Servicios secretos (Continuación)

EuropaUnión Europea, , ,

Un domingo tranquilo en Madrid me sorprendió el artículo en ABC «Negación, distracción y confusión» del señor Simon Manley, embajador del Reino Unido en España. Simon es un colega a quien aprecio por su alta profesionalidad y a quien tengo una simpatía personal. Como veo, los representantes del Reino Unido han recibido las instrucciones desde Londres para promover insistentemente la postura británica sobre el llamado «caso de los Skripal» a través de la prensa. Nosotros, los diplomáticos, estamos convencidos de que «los canales diplomáticos» son los más adecuados para resolver problemas. Pero si la parte británica se siente incapaz de convencernos a través del diálogo profesional y escoge la prensa como el canal de comunicación, no me queda otra opción sino responder por la misma vía.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, , ,

Un domingo tranquilo en Salisbury, una ciudad con una de las catedrales más bonitas del Reino Unido, un padre y su hija fueron víctimas del primer ataque con agente nervioso cometido en Europa desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Serguéi y Yulia Skripal todavía están en el hospital y un agente de policía que acudió en su ayuda también se encuentra en estado crítico. Sin olvidar a las otras 35 personas que tuvieron que recibir tratamiento médico por encontrarse en aquel momento cerca del lugar del ataque.

El ataque en Salisbury el pasado 4 de marzo fue un descarado intento de asesinato de civiles en suelo británico que puso en peligro a cualquier persona, de cualquier nacionalidad, que por azar se encontrase allí.…  Seguir leyendo »

A police officer stands near the scene of the attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. Photo: Getty Images.

EuropaUnión Europea, , ,

There can be little doubt that the Russian government is behind the attempted assassination of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. While there were the typical official denials, the Russian state has ways of communicating its innocence to foreign governments. In this case, it has not done so.

The use of a nerve agent fits a pattern established by the murder of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium in 2006. This was not a McMafia-style operation commissioned by ‘rogue elements’. If they were to blame, Moscow would be even more alarmed than London. Since the chaos of the 1990s, Putin has restored the state’s traditional prerogatives in foreign covert operations, as well as the president’s prerogatives within it.…  Seguir leyendo »

Sberbank offices in London. Photo: Getty Images.

EuropaUnión Europea, , ,

If confirmed, the attack on double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter would be the second known Russian state-sponsored murder in the UK, following the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Other suspicious cases are now being reopened.

What principles should guide an effective response?
  1. Effective measures are more than symbolic. They impose costs that punish unacceptable actions and deter future ones. The UK’s response to Litvinenko’s death – expelling four diplomats, imposing visa restrictions for officials, and suspending security service liaison – was clearly not sufficient enough to deter the latest attack. Symbols matter, but only if they credibly convey intentions about the consequences of further action.
…  Seguir leyendo »
Pedestrians walk past a spray painted job advert for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on the pavement. Photo by LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

Until 1994, GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, didn't officially exist. Now, it has emerged out of the shadows to take a very public role at the heart of British cybersecurity.

Public accountability for intelligence services is crucial to any democracy but, as the recent WannaCry ransomware attack showed, there are inevitable conflicts of interest between the role of intelligence services and network safety.

The past seven years have seen a dramatic change in profile for GCHQ. While the number of police officers has been cut by 14 per cent since 2010, GCHQ's staff numbers - according to the Home Office - have grown by more than ten per cent in the same period.…  Seguir leyendo »

James Comey testifying on Capitol Hill on Monday. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

MundoAméricaEuropa, , ,

Counterintelligence is long, hard work. Investigators need time to string along suspects — seeking the who, what, when, where and why of the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation tries to build 3-D chronologies of who did what to whom. Agents usually follow the money, the best evidence. That’s how the feds got Al Capone: for tax evasion.

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, is running the most explosive counterintelligence case since Soviet spies stole the secrets of the atom bomb more than 70 years ago. Some of those atomic spies didn’t speak Russian: They were Americans. We now know that President Vladimir V.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache

MundoAmérica, , ,

On Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks released an enormous cache of documents that it claimed detailed “C.I.A. hacking tools.” Immediately afterward, it posted two startling tweets asserting that “C.I.A. hacker malware” posed a threat to journalists and others who require secure communication by infecting iPhone and Android devices and “bypassing” encrypted message apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.

