DARPA WANTS TO KNOW MORE ABOUT YOU THAN
NSA
MARCH 2006
WHY THE CIA GOT SO MANY THINGS WRONG
PETER CARLSON, WASHINGTON POST
- [Retiring Harper's editorLewis] Lapham, after matriculating
at Hotchkiss and Yale and Cambridge, hoped for a career as a
Cold Warrior.
"The CIA was in temporary
buildings, Quonset huts down by the Lincoln Memorial," he
says. "The interview was at a wooden table with four guys,
all from Yale. They were of a type that I had come to ridicule
at Yale -- the George W. Bush type."
What type is that?
"Eastern, rich, privileged,
arrogant, perennial cheerleader," he says, the adjectives
rolling out in his patrician voice. . .
"The first question was:
If you were standing at the 13th tee at the National Golf Links
in Southampton, which club would you use?"
He exhales a stream of smoke.
"Now, it so happened that I'd played that golf course and
knew the hole. It's a short hole, so if you said 'driver,' you'd
be wrong. . . . I said 7-iron, and I got it right.". . .
"The second question was:
You're coming in on the final tack at the Hay Harbor on Fishers
Island in the late afternoon -- what tack do you take? I don't
remember what the answer was, but I got it right because I had
sailed at Fishers Island.". . .
"The third question was:
They mentioned the name of a girl who was known on the Ivy League
circuit for being a ravenous nymphomaniac. And the question was:
Does she wear a slip?". . .
"I didn't know, because
I'd never had carnal knowledge of the young lady. I explained
that I'd heard rumors of French silk and Belgian lace but I couldn't
vouch for my sources."
At that point he walked out of
the interview, he says, disgusted with the know-it-all smugness
of his CIA interrogators. "I said, 'Gentlemen, I'm sorry
I've wasted your time. Goodbye and good luck.' "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001945_pf.html
JANUARY 2006
NSA TAPPED THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS
JASON LEOPOLD, TRUTH OUT -This
past spring, an explosive nugget of information slipped out during
the confirmation hearings of John Bolton - nominated by President
Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations
- that in hindsight should have blown the lid off Bush's four-year-old
clandestine spy p ogram involving the National Security Agency.
At the hearing in late April,
Bolton, a former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, told
Congress that since 2001 he had asked the NSA on 10 different
occasions to reveal to him the identities of American citizens
who were caught in the NSA's raw intelligence reports in what
appears to be a routine circumventing of the rules governing
eavesdropping on the American public. It turned out that Bolton
was just one of many government officials who learned the identities
of Americans caught in the NSA intercepts. The State Department
asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500
times since May 2001.
Newsweek revealed earlier this
year that the NSA disclosed to senior White House officials and
other policymakers at federal agencies the names of as many as
10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while eavesdropping
on foreigners. The Americans weren't involved in any sort of
terrorist activity, nor did they pose any sort of threat to national
security, but had simply been named while the NSA was conducting
wiretaps. . .
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/010206Z.shtml
DECEMBER 2005
TOP JUSTICE AIDE OBJECTED TO NSA SPY
PLANS
ERIC LICHTBLAU AND JAMES RISEN,
NY TIMES - A top Justice Department official objected in 2004
to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance
program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns
about its legality and oversight, according to officials with
knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to
have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret
program.
The concerns prompted two of
President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his
chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel
and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington
hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try
to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft,
who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.
The unusual meeting was prompted
because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting
as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling
to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program,
as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee
it.
With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign
off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who
had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University
Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight
security - because "they needed him for certification,"
according to an official briefed on the episode. . . Accounts
differed as to exactly what was said at the hospital meeting
between Mr. Ashcroft and the White House advisers. But some officials
said that Mr. Ashcroft, like his deputy, appeared reluctant to
give Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales his authorization to continue
with aspects of the program in light of concerns among some senior
government officials about whether the proper oversight was in
place at the security agency and whether the president had the
legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.
It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr.
Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting
or moved ahead without it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/politics/01district.html
REPORT: NSA SPIED ON OWN EMPLOYEES AND
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENTS
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT - NSA spied
on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and
their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned
that the National Security Agency, on the orders of the Bush
administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and
e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence
agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in
the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.
The journalist surveillance program,
code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of
Central Intelligence program that was maintained at least until
October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. . .
Firstfruits was a database that
contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone
and other communications of particular Washington journalists
known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly
those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists
included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen,
the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh,
the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and
this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The
Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy
Information Center.
In addition, beginning in 2001
but before the 9-11 attacks, NSA began to target anyone in the
U.S. intelligence community who was deemed a "disgruntled
employee." According to NSA sources, this surveillance was
a violation of United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18
and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The surveillance
of U.S. intelligence personnel by other intelligence personnel
in the United States and abroad was conducted without any warrants
from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The targeted
U.S. intelligence agency personnel included those who made contact
with members of the media, including the journalists targeted
by Firstfruits, as well as members of Congress, Inspectors General,
and other oversight agencies. Those discovered to have spoken
to journalists and oversight personnel were subjected to sudden
clearance revocation and termination as "security risks."
http://tinyurl.com/dnbqq
CHICAGO TRIBUNE BLOWS CIA'S COVER EASILY
[This goes to a point we've made
about the Valerie Plame affair; it is likely that her cover was
not nearly as good as has been implied]
JOHN CREWDSON, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
- From Italian and Spanish police reports and court documents,
the Tribune was able to identify the names, and in some cases
the post office box addresses, used by 67 suspected CIA rendition
specialists who registered at hotels in Milan and on the island
of Mallorca. Those post office boxes, in turn, led to scores
of other names that share the same addresses, most of which are
in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Some of the bogus identities
appear to be inside jokes, with surnames such as "Grayman"
and "Bland," or those of former CIA directors. One
of the bogus identities is an apparent homage to Douglas Neidermeyer,
the authoritarian ROTC commander in the movie "Animal House"
who later is killed by his own troops in Vietnam. A search of
commercially available databases reveals no evidence that any
of the named individuals ever has had a spouse, a residence,
a telephone, a previous address, a mortgage, a credit history
or a family. Even though their listed birth dates place them
in their 30s, 40s and 50s, none appears to have had a Social
Security number before 1998. . . A senior U.S. official acknowledged
that while the cover system had served the agency well for many
years, it had not been designed to withstand the scrutiny made
possible by the Internet. After learning of the extent to which
the Tribune had cracked the CIA's cover network, CIA Director
Porter Goss ordered sweeping changes in the way the agency's
covers are created, according to government sources who asked
not to be named.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-
0512250423dec25,1,6775430.story?coll=chi-news-hed
CIA'S POLISH CONCENTRATION CAMP LOCATED
MARC GOERGEN, STERN, GERMANY
- The CIA is apparently using a training center run by Polish
intelligence in order to question al-Qaeda prisoners. As Stern
has learned, there are now more indications that that this intelligence
camp near Kiejkuty is used as a base by the Americans. According
to statements by a high-ranking Polish intelligence officer from
Kiejkuty, Americans have lived on the premises for months on
end during the past five or six years. At the time, a 50x100
yard interior area, where the perimeter was protected by barbed
wire and a 10-foot-high wall, was also erected within the one-by-two
mile facility.
