We may soon learn France’s real role in the Rwanda genocide; In a milestone court case in Paris, unprecedented testimony could reveal the Elysée’s links to the 1994 génocidaires

‘The policy was devised in secret … within the confines of the Africa Unit. At its heart was François Mitterrand.’ Photograph: Brian Harris/The Independent/REX

The trial this week of a Rwandan genocide suspect in a Paris courtroom is a well-earned victory for the French human rights groups who lobbied so hard and so long for justice. The milestone trial signals the end of France as a safe haven for génocidaries. But more than this, the trial is likely to see intense public scrutiny of one of the great scandals of the past century – the role of France in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda, which for 20 years journalists and activists have tried so hard to expose.

Pascal Simbikangwa, the defendant in Paris, is said to have been a member of an inner circle of power in Rwanda that devised genocide as a planned political campaign. Developed by Hutu ideologues, it was intended to prevent a power-sharing system of government that was to include the minority Tutsi. The genocide claimed up to a million lives.

A captain in the Rwandan gendarmerie until 1986, when he was paralysed in a car accident, Simbikangwa – a fanatic who hoped to create what was known as “a pure Hutu state” – worked for the security services in the capital Kigali. He was eventually found hiding out in the French department of Mayotte, an island group in the Indian Ocean, with 3,000 forged identity papers – more than enough for the hundreds of Rwandan fugitives still at large. He denies all the charges, and his lawyer says he is a scapegoat.

Until now there has been a complete absence of will in Paris to bring to justice any of the estimated 27 Rwandan genocide fugitives who live on French soil. The country was a staunch ally of the Rwandan government which planned and perpetrated the genocide. The trial may well show the French electorate just how appalling its secret policy towards the central African state really was.

The policy was devised in secret, with no accountability from press or parliament and largely determined within the confines of a special office in the president’s Elysée Palace known as the Africa Unit. It operated through a network of military officers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen and senior intelligence operatives. At its heart was President François Mitterrand, who had operated through senior army officers: General Christian Quesnot, Admiral Jacques Lanxade and General Jean-Pierre Huchon.

The prosecution testimony in the trial will be unprecedented in the detail it will provide about the genocide. The evidence combines the results of investigations into the Simbikangwa case at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and details from investigations carried by Rwandan authorities. Never before, not even in the courtrooms of the ICTR, has such an impressive array of witnesses assembled. It is hoped that their combined testimony will put paid to a campaign of denial waged by defence lawyers at the ICTR who claimed the killing in Rwanda was not the result of a conspiracy but was somehow “spontaneous”.

Simbikangwa’s prosecutors are concentrating on his role during the killing, when he allegedly encouraged the murder of Tutsi by Interahamwe militia on roadblocks and provided them with weapons. The roadblocks and the Interahamwe were an integral part of the planned killing mechanism and ensured the speed and scale of the slaughter.

But the impact of the Simbikangwa trial will be felt far beyond the courtroom. It is hoped that for the French public the nature of the genocide will be laid bare, and that at long last a debate about France and Rwanda will begin. Twenty years too late, a true reckoning may at last be possible.

Linda Melvern
The Guardian, Wednesday 5 February 2014 19.11 GMT

Find this story at 5 February 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Sarkozy admits France’s role in Rwandan genocide (2010)

President acknowledges that ‘errors’ were made but stops short of formal apology

President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted yesterday that French “errors” had contributed to the Rwandan genocide which killed an estimated 800,000 people in 1994.

On the first visit by a French leader to Rwanda for 25 years, Mr Sarkozy did not formally apologise. Nor did he accept allegations that France had played an active role in training and arming the Hutu militias and troops who led massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

But he suggested that the entire international community – and France in particular – should accept that its response had been culpably weak. “What happened here is a defeat for humanity,” Mr Sarkozy said. “What happened here left an indelible stain. What happened here obliges the international community – including France – to reflect on the errors which prevented us from foreseeing, or stopping, this appalling crime.”

Previously France has always insisted that it could not have foreseen the genocide and that the intervention of its troops helped to save many Hutu and Tutsi lives. Mr Sarkozy’s visit to Kigali, and joint press conference with the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, were the most dramatic symbols to date of efforts to repair relations. Diplomatic ties were restored in November, three years after they were severed amid mutual recriminations and allegations.