This appeared to be a bombshell. Signal is considered the gold standard for secure communication. WhatsApp has a billion users. The C.I.A., it seemed, had the capacity to conduct sweeping surveillance on what we had previously assumed were our safest and most private digital conversations.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

Amid the political and diplomatic chaos in the US since Donald Trump assumed the presidency, Russian leadership has been experiencing its own turmoil, until recently kept under wraps, but now emerging into the open. To be sure, Russian President Vladimir Putin is still firmly in power, as evidenced by his hour-long conversation last Saturday with Trump and by Putin’s high ratings in opinion polls (which far surpass Trump’s). Yet we have now learned that, since the US election, there has been an unprecedented, and perhaps still continuing shakeup of top officials in Putin’s main security agency, the FSB, and that a top former intelligence official in Putin’s entourage died recently in suspicious circumstances.…  Seguir leyendo »

Edward Snowden seen in a live video link from Russia in 2015. Credit Frederick Florin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MundoAmérica, ,

The last time I saw Edward Snowden, while on assignment for The Financial Times in September, he was not holding out any great hope that President Obama would show the kind of clemency to him that he just granted to Chelsea Manning.

Of course, he would prefer to return home to the United States: It was never his intention to be stranded in Russia, his passport revoked. Although a petition to pardon Mr. Snowden has now attracted more than a million supporters, he is a realist.

I had not met Mr. Snowden in June 2013 when I was the editor of The Guardian and we broke the first revelations from the National Security Agency documents he leaked revealing the scope of modern state surveillance.…  Seguir leyendo »

President-elect Salvador Allende, of Chile, arriving to pay respects to Gen. René Schneider, who was lying in state, killed by a commando. Robert Quiroga/Associated Press

MundoAmérica, , ,  

It is familiar, the outrage and alarm that many Americans are feeling at reports that Russia, according to a secret intelligence assessment, interfered in the United States election to help Donald J. Trump become president.

I have been through this before, overwhelmed by a similar outrage and alarm.

To be specific: On the morning of Oct. 22, 1970, in what was then my home in Santiago de Chile, my wife, Angélica, and I listened to a news flash on the radio. Gen. René Schneider, the head of Chile’s armed forces, had been shot by a commando on a street of the capital.…  Seguir leyendo »

El presidente electo Salvador Allende llega a rendir el último homenaje al general René Schneider. Credit Robert Quiroga/Associated Press

MundoAmérica, , ,  

Es tristemente familiar para mí la indignación y alarma que muchos estadounidenses sienten ante la noticia de que sus servicios de inteligencia han confirmado que Rusia intervino en las recientes elecciones con la intención de que Donald Trump fuera el próximo presidente.

He vivido antes esa misma indignación, esa misma alarma.

Para ser más específico: la mañana del 22 de octubre de 1970, en lo que por entonces era mi casa en Santiago de Chile, escuché, junto a mi mujer Angélica, un flash extraordinario por la radio. Un comando de ultra-derecha había atentado contra el General René Schneider, jefe de las fuerzas armadas chilenas.…  Seguir leyendo »

Edward Snowden

MundoAmérica, ,

This is an article from Turning Points, a magazine that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead.

Edward J. Snowden, a former C.I.A. employee and National Security Agency contractor, leaked top-secret documents in 2013 that exposed the extent of the N.S.A.’s classified cybersecurity program, revealing that the agency was seizing the private communications records of hundreds of millions of people around the world. Mr. Snowden, who is living in asylum in Russia, is wanted in the United States on several charges, including two under the United States Espionage Act of 1917.

