this page last updated: Monday 2 March 2020
related videos can be found here
This page is divided into the following clickable subcategories:
A secret court will decide whether Intelligence agencies are “unlawfully” sharing huge datasets containing sensitive information about the population with industry, government departments and overseas intelligence services.
In Bungled Spying Operation, NSA Targeted Pro-Democracy Campaigner.
The National Security Agency’s ability to capture Internet traffic on United States soil has been based on an extraordinary, decadeslong partnership with a single company: AT&T.
Magicians wield secrecy on the theater stage in the service of illusions. Spies likewise wield illusion on the world stage in the service of secrecy. So it is with the events behind the attacks of 9/11 where those who question the official story are derided as conspiracy theorists. Thanks to the investigative digging of reporter James Bamford, with the assistance of NSA whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe, the 9/11 crowd can now point to a conspiracy fact: an incredible cover-up that goes all the way to the top of the American intelligence community.
Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online.
In a guest opinion post for WIRED, journalist and researcher Duncan Campbell describes how a one-word clue in a document leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden may have revealed a massive increase in the surveillance capacity of GCHQ and other spying agencies.
The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.
A federal appeals court panel ruled on Thursday that the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata of phone calls to and from Americans is not authorized by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, throwing out the government’s legal justification for the surveillance program exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden nearly two years ago.
New Zealand is conducting covert surveillance operations against some of its strongest trading partners and has obtained sophisticated malware to infect targeted computers and steal data, newly released documents reveal.
American and British spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.
What seems to be a U.S.-run computer espionage program has reportedly figured out how to employ a “breakthrough” snooping tactic — the implanting of spyware into hard drives — that could compromise most of the world's computers.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) infected hard disk firmware with spyware in a campaign valued as highly as Stuxnet that dates back at least 14 years and possibly up to two decades – all according to an analysis by Kaspersky Labs.
The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents.
Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents.
Sir David Omand warned there would be greater intrusion on individuals’ privacy, not less, if agencies are unable to intercept communications – because they will be forced into more direct spying methods.
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 2.
GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. Agency includes investigative journalists on ‘threat’ list.
US and British intelligence agencies undertake every effort imaginable to crack all types of encrypted Internet communication. The cloud, it seems, is full of holes. The good news: New Snowden documents show that some forms of encryption still cause problems for the NSA.
According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for surveillance.
A German parliamentary inquiry has been told that German intelligence fed America's NSA filtered data from an Internet hub in Frankfurt, after clearance from Berlin. The “Eikonal” project ended in 2008.
Complex malware known as Regin is the suspected technology behind sophisticated cyberattacks conducted by U.S. and British intelligence agencies on the European Union and a Belgian telecommunications company, according to security industry sources and technical analysis conducted by The Intercept.
The intelligence services have routinely been intercepting legally privileged communications between lawyers and their clients in sensitive security cases, according to internal MI5, MI6 and GCHQ documents.
The National Security Agency has had agents in China, Germany, and South Korea working on programs that use “physical subversion” to infiltrate and compromise networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time.
Troubled that former American spies are plying their trade for foreign governments, Congress has passed new legislation requiring U.S. spy agencies to provide an annual assessment detailing the risks such conduct poses for national security.
The FBI has come under intense criticism after a 2017 leak exposed that its counterterrorism division had invented a new, unfounded domestic terrorism category it called “black identity extremism.”
CIA files show intelligence services wanted to learn from South America’s 1970s campaign of terror against leftwing subversion.
Special Report: The mainstream U.S. media obsesses over Russian “propaganda” yet the U.S. government created a “psyops” bureaucracy three decades ago to flood the world with dubious information, reports Robert Parry.
In May 2013, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine service was being shifted out of that position as a result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John Brennan. As Miller documented, this official — whom the paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the time — was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.
The CIA, and other US government agencies, sponsored, spied upon and ran as agents the world’s greatest thinkers and writers. Joel Whitney’s new book Finks: How the CIA tricked the world’s best writers, claims that intellectuals across the globe were, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unwittingly, pawns in the Great Game of the Cold War.
New evidence points to a Western cover-up of Algerian state sponsorship of Islamist jihadists, to protect oil and gas interests.
Before heading out to capture Pokémon, you might want to consider the data the game has access to and the history of the company that created the game.
The report contains thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of interrogation methods.
Khalil Abu Rayyan was a lonely young man in Detroit, eager to find a wife. Jannah Bride claimed she was a 19-year-old Sunni Muslim whose husband was killed in an airstrike in Syria. The two struck up a romantic connection through online communications.
‘Stripping suspects, taking humiliating photographs of them, sending them around the world into the hands of torturers: these sound like the actions of a crazed dictatorship’.
