Spies’ Roots Reach Deep in Lebanon

BEIRUT, Lebanon — When the Lebanese authorities announced the arrest of an Israeli spy ring late last year, the news aroused little surprise. It is no secret that Israel has long maintained intelligence agents here.

But in recent weeks, more and more suspects have been captured, including a retired general, several security officials and a deputy mayor. All told, at least 21 people have been arrested, and 3 others escaped over the border into Israel with the help of the Israeli military, Lebanese officials say.

The spying network’s extent has mesmerized the Lebanese and made headlines here. It has also infuriated Lebanese officials, who sent an official protest to the United Nations this week. On Friday, President Michel Suleiman complained about the matter in a meeting here with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The arrests appear to reflect a newly energized and coordinated effort by the Lebanese security agencies, which now cooperate far more effectively among themselves and with Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here, than they did in the past.

“New technologies have helped in catching them,” said Gen. Ashraf Rifi, the director of the Internal Security Forces. “But we have also had better cooperation with the army than we had before.”

Those accused of being spies are said to have used sophisticated surveillance equipment and satellite phones, sometimes ingeniously disguised in crutches or knapsacks. One of them, a car dealer in southern Lebanon, placed Israeli tracking devices in cars he sold to Hezbollah members, security officials say. Most seem to have been motivated by the promise of money. Some were caught by Hezbollah before being handed over to the Lebanese authorities.

The arrests have even become an issue in Lebanon’s coming parliamentary elections, with some analysts saying that, intentionally or not, they might benefit the political alliance led by Hezbollah, Israel’s primary nemesis here. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, delivered an angry speech on Friday in which he called for all the captured spies to be executed and urged the Lebanese to help in capturing any remaining agents.

“Everyone who proves to be lenient in this business will be considered a partner” of Israel, Mr. Nasrallah said, noting that some of the spies had been captured with explosives and weapons, not just surveillance devices.

Hundreds of Lebanese spied for Israel during its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, most on a short-term basis. Many were southerners who felt they had no choice, and they were forgiven, or they served short prison terms after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000. But since then feelings have hardened toward those who spy for Israel, which waged a punishing bombing campaign here during its war with Hezbollah in 2006. Those convicted of spying can face the death penalty under Lebanese law.

Of the 21 accused of being spies who have been arrested in the past year, 13 played an important role, General Rifi said, and the others were relatively insignificant.

One of the important ones, the general said, was Ziyad Homsi.

Mr. Homsi, 61, was the deputy mayor of Saadnayel, a town in the Bekaa Valley. According to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al Safir, which has links to Hezbollah, Mr. Homsi had told interrogators he was assigned to meet Mr. Nasrallah, which he apparently failed to do. Israeli monitors planned to track his movements as he went to meet the Hezbollah leader.

Mr. Homsi, who was arrested on May 16, said that he had started working for Israel because he needed the money, the newspaper reported, and that he had been paid $100,000.

Many friends and relatives of those accused of being spies say they cannot believe the accusations. “He’s been a friend for more than 18 years,” Issam Rouhaymi, the mayor of Saadnayel, said about Mr. Homsi. “Nobody could believe such a thing.”

Mr. Homsi was active in the Future Movement, the pro-American political party that is opposed to Hezbollah. Mr. Homsi’s brother said the charges had been manufactured to damage the party’s chances in the elections.

Investigators said that Mr. Homsi, like many others accused of being spies, traveled abroad to meet with Israeli agents, who provided him with instructions and equipment.

Some contrived elaborate schemes to avoid detection. Ali al-Jarrah, who was arrested last year and accused of spying for Israel for 25 years, had two homes and two wives who did not know of each other. Adib al-Alam, a retired general arrested in April, had established a domestic maid service at the behest of his Israeli spymasters, officials have said. He used it to disguise his telephone calls and trips abroad to meet with Israeli officers.