Regular Polish intelligence employees
had no access to this inner area, but the Americans apparently
did. Furthermore, there were small cars with tinted windows parked
at the camp site. The same kind of cars that employees at Szymany
Airport told Stern were always driven to CIA airplanes, which
were waiting with engines running at the end of the runway.
http://www.watchingamerica.com/stern000003.shtml
SPOOK INFLATION
JEFF STEIN, CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY
- You have to wonder how we won the Second World War with such
a paltry spy budget. After the massive intelligence failure that
opened the doors for Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
64 years ago this week, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress
launched the Office of Strategic Services, America's wartime
spying and sabotage outfit, with a $10 million budget and 600
staffers. It took them only about a month. By the end of the
war three and a half years later, with both Japan and Germany
in ruins, the OSS had spent a total of about $135 million (just
under $1.1 billion in today's dollars), and dispatched some 7,500
agents all over the world.
Skip forward six decades, to
Dec. 7, 2004. Following the massive intelligence failure that
opened the doors to al Qaeda's surprise attacks on New York and
Washington, Congress enacted legislation creating the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, the new pinnacle of
the so-called U.S. intelligence community, an array of more than
a dozen major agencies with a long history of paralyzing squabbles,
which together spend $44 billion a year. It took them three and
a half years. The new DNI office itself has between 900 and 1,000
employees and "is still hiring," according to a senior
official who wished to remain anonymous because such data are
secret. Likewise, while the total number of people employed by
U.S. intelligence is classified, the CIA alone is thought to
have upwards of 22,000 employees, according to published figures,
even though it gets only about 15 per cent of the pie, or $6.6
billion. The rest goes mostly to the Pentagon and its expensive
hardware, such as spy satellites and Predator drones. My napkin
math makes those figures out to mean that the old OSS - a rough
doppelganger of the CIA - cost American taxpayers in four years
only a sixth of what the CIA spends every year, some good portion
of which is allocated to a losing battle with Osama bin Laden.
NOVEMBER 2005
VALERIE PLAME'S OUTFIT
JOSHUA FRANK, COUNTERPUNCH, JUL
2005 - The numerous actions the CIA has taken since 1945 have
been guilty, either directly or indirectly, of helping remove
dozens of governments from power - many of which were democratically
elected. According to William Blum, author of "Rogue State":
"From 1945 to the end of the [20th] century, the USA attempted
to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more
than 30 populist-nationalist movements strugglinYg against intolerable
regimes. In the process, the USA caused the end of life for several
million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of
agony and despair."
The CIA of course, played an
integral role in all of these bloody coups. In 1949 the CIA successfully
helped to change the government in Syria, as well as in Greece
that same year. They did the same in Cuba in 1952 and Iran in
1953, Guatemala in 1954, South Vietnam in 1955, Haiti in 1957,
Laos in 1958, South Korea and Ecuador in 1960, the Dominican
Republic and Honduras in 1963, Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, Zaire
in 1965, Ghana in 1966, Cambodia in 1970, El Salvador in 1972,
Chile in 1973, South Korea in 1979, Liberia in 1980, Chad in
1982, Grenada in 1983, Fiji in 1987,
Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in
2004. And this only represents a list of "successful"
US interventions. Many others have failed. Let us not overlook
what the CIA has done here in the United States under the guise
of "national security." As the late journalist Gary
Webb exposed in the mid-1990s, right-wing drug dealers in Latin
America helped finance a CIA-backed covert war in Nicaragua by
selling loads of cocaine to street gangs in Los Angeles, who
then turned the pale powder into crack and distributed it throughout
poor black neighborhoods nationwide.
But the CIA's narcotics dealings
didn't begin in the 1990s - the CIA's drug propagation dates
back at least to 1947 in Afghanistan, as Alexander Cockburn and
Jeffrey St. Clair explain in their seminal book, "Whiteout:
the CIA, Drugs and the Press."
Back in the 1960s the CIA, along with the FBI, routinely used
"mail covers" (the recording of names and addresses)
and electronic surveillance in order to spy on activists in the
anti-war and civil rights movements. The CIA alone admitted to
photographing the outside of 2.7 million pieces of mail during
those years, as well as opening more than 214,000.
Right now, as Professor David
Price recently exposed in Counter Punch, the CIA places covert
agents in American university classrooms to spy on students and
faculty. And this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the
CIA's invasive and violent history in the US.
So you'll have to excuse me if
I think Karl Rove did us all a favor by outing Valerie Plame.
We can only hope more Beltway insiders follow his lead.
http://www.counterpunch.org/frank07142005.html
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - The notorious
CIA official James Angleton said shortly before his death, "You
know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed. .
. We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope.
We - I - so misjudged what happened. . .
"Fundamentally, the founding
fathers of US intelligence were liars. The better you lied and
the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted.
These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside their
duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for
absolute power. I did things, that in looking back on my life,
I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it. . . Allen
Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the
grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a
room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly
end up in hell. . . I guess I'll see them there soon."
