break-in, multiple decoy vehicles were speeding in all directions to various borders. The materials from this heist convinced America and Israel's other allies, including the UK, that Iran truly was intent on building nuclear weapons. This was not a repeat of the Iraqi 'super gun' shambles, which involved a Canadian engineer trying to persuade Saddam Hussein that he could develop a huge artillery piece capable of firing missiles into orbit. Tehran was already very close to producing the enriched uranium it needed to make a bomb. At the time, the head of Mossad was Yossi Cohen, a boisterous and charismatic man known for his dapper dress sense. Cohen is an alpha male, the kind of man who dominates the room. His protege and successor, Barnea, is quite different: calm, understated, quietly spoken, a man you might not notice – and perhaps wouldn't remember if you did see him. Like Cohen, he began his career as a case officer, recruiting and handling agents in enemy territory, as well as a two-year spell as deputy head of Keshet, Mossad's eavesdropping division. But he also served in Sayeret Matkal, a key Israeli army Special Forces unit – as did Naftali Bennett, who had just become prime minister of the newly elected coalition government when Barnea took over Mossad. Bennett, an expert on Iran, insisted on frequent intelligence briefings, and between them the two men agreed on the 'death by a thousand cuts' policy. They understood that the fundamentalist Islamic Republic was loathed by many ordinary Iranians, much as the Soviet Union was hated by millions of its citizens during the Cold War. And the Ayatollahs, like the Politburo, were bound to fall if enough pressure was applied. 'The regime is profoundly incompetent and fairly corrupt,' Bennett told me. 'Large swathes of land don't get water. You turn on the taps and you get mud. And people are very frustrated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC], the Iranian armed forces.' Three weeks after Barnea took charge of Mossad, the security services struck a direct blow against Iran's nuclear facilities, in a meticulously planned assignment that now appears to have been a test run for Operation Rising Lion. A plant near Karaj, about 25 miles west of Tehran, was attacked by a quadcopter drone which was able to drop a bomb on its roof – then returned to its launch location 10 miles away, ready to fly a future mission. The factory, which manufactured parts for the centrifuges essential for uranium enrichment, was associated with the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran [AEOI]. Tehran denied that the attack had caused significant damage but, for the next six months, international inspectors were denied permission to visit the plant. This was a message to Ayatollah Khamenei and his ministers. Mossad now had free rein to be as aggressive as necessary. 'We've been suckers,' Bennett said. 'Iran's goal was to weigh us down fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, while they sit back happy in Tehran. They have to pay a direct price when they use proxies to hit us. Every time Hamas or Islamic Jihad shoots a rocket at an Israeli city, someone will pay a price in Iran.' One of those who received a bill from Mossad, according to my sources and foreign reports, was Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, the head of Unit 840, a secretive IRGC force operating outside Iran against Western targets and opponents of the regime. Khodaei was gunned down by two assailants on a motorcycle as he sat in his car outside his home in downtown Tehran. Images on social media showed him slumped in the driver's seat with the front passenger window shot out. The assassination was the first on Iranian soil of an official not connected to the nuclear programme. This attack too can be seen as a dress rehearsal for Operation Rising Lion. Where targets were too well protected to be hit by drones, human assassins might be used. It's impossible to know how many Israeli agents and commandos, both male and female, are inside Iran right now, but many will have been embedded for years. Some might be disguised as loyal servants of the government, even trusted insiders such as bodyguards or nuclear workers. But others could be taking advantage of the deep divisions within Iranian society. The Islamic regime is Shi'ite but in a country of 92million people, a sizeable percentage come from entirely different cultures: Sunnis, Kurds, Balochs and more. Some of them regard the Tehran government as occupiers in regions that should not even be part of Iran – and, on the basis that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', might be willing to lend support to Israeli special forces. The successes of Operation Rising Lion have been astounding. They include the clinical removal of three very senior figures: the head of the Iranian armed forces, the commander of the IRGC and the commander of Iran's Emergency Command. 'These are three ruthless mass murderers with international blood on their hands,' the Israeli Defence Force posted on social media. 'The world is a better place without them.' And then, to underline the message, Israel's foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar announced that the replacement head of the armed forces, General Gholam Ali Rashid, had also been eliminated after just three days in his post, with a car bomb. 'I would recommend that whoever takes on the post considers carefully,' Saar said sarcastically, 'and if they accept, they should exercise extra caution.' Several top nuclear scientists have also been killed, including one who was in his apartment in a tower block. Photographs showed a drone-shaped hole in the side of the building and blast damage to a single room. Neighbouring flats on adjacent floors were apparently unscathed. But another dimension to the strikes was perhaps even more important, even if it generated fewer headlines. Iran's air defences have been effectively neutralised. And these were the first to go, because their removal was crucial if Israeli jets were to be able to attack the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility. The regime was proud of its S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems, purchased at huge expense from Russia after 10 years of pleading. The S-300 is specifically designed to be deadly against F-15 and F-16 jets. These comprise a large part of Israel's main strike force, ideal for dropping glide bombs on targets. In October last year, Israel destroyed all the S-300s, ostensibly as revenge for a massive Iranian ballistic missile assault. We can now see this manoeuvre as one more far-sighted preparation for Operation Rising Lion. My book, Target Tehran, predicted the war against Iran and, though no one could have foreseen all the ruses Mossad used, I envisaged in detail the waves of fighter-bombers after Iran's air defences were obliterated. Israel is fighting for its existence. And Mossad will be merciless.
Washington Post
01-07-2025
- Washington Post
Justice Department says 2 Chinese nationals charged with spying inside the US for Beijing
WASHINGTON — Two Chinese nationals have been charged with spying inside the United States on behalf of Beijing, including by taking photographs of a naval base, coordinating a cash dead-drop and by participating in efforts to recruit members of the military who they thought might be open to working for Chinese intelligence.
Epoch Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
Epoch Booklist: Recommended Reading for June 13–19
This week, we feature a heartwarming children's story about growing up and growing in faith and a fascinating look at the making of the 1972 blockbuster 'The Godfather.' Espionage ' By James Crossland Robert Lockhart, the Scottish spy and World War II propagandist, is a forgotten figure that readers of just about any stripe will enjoy learning about. He's a man of incredible talent, brilliance, and wit, yet afflicted with unfortunately excessive desires for drinking, women, and danger. An influential figure of the early and mid-20th century, Crossland presents a biography of a conflicted, yet brilliant man.