Perhaps most infuriating of all, for Lebanese investigators, was what happened this week. On Sunday and Monday, two people accused of being spies escaped across the southern border into Israel, one of them bringing his family with him, according to a Lebanese government complaint submitted to the United Nations. The Israeli military helped them escape, the report states. Another man staged a similar escape this month.

It must have been a daring and risky escape, passing through Hezbollah’s home terrain and across a fenced and guarded border. But it is not impossible.

“There are crossing points,” said Timur Goksel, a former senior adviser of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon. “But I don’t think the Israelis would help just anyone cross over. It would have to be someone they saw as important.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases

WASHINGTON — The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits.

In the past 10 months, for example, about a half-dozen midlevel financiers and logistics experts working with Al Qaeda have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services, a former American counterterrorism official said.

In addition, Pakistan’s intelligence and security services captured a Saudi suspect and a Yemeni suspect this year with the help of American intelligence and logistical support, a Pakistani official said. The two are the highest-ranking Qaeda operatives captured since President Obama took office, but they are still being held by Pakistan, which has shared information from their interrogations with the United States, the official said.

The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons.

Human rights advocates say that relying on foreign governments to hold and question terrorist suspects could carry significant risks. It could increase the potential for abuse at the hands of foreign interrogators and could also yield bad intelligence, they say.

The fate of many terrorist suspects whom the Bush administration sent to foreign countries remains uncertain. One suspect, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured by the C.I.A. in late 2001 and sent to Libya, was recently reported to have died there in Libyan custody.

“As a practical matter you have to rely on partner governments, so the focus should be on pressing and assisting those governments to handle those cases professionally,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

The United States itself has not detained any high-level terrorist suspects outside Iraq and Afghanistan since Mr. Obama took office, and the question of where to detain the most senior terrorist suspects on a long-term basis is being debated within the new administration. Even deciding where the two Qaeda suspects in Pakistani custody will be kept over the long term is “extremely, extremely sensitive right now,” a senior American military official said, adding, “They’re both bad dudes. The issue is: where do they get parked so they stay parked?”

How the United States is dealing with terrorism suspects beyond those already in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was a question Mr. Obama did not address in the speech he gave Thursday about his antiterrorism policies. While he said he might seek to create a new system that would allow preventive detention inside the United States, the government currently has no obvious long-term detention center for imprisoning terrorism suspects without court oversight.

Mr. Obama has said he still intends to close the Guantánamo prison by January, despite misgivings in Congress, and the Supreme Court has ruled that inmates there may challenge their detention before federal judges. Some suspects are being imprisoned without charges at a United States air base in Afghanistan, but a federal court has ruled that at least some of them may also file habeas corpus lawsuits to challenge their detentions.

American officials say that in the last years of the Bush administration and now on Mr. Obama’s watch, the balance has shifted toward leaving all but the most high-level terrorist suspects in foreign rather than American custody. The United States has repatriated hundreds of detainees held at prisons in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, but the current approach is different because it seeks to keep the prisoners out of American custody altogether.

How the United States deals with terrorism suspects remains a contentious issue in Congress.

Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., said in February that the agency might continue its program of extraordinary rendition, in which captured terrorism suspects are transferred to other countries without extradition proceedings.

He said the C.I.A. would be likely to continue to transfer detainees from their place of capture to other countries, either their home countries or nations that intended to bring charges against them.

As a safeguard against torture, Mr. Panetta said, the United States would rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment. The Bush administration sought the same assurances, which critics say are ineffective.

A half-dozen current and former American intelligence and counterterrorism officials and allied officials were interviewed for this article, but all spoke on the condition of anonymity because the detention and interrogation programs are classified.

Officials say the United States has learned so much about Al Qaeda and other militant groups since the 9/11 attacks that it can safely rely on foreign partners to detain and question more suspects. “It’s the preferred method now,” one former counterterrorism official said.

The Obama administration’s policies will probably become clearer after two task forces the president created in January report to him in July on detainee policy, interrogation techniques and extraordinary rendition.