OCTOBER 2005
THE REALLY HIDDEN CIA: LEARNING
FROM FACTS, NOT SPIES
[This article appeared in an
open source publication of a CIA think tank]
STEPHEN C MERCADO, CENTER FOR
THE STUDY OF INTELLIGENCE, CIA - We need to rethink the distinction
between open sources and secrets. Too many policymakers and intelligence
officers mistake secrecy for intelligence and assume that information
covertly acquired is superior to that obtained openly. Yet, the
distinction between overt and covert sources is less clear than
such thinking suggests. Open sources often equal or surpass classified
information in monitoring and analyzing such pressing problems
as terrorism, proliferation, and counterintelligence. Slighting
open source intelligence for secrets, obtained at far greater
expense when available at all, is no way to run an intelligence
community. Also, we must put to rest the notion that the private
sector is the preferred OSINT agent. In the end, I would contend,
the Intelligence Community needs to assign greater resources
to open sources.
George Tenet, a recent director
of central intelligence, was fond of defining the CIA to audiences
both within and outside the Intelligence Community with a curt
phrase: "We steal secrets." Neither from reading the
CIA's recruiting brochure nor listening to its chief would one
learn that the Agency includes an [open source intelligence]
service that produces the lion's share of its intelligence. .
.
Those who swear that secrets
are the only true intelligence, in contrast to mere "information"
found through open means, would do well to consider the indistinct
character of the categories of overt and covert in intelligence.
Information hidden behind walls of classification and special
access programs may prove no more than equal in value to material
available to the public.
Overt and covert streams of intelligence
are by no means completely parallel and distinct; they often
mingle and meander over one another's territory. Covert reports
at times are amalgams of press clippings. And newspaper editors,
for their part, frequently publish stories based on accurate
leaks of classified material. . .
Not only are open sources at
times indistinguishable from secrets, but OSINT often surpasses
classified information in value for following and analyzing intelligence
issues. By value, I am thinking in terms of speed, quantity,
quality, clarity, ease of use, and cost. . .
Speed: When a crisis erupts in
some distant part of the globe, in an area where established
intelligence assets are thin, intelligence analysts and policymakers
alike will often turn first to the television set and Internet.
. .
Quantity: There are far more
bloggers, journalists, pundits, television reporters, and think-tankers
in the world than there are case officers. While two or three
of the latter may, with good agents, beat the legions of open
reporters by their access to secrets, the odds are good that
the composite bits of information assembled from the many can
often approach, match, or even surpass the classified reporting
of the few.
Quality: Duped intelligence officers
at times produce reports based on newspaper clippings and agent
fabrications. Such reports are inferior to open sources untainted
by agent lies.
Clarity: When an officer of the
CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (DI), reads a report on a foreign
leader based on "a source of unproven reliability,"
or words to that effect, the dilemma is clear. Yet, the problem
remains with a report from a "reliable source." Who
is that? The leader's defense minister? The defense minister's
brother? The mistress of the defense minister's brother's cousin?
The DI analyst will likely never know, for officers of the Directorate
of Operations closely guard their sources and methods. This lack
of clarity reportedly contributed, for example, to the Iraqi
WMD debacle in 2002-03. . .
Ease of use: Secrets, hidden
behind classifications, compartments, and special access programs,
are difficult to share with policymakers and even fellow intelligence
officers. . .
Cost: A reconnaissance satellite,
developed, launched, and maintained at a cost of billions of
dollars, can provide images of a weapons factory's roof or a
submarine's hull. A foreign magazine, with an annual subscription
cost of $100, may include photographs of that factory's floor
or that submarine's interior.
Beyond this general argument
for open sources, I would maintain that OSINT often equals or
surpasses secrets in addressing such intelligence challenges
of our day as proliferation, terrorism, and counterintelligence.
When a nation develops a weapon of mass destruction, for example,
hundreds or even thousands of engineers, scientists, and manufacturers
may join the program. Bureaucrats and traders may sell the weapons
abroad. The OSINT target is immense. Engineers attend conferences;
scientists publish scholarly articles; manufacturers build production
lines; bureaucrats issue guidelines; and traders print brochures
for prospective clients. Many paper trails wind around the world
beyond whatever may surface in the media.
Before terrorists act, they issue
warnings, religious leaders of their community deliver sermons,
and political leaders plead their cause. Open sources, while
they may not tell us where the next bomb will explode, do allow
us to understand the terrorist agenda and act thereby to address
grievances or launch competing campaigns for hearts and minds.
. .
SEPTEMBER 2005
BETTER THAN A HIDDEN MIKE
THE WASHINGTON POST's curious
and troubling symbiosis with what people in the capital call
the intelligence community has been reported from time to time
and ignored more often. Here's a tidbit to add to the file, followed
by the back story. You have to admit that having the wife of
a longtime CIA agent being Ben Bradlee's administrative assistant
is a lot more cost effective than a hidden mike.
COAST GUARD ACADEMY ALUMNI BULLETIN
CLASS NOTES - I visited with Bob in the new Leggett home in Herndon,
a beautiful spacious place in the woodlands NE of Dulles. . .
Bob told me the story of how a four year-old grandson lives with
them for half the week. That keeps him - now at work with SAIC
(training CIA analysts) after a 29-year career with the Agency,
- and Carol - still administrative assistant to Ben Bradlee -
more than busy. The day of my visit was the day after Deep Throat's
identity had been revealed, so Carol was late in coming home,
as might be imagined. . . When I got home , I pulled Bradlee's
book, A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures, down from
the shelf, and found the following in its preface: "In writing
this book, I had special, quality help . . . TW, my longtime
friend and colleague, recreated with me the sense of excitement
in the 1960's and 70's, and I am especially grateful. The same
goes for Carrol Leggett, secretary and friend, who has been irreplaceable
from day one."
SPARTACUS EDUCATIONAL, UK - James
Truitt was born in Maryland. He became a journalist and worked
for many years under Philip Graham and Ben Bradlee at the Washington
Post. He was also a close friend of Cord Meyer, Mary Pinchot
Meyer and James Angleton.
In October 1961, Mary Pinchot
Meyer began visiting John F. Kennedy in the White House. It was
about this time she began an affair with the president. Mary
told James and his wife Ann, that she was keeping a diary about
the relationship. Mary asked the Truitts to take possession of
a private diary "if anything ever happened to me".
In 1963 Truitt was sent to Tokyo
in order to become the Japan bureau chief for Newsweek. On the
evening that Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered, Ann Truitt phoned
Ben Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary.
Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair
with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. He later recalled
what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start
looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around
the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we
had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton,
and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking
for Mary's diary."
