MURDERED journalist Jamal Khashoggi was about to disclose details of Saudi Arabia’s use of chemical weapons in Yemen, sources close to him said last night. The revelations come as separate intelligence sources disclosed that Britain had first been made aware of a plot a full three weeks before he walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Intercepts by GCHQ of internal communications by the kingdom’s General Intelligence Directorate revealed orders by a “member of the royal circle” to abduct the troublesome journalist and take him back to Saudi Arabia.
The orders, intelligence sources say, did not emanate directly from de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and it is not known if he was aware of them.
Though they commanded that Khashoggi should be abducted and taken back to Riyadh, they “left the door open” for other actions should the journalist prove to be troublesome, sources said.
Last week Saudi Arabia’s Attorney General confirmed that the murder had been premeditated – – in contrast to initial official explanations that Khashoggi had been killed after a fight broke out.
“The suspects in the incident had committed their act with a premeditated intention,” he said.
“The Public Prosecution continues its investigations with the accused in the light of what it has received and the results of its investigations to reach facts and complete the course of justice.”
Those suspects are within a 15-strong hit squad sent to Turkey, and include serving members of GID.
Speaking last night the intelligence source told the Sunday Express: “We were initially made aware that something was going in the first week of September, around three weeks before Mr Khashoggi walked into the consulate on October 2, though it took more time for other details to emerge.
“These details included primary orders to capture Mr Khashoggi and bring him back to Saudi Arabia for questioning. However, the door seemed to be left open for alternative remedies to what was seen as a big problem.
“We know the orders came from a member of the royal circle but have no direct information to link them to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
“Whether this meant he was not the original issuer we cannot say.”
Crucially, the highly-placed source confirms that MI6 had warned his Saudi Arabian counterparts to cancel the mission – though this request as ignored.
“On October 1 we became aware of the movement of a group, which included members of Ri’āsat Al-Istikhbārāt Al-‘Āmah (GID) to Istanbul, and it was pretty clear what their aim was.
“Through channels we warned that this was not a good idea. Subsequent events show that our warning was ignored.”
Asked why MI6 had not alerted its Five Eye intelligence partner, the US (Khashoggi was a US citizen) the source said only: “A decision was taken that we’d done what we could.”
However analysts offered one possible explanation for this.
“The misleading image that has been created of Jamal Khashoggi covers up more than it reveals. As an insider to the Saudi regime, Khashoggi had also been close to the former head of the intelligence agency.He was an Islamist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and someone who befriended Osama Bin Laden and had been sympathetic to his Jihad in Afghanistan,” said Tom Wilson, of the Henry Jackson Society think-tank.
“All of these connections are being hidden by a simplistic narrative that Jamal Khashoggi was just a progressive freedom fighting journalist. It isn’t plausible that he was murdered simply for being a journalist critical of the regime. The truth is much more complicated.”
Last night a close friend of Mr Khashoggi revealed that he was about to obtain “documentary evidence” proving clams that Saudi Arabia had used chemical weapons in its proxy war in Yemen.
“I met him a week before his death. He was unhappy and he was worried,“ said the middle eastern academic, who did not wish to be named.
“When I asked him why he was worried, he didn’t really want to reply, but eventually he told me he was getting proof that Saudi Arabia had used chemical weapons. He said he hoped he be getting documentary evidence.
All I can tell you is that the next thing I heard, he was missing.”
While there have been recent unsubstantiated claims in Iran that Saudi Arabia has been supplying ingredients that can be used to produce the nerve agent Sarin in Yemen, it is more likely that Mr Khashoggi was referring to phospherous..
Last month it was claimed that Saudi Arabia had been using US-supplied white phosphorous munitions against troops and even civilians in Yemen,
Though regulations state the chemical may be used to provide smokescreens, if used illegally it can it burn to the bone.
Chemical warfare expert Col Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said: “We have already seen in Syria that nothing is as effective as chemical, weapons in clearing urban areas of troops and civilians – Assad has used phosphorous for this very reason.
“If Khashoggi did, in fact, have proof that Saudi Arabia was deliberately misusing phosphorous for this purpose, it would be highly embarrassing for the regime and provides the nearest motive yet as to why Riyadh may have acted when they did against him.”
***
Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, couldn’t have imagined one of the other characters in his book was going to be at the centre of a huge political and diplomatic controversy, no less than the book’s central character, namely Osama Bin Laden.
