Gareth Williams murder story represents an old British intelligence modus operandi

The Ziggurat Effect....

Old School....


New School- Home of James Bond & MI6

UPDATE 1X. Gareth Williams murder story represents an old British intelligence modus operandi....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/02/AR2010110200467.html

Death of British espionage officer suggests a sinister plot involving British intelligence....assassins of MI6.....

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20878

The discovery of the body of 31-year old British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) officer Gareth Williams in a posh flat in Pimlico, just a mile from the "Ziggurat" headquarters of the British MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service headquarters along the banks of the Thames in Vauxhall, bears all the markings of a British intelligence hit.....

http://cryptome.org/eyeball/nsa-sanantonio/nsa-sanantonio.htm

Williams, who had frequently traveled in the past to visit his counterparts at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland and was due to return home to Cheltenham, the headquarters of the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency GCHQ, was found stuffed in a bag in the flat's bathroom. Police estimated Williams, whose body was decomposed and reportedly, dismembered, had been dead for some two weeks.

Several cell phone and SIM cards were found neatly arranged in the flat.

There was no sign of a break-in at the flat on Alderney Street, where two former British Home Ministers, Michael Howard and Lord Brittan, also reside, and police report that Williams may have known his murderer or murderers. The flat property is owned by a company called New Rodina [Rodina is Russian for "new motherland"], said to be a Russian company registered in the British Virgin Islands. However, the reported presence of retina scanners on the flat's lock suggests the flat was used by MI-6 as a safe house of some sort. There is little known about New Rodina because of British Virgin Islands company secrets laws. New Rodina bought the property in 2000 with a mortgage from the Royal Bank of Scotland and The Guardian has reported that the agent for the property was the law firm Park Nelson, which had offices off Fleet Street in London. "New Rodina" is a term used by British intelligence members to refer to being stationed in London. It is a term used by Russian exiles living abroad -- "new motherland."

British media are now reporting that Williams was a gay transvestite who, because of the reported "Russian" connection to the flat owners, was somehow involved in a Russian gay sex plot. However, this fits a long pattern with British intelligence. Past deaths of male British officials have seen post-mortem reports of women's underwear and clothing being discovered, as well as child pornography. The resulting embarrassment to the families of the deceased prevents them from seeking a wider investigation and the cases simply fade away from the public's attention. It is classic British intelligence trade craft to cover up murders carried out by British intelligence or other agents acting on their behalf.

The Sun of London is reporting that police discovered women's clothing of Williams's size in the Pimlico flat. The Sun is owned by neocon publisher Rupert Murdoch.

In March 1994, former British MI-agent Alan Rusbridger was found hanging in his home in Cornwall. Rusbridger's body was found suspended from two ropes and dressed in an NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical) protective suit and a rain coat. Rusbridger was wearing rubber gloves and a gas mask. Police reported they found sexual bondage photos and magazines scattered around Rusbridger's hanging corpse and they later concluded Rusbridger killed himself accidentally while engaged in a sexual strangulation act. Rusbridger was found with his legs bound at the ankles, knees, and upper thighs. Police also reported that Rusbridger was lonely, unhappy, and in financial distress.

Rusbridger was the cousin of retired MI-5 agent Peter Wright, whose book "Spycatcher" resulted in then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seeking to ban its publication in Britain and abroad due to damaging revelations that British intelligence bugged Commonwealth conferences, tried to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and failed the investigate Sir Roger Hollis, director of MI-5 as a Soviet mole.

Rusbridger, who, like Wright, was an author of intelligence books, was investigating the death of Conservative Member of Parliament Stephen Milligan, whose body was found naked, except for wearing a pair of women's stockings, in his west London home just a month before Rusbridger was found hanging in Cornwall. Milligan, a former journalist and rising political star in the Conservative Party, was parliamentary private secretary to junior defense minister Jonathan Aitken in the Tory government of British Prime Minister John Major. There were reports that Millgan had been found gagged and bound in addition to wearing a pair of women's stockings.

Aitken was sentenced to prison in 1999 after he was convicted of perjury for his testimony in an investigation of a British arms scandal involving Matrix Churchill, the Saudis, and arms sales to Saddam Hussein. While Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Aiken signed a "gag order" preventing evidence to be revealed in the 1992 trial of Matrix Churchill for weapons sales to Iraq. Aitken had been a director of BMARC, a subsidiary of the Swiss firm Oerlikon, which stood accused of indirectly supplying anti-aircraft systems to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. BMARC was a subject of the Matrix Churchill investigation.

Aitken was also chairman of a secretive right-wing think tank known as Le Cercle, established after World War II and which was funded by the CIA, the Ford Foundation, and the Rothschilds....which became the Siamese threesome CIA/MOSSAD/MI6....

In 2005, the commander of British forces in Gibraltar, Royal Navy Commander David White, was found dead and fully clothed in his swimming pool in The Rock section of Gibraltar. White had been ordered to return to Britain and go on mandatory leave by Britain's Ministry of Defense. After his death, police said White had been under investigation for possession of child pornography. White, whose job put him in command of a GCHQ SIGINT installation in the British colony, was determined to have committed suicide and that there was no sign of foul play.

UPDATE 1X. Although Williams is reported to have originally been from Holyhead in Anglesey, Wales, we have learned from a boyhood friend that he grew up in Pwlhelli, north Wales. We have also learned that Williams was a veteran of the elite British Special Air Service (SAS) commandos....

The key to global British crumbling power of utter corruption and thuggery courtesy of the UKUSA alliance of evils...

GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency

by Richard J Aldrich

Reviewed by Mahan Abedin ....

“GCHQ provides intelligence, protects information and informs relevant UK policy to keep our society safe and successful in the Internet Age“, so reads the headline message on the Government Communication Headquarters website. This is a classic example of British understatement, effortlessly disguising what is in fact the most strategic asset in British foreign policy formulation and implementation.

If there is one single organization that explains the longevity of the United Kingdom's global reach in the post-colonial period, then it is surely the GCHQ, a massive worldwide eavesdropping enterprise, which obtains over 80% of the United Kingdom's intelligence and provides critical support to both the domestic Security Service (MI5) and the foreign Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), as well as the British armed forces.

Founded more than 90 years ago, the GCHQ specializes in the art of secret listening, and after America's National Security Agency (NSA), it is the most prolific signals intelligence (sigint) agency in the world.

It is against this backdrop of global dominance and strategic indispensability that Richard J Aldrich's GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency, immediately attracts elevated significance. A scrupulous researcher, Aldrich's main achievement has been to construct an independent and non-official history of the GCHQ.

