Russian spy Anna Chapman makes rare public appearance at cosmonaut ceremony

A Russian rocket with a U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts onboard blasted off successfully early Friday for the International Space Station, with flame-haired Russian spy Anna Chapman making an unexpected appearance at the cosmodrome to wave them goodbye.

The Soyuz TMA-01M was launched at the scheduled time of 5.10am from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the vast steppe of southern Kazakhstan.

The crew's relatives and supporters cheered when the Soyuz engines roared and the spaceship lifted off in a blaze of orange flames, making the ground shudder.

Russian engineers hugged and kissed one another after the craft shed its first stage and it became clear the launch was a success.

I spy: Miss Chapman was spirited away shortly after the launch

International Space Station crew member U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly waves before entering the Soyuz TMA-01M spacecraft

Mike Suffredini, head of Nasa's space station programma who watched the launch from an observation point with his Russian counterparts, gave his thumbs-up to the launch: 'You can hear it all the way up.'

Scott Kelly and Russia's Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka are due to reach the orbiting laboratory in two days to begin their five-month mission.

They will join two U.S. astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut who have been at the station since June.

Chapman, who has avoided the public and the press since being deported from the United States in July, appeared at the farewell ceremony for the space crew.

She told a reporter that she had 'just arrived' and refused to answer any questions.

She then walked hastily to a guarded guest house near the launch pad accompanied by a burly man who blocked her from reporters.

An official with Russia's space agency, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Chapman was at Baikonur as an adviser to the president of FondServisBank.

The bank works with space industry companies and was handing out awards, the official said.
Chapman was one of 10 Russian spies deported from the United States.

Her sultry photos gleaned from social-networking sites made her a tabloid sensation.

Since returning to Russia she has kept a low profile. Last week, a trendy Moscow night club invited the media to a party to meet 'the head heroine of the spy scandal of the year, the Russian Mata Hari Anna Chapman.' But she did not show.

Kelly and the two Russians on their way to the International Space Station are flying in Russia's first all-digital Soyuz TMA-01M.

The overhauled Soyuz will allow a doubling of the launch rate of Soyuz spaceships, which will help maintain a crew of six aboard the space station when the Nasa shuttle fleet is retired.

Kelly, a New Jersey native, will be joined at the space station by his twin brother Mark, another Nasa astronaut who will fly a shuttle mission in February.

The Endeavor that will bring Mark Kelly to space is the next-to-last U.S. shuttle before Nasa wraps up 30 years of shuttle flight.

The International Space Station celebrates its 10th anniversary on Nov. 20. The mammoth station consists of 10 modules built by the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and the 18-nation European Space Agency.

The Soyuz that will be used to ferry the next crew to the station in December was damaged during transportation by rail from the factory outside Moscow, and Russian space agency chief Anatoly Perminov said Thursday that the launch could be delayed by a few days if experts rule that the craft needs repairs.

Nasa's Suffredini said the United States is not worried about the incident and he expressed confidence that 'the Soyuz that flies out in December will be in excellent shape.'

A Russian Soyuz TMA-01M rocket with International Space Station (ISS) crew members - Russian cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka and US astronaut Scott Kelly - blasts off from a Russian-leased Kazakh Baikonur cosmodrome

Lady in red: The Russian spy was snapped at a farewell ceremony for some astronauts - and only briefly spoke to journalists to say 'I've arrived'

Service towers move away from the Russian Soyuz TMA-01M spacecraft carrying the International Space Station crew

Indian diplomat accused of spying for Pakistan

An Indian diplomat was arrested by her government on charges of spying for Pakistan, officials said Tuesday, a development that could hurt relations between the wary nuclear neighbors and almost certainly leave New Delhi red-faced.

Madhuri Gupta, 53, a second secretary at the Indian Embassy in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, was reportedly lured back to India on the pretext that her help was needed to prepare for an upcoming regional meeting in Bhutan.


She was detained as soon as she landed at the airport several days ago and was found to be in possession of seven sensitive documents, according to Indian news reports.

"We have reason to believe that an official in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad had been passing information to Pakistani intelligence agencies," said Vishnu Prakash, spokesperson for the Indian Foreign Ministry. "The official is cooperating with our investigation and inquiries."

Gupta has worked in the embassy's press and information department for 2 1/2 years as an Urdu translator, Indian news reports said, citing police sources. She had been under suspicion for a few months.

As a second secretary, Gupta probably would not have had much access to sensitive information, said B. Raman, a security analyst and former Pakistan desk head with the Research and Analysis Wing, India's equivalent of the CIA. But she still could have caused significant damage if she planted electronic listening devices, he said.



In the 1970s, he said, India caught a British telephone operator in its Paris Embassy taping conversations and feeding them to British intelligence services. The operator was fired.

Red flags reportedly went up after Gupta, who is unmarried, started asking questions outside her area of responsibility and was found to have funds in a Pakistani account, the Times Now news network reported. She has since confessed that she was lured by the money and motivated by unhappiness over not being promoted, the network said.