As I read The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, a new book by Salon founder David Talbot, I couldn’t help thinking of an obscure corner of 1970s history: the Safari Club.
The Real Story Behind the Fort Dix Five Terror Plot.
The current debate about government surveillance has largely overlooked the CIA, possibly because we know little about the agency's activities within the United States.
The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place.
A US intelligence report reveals that Western support for Syria’s rebels aided and abetted the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ — and the Pentagon won’t deny it.
Last March, John T. Booker, a 20-year-old from Kansas, checked himself into a mental health facility for evaluation. Now, a year later, he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, charged with attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction — the fake bomb that he was provided by undercover FBI informants.
Informants represent the manpower behind the FBI’s controversial stings, which are intended to find would-be terrorists before they attack. In the decade after 9/11, 158 defendants were prosecuted following these undercover operations, which are usually led by an informant and provide the means and opportunity for someone to attempt to commit an act of terrorism. A Human Rights Watch report in 2014 criticized the FBI for targeting “particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent.”
Yemen is the latest casualty of a neoconservative strategy commissioned by the US Army to ‘capitalise on Sunni-Shia conflict’ in the Middle East — the goal is nothing short of ‘Western dominance’.
The brutal ‘Islamic State’ is a symptom of a deepening crisis of civilisation premised on fossil fuel addiction, which is undermining Western hegemony and unravelling state power across the Muslim world.
Sami Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.
A spy who worked for a country in the U.S.-led coalition that is fighting Islamic State had helped three British girls to cross into Syria to join the militants and has been caught, the Turkish foreign minister said on Thursday.
Newly revealed documents show that the Ecuadorean military was part of Operation Condor.
Researchers working with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept.
Israel’s ambitions to conquer the Golan Heights and western hopes to topple Assad raise questions around the discovery of oil in the Golan.
Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet—part 1.
Special Report: The rapid expansion of America’s right-wing media began in the 1980s as the Reagan administration coordinated foreign policy initiatives with conservative media executives, including Rupert Murdoch, and then cleared away regulatory hurdles, reports Robert Parry.
Yale University American historian Beverly Gage was sifting through the US National Archives in the summer of 2014, doing research for a book on J. Edgar Hoover, when she came across a letter historians had been searching for for many a decade. Written from the perspective of an imaginary yet disappointed admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr., the missive encouraged the leading civil rights, anti-war, and socialist activist to kill himself.
“It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it.” That should have been the headline for the lead story in The New York Times on Oct. 15, which was more politely titled “CIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels.” The article reports on a CIA review of recent U.S. covert operations to determine their effectiveness. The White House concluded that unfortunately successes were so rare that some rethinking of the policy was in order.
Margaret Thatcher was warned that the CIA did not always give sufficient advance notice when it carried out operations in Britain, a secret file released on Friday shows.
Declassified documents describe in detail how US – with British help – engineered coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq.
Bomber involved in plot to attack US-bound jet was working as an informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged.
US authorities say former Liberian leader Charles Taylor worked for its intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Boston Globe reports.
Two documents suggest northeast Libya, centre of rebellion, is an al-Qaeda hotspot.
Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret CIA documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 operating in the region, providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents,” according to a report.
Release prompts claim Islamist was US informant while assisting London terrorist.
A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.
The CIA has paid millions of dollars to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since 9/11, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, says a media report.
The official denial of a kill squad is disingenuous, says Alexander Cockburn, given what we know about the agency’s history of killing.
The late President Milosevic's secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States' top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92.
A witness in the Lockerbie case has claimed he was offered $4 million by American investigators to lie to the trial judges.
President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran, intelligence sources have revealed.
With his trial on immigration charges set for May 11, the US government has filed a motion in federal court seeking to bar the international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from testifying on his role as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA manipulated the Lockerbie trial and lied about the strength of the prosecution case to get a result that was politically convenient for America, according to a former US State Department lawyer.
Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, says he is in possession of intelligence showing that the United States plans to invade his country.
The Amsterdam court, which sentenced the father of Pakistan's nuclear program Abdul Qadeer Khan to four years in prison in 1983, has lost Khan's legal files and the court's vice-president suspects the CIA had a hand in the documents' disappearance.
Crucial new claims that could free the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing have emerged via a retired Scottish police officer of high rank who has told lawyers that vital evidence was fabricated.
A former Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.
At the request of the CIA, the Netherlands let go the father of Pakistan's nuclear program Abdul Qadeer Khan who worked in the country between 1975 and 1986, former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers told Dutch public radio on Tuesday.