In 2006, a French investigating judge issued international arrest warrants for eight Tutsi officials close to President Kagame, suggesting that they had deliberately provoked the genocide of their own people by assassinating a moderate Hutu president in May 1994. The accusations brought renewed allegations from Mr Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government that France had armed and trained Hutu militias and soldiers knowing that genocidal attacks were likely or possible.

In 1998, a French parliamentary investigation rejected these accusations but admitted that the late President François Mitterrand and the then centre-right government in France had been blinded by supposed French interests in the region into siding with radical, and eventually murderous, Hutu groups.

The eight arrest warrants against Kagame aides are still active but the Rwandan government now accepts that they were drawn up by an independent investigating magistrate and not the French government.

Before his press conference with President Kagame, Mr Sarkozy was taken on a tour of Kigali’s genocide museum. On two occasions, the official guide made references to alleged French complicity in the massacres, including a photograph of a French military vehicle driving past armed Hutu civilians. President Sarkozy ignored the remarks.

He later placed a wreath on a memorial to the dead and said that “in the name of the people of France” he “bowed” to “victims of the genocide of the Tutsis”. “Errors of appreciation, political errors, were committed here which had consequences which were absolutely tragic,” Mr Sarkozy said. Although he spoke of the cumulative guilt of the international community, the implication was clear. France was – for the first time – admitting that its own actions had contributed to the calamity.

On his way to Rwanda, Mr Sarkozy visited Gabon and made an unscheduled stop in Mali to greet a French aid worker, Pierre Camatte, released this week after almost three months as the hostage of an extreme Islamist group.

By John Lichfield in Paris
Friday, 26 February 2010

Find this story at 26 February 2010

© independent.co.uk

Rwandan genocide; A devastating report on France’s role (2008)

Is the defendant’s dock at the International Criminal Court reserved for leaders of small and poor countries that defy the West? Not if Rwanda has its way. It wants to charge some of France’s most celebrated leaders of the 1990s as collaborators in genocide.

Last week the government of Rwanda issued a damning 500-page report documenting France’s participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This marks a remarkable turnaround in the deeply politicized world of human rights reporting. Usually, such reporting takes the form of governments or human rights groups based in the West condemning poor countries for having political or social systems that do not meet Western standards.

Now a wretched African country has turned the table.

All who study the Rwandan genocide, as I did while researching a book about that ill-fated country, come away stunned by what they learn about French support of mass murder. France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support” and “directly assisted” its genocidal campaign.

The report names 33 present and former French politicians and military officers as conspirators, among them the late President François Mitterrand and other well-known figures like former foreign minister Alan Juppé and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

The report, commissioned by the government and prepared by a panel that heard from more than 150 witnesses, is not only a devastating account of France’s eager participation in mass murder. It is also the most provocative example in modern history of a victimized nation pointing a credible finger of blame at the supposedly virtuous West.

France armed Rwanda’s murderous regime, sent soldiers to support it as the genocide was unfolding, and accepted some of its most heinous perpetrators as “refugees” after rebels forced them from power. Later, France helped the genocidaires regroup in the Congo and launch a savage cross-border campaign aimed at retaking power so they could complete their murderous work.

Even as the genocide was unfolding, reports of France’s support for it began appearing in French newspapers. French soldiers who arrived in Rwanda believing that they had come to protect victims soon realized that they were, in fact, protecting killers, and several communicated their disgust to French journalists.

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac of France made a remarkably honest confession of his nation’s guilt. “France … delivered protected people to their horrors. These dark hours have sullied our history forever and are an insult to our past and our traditions.”

Unfortunately Chirac was not speaking about Rwanda, but about France’s delivery of French Jews to the Nazi murder machine during World War II. His statement suggests that it takes nations at least half a century before they can apologize for their misdeeds. Doctors Without Borders declared in 1998 that it was “high time the French government broke its traditional silence on its shameful role in the genocide.”

Foreign Minister Juppé responded indignantly that no one could question the “good intentions of our humanitarian intervention of that era,” and that the government would not consent to “investigating an action we should be proud of.”

Parliament eventually did convene an investigation, but it predictably absolved France of all guilt.

France, though, has never forgiven the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, for deposing a French-backed regime and pulling Rwanda out of the Francophonie. In 2006 a French judge charged Kagame with assassinating his predecessor; Rwanda responded by breaking diplomatic relations with France.

