WORLD

After more than two decades of singleminded focus on terrorism, the CIA, spying arm of the United States, is pivoting to what has emerged as a larger geo-political threat to American primacy: China. The world's most storied spy agency on Thursday announced that it is establishing a China Mission Center to focus on a country that US analysts believe will be an even bigger challenge than the former Soviet Union, given its massive population and economic clout.

The new center “will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” CIA director William Burns, said in a statement accompanying background briefings to the US media by unnamed officials in which they outlined an agency-wide effort to ramp up personnel and resources for the new mission center, including China-specific analysts, linguists, technologists, and other specialists.

Top US counterintelligence officials have warned CIA stations around the world about the “troubling” number of informants recruited from foreign countries to spy for America being killed, arrested or most likely compromised, according to a New York Times report citing an “unusual top secret cable”. The report claims that the cable has provided the specific number of informants who were executed by adversarial intelligence agencies in the last few years, highlighting the struggle they are facing in recruiting spies around the world.

“In recent years, adversarial intelligence services in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have been hunting down the C.I.A.’s sources and in some cases turning them into double agents,” the NYT said in a report Tuesday.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Tuesday assured India that his country would not be allowed to be used for any activity that could pose a threat to India''s security, as he explained Colombo''s ties with China in a "comprehensive manner" to Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla and exchanged views with him on a wide range of issues, including post-pandemic economy revival.

Foreign Secretary Shringla called on President Rajapaksa before he wrapped up his four-day visit to the island nation to review the bilateral ties. The meeting took place a day after the president returned from the US after attending the annual UN General Assembly.

“Sri Lanka would not be allowed to be used for any activity that could pose a threat to India''s security,” Rajpaksa conveyed it to Shringla during the meeting, a presidential release said.

The Russian military successfully launched its new Zircon hypersonic cruise missile from a submarine for the first time on Monday, the Russian defense ministry announced.

Missiles were fired from the Russian Navy Yasen-class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine Severodvinsk at a target in the Barents Sea. The submarine fired one while surfaced and another while submerged at a depth of about 40 meters.

The Russian military first test-fired the Zircon, also spelled Tsirkon, hypersonic missile from the frigate Admiral Gorshkov in October 2020. The weapon, state media reported, flew at speeds of Mach 8 and successfully hit a target 280 miles away.

Barely seven hours before the retreat ceremony of the Border Security Force (BSF) was inaugurated by lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha at Octroi post on International border in RS Pura sector of Jammu district, a Pakistani drone dropped a consignment of arms and ammunition in Sohanjana village, on the outskirts of Jammu city late Saturday night.

A senior police officer said, “it was a clear case of a Pakistani drone dropping arms and ammunition for the overground workers or OGWs ”. Over ground workers are sympathisers of terrorism who aide in terror operations.

“Sohanjana is a vast area by the side of fourth Tawi Bridge where large scale encroachments took place in recent years under political patronage. The possibility of OGWs among the encroachers cannot be ruled out,” he said.