CIA and the media

[Magda Hassan]

Not the CIA specifically but here is a classic example of how the media and intel services work hand in glove in the gathering and suppression of information:

Transcript excerpts of the ABC Lateline interview below, emphasis added by the Back Channel on details suggesting the conversations with the reporter may have come on radar of Israeli intelligence and possibly contributed to Zygier's legal predicament:
JASON KOUTSOUKIS: Well, I was contacted in October of 2009 by an Australian intelligence source who wanted to alert me to what he believed was a pattern of Israeli intelligence exploiting Australian law to obtain new sets of identity documents. [...]

And one of those people that I was told had been doing this was Ben Zygier. So we began working on the story in October and it took quite a long time to try and firm up different details that I was given and in December I felt I was in a position to try to contact Ben Zygier and I was able to get a number for him in Israel.
I rang that number for the first time, I think, around December 8 or December 7 and I had a conversation with him and that was the first of three or four conversations that we had. [...]

And Ben Zygier, he listened to me. It seemed clear to me that he knew who I was, which is unsurprising given that he's from Melbourne and that I had written for The Age for a long time.
So he listened politely to what I had to say and it was, even to me, an outlandish story, what I was putting to him. And at the end of what I had to say, he responded and denied it as strenuously as he could possibly deny something like that. [...]
He was just incredulous and then we wound up the conversation. I found him to be very convincing and then I went away and tried to do more work on the story and it wasn't until January, mid-January that I contacted him again and in the subsequent conversations that we had he just grew increasingly exasperated at my inability to accept his denials. [...]
I had a couple of different sources…to confirm…that these three people had changed their names and that they had used these travel documents to go to ..these sensitive countries, sensitive for Israel, countries such as Iran and Syria, but I could not be sure what exactly Ben Zygier was doing in those countries.
It seemed to me that he was doing some kind of intelligence-gathering, but I couldn't be more certain than that. And as I've said, I found his denials to be very convincing.
TONY JONES: Jason, one of your old colleague at Fairfax, Phil Dorling, has tonight posted a story suggesting that unnamed security officials have said that Zygier may have been about to dump, if you like, on the Israelis [...]
JASON KOUTSOUKIS: Well, he certainly didn't give an indication that he was going to do that to me. But I contacted one of the other people, one of the other names that I'd been given and that person behaved very differently. He didn't listen to me really at all. He just cut me off and I was never able to contact that person again. Whereas I guess Ben Zygier did listen to what I had to say and he kept taking my calls.
I thought at the time that perhaps Israeli intelligence were aware of our phone conversations. There were a couple of strange incidents that happened around my home in Jerusalem which I didn't really take seriously at the time, but in hindsight I think, well, it is possible that they were monitoring our conversations and maybe I can't remember or pinpoint the exact last time that I spoke to Ben Zygier, but I think it was probably in early to mid-February and so it's quite possible that they were aware that he was talking to me and became concerned, but really that is just my own speculation. …
Zygier denied the spying allegations to Koutsoukis. But Koutsoukis already had quite a lot of informationnames, aliases, methods, shell company information, sensitive countries allegedly visited, etc. from Australian ASIO and other sources, for a story he was proceeding with.

Read more: http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index....z2LJIT04x6