CNN) — All four airmen on board an Air Force C-17 were killed when the cargo plane crashed during a training mission near Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska on Wednesday, the Air Force reported Thursday. The names were being withheld, pending notification of next of kin.
The aircraft, assigned to the 3rd Wing at the base, crashed about 6:14 p.m. local time, Air Force Capt. Uriah Orland said.

In a statement Thursday, 3rd Wing commander Col. John McMullen said, “Our deepest sympathy and sincerest condolences go out to the family and friends of those airmen killed in this crash. Yesterday, we lost four members of our Arctic Warrior family and it’s a loss felt across our entire joint installation. Right now, our immediate focus is on providing all possible support to the loved ones of our fallen aviators. We are also engaged in a deliberate investigative process.”
Gov. Sean Parnell issued a statement expressing his sympathy for the crash victims.
“Alaskans are very connected to the military and our thoughts and prayers are with Alaska’s Air Force family,” Parnell said.

A board of officers will investigate the accident, Orland said.

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An unmanned plane crashed through a perimeter fence at Cannon Air Force Base Wednesday morning before coming to rest in a nearby cornfield.

There were no injuries, according to a statement from Cannon.

Cannon officials said the plane was an MQ-1 B Predator assigned to Cannon’s 3rd Special Operations Squadron.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) reportedly taxied off the base runway, crashing before it got airborne.

The aircraft was carrying practice munitions that posed no threat, Cannon stated in a press release.

The crash occurred off of N.M. 467 just east of Cannon’s south perimeter gate, also known as the Portales Gate.

Curry County Undersheriff Wesley Waller said deputies were called to assist Cannon personnel around 8:30 a.m. but left shortly because base personnel had the situation under control.

Joe Black said he was contacted by sheriff’s deputies just after 8:30 a.m. and went out to the crash site. Black manages the farm for owner Art Schaap.

Black said there were base emergency response vehicles on scene and hazardous materials personnel in protective clothing cleaning the area.

“It looked like they had it pretty well under control,” Black said.

He said he didn’t see any fluid leaks and there was no significant damage to crops or nearby irrigation equipment.

“It was approximately 20 to 30 feet from our pivot system … (the damage) was just their fence and probably a little bit of road work that will have to be done,” he said. “But it was okay, everything’s going to be okay.”

Black said in eight years working on the farmland near the base, “we see a lot of planes every day go over,” but he has never seen an aircraft crash in the area before.
Cannon personnel are continuing to recover debris.

Cannon Spokesman Elliott Sprehe said the cause of the crash is unknown and more information will be released as it becomes available.

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Washington (CNN) — The Pentagon is focusing on jailed Army Pfc. Bradley Manning as the main suspect in the leak of tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents related to the war in Afghanistan, a senior Pentagon official told CNN Wednesday.

Manning, 22, is believed to have accessed a worldwide military classified internet and e-mail system to download tens of thousands of documents, according to the official, who did not want to be identified because of the ongoing criminal investigation of the soldier.

The FBI is assisting in the investigation as well, its director, Robert Mueller, said Wednesday.
“We’re currently supporting the (Defense Department) investigation into that leak, and to the extent that DOD needs our assistance or we can be of help we are providing that support at this juncture,” Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I can’t say as to where that particular investigation will lead.”

The Pentagon official said investigators now believe Manning logged into a system called the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, which essentially provides military members who have appropriate security clearances access to classified e-mails and the military’s classified internet system. But the official emphasized passwords and other control measures such as physical access are needed to log onto specific systems that provide information classified at the highest levels.

Pentagon officials have said for the past several days that so far the only material they have seen on the website WikiLeaks.org is classified at the “secret” level, a relatively low-level designation that allows for a large number of military personnel to access the information.
Video: Pentagon has ‘main suspect’ in leak

The senior Pentagon official told CNN that for now, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is relying on the Army criminal investigation into Manning and the leaks to determine how it happened and what might need to be done to prevent future cases.
“The secretary is determined to get to the bottom of this,” the official said.

The editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has refused to say where his whistle-blower website got about 91,000 United States documents about the war. Some 76,000 of them were posted on the site Sunday in what has been called the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War.

Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said.

“From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the ’secret’ level,” Col. David Lapan said Tuesday. That’s not a very high level of classification.

Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the papers published on WikiLeaks.
President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information” about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don’t shed much new light on the war.

Manning was charged in June with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for allegedly illegally transferring classified data, reportedly including an earlier video that wound up on WikiLeaks.org. The private had top-secret clearance as an intelligence analyst for the Army when he was stationed in Iraq.

READ THE FULL STORY AT CNN HERE

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Washington (CNN) — A former State Department analyst was sentenced to life in prison Friday for spying for Cuba for almost 30 years.
His wife and partner in spying received a sentence of six years and nine months, but will get credit for more than a year already served.

Kendall Myers, 73, pleaded guilty last November to conspiracy to commit espionage and wire fraud. His wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 72, admitted to one count of conspiracy to gather and transmit national defense information.
Kendall Myers’ life sentence does not include the possibility of parole.
In a prepared statement, Myers said he and his wife never wanted to harm Americans.”

We wish to add at this time that we acted as we did for 30 years because of our ideals and beliefs,” he said. “We did not seek nor receive payment for our work. We did not act out of anger at the United States or from a feeling of anti-Americanism. Nor did we ever intend to hurt any individual Americans. Our overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We also hoped to forestall conflict between the two countries.”

“We share the dreams and ideals of the Cuban revolution,” he added. “We are equally committed to helping the struggling people of the world, whether they are here at home or abroad.”
As part of their sentences, the couple also agreed to pay the government more than .7 million, a figure matching Kendall Myers’ estimated salary over the years while working for the U.S. government and secretly spying for Cuba.
The two were arrested in June 2009 after meeting several times with an undercover FBI agent to whom they admitted their activities on behalf of Cuba. Those meetings were captured on video and audio tape.

Court documents painted an intriguing picture of a couple motivated by admiration for Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. They used code names. Kendall Myers was known as Agent 202. Gwendolyn Myers used the names Agent 123 and Agent E-634.
They used a shortwave radio to communicate from their District of Columbia home with their Cuban handlers. The couple also admitted they met Cuban agents on overseas trips to various places, including Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina.
Kendall Myers worked at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and later at the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He received a “top secret” security clearance in 1985.

According to court documents, Myers told the undercover FBI agent he usually took information from the State Department by memorizing it or taking notes, and upon occasion he actually took classified documents home. Gwendolyn Myers said she would process the information to be delivered to their Cuban intelligence handlers.

At the request of the defense, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton agreed to recommend the Myerses serve their time in facilities near one another to make it easier for family members to visit them. The Bureau of Prisons will make the ultimate decision on that.

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A photo taken by a resident in Hangzhou shows an unidentified flying object hovering over Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang province, late Wednesday, July 7, 2010. (Photo: Metro Express)

ABC NEWS:

An unidentified flying object (UFO) forced Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou, China to cease operations on July 7. A flight crew preparing for descent first detected the object around 8:40 p.m. and notified

A UFO in China’s skies forced Xiaoshan Airport to cease operations for one hour.

Eighteen flights were affected. Though normal operations resumed an hour later, the incident captured the attention of the Chinese media and sparked a firestorm of speculation on the UFO’s identity.

UPDATE: Aviation experts are expected to complete late Friday their investigation into an unidentified flying object that disrupted air traffic over east China for an hour on Wednesday.

An investigation team, comprising police and aviation officials, are still trying to identify the UFO that was located over Zhejiang Province.

“No conclusion has yet been drawn,” said Wang Jian, head of air traffic control with Zhejiang branch of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, told Xinhua Friday.

Media have reported speculation that the UFO might have been a private aircraft, based on the increasing number of privately-owned aircraft in the province.

But an industry insider who declined to be named Friday ruled out the speculation as “too unprofessional” without giving further explanation.

Wang Jian said the private plane was “just a guess.”

Xiaoshan Airport in the provincial capital of Hangzhou was closed after a UFO was detected at around 9 p.m. Wednesday, and some flights were rerouted to airports in Ningbo and Wuxi cities.

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Discovered this amazing looking well-worn C-5 Galaxy that flew into Amarillo some time during the wee-hours last night. I think it was here to pick up (or deliver) V-22 Osprey fuselage (or parts) to the Bell/Boeing plant here in Amarillo.

I hope you like this shot - because I literally went through hell to get it. I was attacked my a squadron of blood-sucking mosquitos (lying in wait in the open airport field) that ambushed my bare legs.

I think I lost a pint or two trying to get this shot just right!

LINK

(C) Steve Douglass

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Taliban terrorists have a secret weapon to destroy the infidel American enemy — monkey marksmen.
According to The People’s Daily in China, the Taliban in Afghanistan is “training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops.

The newspaper’s bizarre story says the Islamic insurgents have drafted macaques and baboons to be all that they can be, arming them with AK-47 rifles, machine guns and trench mortars in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The monkeys, being rewarded with bananas and peanuts, are being turned into snipers at a secret Taliban training base.

The newspaper says “photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.”

One of those sites is the Pakistan Defense Forum, which has pictures of gun-toting monkeys, and makes the wild claim that a monkey-soldier program was first launched by the CIA in Vietnam.
“Today, the Taliban forces have given the American troops some of their own medicine,” The People’s Daily said.

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US aerospace mammoth Boeing yesterday rolled out its “Phantom Eye” unmanned strato-plane, able to cruise high above the airlanes for up to four days - powered by two ordinary Ford car engines running on hydrogen.

“The program is moving quickly, and it’s exciting to be part of such a unique aircraft,” said Drew Mallow, Phantom Eye program manager, in a statement issued yesterday. “The hydrogen propulsion system will be the key to Phantom Eye’s success. It is very efficient and offers great fuel economy, and its only byproduct is water, so it’s also a ‘green’ aircraft.”

To be specific, the Phantom Eye uses 2.3 litre four-cylinder engines of a type normally found in some models of petrol-burning Ford Fusion, turbocharged and tweaked so as to run on hydrogen at 65,000 feet.

Four days would suggest pretty good fuel economy, right enough. However “green” is a bit of a stretch as hydrogen at the moment is normally made by reforming natural gas. This releases copious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere - usually more than one would generate by running an ordinary fossil-fuelled car engine - so it is hardly green*.

One might also quibble with the “moving quickly” description of Phantom Eye. True, Boeing announced that it would start work on the Eye only in March, which would suggest impressive speed by the Phantom Works engineers.

In fact, however, the company has been touting Ford-powered high altitude drones for several years now. Indeed, back in 2007 it managed to get some military development cash for the previous “Orion” single-engined version, which could also stay up for four days. At that time, Boeing considered that a twin-engined job along Phantom Eye lines would be good for 10 days, not four - though the firm seems to have walked back on that somewhat.

Phantom Eye, then, hasn’t appeared with lightning swiftness: though one might excuse the Phantom Works engineers for that. The event which actually got the ball rolling again on the Phantom Eye was Boeing’s decision to provide development cash itself, having failed to get any from government customers. Lately, companies such as General Atomics have won a lot of government UAV business by offering finished products rather than insisting on taxpayers furnishing development money up front.

The next move for Phantom Eye is shipment to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It’s expected to make its first flight next year.

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Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Villagers in eastern Afghanistan repelled an insurgent attack Tuesday, an incident that left an Afghan civilian and “numerous” Taliban dead, the NATO-led command said.
The incident took place in Ghazni province, where Taliban fighters tried to attack the village of Aalai Shahea. After unsuccessful attempts to overpower the village, they were “met with effective resistance” by its residents and quickly left the scene, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.

The event is one in a series of examples of villagers withstanding and repelling insurgent attacks, including the successful defense of a village in the Gizab district in southeast Afghanistan in April that resulted in several insurgent deaths and four arrests, the statement said.

The insurgents traveled from neighboring Uruzgan province to conduct Tuesday’s attack on the village, which is largely populated by Afghan security forces and their families, ISAF said.
“Attacking local people in their houses and villages demonstrates how desperate the Taliban have become in their failing operations to terrorize the Afghan people, and today the villagers fought back and won,” said Maj. Paul Oliver, a military spokesman.

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Captured these two new helicopters (Cobra AH1Z and UH-1Y) coming in after a test flight today (here in Amarillo) to the Bell/Textron plant.

Enjoy!