James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence
chief, admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with John
F. Kennedy and was searching her home looking for her diary and
any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According
to Ben Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who
found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed
that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents
of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary.
Angleton later admitted that Mary recorded in her diary that
she had taken LSD with Kennedy before "they made love".
Ben Bradlee sacked Truitt in
1969. As part of his settlement he took $35,000 on the written
condition that he did not write anything for publication about
his experiences at the Washington Post that was "in any
way derogatory" of the company.
March, 1976, Truitt gave an interview
to the National Enquirer. He told the newspaper that Mary Pinchot
Meyer was having an affair with John F. Kennedy. He also claimed
that Mary had told them that she was keeping an account of this
relationship in her diary. Truitt claimed that the diary had
been removed by Ben Bradlee and James Angleton.
At first Bradlee and Angleton
denied the story. Some of Mary's friends knew that the two men
were lying about the diary and some spoke anonymously to other
newspapers and magazines. Later that month Time Magazine published
an article confirming Truitt's story. Antoinette Bradlee, who
was now living apart from Ben Bradlee, admitted that her sister
had been having an affair with John F. Kennedy. Antoinette claimed
she found the diary and letters a few days after her sister's
death. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's
studio. The contents of the box were given to James Angleton
who claimed he burnt the diary. Bradlee and Angleton were now
forced to admit that Truitt's story was accurate.
In 1981 James Truitt committed
suicide. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) Truitt's
wife, Evelyn Patterson Truitt, claimed that her husband's papers,
including copies of Mary's diary, had been stolen from the home
by an CIA agent called Herbert Burrows.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKtruitt.htm
WIKIPEDIA - In 1952 Bradlee joined
the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange,
the embassy's propaganda unit. USIE produced films, magazines,
research, speeches, and news items for use by the CIA throughout
Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice
of America, a means of disseminating pro-American "cultural
information" worldwide. While at the USIE Bradlee worked
with E. Howard Hunt and Fred Friendly. According to a Justice
Department memo from a assistant U.S. attorney in the Rosenberg
Trial, Bradlee was helping the CIA to manage European propaganda
regarding the spying conviction and the execution of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg on 19 June 1953.
http://en.wikipedia.org
KATHARINE THE GREAT: KATHARINE
GRAHAM AND THE WASHINGTON POST. By Deborah Davis. National Press,
1987,
DANIEL BRANDT, NATIONAL REPORTER,
1987 - How's this for a mini-series? Philip Graham, a military
intelligence veteran from World War II, marries Katharine and
thereby inherits the Post from her multi-millionaire father Eugene
Meyer. Phil admires the work of philosopher and MI6 agent Sir
Isaiah Berlin and frequently seeks the company of CIA propaganda
heavies Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Desmond FitzGerald, and Richard
Helms. He brings CIA mouthpiece Joseph Alsop to the Post in 1958,
and soon reaches the pinnacle of Washington insider success --
sharing girlfriends with President Kennedy. After his suicide
in 1963, his wife Katharine takes over ownership of the Post
and hires Ben Bradlee to run it. James Truitt, a former Post
vice- president and close aide to Phil, is fired in 1969. Both
Truitt and Bradlee are friends of CIA counterintelligence chief
James Angleton, with Bradlee also close to President Kennedy.
In the fifties, Bradlee's wife Tony Pinchot and her sister Mary,
who is married to CIA heavy Cord Meyer, Jr., are both close to
Vassar classmate Cicely d'Autremont, who is married to Angleton.
After her divorce from Cord, Mary Meyer becomes President Kennedy's
lover. She is murdered in 1964 (the case is never solved), whereupon
Angleton, as trustee of her children, makes off with her diary.
. .
There's much more. According
to his Who's Who entry, Alfred Friendly was a Post reporter while
also serving in Air Force intelligence during World War II and
as director of overseas information for the Economic Cooperation
Administration from 1948-49. Joseph B. Smith (Portrait of a Cold
Warrior) reports that the ECA routinely provided cover for the
CIA. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were set up by the CIA
and John S. Hayes was their chairman by 1974. Years earlier when
Hayes was vice-president for radio and television at the Post,
he was appointed by Kennedy to a secret CIA propaganda task force.
. .
But poor Bradlee claims he didn't
know that Cord Meyer was a globetrotting CIA destabilizer in
the fifties, just as he knew nothing about CIA links when he
took time off from the Post to work as a propagandist for the
U.S. embassy in Paris from 1951-53. Deborah Davis includes in
her book a memo released under the FOIA that shows Bradlee responding
to a request from the CIA station chief in Paris, Robert Thayer.
His assignment was to place stories in the European press to
discredit the Rosenbergs, who had been sentenced to death, and
Bradlee followed orders.
Benjamin Bradlee: from Post reporter
to embassy propagandist, then on to Newsweek and back to the
Post as executive editor, without breaking stride. The point
of Davis' book is that this pattern is repeated again and again
in Post history; she calls it "mediapolitics" -- the
use of information media for political purposes. Robert Thayer's
status as CIA station chief in Paris is confirmed in Richard
Harris Smith's book OSS. While in Paris, Bradlee already knew
Thayer, having attended the preparatory school Thayer ran while
Robert Jr. was his classmate. Bradlee categorically denies any
CIA connection, but it's a toss-up as to which is more disturbing:
Bradlee in bed with the CIA and lying about it, or Bradlee led
around by the CIA and not knowing it. . .
Davis could have remarked on
the current New Right editorial line in the Post, or added the
fact that former editorial page editor (1968-79) Philip Geyelin
joined the CIA for a year in 1950, while on leave from the Wall
Street Journal, but found the work boring and went back to the
Journal. And she also doesn't mention that Walter Pincus, a Post
reporter who still covers intelligence issues, took two CIA-financed
trips overseas to international student conferences in 1960,
and waited to write about them until 1967 when reporters everywhere
were exposing CIA conduits. . .
The CIA connections that Davis
does mention are dynamite. The issue is relevant today because
frequently the D.C. reader has to pick up the Washington Times
to get information on the CIA the Post refuses to print. . .