Indeed, unlike many other academics and journalists who write about intelligence history - in particular Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew - Aldrich does not appear to be tied to the British secret state. This independence from British intelligence enables Aldrich to put the GCHQ's successes and failures into perspective. However, Aldrich fails to draw the correct strategic lessons from the totality of his findings and that is the biggest flaw of his book.

A global spying network
The GCHQ's origins date to November 1, 1919, with the founding of the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS). Over the next two decades, the GCCS gradually came to be known as the GCHQ and from 1946 onwards the latter name was invoked more or less exclusively.

The GCHQ's mission is to collect signals intelligence, which can incorporate a wide range of communications and accompanying specialist tasks, including communication intelligence (comint), electronic intelligence (elint) and many other "ints". But in essence, sigint is the unauthorized interception of communications sent by wireless, satellite or electronic means. The GCHQ's core expertise is cryptography, namely the breaking of codes and ciphers and in turn the innovation of new and stronger cryptographic techniques and systems.

The GCHQ's main task is to attack the encryption systems of other countries, entities and individuals. Additionally, the eavesdropping agency is a provider of protective security to British government departments, helping them to encrypt and otherwise protect their most sensitive documents and data.

Aldrich provides a coherent and chronological history of the GCHQ and displays a refreshing ability to explain the spy agency's highly technical and complex work to the lay reader. However, the majority of his findings have been exposed by other publications since the 1980s, when journalists, academics and former spies began to write about the British intelligence community in earnest.
While there is not much new in the book, Aldrich's work rises above other efforts to some degree in the effortlessly fluent and scrupulously researched manner in which he has presented his findings.

Any book on the GCHQ cannot ignore Bletchley Park and "Ultra", the highly secret program to decrypt German radio signals and other communications during World War II. The remarkable effort at Bletchley Park is now widely considered to have given the United Kingdom and the Allies a significant edge over Germany and thus shortened the war by at least 12 months.

While Aldrich recounts the exploits at Bletchley Park, he is keener to unravel the mystery of the post-war UKUSA Agreement, a much misunderstood subject, whose unraveling has not been helped by sensationalist and conspiracy-oriented reporting and analysis. Often referred to as "Echelon" by the global media, this agreement is widely understood to underpin Anglo-American domination of the sigint realm and by extension the world of secret intelligence.

Using declassified files and other sources Aldrich outlines the intricacies of the UKUSA Agreement as more a "complex network of different alliances built up from many different overlapping agreements" than a single treaty. UKUSA soon incorporated a second tier of Anglo-Saxon countries, namely Canada, Australia and New Zealand, thereby creating a massive sigint network with global coverage.

Aldrich's main contribution to the understanding of Echelon is his detailed description of the periodic tensions underlying the core UKUSA sigint agreement. Most importantly, he recounts the episode in July 1973 when the legendary American statesman Henry Kissinger ordered an abrupt termination to all intelligence cooperation with the UK as a retaliatory measure over disputes on European security policy.

While this row proved temporary and cooperation soon resumed in earnest, fissures in the cross-Atlantic intelligence relationship continued to fester beneath the surface. According to Aldrich, tensions reached new heights in the mid-1980s when William Eldridge Odom, the then head of the NSA, determined to reorient American sigint cooperation away from the UK.

While Aldrich depicts the notoriously abrasive Odom in a negative light, he does, however, convincingly question his plans to forge closer ties with the German BND (responsible for both human intelligence and sigint), because of the latter's aggressive and increasingly global sigint activities in the 1980s, which even included cooperation with the Taiwanese code-breaking agency.

Aldrich's work suffers from key flaws. First, his treatment of commercial encryption is short and thin on details to the extent that he appears not to have a deep and specialized understanding of this topic. The proliferation of commercial encryption software in the past 20 years has been a major headache for Western sigint organizations, and although these agencies have expended considerable effort at subverting commercial encryption, there are still a range of products that defeat even the most concerted and sophisticated cryptanalytic attacks.

Aldrich also largely falls for the GCHQ and NSA line that it is only organized criminals and terrorists who stand to benefit from strong encryption, neglecting to explain that there may be legitimate reasons why a wide range of actors would want to hide the contents of their communications from the prying eyes of the GCHQ and the NSA.

Second, the latter chapters of the book, in particular the final chapter entitled "From Bletchley Park to a Brave New World?", steadily deteriorate in analytical quality. Aldrich appears to be arguing that the GCHQ has been overwhelmed by the global communications revolution - underlined by the explosion in the use of e-mail and mobile phones - and is consequently struggling to find its bearings in the 21st century.

This betrays a remarkably unimaginative mindset, for surely if there is anything to be learnt by the forensic study of the GCHQ, it is that it is always several steps ahead of the game. Indeed, it is very difficult to believe that immensely resourceful and far-sighted agencies like the GCHQ and the NSA - which employ the best mathematical brains on the planet - would be drastically wrong-footed by developments in the wider world.

Aldrich's mistake in underestimating the predictive capacity of the GCHQ leads him to make another and this time an altogether far more serious error, and one with profound political consequences.
He argues that the development of the Big Brother society in the UK and the Western world in general, characterized by the mass capturing and storage of ordinary individual and commercial data (the great majority of which are "in clear", ie in non-encrypted form) by sigint agencies and their commercial subsidiaries and allies, is a consequence of conscious choices made by citizens.

In other words, by choosing to make prolific and in some cases doubtless excessive use of new communications technologies, we have invited the GCHQ to intrude into and map out every aspect of our lives. This is a dangerously complacent and lazy argument.

Aldrich's description of this so-called brave new world where "no one is in control" sums up the analytical poverty of the last chapters of his book. It inevitably gives rise to the suspicion that despite his intense 10-year research

, the author doesn't appear to fully grasp all the dimensions of this highly sensitive topic.

Finally, Aldrich fails to apply his findings to potential developments in international relations in the years and decades ahead. The world of sigint is changing beyond recognition - with super-computers and cyberspace defining the new battle grounds - and any aspiring global power would be wise to make massive investments in this domain.

GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency by Richard J Aldrich. HarperPress, June 2010. ISBN 9780007357123. 688 pages.

Mahan Abedin is a senior researcher in terrorism studies and a consultant to independent media in Iran.....

NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland, where murdered spy Gareth Williams had worked. Williams reportedly helped oversee Echelon.