The report last week is another volley in what has become one of the world’s most bitter diplomatic battles.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry rejected the Rwandan report as “unacceptable.” That was a mistake. The report should be an occasion for French leaders to reflect on their country’s history in ways Western nations seldom do. Perhaps they could even break with the longstanding pattern of denial that has shaped so much of modern history.

Like all countries, France is built on national myths. If it can admit the evil that has pervaded its role in Africa, perhaps other countries could follow by confronting the sins of their past. That would be an admission that people who, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” are not the only ones guilty of the 20th century’s great crimes.

Stephen Kinzer is author of “A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.”

By Stephen Kinzer

Find this story at 15 August 2008

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

France accused in Rwanda genocide (2008)

Rwanda has accused France of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994, in which about 800,000 people were killed.

An independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators.

The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings.

It named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted. France has previously denied any such responsibility.

Among those named in the report were the late former President, Francois Mitterrand, and the then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Two men who went on to become prime minister were also named – Alain Juppe, the foreign minister at the time, and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin.

The French foreign ministry told the BBC it would only respond to the fresh allegations after reading the report, which was released on Tuesday afternoon.

Checkpoints

Earlier this year France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner denied French responsibility in connection with the genocide, but said political errors had been made.
The Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice

Rwandan justice ministry

Report raises issue of motive

Some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias in just 100 days in 1994.

The report says France backed Rwanda’s Hutu government with political, military, diplomatic and logistical support.

It accuses France of training Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter, helping plan the genocide, and participating in the killings.

“French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis… French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors,” said a statement from the justice ministry cited by AFP news agency.

“Considering the seriousness of the alleged crimes, the Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice,” the statement said.

It further alleged that French forces did nothing to challenge checkpoints used by Hutu forces in the genocide.

“They clearly requested that the Interahamwes continue to man those checkpoints and kill Tutsis attempting to flee,” it said.

Testimonies

The BBC’s Geoffrey Mutagoma in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, says the commission spent nearly two years investigating France’s alleged role in the genocide.

It heard testimonies from genocide survivors, researchers, writers and reporters.

The 500-page document was presented to the Rwanda’s government last November, but was not made public until now.

Rwanda has repeatedly accused France of arming and training the Hutu militias that perpetrated the genocide, and of dragging its feet in co-operating with the investigations that followed.

France has maintained that its forces helped protect civilians during a UN-sanctioned mission in Rwanda at the time.

The two countries have had a frosty relationship since 2006 when a French judge implicated Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the downing in 1994 of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane – an event widely seen as triggering the killings.

President Kagame has always denied the charge.

He says Mr Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed by Hutu extremists who then blamed the incident on Tutsi rebels to provide the pretext for the genocide.

Page last updated at 17:25 GMT, Tuesday, 5 August 2008 18:25 UK

Find this story at 5 August 2008

BBC © 2013

“A Silent Coup”: Jeremy Scahill & Bob Herbert on Corporate, Military Interests Shaping Obama’s SOTU

On issues from domestic inequality to foreign policy, President Obama delivered his fifth State of the Union with a vow to take action on his own should Congress stonewall progress on his agenda. But will Obama’s policies go far enough? We host a roundtable with three guests: Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” and senior investigative reporter at First Look Media, which will launch in the coming months; Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow with Demos; and Lorella Praeli, director of advocacy and policy at the United We Dream coalition.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Jeremy Scahill—his film, Dirty Wars, has just been nominated for an Oscar; Bob Herbert with us, former New York Times columnist, now with Demos; and Lorella Praeli with the United We Dream coalition. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re continuing our coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union address. During Tuesday’s speech, he announced an executive action to raise the minimum wage for some federal contract workers from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In the coming weeks, I will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour, because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you should not have to live in poverty.

Of course, to reach millions more, Congress does need to get on board. Today, the federal minimum wage is worth about 20 percent less than it was when Ronald Reagan first stood here. And Tom Harkin and George Miller have a bill to fix that by lifting the minimum wage to $10.10. It’s easy to remember, 10-10. This will help families. It will give businesses customers with more money to spend. It does not involve any new bureaucratic program. So join the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Bob Herbert, can you respond to that, the significance of this raise for some federal workers?

