Espionage

Citing a journalist's need to keep news sources confidential, a federal judge in Santa Ana declined Thursday to order a reporter to reveal the names of federal officials who leaked information to him for a 2006 story about a grand jury investigation into a scheme to send sensitive military technology to China. Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz was subpoenaed to testify in federal court by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney.

An American lawyer was sentenced Monday to three years in prison in Belarus in a case that raised already high tensions between Washington and the authoritarian ex-Soviet republic. Emmanuel Zeltser was convicted at a closed trial of commercial espionage and using false documents. He is an expert on organized crime and money laundering. The United States protested his detention and raised concerns about his health in custody.

Before she became a famously untidy television chef, Julia Child had a secret career as an American spy, winning praise for her attention to detail as she managed the flow of classified communications from remote posts in Ceylon and China during World War II. Long before he appeared on screen as a lunatic general in "Dr. Strangelove" and a corrupt cop in "The Godfather," Sterling Hayden was parachuting into fascist Croatia as a secret operative for America's fledgling espionage service.

Russian officials have said Michael Lee White was a U.S. agent involved in the recent fighting between their troops and Georgia. They claim to have found the Army veteran's passport in Georgia's breakaway province of South Ossetia. But in his cramped teacher's apartment at a business college in southern China, the American said Wednesday that he'd never been to Georgia. When the five-day war was raging last month, White said, he was in his hometown of Austin, Texas, caring for his sick father.

Facing allegations that the U.S. spied on its Iraqi allies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended relations between the two governments as "very open and transparent." Rice did not directly confront the assertion, raised in a new book by Bob Woodward, that the Bush administration spied extensively on Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and other Iraqi officials. Rice said in Morocco, "I myself work constantly with Prime Minister Maliki, and we share information." From Times Wire Reports

She's called the Mata Hari of North Korea, a temptress-spy who for years used her sensual charms to seduce South Korean military officers into giving up secrets. The method was potentially lethal: Won Jeong-hwa reportedly plotted to assassinate South Korean agents with poisoned needles provided by handlers from Pyongyang.

A South Korean court convicted a North Korean defector charged with extracting state secrets from military officers in return for sexual favors and sentenced her to five years in prison, media said. Won Jeong-hwa, 34, was arrested in August on suspicion of posing as a defector and sleeping with South Korean military officers so she could get classified information.

Iran detained 10 spies carrying $500,000 in cash who had entered the Islamic Republic illegally from neighboring Pakistan, state television said. Modern espionage cameras and maps of sensitive regions in Iran were found when the group was detained in Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province, the report said.

On an early autumn day more than four years ago, the CIA station chief in Rome allegedly presented Italy's top spymaster with a list of people he described as prime targets in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. The CIA wanted the targets "taken away," in the words of one Italian official. At the top of the list of about 10 names was a radical Egyptian cleric widely known as Abu Omar. Within months, Abu Omar was abducted, allegedly by CIA operatives, as he walked along a Milan sidewalk.

Can the coins jingling in your pocket trace your movements? The Defense Department is warning its American contractor employees about a new espionage threat seemingly straight from Hollywood: It discovered Canadian coins with tiny radio-frequency transmitters inside. In a U.S. government report, it said the coins were found planted on U.S.