-Steve Douglass

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Looming ominously like a space ship from Star Wars, this is the future of unmanned flight.

Defence firm BAE Systems today officially unveiled its first ever high-tech unmanned stealth jet.

The Taranis, named after the Celtic god of thunder, is about the same size as a Hawk jet and is equipped with stealth equipment and an ‘autonomous’ artificial intelligence system.

The plane will test the possibility of developing the first ever autonomous stealthy Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) that would ultimately be capable of precisely striking targets at long range, even in another continent.

Taranis, the prototype of an unmanned combat aircraft of the future, which was unveiled today

The trial aircraft cost £143 million pounds to construct and spearheads BAE’s drive to convince the Ministry of Defence to invest in the next generation of unmanned aircraft.

Almost invisible to ground radar, it is designed to travel at high jet speeds and cover massive distances between continents.

The plane is built to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance on enemy territory using onboard sensors.

And it has been designed to carry a cache of weapons - including bombs and missiles -, giving it a potential long-range strike capability.

It can be controlled from anywhere in the world with satellite communications.

Experts say the cutting-edge design is at the forefront of world technology and as advanced as any US development.

The plane began development in December 2006, and is intended to prove the UK’s ability to produce a stealthy UAV.

Taranis will be stealthy, fast, able to carry out use a number of on-board weapons systems and be able to defend itself against manned and other unmanned enemy aircraft.

The concept demonstrator will test the possibility of developing the first ever autonomous stealthy Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) that would ultimately be capable of precisely striking targets at long range, even in another continent

Any future need hinges on the outcome of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, which will conclude around October.

Speaking at the unveiling ceremony at BAE Systems in Warton, Lancashire, Minister for International Security Strategy Gerald Howarth said: ‘Taranis is a truly trailblazing project.

‘The first of its kind in the UK, it reflects the best of our nation’s advanced design and technology skills and is a leading programme on the global stage.’

He added: ‘Taranis shows the UK’s advanced engineering, research, technology and innovation sector at its world-beating best.’

Taranis is an informal partnership of the UK MoD and industry British engineering firms including BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, QinetiQ and GE Aviation.

Rolls-Royce will focus on the next generation propulsion system for the Taranis demonstrator.

Speaking on behalf of the industry team, Nigel Whitehead, Group managing director of BAE Systems’ Programmes & Support business, said: ‘Taranis has been three and a half years in the making and is the product of more than a million man-hours.

‘It represents a significant step forward in this country’s fast-jet capability. This technology is key to sustaining a strong industrial base and to maintain the UK’s leading position as a centre for engineering excellence and innovation.”

The Taranis prototype will provide the MOD with knowledge on the technical and manufacturing challenges and the potential capabilities of Unmanned Combat Air Systems.

Test flights for the Taranis plane are due to start in 2011.

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Editors note: Mr Amir thinks he’ll be greeted with open arms by the Iranian government if he returns to Iran. Most likely he will be - but one of them will be holding an axe. It’s a fact he revealed the existence of several secret Iranian nuclear facilities.

A missing Iranian nuclear scientist, who Tehran says was kidnapped a year ago by the CIA, has taken refuge in the Iran section of Pakistan’s US embassy.

A spokesman from Pakistan’s Foreign Office, Abdul Basit, told the BBC that Shahram Amiri was seeking immediate repatriation to Iran.

In June videos purportedly of Mr Amiri but containing contradictory information on his whereabouts emerged.

The US rejected Tehran’s claims that it was behind Mr Amiri’s disappearance.

Iranian media say Mr Amiri worked as a researcher at a university in Tehran, but some reports say he worked for the country’s atomic energy organisation and had in-depth knowledge of its controversial nuclear programme.

Two videos supposedly showing Shahram Amiri emerged on 8 June
ABC News reported in March that he had defected and was helping the CIA, revealing valuable information about the Iranian nuclear programme.

But earlier this month, Tehran said it had proof he was being held in the US.

The allegation came after three videos purportedly of Mr Amiri emerged - the first said he had been kidnapped, the second that he was living freely in Arizona, and the third that he had escaped from his captors.

Diplomatic standoff

The BBC’s former correspondent in Tehran, Jon Leyne, says that Iran’s version of the story seems to be backed up by events unfolding in Washington DC.

Our correspondent says Mr Amiri’s sudden appearance is a major embarrassment for the American spy agencies and could lead to a diplomatic stand-off.

There are two diametrically opposed versions of the Shahram Amiri story. Iran says he was kidnapped. American sources said that he defected and was spilling the beans on the Iranian nuclear programme.

On the face of it, the Iranian version now sounds a lot more credible. However those inclined to give the US the benefit of the doubt will point out that it is still conceivable that Mr Amiri was persuaded, blackmailed, or even conceivably kidnapped by the Iranians themselves back into their hands.

Either way this is a big embarrassment for the American spy agencies, who have let slip a man they had been building up as a major catch.

Profile: Shahram Amiri
According to Mr Basit in Pakistan, the head of Iran’s interest section, Dr Mostafa Rahmani, is planning to repatriate the scientist back to his country.

But while US authorities cannot enter Iran’s diplomatic premises, they could prevent Mr Amiri leaving.

The Iran interest section is part of Pakistan’s embassy in Washington, but run by Iranians. The US cut diplomatic relations with Iran shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iranian state radio has reported that Mr Amiri said in a telephone interview from inside the embassy that the US government had wanted to quietly return him to Iran using another country’s airline and in doing so “cover up this abduction”.

“After my comments were released on the internet, the Americans realised that they were the losers of this game,” he was quoted as having said.

Mr Amiri went missing a year ago while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

The first two videos, telling starkly contradictory stories, were posted on the video-sharing site YouTube on 8 June.

In the first, initially broadcast by Iranian television, a man purporting to be Mr Amiri says he was kidnapped by the US while on pilgrimage in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina and that he is now living in the US state of Arizona.

At the time the Iranian government described the video as evidence that he was being held in the US against his will.

In the second, posted hours later on YouTube, a similar-looking man claiming to be the scientist says he is happy in the US, living in freedom and safety.

Plea for help

In the third video, which was broadcast by Iranian state TV on 29 June, a man claiming to be the missing scientist says: “I, Shahram Amiri, am a national of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a few minutes ago I succeeded in escaping US security agents in Virginia.

In the most recent video the man claims to have escaped US custody
“Presently, I am producing this video in a safe place. I could be rearrested at any time.”

The man in the video also dismisses the second recording, in which it was claimed that the scientist was living freely in the US, as “a complete fabrication”.

“I am not free here and I am not permitted to contact my family. If something happens and I do not return home alive, the US government will be responsible.”

The video finishes with the man urging Iranian officials and human rights organisations to “put pressure on the US government for my release and return”.

“I was not prepared to betray my country under any kind of threats or bribery by the US government,” he adds.

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From DailyTech

It’s little secret that the U.S. cybersecurity could use some help. Recent studies have shown the nation’s power grid and armed forces to be highly vulnerable to a cyberattack from an internet savvy nation like China or Russia. Under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama slow steps have been made to improve that state of affairs.

But now there’s a growing debate over one of the most ambitious cybersecurity initiatives yet, a program developed by the National Security Agency called “Perfect Citizen”. The program is designed to detect, neutralize, and counter cyberattacks on critical parts of the U.S. private sector — such as defense contractors, power plants, and major internet firms like Google. Its critics, though, contend that it is government meddling and playing “Big Brother”.

Raytheon Corp. has reportedly been selected to spearhead the initiative, receiving a 0M USD initial phase surveillance contract.

Internally, there’s been discord over the government’s plans to peer inside private networks. States a Raytheon email leaked to The Wall Street Journal, “The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security. Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

While the NSA had no official comment, unnamed U.S. officials took issue with the claim that they were playing “Big Brother”. They said the program was vital to protecting the nation and no more intrusive to privacy than traffic cams over intersections.

At the core of the issue is the fact that many “mission critical” systems which drive subway systems, air-traffic control networks, and more are composed of aging machines which were built at a time when security was less understood and considered. The NSA believes that China and Russian may have gained deep access and exploration into these networks, but it needs to watch them in order to determine the full extent of the penetration.

One of the U.S. government’s critical roles is to provide for the defense of the nation. Under the U.S. constitution the government has the power to “raise and support armies,” “provide and maintain a navy,” and to “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces”.

Initially, the government began to interface with the private sector — such as power utilities — to solve physical problems; for example sealing a manhole cover to a power line going to a critical government center. However, those efforts quickly expanded to the digital realm.

“Perfect Citizen” sprung from an earlier surveillance project called “April Strawberry”. The new project is still in its early stages, but NSA officials have reportedly met with utility executives and politely asked them to cooperate with the surveillance. Participation is reportedly voluntary, but those who comply will earn incentives, such as additional government contracts.

Ultimately it may be too early to judge the merits of “Perfect Citizen”, but as the program is fleshed out, it seems likely to provoke a lively debate about the government, privacy, and intervention in the private sector.

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A loud cracking sound as Excalibur broke the sound barrier forced Freaks to look up.

High above he caught site of the aircraft, spiraling out of control and headed straight down.

“Come on buddy. You can do it!” Freaks caught himself saying out loud.

As the Manta spiraled in, condensation contrails formed on the wingtips trailing out white mist behind it marking the Manta’s path through the sky like a big exclamation point, pointing down at the desert floor.

“Come on- now!” Freaks said watching the aircraft diving lower and lower.

Caysi couldn’t watch, preferring to stare at the noise on the video screens than watch Stanley die.

Gavin, Harley and Sami had left the Remote Humvee, stepped outside and stood gazing into the air at the Manta now tumbling down out of control.

“Any time now Static.” Gavin yelled.

“I can’t look.” Sami said turning away.

It was clear to everyone if something didn’t happen in the next few seconds, it never would.

BUY THE E-BOOK TODAY AT A SPECIAL LIMITED-TIME REDUCED PRICE!

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July 8, 2010

By Graham Warwick
AVWK Washington

Airships are survivors—a genus of aircraft that has been around since the dawn of aviation and is now being offered another chance at lasting success. This time the mission is persistent surveillance, but can undisputed endurance carve out a role for unmanned airships that lasts beyond today’s war?

As it embarks on a 7-million contract to develop the Long-Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) for deployment by the U.S. Army to Afghanistan in early 2012, Northrop Grumman believes the unmanned airship can find long-term roles in border security and disaster relief, as a communications and surveillance platform. “There is a lot of emphasis on today’s war, but tomorrow the airship can provide inexpensive surveillance,” says Alan Metzger, Northrop Grumman LEMV program director.

The vehicle will use 15,000-20,000 lb. of fuel to stay aloft for 3-4 weeks in the surveillance role. “That’s only ,000-25,000,” he says. The Army calculates it would take 12 MQ-9 Reaper-class fixed-wing unmanned aircraft and their crews to sustain the same mission.

The LEMV’s role is to maintain continuous surveillance over a wide area, providing correlated video, radar and signals intelligence data to the brigade combat team on the ground. Stripped of its sensors and long-endurance fuel tanks, the same vehicle could lift 20 tons of cargo with minimal modification, says Metzger, adding: “Airships are not for everything, but there are opportunities they are suited for. It will come down to economics.”

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

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Moscow, Russia (CNN) — A spy swap between the United States and Russia took place Friday at the airport in Vienna, Austria, Russian state media reported.
A plane carrying 10 Russian agents, who were expelled from the United States for intelligence gathering, took off from Vienna, apparently bound for Moscow, Russia, state TV reported.

A separate plane carrying four people convicted of spying for the United States took off from Vienna, too, bound for a destination in the West, according to Russia Today, the state television station.
The elaborately choreographed transfer — reminiscent of a scene from the Cold War — took about an hour, Russian state media reported.

The 10 pleaded guilty in the United States on Thursday for failing to register as foreign agents and were ordered out of the country. They then boarded a U.S.-chartered flight accompanied by U.S. Marshals, a federal law enforcement source said.
Video: Spy swap between U.S., Russia Video: Russian spies: Deal or no deal? Video: Accused spy responds to photos

Their expulsion was in exchange for Russia’s release of the four prisoners, officials from both countries said Thursday.
In Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder said none of the 10 had passed classified information and therefore none was charged with espionage.