Gareth Williams....obviously an easy target....and obviously in a long list of string assassination Matrix since 1999.....by the infamous White House Assassinations INC,.....

Gareth Williams was a UK spy "who made regular trips to the US National Security Agency.... NSA and to CIA...."

On 23 August 2010, the police found his body in an MI6 flat near to MI6 HQ in London....

According to "a source" Mr ­Williams’ body was found ­during a "welfare check" by ­police following a call from one of his colleagues at GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in Cheltenham. (DEAD SPY GARETH WILLIAMS A)

According to Nicholas Anderson, a Former MI6 agent, "It took nearly two weeks for the FCO (Foreign & Commonwealth Office) employee assistance head to follow up on why he hadn't been at work." (MI6 death: Murder most strange)

1. Reportedly he had been dead for weeks.

Jenny Elliott said: 'He definitely wasn't on annual leave as the security services woman who came to see me after they found his body told me that he wasn't on holiday." (The Daily Mail. )

How did MI6 not notice that one of its Agents was missing ? (MI6 inquiry will ask why it took two weeks to find murdered officer )

And how did they not notice he was in one of their own safe houses ? (Murdered British Spy Found Stuffed Into Sports Bag in Bath of ...)

MI6 Flat

2. Five weeks before Gareth Williams' death, Gareth Williams' 'best friend' was suddenly posted to Denver, Colorado on secret duties.

"A source claimed detectives have been ‘blocked’ from interviewing several potentially crucial witnesses.

"Mr Williams’s ‘best friend’, a female colleague at the Government’s listening post, was posted to work for an intelligence agency linked to the Pentagon in the U.S. five weeks ago.

"The 25-year-old woman and her husband, who also knew Mr Williams, both worked at GCHQ in Cheltenham and were ‘suddenly’ transferred to Denver, Colorado, on secret duties.

Murder squad detectives are keen to speak to her in case she can offer any clues to why someone would want Mr Williams dead. (Gareth WIllams: Riddle of murder spy's money trail Mail Online)

Echelon spies on the world. (Website for this image)

"Mr Williams was a top-level cryptologist helping to oversee a network called Echelon, which links satellites and super-computers in Britain and the US with those of other key allies.

"Echelon now eavesdrops on terror suspects and drug dealers, and searches for other political and diplomatic intelligence." (Investigation into death of British spy Gareth Williams takes ...)

"Diana, Princess of Wales may have come under ECHELON surveillance before she died." (NSA Watch Echelon FAQ)

According to Roger Graef, broadcaster and criminologist, "if he was such a hot shot at code breaking then presumably he'd have been protected." (MI6 death: Murder most strange)

British and Israeli MOSSAD and many other clandestine units based mainly overseas to evade US laws and regulations,..... spies are used by the US government to spy on Americans and a whole host of others...and to control the "unruly"....CONGRESS in USA....is the most guarded SECRET in US history.....

3. On 26 August 2010, a blogger at the Slovenian website Polonika attributed Williams' death to an agent from Slovenia.

The post was deleted the same day.

According to this unknown individual, someone "from Slovenia [is] involved into [sic] the death of spy Gareth Williams.

"He [that is, Williams] was researching mind control, prostitution, and kidnapping." (Once Upon a Time in the West - Exposing the Twenty-First-Century ...)




4. On 28 August 2010, at This is Gloucestershire, (THE former landlady of dead GCHQ spy Gareth Williams.‎) we learn that Jenny Elliott, the former landlady of the dead British spy Gareth Williams, says she is baffled about the lack of a police approach to her.

Jenny Elliott said she had not been contacted since Dr Williams' body was discovered on Monday 23 August 2010.

The body of Dr Williams was found in a bag in his London flat, which reportedly was an MI6 flat.

He had been working with MI6 in London.

Mrs Elliott, 71, let Dr Williams a flat in Bouncers Lane from the late 1990s until just over a year ago when he moved to London.

He was due to return to live in the self-contained annex on September 3.

Dr Williams worked for the United States National Security Agency and made regular trips to Washington DC and Fort Meade, near Baltimore.

James Rusbridger, who worked for MI6, was found dead at his home near Bodmin in the UK. "He was dressed in a green protective suit... His face was covered by a gas mask and he was also wearing a sou-wester. His body was suspended from two ropes, attached with shackles fastened to a piece of wood across the open loft hatch, and was surrounded by pictures of men and mainly black women in bondage." (Animal Rites: Beast of Bodmin)

5. According to the police, claims that Williams was stabbed and dismembered are untrue. (Police play down money, sex in spy death )

Mossad are experts in murder by smothering. (Gareth Williams: 'backroom boy' spy was really a high-flier )

Gareth Williams "was found dead in the bath of a flat in London was stabbed several times before his body was stuffed into a sports bag where it lay decomposing for up to two weeks."

Williams had been working at GCHQ, the Government’s 'listening post' in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Williams, who was in his thirties, was on secondment at the headquarters of MI6, in Vauxhall, just across the Thames from where his body was found.

He had apparently been due to return home to Gloucestershire before he was murdered.

The discovery of the body was made after police were called to the top floor flat in Pimlico, Central London, following reports that the occupant had not been seen for some time. (telegraph.Murdered-British-spy-html)

6. From The Daily Mail. : "The family of murdered British spy Gareth Williams today accused the government of running a 'dirty tricks' campaign to blacken his name.'

"William Hughes, the codebreaker's uncle, said Mr Williams' parents Ellen and Ian were 'furious' at suggestions their son has been labelled as gay and a cross dresser."

The police have "strongly refuted suggestions that ‘bondage equipment and gay paraphernalia’ were found in the flat.

"‘Those reports are garbage,’ said a spokesman, who also dismissed suggestions that gay contact magazines were found. (Investigation into death of British spy Gareth Williams takes ...)

British police have played down as 'pure speculation' reports that thousands of pounds had passed through Gareth Williams' bank account shortly before he was found dead in his London apartment. (Police play down money, sex in spy death )

James Mossman was a BBC reporter, interviewer and former MI6 agent. He committed 'suicide' in his cottage in Norfolk. It was reported that he was gay.

James Rusbridger, an ex-MI6 agent, and writer about spying, died in mysterious circumstances. (Sean Copland Dot Com - Spies - MI5 Murder British Author.)

His book "The Intelligence Game" is a source for:

The Hilda Murrel Story, detailing MI5's alleged role in the murder of an old lady.

The CIA Middle East car bomb, where the CIA detonated a car bomb in a packed Middle Eastern street killing 85, and maiming a further 200.