The book was adapted for television as a series with the same title and tells the story of Al-Qaeda’s infamous attacks on New York and Washington. In one paragraph, Wright mentions a close friend of Bin Laden’s who shared the latter’s ambition to “establish an Islamic state anywhere.” That friend was Jamal Khashoggi. Both Bin Laden and Khashoggi were at the time active members of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Bin Laden would split from the Brotherhood to form with Abdullah Azzam Al-Qaeda, the most dangerous organisation in the world. Khashoggi, Bin Laden, and Azzam, were all the merry companions of the same extremist group.
Today, the world is busy keeping up with the news of the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, journalist and Human Rights activist in Saudi Arabia, but very few know the man’s past and his affiliation with Al-Qaeda during the war in Afghanistan. He promoted Saudi Mujahedeen focusing on his friendship with Bin Laden.
On May 4, 1988, the Saudi daily Arab News published a report by Jamal Khashoggi about his tour in Afghanistan in the company of Al-Qaeda operatives. Even though Khashoggi was just a journalist doing a report, the photos published with the article show him wearing Afghani garb and shouldering a RBG rocket launcher. More here.
Category Archives: Department of Defense
When Will the US Begin to Sanction China?
Last week, Defense Secretary Mattis said:
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis this week voiced new U.S. opposition to China’s continued militarization of islands in the South China Sea.
“We remain highly concerned with continued militarization of features in the South China Sea,” Mattis told reporters on Monday as he traveled to Vietnam.
Mattis also said China is using predatory economics to seek control over other nations.
The Chinese are engaged in a global infrastructure development plan called the Belt and Road Initiative that U.S. officials have said is being used by Beijing to expand influence and control abroad, and expand Chinese military bases around the world.
Mattis said the predatory economic policies include loans “where massive debt is piled on countries that fiscal analysis would say they are going to have difficulty, at best, repaying in the smaller countries.”
The defense secretary, echoing the new U.S. hardline policy toward China, said the United States is not seeking to “contain” China but wants more reciprocal relations.
In part from Newsweek:
“Beijing can now deploy military assets, including combat aircraft and mobile missile launchers to the Spratly Islands at any time,” said the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) on Monday in a report that included images of the three man-made islands—Fiery Cross reef, Subi, and Mischief. Its director Greg Poling told Voice of America that new antennas had been spotted on Subi and Fiery Cross, so he expected deployments there soon.
The Spratly Islands are around 500 miles from the coast of China, and Fiery Cross Reef about 740 miles from mainland China. It is approximately 170 miles off the coast of Vietnam. Why did China build these islands and how did they manage to make land out of sea?
***
But media is not paying attention.
It gets worse.
Researchers have mapped out a series of internet traffic hijacks and redirections that they say are part of large espionage and intellectual property theft effort by China.
The researchers, Chris Demchak of the United States Naval War College and Yuval Shavitt of the Tel Aviv University in Israel, say in their paper that state-owned China Telecom hijacked and diverted internet traffic going to or passing through the US and Canada to China on a regular basis.
Tel Aviv University researchers built a route tracing system that monitors BGP announcements and which picks up on patterns suggesting accidental or deliberate hijacks and discovered multiple attacks by China Telecom over the past few years.
In 2016, China Telecom diverted traffic between Canada and Korean government networks to its PoP in Toronto. From there, traffic was forwarded to the China Telecom PoP on the US West Coast and sent to China, and finally delivered to Korea.
Normally, the traffic would take a shorter route, going between Canada, the US and directly to Korea. The traffic hijack lasted for six months, suggesting it was a deliberate attack, Demchak and Shavitt said.
Demchak and Shavitt detailed other traffic hijacks, including one that saw traffic from US locations to a large Anglo-American bank’s Milan headquarters being terminated in China, and never delivered to Italy, in 2016.
During 2017, traffic between Scandinavia and Japan, transiting the United States, was also captured by China Telecom, ditto data headed to a mail server operated by a large Thai financial company.
China Telecom is able to divert the traffic by announcing bogus routes via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that governs data flows between Autonomous Systems, the large networks operated by telcos, internet providers and corporations.
After the traffic was copied by China Telecom for encyption breaking and analysis, it was delivered to the intended networks with only small delays. Demchak and Shavitt said.
Such hijacking is difficult to detect as China Telecom has multiple points of presence (PoPs) in North America and Europe that are physically close to the attacked networks, causing almost unnoticeable traffic delivery delays despite the lengthened routes.
China in comparison does not allow overseas telcos to establish PoPs in the country, and has only three gateways into the country, in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This isolation protects the country’s domestic and transit traffic from foreign hijacking.
BGP hijacking of internet traffic is a common phenomenon, one which requires the support of large network operators to exploit at scale.
