New treasure trove of intelligence documents leaked

[Cain]

This time, however, American intelligence agencies are not the ones suffering an unprecedented failure in security.

No, instead its South Africa's SSA.  However, unlike previous leaks, these leaks deal with HUMINT, and with the SSA's foreign liasons - including MI6, Mossad, ASIO and the FSB.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/02/spy-cables-world-espionage-snowden-guardian-mi6-cia-ssa-mossad-iran-southafrica-leak-150218100147229.html

A digital leak to Al Jazeera of hundreds of secret intelligence documents from the world's spy agencies has offered an unprecedented insight into operational dealings of the shadowy and highly politicised realm of global espionage.

Over the coming days, Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit is publishing The Spy Cables, in collaboration with The Guardian newspaper.

Spanning a period from 2006 until December 2014, they include detailed briefings and internal analyses written by operatives of South Africa's State Security Agency (SSA). They also reveal the South Africans' secret correspondence with the US intelligence agency, the CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Russia's FSB and Iran's operatives, as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and Africa.

Among the revelations, the Spy Cables disclose how:

Israel's Mossad told its allies that Iran was not working to produce nuclear weapons just a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned it was barely a year from being able to do so;

The CIA made attempts to contact Hamas directly despite the US government listing the Palestinian group as a "terrorist organisation";

Britain's MI6 sought South African help in an operation to recruit a North Korean official who had previously refused their cash; and

South African and Ethiopian spies struggled to "neutralise" an assassination plot targeting a leading African diplomat.

The files unveil details of how, as the post-apartheid South African state grappled with the challenges of forging new security services, the country became vulnerable to foreign espionage and inundated with warnings related to the US "War on Terror".

Following the 9/11 attacks, South African spies were flooded with requests related to al-Qaeda, despite their own intelligence gathering and analysis telling them that they faced minimal direct threats from such groups, and that the main threat of violence on South African soil came from domestic far-right groups.

[Doktor Howl]

I'm not really surprised. 

Considering what the defacto requirements to be in an intelligence agency, I fully expect this sort of fuck up.

[LMNO]

This is gonna be good.

[Cain]

I knew about the Mossad one already, but seeing further dissemination of that information would be nice,