The failed Mossad plan to bomb London, where they hoped to leave enough forensic evidence to blame the Arabs, thereby ruining British-Syrian relations.....

And also, the Madeline Haigh story, detailing how a housewife found herself on MI5's subversive list after writing a letter.

Stephen Milligan, was a Tory MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken. On February 7, 1994, Milligan was allegedly discovered bound to a chair with a plastic bag over his head and a satsuma [mandarin orange] stuffed in his mouth. (British Pol Ties to Auto-Erotic Deaths )

Jonathan Moyle was in MI6 (Investigation into death of British spy.)

On March 31st 1990, Jonathan Moyle, the editor of the magazine Defence Helicopter World, Moyle was in Chile looking into a story about a Chilean firm, Industrias Cardoen which intended to convert US civilian helicopters into gunships for sale to Iraq.

"It has long been believed that Mark Thatcher, the son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was mixed up in surreptitious weapons agreements with Chile.

"Originally, Moyle's family was informed that he had passed away as he was masturbating while hanging inside a closet in a hotel room in Chile. He was discovered suspended by his shirt with a pillow case over his head.

"As per a report in The Guardian on February 28th 1998, Moyle seemed to have been sedated. A needle mark on his leg may have indicated this." (British Pol Ties to Auto-Erotic Deaths )

The late Roland Carnaby at the CIA compound in Langley, VA. (Website for this image)

Roland Vincent Carnaby, reportedly an agent of the CIA, was murdered in the USA.

Wayne Madsen "learned that Carnaby possessed knowledge of something the Bush administration or Israel did not want made public and that the 'hit' on Carnaby involved Israeli Mossad agents operating in Houston." (CIA Agent in Houston Murdered.Mossad gets the Blame.)

Gary Underhill

Gary Underhill, a CIA agent who claimed the CIA was involved in the JFK assassination, died of a gun shot to the head in May 1964. His death was ruled a suicide. (Who Killed JFK?)

William Casey was Director of the CIA from 1981-87. Hours before he was due to testify before Congress about Iran-Contra, he was rushed off to hospital and soon died. (aangirfan: Opus Dei, Tony Blair, Fascists and Zionists)

Joseph E. Persico, points out (The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey): "one school of rumors ran, the CIA or the NSC or the White House had arranged to have a piece of the brain removed from the man who knew the secrets". How William Casey was Silenced - The Education Forum

William Colby (1920 – 1996) was the boss of the CIA from 1973 until 1976.

He was no friend of Israel.

He knew a lot about CIA dirty tricks and he died in 'mysterious circumstances'.

On 28th April 1996 William Colby went on a canoe trip at Rock Point in Maryland. His body was found several days later.

Colby may have known too much about 1. The CIA and heroin 2. Israeli attempts to infiltrate and control the CIA 3. child sex abuse scandals and the CIA.

John DeCamp, who had once worked for Colby, investigated the Franklin child sex abuse case.

Shortly before Colby died, Colby warned DeCamp to give up the case.

However, 'with the blessing of Colby', DeCamp wrote a book about the case: The Franklin Cover Up." (George Bush, The CIA, Mind Control & Child Abuse)

Reportedly: Many of the children described satanic rituals that they were forced to attend, some of which involved sacrificing infants and young children. (aangirfan: William Colby, heroin, Israel and child sex abuse) (Classic State Terrorism) (aangirfan: OMAHA IS FAMOUS)

Viktor Bout extradition stuck on the runway....

Viktor Bout extradition stuck on the runway....
By Richard S Ehrlich

BANGKOK - American officials hoping to extradite Viktor Bout on Wednesday from Thailand were unable to fly the suspected Russian international arms dealer to New York because the United States added fresh allegations against him that must be heard or dismissed in a Thai court.

A sleek white twin-engine jet from the US reportedly waited in vain on the tarmac at Bangkok's Don Muang air force base on Wednesday only to be told that Bout would not be handed over without jumping through some additional legal hoops.

"We are not sending Viktor Bout back today. There are still several legal steps to go through," Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said on Wednesday. "Before Bout's extradition can take place, the second case needs to be dropped by the court," Foreign Ministry spokesman Thani Thongpakdi said the same day.

The problem could still be quickly sorted out by US officials and a Bangkok judge, allowing Bout to immediately be flown to New York. Or his closely watched case could meander through Thailand's court system, resulting in a delay or cancelation of his extradition which eventually permits him to walk free.

The surprising development prompted a glimmer of hope among those defending Bout because the extradition ruling said he must be sent to New York within 90 days or else be released.

The US attempt to extradite Bout "has descended close to farce, with Thai agencies squabbling about how to proceed," reported London's Financial Times on Wednesday.

American prosecutors created the snafu in February when they added financial crimes - including money laundering and wire fraud - to a US list of reasons why Bout should be extradited to New York to stand trial.

Those seemingly tighter charges were added in August 2009 because a lower Bangkok court rejected New York's extradition request, which was based on a sting operation led by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who bugged Bout in a Bangkok hotel and then arrested him in March 2008.

Bout and the agents reportedly discussed a deal involving unmanned drones, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-air missiles and other weapons and ammunition. The March 2008 sting, however, was deemed insufficient grounds to extradite the Russian because, as a lower court judge ruled, no weapons or money were produced in Bangkok.

The court ruled it was not a crime for foreigners to simply discuss illegal activity in Thailand if they did not commit any actual crime. A Grand Jury's "Count One" in the United States of America vs Viktor Bout case, filed in New York's Southern District court, is titled: "Conspiracy to Kill United States Nationals."

The DEA said it convinced Bout to sell weapons to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, which could be used to kill US citizens in South America, but the Thai lower court judge also said FARC was not considered a "terrorist" group by the Thai government.

After the US added the financial crimes to their allegations against Bout, an appeals court agreed on August 20 to extradite him, but warned that the alleged financial crimes must now be heard by a separate court in Bangkok or formally withdrawn - which meant he could not be sent to New York on Wednesday as planned.

The new US indictment reportedly said New York prosecutors wanted to seize Bout's alleged accounts at Wachovia, the International Bank of Commerce, Deutsche Bank, and the Israel Discount Bank of New York.

Bout allegedly hid his name behind a front company, Samar Airlines, and tried to buy two Boeing aircraft while a US ban was in force against any American company or bank doing business with him.