The American people have been seriously misled about the origins of the al Qaeda movement blamed for the 9/11 attacks, just as they have been seriously misled about the reasons for America’s invasion of Iraq. The truth is that for at least two decades the United States has engaged in energetic covert programs to secure U.S. control over the Persian Gulf, and also to open up Central Asia for development by U.S. oil companies.
In recent months, several people have emerged to suggest that Sirhan may have been telling the truth; that he may have been hypnotized into becoming a “Manchurian Candidate”-style assassin.
A new book claims to reveal evidence that the CIA, FBI and Aristotle Onassis hypnotised a Palestinian man into assassinating Robert Kennedy.
At a time when experts are debating whether NATO is suited to deal with the global “war on terror”, new research suggests that the alliance’s own secret history has links to terrorism.
The U.S. government knew of a plot to oust Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, in the weeks before a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week after the coup.
Neither the Americans nor their victims in numerous Muslim and Third World countries will ever know peace until the Central Intelligence Agency has been abolished.
“I'm educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western Intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al Qaeda.”
I've been thinking about a scenario described in James Bamford's book Body of Secrets. The story has nothing to do with forests, but rather deals with how we frequently can't see the forest because of the trees.
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II — selection of chapters from the book Killing Hope
The CIA rejected as fantasy claims it tried to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Osama bin Laden just two months before the September 11 attacks.
A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.
A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.
Federal law enforcement officials confirmed that listening devices found in the offices of Philadelphia mayor John F Street were planted by the FBI — a discovery that touched off a political furore just weeks before Election Day.
While President Clinton was trying to broker an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the FBI was secretly funneling money to suspected Hamas figures to see if the militant group would use it for terrorist attacks, according to interviews and court documents.
Documents show White House and No 10 conspired over oil-fuelled invasion plan.
The CIA paid mullahs and created fake Islamic religious leaders to preach a moderate message and counter anti-American sentiment in the Arab world after the 11 September attacks, a new book claims.
Sources in Venezuela's Military Intelligence Directorate (DIM) have told VHeadline.com that “presented with overwhelming evidence of Washington's planned attack on the Presidential flight, it was decided that the President's personal security was preeminent and that he should not go!”
Evidence that the CIA remains involved in clandestine activity (i.e. espionage) in Venezuela even after the US-backed coup attempt in April 2002. He also says he has clear and certain evidence of US involvement before and during the coup d'etat... “some day these pieces of evidence will be released to the public.”
Indeed, “regime change”, as overthrowing governments has come to be known, has been the continuing US goal in Cuba since the earliest days of the revolutionary government.
Indeed, “regime change”, as overthrowing governments has come to be known, has been the continuing US goal in Cuba since the earliest days of the revolutionary government.
The American al-Qa'eda operative unmasked last week as having planned to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge was first detained in March, and has been used by the FBI for months as a double agent, it was reported yesterday.
As befits a company that has been accused of being a CIA front, of recruiting “executive mercenaries” and attempting to overthrow the Prime Minister of a Commonwealth state, the Vinnell Corporation kept a low profile in Riyadh.
U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.
On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.
Former State Intelligence Coordinating Board (BAKIN) chief A.C. Manulang has said that Kuwaiti citizen Omar Al-Faruq, a terrorist suspect who was arrested in Bogor, West Java, on June 5, 2002 and handed over to the US three days later, is a CIA-recruited agent.
US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld have been sensationally accused of covering up the “murder” of a former army scientist.
The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window, is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history.
The Srebrenica report reveals the Pentagon's role in a dirty war.
The Resister, a US military whistleblower publication, has claimed that DynCorp was contracted by the CIA to “observe” activities against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) on the part of the Serbs.
The public enemy number one would have been met in the American hospital of Dubai at the beginning of the summer for serious renal insufficiencies. During his 15-day stay, the billionaire Saudi would have received the visit of a local representative of the CIA. This agent would have even been informed on possible attacks.
The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years — and it's still at it.
A man who once drove a cab for a living through the streets of Boston is on trial in Jordan, suspected of being a terrorist for Osama bin Laden. And now authorities believe he was also a one-time informant for the FBI. In a NewsCenter 5 exclusive, David Boeri reports that Raed Hijazi, once of Everett, Mass., is believed to be a leading connection between the hijackers of four airplanes and bin Laden.
Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
From The CIA's Greatest Hits.
In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
Files released by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States have confirmed that World War II Nazi war criminals were employed by Western intelligence agencies.
U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National Security Agency.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked in tandem with Pakistan to create the “monster” that is today Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, a leading US expert on South Asia said here.
The Pan Am report is believed to have concluded that the bomb was not aimed at the killing of Americans in general, but was targeted specifically to kill a small band of DIA operatives that had uncovered a drugs ring run by a “rogue” CIA unit in Lebanon.
