International Spies, Intelligence | featured news

A BRITISH businessman whose murder triggered China's biggest political scandal in decades had been informing MI6 of the private affairs of one of the most powerful families in the Communist Party in the last year of his life.

The murder of the British businessman, Neil Heywood, is still seen as stemming from a financial dispute, but the intelligence links add an enticing subplot to his death.

The Pentagon is beefing up its spy service to send several hundred undercover intelligence officers to overseas hot spots to steal secrets on national security threats after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iranian state television on Sunday aired what it described as the confession of an Iranian man detained for spying for the CIA. State television broadcast a taped interview with Amir Mirza Hekmati, in which he said he had received training by the U.S. intelligence services. The channel said he had been sent to Iran to provide misinformation to Iranian intelligence.

The CIA's operations in Lebanon have been badly damaged after Hezbollah identified and captured a number of U.S. spies recently, current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press. The intelligence debacle is particularly troubling because the CIA saw it coming....

A Syrian-born, naturalized U.S. citizen has been indicted on charges of spying on American activists opposed to the Syrian regime.

The head of Russia's deep cover U.S. spying operations has betrayed the network and defected, a Russian paper said on Thursday, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War.

Seducing the enemy in order to get information that would help save the lives of countrymen has received the blessing of an Israeli rabbi... "If it is necessary to use a married woman, it would be best [for] her husband to divorce her. ... After the [sex] act, he would be entitled to bring her back," Schvat's ruling said.