While the US and China agreed in 2015 to not hack one another’s computer networks, the deal did not cover hijacking of internet backbones, Demchak and Shavitt pointed out.
The researchers suggest the allied democratic nations establish an “access reciprocity” policy for internet PoPs located in their countries, to address the traffic hijacking.
Under the access reciprocity policy US telcos and providers should be allowed to set up PoPs in China, Demchak and Shavitt said.
If access reciprocity is refused, “then an appropriate defence policy in response could state that no traffic to or from the US or ally is allowed to enter a China Telecom PoP in the US or in the ally’s networks,” the researchers suggested.
Such a policy could be inserted into BGP routing tables as required for automatic implementation.
Afghanistan Then and Now
Primer:In September of 1963, the King and Queen of Afghanistan visited Washington DC as guests of President Kennedy.
55 years later, this month, the United States and allies have entered the 17th year of military conflict in Afghanistan. The target is the Taliban. Under the Obama regime, several attempts were made to normalize relationship with the Taliban leadership including swapping one treasonous soldier for 5 senior Taliban leaders from Guantanamo. At the same time, the United States coordinated with Qatar to pay for a Taliban consulate operation in Qatar. It remains today.
Under the Trump administration, the same kind of talks are taking place with Zalmay Khalilzad leading the U.S. envoy.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-born U.S. adviser and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, briefed Ghani and Abdullah on October 13 about his meetings with senior ministers and top diplomats in four countries as part of a diplomatic mission aimed at bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table.
Since Khalilzad last visited Kabul on October 4, his tour has taken him to Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
A statement sent to journalists on October 13 by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Khalilzad met Taliban representatives on October 12 in Qatar’s capital, Doha, to discuss ending the Afghan conflict.
Mujahid said the Taliban representatives told Khalilzad that the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan was a “big obstacle” to peace and that both sides “agreed to continue such meetings.”
Another senior Taliban member said the U.S. envoy had asked the Taliban leadership to declare a cease-fire in Afghanistan for six months, in time for the planned October 20 parliamentary elections.
“Both sides discussed prospects for peace and the U.S presence in Afghanistan,” another Taliban official said.
The Taliban in exchange are seeking the release of their fighters from Afghan jails and the removal of foreign troops currently aiding Afghan security forces.
“Neither side agreed to accept the other’s demands immediately, but they agreed to meet again and find a solution to the conflict,” said a Taliban official who asked not to be identified.
A statement about Khalilzad’s diplomatic tour released by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul did not confirm his meeting with the Taliban. More here.
After 17 years, there are still more Taliban fighters? How is that possible?
Let’s go back many years shall we?
BEFORE THE AMERICAN invasion, before the Russian war, and before the Marxist revolution, Afghanistan used to be a pretty nice place.
An astonishing collection of photos from the 1960s was recently featured by the Denver Post.
GAO Report on Weapons Systems Hacking Vulnerabilities
Cant make this up and further there is a huge element of deniability that such vulnerabilities exists.
GAO: In recent cybersecurity tests of major weapon systems DOD is developing, testers playing the role of adversary were able to take control of systems relatively easily and operate largely undetected.
DOD’s weapons are more computerized and networked than ever before, so it’s no surprise that there are more opportunities for attacks. Yet until relatively recently, DOD did not make weapon cybersecurity a priority. Over the past few years, DOD has taken steps towards improvement, like updating policies and increasing testing.
Federal information security—another term for cybersecurity—has been on our list of High Risk issues since 1997.
Today’s weapon systems are heavily computerized, which opens more attack opportunities for adversaries (represented below in a fictitious weapon system for classification reasons). The full report here.
*** From Wired in part:
In other cases, the report states that automated systems did detect the testers, but that the humans responsible for monitoring those systems didn’t understand what the intrusion technology was trying to tell them.
Like most unclassified reports about classified subjects, the GAO report is rich in scope but poor in specifics, mentioning various officials and systems without identifying them. The report also cautions that “cybersecurity assessment findings are as of a specific date so vulnerabilities identified during system development may no longer exist when the system is fielded.” Even so, it paints a picture of a Defense Department playing catch-up to the realities of cyberwarfare, even in 2018.
Edelman says the report reminded him of the opening scene of Battlestar Galactica, in which a cybernetic enemy called the Cylons wipes out humanity’s entire fleet of advanced fighter jets by infecting their computers. (The titular ship is spared, thanks to its outdated systems.) “A trillion dollars of hardware is worthless if you can’t get the first shot off,” Edelman says. That kind of asymmetrical cyberattack has long worried cybersecurity experts, and has been an operational doctrine of some of the United States’ biggest adversaries, including, Edelman says, China, Russia, and North Korea. Yet the report underscores a troubling disconnect between how vulnerable DOD weapons systems are, and how secure DOD officials believe them to be.