Nicknamed the "Lord of War" and "Merchant of Death," the former Soviet air force officer and linguist is purportedly one of the world's biggest private weapons dealers. Weapons sold or delivered by Bout allegedly boosted rebel wars in Africa, the Middle East and South America, with customers including Liberia's Charles Taylor, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, Afghanistan's Taliban and others.

"Governments - particularly the US, British and French - and the United Nations used his aircraft long after it was known who he was, and what types of business he was engaged in," said Douglas Farah, who has written extensively on Bout's deals.

In a separate twist, a parliamentarian in Thai Prime Minister Abhisit's ruling Democrat Party, Sirichok Sopha, said on Wednesday he visited Bout in prison in April, but Sirichok denied opposition politicians' allegations that he was trying to get the Russian to somehow frame former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

"Let me explain about my involvement with Victor Bout, his lawyer has confirmed I met with Victor. This is true, but my meeting was not about faulting or framing Thaksin," Sirichok said.

The parliamentarian and close aide to the prime minister said he instead wanted to ask Bout if he knew anything about an airplane which landed in Bangkok on December 12, 2009, with more than 30 tons of weapons onboard, purportedly being smuggled from North Korea to Europe or the Middle East.

The plane's cargo was seized by Thailand, but the five-man crew - mostly from Belarus and Kazakhstan - were eventually released with no independent confirmation about who financed the smuggling operation, who sent the Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane from Pyongyang, or where the weapons were ultimately destined.

"Thailand’s efforts in counter-proliferation have also directly contributed to regional peace, and were on full-display last year when Thai police interdicted a substantial shipment of arms from North Korea," US Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns said during a visit to Bangkok on July 16.

Perhaps coincidentally, relations between Bangkok and Moscow recently suffered because of Thailand's most wanted criminal, fugitive former premier Thaksin, though that spat was never publicly linked to Bout's appeal against extradition.

In April, Thailand's Foreign Minister harshly criticized Russia for briefly hosting Thaksin, who Bangkok wants sent home to serve a two-year prison sentence for corruption.

"Everyone is washing their hands, but he [Thaksin] is a bloody terrorist," Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya said in April.

"There is this act of interference by third countries - how can the Russians allow him there for two days or the Germans before that?"

Despite that frost, Bout and his lawyer said they would plead with Thailand's Foreign Ministry, and also its monarchy, to ignore the extradition order and set him free - which observers predicted would not be likely.

"Viktor Bout allegedly made a career of arming bloody conflicts and supporting rogue regimes across multiple continents, even using the US banking system to secretly finance a fleet of aircraft," US Attorney Preet Bharara said in February.

"The United Nations and the United States have long-standing sanctions against Bout that stem from, among other things, his support of the most violent and destabilizing conflicts in recent African history," Bharara had said earlier.

A United Nations Security Council sanctions committee on Liberia said Bout had supported Liberia's former president Charles Taylor to destabilize neighboring Sierra Leone and steal its so-called "blood diamonds".

Bout's aliases include Boris, Victor But, Viktor Budd, Viktor Butt, Viktor Bulakin and Vadim Markovich Aminov, according to DEA Special Agent Robert F Zachariasiewicz, who signed the original 2008 charges presented to the court in New York.

Evidence presented in Bangkok included wiretapped telephone and e-mail messages between a US-paid DEA "confidential source" and Andrew Smulian, who was allegedly Bout's partner before being arrested in America.

One e-mail message, allegedly from Bout to the agent, ended: "Best Regards Friend of Andrew," apparently referring to Mr Smulian.

The DEA also displayed what it called "a map of South America that Bout reportedly used in discussions about the locations of American radar stations", which might monitor his cargo planes during deliveries to the FARC guerrillas.

The DEA also showed what they described as "notes handwritten by Bout during the meeting regarding the details of the weapons deal" in Bangkok, allegedly listing anti-aircraft guns, AK-47 assault rifles, an unmanned aerial vehicle, 10 million rounds of ammunition for sniper rifles and machine guns, plus rocket launchers and grenade launcher.

The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York provided the documents to the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which was concerned about where the weapons might be located and how they could be seized, especially a purported missile.

"It appears that missile on offer was the AT-4 Spigot, a wire-guided Russian missile system that has a maximum range of 2,000-2,500 meters and can penetrate up to 400-460mm of armor, depending on the type of missile used," FAS said in October.

FAS said it was also concerned about locating "100 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles," which could shoot down military and commercial planes.

It was unclear if Bout actually had personal access to any weapons allegedly discussed in the Bangkok hotel room.

Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California....

The 'Merchant Of Death' .... the view from CIA's Disinformation angle.....
By Richard Solash

He has seven aliases, a handful of passports, and has been described by US officials as one of the world's most prolific arms traffickers, with clients ranging from the Taliban to Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.

But today Viktor Bout sits in a cell in Thailand awaiting extradition to the United States to face criminal charges, including conspiracy to kill US nationals and provide material support to terrorists, that could put him behind bars for life.

A 43-year-old former Soviet Air Force officer, Bout was the inspiration for the 2005 film Lord of War starring Nicholas Cage. He allegedly funneled weapons to conflict zones in South America, the Middle East and Africa.

Douglas Farah, co-author of a 2007 book about Bout titled The Merchant of Death, says Bout had an uncanny ability to move weapons to trouble spots that were inaccessible to most arms traffickers.

"As someone told me in the book, he was the ultimate mailman and you never shoot the mailman," Farah says. "There were very few other people who could deliver what he could deliver, across the African continent particularly, but also in Afghanistan, where you have no roads, no trains, no other method of transportation."

Bout says he runs a legitimate air-transport business and denies involvement in illicit activities. He has long evaded attempts by the United Nations to block his travel and financial activities.

"He was violating UN arms sanctions on different countries, but the punishment for that is for the UN to say, 'You're a bad person, please don't do it again,' and then you just keep on flying, which is what he did," Farah says. "So there was no specific law of any specific country that he had violated, which made it very difficult for the amorphous United Nations structure to ever do anything."

Thailand arrest
Bout was arrested in a luxury Bangkok hotel in March 2008 in an elaborate sting operation in which US agents posed as arms buyers from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC).
A Thai appeals court ordered Bout's extradition last week, following more than a decade of attempts by US and international law enforcement to bring him to justice.

Russia fiercely opposes Bout's extradition. Speaking to reporters in Yerevan on August 20, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that the court's ruling was political.

"We regret what in my opinion is an unlawful, political decision that the appeals court in Thailand has made," Lavrov said. "According to the information available to us, this decision was made under very strong pressure from the outside. This is sad."