Much has been written already
about the probability that Nixon was set up. McCord as a double
agent has been covered neatly in Carl Oglesby's Yankee and Cowboy
War, Bob Woodward's previous employment with a Pentagon intelligence
unit was mentioned in Jim Hougan's Secret Agenda, and the motive
-- that Nixon was losing perspective and becoming a threat to
those who were still able to see their long-range interests clearly
-- is evident after reading Seymour Hersh's The Politics of Power.
. .
Part of the Post success story
has to do with sheer wealth. As one of the world's richest women,
Graham has the empire backed up with many millions, which guarantees
continued access to privilege and power. Another part is an ability
to play dirty. Katharine Graham, who became one of Washington's
most notorious union-busters in the name of a free press, used
her "soft cop" with Bradlee's "hard cop"
to insure that William Jovanovich, who published the first edition
of this book in 1979, was bullied into recalling 20,000 copies
because of minor inaccuracies alleged by Bradlee. Jovanovich
made no effort to check Bradlee's allegations. Deborah Davis
filed a breach-of- contract and damage-to-reputation suit against
Jovanovich, who settled out of court with her in 1983.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/morley1.htm
FEBRUARY 2005
CIA HIRED FIVE AIDES TO EICHMANN
AFTER WAR
http://www.arutzsheva.org/news.php3?id=76492
ARUTZ SHEVA, ISRAEL - At least
five former associates of Adolph Eichman were employed by the
CIA after World War II. So disclosed the National Security Archive,
a private organization working out of Washington, D.C. Adolph
Eichmann was responsible for implementing Hitler's "final
solution" for European Jewry and devised and supervised
the plan for systematically executing millions of Jews during
the war. He later escaped to Argentina, from where he was secretly
abducted by Israeli security forces and brought to Israel, and
was executed in 1962. . .
DECEMBER 2004
CIA INSPECTOR GENERAL
FREDERICK P. HITZ - Let me be frank. There are instances where
CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off
relationships with individuals supporting the contra program
who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity,
or take action to resolve the allegations.
REP. NORMAN DICKS, WA
- Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United
States?
HITZ - Yes
[Testimony before House
Intelligence Committee, March 16, 1998]
THE GARY WEBB STORY
It was, I believe, during
Edwin Meese's nomination hearings that I first noticed that Washington
news coverage had dramatically changed from a skeptical attitude
towards politicians to a courtroom standard: politicians were
innocent until proved guilty. This shift was one of the greatest
gifts the media ever gave to the cruel, corrupt and contemptible.
Imagine if one chose a
spouse, an employee, or a friend by such standards, wiping away
all judgment save for guilt provable in a court of law. Yet that
is precisely what the media has taught us. It even almost got
Bernie Kerik in as homeland security czar despite the best efforts
of the far more traditional New York City press to tell us who
this guy really was. Washington - its media and its other elite
- simply didn't believe it until the nanny problem - a clear
and provable matter, albeit inconsequential one compared, say,
to wondering what Kerik's ties to the mob were.
This recent obsession
with courtroom standards for story-telling - unprecedented in
journalistic or even human history - makes some curious assumptions.
Firstly, one need not follow any such standard in positive stories
about politicians or their actions. The mere fact that they are
in power is all the proof you need that they are doing right.
The only people who need to prove anything are their critics.
Secondly, it assumes,
that events are connected to each other in clear organizational
lines with identifiable individuals at each stop. It is, to borrow
a phrase, a sort of conspiracy theory: nothing happens without
someone telling it to.
If those in the Washington
media had majored in environmental sciences or anthropology,
rather than in political science or great-man-history, they would
understand that life isn't' really like that at all. They would
know that we are all part of cultures and environments and much
of what we do reflects these without anyone ordering us to do
anything. We just do things the way we know they're done. Including
in Washington. In the media. In the CIA.
As Gary Webb himself said
in 1999, "I do not believe -- and I have never believed
-- that the crack cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy,
or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never
believed that South Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S.
government to become the crack capitol of the world. But that
isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U.S. government's hands
are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending
three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced
than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug
problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities
is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper. But it's important
to differentiate between malign intent and gross negligence.
And that's an important distinction, because it's what makes
premeditated murder different from manslaughter. That said, it
doesn't change the fact that you've got a body on the floor."
The story was not a new
one. Going back to the end of World War II, the CIA started making
deals with the devil, unconcerned by the consequences. It worked
with the Mafia - including studied indifference to its drug trade
- because the mob was anti-communist. Long before Gary Webb's
series it encouraged the importation of heroin into the U.S.
by supporting drug-growing allies in Cambodia and later in Afghanistan.
The history of the CIA is in no small part the history of behavior
that, in normal life, would be considered at best criminal negligence.
And it is a story in which the major media has shown little interest.
We wrote at the time of
the Webb series: "The Washington Post and New York Times
have engaged in unusually intense spin work on the CIA-Contra
story. The Times even printed an op-ed piece by ex-CIA chief
John Deutch in which he made the fatuous claim that 'I know of
no evidence that the CIA has ever directed or knowingly condoned
drug smuggling into the United States.' The papers have used
complaints about details of the San Jose Mercury News series
to obscure the central point made by MN editor Jerry Ceppos months
before his recent mea culpa that has the Langley lackeys licking
their chops. Ceppos noted that the claim that "people associated
with the CIA also sold many tons of cocaine has not been challenged."
The CIA has a long history of outsourcing its dirty work to drug
runners and other criminals. There is strong corroborating evidence
such as that from Oliver North's diaries and Senate hearings
that CIA-friendly dailies like to pretend doesn't exit. While
the MN pieces may have been somewhat jingoistic in giving California
all the credit for the crack epidemic, the Mercury News was far
closer to the truth than the Post and the Times."
Even if Webb overstated
his case, he told the story far better than either the Post or
the Times have to this day. It is bad enough for them to have
misled their readers so badly, to disparage another journalist
for trying to get the story right is despicable. - Sam Smith
AMERICA'S DEBT TO GARY
WEBB
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html
ROBERT PARRY, CONSORTIUM
NEWS - Whatever the details of Webb's death, American history
owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national
news media, Webb's contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations
by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department,
probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected
individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also
showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations
into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.
Unintentionally, Webb
also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had
become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the
mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail
of some titillating scandal - the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica
Lewinsky scandal - but the major media could no longer grapple
with serious crimes of state.