A former CIA agent who claims Libya is not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing is being gagged by the US government under state secrecy laws and faces 10 years in prison if he reveals any information about the terrorist attack.
A documentary broadcast August 25 by German public television presents compelling evidence that some of the main suspects in the 1986 Berlin disco bombing, the event that provided the pretext for a US air assault on Libya, worked for American and Israeli intelligence.
What follows is part of a transcript of remarks made by Professor Alfred McCoy on February 13, 1997 in Washington D.C. Professor McCoy holds degrees from Columbia, Berkeley and Yale and is a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin.
Excerpted from testimony before the Special Seminar focusing on allegations linking CIA secret operations and drug trafficking — convened February 13, 1997, by Rep. John Conyers, Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus.
This is an adaptation and massive compression of the pamphlet The Clandestine Caucus written and published by Robin Ramsay in 1996. In that the sources for most of the claims contained in this talk are to be found.
Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.
When PAN AM Flight 103 crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland last December 21st, killing 270 people, news agencies quickly reported that West German and U.S. intelligence agencies had been warned of a possible terrorist attack on a U.S. carrier.
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989.
The Iran–Contra affair, also referred to as Irangate, Contragate or the Iran-Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that came to light in November 1986. During the Reagan administration, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo. Some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
Operation Gladio is the codename for a clandestine NATO “stay-behind” operation in Europe during the Cold War. Its purpose was to continue anti-communist actions in the event of a Soviet invasion and conquest.
Project FUBELT (also known as Track II) is the code name for the secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations that were to prevent Salvador Allende rise to power before his confirmation, and promote a military coup in Chile.
Operation Northwoods was a series of false flag proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962, but were rejected by the Kennedy administration. The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other operatives, to commit perceived acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on 17 April 1961. A counter-revolutionary military trained and funded by the United States government's Central Intelligence Agency, Brigade 2506 fronted the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front and intended to overthrow the revolutionary leftist government of President Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado.
The 1953 Iranian coup d'état was the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran, and its head of government Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United Kingdom (under the name ‘Operation Boot’) and the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project).
Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939–45).
The Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory is the idea that American officials had advance knowledge of Japan's December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
A British mercenary company established by former SAS veterans conducted clandestine and highly controversial operations around the world, with successive British governments either unwilling or unable to rein it in, a new book reveals.
Historical documents released by the Foreign Office shed new light on how a secretive team of British civil servants tried to influence the international media during the Cold War.
Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5 can authorize its agents to engage in criminal activities, potentially including murder, kidnap and torture, a London court ruled, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new government prepares to overhaul espionage laws.
The security service MI5 wiped secret information from computer hard drives being held by an inquiry examining the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane.
MI5 has lost control of its data storage operations and has been obtaining surveillance warrants on the basis of information it knows to be false, the high court has heard.
The UK's domestic-facing intelligence agency, MI5, today admitted that it captured and read Privacy International's private data as part of its Bulk Communications Data (BCD) and Bulk Personal Datasets (BPD) programmes, which hoover up massive amounts of the public's data. In further startling legal disclosures, all three of the UK's primary intelligence agencies — GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 — also admitted that they unlawfully gathered data about Privacy International or its staff.
Whitehall and MI5 identified 1,420 individuals to be kept under observation and away from certain roles.
Britain’s Foreign Office destroyed almost 200 files on Sri Lanka dating from the start of a Tamil Tiger uprising during which MI5 and the SAS secretly advised the country’s security forces, it has emerged.
Secret order on authorised criminality by spies made public after legal battle by rights groups.
The terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
The unsayable in Britain's general election campaign is this. The causes of the Manchester atrocity, in which 22 mostly young people were murdered by a jihadist, are being suppressed to protect the secrets of British foreign policy.
Fighters say government operated ‘open door’ policy allowing them to join rebels, as authorities investigate background of Manchester bomber.
When the intelligence services tilt the scales of British justice, something is deadly wrong. Our entire society, not just victims, suffer.
When Britain’s collusion with death squads across the ‘Middle East’ and Africa is mentioned it falls on deaf ears. The only time you’ll hear of Britain’s open collaboration with these forces are when they are branded ‘moderates’ or ‘rebels’ by the British media.
One of Britain’s most important agents inside the IRA has been linked to 18 murders and was provided with an alibi by a senior police officer to avoid getting him arrested during the Troubles, it has emerged.
Suggesting a spooky hand behind the smearing of Corbyn, has Len McCluskey gone full Harold Wilson? Richard Murphy, MI5 and the rebels of the PLP sneer at the idea but a less than exhaustive public realm research assignment casts doubt on crackpot certainty.