BOB HERBERT: Sure. I think it’s symbolically significant. So, it’s not going to take effect until new contracts come up, so federal contract workers will have to be paid at least a minimum of $10.10 an hour. The reason I think it’s symbolically significant is because it keeps a spotlight on the issue of the minimum wage, on the issue of employment going forward.

You know, to Jeremy’s point about the State of the Union essentially being a propaganda speech, which is absolutely true, what you didn’t hear there was really what the state of the economy is for ordinary Americans, for working people in this country. You didn’t hear anything about poverty, for example. So, for years now, the American people have made it clear, in poll after poll and in other ways, that employment is their top priority. I mean, people need jobs. But neither party, presidents from either party and Congress, whether it’s in the control of the Republicans or the Democrats, have had a sustained, effective job creation program in this country. And the United States is never going to get out of its morass until it’s able to put people back to work.

We now have nearly 50 million people who are officially poor in the United States, according to federal guidelines. Another 50 million people are just a notch or two above the official poverty rate. That’s nearly a third of the entire population that’s poor or near poor. One out of every three black children in the United States is poor. If you just walk a few blocks from this studio, every day you will see enormous lines wrapped around the corner for soup kitchens and that sort of thing. And that’s the case in places across this country. None of that was addressed. And none of the initiatives that the president has offered, and nothing that the Republicans have offered in years, would begin to address this state of distress among American working people and among the poor.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Just to give us an idea, Bob Herbert, how many employees does the federal government have through contractors?

BOB HERBERT: Well, it’s interesting. It was actually Demos that—it was a Demos initiative that put the spotlight on this $10.10 initiative, because Demos was the first organization to point out that the federal government, through its contractors, employs nearly two million low-wage workers, which is more than Wal-Mart and McDonald’s combined. So, if you could get this initiative expanded to cover all of the workers who are contracted to work for the federal government, then you would help an enormous number of people.

AMY GOODMAN: Mention of unions? I saw Richard Trumka in the audience.

BOB HERBERT: You know, get me started on unions. One of the reasons American workers are in such a deep state of distress is because they have no clout in the workplace. They are not organized, and they are not represented, so they cannot fight for their own interests. Corporations are organized every which way from sundown, and they have tremendous amounts of money. They have a lot a political clout and that sort of thing.

Workers go to work. You know, it’s just one man or one woman, you know, against an employer in a terrible job market. So you’re afraid to even ask for a raise, even if you deserve a raise, because you think the employer is going to say to you, “Take a hike.” And then you go out there in this terrible job market, and there’s no jobs to be had. If workers were organized, then they would be able to have clout. You’d be able to bring pressure not just on employers, not just on corporations, but also on the federal government to get legislation passed that would be beneficial to workers.

And one of the most important things you could do is to just enforce the laws that are on the books that have to do with labor organizing. I mean, so, if you’re in an organization, a corporation, a plant, that sort of thing, where workers are not organized, do not belong to a labor union, they want to organize—the majority of the workers want to organize—the corporations fight you every step of the way. And they use a tremendous number—amount of unfair tactics. That’s illegal, but the federal government has not enforced the laws.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about international trade policy and how that relates. In his State of the Union, President Obama also sought fast-track authority to give lawmakers an up-or-down vote on the trade deals such as TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When 98 percent of our exporters are small businesses, new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help them create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment, and open new markets to new goods stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” Listen, China and Europe aren’t standing on the sidelines. And neither should we.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in his fifth State of the Union address. We just returned from Japan, Bob Herbert. There, there’s a huge discussion about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Here, most people, if you asked them, they wouldn’t even know what it is.

BOB HERBERT: Well, one of the things that’s a problem in this country is because the economic situation has been so stagnant for most people for so long and because the government has been—the government in Washington has been so dysfunctional, that Americans have really tuned out. And also, I don’t think that the press has done a good job at all on trade agreements, if you go all the way back to NAFTA in the 1990s. So people essentially don’t even understand these agreements. But what they do understand is that they have not been helpful to the vast majority of workers over all these years. So…

JEREMY SCAHILL: Can I just make a comment?

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, you know, what Obama was doing there—in his last major address that he gave, he—at the United Nations General Assembly, he laid out this sort of forceful defense of American empire, and even went so far as to say that the U.S. will use its military might to continue to secure energy resources. In this speech, it was a pretty forceful defense of a neoliberal economic agenda. And, you know, what Bob is saying about corporations resonates on a foreign policy level, as well.