Bout's extradition was originally scheduled to take place on August 25, but Thai officials announced that would be delayed because all the necessary legal procedures had not been completed.

Soviet connections
The son of an accountant and an auto mechanic, Bout was born in the Soviet Union in Dushanbe, now the capital of Tajikistan. He has at times claimed to be from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, and has also been identified as Ukrainian.

Bout studied at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow and is said to speak six languages. After graduating, he became an officer in the Soviet Air Force and was initially posted to Angola, where he is alleged to have worked for the KGB.

Bout, however, denies any connection to the Soviet intelligence agency.

Whether or not the speculation about KGB ties is true, analysts say Bout appears to enjoy high-level connections among the Russian political elite.

"It is clear that he has a very high respect in Russia. How do you say it in Russian? He has a 'roof' [protection from high officials] in Russia. And it is very high," Farah told RFE/RL's Russian Service recently.

Bout left the military in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed and began assembling a fleet of more than 50 cargo planes cast off by the government for a private shipping business.

'The Merchant of Death'
In the ensuing years, the US indictment alleges, Bout and his associates traveled the world and used a network of front companies to channel massive quantities of arms and ammunition from poorly-guarded Soviet arsenals to militants and despots in Africa, Asia, and South America.

According to Farah, Bout also transported attack helicopters, antiaircraft systems, and antitank-mine systems - making it "highly unlikely" that he did not have at least tacit support from Russian intelligence.

The most well-documented case involving Bout concerns former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who is now on trial for war crimes for his involvement in Sierra Leone's vicious civil war of the 1990s.

In UN documents, Bout was identified as a "dealer and transporter of weapons and minerals [who] supported former President Taylor's regime in [an] effort to destabilize Sierra Leone and gain illicit access to diamonds."

Bout also allegedly armed both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, various Congolese factions, Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, and both sides of Angola's civil war. He has also been accused in Western media reports of ferrying weapons to al-Qaeda and of delivering Russian arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon ahead of the 2006 war with Israel.

In an interview with Britain's Channel 4 News last year, Bout admitted that his planes brought weapons into Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, but said they were to supply the government and not the Taliban. He has vehemently denied any business dealings with al-Qaeda and maintains he ran a legitimate cargo business.

A worldwide brand
Indeed, Farah says at least part of his fortune, at one time estimated to be billions of dollars, was amassed by transporting everything from flowers to chicken on the flights back from weapons deliveries.

In perhaps the most ironic twist of Bout's career, his companies were hired by the United States and its contractors in the early 2000s to ship goods into Iraq.

Most of these flights, which according to Farah numbered into the hundreds, occurred after former president George W Bush had issued an executive order making it illegal to do business with Bout, identifying him as a security threat to the United States. Farah says that even after the mistake was identified, the flights continued.

Bout's companies were reportedly used by the United Nations to transport peacekeepers to Somalia, French troops to Rwanda, humanitarian goods to post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

He also transported hostage negotiators to the Philippines, when in 2000, a group of tourists were being held by the militant organization Abu Sayyaf - to whom Bout had allegedly supplied arms in the past. He was also a key arms supplier to the Bosnian Muslims during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to Farah.

After years of skirting officials and operating by proxy around the globe, Interpol issued a 2002 arrest warrant for Bout in connection with a money-laundering case. By that time, he had made his way back to Russia, where the government said there was no evidence to suggest he had committed illegal actions. It has maintained that position.

Analysts say that should Bout eventually be extradited, it would be a major victory for the United States, which would have the opportunity to glean valuable information about Russian intelligence and militant groups around the world.

Speaking to reporters in Bangkok on August 20, Bout's wife, Alla, accused the United States of leaning on the Thai authorities to extradite here husband.

"I believe that in this issue there's been tremendous pressure from the American side," she said. "The Americans have been quite open in letting the world know that they will exert pressure on the Thai side to get my husband extradited to the US....."

Why the US really wants Bout.....
By Bertil Lintner

BANGKOK - While Bangkok-based observers weigh the legal merits of extraditing alleged Russian gunrunner Viktor Bout to the United States, a far more important issue seems to have eluded the media: why is Washington so eager to get its hands on Bout and why is Moscow doing everything in its power to prevent that from happening?

Bout was caught in a sting operation in Bangkok in March 2008 when US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, posing as representatives of the Colombian narco-rebel movement Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), claimed that they wanted to buy a large consignment of weapons from him.

Notably there had been no other reports of Bout's alleged involvement in the international arms trade since he reportedly flew weapons from a base in the Middle East to virtually every conflict zone in Africa during the 1990s and early 2000s. Russia claims that he is innocent of the charges, insisting that he is just an ordinary businessman.

Underscoring that official claim, Vladimir Kozin, deputy director of the information and press department at Russia's Foreign Ministry, wrote in the Moscow Times on August 26 that Washington's attempts to extradite Bout "may inevitably affect Russian-US relations to the detriment of the US effort to 'reset' them".

So why then all the geopolitical fuss over Bout? One plausible answer was ventured in another recent Moscow Times opinion piece by Yulia Latynina, host of a political talk show on Russia's Ekho Moskvy radio station. She pointed out that Bout served in Mozambique in the 1980s, along with a man named Igor Sechin, who today serves as Russia's deputy prime minister and who is widely considered the second-most-important person in that country after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The op-ed article was headlined "Bout, Sechin and a Political Firestorm".

According to a court statement by DEA special agent Robert Zachariasiewicz, undercover agents in Bangkok were told that Bout had 100 Russian-made Igla surface-to-air missiles available immediately. The DEA agents had advised Bout that they needed anti-aircraft weapons to kill American pilots on anti-drug missions in Colombia.

According to the same court documents submitted by the DEA, "Bout indicated that he could supply the FARC with 700 to 800 surface-to-air missiles, 5,000 AK-47 firearms, millions of rounds of ammunition, various Russian spare parts for rifles, anti-personnel mines and C-4 explosives, night-vision equipment, 'ultralight' airplanes, which could be outfitted with grenade launchers and missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles, which have a range of 200 to 300 kilometers."

Latynina wrote in her article: "The delivery of 100 Russian anti-aircraft missiles appears to be a government-sponsored program ... it is frightening to consider what Bout could tell US authorities about who promised to provide him with [those] 100 Russian anti-aircraft weapons."

