Espionage

In movies, the CIA has so many prolifically lethal assassins roaming the world that the main problem often seems to be reining them in. But details that spilled out this week about a real CIA assassination program indicate that when the plotting is being done by spies instead of screenwriters, the obstacles are not so easy to surmount. According to current and former U.S.

At night, when the lawns are empty and the lamps along the walking paths are the only source of light, Topcider Park on the outskirts of Belgrade is a perfect meeting place for spies. It was here in 1992, as the former Yugoslavia was erupting in ethnic violence, that a wary CIA agent made his way toward the park's gazebo and shook hands with a Serbian intelligence officer. Jovica Stanisic had a cold gaze and a sinister reputation.

For nearly 30 years, a now-retired State Department official and his wife conspired to provide classified information to the Cuban government, starting with secrets squirreled away in grocery carts and culminating in encrypted e-mails sent from Internet cafes, federal authorities said Friday. Walter Kendall Myers, 72, was known to his handlers as "Agent 202," according to an indictment and criminal complaint unsealed in federal court here. Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, was "Agent 123."

Growing up in West Germany, Lothar Schroeder never knew that terrible sense of violation suffered by people in the communist East at the hands of the secret police who tailed them, bugged their homes and recruited neighbors and even family members to snitch on them. Now he knows. But it's not a totalitarian state doing the snooping this time; it's some of the country's largest corporations -- big names in telecommunications, transportation and retail.

Like many spy tales in fiction and reality, "Background to Danger" begins in a train station. A down-and-out freelance journalist awaits a night train alone on a platform in Nuremberg, Germany, hands in overcoat pockets, shoulders hunched against a November wind. Soon a frightened Russian offers him cash to smuggle documents across the Austrian border, and the plot steams into a labyrinth of treachery.

President Hugo Chavez's government accused Colombia on Monday of using its state security agency to spy on Venezuela while purportedly helping investigate the killings of eight Colombians. Venezuela sent a diplomatic protest note saying officials of Colombia's DAS agency were "detected carrying out espionage work and attempting to bribe." Venezuela did not give details but said authorities had seized documents referring to a conspiracy to destabilize its government. Colombia has offered help in investigating the slayings of 10 men -- eight Colombians, a Venezuelan and a Peruvian -- whose bodies were found in the western Venezuelan border state of Tachira on Saturday.

A scientist credited with helping discover evidence of water on the moon was arrested Monday on charges of attempting to pass classified information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer. Stewart David Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Md., was charged in a criminal complaint with attempting to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information, the Justice Department said. The complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf violated U.S. law. Nozette was arrested by FBI agents and is expected to make his initial appearance in federal court in Washington today.

To anyone passing through Havana's international airport, or by the U.S. Interests Section on the Cuban capital's seaside boulevard, the images of the Five are persistently familiar. On billboards and wall-size posters, they are honored as heroes in Cuba. In the U.S., they are little-known convicted spies and saboteurs.

The nervous woman in a gray suit clicked on a photo lineup on an overhead screen labeled "Jihadi Martyrs." It flashed to mug shots of men with names like Abu Issa, an Al Qaeda recruiter, and Abu Jabber, a trainer. A man in one photograph was pointing a machine gun. "They are all me," said the blond mother from Montana, speaking before an audience of computer experts, law enforcement agents and investigators at the first International Conference on Cyber Security, held last week in New York.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has decided to kill a controversial Bush administration program to use U.S. spy satellites to collect domestic intelligence for counter-terrorism, law enforcement and security, a senior Homeland Security official said Monday evening. The National Applications Office program was established in 2007 to provide up-to-the-minute electronic intelligence to local and state law enforcement.