“They were acting as agents to a foreign power,” he told CBS News, referring to the Russians who, U.S. officials have said, had been under observation by federal authorities for more than a decade.
All of their children have been repatriated, he said. Attorneys for some of the Russians involved in the case said no children were aboard the Vienna-bound flight.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel told PBS’ “NewsHour” that although the 10 didn’t plead guilty to being spies, they “were clearly caught in the business of spying.”
In a conference call with reporters, senior administration officials said the agents agreed never to return to the United States without permission from the U.S. government.
Holding them would have conferred no security benefit to the nation, they said.
This “clearly serves the interests of the United States,” one official said.

A second official said the four prisoners in Russia were in failing health, a consideration that prompted quick completion of the deal.
Under the plea agreements, the defendants disclosed their true identities in court and forfeited assets attributable to the criminal offenses, the Justice Department said in a news release.
“Defendants Vicky Pelaez, Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko, who operated in the United States under their true names, admitted that they are agents of the Russian Federation; and Chapman and Semenko admitted they are Russian citizens,” the Justice Department said.

Carlos Moreno, an attorney for Pelaez, said his client does not want to take up residence in Russia and would prefer ultimately to live in her native Peru or in Brazil where she has family. Pelaez hopes to continue her work as a journalist, according to Moreno.
Pelaez told the court that Moscow has promised her free housing in Russia and a ,000 monthly stipend for life, as well as visas for her children to travel to see her. Pelaez and her husband, both naturalized American citizens, were stripped of their citizenship as a part of the plea deal.

Authorities have lost track of an 11th suspect, who was detained in Cyprus, released on bail, and then failed to check in with authorities as he had promised to do.
In Moscow, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree Friday pardoning the four individuals imprisoned for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies, the Kremlin press service said, according to state-run RIA Novosti.

Though the four Russians were released to the custody of the United States, that does not necessarily mean they would go to America, an embassy spokesman said.

“Three of the Russian prisoners were convicted of treason in the form of espionage on behalf of a foreign power and are serving lengthy prison terms,” the Justice Department said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood. “The Russian prisoners have all served a number of years in prison and some are in poor health. The Russian government has agreed to release the Russian prisoners and their family members for resettlement.”

It added, “Some of the Russian prisoners worked for the Russian military, and/or for various Russian intelligence agencies. Three of the Russian prisoners have been accused by Russia of contacting Western intelligence agencies while they were working for the Russian (or Soviet) government.”

The individuals pardoned by Russia are Alexander Zaporozhsky, Gennady Vasilenko, Sergei Skripal and Igor Sutyagin.

All four appealed to the Russian president to free them after admitting their crimes against the Russian state, press secretary Natalia Timakova said.

But in Washington, State Department spokesman Mark Toner denied Thursday that Sutyagin had been a spy.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the move was made “in the general context of improving Russian-American relations, and the new dynamic they have been given, in the spirit of basic agreements at the highest level between Moscow and Washington on the strategic character of Russian-American partnership.”

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Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis has been chosen as the new head of the U.S. Central Command, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Thursday. Mattis replaces Gen. David Petraeus, who was recently tapped by President Barack Obama to head the military campaign in Afghanistan.

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DIY: Military UHF SATCOM antenna

PART THREE

By Steve Douglass

By now you might be wondering when I’m going to write about building the UHF SATCOM antenna.

I mean – isn’t that why you tuned in?

To recap, I wrote (and you patiently read) about my motivation and my rant about the high cost of new and surplus antennas, not to mention a little about the cool new receiver (Uniden BCD-998T/BCD-396XT) I intend to use(said) antenna with.

So without further delay –

I once reasoned that if I ever came across one of the Dorne & Margolin antennas again – if I could just take some photos and (maybe) some measurements I might be able to reverse-engineer one and possibly build my own version.

Heck, I had (on many occasions) built home-brew UHF Yagi beams and in fact sold quite a few in the past, offering them for sale on my now (long defunct) Intercepts Newsletter – with many of them still in use today.

All it would take (I figured) was some educated-best guess-photogrammetric analysis (with something in the image to indicate scale) and I could probably Yankee-engineer a decent-working-prototype with the final goal selling (either antennas or the plans to build their own) to like-minded UHF MILCOM aficionados like myself.

As fate would have it, at an open house (air show) at Cannon Air Force Base I finally (after quite a few years wait) was able to inspect (up close) and take a few photos of another D&M antenna.

It was part of a military PR –display – connected to a DAMA portable (man-pack) UHF SATCOM transceiver. I again pumped the airman (in charge of the display) for information about the system and took a few close-up photos. I couldn’t help but notice his raised eyebrows at my more-than-passing curiosity and intense interest in his radio rig he but didn’t say anything.

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Later (as I examined my photos) I came to the (false) realization that the antenna must be a simple X-beam design. I guessed (incorrectly) they weren’t much more complicated than the Yagi’s I had constructed.

The driven elements looked much like two folded dipoles, attached to a short boom (six feet) situated behind a series of x-shaped directors with a wire-mesh reflector at the back. How hard could that be to replicate?

Using the photos as my guide, I experimented and over the years I built many antennas. Although they all worked (as good UHF MILAIR antennas) I was never able to monitor the UHF satellites with any real success. The most I could ever manage were choppy or weak, static filled brief intercepts. My assumption was I just didn’t have the element measurements figured out right.

Then one day while doing some research on the Internet I stumbled across this: http://www.marlboroughcomms.com/MCL/Product.aspx?proId=65

Marlborough Communications Limited is a British Company that builds military-communication gear under various government contracts, for both her Majesty’s special armed services as well for us Yanks.

Like other companies of this type, seeking lucrative government bid-approval, specifications of all their products are (SOP) posted online in downloadable Adobe Acrobat .pdf form.

However, standing out clearly among the usual obtuse list of equipment specifications, frequency ranges and MilSpec nomenclature was something I had never seen - a simplified three-view drawing of their manpack foldable UHF SATCOM antenna known as the AV2040-2 – complete with metric dimensions.

CLICK TO ENLARGE:

Dimensions! Was this the missing data I needed? I quickly downloaded the .pdf and printed it out.

I then took it to my computer guru, Wilhelm Scream (not his real name) since he is to math what Lance Armstrong is to cycling.

He took a long look at the three-view and the dimensions posted, produced a set of digital calipers and placed them on the drawing.

After a few minutes of caliper(ing) calculating and re-calculating, Scream said, “This drawing is to scale. Within a small degree of error – we could upscale it and use them as blueprints to build your antenna. “

Over the next few minutes, Scream produced the measurements that had eluded me for so long. A slow grin spread across my face when I realized that it was very possible to build a working UHF SATCOM antenna, an esoteric passion to be sure, but one that had been floating around in the back of my consciousness for a very long time.

After several brain-fart sessions with Scream, we drafted up a laundry list of parts we would need, which included: several sections of various-sized PVC piping, aluminum rods of various length, copper wire, RF connectors, RG-6 coax feed-line and flat aluminum bar-stock for construction of the driven elements.

Most of the tools we would need to cut, drill and shape our parts, Scream already had – which included electric saws, a Dremel and a drill press.

Armed with our list we went to the only place that had everything an Interceptor could need to build a UHF SATCOM antenna system – Home Depot.

It took several trips – but soon we had everything we needed – and incredibly I paid something in the neighborhood of .00.

To be continued in PART 4.

READ PART ONE HERE!

READ PART TWO HERE!

You might also like: The Interceptors Club & the Secret of the Black Manta

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CNN) — More information about an alleged Russian spy ring that was operating in the United States is expected to be revealed Wednesday at court hearings in Virginia and Massachusetts, court officials said.

Accused Russian spies Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley have a newly scheduled hearing in Boston federal court at 11 a.m., according to their attorney, Paul Krupp.
Three other suspects, Michael Zottoli, Patricia Mills and Mikhail Semenko, are scheduled to appear for a preliminary hearing Wednesday morning in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court, the officials said.

Zottoli and Mills have already admitted that they are Russian citizens and have been living as a couple under false identities in Virginia. Prosecutors said that they made the admissions soon after being arrested and authorities have found evidence to support that information.
The other suspect, Semenko, is accused of aiding the plot by allegedly conducting private wireless computer links to communicate with a Russian government official, court documents said.

In all, 11 suspects were arrested in the alleged spy plot in late June.
Meanwhile, a human rights activist has raised the possibility that a Russian researcher convicted of spying for U.S. intelligence services could be exchanged for one of the spy suspects in the United States.

Ernst Chyorny, a member of the Public Committee in Defense of Scientists in Russia, told CNN on Wednesday that the mother of Igor Sutyagin, the convicted Russian spy, told him about the development.

Earlier on Wednesday, Russian news agencies also reported that Sutyagin may be swapped along with other individuals in exchange for the people suspected of spying for Russia and detained in the United States.

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CNN) — The Pakistani army killed one of the most wanted Taliban commanders on Sunday in the country’s tribal region, the military said Tuesday.

He is Ameer Ullah Mehsud, one of the founders of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP.
Mehsud, 45, was from the town of Makeen in South Waziristan, one of the seven districts of Pakistan’s lawlessness tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The military said Mehsud, wanted for a bounty of 4,000, was killed during an exchange of fire with soldiers near Miran Shah in North Waziristan. He was known as Mazloomyar, which means “friend of the oppressed.”

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New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) — A massive, silver-colored blimp is expected to arrive in the Gulf Coast Tuesday to aid in oil disaster response efforts.
The U.S. Navy airship will be used to detect oil, direct skimming ships and look for wildlife that may be threatened by oil, the Coast Guard said Monday.

The 178-foot-long blimp, known as the MZ-3A, can carry a crew of up to 10. It will fly slowly over the region to track where the oil is flowing and how it is coming ashore.
The Navy says the advantage of the blimp over current helicopter surveillance operations is that it can stay aloft longer, with lower fuel costs, and can survey a wider area.
The Coast Guard has already been pinpointing traveling pools of oil from the sky.

“The aircraft get on top of the oil. They can identify what type of oil it is and they can vector in the skimmer vessels right to the spot,” Coast Guard Capt. Brian Kelley said.
But the problem since last Wednesday has been the ability to clean it up before it approaches land.

Rough seas have hampered cleanup efforts and tests by the boat — called A Whale — billed as the world’s largest skimmer.
Tests of A Whale’s ability so far are “inconclusive,” meaning the massive converted oil tanker–which is 3.5 football fields long — has yet to prove its Taiwanese owner’s claim that it can skim between 15,000 and 50,000 barrels of oil off the sea in a day.

The Coast Guard said the testing period for the A Whale has been extended through Thursday.
So far, crude oil floating in the sea has not been concentrated enough for A Whale to skim effectively, according to oil company BP, even though it appears the ship has been surrounded by pools of oil just a few miles from the gusher.

“We’ve got oil coming up from over a mile below the surface. And it doesn’t always come up in one spot. It’s not always predictable. So, in fact, we need to locate the oil first, and then assign the ship to the areas of heaviest concentration,” BP spokesman Hank Garcia said.

Bad weather has hindered cleanup efforts, he said.
“When you’ve got 6-foot, 8-foot seas, it’s not going to lend itself to good capture of the oil.”
According to the National Hurricane Center’s 8 a.m. ET update Tuesday, two low-pressure weather systems over the Gulf of Mexico are persisting for another morning, but neither has more than a 30 percent chance of evolving into a tropical depression or more severe storm over the next 48 hours.

On Monday, authorities said tar balls linked to the crude gushing from BP’s ruptured deepwater well had reached Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain and hit the beaches near Galveston, Texas.

The Coast Guard reported over the weekend that a shift in weather patterns could send more oil toward sensitive shores in Mississippi and Louisiana, and bad weather over the past few days has significantly hampered cleanup efforts.

Anne Rheams, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, said Monday that the pattern was expected to persist for at least three more days.
The National Hurricane Center said early Tuesday morning that a low-pressure area located near the Louisiana coast was producing a few showers and thunderstorms, but it was not likely to develop into a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours.

Federal estimates say between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels (about 1.5 million to 2.5 million gallons) of oil have been gushing into the Gulf daily since April 22, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank in the Gulf, two days after it exploded in flames.
The accident left 11 workers dead and uncorked an undersea gusher that BP has been unable to cap for 11 weeks.