What is widely being considered to be the most moving part of last night was when this U.S. Army Ranger was addressed in the crowd and who was severely wounded and had done 10 tours. Think about that for a moment—10 tours in these war zones. You know, this young American spent his entire adult life in these combat zones. And, you know, the issue of how veterans are treated in this country is one thing, but at the end of the day, did he benefit from these wars? Does the average American benefit from the continuation of these wars? No. Who benefits? That’s the most important question we all have to ask. It’s corporations.

BOB HERBERT: Exactly.

JEREMY SCAHILL: War corporations, the Halliburtons of the world, the Boeings. John Kerry, yesterday it was announced, is giving these awards for corporate excellence around the world. He’s giving them to Citibank, to Apache, to Boeing, to Coca-Cola. And so you have this neoliberal economic agenda, which is sort of the hidden hand, in many ways, of the U.S. empire, and then you have this iron fist of U.S. militarism that is being sold to the American public, and increasingly to the world, as national security policy.

And so, you know, when I see that Army Ranger who’s wounded like that, the first thing that just occurs to me is: Who has benefited from all of this? When corporations control our political process in this country through a legalized form of corruption that’s called campaign finance, what does that say about the state of our democracy? In a way, there already has been a coup in this country, but it’s been a silent coup. And it reminds me of that famous line from the great movie The Usual Suspects. At the end of it, Kevin Spacey’s character says the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. In many ways, a coup has happened, and the brilliance of it is that it’s not sparking major uprisings because we’ve been pacified and taught to just accept this as how things work. We have two parties in this country, the minimum wage is going to be the minimum wage, and corporations are in control, and these wars are fought in our name, but without our consent.

BOB HERBERT: And the flipside of who benefits is the suffering that is so tremendous out there among the warriors who have been sent over to fight these wars since late 2001. And so, you just have hundreds of thousands of people who have—men and women, who have come back from the combat zones, who have terrible, disabling injuries, who are going to have to be cared for—we have an obligation to care for them—in many cases, for the rest of their lives. We have to pay, as a society, to care for these folks. You know, it’s probably—Joe Stiglitz has estimated that now these wars are probably going cost cumulatively $4 trillion or more. None of this has been really explored clearly or properly explained to the American public.

JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, just a small sort of side point on this, you know, when we talk about the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, the conventional military, a story that very seldom gets attention is the connection between a paramilitarization of law enforcement inside of the United States and increasing use of what they call counterterrorism tactics on SWAT-style operations in the U.S. The military is donating a lot of its equipment to local police agencies and other so-called law enforcement agencies, and the communities that are most at risk here are communities of color and poor communities. Everything is about war—the war on drugs, the war on crime.

BOB HERBERT: Right.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And war requires some kind of a militarized response. And that’s what we’re seeing. This is deeply connected to the wars abroad, the wars at home, as well.

BOB HERBERT: And this is actually going into our public schools, where you have that type of militarized behavior going on actually in public schools. That’s how you get the school-to-prison pipeline that people are talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: On Afghanistan, President Obama said, “If the Afghan government signs a security agreement that we have negotiated, a small force of Americans could remain in Afghanistan with NATO allies.” But the latest news says the Pentagon has proposed up to 10,000 troops remaining behind, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, and if you look at what sort of various senior anonymous military officials have been saying for several years now, they’ve known that the withdrawal is not really going to be a withdrawal. Yes, we’re going to see the Marines pull out. We’re going to have this thing where journalists can ride on the tanks, like they did out of Iraq. But at the end of the day, this is an Afghanization of a U.S. policy. So, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to have these advise-and-assist squads of highly trained U.S. special ops and CIA personnel accompanying Afghan units, and they’re going to try to have the Afghans do the fighting and dying and killing on behalf of U.S. policy. But what I think should be of greater concern to the American public is that you are going to have these strike forces in place. It’s taken as conventional wisdom now that the U.S. is out of Iraq. Actually, the U.S. has a massive paramilitary presence inside of Iraq and is going to continue to have one inside of Afghanistan. So, these wars are going to continue on for at least another generation, albeit on a sort of covert, hidden-hand manner of doing it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what’s the justification, Jeremy, for keeping troops in Afghanistan?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, there is no counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan anymore. I mean, no one wants to talk about this, because you’re going to be accused of being sympathetic to the Taliban. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization with global aspirations. The Taliban has a constituency, has a greater constituency than the U.S., arguably than Hamid Karzai, who the U.S. recognizes as the president. And I think the Taliban is a morally reprehensible group of individuals, but they do have indigenous support. And the reason that they’re fighting right now is because the U.S. and NATO are in their country. And so, to sort of imply that what we’re doing there is countering terrorists, when in the first months of the Obama administration his own national security adviser said there are less than a hundred al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, we should be asking that question that John Kerry asked in 1971: Who wants to be the last to die for this failed war? What do they tell the families of the soldiers who die from here until they pull out the conventional military?