Intelligence services posing as Jeremy Corbyn supporters could be behind the abuse and intimidation of MPs on social media in an attempt to “stir up trouble” for the Labour leader, the Unite boss Len McCluskey has suggested.
The Historical Institutional Abuse (HIA) Inquiry will hear evidence from former residents of the notorious east Belfast facility where it is claimed a high-ranking paedophile ring preyed on vulnerable boys during the 1970s.
The coroner who is considering re-opening the inquests into the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings has received “significant” new information about whether MI5 knew about the IRA attacks in advance.
A BBC ‘investigation’ into Deobandi extremism bears the hallmarks of Whitehall propaganda.
A major MI5 surveillance operation against three Co Armagh republicans used methods never publicly revealed before.
Nobel Prize-winning writer Doris Lessing was under surveillance for more than 20 years during her youth by British spies who took a dim view of her Communist beliefs and anti-racist activism, declassified intelligence files have revealed.
The MI6 spy's body was found inside a padlocked bag in his flat in 2010 and detectives believed his flat was mysteriously visited after his death.
Unaccountable body consorted with terrorists and indulged in perjury.
ISIS propagandist lures aggrieved Western Muslims with promise of luscious kebabs and untold wealth.
The ultimate determinant of which party won the elections was the money behind their political campaigns — the winning and losing parties correlate directly with the quantity of funding received. Yet there is also compelling evidence of another factor — interference from Britain’s security services.
The Daily Mail has a long history of supporting right-wing parties, including the fascists in the 1930s.
Papers show top UK intelligence committee, whose members included Winston Churchill, discussed ‘anti-red activities’ following Zinoviev letter incident.
Documented evidence suggests the UK's MI5 drove a young Muslim man to the brink of madness.
‘Jihadi John’ was able to join IS for one simple reason: from Quilliam to al-Muhajiroun, Britain’s loudest extremists have been groomed by the security services.
The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.
Lawyers move to sue UK intelligence agencies for allegedly helping to render Libyan suspects to be tortured in Gaddafi prisons.
Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution.
During the 1984-5 miners’ strike so much phone-tapping was going on that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, took immediate steps to ensure that no mention was ever made of its extent. Margaret Thatcher’s success in hushing up the bugging of phones by the Security Service MI5 is finally revealed in her 1985 cabinet papers released by the National Archives.
The growing row over British security services' possible involvement in the CIA torture programme is starting to fill a few column inches. Slowly but surely, parliamentarians are feeling the pressure to investigate it fully. What's surprising is that it's this story which has put the security services in the papers. It's a speck on the horizon compared to what MI6 are alleged to have been up to in 2014.
British military intelligence agents in Northern Ireland used fears about demonic possessions, black masses and witchcraft as part of a psychological war against emerging armed groups in the Troubles in the 1970s, a study says.
Brian Gemmell hopes new regime at security service will allow truth to come out.
It’s looking increasingly likely that VIP paedophiles — particularly those in Westminster — are being protected by MI5.
Allegations broadcast this week on BBC Newsnight, based on a letter addressed to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), claim that Woolwich suspect Michael “Mujahid” Adebolajo had been tortured by Kenyan authorities “at the behest of British intelligence.”
The level of state collusion uncovered by a report into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane is “shocking”, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.
National Archives' files show how PM tried to browbeat BBC and reveals speculation about Erroll Flynn being a Nazi agent.
Half of all senior IRA members in the Troubles were working for intelligence services, a secret dossier of evidence into the murder of two RUC men has claimed.
Documents released by National Archives show prime minister Winston Churchill feared the colony would turn communist.
Labour MP Tom Watson asks David Cameron if phone-hacking inquiry will examine alleged MI5 and MI6 links to scandal.
Dr Jacob Bronowski and editor Cyril Connolly were among those whose political views were suspected by the secret services.
Security Service used blackmail to turn us into informers, immigrants say.
Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5.
‘Work for us or we will say you are a terrorist’.
Journalists who worked for Private Eye, the satirical magazine, believe that it may have been used by the security services to spread smears against the Wilson government in the mid-1970s.
Allegations that police plotted to mislead the original inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing, resulting in a wrongful conviction, have been passed to official investigators, it is understood.
BP executives working for Lord Browne spent millions of pounds on champagne fuelled sex parties to help secure lucrative international oil contracts. The company also worked with MI6 to help bring about changes in foreign governments, according to an astonishing account of life inside the oil giant.
The security services is bracing itself for further disclosures over Tube bombing intelligence failures.
The man identified by the FBI as one of the primary financers of the 9/11 attacks, Omar Sheikh, may have worked for British intelligence during the 1990s, according to a newly released book by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has disclosed that Omar Sheikh, who kidnapped and murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl and is now facing death penalty, was actually the British secret Agency MI6’s agent and had executed certain missions on their behest before coming to Pakistan and visiting Afghanistan to meet Osama and Mullah Omar.