Even after the CIA's inspector
general issued his findings in 1998, the major newspapers could
not muster the talent or the courage to explain those extraordinary
government admissions to the American people. Nor did the big
newspapers apologize for their unfair treatment of Gary Webb.
Foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge
George W. Bush's case for war with Iraq five years later, the
major news organizations effectively hid the CIA's confession
from the American people.
The New York Times and
the Washington Post never got much past the CIA's "executive
summary," which tried to put the best spin on Inspector
General Frederick Hitz's findings. The Los Angeles Times never
even wrote a story after the final volume of the CIA's report
was published, though Webb's initial story had focused on contra-connected
cocaine shipments to South-Central Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times'
cover-up has now continued after Webb's death. In a harsh obituary
about Webb, the Times reporter, who called to interview me, ignored
my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance
of the CIA's inspector general findings. Instead of using Webb's
death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the
Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation
confirming many of Webb's allegations. [Los Angeles Times, Dec.
12, 2004.]
THE REST OF THE STORY
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html
JEFF COHEN, COMMON DREAMS
-The Post and others criticized Webb for referring to the Contras
of the so-called Nicaraguan Democratic Force as "the CIA's
army" -- an absurd objection since by all accounts, including
those of Contra leaders, the CIA set up the group, selected its
leaders and paid their salaries, and directed its day-to-day
battlefield strategies.
The Post devoted much
ink to exposing what Webb readily acknowledged -- that while
he could document Contra links to cocaine importing, he was not
able to identify specific CIA officials who knew of the drug
flow. The ferocity of the attack on Webb led the Post's ombudsman
to note that the three national newspapers "showed more
passion for sniffing out the flaws" in the Webb series than
for probing the important issue Webb had raised: U.S. government
relations with drug smuggling.
The L.A. Times' anti-Webb
package was curious for its handling of Freeway Ricky Ross, the
dealer Webb had authoritatively linked to Contra-funder Blandon.
Two years before Webb's revelations, the Times had reported:
"If there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long
reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for
flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his
name was Freeway Rick." In a profile of Ross headlined "Deposed
King of Crack," the Times went on and on about "South-Central's
first millionaire crack lord" and how Ross' "coast
to coast conglomerate was selling more than $550,000 rocks a
day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of
anyone with a few dollars."
But two months after Webb's
series linked Ricky Ross to Contra cocaine, the L.A. Times told
a totally different story, now seeking to minimize Ross's role
in the crack epidemic: Ross was just one of many "interchangeable
characters" -- "dwarfed" by other dealers.
The reporter who'd written
the 1994 Ross profile was the one called on to write the front-page
1996 critique of Webb; media critic Norman Solomon noted that
it "reads like a show-trial recantation."
The hyperbolic reaction
against Webb's series can only be understood in the context of
years of bias and animosity toward the Contra-cocaine story on
the part of many national media. Bob Parry and Brian Barger first
reported on Contra-cocaine smuggling for AP in 1985, at a time
when President Reagan was hailing the Contras as "the moral
equivalent of our Founding Fathers." The story got little
pickup.
In 1987 the House Narcotics
Committee chaired by Charles Rangel probed Contra-drug allegations
and found a need for further investigation. After the Washington
Post distorted the facts with a headline "Hill Panel Finds
No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling," the paper
refused to run Rangel's letter correcting the record.
That same year, Time magazine
correspondent Laurence Zuckerman and a colleague found serious
evidence of Contra links to cocaine trafficking, but their story
was blocked from publication by top editors. A senior editor
admitted privately to Zuckerman: "Time is institutionally
behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas
and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine."
(The N.Y Times and Washington Post both endorsed aid to the Contra
army, despite massive documentation from human rights monitors
that they targeted civilians for violence and terror.)
In 1989, when Sen. John
Kerry released a report condemning U.S. government complicity
with Contra-connected drug traffickers, the Washington Post ran
a brief report loaded with GOP criticisms of Kerry, while Newsweek
dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."
In this weekend's mainstream
media reports on Gary Webb's death, it's no surprise that a key
point has been overlooked -- that the CIA's internal investigation
sparked by the Webb series and resulting furor contained startling
admissions. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz reported in
October 1998 that the CIA indeed had knowledge of the allegations
linking many Contras and Contra associates to cocaine trafficking,
that Contra leaders were arranging drug connections from the
beginning and that a CIA informant told the agency about the
activity.
THE PARIAH: ESQUIRE 1998
STORY ON WEBB
http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/post/whosarat/vpost?id=12
ONE OF GARY WEBB'S LAST
STORIES
http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2004-10-14/cover.asp
CONTRAS AND COCAINE:
WHAT THE BIG MEDIA WON'T TELL YOU
http://prorev.com/blum.htm
EFFORTS BY THE MEDIA -
led by the NY Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times
- to vilify the reporting of the late Gary Webb on the connection
between the CIA and the domestic cocaine problem ignores a long
history of the CIA getting in bed with the drug dogs and waking
up with fleas - from the Mafia in post-World War II Europe to
Cambodia to Noriega to Afghanistan. It also ignores (as such
media did at the time) congressional inquiries into this issue
such as those conducted for a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee
by attorney Jack Blum. Blum differentiates his view from that
he saw as being presented by Webb (although what Webb said and
what antagonistic media said he said was quickly hopelessly merged),
yet in the end he makes a similar case of tremendous - if more
indirect - complicity by the CIA
OCTOBER 2003
CALM DOWN EVERYONE
The current hysteria over
the outing of a CIA official by Robert Novak is of little benefit
to anyone except those wishing to perpetuate the myth of the
agency among the general populace. The incident is a classic
case of the capital's concern for an issue being in inverse proportion
to its importance.
The media attention is
being driven by a number of puerile factors:
- Some Bush capos' desire
to embarrass Joseph Wilson.
- The CIA's desire to embarrass George Bush
- The Democrats desire for an issue, any issue, that might work
- And the media's desire for an issue it can understand.
To get an idea of how
silly this frenzy is, consider what is being alleged - that Novak
endangered the life of a CIA operative by revealing her name.
If she had really wanted
to keep her cover, the first thing she should have done is divorce
Wilson. Surprising as it may seem, the evil forces of the world
are quite aware that CIA agents are omnipresent on diplomatic
staff, hanging around ambassadors, and so forth. A would-be assassin
merely has to narrow the field down from about a dozen people
to pick his target. They don't need the help of the Prince of
Darkness. In fact, the proper of Novak when told about Wilson's
wife should have been, "So?"