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the significance of that, for people who don’t remember, John Kerry, who is the secretary of state and formerly senator, was—fought in Vietnam, and when he came home, he was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam, and he testified before Congress asking that question.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I’d love to see 1971 John Kerry questioning, you know, 2014 John Kerry at a hearing about all these policies that he’s having to sell as secretary of state around the world.

Find this story at 29 January 2014

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The US & the Falklands War (2): the CIA

Bit by bit, with deep and understandable reluctance, the CIA has been opening its archives. Only fragments of its view of the Falklands War are currently available, but they are still worth close study.

Intelligence material often plays a large part in the formulation of foreign policy, sometimes a decisive one, but it is almost always held back far longer than other government information, creating a structural weakness in our understanding of the recent past.
the cia’s declassified files: the crest database

CIA Director’s angry memo to almost everyone re: the leaks that caused Argentina to change its cypher, 9 Jun 1982

Around 40 CIA documents on the war have been released through the agency’s “CIA Records Search Tool” database (CREST). These are items more than 25 years old that the agency has been obliged to release by a Clinton-era Executive Order (EO 12958/13256), rather than responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, which probably gives this mini-collection a little more coherence and completeness than it might otherwise have. One of the great problems with relying on FOI to produce historical information is that the selection of things released is dependent on the interests of the persons or organisations who made the original request, and their interests probably won’t be the same as yours, indeed are likely to be different – and might be completely crazy. You generally won’t know why one document has been released and not another, since the terms of the original requests are not themselves released alongside each document.

Even so, there is much about this CIA collection that is obscure. While you can sometimes work out in Presidential Library files what part of the whole has been released and what not, and roughly why, in the case of these CIA documents that is all but impossible. What we are looking at here might be a fifth of the whole, or a fiftieth. It might contain much of what they knew about the Falklands, or the merest fraction. It might be representative, it might be completely the reverse. One obvious element is definitely missing: there is no signals intelligence here. But we know that the US had broken Argentinian military codes, until leaks in the US press caused the Argentinians to change their cypher, of and it would be a surprise if it wasn’t reading diplomatic traffic as well.

Some of the CREST documents are so heavily redacted that they resemble a kind of two-dimensional Swiss cheese. Redacting becomes so compulsive an activity that even unclassified documents get redacted sometimes. Generally though the Falklands documents have been released without too much of this kind of semi-shredding. Unhelpfully, you need to visit in person to use this database, which is stored at National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and print out what you find. They give you free paper at least. The team at margaretthatcher.org has done the work and now uploaded the Falklands material. There is more useful information available in the library section of the CIA’s excellent website, including a number of additional Falklands documents, and we have added in a handful also from the official-sounding but resolutely independent “National Security Archive”, based at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

This CIA material includes twice-daily situation reports at the very beginning of the war, some satellite image interpretations, as well as high-level internal papers updating the Director and Deputy Director. It includes too a number of the “National Intelligence Daily” (NID) intelligence summaries circulated only to senior officials in the White House and Cabinet Members, the CIA’s ‘newspaper’, printed in tabloid form and some “Monthly Warning Assessments” (MWA).

Given the fragmentary picture these documents provide of the agency’s knowledge and outlook, conclusions are best presented as a series of points rather than a connected story, with suitable warning that they are incomplete and that possession of the full record would require them to be amended.