Confidential papers, obtained by the Sunday Telegraph, have revealed that the BBC allowed MI5 to investigate the backgrounds and political affiliations of thousands of its employees, including newsreaders, reporters and continuity announcers.
An electronic tracking device of the type used by police to monitor suspected terrorists was recovered from a car belonging to the leader of the London suicide bombers in the days following July 7, a senior security official has claimed.
The official line on 7/7 is that it came out of the blue. But the security services were tipped off about the bombers’ Beeston hang-out long before the attacks.
American intelligence officials monitored e-mails sent by the leader of the 7/7 bombers and tipped off their British counterparts that they considered him a threat, it is claimed today.
One of four British citizens and residents seized by the Americans in Africa before two of them were flown to Guantanamo Bay has told the Independent that they were victims of an MI5 plot.
A former British Army mole in the IRA has claimed that MI5 arranged a weapons-buying trip to America in which he obtained detonators, later used by terrorists to murder soldiers and police officers.
MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism.
Two of the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people in the July 7 attacks were scrutinised by MI5 last year but were not considered to be a threat, the Independent has learnt.
All four July 7 London suicide bombers were tracked by intelligence services a year before the attacks, it was claimed today.
One of the suicide bombers who attacked London on 7 July was filmed arguing with a cashier about being short-changed hours before he blew himself up.
Intelligence interests may thwart the July bombings investigation.
Saudi Arabia officially warned Britain of an imminent terrorist attack on London just weeks ahead of the 7 July bombings after calls from one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives were traced to an active cell in the United Kingdom.
Police were warned that Osman Hussain, the bombing suspect arrested in Rome, was a dangerous extremist at least two years before the attempted attacks on London, it was claimed last night.
New York police insist they were right to release details of the bombs that killed 52 people in London, even though they had not been vetted by UK police.
The July 7 attackers used hair bleach and citric acid to prepare the explosives that killed 52 innocent people in London four weeks ago and set off their bombs with mobile phones, according to the New York Police Department.
A British intelligence team in Zambia is today questioning Haroon Rashid Aswat, a West Yorkshire man said to have been a personal body guard to Osama bin Laden and to have master-minded the London July 7 bombings.
A former Royal Marine, who converted to Islam, last night denied preaching violence to the four London bombers.
One of the four suicide terrorists behind the London bomb attacks was scrutinised by MI5 last year, but was judged not to be a threat to national security, a senior government official said yesterday.
A story in the Daily Mirror, 16/7/05 titled ‘Exclusive: Was it suicide?’, attempts to use essentially the same facts presented in this article, but still make them out to be bombers. There are a lot of problems with this approach, especially in the light of the latest information to emerge.
It began when Peter Power, one time high ranking employee of Scotland Yard and member of its Anti-Terrorist Branch, reported in two major UK media outlets that his company Visor Consulting had on the morning of 7th of July been conducting ‘crisis exercises’ whose scenarios uncannily mirrored those of the actual attack.
If we assume they were simply running what they thought were packets of drugs, they may well have done it before, perhaps even have conducted a ‘dry-run’ or two and of course, ‘ask no questions’, just do the run and pick up the bread.
An Anglo-French rift has marred a key European Union meeting after France's Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said police arrested members of a cell to which the suspected London bombers belonged last year.
Home Secretary Charles Clarke has denied some of the London bomb suspects were arrested last year.
Suspected al Qaeda militants behind the London bombings may well have come from a previously unknown local cell and yet had access to military explosives, European security officials familiar with the probe said.
The bombs used in Thursday's terrorist attacks were of “military origin”, according to a senior French policeman sent to London to help in what has become the biggest criminal investigation in British history.
Investigators searching for clues in the attacks here said Thursday that the three bombs used in the subway apparently were detonated by timers, not suicide bombers, and that a fourth device may have been intended for a target other than the city bus that it destroyed.
A detainee in Guantanamo Bay with strong links to Britain has claimed he acted as a go-between for British intelligence and an alleged leading member of al-Qa'ida in London.
London resident believes he was set up after being illegally arrested by US intelligence service.
Intelligence chiefs are to be questioned by Britain's top policeman over claims that the driver in the Princess Diana death crash was an MI6 spy.
Relatives of two brothers suspected of plotting a terrorist bombing outrage in Britain today made extraordinary claims that they were visited by an MI5 agent in the weeks before they were arrested.