I asked an old Washington
hand how he would pick out the chief agency person at an embassy.
His answer: "the one who was too much of a smart ass and
[being on another's payroll] didn't have respect for the ambassador."
Over the years, much of
the best work of the CIA has been done by those who in a different
environment would be known as scholars or senior fellows. They
get their status by knowing more about their subject than most
other people and not by handing explosive cigars to their subjects.
The good ones, as in other places such as the campus or the newsroom,
are, however, the exception. More fall into that category well
encapsulated by Lyndon Johnson when he told an aide to bear in
mind that the agency was filled with Princeton and Yale graduates
whose daddies wouldn't let them into the stock brokerage firm.
The evil forces don't
usually assassinate analysts. Instead, they go after their opposite
numbers in the spy game. In this game, the agency's record has
been pretty pitiful ranging from painstakingly building a secret
tunnel in Berlin only to find out later that the East Germans
knew about it all along, to totally misrepresenting the Soviet
economy, to not being able to find bin Laden.
The agency has been able
to avoid responsibility for its history of failure largely because
of a sycophantic media, some of which - hundreds during at least
one period - were either directly in its employ or at its service.
Given the contemporary lack of honor in the media, one might
reasonably surmise that the day of the agency-embedded journalist
has returned.
The CIA has all the virtues
and failings of a government bureaucracy but without even the
minimal open oversight that other departments get. During its
history, only a tiny number of agents have been killed or endangered
by the media. Its own failings, exercises in institutional machismo,
career stuffing, and foolhardy fantasies have cost far more lives.
Howe many? Well, the notorious
CIA official James Angleton said shortly before his death, "You
know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed. .
. We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope.
We - I - so misjudged what happened. . .
"Fundamentally, the
founding fathers of US intelligence were liars. The better you
lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be
promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside
their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire
for absolute power. I did things, that in looking back on my
life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it. .
. Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner
were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were
in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly
end up in hell. . . I guess I'll see them there soon."
So calm down and think
about something else more important, say like the law known as
the Constitution that George Bush broke - by failing to uphold
it in his lies to the people and the Congress about Iraq. - SAM
SMITH
RECOVERED HISTORY
SECRECY & GOVERNMENT
BULLETIN, NOVEMBER 1998 - CIA Station Chief in Israel Unmasked
Describing the CIA's participation in the Middle East peace process,
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet noted in the New
York Times on October 27 that "[T]he agency's role has become
widely publicized." In fact, the rather unconventional role
of the CIA in mediating between Israeli and Palestinian security
forces has entailed a significant erosion of the traditional
secrecy surrounding CIA activities abroad. This erosion is reflected
most starkly in the publication of the name of the CIA station
chief in Tel Aviv, who has practically become a public figure.
The naming of intelligence officers under cover is something
of a taboo, and potentially a criminal act. Richard Welch, the
CIA station chief in Athens, was murdered in 1975 by a Greek
revolutionary organization after a local newspaper published
his name and address. This incident eventually led to passage
of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 which generally
makes it unlawful for authorized personnel to publicly identify
a covert agent, and for others to expose such agents "as
part of a pattern of activities" intended to impede U.S.
intelligence.
So the recurring publication
of the name of the CIA station chief in Tel Aviv has been viewed
with alarm and dismay by U.S. intelligence officials. . . CIA
spokesman Mark Mansfield would not formally acknowledge that
the name had been published. "As a matter of policy, we
don't discuss individuals serving abroad. . .
Disclosure of the station
chief's name seems to have begun last year in Israel which, despite
its official system of military censorship, has an aggressive
and resourceful press corps. Yediot Aharonot disclosed the U.S.
program to train Palestinian security personnel at CIA headquarters
in Langley, for example, several weeks before it became front
page news in the New York Times earlier this year. The name of
the CIA station chief appeared in an article by Akiva Eldar in
Ha'aretz last January 22, among other places. As one Israeli
reporter told S&GB, "The dam has burst. Previously,
Israeli journalists were reluctant to get in trouble with U.S.
law [by publishing such information]. We all intend to visit
the States again sometime. This fear is no longer operative."
The official's name (which
need not be repeated here) subsequently appeared in the Arabic
press. Al Watan Al 'Arabi, published in Paris, reported last
June 26 that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had asked
DCI George Tenet to remove the Tel Aviv station chief, who was
identified by name and described as an American Jew, because
Netanyahu felt he was biased in favor of the Palestinians.
The station chief's name
was first published in the U.S. in an article written by Robert
Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a mainstream
policy research outfit, that appeared in the February 2 issue
of The New Republic.
The identity of the station
chief is well known to many U.S. reporters who cover national
security issues. He is not a wholly clandestine figure, having
formerly served as CIA's liaison to Congress. And he has gradually
assumed a quasi-diplomatic role rather than an undercover intelligence
gathering function. Yet both the Washington Post and the New
York Times have refrained from publishing his name, even after
The New Republic ran Satloff's story.
APRIL 2001
BBC: The US spy plane that made an emergency landing
in China on Sunday after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet
belongs to an elite highly classified reconnaissance unit. The
EP-3E Aries II is the US Navy's principal long-range electronic
surveillance aircraft, described by one expert as "a really
big flying tape recorder." It is packed with sensitive receivers
and antennas capable of intercepting and analyzing military and
civilian radio and other electronic communications, including
e-mails, faxes, and telephone conversations. All the information
is fed for analysis into a huge on-board computer which sends
information back to defense officials at the Pentagon, in Washington
. . . "It's a disaster if that equipment is analyzed by
the Chinese Government," said US aviation expert Jim Eckes.
"It's one of the most sensitive aircraft in the US fleet.
