FPI Overnight Brief: July 9, 2010

FPI Overnight Brief
July 9, 2010

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Russian Spies

In a rapidly arranged spy swap reminiscent of Cold War intrigues, the U.S. government on Thursday agreed to expel 10 agents who had burrowed into American society and in return won the release of four Russians jailed for illegal contacts with the West. – Washington Post

Ten Russian spies convicted in the US were on their way back to Moscow on Friday after being deported in a swap for four people convicted of espionage in Russia. Television crews in Moscow converged on Sheremetyevo airport awaiting the arrival of the spies, who reportedly left the US last night on a flight to Moscow. – Financial Times

Mikhail Semenko, one of 11 Russian "illegals" accused of spying for Moscow against the United States, targeted leading Washington think tanks in an apparent effort to get close to policy makers in the American government. - Telegraph
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Obama Administration

A four-star Marine general known equally for blunt speech, combat prowess and understanding counterinsurgency warfare will be nominated to command American forces across the Middle East, officials said Thursday. – New York Times
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Koreas

The United Nations Security Council is expected Friday to formally condemn the sinking of a South Korean warship, with a carefully worded statement that avoids directly blaming North Korea or imposing penalties on it. – Wall Street Journal

China warned the U.S. and South Korea on July 8 against holding joint war games near its waters and urged the two nations to guard against exacerbating festering tensions with North Korea. – AFP
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Afghanistan/Pakistan

A suicide bomber targeted a group of tribal elders gathered near the headquarters of the civilian government in Mohmand on Friday, killing more than 50 people and wounding about 100, a senior Pakistani security official said. – New York Times

British troops could end their combat role in Afghanistan even sooner than the five years the government has suggested, the UK's top diplomat in the country said today. - Guardian

Pakistani and Afghan officials have met in Islamabad to discuss a possible agreement to facilitate Afghan trade with India, RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal reports. – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Bill Roggio reports: Al Qaeda has replaced its emir, or leader, for Afghanistan, according to a report in the Asia Times. While al Qaeda hasn't officially announced the appointment, the author of the article has been adept at identifying top terror leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and he has extensive contacts with al Qaeda, Taliban, and Pakistani jihadists. – The Weekly Standard Blog

Raphael Cohen writes: [I]n this case especially, analysis should not stop simply with the conclusion that corruption in Afghanistan is rampant and bad. Instead, the data should prompt us to reconsider some of our basic assumptions about our efforts in Afghanistan—be it the effects of population-centric counterinsurgency strategy, or the challenge of combating perceived versus actual corruption. Polls may not provide us with all the answers, but at least they force us to ask the important questions. – AEI’s Center for Defense Studies
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Iran

Even as the United States imposes new sanctions on Iran, one of the biggest gaps in the American strategy is on full display here in Iraq, where hundreds of millions of dollars in crude oil and refined products are smuggled over the scenic mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan every year. – New York Times

Twelve Iranian women and three men are on death row awaiting execution by stoning despite an apparent last-minute reprieve for a mother of two who had been facing the horrific sentence after being convicted of adultery. - Guardian

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's current visit to Nigeria and Mali is yet another attempt to forge new alliances with African states in the hope that this can offset his country's growing isolation. Attending the July 4-8 Developing Eight (D8) summit in Abuja, Ahmadinejad is trying to rally support for his show of resistance against growing U.S.-led international pressure. – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Charles Robb and Charles Wald write: We cannot afford to wait indefinitely to determine the effectiveness of diplomacy and sanctions. Sanctions can be effective only if coupled with open preparation for the military option as a last resort. Indeed, publicly playing down potential military options has weakened our leverage with Tehran, making a peaceful resolution less likely. – Washington Post

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China

Wu Yuren, an artist who helped lead an unusually bold public protest last winter over a land dispute, has been languishing in a Beijing jail for almost six weeks after having been beaten by police officers, his wife said on Thursday. – New York Times

The US declined to name China as a currency manipulator in a politically sensitive report on Thursday, citing Beijing’s loosening of the renminbi peg in June as “a significant development”. The report had been delayed from April as part of a process of quiet diplomacy to encourage China to allow some flexibility in the exchange rate. – Financial Times

Alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing June 28 when the Tomahawk-laden 560-foot USS Ohio popped up in the Philippines' Subic Bay. More alarms likely were sounded when the USS Michigan arrived in Pusan, South Korea, the same day. And the klaxons would have maxed out as the USS Florida surfaced the same day at the joint U.S.-British naval base at Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 additional Tomahawks deployed by the U.S. in its neighborhood. - Time

Chinese authorities seized 64 tonnes of milk powder and products laced with the same deadly toxic additive that sparked an uproar in 2008, officials and state media said, underscoring the persistence of food safety breaches. - Reuters
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Middle East

Turkey’s foreign minister on Thursday dismissed concerns that his country was moving away from the west as “nonsense,” insisting that Ankara’s main strategic objective was to join the European Union. – Financial Times

Declaring that he intended to “confound the critics and the skeptics,” an upbeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told an audience of foreign policy experts in New York on Thursday that he was ready to begin direct peace talks with the Palestinians “next week” or even sooner. “Just get on with it,” he said. – New York Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled on Thursday he would not extend beyond September a 10-month moratorium on new housing starts in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. - Reuters