The earliest document is a memo from CIA Director William Casey to Secretary of State Al Haig, copied to the White House, providing a “Quick Intelligence Assessment on Falkland Affairs (April 2, 1982)”. This helpfully reminds one how useless intelligence reports can sometimes be. Forced to make snap judgments without much hard information, the interpretation inevitably tended towards the bland. The British, Casey solemnly suggested, would be hoping to use the UN Security Council “to put Argentina in the dock as an ‘aggressor'”. He explained that “British economic options are limited” and suspected that the Argentinians would be likely reinforce the islands before the British Task Force arrived. And so on: there are pages of this. Any averagely well-informed reader would have been tempted to skip large chunks of it in the hope of finding something seriously useful further on. More interesting was the point that many of the ships in the Argentinian fleet were 40 years old – i.e, dated from WW2 – and would need to be withdrawn as soon as possible from the wintry southern seas. “We also do not believe they would fare well in a full-scale naval engagement with the British”. How Argentina’s actions had been received in Latin America is nowhere touched on in the document, but must surely be in the redacted sections. The memo wraps up with Cold War aspects – Cuba likely to make trouble if it thought Argentina might win, though only rhetorically, the Soviets likely to supply surveillance information on the British Task Force to the Argentinians as part of a general strategy of ingratiating themselves with Buenos Aires, but no more. Almost the most telling point in the memo is the reminder that the post-Afghanistan US grain embargo on the Soviet Union, 1980-81, had created a big new trade between Argentina and the USSR, the former supplying no less than 10 per cent of the latter’s imports, though this was hardly classified information. The CIA was wrong, however, in thinking that Moscow would work with Argentina to block British attempts to persuade the UN Security Council to condemn the invasion by Resolution, “threatening to veto it”. This might have seemed a safe bet, but in fact there was no Soviet veto, to Argentinian disappointment and general surprise, UNSCR 502 passing easily on 5 April. This early success anchored the British diplomatic position from the beginning of the conflict, because almost no one could be found to defend Argentina’s first use of force.

The Argentinians understood, of course, the centrality of the Cold War to US perceptions and were themselves playing the Soviet card with Washington from the beginning of the war – warning the US that the Soviets were watching and waiting (CIA sitrep, 3 Apr). Later they threatened to turn to them for arms supplies (MWA, 28 May). Of course, this was a familiar move in third world diplomacy. It is not clear how seriously the CIA took it in early April, but by the time the junta faced defeat – indeed “military humiliation”, in the agency’s eyes (MWA, 26 May) – they were watching closely. On 28 May Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates told the CIA Director, William Casey, that a special memo had been prepared for the White House on Cuban assistance to Argentina and Casey himself was specially briefed on Soviet responses prior to a meeting with Haig. The movement of the Soviet ELINT satellite into orbit above the South Atlantic is noted in the 30 Apr 1982 NSC meeting on the previous page. But anxieties settled after the war. An Interagency survey of the “Prospects for Soviet Arms Deliveries to Argentina” in July 1983 concluded that: “Only as a last resort would the Argentines move to major purchases that would involve a long time arms relationship with the Soviets”.

The CIA debated the possibility that the Galtieri junta might be replaced by a “highly nationalistic military regime” (MWA, 30 Apr) – as if it wasn’t one, or not much of one. One has the sense that Galtieri was their preferred strongman, a caudillo in the making maybe, and that change was thought unlikely to be an improvement from a US perspective.
apr – jun 1982: the military campaign

The agency saw major difficulties for a British assault on the islands and thought at one point we were underestimating Argentine forces (NID 19 May), but consistently, and from early on, it believed a British victory was ‘likely’ (eg, MWA 30 Apr). Several times they revert to Casey’s initial point that much of the Argentine navy was clapped out.

British attacks on the mainland of Argentina were thought a real possibility, though one that diminished significantly once troops were landed safely on the islands (which happened on 21 May). It was believed that British submarines might attack the Argentine navy, particularly its carrier (the former HMS Venerable), even within the country’s coastal waters (ie, 12 mile limit), if there were big losses during landing of forces. If the troopship Canberra was hit, the agency believed landings would have to be aborted.

After the landings the agency judged (NID 24 May) the British were planning a speedy campaign and were willing to tolerate high casualties to wrap things up quickly, warning that “serious reverses” would create big political pressures at home and perhaps open the way to a Pym government. If on the other hand the campaign was quickly successful, “chances would increase dramatically for an election as early as next spring, with a major Tory victory likely”. That Goose Green would be attacked ahead of Port Stanley, rather than bypassed, was correctly predicted.