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AVWK ARES BLOG:

Patent Lifts Veil on Boeing’s Speed Agile
Posted by Graham Warwick at 7/2/2010 9:02 AM CDT

I am researching something on future airlifters and wanted artwork on the stealthy super-STOL tactical transport Boeing windtunnel tested under the US Air Force Research Laboratory’s Speed Agile program. I asked Boeing if they had a releasable image. No, they said. I asked AFRL. No, said they. So there I was passing the time browsing the US Patent and Trademark Office website and what do I find but this:

Source: USPTO

The patent is here and it’s Speed Agile, or close to it based on the one image of a 2008 windtunnel model that I do have, from a presentation by the Boeing program manager at an AIAA conference.

Photo: Boeing

Speed Agile involved low- and high-speed windtunnel tests of a stealthy airlifter concept that could take off in 1,500ft and cruise at Mach 0.8. Usually STOL aircraft aren’t that fast. Boeing’s design achieves this “speed agility” using a “propulsive wing” - engines embedded in the wing exhaust throught slots at the trailing edge to provide lift as well as thrust.

RELATED LINK: SPEED AGILE POWERPOINT SOLICITATION DOCUMENTS

Source: USPTO

Speed Agile is part of studies into a potential C-130 replacement once called AMC-X, then the Advanced Joint Air Combat System (AJACS), but now morphed into the Air Force/Army Joint Future Heavy Lift. AFRL says Lockheed Martin is now building models of its design for low- and high-speed windtunnel testing. Lockheed has previously shown what could be their Speed Agile concept.

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CNN) — An unmanned cargo spacecraft failed to dock as scheduled Friday with the International Space Station, a NASA spokeswoman said.
The Progress cargo vessel, a resupply craft, was trying to dock with the space station when a technical problem occurred about 20 minutes before the scheduled docking time, said Lynette Madison, the spokeswoman.
The vessel flew about two miles past the space station.

“This is kind of a fluke event,” she said. “We normally don’t have any problems with Progress dockings. We dock those every few months. So this is an unusual event.”

Six people aboard the space station — three Americans and three Russians — are not in danger, Madison said.

Engineers with the Russian Space Agency will try to dock the vehicle again, but they do not plan to try that on Friday, she said. They have “some” control of the vehicle, she said.

The craft launched Wednesday from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan, the state-run RIA-Novosti news agency of Russia said.

It planned to deliver “fuel, oxygen, scientific equipment and video and photo equipment” to the space station along with food, water and personal items for crew members, the news agency said.
Progress re-supply vehicles typically deliver supplies to the space station and haul away trash, burning up on re-entry.

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Police are on high alert across Pakistan after a deadly suicide attack on a Sufi Islamic shrine in the eastern city of Lahore.

Security has been increased in Lahore and at Sufi shrines across the country, after 42 people died at the Data Darbar shrine on Thursday.

Protesters have demonstrated outside the shrine, in anger at what they say were lax security measures.

Wider demonstrations are expected for later in the day, after Friday prayers.

No group has yet said that it carried out the attack, but the finger of blame is being pointed at the Taliban.

The type of target, a Muslim shrine, is unusual. There are some elements among Islamist extremists, including the Taliban, who believe that worshipping at the shrines of saints is un-Islamic, and this is one theory why this shrine was attacked.

There was another sectarian attack just over a month ago in Lahore in which 80 people died, when two mosques used by Ahmadi Muslims were hit by militants.

This could be a battle within a battle that the militants are having with the Pakistani state.

The popular shrine holds the remains of a Persian Sufi saint, Abul Hassan Ali Hajvery.

It is visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year from both Sunni and Shia traditions of Islam.

The impact of the two blasts ripped open the courtyard of the shrine. Rescuers had to clamber over rubble as they carried out the victims.

The first attacker struck in the underground area where visitors sleep and prepare themselves for prayer, officials said.

As people fled, a second bomber detonated his explosives in the upstairs area.

The bombers are thought to have used devices packed with ball-bearings to maximise the impact of their attack.

A volunteer security guard at the shrine described scenes of devastation.

“It was a horrible scene,” said Mohammed Nasir. “There were dead bodies all around with blood and people were crying.”

The attack is the biggest on a Sufi shrine in Pakistan since militant attacks began in 2001.

No group has said it carried out the attack, but correspondents say the attacks continue a growing trend among militants to target members of other sects as well as minorities.

The attack may also feed the pervading anti-American sentiment, a sense that US interference in the region is indirectly to blame, says the BBC’s Jill McGivering.

Lahore has been hit by a series of bomb attacks, including a suicide blast at anti-terrorist offices in March, when at least 13 people died.

BIG MILITANT ATTACKS

28 May 2010 - 93 people killed in attacks on two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore
19 Apr 2010 - At least 23 die in suicide bombing at market in Peshawar
1 Jan 2010 - A bomb at a volleyball match kills about 100
28 Oct 2009 - At least 120 die in car bomb attack on packed market in Peshawar
15 Oct 2009 - About 40 die in a series of gun and bomb attacks
9 Oct 2009 - At least 50 die in Peshawar suicide blast
In May, more than 90 people were killed in a double attack on the minority Ahmadi sect in the city.

Earlier, security chiefs had been congratulating themselves after June was the first month in two years in which there had been no suicide bombings in Pakistan.

They said it was proof the militant networks had been disrupted.

Last year Pakistan launched a major military offensive against militant strongholds in South Waziristan.

In December the military said they had achieved victory, but subsequent reports have suggested the militants remain active in the region.

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London, England (CNN) — The former husband of alleged Russian spy Anna Chapman said her personality changed after she started having “secretive meetings” with Russian friends a few years ago.

Alex Chapman told The Daily Telegraph newspaper he “hardly knew her anymore” after she became involved with shadowy contacts.
Anna Chapman also confided to her husband that her father, Vasily, had been a senior KGB agent.

The Chapmans met at a London rave or party in 2001, when Alex Chapman, then 21, saw her across the dance floor and told her she was “the most beautiful girl” he had ever seen. She was 19.
They married six months later.

Her “carefree” bohemian lifestyle soon changed, however, he told the paper, and she became obsessed with money and moving to America.

“It was like someone having a midlife crisis, but in their 20s,” Chapman told the paper. “She would arrange to go out, but when I said I would join her, she told me not to bother because they would all be speaking Russian. She was adamant I wasn’t to meet them.”

Chapman said he had suspicions she was being “conditioned” by shadowy contacts by the time their marriage broke down in 2005.

“She had never been materialistic during the years we were together, but in 2005 and 2006, after she started having these meetings with people she referred to as ‘Russian friends,’ she was transformed into someone with access to a lot of money, boasting about all the influential people she was meeting.”

There was such a “dramatic change” in her thoughts and behavior that “I felt I hardly knew her anymore,” he said.

Chapman is one of 10 suspects arrested this week in the States as part of an alleged Russian spy ring. She was denied bail and has her next hearing July 27.
The suspects were “trained Russian intelligence operatives,” a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said, and information from court documents alleged they were part of a mission to plant “deep-cover” agents in the United States.

The Justice Department said the suspects were supposed to recruit intelligence agents, but were not directly involved in obtaining U.S. secrets themselves. They were charged with acting as agents of a foreign government, and nine also were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The case resulted from a “multiyear investigation” conducted by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Justice Department’s National Security Division, according to a Justice Department statement.
Chapman and another suspect, Mikhail Semenko, allegedly conducted the private wireless computer links to communicate with a Russian government official, one court document alleged. In one instance, Chapman was in a bookshop and the Russian government official drove by in a van to make the wireless connection, the document said.

Wednesday, a Security Service officer visited Alex Chapman at his current home in Bournemouth, England, to question him about his ex-wife, the Telegraph reported. The officer wanted to know whether Anna Chapman could have been recruited in London or even spied on Britain while she lived there, the paper said.

Alex Chapman met his former father-in-law for the first time during the couple’s delayed honeymoon to Africa in 2002, he said.”

Her dad was scary,” he said. “He was very concerned about which direction my life was going, how I was going to earn my money. Anna told me he worked as a diplomat for the Russian government. It was only much later that she told me he had been a KGB agent.”
The Chapmans remained close after their divorce in 2006, the Telegraph reported, and Alex

Chapman “watched with bemusement” as his former spouse achieved success in America.
“She had always said she didn’t like America,” Chapman told the paper. “She didn’t like their accents and would always imitate them when American TV shows were on.
“In late 2006 she went back to Russia and said she was staying there for good, but then all of a sudden she wanted to go to America. She started seeing a very rich American guy who took her to the States, and when she came back, she said she loved it.”
Anna Chapman told her ex-husband she was having trouble making her Internet real estate agency a success, he said, but the business suddenly flourished last year and she was employing 50 people.

“Clearly a lot of money had been pumped into the business from somewhere, but I couldn’t work it out,” he said.
Anna Chapman “seemed distant” when he last spoke to her four weeks ago, Alex Chapman told the paper.

“I thought I knew her, but she has taken this path I don’t believe she consciously knew she was going down,” he said. “I believe in my heart there has been some sort of influence on her, some sort of conditioning. Then, when push came to shove, she found herself in a situation she couldn’t get out of.”

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Reuters) - Patriotic, anti-American messages adorn the pages of two alleged Russian spies on Russia’s answer to Facebook, a reminder of historic suspicions and resentments that have survived the end of the Cold War.

“Russia will never abandon you!” is the repeated message on the pages of Mikhail Semenko and Anna Chapman, arrested in the United States on suspicion of being part of a Russian spy ring. Over 100 people left similar messages of support on the Russian language social netowrking site odnoklassniki.ru on Wednesday.

“Hang on in there Misha (Mikhail)… Everyone knows this is an American witch-hunt,” one surfer posted on Semenko’s page, referring to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations at the height of the Cold War.

The U.S. arrests earlier this week of 10 alleged spies and tales of secret meetings, invisible ink and secret handovers, have been splashed over the front pages of U.S. media.

Russia has angrily rejected the allegations but later said ties between the Cold War foes would not be damaged.

Semenko’s page says he is 27 and last visited on May 24. In his profile picture, the floppy-haired smiling Russian poses in front of the White House in Washington.

“Those yanks really know how to freak people out,” another surfer wrote in one of many comments slamming Americans and protesting the innocence of those arrested.

People ranging from teenage boys to female pensioners posted the comments.

Chapman, who Russian media say is actually called Kushchenko, last visited the site on June 20. The 28-year-old’s photo shows her casting a sideways glance, clad in a bright blue bustier and with flowing brown hair.

One of her many female supporters wrote: “Soon Anna will return home… Enormous respect is due to Anna. A book will be written about her and a film made.”

The spy ring is accused of gathering information ranging from data on high-penetration nuclear warhead research programs to background on CIA applicants for the Russian government.

(Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman, additional reporting by Aleksandras Budrys; editing by Ralph Boulton)

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(CNN) — International and Afghan security forces wounded and captured a Taliban district chief and killed a “large number” of insurgents in a four-hour firefight, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said in a statement Thursday.
The battle took place in a compound outside a village in the Baghran district of Afghanistan’s Helmand province after insurgents opened fire on security forces with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, ISAF said.

No security force members or civilians were killed or wounded in the fighting, but a “large number of insurgents” died, ISAF said, without providing specific numbers.
“Dozens of automatic weapons, RPG launchers and rounds, a machine gun, grenades, and ammunition were discovered along with 20 pounds of wet opium” after the fighting, the statement said.

“This joint force operation dealt another significant blow to the Taliban network,” said Col. William Maxwell, ISAF Joint Command Combined Joint Operations Center director. “These joint efforts are key to further establishing peace in the region.”

NATO-led forces have been waging an offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.
Dubbed Operation Moshtarak, the offensive was launched in February by an international coalition of 15,000 troops including Afghans, Americans, Britons, Canadians, Danes and Estonians.
The Taliban had set up a shadow government in Helmand province’s Marjah region, long a bastion of pro-Taliban sentiment.
It is a key area in Afghanistan’s heroin trade and full of the opium used to fund the insurgency.

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CNN) — A suspected Russian spy is missing after being arrested in Cyprus and released on bail, a police spokesman told CNN on Wednesday.

Authorities arrested Robert Christopher Metsos, 55, in Larnaca after an Interpol “red notice” was served on him, Cypriot police said Tuesday.