One of al-Qaeda's most dangerous figures has been revealed as a double agent who fooled MI5, raising intense criticism from European governments who had repeatedly called for his arrest. Britain ignored warnings from friendly governments about Abu Qatada's links with terrorist groups and refused to arrest him.
One of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous figures, Abu Qatada, has been revealed as a double agent working for MI5, raising criticism from European governments, which repeatedly called for his arrest.
The Secret Intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
The crash, it was claimed, had “striking similarities” to an earlier MI6 plot to remove Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Serbia.
Security services were monitoring Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al Fayed in the month before their death, a Scottish court has heard.
A former MI5 agent has exposed a bungled attempt by the security service to bug the London embassy of one of Britain’s key allies in the war on terror.
Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive “regime change” in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west's oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.
Tony Blair has been accused of misleading MPs and concealing the tapping of politicians' telephones by the security services.
The revelation that Asif Hanif, the terrorist who blew himself up in Tel Aviv on 29 April, and his accomplice and would-be bomber, Omar Khan Sharif, were British, should have come as no revelation. Nor should it have come as a surprise that they had links with Al-Muhajiroun.
So, Brian Nelson, secret agent and loyalist assassin, is dead. More than anyone else he symbolised the symbiotic relationship between the British security state and loyalist death squads — the radioactive core of he report Sir John Stevens will present to Northern Ireland's chief constable Hugh Orde this week.
Police and Army officers conspired to murder republicans in Northern Ireland over 10 years, the longest-running criminal inquiry in UK history will conclude this week.
MI5 set up a special department to “study negro political movements” in the British empire near the end of the war, according to Colonial Office files released yesterday.
The former head of Belfast special branch claimed yesterday that he had been under pressure from MI5 not to arrest those suspected of spying for the IRA because the political fallout would damage the peace process.
British intelligence officials in World War II allowed double agents to bomb targets in the UK to protect their cover, newly declassified documents show.
British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
MI5 ran an agent to monitor the activities of Dave Nellist, the Labour MP and supporter of the far left Militant group in the 1980s. It asked the West Midlands police special branch to find an agent to infiltrate the Labour party in Coventry and cultivate Mr Nellist, then MP for the city's south east constituency.
Channel 4 News reveals for the first time, extraordinary evidence that the Irish police had a major informant, who was the man the Real IRA used to buy their bomb-carrying cars, and that the police allowed the car bomb to go through to Omagh.
Police Warned of Dissident IRA Threats Before Deadly Bombing, TV Report Says.
The British media have been gagged from reporting sensational courtroom evidence of former MI5 spy David Shayler, including his alleged proof that the British secret service paid $270,000 for al Qaeda terrorists to assassinate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1986.
Treasury officials are fighting a last-ditch battle to stop MI6 documents being handed over to creditors of the collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
National newspapers, including the Guardian, are to challenge a request by state prosecutors that parts of the trial of the former MI5 officer, David Shayler, must be held in secret, it emerged yesterday.
Clandestine operations by the secret services over the last 50 years are to be exposed in a new BBC series that will include disturbing details of the lengths to which MI5 went to track Royle Family actor Ricky Tomlinson. Confirming many conspiracy theories, the BBC2 documentary, True Spies, will show how government operatives infiltrated political groups, trade unions and media organisations.
Germany's most notorious postwar neo-Nazi party was led by an intelligence agent working for the British, according to both published and unpublished German sources.
Abandoned double agents spill Ulster Dirty War secrets.
The army asked me to make bombs for the IRA, told me I had the Prime Minister's blessing... then tried to kill me.
The London-based Islamic cleric Abu Qatada, accused by America of being a key member of Osama bin Laden's network, claims British security services offered him a chance to escape to Afghanistan. Abu Qatada, whose Bolton bank account was frozen last week when he was named on a US list of suspected terrorists, told the Observer that MI5 approached intermediaries to offer him a passport and an Iranian visa so he could leave the country.
Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, admits in the Guardian today that the agency targeted union leaders during the 1984 miners' strike, as well as prominent members of CND.
The topic was suggested to me by Kevin O'Brien of ICSA. It wasn't clear to me if it was simply that I was being played out a very long piece of rope with which to hang myself.
During the past three weeks, the Guardian newspaper has run several articles on the Force Research Unit (FRU), an undercover security operation financed and run by the British state in Northern Ireland or more than two decades.
A former president of the Transport and General Workers' Union has admitted knowingly passing information on strike tactics to the security services, after MI5 reports on a national docks stoppage in 1970 released today detailed his views and attitudes.
The truth about MI5's role in the miners' strike will not come out in Rimington's memoirs.
It's a long way from Rothesay Academy to the art deco HQ of MI6 on the banks of the Thames at Vauxhall Cross. But Andrew Fulton did it. In fact, this gentlemanly, erudite son of a Scottish reverend rose so rapidly through the ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service that he became the sixth most powerful spy in the United Kingdom.