Sechin is seven years older than Bout, and they both are linguists fluent in Portuguese and French. Bout served under Sechin in the 1980s in Portuguese-speaking Mozambique, when, officially, Sechin was an interpreter with the then Soviet trade and diplomatic mission there. However, according to http://rt.com website, "Some consider this to be the beginning of [Sechin's] career at the KGB. He was allegedly the USSR's point man for weapons smuggling to Latin America and the Middle East."

Douglas Farah, author of a controversial biography about Bout, pointed out in a Foreign Policy article on August 20: "[Bout's] knowledge base, although he is only 43 years old, goes back more than two decades and possibly extends to the heart of the Russian campaigns around the globe."

If accurate, it could go a long way toward explaining why Russia doesn't want to see him extradited to the US. And that may be what Washington wants more than just to bust Bout for alleged gunrunning. Some suggest a plea-bargain could be offered by the US whereby Bout would be treated leniently if he is found guilty in exchange for sharing what he may know about any possible Russian clandestine arms dealings.

Death merchants
Bout is not the only alleged global arms dealer in the US's sights. Syrian millionaire and alleged arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar/CIA was arrested in Spain in 2007 in a similar sting operation organized by US authorities. He had also been indicted on charges of seeking to sell weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, to FARC. After a year of legal wrangling, al-Kassar/CIA was eventually extradited to the US.

In September 2006, Indonesian arms dealer Hadja Subandi and a group of Sri Lankan and Singaporean associates were arrested in a sting on the Pacific Island of Guam, a US territory. They were accused of trying to sell US$900,000 worth of surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weaponry to the Sri Lankan separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebel group.

It has been clear for more than a decade that Western security services have been concerned over the proliferation of man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, including the shoulder-launched Igla surface-to-air missiles Bout was allegedly trying to sell to the FARC. The US has been more active than any other country in trying to secure stocks of these missiles, persuading governments to destroy obsolescent stocks while cracking down on arms merchants dealing in them and identifying the actual suppliers of such weapons.

"When you have al-Kassar in 2007 and Viktor Bout in 2008 caught in strikingly similar sting operations, a pattern clearly emerges,” says Anthony Davis, a security analyst with IHS-Jane's, a military information group. That pattern is precisely why the US is on a collision course with Russia, where many surface-to-air missiles are manufactured and from where they later somehow find their way onto black markets. China is another, even more important, source of surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weaponry that is bought and sold on underground international markets.

Bout was in prison in Bangkok when Thailand was shaken by another incident involving Russian arms traders. A Russian-made Il-76 was impounded on December 12, 2009, in Bangkok with 35 tonnes of weapons on board. The plane had flown from North Korea and was on its way to Iran, and according to Latynina the shipment was allegedly "owned by a firm controlled by Bout".

Bout could not possibly have organized arms shipments to anywhere while in prison. However, Latynina traced the ownership of the plane to Air West Georgia, which does have its registered address in the former Soviet republic of Georgia but whose actual location is at Vnukovo Airport in Moscow. According to Latynina, Air West is also listed in the business directory Gde24.ru as being located "near the Okhotny Road metro station and just a stone's throw from the Kremlin and the headquarters of [the KGB's successor agency] the Federal Security Service on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad."

It is unlikely, however, that the ultimate destination for the Russian-organized arms shipment from North Korea was Iran, which has its own arsenal of relatively small weapons similar to those on the Il-76 plane. Iran has for years armed the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon with weapons through its Syrian allies. That Russian-made weapons may end up in the hands of Islamic extremist groups is for the US a far more serious security concern than deliveries to Columbia's FARC. The North Korean shipment is reported to have included MANPADS of unknown origin.

According to security analyst Davis, the US and others are especially worried about the black-market proliferation of Russia's 9K38 Igla, which the US Department of Defense designates as SA-18, an improved version of the simpler 9K310 Igla-1, or SA-16 Gimlet. It is uncertain which kind of Igla Bout was allegedly trying to sell to the undercover DEA agents in Bangkok, but the SA-18, according to Davis, is capable of avoiding counter weapons carried on targeted aircraft.

If Hezbollah could access such weapons, it would be a serious concern for Israel, a close US strategic ally. Even more alarmingly, if the Taliban or al-Qaeda gained access to MANPADS of that degree of sophistication it would raise even greater risks for the US and its allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thus, the main question remains: what does Bout know and would he be willing to talk once he has been extradited to the United States? When this correspondent met Bout in Bangkok's Remand Prison in June 2008, he was fiercely anti-American, spewing anger at the US agents who had seemingly lured him into the trap. Bout is known to be a strong nationalist and he might, if eventually extradited to the US, prefer to be a Russian hero in a US jail than serve as a turncoat source on Russia's clandestine arms business......

China's secure communications quantum leap....?