In many instances now, allies are using information provided by the United States to pick up terrorism suspects on their own territory — including the two suspects seized in Pakistan this year.

The Saudi militant, Zabi al-Taifi, was picked up by Pakistani commandos in a dawn raid at a safe house outside Peshawar on Jan. 22, an operation conducted with the help of the C.I.A.

A Pakistani official said the Yemeni suspect, Abu Sufyan al-Yemeni, was a Qaeda paramilitary commander who was on C.I.A. and Pakistani lists of the top 20 Qaeda operatives. He was believed to be a conduit for communications between Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and cells in East Africa, Iran, Yemen and elsewhere. American and Pakistani intelligence officials say they believe that Mr. Yemeni, who was arrested Feb. 24 by Pakistani authorities in Quetta, helped arrange travel and training for Qaeda operatives from various parts of the Muslim world to the Pakistani tribal areas.

He is now in the custody of Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, but his fate is unclear. The Pakistani official said that he would remain in Pakistani hands, but that it would be difficult to try him because the evidence against him came from informers.

American officials said the United States would still take custody of the most senior Qaeda operatives captured in the future. As a model, they cited the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd who is said to have joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and risen to become a top aide to Osama bin Laden, and who was captured by a foreign security service in 2006. He was handed over to the C.I.A., which transferred him to Guantánamo Bay in April 2007. He was one of the last detainees shipped there.

Stiamo parlando in realtà del

“…Il Turista

“…Un’associazione segreta di assassini, un gruppo super scelto di uomini determinati e senza scrupoli, che non conoscono coscienza e pentimento. Si tratta dei Turisti, vengono da ogni parte del mondo quando il potere e i grandi interessi vengono minacciati, allora intervengono, uccidono e commettono le peggiori atrocità, prima di sparire nel nulla da cui sono comparsi.
Milo Weaver era un Turista. Apparteneva a quel mondo oscuro del quale pensava di essersi definitivamente liberato, ma nessuno può liberarsi del Turismo.
Grainger, il suo vecchio capo, lo ha scovato, e gli ha consigliato di partire per la Francia per una sporca missione: trovare Angela, sua vecchia amica e compagna di avventure che sta facendo il doppio gioco passando informazioni petrolifere ai cinesi.
Milo la trova morente, apparentemente suicida, in una messinscena che ha un solo scopo: trasformarlo nel principale sospettato dell’improbabile suicidio della ragazza.
Qualcosa non torna… Qualcuno sta cercando di incastrarlo, ma chi?
La CIA e l’Homeland Security gli sono alle costole, e l’unico modo di sopravvivere è tornare, a testa bassa, all’interno del Turismo.

Il Turista di Olen Steinhauer è il thriller statunitense che negli ultimi anni ha ricevuto le migliori recensioni, e gli elogi incondizionati di tutta la stampa, che è arrivata a paragonare il suo autore a mostri sacri del calibro di Graham Greene e John Le Carrè. Questo attesissimo romanzo arriva finalmente nel mese di maggio nelle nostre librerie, pubblicato dalla Giano editore, nella collana Nerogiano.

«Il nuovo thriller di uno scrittore le cui storie sono avvincenti quanto quelle di Greene, Deighton o Le Carré…un romanzo di spionaggio internazionale contemporaneo che ha attirato l’attenzione di George Clooney e di Warner Bros.» Paula Woods, Los Angeles Times

 «Ogni tanto emerge uno scrittore di thriller che merita di essere paragonato ai grandi. Con Il Turista assistiamo a uno di questi momenti». Chicago Tribune
 
«Un romanzo di spionaggio contemporaneo davvero superbo nella migliore tradizione dei vecchi maestri del genere. Il Turista ha tutto ciò che serve per poter diventare un classico». Nelson DeMille
 
Olen Steinhauer ha trentasette anni ed è nato in Virginia. Dopo un soggiorno di studi in Romania, ha concepito l’idea di una detective story a più volumi ambientata nel mondo comunista, con Emil Brod come protagonista. Neri Pozza ha pubblicato nel 2005 il primo volume di questa serie Il Ponte dei Sospiri. Steinhauer vive oggi a Budapest. Il suo sito ufficiale è http://www.olensteinhauer.com

