National Post

‘Vulture spying for Israel’ captured in Sudan is latest claim of feathered spook
Sudan has captured an alleged avian spook it believes is spying for Israel and broadcasting satellite images back to the Jewish state, several Middle Eastern media have reported.

Officials in the North African nation have concluded that Israel fitted a vulture with a GPS chip and solar-powered equipment that can take reconnaissance pictures from a bird’s eye view, according to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, which cited Egypt’s El Balad website.

“[The Egyptian site reported that] the vulture was captured in the town of Kereinek in the Darfur region in Sudan’s west and that the finding prompted Sudanese authorities to announce Israel was using vultures to spy on their country,” Haaretz said. “The report in El Balad does not say who made these claims.” (MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images)

Treason on the cheap? National secrets for sale: $3K/month
Struggling with a failed marriage and deep in debt, Canadian navy intelligence officer Jeff Delisle was dressed in civilian clothes the day he walked into the Russian embassy on the corner of Laurier Avenue and Charlotte Street in Ottawa in 2007, asked to speak with a security officer, and offered to sell the military secrets entrusted to him.

“I showed them my ID card and they asked me a bunch of questions, took my name and off I go,” Sub-Lt. Delisle told police after he was arrested last Jan. 13.

Delisle had much to offer the Russians. He worked at HMCS Trinity, a military intelligence facility on the East Coast, where he had access to the flow of secrets shared among the Five Eyes alliance: Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

For the next four years, he fed a stunning volume of classified information to his Russian handlers, who put him on their payroll. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)

British operatives used ‘fake rock’ to spy on Russia
What would James Bond do without the ingenious Q, who provides him with all sorts of improbable gadgets for his espionage adventures?

It now seems that Britain’s real-life secret agents have a Q of their own after it emerged that they used a fake rock concealing a high-tech communications device to spy on Russia.

In a television program aired on Russian state television in 2006, Russia’s FSB security service accused Britain of using the gadget for top secret communications in Moscow, but London did not admit to the charge at the time.

Now Jonathan Powell, who was chief of staff to then Prime Minister Tony Blair, has confirmed the Russians were correct.

“They had us bang to rights,” Powell says in a BBC documentary to be aired on Thursday. (Photo: EURONEWS/ROSSIYA TELEVISION AFP/Getty Images)

Graphic: The state of the global spy game

With the Middle East in turmoil, Iran is not the only country in the region to see a surge in espionage. At times of major political, economic and social unrest, the use of agents on the ground, eyes in the sky and computerized intelligence gathering increase, experts say. The National Post’s graphics team takes a look.

Chanel No. F-7124
Coco Chanel acted as a numbered Nazi agent during the Second World War, carrying out several spy and recruitment missions, a new biography claims.

Chanel was feted as a fashion pioneer who changed the way women dressed and thought about themselves. Her life has been the subject of countless biographies and films, which have charted her career but also her darker side as a Nazi sympathizer and collaborator.

But according to Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, the creator of the famed little black dress was more than this: She was a numbered Nazi agent working for the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency. (Photo: Coco Chanel in 1944 in Paris/Agence France-Presse)

Regular dad was crack WWII code breaker
To his four kids, he was a regular dad with some irregular talents. Cliff Stewart could fix the family toaster in a blink. Radios, television sets, family cars — anything with wires that went on the fritz, and out came the tools.

“His ability to solve problems — his technical skills — he could always figure something out and make it work. He could literally fix anything,” said Tom Stewart, his eldest son.

To his family, Cliff Stewart was Dad, the super-whiz. But to his World War II comrades, Cliff Stewart was something else. Behind the extraordinary technical talents around the house was an extraordinary secret, a tale of intrigue and espionage that featured Mr. Stewart at the centre of it as a super spy and code breaker.

It was an occupation he never, ever, spoke about, not until the last years of a long life that ended when Mr. Stewart passed away at his home in suburban Charlottetown last weekend. He was 91.

Mr. Stewart’s spent time at Camp X, a top-secret training facility in southern Ontario where he honed his craft with budding assassins, demolitions experts, frogmen, forgers, a man called Intrepid and Ian Fleming, a British naval intelligence trainee and future author of the James Bond books.