Police said he was released on bail pending further proceedings but was told not to leave the country and was ordered to check in nightly with police. He did not check in Wednesday, and police are searching for him, a spokesman said.
Metsos is among 11 suspects in an alleged Russian spy ring in the United States.

At the time of his arrest, he was traveling on a Canadian passport and was about to board a flight to Budapest, Hungary. Metsos faces extradition to the United States.
His disappearance came two days after the U.S. Justice Department announced the arrest of 10 people on charges of being Russian agents involved in a long-term mission in the United States.

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DIY: Military UHF SATCOM antenna
PART Two
By Steve Douglass

Is it just me (probably) or do antennas cost way too much? Sure that’s an odd statement to make.

I mean-how often does the average Joe think about the costs of antennas – right?

But I have never been an average Joe – and never wanted to be one.

I’ll admit - I’m an odd duck.

My idea of relaxing entertainment is to sit back with the headphones on, listening to emergency action messages on HF or scanning the MILAIR bands for Top Guns in training, fighter jocks going at it in one the nearby MOAs.

I like to be wired in – to everything – to the world. I take pride in the fact that I probably know more about what is going on in my neighborhood, city, state, world … then probably anyone I know – all because of my obsession with monitoring radio communications.

This hobby (addiction) has (time and time again) put me front-row center at some of the most tumultuous events of our times.

I once was hired (by a major news network) to ferret out and monitor the bugs and baby-monitors transmitting from inside the Branch Davidian complex during the infamous “Siege in Waco” 1993. On a cold day in February, 2003, I ran outside in my underwear and photographed the Space Shuttle Columbia as it plunged to its tragic demise over Texas.

On September, 11, 2001 I monitored the mass-confusion surrounding the FAA’s order to ground every aircraft flying over the U.S. or to shoot down any aircraft that wasn’t responding to the order. I also knew exactly where Air Force One was going when the rest of the world’s media hadn’t a clue, including the Vice President - for a time.

Because of my addiction to communications monitoring, I have become a trusted source for national, international and local news media, especially when it comes to breaking news.

My reputation was when in 1986 (while casually tuning through the shortwave bands) I happened across an errant U.S. Navy communications involving the accidental explosion of missile propellant aboard “K-219” a Soviet submarine prowling the sea lanes off Bermuda. From then on I became obsessed with radio monitoring and since, if there isn’t a scanner or the hiss of a shortwave radio playing low (almost buried) in the background, I feel cut-off.

It was then I realized that there was this entire amazing-invisible world of wireless signals, out there, just waiting to be snatched out of the ether - carrying on their backs the electromagnetic emanations of modern human condition, from tragedy to triumphs.

I’m tapped into this invisible world of waves (that are passing through your brain even as you read this) from my humble two-bedroom apartment in Texas.

It is my great passion to not let these radio emanations go undisturbed and unheard.

So that’s why I worry about the cost of antennas.

Antennas are the proverbial fly-traps that snare the waves- and (in my opinion) they cost too much.

One day-while the idea of building a UHF SATCOM antenna was rattling around in my brain-I came upon this site that sold them to soldier-of-fortune types.

I was stunned that a simple folding TACSAT antenna cost almost ,000 dollars!

In the demonstration video it looked like nothing-made of ABS plastic and flexible metal. What a rip-off!

But wait there’s more!

As an extra incentive they threw in a hand-dandy flexible tripod and carry pouch – and all this for just under three grand!

Let’s not tell them the same tripod could be had at Walmart for under twenty bucks and the pouch was just like one I saw for less than at the local sporting goods super-store, as a pistol case.
Oh- lest we forget “special pricing available for GSA employees.”

I shouldn’t be surprised – general service contractors have been ripping off the government (i.e taxpayers) for years with 0 toilet seats and 0 space diapers (MilSpec) of course since – forever.

Note: This firm also sells a 20 foot run of coax for .00 something RadioShack sells (100 feet) for .95.

Needless to say – seeing that video was just another thing that pushed me to start my DIY UHF SATCOM antenna project.

To be continued …

VIEW PART ONE HERE

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE THIS!

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Ultimate DIY: Military UHF SATCOM antenna
PART ONE
By Steve Douglass

I remember the first time I saw a Dorne & Margolin UHF portable SATCOM antenna.

It was many years ago at the annual “ROVING SANDS” military exercises held in southern New Mexico. I was there covering the games as an aviation journalist.

The world’s largest air and missile defense exercise, ROVING SANDS overseen by the JFACC, combines Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force units and pits them against each other over the White Sands Missile Range and Biggs Army Ranges.

For many years Roving Sands afforded me a unique opportunity to observe (very up-close and personal) military aviation operations that didn’t require going through the laborious task of obtaining government-vetted-sanctioned press credentials, which is exactly what I didn’t want.

Once one is allowed on the inside - you only see the stuff they want you to see. Sure you have better access-but it is chaperoned access.

My job (then) was to look for the “unacknowledged” black-project aircraft that were rumored to be involved in the games, reporting for magazines such as Popular Science and Aviation Week & Space Technology.

Almost needless to say, my compatriots and I weren’t disappointed- but that’s different story for another day.

Anyway, (being a rabid military-monitoring hobbyist) I couldn’t help but spot the uber-cool milspec-looking-fishbone-yagi antenna on a building at the Roswell Industrial Airfield (where the Red Forces were based) pointing up at what I could easily deduce was a military satellite hanging 22,000 miles above the equator in geosynchronous orbit.

Later in the week, I summoned up my courage and asked an airman (eating his lunch near the antenna at a picnic table) what it was. Apparently he was the right man to ask.
He said it was a Dorne & Margolin portable antenna used for UHF-TACSAT/DAMA voice, data and telemetry work.

The airman (a com-tech) was proud of his MOS and even took time from his lunch to show me his radio rig. It was impressive, big and bulky over-built by Harris and looked like you cold have dropped it out of the back of a C-130 without damage.

He then graciously demonstrated it for me by doing a radio check (voice) with the Joint Training Analysis and Simulation Center (JTASC) in Suffolk, VA. I was surprised at the high-fidelity and clarity of the return com-check, considering it was relayed off a rotating hunk of spinning metal and wires located some 22,000 miles in space, making the round-trip just under 50,000 miles.

As the tech continued with his demonstration, he rattled off a list of technical specifications, frequency ranges and communications parameters and protocols that I’m sure he thought I wouldn’t understand. I played dumb, scratched my head all the while trying as hard as I could to take it all in. He had no idea that he was talking to man who had written a hobbyists guide to military monitoring.

As impressive as the radio equipment was, I knew I’d never be able to afford one - even sometime in the far-flung future when it had become obsolete and be sold as surplus. It was kind of like taking a test drive in a Ferrari, all the while knowing you couldn’t even afford a Yugo.

But the antenna was a different matter entirely. I did own more than one receiver that could (with the right antenna) intercept satellite signals in the bands the airman had detailed (240 to 310 MHz) and had done so (with very limited success) from time to time.

The trouble was – that UHF TACSAT satellite downlink transmissions were what was technically described as being (right-hand circularly polarized) making reception on commercial and consumer grade antennas (usually vertically or horizontally polarized) problematic at best.

Without getting too technical, rotating satellites have forced the use of circular polarization. The fundamental advantage of circular polarization is that all reflections change the direction of polarization, precluding the usual addition or subtraction of main and reflected signals. Therefore there is far less fading and flutter when circular polarization is used at each end of the link.

Over the years I tried building my own high-gain UHF Yagi antennas to receive military satellite communications with very limited success. Main trouble was, as the satellite rotated, the signal would swing out of phase and fade (rapidly) in and out and sound much like a record skipping – making interception just plain irritating.

To put it simply, it was like trying to have a conversation with someone riding on a merry-go-round. If you weren’t running along side them (constantly) all you would here were bits and bursts of voice.

Radio hobbyists (with more technical knowledge than moi) had built home-brew helical antennas and were reporting (via Internet news-groups) great success but the antennas were difficult to engineer and build, especially for a man who barely squeaked by with a C in high-school algebra.

For me, looking at the formulae for calculating the spacing and turns on a helical antenna was like trying to read Greek, but that wasn’t what turned me off to ever attempting to build one.

The main problem was, none of the antennas looked like the one I saw at Roving Sands, with the majority of the home-brew designs looking like the coils of razor wire ringing the local prison, plus they were huge -sometimes doubled-arrays hardly portable or easily mounted on the back balcony of my tiny apartment.

What I wanted was a Dorne & Margolin (now EDO) portable SATCOM antenna, transportable, easy to set up and tear down – and not to mention – tough-looking and black-like those used by covert operators, Rangers, SEAL teams and DELTA.

I wanted an antenna that didn’t say “ham radio operator” but instead said “government spy” and “If I tell you what it is I’d have to kill you – so don’t ask.” type of antenna.

Anyways –

Over the years I’ve held out hopes that some military surplus outlet advertising on the Internet would acquire one of these beauties (and not knowing what it was) offer it for sale at a reasonable price.

A few years ago – it happened. Dorne & Margolin/EDO and Trivec Avant (the major military contractors building SATCOM gear) surplus antennae began showing up sporadically on Ebay.

Unfortunately they were snapped up fast (and at premium prices) by the well-heeled radio hobbyists.

The going price was around 3K to (for pristine units) with even broken or heavily used and abused specimens going at over 1,000 dollars.

Refurbished (and new) antennas can also be (now) bought through various re-sellers, who equip shady-military-security for hire companies like Blackwater/Xe Services LLC.

These controversial firms are authorized to communicate with the military via SATCOM in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackheart International (http://www.bhigear.com/) offers a mini-satcom antenna on their site for the walk-away price of ,000. Heavy-duty antennas (Bigger-more gain) could be had for 5K.

I couldn’t (and still cannot) fathom why a simple assembly of electronics and aluminum sticks could cost so durn-much! For the life of me – they looked like a simple X-wing Yagi design. Was there something super-secret or complicated (hidden within the design) that made their construction complicated and thusly (and rightly-so) so expensive?

Still, hope springs eternal and I thought it would only be a matter of time before one popped up at a price I could afford.

In the meantime – I acquired a new super-scanning radio released by Uniden the BCD-996XT. The 996XT is a computer-controlled-programmable scanner with a 25,000-channel capability.

To quote Uniden: “This new scanner significantly raises the bar with much improved APCO-25 digital decoding as well as a host of new features and more memory. For those who like GPS scanning, a feature no other manufacturer offers, you can now enable and disable not only Systems but Groups as well depending on your location (the optional GPS antenna that we sell is required).

The radio offers a band-scope feature, a Fire Tone Out search feature to help you determine the tone out frequencies being used, improved Close Call, APCO-25 NAC code decoding, and more. The 996XT is a big leap forward.”

The main reason I acquired the BCD-996XT was for its digital-decoding capabilities. I run a small news-gathering company for the local and (sometimes national) news media called “The Reporter’s Edge.” Recently, the Texas Department of Public Safety had “gone digital” employing APCO-25 digital encoding.

It is my job to scan the public safety bands for their producers and reporters and be a sort of safety net for the breaking-news stories that sometimes fall between the cracks while already over-tasked and under-staffed TV journalists took time to write, edit and produce the news as well have a life that didn’t dictate them spending their sacred off-time with their ears glued to a scanning radio.

Since I always have a scanning radio droning on in the background wherever I am- it was only natural I found a way to make my obsession (for intercepting radio communications) pay off. Once the Texas DPS went digital, the only way to listen in on their communications was with an APCO-25 digital scanning radio. The BCD-996XT filled the bill nicely.

The BC-996XT didn’t disappoint. In fact I can say without hesitation it is the finest scanning radio I have ever owned, only second to the handheld version Uniden’s BC396XT which I also own. Computer aided scanning software of choice is Butel’s ARC396, followed closely by Freescan.

The BCD996XT (with its’ more than ample 25,000 channel capacity) freed my BCT396XT for use as a MILCOM scanner, something I have wanted to do for a long while.

I love intercepting military aircraft (MILAIR) and associated communications on all the bands and to have a scanner dedicated to just MILCOM was a real treat.

I even went so far as to custom outfit a case (containing an ASUS netbook computer loaded with scanning software) that also housed the BCT396XT making it look somewhat like a retro SAC “nuclear football” capable of sending the emergency action messages triggering WWIII. It comes complete with an Cold-War era SAC badge that General Ripper would trade his Cuban cigars to have.