Speaking by video link during the Athens Democracy Forum in Greece, convened by The New York Times in September, Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

I’ve never been enamored of the cliché about an “October surprise”; it’s an artificial construct for anything unexpected in the final weeks before an election. Actually, the only surprise in this turbulent election would have been if nothing out of the ordinary happened in the closing days. It felt a bit weird that—up until about 1:00 PM on Friday, October 28—we seemed to be drifting toward an inexorable and overwhelming victory for Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump was headed toward a humiliating defeat. The esteemed political analyst Charlie Cook predicted that the Democrats would win five to seven Senate seats and take over that body in the next session; even the highly gerrymandered House of Representatives was seen as possibly in play.…  Seguir leyendo »

Moscow, September 2008. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

MundoAméricaEuropa, , ,

The second act of the Trump-Putin farce seems to be playing out faster than the first act, but following the same general trajectory: apparent revelations followed by exaggerated interpretation followed by a subdued debunking, all of it somehow giving weight to what, in the end, has never been much more than a matter of speculation. The theory is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is actively trying to bring Donald Trump to office and in fact has direct ties to the onsandidate. The evidence is scant, but the assumption is strong. The reality-based world view is further weakened and American political culture is the loser.…  Seguir leyendo »

FBI director James Comey, Washington, DC, July 7, 2016. Rex Features via AP Images/Shutterstock

MundoAmérica, ,

Is FBI Director James Comey “fiercely independent,” as President Barack Obama described him three years ago when nominating him for his current job, or fiercely self-serving? That’s the question that looms large in the wake of Comey’s unprecedented decision to wade into a presidential race eleven days before election day by announcing that he’d reopened an investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton concerning her private email server—an investigation that he had brought to close in a major press conference in July. The announcement, which came in a very short letter to members of Congress Friday, violated two long-established rules governing criminal investigations. …  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

Se acuerdan de aquel magnífico filme alemán, La vida de los otros? Teníamos el corazón en un puño y la indignación a flor de piel ante aquellos espías de la Alemania Oriental que lo controlaban todo. No sólo las conversaciones, sino hasta los actos más íntimos, para que nada quedara fuera del control del Estado. Era la profecía de George Orwell que predijo en un libro, 1984, y que evocaba los países comunistas del este de Europa. El Gran Hermano que lo controla todo, que lo sabe todo de todos, que maneja la información privilegiada hasta imbuir la cobardía absoluta.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaEuropa, , ,

During the Cold War, the Soviet KGB coined the term “desinformatsiya,” or disinformation, which the CIA defined as "false, incomplete or misleading information" fed to various targets. Both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in the same game, though the Russians played it far more vigorously.

In the digital age, the players might not have to go to the trouble of altering information, or mixing true information with false. Simply hacking into sensitive emails or other data, even when the information is true, can have the same impact as disinformation.

Witness WikiLeaks’ release of a steady flow of emails the group asserts are from John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and former counselor to President Barack Obama.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

The days leading up to last Friday’s release of director Oliver Stone’s Snowden looked like one long movie trailer.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other human-right groups on Wednesday announced a campaign to win a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of its highly classified documents to journalists. The next day, the House Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan letter to the president that advised him against any pardon and claimed Snowden “caused tremendous damage to national security.”

The week before, Stone had invited me to a private screening of his movie in Washington.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y SeguridadInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional, , ,

The horrifying truck attack in Nice, France, that killed at least 84 people is the 10th strike in the country since the beginning of 2015. The French government is now considering a complete overhaul of its intelligence agencies to address this persistent threat.

A French parliamentary commission released a report last week that recommended the government fuse all its security services into one large “national anti-terrorism agency.”

Such an approach would mirror Washington’s National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a bureaucracy created in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The objective was to break down barriers within the U.S. government and pull together all agencies and departments related to terrorism issues.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y Seguridad,

Cuando el presidente Vladimir Putin contemplaba a sus tanques en la Plaza Roja durante el desfile del Día de la Victoria, no estaba mirando más que una parte, tal vez la menos importante, de su arsenal. Dada la creciente vigilancia de la OTAN, las armas más eficaces de las que dispone son sus espías.

Tanto el Servicio de Inteligencia Exterior (SVR), como la inteligencia militar (GRU), como incluso el Sistema de Seguridad Federal (FSB), tienen sus propias redes de agentes en Europa, y por más que en el mundo actual todos espíen a todos, ellos se distinguen por su gran número, su actividad y su agresividad.…  Seguir leyendo »