“In operational testing, DOD routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in systems that were under development, yet program officials GAO met with believed their systems were secure and discounted some test results as unrealistic,” the report reads. DOD officials noted, for instance, that testers had access that real-world hackers might not. But the GAO also interviewed NSA officials who dismissed those concerns, saying in the report that “adversaries are not subject to the types of limitations imposed on test teams, such as time constraints and limited funding—and this information and access are granted to testers to more closely simulate moderate to advanced threats.”
It’s important to be clear that when the DOD dismisses these results, they are dismissing the testing from their own department. The GAO didn’t conduct any tests itself; rather, it audited the assessments of Defense Department testing teams. But arguments over what constitutes a realistic testing condition are a staple of the defense community, says Caolionn O’Connell, a military acquisition and technology expert at Rand Corporation, which has contracts with the DOD.
Items SecState Pompeo Manages in Dealing with N Korea
All is not so copacetic with North Korea. The United States has many channels of intelligence regarding North Korea and dealing with Kim Jung Un with many of the moving parts requires diplomatic artistry.
Below are but two examples and the prediction of a second summit between the United States and North Korea being noted, the logistics is a chess game.
FireEye has released a report stating the tools and techniques used by the group, “We believe APT38’s financial motivation, unique toolset, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed during their carefully executed operations are distinct enough to be tracked separately from other North Korean cyber activity. There are many overlapping characteristics with other operations, known as “Lazarus” and the actor we call TEMP.Hermit; however, we believe separating this group will provide defenders with a more focused understanding of the adversary and allow them to prioritize resources and enable defense.”
In their official blog, the company further explained the distinction of the group from any other hackers out there. Foremost, the malware tools used overlap or are similar indicating the similar developer behind the scenes.
The general pattern used by APT38 was observed to be this way –
- First, the information is gathered by targeting third-party vendors to understand the mechanics of their transactions.
- Then, initial compromise takes place followed by internal reconnaissance, pivot to victim servers used for swift transactions.
- After this, finally, the funds are transferred or stolen.
- This group does not stop just there but it removes all the evidence that might help the authorities trace them back or know the exact way or methodology of the fraud.
FireEye addressed the threat the group poses to its targeted sector by stating, “APT38 is unique in that it is not afraid to aggressively destroy evidence or victim networks as part of its operations. This attitude toward destruction is probably a result of the group trying to not only cover its tracks but also to provide cover for money laundering operations.” The full 32 page report is here.
Meanwhile:
The U.S. Treasury Department last week sanctioned a Turkish company, two Turkish individuals, and a North Korean individual for violating UN sanctions on Pyongyang. These sanctions came just before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s fourth trip to North Korea in preparation for an anticipated second Trump-Kim summit.
Treasury targeted the Turkey-based company SIA Falcon International Group; the company’s chief executive officer, Huseyin Sahin; the company’s general manager, Erhan Culha; and North Korea’s economic and commercial counselor in Mongolia, Ri Song Un. The sanctions were issued pursuant to Executive Order 13551, which restricts trade in arms and luxury goods with North Korea. UN Security Council Resolution 1718 from 2006 also prohibits member states from conducting such trade.
In a press release, Treasury noted that SIA Falcon operates in Latvia. In February 2018, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) named ABLV Bank of Latvia an institution of primary money laundering concern. FinCEN noted that ABLV “institutionalized money laundering as a pillar of the bank’s business practices” and conducted illicit financial transactions for North Korean procurement or export of ballistic missiles. Treasury did not confirm, however, that SIA Falcon’s Latvian branch office used ABLV’s bank services.
Treasury’s latest sanctions came the same day as The Rodong Sinmun, a North Korean state-run newspaper, published an article lambasting U.S. sanctions policy. Just days earlier, North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, implored the UN Security Council to lift sanctions in response to Pyongyang’s moves to freeze missile and nuclear testing and to destroy the Punggye-ri test facility. However, until North Korea agrees to denuclearization and a full declaration of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, facilities, and capabilities, Washington has confirmed it will not ease sanctions pressure
After Secretary Pompeo’s latest trip to North Korea, Pyongyang’s media outlets suggested U.S.-North Korea relations are improving. Of course, these latest designations, as well as ongoing U.S. diplomatic efforts to ensure international compliance with UN sanctions, could stir further tensions. Despite these risks, the sanctions send a useful message to Pyongyang that the Trump administration will not back down until the Kim regime meets its core demands. Hat tip FDD.