Okay, I admit-its’ kind off geeky – but that’s just my way.

The “football” does have a utilitarian function. Underneath the netbook are two gel-cell batteries that can power the scanner and computer for up to twelve hours. Both can be charged by plugging it into a wall or a cigarette/accessory plug in an automobile.

(C) Steve Douglass

Continued soon in PART II

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Author’s note: In light of the recent Russian spy-flap - I couldn’t help but post this excerpt. It seems the Russian spy ring arrested in New york used the same technique to transmit their reports.
Sometimes fact does mirror fiction.

-Steve Douglass

Colonel Pepper typed up two progress reports on two separate computers. One was on his official AFOSI work computer located in his office, the second he composed a few hours later on his personal laptop he always kept in his sight at all times.

The first report was for General Hogle, a skillfully written fictional report detailing his meeting with the Interceptors and how they were just a bunch of precocious kids who accidentally encountered Excalibur and made a model of it.

It was Pepper’s recommendation he have the kids sign an inadvertent disclosure to a classified program agreement and have the model confiscated and destroyed.

He also explained he had sufficiently put the fear of prosecution into these kids (who really didn’t mean any harm) and who were just in the wrong place at the right time. Since it was displayed as a “hypothetical” de-sign, the damage was minimal and the cat hadn’t been let out of the proverbial bag.

It was Pepper’s recommendation that the case be consid-ered closed.

The second report was for his spy-handler Chin. It also included a report on the Interceptors, and how they could be used unwittingly to fill their needs, gathering intelligence for them on Excalibur.

Although this report did include his interviews with Static and his gang, he did leave out one important fact that he felt that Chin did not need to know.

He didn’t tell them they were just teenagers. He knew his North Korean intelligence contact would not believe kids were able to succeed where their best-trained agents had failed.

The report for Hogle would be printed and hand-delivered to the General via a secure courier.

The other (to his North Korean spy masters) would travel over the internet and be posted on a public site in plain sight, but encrypted to prevent interception.

To insure that he would never be uncovered as a spy, Pepper took great efforts to keep his secret files safe.

He never typed up his reports on a computer attached to the internet. He knew from experience that by hooking up a phone line to a computer it became a gateway to almost anyone and especially to the FBI or CIA.

Although he used a laptop computer to covertly send his reports, he did so in a unique way that left no trace.

As part of his duties as an AFOSI agent, he was well aware there were powerful programs that could recover even erased files from a computer hard drive. So he took great pains to insure the hard drive on his per-sonal computer remained pristine. To do this he saved his secret files on tiny secure media cards, the type usually used inside digital cameras.

These cards could hold over 2 gigabytes of documents and were only half size of a tea bag (but wafer thin) and could be easily hidden in places that even the most diligent spy hunter would never look.

But Pepper didn’t bother to hide his files in some re-mote location. He knew they would only be safe if kept close at hand.

Since AFOSI officers were routinely investigated by internal Air Force security agents (charged with finding spies) he kept them close by at all times, inside his compact digital camera tucked away in the breast pocket of his uniform.

Since a camera was part of his normal investigating gear it would not seem out of place for him to be carrying one. If by chance he was ever suspected of being a spy (and the camera was confiscated) all one would find on the card were what looked like ordinary snap-shots any amateur shutterbug would take.

But cleverly imbedded in the images were all of Pepper’s stolen secrets, interlaced inside innocuous looking photographs of sunrises, landscapes and vacation snapshots.

To hide his files inside the photographs, he used a commonly available program known as “Outguess” utilizing a technique in intelligence circles known as steganographic encoding.

Since it would also be very suspect to have such a pro-gram on his personal computer it was kept stored on another photo media card and never mounted on his hard drive. In this way a routine search of his computer would show nothing to arouse suspicions.

To transmit the imbedded documents to his handlers he just simply posted them on a photography website known as photographio.org, where amateur photographers could display their talents.

It made Pepper smile to think that at any given moments thousands of people could be viewing his photos without knowing they were looking at top-secret military documents.

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Allegations that Moscow ran a spy ring in the US are baseless and a throwback to the Cold War, a Russian foreign ministry official has said.

The claims had set back attempts by President Barack Obama to reset ties with Moscow, the official added.

The response comes a day after 10 people were arrested in the US.

They are accused of conspiracy to act as unlawful agents of a foreign government, a crime which carries up to five years in prison.

Nine of those arrested also face a charge of conspiracy to launder money.

An 11th suspect named as “Christopher R Metsos” was arrested on Tuesday on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, police there said. They said he was arrested at Larnaca airport as he tried to leave for Budapest and was released on bail pending US extradition proceedings.

The 11 were allegedly part of an operation where agents posed as ordinary citizens, some living together as couples for years.

‘Special finesse’
A statement by the Russian foreign ministry official on Tuesday said of the allegations: “In our opinion, such actions are groundless and pursue unseemly aims.”

So what were the alleged spies up to? The Department of Justice has made clear that none of the information at stake was classified. Most of what the alleged spies were after seems almost anodyne.

While the incident does not look good for the Russians, the initial US reaction has been sanguine.

Russian spy stories may be a throwback to the Cold War and sound alarming but they probably don’t surprise anyone in Washington, especially not in the government.

US officials who travel to Moscow routinely turn off their Blackberries and leave them on the plane to make sure data on their phones remains out of reach of any tech-savvy Russian intelligence agents.

Cold War meets ‘burger summit’

It added: “In any case, it is highly deplorable that all of this is happening against the background of the reset in Russia-US ties announced by the US administration itself.”

Earlier, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow expected Washington to provide an explanation over the arrests.

“The moment when it was done has been chosen with a special finesse,” he added with apparent sarcasm, declining further comment.

Mr Lavrov’s comments suggest that he thinks it is an attempt by someone or some group within the US power structure to undermine newly warming relations between Moscow and Washington, the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow reports.

One Russian academic told the BBC he believed the case would serve as a warning to US President Barack Obama not to trust Russia and not to get too close to the Kremlin, our correspondent adds.

A senior government official told the BBC that it was unfortunate that such activity was taking place in the US, but that it should not affect the momentum established in the relationship with Russia.

Last week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was in Washington for talks, and was seen having lunch with President Obama.

‘Deep cover’

Alleged intercepted messages in court documents suggest the 10 people arrested in the US were asked to find information on topics including nuclear weapons, US arms control positions, Iran, White House rumours, CIA leadership turnover, and political parties.

Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc - all these serve one goal: fulfil your main mission, ie to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels

Message to alleged agents

The US Department of Justice says that eight of the suspects allegedly carried out “long-term, ‘deep-cover’ assignments” on US soil, working in civilian jobs so as not to arouse suspicion.

They were allegedly trained by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to infiltrate policy-making circles and collect information, according to papers filed in the US court for the southern district of New York.

They were told to befriend US officials and send information using various methods to Russian government handlers.

US officials say the spy ring was discovered in a “multi-year investigation” by FBI agents who posed as Russian handlers and gleaned information from two of the suspects.

Investigators say some of the agents had been using false identities since the early 1990s, using codes and engaging in advanced computer operations, including posting apparently innocent pictures on the internet which contained hidden text.

The FBI also reported observing older techniques, such as messages sent by invisible ink, money being buried next to a beer-bottle marker and “brush pasts” in parks, where agents swap identical bags as they pass each other.

“You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,” says one purported message to two of the suspects that was intercepted by US intelligence.

“Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc - all these serve one goal: fulfil your main mission, ie to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels.”

Generally, spies were allegedly tasked with becoming “Americanised” to be able to do this, with some pursuing university degrees, holding jobs, and joining relevant professional associations, court documents said.

The group allegedly got close to a scientist involved in designing bunker-busting bombs and a top former intelligence official.

Five of the suspects briefly appeared in a Manhattan federal court on Monday, where a judge ordered them to remain in prison until a preliminary hearing set for 27 July.

These included a couple known as “Richard Murphy” and “Cynthia Murphy”, who were arrested in Montclair, New Jersey; Vicky Pelaez and a man known as “Juan Lazaro” who were arrested in Yonkers, New York state; and Anna Chapman, who was arrested in Manhattan, New York City.

Another three - Mikhail Semenko and a couple known as “Michael Zottoli” and “Patricia Mills” - appeared in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, after being arrested in Arlington, Virginia.

The final two people - a couple known as “Donald Howard Heathfield” and “Tracey Lee Ann Foley” - were arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, and appeared in a federal court in the city.

All the suspects except Ms Chapman and Mr Semenko have also been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.

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CNN) — North Korean officials are criticizing the U.S. for bringing heavy weapons into a border village in the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, state media reported Monday.
State-run KCNA claims U.S. forces brought weapons into the Panmunjom area Saturday morning. A U.S. military spokesperson did not immediately return a call requesting comment.

“The introduction of heavy weapons to the area around the conference hall where armed forces of both sides stand in acute confrontation is a premeditated provocation aimed to spark off a serious military conflict,” the agency said.

North Korean military officials have said they will “take strong military countermeasures” if the weapons are not removed, according to KCNA.

Tensions have been running high on the Korean peninsula since the sinking in March of a South Korean warship.

Last week G8 leaders condemned North Korea’s communist government for its alleged role in the sinking of the ship.

“Such an incident is a challenge to peace and security in the region and beyond,” the G8 final communique said.
“We demand that the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea refrain from committing any attacks or threatening hostilities against the Republic of Korea,” the statement said.

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By DAVID STRINGER and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV (AP) – 40 minutes ago
LONDON — One of the Cold War’s most famous defectors says Russia may have as many as 50 deep-cover couples spying inside the United States.
Oleg Gordievsky, a former deputy head of the KGB in London who defected in 1985, said Russian President Dmitry Medvedev would know the number of illegal operatives in each target country.

The 71-year-old ex-double agent told The Associated Press on Tuesday that, based on his experience in Russian intelligence, he estimates that Moscow likely has 40 to 50 couples operating under cover in the U.S.

“For the KGB, there’s usually 40 to 50 couples, all illegal,” said Gordievsky, who defected to Britain after supplying information during the Cold War to the U.K.’s MI6 overseas spy agency.
Gordievsky said he spent nine years working in the KGB directorate in charge of illegal spy teams. “The president will know the number, and in each country how many — but not their names,” Gordievsky said.

The FBI announced Monday the arrests of 10 alleged deep cover Russian agents after tracking the suspects for years. They are accused of attempting to infiltrate U.S. policymaking circles while posing as ordinary citizens. All 10 are charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general — an offense that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

An 11th person allegedly involved in the Russian spy ring was arrested Tuesday in Cyprus.
In Moscow, Russia called the arrests an unjustified throwback to the Cold War, and senior lawmakers said some in the U.S. government may be trying to undercut President Barack Obama’s warming relations with Moscow.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it was regrettable that the arrests came amid Obama’s push for a “reset” in Russian-U.S. ties.
“
These actions are unfounded and pursue unseemly goals,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “We don’t understand the reasons which prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to make a public statement in the spirit of Cold War-era spy stories.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that U.S. authorities announced the arrest just days after Medvedev visited the United States and Obama.

“They haven’t explained to us what this is about,” Lavrov said at a news conference during a visit to Jerusalem. “I hope they will. The only thing I can say today is that the moment for doing that has been chosen with special elegance.”

Medvedev met with Obama at the White House last week after the Russian leader visited high-tech firms in California’s Silicon Valley. The two presidents went out for cheeseburgers, exchanged jokes and walked together in the park.
When ask if those arrested were Russian spies, the Russia Foreign Ministry and the foreign intelligence service refused to comment.

Countries often have a number of intelligence officials whose identities are declared to their host nation, usually working in embassies, trade delegations and other official posts.
Gordievsky said he estimates there are 400 declared Russian intelligence officers in the U.S., and likely 40 to 50 couples charged with covertly cultivating military and diplomat officials as sources of information.

He said the complexity involved in training and running undercover teams means Russia is unlikely to have significantly more operatives than during his career.
“I understand the resources they have, and how many people they can train and send to other countries,” Gordievsky said. “It is possible there may be more now, but not many more, and no more than 60.”

The ex-KGB official said deep cover spies often fail to deliver better intelligence than their colleagues who work in the open.
“They are supposed to be the vanguard of Russian intelligence,” Gordievsky said. “But what they are really doing is nothing, they just sit at home in Britain, France and the U.S.”
He said undercover operatives may report to Russia once or twice a year, but otherwise work largely without any support network.