E’ uscito il nuovo segretissimo. Non l’abbiamo ancora letto, ma contiamo di farlo presto. Di seguito le informazioni che abbiamo prelevato dal Blog della Mondadori http://blog.librimondadori.it/blogs/segretissimo/

Il campo di fuoco: le piantagioni abbandonate lungo il fiume Mississipi. La vittima: solo un tragico bersaglio di prova, in attesa di ben altri obiettivi. L’assassino:un tiratore scelto, infallibile e letale. Una nemesi con la quale Winter Massey, duro ex agente dell’FBI ha ancora un conto aperto. Così, in bilico tra paesaggi desolati e scintillanti casinò, la caccia all’uomo ha nuovamente inizio. Ma in un mondo fatto di tetre cospirazioni paramilitari, e infami corruttele politiche molto fumo ingannevole e troppo specchi deformanti nascondono il più esplosivo dei segreti.

 

Ecco i titoli precedentemente pubblicati dello stesso autore:

1519 - Punto d’Impatto - Settembre 2005

1539 - Ore Contate - Maggio 2008

…In realtà, la notizia l’abbiamo letta la prima volta su ‘VSD’, una rivista francese. ovvero, che Luise Menot, attrice francese di qualche pretesa, avrebbe fatto la parte nell’ultimo film di OSS117, di un agente del Mossad. Incuriositi, siamo andati a fare una piccola ricerca sulla rete, ed ecco quello che abbiamo scoperto: OSS 117, Rio ne répond plus: l’arte dell’umorismo caustico Enorme copertura mediatica e forte sostegno della critica per la commedia OSS 117, Rio ne répond plus [trailer] di Michel Hazanavicius, lanciata da Gaumont in 589 copie. Dopo i 2,3 milioni di entrate nel 2006 del primo capitolo OSS 117, Le Caire Nid d’Espions [trailer], la cui trama era ambientata nel 1955, la spia Hubert Bonisseur della Bath, impersonato dal popolare Jean Dujardin, torna per una caccia al nazista nel Brasile del 1967 con l’aiuto di una bella agente del Mossad Louise Monot. Sceneggiato dal regista e da Jean-François Halin, OSS 117, Rio ne répond plus sviluppa un umorismo caustico basato sulla stupidità del personaggio principale caratterizzato dal “suo essere francese, vagamente razzista, in ogni caso incolto, sicuro di sé, ignaro e superiore”, come sottolinea Michel Hazanavicius. “Si può vedere il film come una semplice commedia”, rincara il suo co-sceneggiatore, “ma sia nel testo che nella messa in scena, si trova un secondo livello, un riferimento, un omaggio”, in particolare a Harper, L’uomo di Rio, Il caso Thomas Crown, Intrigo internazionale, la serie di Matt Helm, Al servizio segreto di Sua Maestà e ancora a Il vagabondo di Tokyo di Suzuki. Prodotto da Mandarin Cinéma, il lungometraggio ha beneficiato di un budget di 23,36 M€, che include una coproduzione di M6 Films e i pre-acquisti di Canal + e Ciné Cinéma. Anche coproduttore, Gaumont guida le vendite internazionali.Aggiungiamo noi, che in Italia l’agente segreto 0SS 117 è noto per essere stato a lungo pubblicato dalla collana Segretissimo di Mondadori, molti e molti anni fa e che non sappiamo se questo film lo vedremo anche in Italia. Sinceramente lo spionaggio trasformato in commedia non mi piace molto.

L’annuncio del ministro degli Esteri Lavrov in segno di protesta
contro l’espulsione di due diplomatici accreditati presso l’Alleanza

Mosca non parteciperà
ai colloqui Nato a Bruxelles

Già annullata anche la partecipazione alla riunione dei capi di stato maggiore