Analysts said cellphone intercepts may also have played a role, along with the suspicions raised by embassy colleagues.

A picture of Gupta obtained by news networks showed a round-faced woman with glasses and shoulder-length dark hair.

Although many questions about the alleged intelligence gathering remain unanswered, analysts said, the news will almost certainly lead to soul searching at India's Foreign Ministry and among counter-intelligence officials responsible for screening embassy staff members.

"Any disclosure of intelligence activities involving Indian diplomats is embarrassing," said Raman, now director of the Institute for Topical Studies in the southern Indian city of Chennai.

Some expressed outrage on hearing the news, especially in light of attempts to revive talks between the longtime enemies.

"Even as Pakistan talks about having prime minister-level talks, they go ahead with intelligence activities," said Ajit Doval, former head of the Intelligence Bureau, India's equivalent of the FBI. "It doesn't send the right signal."

Others said there were no angels in this game.

"This is standard practice worldwide," said Imtiaz Gul, executive director of Islamabad's Center for Research and Security Studies. "America, Britain, India or Pakistan — they all do it. It obviously comes to a halt once discovered."

It's not clear that Gupta will face prosecution, analysts said, given the high bar required to prove a legal case and reluctance to disclose secrets in court.

In the 1980s, Pakistani intelligence allegedly recruited a senior Indian military attache using a "honey trap" involving an attractive woman in Karachi who reportedly seduced and blackmailed him. When the government found out, it returned him to India and fired him but never prosecuted him. "It's sometimes very difficult to prove," Raman said. "You need evidence from people in Pakistan, which is difficult to get."

Details of Gupta's career track were not immediately available, but her age and low-level position suggested that she was not a career foreign service officer.

A properly trained Indian civil service official might be less "susceptible to foreign inducements," Kapil Sibal, India's human resources minister, said outside the parliament. "That they were able to penetrate the embassy is shocking."

American intelligence chief brands U.S. spy efforts in Afghanistan 'ignorant' and 'disengaged'

The U.S. military's intelligence chief in Afghanistan branded the work of his own spy agencies in the war-torn country as 'ignorant' and 'out of touch with the Afghan people'.

Major General Michael Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan for the U.S. military and its Nato allies, offered a bleak assessment of the intelligence community's role in the eight-year-old war.

In a report issued by the Centre for New American Security think tank, he described U.S. intelligence officials there as 'ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the power brokers are and how they might be influenced ... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers'.

An operations officer was quoted in the report as calling the U.S. 'clueless' because of a lack of needed intelligence about the country.

The report highlighted tensions between military and intelligence agencies in the country. It urged changes such as a focus on gathering more information on a wider range of issues at a grassroots level.

The report's release comes less than a week after a suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers at a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, the second-most deadly attack in the agency's history.

The bomber was an Al Qaeda triple-agent from Jordan, according to NBC news.

The security breach was a major blow to the spy agency, which has expanded operations hunting down and killing Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and tribal areas in neighboring Pakistan, partly through the use of unmanned drone aircraft.

The drone strikes have fuelled public anger and have been sharply criticised by human rights groups.

'Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,' Flynn wrote in the report with his chief adviser, Captain Matt Pottinger.

The study said American intelligence had focused too much on gathering information on insurgent groups and was 'unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade'.

A revised war strategy unveiled last month by Barack Obama called for sending 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. The President wants to expand the counter-insurgency campaign to secure Afghan public support and sideline the resurgent Taliban.

Instead of mounting a counterinsurgency, Flynn asserts that the intelligence community had 'fallen into the trap' of waging an 'anti-insurgency campaign' aimed at capturing or killing mid-to-high level militants.

In a passage that also challenges Britain's strategy in Helmand province, he says: 'Merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them.

 
Major General Michael Flynn, left, authored the damning report with his deputy Captain Matt Pottinger and an academic, Paul Batchelor

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 Failings: Maj Gen Flynn's report criticises U.S. intelligence for failing to gather enough information at a grassroots level in Afghanistan


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 Voice From the Field: The think tank report comes in the same week a suicide bomber killed seven CIA agents in an attack on the Afghan border with Pakistan

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U.S. troops this morning stand near a vehicle holding transfer cases containing the remains American soldiers killed in Afghanistan

'This is common in many guerrilla conflicts and is especially relevant in the revenge-prone Pashtun communities whose co-operation military forces seek to earn and maintain.

'The Soviets experienced this reality in the 1980s, when despite killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they faced a larger insurgency near the end of the war than they did at the beginning.'

An intelligence official defended the focus of U.S. spy agencies on insurgents, saying: 'You can't be successful at counterinsurgency without a profound understanding of the enemy.'

Flynn's report said the intelligence community had enough analysts in Afghanistan but 'too many are simply in the wrong places and assigned to the wrong jobs'.

The report described the main problems as 'attitudinal, cultural, and human,' saying U.S. intelligence community had 'a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders'.

A U.S. operations officer quoted in the report, wondered why spies were unable to produce more information about the Afghan population.