“The illegals don’t have the support of the office behind them, and they are very timid as a result, so they don’t produce a lot,” Gordievsky said.

In Britain, the case stirred memories of the country’s own illegal Soviet spy — Melita Norwood, a civil servant who spent about 40 years passing atomic research and other secrets to Moscow. Authorities ruled against prosecuting the elderly grandmother when she was exposed in 1992. Norwood died in 2005 at the age of 93.
Britain and Ireland’s foreign ministries said Tuesday they are seeking clarification over the alleged use of forged passports by suspects arrested in the case by the FBI.

Documents filed at the U.S. District Court for the southern district of New York allege that suspect Richard Murphy used a false Irish passport and accuse suspect Tracey Lee Ann Foley of using a fraudulent British passport.

Ireland’s foreign ministry said it had asked the U.S. embassy in Dublin for confirmation. In London, the Foreign Office said it was checking the claim.

Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin contributed to this report.

Update: Russian spy a hottie:

A ring of 10 Russian moles right out of a Cold War spy novel was smashed yesterday — and among those busted was a flame-haired, 007-worthy beauty who flitted from high-profile parties to top-secret meetings around Manhattan.

Russian national Anna Chapman — a 28-year-old divorcee with a masters in economics, an online real-estate business, a fancy Financial District apartment and a Victoria’s Secret body — had been passing information to a Russian government official every Wednesday since January, authorities charged.

In one particularly slick spy exchange on St. Patrick’s Day, Chapman pulled a laptop out of a tote bag in a bookstore at Warren and Greenwich streets in the West Village while her handler lurked outside, receiving her message on his own computer, the feds said. A similar exchange occurred at a Midtown coffee shop at 47th Street and 8th Ave.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: The Interceptors Club and the Secret of the Black Manta

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Videos Deepen Mystery of Iranian Scientist
By NAZILA FATHI

The mystery of an Iranian nuclear scientist who Iran says was kidnapped and tortured last year by American agents deepened Tuesday, as Iran publicized what it called a videotaped statement from him that proved its claim. That videotape was contradicted by a second videotape posted on the Internet in which a man who identified himself as the same scientist said he was studying happily in the United States.
Enlarge This Image

A video in which Shahram Amiri says he is safe and free in the United States and studying for a Ph.D

The rival videos that claimed to show the scientist, Shahram Amiri, 32, emerged on the eve of an expected United Nations Security Council vote on a new set of American-backed economic sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. Iran has accused the United States of extracting information about its program from Mr. Amiri.

In preparing for the vote, the Obama administration has been offering classified intelligence briefings to members of the Security Council. In these sessions, American officials have used new evidence to revise previous conclusions about whether Iran has suspended efforts to design nuclear warheads, according to foreign diplomats and some American officials.

It is not clear whether information from Mr. Amiri contributed to these revised assessments.

The United States government has never acknowledged Mr. Amiri’s existence, much less admitted to having any role in his disappearance. But one United States official, declining to speak on the record about an intelligence matter, said the very fact that the video released by Iran showed someone talking over an Internet connection would suggest that he was not being held under duress.

“The United States doesn’t force people to defect or hold them here if they do,” the official said. “That’s ridiculous. It’s ultimately their decision.”

The official added: “Does anyone really believe that someone supposedly held captive has Internet access and the ability to make and send videos? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Mr. Amiri, whom Iran has described as one of the country’s top nuclear scientists, vanished during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia a year ago. He worked at Iran’s Malek Ashtar University, an institution linked to the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards.

ABC News reported on March 30 that Mr. Amiri had defected to the United States, citing current and former C.I.A. officials.

But Iranian authorities said Tuesday that the video it publicized was the first document that proved Mr. Amiri had been abducted. The Foreign Ministry summoned the Swiss ambassador in Tehran to press a formal complaint, the ISNA student news agency reported.

The Swiss handle American interests in Tehran because Iran and the United States severed diplomatic ties after the 1979 revolution.

“In the meeting with the Swiss envoy, Iran emphasized that America is responsible for the life and well-being of Mr. Amiri,” the ISNA report said. “It stressed that his abduction was against international laws and human rights.”

The report said Iranian officials also submitted other documents to the Swiss ambassador that they said proved their claim of Mr. Amiri’s abduction, and also that of a former Iranian deputy defense minister, Alireza Asgari, who disappeared during a trip to Turkey in 2007.

In the Iranian video of Mr. Amiri, which was broadcast on state-run television, an announcer identified a young man, in a blurry video wearing a T-shirt and talking in Persian through a computer phone hookup, as Mr. Amiri. He said he had been kidnapped in a joint operation involving the C.I.A. and the Saudi intelligence service in Medina on June 3, 2009. He said that he was taken to a house in Saudi Arabia, that he was injected with a shot, and that when he awoke he was on a plane heading to the United States.

He said he recorded the video on April 5 in Tucson, Ariz. The announcer said that he could not disclose how the video was obtained. The second video, which was released shortly afterward on YouTube, showed a young man, slightly more overweight than the man in the first video, wearing a suit in a well-decorated room, who also identified himself as Mr. Amiri. He said in Persian that he was free and safe in the United States and was working on his Ph.D. He also demanded an end to what he called faux videos about himself, saying he had no interest in politics or experience in nuclear weapons programs.

“My purpose in today’s conversation is to put an end to all the rumors that have been leveled at me over the past year,” he said. “I am Iranian, and I have not taken any steps against my homeland.”

The rival videos emerged as Iranian officials in Tehran denied some speculation that they would be willing to swap three American hikers, who have been in jail there since last summer, for Mr. Amiri.

Ramin Mehmanparast, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in Iranian government news accounts that it was not Iran’s practice to “exchange people whose cases are still with the judiciary,” referring to the cases of the three hikers, who are accused of entering Iran illegally and spying.

“The two cases are not comparable,” Mr. Mehmanparast said. “Iran will use legal channels to secure the release of Mr. Amiri.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

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By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
WSJ

KABUL—More than billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.

The cash—packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes—is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan’s small economy and the murkiness of their origins.

Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say.

The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled .5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. “It’s not like they grow money on trees here,” said a U.S. official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. “A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course.”

Most of the funds passing through the airport are being moved by often-secretive outfits called “hawalas,” private money transfer businesses with roots in the Muslim world stretching back centuries, officials say.

The officials believe hawala customers who have sent millions of dollars of their money abroad include high-ranking officials and their associates in President Hamid Karzai’s administration, including Vice President Mohammed Fahim, and one of the president’s brothers, Mahmood Karzai, an influential businessmen.

Where they allegedly get the money is one of the questions under investigation.

Vice President Fahim, responded through his brother, A.H. Fahim, a businessman, who denied the allegations. “My brother? He doesn’t know anything about money,” Mr. Fahim said.

Mahmood Karzai said in an interview he has engaged in only legitimate businesses and has never transferred large sums of cash from the country.

In a Jan. 22 financial disclosure form that he gave the Wall Street Journal to review, Mr. Karzai declared his net worth was ,157,491 with assets of ,163,347 and liabilities of ,006,106. He reported an annual income of just over 0,000 but didn’t provide dates.

Mahmood Karzai, an American citizen, blamed the allegations that he was transferring illicitly earned cash from Afghanistan on political opponents.

“Yes, millions of dollars are leaving this country but it is all taken by politicians. Bribes, corruption, all of it,” he said. “But let’s find out who is taking it. Let’s not go on rumors. I’ve said this to the Americans.”

President Karzai addressed the matter at a news conference Saturday, calling for greater scrutiny of business run by relatives of officials.

“Making money is fine and taking money out of the country is fine,” he said. “The relatives of government officials can do this, starting with my brothers. But there’s a possibility of corruption,” he said without being specific.

Between the beginning of 2007 and February of this year, at least .18 billion left through the airport, according to Afghan customs records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Jo’l van Houdt for The Wall Street Journal

The Sharay-e-Shahzada financial trading center, the main money exchange market in Kabul. More than billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years.
AfMoney
AfMoney

U.S. officials say the sum of declared money may actually be higher: One courier alone carried .3 billion between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009, said a senior U.S. official, citing other documents that are in the possession of investigators.

The officer said officials believe the money was declared, and that Afghan customs records may not be complete.

In their declarations, couriers must record their own names and the origins of the money they are transporting. Instead, they usually record the name of the Afghan hawala that is making the transfer and the one in Dubai that is accepting the cash. Often, the actual sender of the money isn’t named, officials said.

“We do not even know about it. We don’t know whose it is, why it is leaving, or where it is going,” Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said at a December conference about the money leaving the airport.

The capital flight has continued apace in 2010. In the week ending May 29, more than million, about half of it in U.S. currency, left the airport, according to a senior Afghan customs official. Apart from U.S. dollars, the currencies being flown out range from Saudi riyals and Pakistani rupees to Norwegian kroners and even outdated Deutsche marks now redeemable for euros.

“You get boxes loaded on the back of airplanes. You get guys, literally, bringing boxes of cash onto the plane,” said the senior U.S. official.

The declared cash is believed to represent only “a small percentage” of the money moving out of the airport and all of Afghanistan, said Gen. M. Asif Jabar Khail, the chief customs officer at Kabul’s airport.

Hundreds of millions of undeclared dollars, maybe billions, are being carried across Afghanistan’s porous border with Iran and Pakistan, where a number of Afghan hawalas have branches, he said.

One figure often cited by Afghan and Western officials is million a day leaving Afghanistan. That is .65 billion a year, more than a quarter of the current GDP.

Officials can’t say how much money is coming into Afghanistan; that isn’t tracked by Afghan authorities.

Afghanistan’s endemic corruption and the suspected involvement of high-ranking officials in the opium trade has left the government deeply unpopular and fueled support for the Taliban, undercutting a war effort that is now focused on convincing Afghans to support their own state and turn away from the insurgents.

U.S. officials are also trying to disrupt the flow of money to the Taliban.

The insurgency is believed to earn a sizable portion of its operating expenses from extortion and the opium trade, funds that can easily be moved abroad to avoid detection or seizure.

But anticorruption efforts have increasingly taken center stage for the U.S. and its Western allies.

Restoring the credibility of the Afghan government is a central tenet in the American counter-insurgency strategy. Combating corruption by the government is now as important a priority as actually fighting insurgents. The investigations into the money flow are part of the shift in focus.

The U.S.-led initiatives carry significant risks: many of those believed by U.S. officials to be involved in shipping money out of the country are key Afghan power brokers who are important allies in the fight against the Taliban.

Balancing demands to clean up the government with the need to keep them on the same side will not be easy, especially after so many years of Western officials effectively turning a blind eye to allegations of wrongdoing by their Afghan allies, U.S. officials say.

Gen. David Petraeus, who is to take over shortly as top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, faces the added burden of getting to know many of the main players in the country at the same time that officials under his command are investigating some of them and their associates.

The formal banking system here is in its infancy, and hawalas form the backbone of the financial sector. The State Department says that 80% to 90% of all financial transactions in Afghanistan run through hawalas.

Hawala networks run on what is effectively an honor system and much of the business they do is legitimate.

At their simplest, a customer drops off money at one dealer and is given a numeric code or password, which is then used by the money’s recipient when the cash is picked up elsewhere.

The hawala operators then settle up among themselves.

Hawala fees are far cheaper than standard banks, often as little as 0 to move 0,000, and transfers can be done in minutes or hours as opposed to days.

The United Nations, NATO and international aid groups in Afghanistan have at times even used hawalas to move money and pay staff.

Afghanistan, shattered by three decades of war, is a predominantly cash society. “Afghanistan is a country that is built on personal connections and trust.

If someone trusts them, he will do business with them,” said Haji Najib, the chairman of Kabul’s hawala association. “It is the same for hawala.”

But those ties also make hawalas especially difficult for investigators to penetrate to find the identity of funds being transferred.

Most of the cash loads are taken on one of the eight flights a day from Kabul to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Wealthy Afghans have long parked their money in Dubai.

Dubai and neighboring emirates, with their tight banking secrecy laws, also have been used by the Taliban and al Qaeda as a convenient locale to move or stash money, although Emirati authorities have aided American efforts to shut the flow of terror money.