It's totally designed to intercept communications anywhere in
the world." . . . [NOTE: This story brings to mind how easy
it is for the military to spy on Americans as well as the Chinese]
VERNON LOEB, WASHINGTON POST: Never bashful, former
CIA case officer and open-source guru Robert D. Steele has taken
his crusade for intelligence reform directly to the White House,
telling President Bush in a recent letter that he is being ill-served
by an intelligence community obsessed with secrets. "Our
secret intelligence community is spending $30 billion a year
focusing on the 5 percent of the information they can steal,
while ignoring the 95 percent of the relevant information that
is not online, not in English, and yet vital and very relevant
to your strategic decisions," Steele wrote . . . "The
problem with spies," Steele said, "is they only know
secrets. In the information age, the center of gravity for national
security is knowledge power, but the U.S. has an industrial-era
spy system."
PHILIP WILLEN, GUARDIAN: US intelligence services
instigated and abetted right-wing terrorism in Italy during the
1970s, a former Italian secret service general has claimed. The
allegation was made by General Gianadelio Maletti, a former head
of military counter-intelligence, at the trial of right-wing
extremists accused of killing 16 people in the bombing of a Milan
bank in 1969 - the first time such a charge has been made in
a court of law by a senior Italian intelligence figure . . .
"The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted
to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw
as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made
use of right-wing terrorism," Gen Maletti told the Milan
court. "I believe this is what happened in other countries
as well."
WELL, THEY COULD
ALWAYS STOP
LISTENING TO OUR CONVERSATIONS
VERNON
LOEB, WASHINGTON POST: Every day, a digital monsoon engulfs the Central
Intelligence Agency. Video and audio signals pour in from around
the world as a million new pages pop up on the Internet. What's
an intelligence agency to do about this "volume challenge
of staggering proportion," as one CIA official called it?
It is a question CIA scientists have spent millions of dollars
addressing in recent years in a search for "data mining"
technologies that produce knowledge from raw information . .
. All of this "data mining" technology is designed
to allow individual analysts to master gigabytes of digital information.
But it is of critical institutional importance to the CIA, which
must show that it can master the digital domain to survive in
a world where it no longer controls most information.
MARCH 2001
JOHN LETTICE, THE REGISTER, LONDON: The German foreign office
and Bundeswehr are pulling the plugs on Microsoft software, citing
security concerns, according to the German news magazine Der
Spiegel. Spiegel claims that German security authorities suspect
that the US National Security Agency has 'back door' access to
Microsoft source code, and can therefore easily read the Federal
Republic's deepest secrets. The Bundeswehr will no longer use
American on computers used in sensitive areas. The German foreign
office has meanwhile put plans for video conferencing with its
overseas embassies on hold, for similar reasons. Under secretary
of state Gunter Pleuger is said by Spiegel to have discovered
that "for technical reasons" the satellite service
that was to be used was routed via Denver, Colorado. According
to a colleague of Pleuger's this meant that the German foreign
services "might as well hold our conferences directly in
Langley."
FEBRUARY 2001
ERIC LICHTBLAU, LOS ANGELES TIMES: Congressional leaders
demanded to know how the FBI failed to catch a suspected Russian
spy in its ranks for 15 years and what steps authorities will
take to prevent a recurrence of the worst spy scandal in the
agency's history. At a three-hour, closed-door briefing with
the heads of the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department, members
of the Senate Intelligence Committee pondered possible spy-catching
remedies that included more aggressive use of polygraph tests,
financial audits and computer surveillance of FBI agents to detect
suspicious activity, officials said . . . [Chair Richard]Shelby
and other members of the intelligence committee said they have
continued confidence in Freeh's ability to lead the FBI. Some
critics wonder, however, whether the FBI director has gotten
a free ride from Congress in the wake of this latest scandal.
In eight years as director, Freeh has emerged largely unscathed,
despite a series of controversies that included the FBI's handling
of the Waco standoff, the Richard Jewell-Olympic bombing investigation,
the Wen Ho Lee espionage probe and now the Hanssen case.
THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY has opened the doors
of its headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., for its first job fair.
The agency is looking to hire 600 workers with experience or
education in computer science, mathematics, engineering, signal
analysis, data collection, cryptanalysis and intelligence analysis.
"The recruitment event is part of a larger strategy to recruit
the diverse, highly skilled work force needed to meet the challenges
of the 21st century,'' officials said in a prepared statement.
They said old hiring methods must be changed to meet today's
needs.
JANUARY 2001
HOW TO SPY
A common saying
has it that there are no walls which completely block the wind,
nor is absolute secrecy achievable . . . And invariably there
will be numerous open situations in which things are revealed,
either in tangible or intangible form. By picking here and there
among the vast amount of public materials and accumulating information
a drop at a time, often it is possible to basically reveal the
outlines of some secret intelligence, and this is particularly
true in the case of Western countries. Through probability analysis,
in foreign countries it is believed that 80 percent or more of
intelligence can be gotten through public materials. - From
a Chinese manual on spying cited by Bill Gertz in the Washington
Times
OCTOBER 2000
DEPARTMENT OF
DUBIOUS DOWNLOADERS
AL KAMEN, WASHINGTON POST: Just the other day,
ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk was deep into the State
Department doghouse for "suspected violations" of security
regulations. His security clearance was suspended, so he couldn't
handle classified materials. He needed an escort while in the
State Department building. The department's diplomatic security
folks wanted him to stay in this country until their investigation
was completed. At a White House briefing Monday, a reporter asked
if Indyk could "function as ambassador? Do we have a functioning
ambassador?" "Not at the moment," press secretary
Jake Siewert said.
Well, moments change. Indyk returned to Israel several days ago,
purportedly to celebrate the Jewish holidays with his family,
but it's pretty clear he's back on the job. There's even a meeting
on tap with Israeli Prime Minister and Indyk pal Ehud Barak .
. . Here is what a senior State Department official had to say
on the subject: "In light of continuing violence in the
West Bank, Gaza and Israel, for compelling US national interests,
the secretary has asked Ambassador Indyk to engage with government
officials and others in Israel to help calm the current crisis."
WALTER PINCUS AND VERNON LOEB, WASHINGTON
POST:
The Department of Energy intelligence chief who spearheaded a
1995 probe into suspected Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National
Laboratory yesterday blamed the FBI for targeting physicist Wen
Ho Lee as the government's prime suspect and denied that racial
profiling played a role in the case. "It was the FBI that
focused solely on Dr. Lee," Notra Trulock III told a Senate
Judiciary subcommittee . . . "Our final report listed 12
investigative leads for the FBI . . . DOE believed that the FBI
would pursue all 12 leads with equal vigor and diligence."