...one of the advance/ground team for the July 2002 assassination in Gaza of Hamas military commander Salah Shehadeh was allegedly posing as a Canadian sociologist, and Palestinian counterintelligence services had suspicions that one of the advance/ground team for the 1988 Tunis assassination of Fateh military commander Khalil al-Wazir was posing as a Western graduate student. Whether either claim is true I don't know, although the former was substantive enough for Ottawa to pursue the issue with the Israeli government.

As for myself, while doing my own PhD research I was once accused of being an spy while in a safe house full of armed men belonging to one of the designated foreign terrorist organizations. My unfeigned outrage won me laughter, several cups of Turkish coffee, and a very good interview. (My interview subject was later assassinated in 2001.)

As to Phil Salzman's broader point on MESH, he's correct that scholars (and especially anthropologists) are very wary of excessively close connection with the government/military for both ideological and scholarly reasons.

Regarding the latter, I'm struck by the extent to which--despite all the hot debate on HTTs, Project Minerva, and so forth--there has been very little substantive analysis of the pluses and minuses of the relationship, how to address the ethical issues involved, and other practical issues. (SWJ and Savage Minds being, in general, relatively rare exceptions to this pattern.)

Instead, much of the commentary and discussion remains far too polemical to be useful.