Investigators say it is tough to trace where the Afghan money goes from Dubai. Some of it likely stays in Dubai, either in banks or property, some is probably moved to U.S. and Europe or back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Dubai officials didn’t respond to requests to comment.
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Over the past year, U.S. and other Western officials have grown alarmed by the ways in which corruption was fueling support for the Taliban and indications that the massive infusions of poorly monitored Western dollars were helping foster a culture of graft.

A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration-led operation to disrupt Taliban finances created last year is now largely focused on corruption, and military intelligence is dedicating more assets to fighting the problem. NATO is also creating a task force to scrutinize contracts given to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces.

American officials have been working with Afghanistan’s central bank to impose Western-style regulation on hawalas.

Under Afghan regulations enacted in the last few years, hawalas must report to the central bank every transaction they made monthly.

When they suspect illicit activity, they are required to file suspicious activity reports, as banks do in the U.S.

Compliance has been spotty, say central bank officials. Most still keep track of their transactions in handwritten ledger books, sometimes transcribed in code.

So far, not one suspicious activity report has been filed, said a central bank official who deals with enforcement matters.

Cash also moves easily without detection or declaration through the airport’s VIP section, where officials aren’t searched and often driven straight up to their planes, according to Gen. Asif and U.S. and Afghan officials.

Gen. Asif said that last year, his men found a “pile of millions of dollars,” all undeclared, and tried to stop it from being put on a flight to Dubai.

But “there was lots of pressure from my higher ups,” Gen. Asif said. He refused to name the officials who were pressuring him, but said: “It came from very, very senior people. They told me there was an arrangement with the central bank and told me to let it go.”
—Mark Schoofs in New York and Maria Abi-Habib in Kabul contributed to this article.

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Ten alleged Russian spies — including a Cambridge couple — were arrested Sunday on charges that they plotted to act as unlawful agents of the Russian Federation inside the United States.

The US Department of Justice issued a press release this afternoon announcing that the 10 people, who allegedly used fictitious names like Murphy and Foley, were arrested in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia.

All 10, and an additional suspect who is being sought, are charged in criminal complaints filed in US District Court in Manhattan.

A couple who went by the names Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley were arrested on Trowbridge Street in busy Harvard Square around 7:30 pm Sunday by a team of FBI agents.

The pair appeared briefly today in US District Court in Boston. A prosecutor asked to have them moved to New York to face charges, but Heathfield and Foley asked for a detention hearing in Boston.

US Magistrate Judge Jennifer Boal ordered them held without bail pending a hearing Thursday on whether they should be held without bail pending resolution of the charges.

The arrests served as a reminder that over two decades after the end of the Cold War, and despite the Obama administration’s declared effort to “reset” relations with Moscow, Russia and the United States remain suspicious rivals.

Spying between the two countries with the largest nuclear arsenals remains a fact of life, said John Pike director of Globalsecurity.org a military information website.
“They’re the only other country on the planet that can wipe out civilization,” Pike said. “They are one of the few countries on the planet that could pose a military challenge to us.”

But while Washington’s intelligence effort centers around Russia’s military secrets, the Kremlin’s spies on US soil are usually after trade secrets.

“Computer chips, pharmaceuticals, the secret formula for Coke,” Pike said, adding that industrial espionage has not often brought Moscow intelligence coups.

“Pretty much the last time they were really successful was when they stole the secret for the atomic bomb,” he said.

In court papers, federal prosecutors said all of the spies, including the husband and wife team of ‘Heathfield’ and ‘Foley,’ were supposed to become as American as they possibly could.

The Cambridge couple and the others are charged with conspiring from the 1990s to the present to serve as agents in the United States of a foreign government.

Nine of those charged, including Heathfield and Foley, are also accused of money laundering.

According to Massachusetts Secretary of State records, “Heathfield” incorporated a company called Future Map Strategic Advisory Services LLC this February and listed its business as “consulting.”

The FBI alleges that “Heathfield” and “Foley” both claimed to be Canadian by birth but who became naturalized Americans. Heathfield, according to the FBI, took his name from a man who died in Canada in 2005.

The FBI suggests they have long suspected both Heathfield and Foley of being someone other than who they claim to be. In 2001, the FBI said, they searched a safe deposit box at a Cambridge bank and found film negatives of ‘Foley’ that had been prepared by TACMA, a Russian film company.

They also found a Canadian birth certificate that they used to match the dead Canandian man to the Heathfield living in Cambridge, the affidavit said.

The FBI said the ”Boston conspirators” would get “info tasks” from their handlers in Moscow. The requests have included information about “United States policy with regard to the use of the internet by terrorists, United States policies in Central America, problems with United States military policy and ‘Western estimation of (Russian) foreign policy.”

The alleged Boston spies, in a May 2006 message, reported about the new boss of the CIA and the upcoming 2008 campaign that ended with the election of the nation’s first African-American president.

In cryptic references in the FBI affidavit, the government reported that the Boston spies had established ties to former congressional staffers and faculty members of an unidentified university.

Heathfield, the report said, also had ties with a “former high-ranking United States Government national security official” whose name was not included in the FBI affidavit.

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BBC:

The head of CIA has defended awarding a large contract to the controversial security company formerly known as Blackwater.

The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, said the company’s bid was US m less than its nearest rival.

The contract, worth 0m, is to provide security at US consulates in the cities of Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Blackwater guards allegedly opened fire on unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007 killing 17 people.

In the wake of the killings, the company rebranded itself Xe Services.

The company ended its operations in Iraq in 2009, in line with a ban by the government.

The US government said in January 2009 that it would not renew the company’s task orders.

An Iraqi inquiry found Blackwater quards killed 17 civilians in 2007
The new contract with the company initialy runs for a year but could be extended to 18 months.

In a rare television interview with ABC News on Sunday, Leon Panetta said the CIA had come to rely on such companies to provide security for forward bases.

“[Xe] provided a bid that… underbid everyone else by about US m. And a panel that we had said that they can do the job, that they have shaped up their act. So there really was not much choice but to accept that contract,” Mr Panetta explained.

As Blackwater the company provided the US government with bodyguards both in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It hit the headlines when four of its bodyguards were ambushed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and their bodies left hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Earlier this month the company was put up for sale.

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By PEGGY NOONAN WSJ

Now Petraeus owes us a candid assessment of the Afghan effort.Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s greatest contribution to the war in Afghanistan may turn out to be forcing everyone to focus on it. The real news there this week was not Gen. McChrystal’s epic faux pas and dismissal but that 12 soldiers were killed on June 7-8, including five Americans by a roadside bomb, making that “the deadliest 24 hour period this year,” as The Economist noted. Insurgency-related violence was up by 87% in the six months prior to March. Agence France-Presse reported Thursday that NATO forces are experiencing their deadliest month ever.

There have been signal moments in this war since its inception, and we are in the middle of one now.

It has gone on almost nine years. It began rightly, legitimately. On 9/11 we had been attacked, essentially, from Afghanistan, harborer of terrorists. We invaded and toppled the Taliban with dispatch, courage and even, for all our woundedness, brio. We all have unforgettable pictures in our minds. One of mine is the grainy footage of a U.S. cavalry charge, with local tribesman, against a Taliban stronghold. It left me cheering. You too, I bet.

But Washington soon took its eye off the ball, turning its focus and fervor to invading Iraq. Over the years, the problems in Afghanistan mounted. In 2009, amid a growing air of crisis, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates sacked the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan—institutional Army, maybe a little old-style. He was replaced by Gen. McChrystal—special forces background, black ops, an agile and resourceful snake eater. “Politicians love the mystique of these guys,” said a general this week. Snake eaters know it, and wind up being even more colorful, reveling in their ethos of bucking the system.

Last August, Gen. McChrystal produced, and someone leaked, a 66-page report warning of “mission failure.” More troops and new strategy were needed. The strategy, counterinsurgency, was adopted. That was a signal moment within a signal moment, for at the same time the president committed 30,000 more troops and set a deadline for departure, July 2011. The mission on the ground was expanded—counterinsurgency, also known as COIN, is nation building, and nation building is time- and troop-intensive—but the timeline for success was truncated.

COIN is a humane strategy not lacking in shrewdness: Don’t treat the people of a sovereign nation as if they just wandered across your battlefield. Instead, befriend them, consult them, build schools, give them an investment in peace. Only America, and God bless it, would try to take the hell out of war. But the new strategy involved lawyering up, requiring troops to receive permission before they hit targets. Some now-famous cases make clear this has endangered soldiers and damaged morale.

The Afghan government, on which COIN’s success hinges, is corrupt and unstable. That is their political context. But are we fully appreciating the political context of the war at home, in America?

The left doesn’t like this war and will only grow more opposed to it. The center sees that it has gone on longer than Vietnam, and “we’ve seen that movie before.” We’re in an economic crisis; can we afford this war? The right is probably going to start to peel off, not Washington policy intellectuals but people on the ground in America. There are many reasons for this. Their sons and nephews have come back from repeat tours full of doubts as to the possibility of victory, “whatever that is,” as we all now say. There is the brute political fact that the war is now President Obama’s. The blindly partisan will be only too happy to let him stew in it.

Republican leaders such as John McCain are stalwart: This war can be won. But there’s a sense when you watch Mr. McCain that he’s very much speaking for Mr. McCain, and McCainism. Republicans respect this attitude: “Never give in.” But people can respect what they choose not to follow. The other day Sen. Lindsey Graham, in ostensibly supportive remarks, said that Gen. David Petraeus, Gen. McChrystal’s replacement, “is our only hope.” If he can’t pull it out, “nobody can.” That’s not all that optimistic a statement.

The U.S. military is overstretched in every way, including emotionally and psychologically. The biggest takeaway from a week at U.S. Army War College in 2008 was the exhaustion of the officers. They are tired from repeat deployments, and their families are stretched to the limit, with children reaching 12 and 13 without a father at home.

The president himself is in a parlous position with regard to support, which means with regard to his ability to persuade, to be believed, to be followed. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows more people disapprove of Mr. Obama’s job performance than approve.

When he ran for president, Mr. Obama blasted Iraq but called Afghanistan the “good war.” This was in line with public opinion, and as a young Democratic progressive who hadn’t served in the military, he had to kick away from the old tie-dyed-hippie-lefty-peacenik hangover that dogs the Democratic Party to this day, even as heartless-warlike-bigot-in-plaid-golf-shorts dogs the Republicans. In 2009 he ordered a top-to-bottom review of Afghanistan. In his valuable and deeply reported book “The Promise,” Jonathan Alter offers new information on the review. A reader gets the sense it is meant to be reassuring—they’re doing a lot of thinking over there!—but for me it was not. The president seems to have thought government experts had answers, or rather reliable and comprehensive information that could be weighed and fully understood. But in Washington, agency analysts and experts don’t have answers, really. They have product. They have factoids. They have free-floating data. They have dots in a pointillist picture, but they’re not artists, they’re dot-makers.

More crucially, the president asked policy makers, in Mr. Alter’s words, “If the Taliban took Kabul and controlled Afghanistan, could it link up with Pakistan’s Taliban and threaten command and control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons?” The answer: Quite possibly yes. Mr. Alter: “Early on, the President eliminated withdrawal (from Afghanistan) as an option, in part because of a new classified study on what would happen to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if the Islamabad government fell to the Taliban.”

That is always the heart-stopper in any conversation about Afghanistan, terrorists and Pakistan’s nukes. But the ins and outs of this question—what we know, for instance, about the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, and its connections to terrorists—are not fully discussed. Which means a primary argument in the president’s arsenal is denied him.

It is within the context of all this mess that—well, Gen. Petraeus a week and a half ago, in giving Senate testimony on Afghanistan, appeared to faint. And Gen. McChrystal suicide-bombed his career. One of Gen. McChrystal’s aides, in the Rolling Stone interview, said that if Americans “started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular.”

Maybe we should find out. Gen. Petraeus’s confirmation hearings are set for next week. He is a careful man, but this is no time for discretion. What is needed now is a deep, even startling, even brute candor. The country can take it. It’s taken two wars. So can Gen. Petraeus. He can’t be fired because both his predecessors were, and because he’s Petraeus. In that sense he’s fireproof. Which is not what he’ll care about. He cares about doing what he can to make America safer in the world. That means being frank about a war that can be prosecuted only if the American people support it. They have focused. They’re ready to hear.

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