Mark Hollingsworth on Stephen Dorril's revealing history of MI6.
The British Government helped supply deadly chemical weapon materials to Iran in spite of its own ban on such sales, according to evidence to be put before an Israeli court.
Former MI5 officer David Shayler has won his battle against extradition from France. He is charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act after going to the press in August.
This is an adaptation and massive compression of the pamphlet The Clandestine Caucus written and published by Robin Ramsay in 1996. In that the sources for most of the claims contained in this talk are to be found.
The official inquest concluded that WPC Fletcher was killed by someone firing a 9mm calibre automatic weapon from a lower floor in the Libyan embassy. But this verdict has been disputed by a number of experts, including the British Army's senior ballistics officer Lieutenant Colonel George Styles and Home Office pathologist Hugh Thomas.
It is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Mossad: In the mid-sixties, Israeli intelligence became embroiled in a political assassination in the heart of Paris, in a case that threatened to drag in the head of the Mossad, the prime minister and the entire country, and whose reverberations are felt to this day. Ronen Bergman and Shlomo Nakdimon are the first to open the “Baba Batra” file, and reveal those who buried the body of the exiled Moroccan opposition leader in the woods at night, doused in acid.
Israel’s ambitions to conquer the Golan Heights and western hopes to topple Assad raise questions around the discovery of oil in the Golan.
After mysteriously falling from a London balcony, Ashraf Marwan was found to be halfway through an expose of his life.
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) may have been involved in the hijacking of an Air France plane in 1976 by Palestinian terrorists, according to newly declassified British government documents released Friday.
Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA?
PA unveils Israeli intelligence scheme, denies Gaza links to bin Laden.
Palestinian security forces have arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, a senior official said yesterday.
Officials from the Palestinian Authority have accused the Israeli spy agency Mossad of setting up a fake al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority accused Israel's Mossad spy agency on Saturday of setting up a fake al Qaeda cell in Gaza so that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could justify Israeli attacks in Palestinian areas.
After two and a half years of investigative journalism, we believe we have unearthed the true story of Maxwell's death and can reveal how he was murdered by the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
Book claims to tell the true story behind Maxwell's decade of service for Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.
Some 60 Israelis, who federal investigators have said are part of a long-running effort to spy on American government officials, are among the hundreds of foreigners detained since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Fox News has learned.
A UK MP has said that four members of the United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq are Israeli spies.
The late President Milosevic's secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States' top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92.
Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf has disclosed that Omar Sheikh, who kidnapped and murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl and is now facing death penalty, was actually the British secret Agency MI6’s agent and had executed certain missions on their behest before coming to Pakistan and visiting Afghanistan to meet Osama and Mullah Omar.
“Drug money sustains al Qaeda,” declared the headlines, last week. “The linkage between terrorists and drug trafficking are only now becoming clear and are a great concern,” said government officials. Indeed, if only now al Qaeda’s involvement in the drug trade entered the radar of the U.S. authorities, it is not surprising that al-Qaeda has been able, not only to sustain itself, but also to expand.
The Srebrenica report reveals the Pentagon's role in a dirty war.
Interpol believes that Osama bin Laden is linked to Albanian gangs who have taken over a growing web of crime across Europe.
Related Sunday Times article alleges CIA role.
Disclosure angers European diplomats.
The November 28 edition of Britain's Observer newspaper presented fresh evidence to back up its claim that the May 7 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was deliberate.
A German intelligence officer has been caught boasting of his sympathies for a white supremacist movement, raising fears that the far right is infiltrating the country’s security apparatus.
Authorities confirm leak after arrest warrant for Iraqi murder suspect sparked violent anti-foreigner protests.
Norwegian police said Sunday they have warned politicians about possible eavesdropping of cellphone calls after several listening devices were reportedly found in central Oslo, including near government buildings and Parliament.
Christian Ringdal reports on revelations about a decade-long operation to infiltrate left-wing organizations in Norway, including the International Socialists.
A group linked to the suspected killer of the film-maker and critic of Islam Theo van Gogh had a mole inside the Dutch secret services, a court in Rotterdam heard yesterday.
All computer records in PM's office destroyed, says Zapatero.
The man accused of supplying the dynamite used in the al-Qaeda train bombings in Madrid was in possession of the private telephone number of the head of Spain’s Civil Guard bomb squad, it emerged yesterday.
The Spanish interior ministry says it is investigating reports that two suspects in the 11 March Madrid train bombings were police informants.
A Frenchman on trial over the Casablanca suicide bombings has worked for French intelligence, he has claimed at his trial in Morocco.