China's secure communications quantum leap.... By Matthew Luce http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/quantum-hackers-use-lasers-crack-quantum-encryption-scheme-leaving-no-trace http://voices.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/2010/08/army_intelligence_buys_intelli.html http://vayu-sena.tripod.com/info-su30mki.html A team of 15 Chinese researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences, a government-directed research center, in May published a research paper announcing a successful demonstration of "quantum teleportation" (liangzi yinxing chuan) over 16 kilometers of free space. http://indiangeopolitics.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html These researchers claimed to have the first successful experiment in the world. The technology on display has the potential to revolutionize secure communications for military and intelligence organizations and may become the watershed of a research race in communication and information technology. Although much of the science behind this technology is still young, quantum technologies have wide-ranging applications for the fields of cryptography, remote sensing and secure satellite communications. In the near future, the results from this experiment will be used to send encrypted messages that cannot be cracked or intercepted, and securely connect networks, even in remote areas, with no wired infrastructure, even incorporating satellites and submarines into the link [1]. Roots in quantum physics, applications in intelligence Rather than transporting matter from place to place, quantum teleportation's most practical applications currently involve using photons for instantaneous, almost totally secure data communication. Using the term "teleportation" to describe this effect can be justified by what Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance": after two particles are linked together through quantum entanglement, any change in the state of one particle immediately alters the other, even from kilometers away. In effect, the state of the particle at the sender's end is destroyed and reappears as an exact replica at the receiver's end, with a negligible chance of undetected third-party interception [2]. While the teleportation of physical matter remains science fiction at this point, quantum teleportation could be immediately implemented as a means for secure communications and cryptography. Current encryption techniques are based upon mathematical functions involving very large prime numbers and secure key management and distribution, but this strategy has a number of drawbacks and is nearing the end of its shelf life. In particular, as computing power continues to double every year and computer bits speed up through the use of quantum particles, the cryptographic keys used for encoding and decoding must now be changed more often to prevent encrypted data from being cracked. As a result, it has become very difficult to "future proof" the encryption of data, and were any major breakthrough in quantum computing to be achieved in the near future, current encryption techniques could become obsolete and encrypted data could suddenly become unprotected [3]. The security of using quantum teleportation to distribute cryptographic keys, on the other hand, is upheld by the laws of physics and has a seemingly infinite time horizon. These keys cannot currently be detected and cracked even with the help of the most powerful computers. Owing to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the quantum states of photons cannot be observed without changing the state of the particle, which has the result of immediately informing the sender and receiver of any eavesdropping. Quantum communication can thus be used to send the most sensitive information, including keys to decode encrypted data sent over less secure means. Significance of the China's achievement As a result, the issue has found itself at the center of a rapidly developing geopolitical race to apply quantum technology to military and intelligence work. Since secure quantum key distribution (QKD) provides a much higher level of security between communication networks, employing quantum teleportation over a satellite network allows for completely secure communications, even in sensitive and remote areas, without fiber optic infrastructure, as long as all parties are able to maintain line of sight with a satellite. This could have wide applications in communications and intelligence for ground troops, aircraft, surface ships and submarines, and fits into China's current plans to grow its satellite network even further. Using quantum teleportation to send this type of information has been technically possible for several years, but according to the Chinese research paper, it had been previously demonstrated experimentally only over an enclosed fiber optics network and then only over a distance of several hundred meters [4]. The Chinese experiment appears to shatter these records by claiming to be the first to use a high-powered blue laser to exchange quantum information over a free space channel, and to demonstrate the principle over a distance as great as 16km. This distance is significant because it displays approximately the same degree of light distortion as is seen in communication from the earth's surface to a satellite, and so would allow for quantum communication using satellites. If this experiment were indeed the first of its kind, it would appear that China has succeeded in leapfrogging the West, and gained a significant edge in next-generation communications and cryptography. A quantum space race? The Chinese claim to be the first may not be entirely accurate, although certain elements of their experiment were unique and innovative. In 2005, a group of universities and defense corporations under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant and led by BBN Technologies, the company responsible for developing the precursor to the Internet, succeeded in transferring cryptographic keys over a free-space link of 23 km in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Well beyond the single link employed by the Chinese, the BBN program has developed an expanding, multi-node web of secure quantum communication that will be able to further expand and link seamlessly with existing Internet technology [5]. There are a few differences in the physics of their experiment that still make it notable and may not technically disqualify the Chinese from claiming their status as first, but nonetheless American researchers seem to have had a five-year head start in demonstrating the principles of the technology. However, one notable difference between the Chinese and American experiments is that the Beijing experiment used a blue laser for their teleportation experiments while the BBN team had been employing infrared. Both have advantages and disadvantages in range and power, but the primary difference in their applications seems to be that blue and blue-green lasers penetrate further into water and so have wider applications for sub-surface communications. China is currently modernizing its submarine fleet as a way to project force further past its coastal waters to deter any US naval response to a potential invasion of Taiwan as well as doing significant research into laser communications in submarines [6]. Quantum laser links with satellites would allow sub-surface communication without most of the traditional downsides of radio communications and allow subs to operate with even greater autonomy and silence [7]. Judging from the interest in blue lasers for underwater communication and the interesting choice of a blue laser for the teleportation experiment, it would be safe to venture a guess that applications for quantum communication are already beginning to find their way into Chinese military research and development. Because of its security level and applications for satellite and submarine communications, quantum communication technology figures centrally in the objectives of the Chinese military to upgrade their growing command and control capabilities. A functional satellite-based quantum communication system would give the Chinese military the ability to operate further afield without fear of message interception. However, Chinese researchers must also be aware of the potential for the United States to employ the same technology and may be seeking ways to counter this eventuality. While it is still almost impossible to intercept quantum messages without being detected, it may be feasible to jam the laser signals that send them with "optical noise" or other lasers. Understanding the ways in which quantum cryptography functions may also eventually expose further weaknesses in the network that can be exploited by a savvy adversary. China's continuing cutting-edge quantum cryptography, lasers and optics research thus seems as much a reaction to the same research in the United States and an attempt to counter it as it is to develop its own indigenous network. Conclusions All of these potential uses are motivations for Chinese labs to be the first to develop successful applications of quantum technology for immediate deployment and to claim milestones like being the first to successfully execute teleportation over several miles of free space. Besides the military uses and academic prestige, this accomplishment could attract a significant amount of international funding for China's developing optics industry, and if quantum teleportation becomes the new paradigm for the future of secure communications, China would like to make a name for itself as the premier research and development hub. Claims of this recent "first" for China then have that much greater significance for security and the continued health of US technological superiority. Notes 1. Jin Xian-Min, et al. "Experimental free-space quantum teleportation." Nature Photonics 4, 376 - 381 (2010). Published online: May 16, 2010 doi:10.1038/nphoton.2010.87. See also the Chinese Academy of Sciences review. 2. Lei Zhang, Jacob Barhen, and Hua-Kuang Liu. "Experimental and Theoretical Aspects of Quantum Teleportation." Center foe Engineering Science Advanced Research, Computer Science and Mathematics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2000). 3. David Pearson, "Building a QKD Network out of Theories and Devices," BBN Technologies (December 2005). 4. The Chinese paper cites R Ursin, et al. "Quantum teleportation across the Danube" and I Marcikic, et al "Long-distance teleportation of qubits at telecommunication wavelengths," both descriptions of quantum cryptography over hundreds of meters of optical fiber. 5. Chip Elliott, et al. "Current status of the DARPA Quantum Network." In Quantum Information and Computation III, edited by Eric J. Donkor, Andrew R. Pirich, Howard E. Brandt, Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 5815 (SPIE, Bellingham, WA, 2005). 6. See Yingzhuang Liu and Xiaohu Ge, "Underwater laser sensor network: a new approach for broadband communication in the underwater." Department of Electronics & Information Engineering, Huazhong University for Science and Technology (May 2006). 7. These include detectability, the need to surface to communicate, limitations in range, and the reliance on cryptographic keys that may be cracked. Matthew Luce is a researcher and Chinese linguist at Defense Group Inc’s Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, where he does primary source research and analysis of China’s science and technology policies and development programs. Mr. Luce's research and writing focuses on cyber security, C4ISR-related technologies, and China's ethnic relations. He has worked and traveled extensively in China and speaks and reads fluent Chinese.