He said: 'I don't want to say we're clueless, but we are. We're no more than fingernail deep in our understanding of the environment.'

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Read more about US Intelligence and Afganisthan ,CIA.


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Ilinois man admits stalking ESPN's Erin Andrews-Taping her naked in hotel

An emotional Erin Andrews begged a judge yesterday to throw the book at her peephole predator, claiming she still has "nightmares" about the camera- wielding perv.



In this Friday, Nov. 13, 2009, file photo, Michael Barrett, who is accused of secretly making nude videos of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews, arrives to federal court in Los Angeles. An insurance executive agreed to plead guilty to interstate stalking, according to court documents filed Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009, and first obtained by The Associated Press. Barrett, 48, will plead guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Dec. 15, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman with the U.S. attorney's office.


The ESPN reporter -- her hair tied back in a pony tail and wearing black pants, a cream blazer and four- inch heels -- told a hushed federal courtroom how she was "humiliated" by Michael David Barrett, 48, who secretly filmed her naked in hotel rooms across America.

"I've been embarrassed and my career has been ripped apart," the ESPN pin-up told federal Judge Manuel Real. "I walk into a stadium and fans say obscene things to me."

She added: "I have nightmares about this sexual predator. I walk in crowds and see him out of my peripheral vision."

Barrett pleaded guilty yesterday to one count of stalking. Andrews asked Real to throw Barrett in jail immedi ately, but the judge al lowed him to remain free on bail.

Barrett is set to be sentenced Feb. 22 and he faces a maximum of five years behind bars.

Assistant US Attorney Wes Hsu said he'll recommend a 27-month sentence.

Outside court, Andrews said she's opposed to the plea bargain because Barrett should do more time.

"I want him to stay in jail as long as possible, he's a threat to women everywhere," said Andrews, adding that ESPN has had to hire a full-time body guard to travel with her on assignments.

Andrews said she's upset that hotel clerks are not trained to keep names of guests secret. The sideline stunner claims she regularly calls hotels to test if they'll confirm her stay -- and they always do, Andrews said.

"I'm constantly looking around thinking he's going to be there, even at my house," she said.

Andrews' lawyer Marshall Grossman claims they've been receiving tips from women across the country, claiming they, too, might have been secretly filmed by Barrett.

"There are well over a dozen other women who have been surreptitiously filmed and stalked. That will come out in the reports given to the judge.

"We are not supportive of the plea agreement. We expressed our feelings to the US attorney and the US attorney has his job to do."

The ESPN babe sat behind the prosecution table and often leaned her head on the shoulder of her father, Tampa TV reporter Steve Andrews.

When Barrett stood up to plead guilty, Real read into the record all the dirty details of defendant's efforts to film Andrews.

The sideline babe shook her head in disgust after Barrett admitted he posted footage of her on Google video pages with titles such as "Erin Andrews' naked butt" and "Sexy and hot blonde sports celebrity shows us her all."

It took Real 10 minutes to read all the details. Every few sentences, Real asked, "Did you do this?" and Barrett always responded "Yes, your honor."

The Illinois insurance salesman tracked down Andrews to hotels in Columbus, Nashville and Milwaukee in 2008 and then secretly video taped naked footage of Andrews through reversed peep holes.

Andrews was on assignment in those cities, covering an Ohio State basketball game, a Vanderbilt football game and a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game, respectively.


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Iran confirms detention of three Americans

-Iran has arrested three Americans who strayed across the border from Iraq on allegations they illegally entered the country, and a lawmaker said Tuesday that authorities are deciding whether they will be accused of spying.

Officials in northern Iraq's Kurdish region said Sunday that the three — Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal — were tourists who inadvertently crossed into Iran on July 31 while hiking in the region. Friends and family say the three were adventurous travelers who accidentally stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lawmaker Mohammad Karim Abedi, who heads the Iranian parliament's National Security Committee, said "Surely we can say that they came as spies," he said. "The concerned authorities will decide whether they were spies or not," he added. "If it is proven that they were spies, the necessary legal procedures will be sought against them."He said the Americans had Iraqi and Syria visas.





A general view of Dukan Resort, where three American hikers were last seen, near Sulaimaniyah, 260 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. Iranian authorities have given no word on three Americans detained after reportedly wandering across the border with Iraq last week during a hike in the Iraqi Kurdish region.



Unidentified foreign and local tourists are seen at Dukan Resort, where three American hikers were last seen, near Sulaimaniyah, 260 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. Iranian authorities have given no word on three Americans detained after reportedly wandering across the border with Iraq last week during a hike in the Iraqi Kurdish region



A general view of Dukan Resort, where three American hikers were last seen, near Sulaimaniyah, 260 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. Iranian authorities have given no word on three Americans detained after reportedly wandering across the border with Iraq last week during a hike in the Iraqi Kurdish region.




A general view of Dukan Resort, where three American hikers were last seen, near Sulaimaniyah, 260 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. Iranian authorities have given no word on three Americans detained after reportedly wandering across the border with Iraq last week during a hike in the Iraqi Kurdish region.

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