Britain's ambassador to Lebanon has been condemned by victims of Middle East terror groups for writing an appreciation of the spiritual leader of Hizbollah who masterminded the 1980s Lebanese hostage crisis. - Telegraph

Hizbollah instigated several confrontations with French peacekeepers over the past 10 days after the group decided the UN-led force was engaging in espionage-style activities, according to Hizbollah and Lebanese military officials. – The National
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The War

Three men who were arrested in Norway and Germany on Thursday on suspicion of terrorism were “one node” in the global terror network that plotted the foiled attack against the New York subway and planned to blow up a shopping center in Manchester, England, European and American counterterrorism officials said. – New York Times

The European Parliament approved a deal Thursday that allows the sharing of sensitive financial data with U.S. counterterrorism officials that the Obama administration had been urgently seeking since the previous system went dark at the start of the year. – Wall Street Journal

Six months after President Obama halted all transfers of Guantánamo Bay detainees to Yemen, the moratorium is coming under escalating pressure from federal judges — raising doubts about its sustainability. – New York Times

The longest and costliest terrorism prosecution in British history came to an end on Thursday when three men were found guilty in a London court of plotting to commit murder in a case that centered on a 2006 conspiracy, with links to Al Qaeda, to attack seven trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States and Canada with “liquid bombs.” – New York Times
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Defense

U.S. congressional investigators have upped the ante in their confrontation with two top Pentagon contractors who have received billions of dollars supplying fuel to troops in Afghanistan but have refused to reveal their owners. – Wall Street Journal

The Pentagon wants to shift nearly $4 billion in previously allocated funding, much of it within the Army's budget to buy arms and gear needed in Afghanistan, according to a July 2 omnibus reprogramming request. – Defense News

The Joint Cargo Aircraft C-27J program was restructured more than a year ago, but Congress is still raising questions about the Pentagon's plans to reduce the number of aircraft and transfer the joint program and the mission it supports solely to the Air Force. – Defense News
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Wikileaks

The soldier accused of downloading a huge trove of secret data from military computers in Iraq appears to have exploited a loophole in Defense Department security to copy thousands of files onto compact discs over a six-month period. In at least one instance, according to those familiar with the inquiry, the soldier smuggled highly classified data out of his intelligence unit on a disc disguised as a music CD by Lady Gaga. – New York Times
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Cybersecurity

Hundreds of computers that helped cause a wave of outages on U.S. and South Korean government websites last July launched new attacks on the same sites, but no major interference was reported, police said Thursday. – Associated Press

Singapore will host the first Regional Collaboration in Cyber Security conference from July 13-14 at the Shangri-La Hotel. The conference will cover cyber terrorism, information operations, cyber warfare, wireless hacking and cyber crime. – Defense News
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Russia

Two prominent intellectuals, facing a verdict of up to three years’ imprisonment over a museum exhibition in 2007, issued dire warnings on Thursday that Russia was starting to resemble Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran and the Soviet Union in the harshness of its growing nationalism, dominance of the Russian Orthodox church and fear of modern art. – New York Times

Romanov is one of hundreds of Russian business owners who face prison each year for alleged financial misconduct. And like him, most accuse corrupt police and investigators of trumping up charges to extort money from them or take over their businesses. Not all, of course, are innocent. But the number of criminal cases against businesspeople has grown so sharply in recent years that entrepreneurs are now taking action to combat what they say is a vast campaign of racketeering by law enforcement officials. – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
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France

The former accountant of France’s richest woman denied to the police that she had told a French Web site that President Nicolas Sarkozy had taken envelopes of cash from her boss, Liliane Bettencourt, according to a report in the newspaper Le Monde on Thursday. – New York Times
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Japan

Japanese Prime Minister Noato Kan's Democratic Party looked increasingly likely to suffer a sharp setback in a weekend election, surveys showed on Friday, putting his job at risk and hampering efforts to curb a huge public debt. - Reuters
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Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan asked for up to $500 million in aid Thursday to restore two southern cities where hundreds of people are living in the ruins of homes destroyed during the worst violence in the country's modern history. - Reuters
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Sri Lanka

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon retaliated on Thursday for protests led by a Sri Lankan minister outside U.N. premises in Colombo by closing the office and recalling the top U.N. official in the Asian country. - Reuters
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Americas

As in all major government takeovers of private companies in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez declared that seizing beer-and-food giant Polar's facilities here would mark another victory for the poor in the country's march toward socialism…Except this time, the president's plans went badly awry, exposing mounting national opposition to a policy under which oil companies, supermarkets and factories have been taken over by the state, only to founder under the control of government functionaries. – Washington Post

Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas has called off his four-month hunger strike after the island's government promised to free 52 political prisoners. – Associated Press

Mexico's richest city, once a poster child for development with its high-rise office blocks and flourishing industries, is being gripped by drug war terror with rising violence forcing dozens of its factories to freeze investment. - Reuters
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Postscript

Women won more seats in the Czech parliament than ever before during national elections in late May. To tout its new stars, one upstart party decided to give them special billing—as pin-up girls – Wall Street Journal

ENDS

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