There were believed to be 17 US citizens on the Falklands at the outbreak of the war. Efforts were made through the Argentine occupying forces to persuade them to leave before the Total Exclusion Zone was declared (29 Apr – TEZ was the following day).

Judging from the junta’s efforts to acquire new equipment and supplies even as its forces faced defeat on the Falklands, the CIA thought it was planning to fight a campaign of long-term resistance (MWA 28 May) and that the Argentine government regarded its Falklands garrison as ‘expendable’ (Watch Committee 26 May).

There is limited military analysis in the CREST documents and there is a dearth of material from the Department of Defense on the Falklands War. The CIA predicted an outright British assault on Port Stanley led by Scorpion light tanks, but of course the Argentinians surrendered following a series of small battles in high ground outside the town so no assault on the town itself was needed. The analysts noted the effectiveness of Argentine air force attacks after the landing at San Carlos, but were unaware apparently of the failure of some of their bombs to explode. They doubted the Argentines could keep up their rate of air attacks, and questioned also whether Britain was being truthful about the number of Harriers it had lost (NID 29 May). The role of EXOCET missiles was discussed, but a redaction obtrudes, perhaps touching on Argentine efforts to buy more of these effective missiles.

The CIA Director, William Casey, sent a sharp memorandum to Cabinet Officers and a wide range of agency heads (but not the White House) regarding “Unauthorized Disclosures on the Falklands Situation” (9 Jun). He warned of the “seriousness of leaks compromising sensitive collection sources and methods” and urged investigations to determine whether leaks should be referred to the Attorney-General – i.e., considered for criminal prosecution. The 30 Apr meeting above noted that press stories had caused the Argentines to realise the US was reading their military codes and to change their cipher, locking the US out (for a time at least). ABC Nightline had broken the story on 14 Apr, but the 15 Apr New York Times article mentioned on the previous page pops up in the CREST database when you search for ‘Falklands’: plainly, it drew the agency’s special attention.

The US had no satellite over the South Atlantic at the outbreak of the war and took some time to reposition one. Observation conditions were less than perfect, with the southern hemisphere moving into winter, so the CIA analyses of 28 May of images over Port Stanley and southern Argentina may be the earliest they got. Even then they note problems with cloud cover. These photographs showed increased defensive preparations around Port Stanley, while a series of images of mainland military installations in north and south of the country showed the Argentine navy safely tied up in port, aircraft carrier, submarines and all. Given that signals intelligence was available, apparently in some abundance, it is unlikely on this showing that satellite intelligence played anything like as significant a role in the war. Many, of course, thought otherwise at the time. A State Department telegram of 4 May shows that the Embassy in Buenos Aires was unable to kill the story that a US satellite had given the British the position of the General Belgrano, whereas the British Official History of the Falklands War, by Lawrence Freedman (vol.2, p285) credibly explains that it was an intercepted and decrypted signal from Admiral Lombardo late on 1 May that showed the British that the Argentine navy was planning a coordinated strike against the Task Force the following day, information that led directly to the decision to sink the ship, which had first been found when the British nuclear submarine south of the islands got a sonar trace of the Argentine tanker sent to refuel it. One cannot safely assume that the signals intelligence came from the US side to the British either: we had our own formidable listening and decrypting capability, and it was only the day before the crucial signal that Inman was telling his colleagures that the US had been locked out.

News of the Argentine surrender was circulated as a “CIA late item” in the National Intelligence Daily deriving the information straight from MT’s office (NID 15 Jun).
jun 1982 – jul 1983: after effects – damage to U.S. Interests in south america judged ‘manageable’

Almost immediately the war was over Casey requested briefing on the impact of the war on global high technology transfers (Gates memo, 18 Jun).

The agency pointed out internal divisions in the Argentinian army resulting from recriminations over the war and saw in them a potent threat to the successor regime of General Reynaldo Bignone (NID 29 Jul). Returning soldiers from the garrison were expected to have unhappy stories to tell, with possibly radicalising results.

Long-term fallout from the war in the form of anti-US sentiment in Latin America was a genuine concern for the US, but swiftly diminished. This was apparent even at the most difficult moment, days after the Argentine surrender on 14 June.
The CIA prepared a lengthy intelligence appreciation for the President and other senior figures on 18 June, “Short-Term Prospects for Central America”. This commented: “The circumstances of the Falklands war will doubtless reduce the readiness of some Latin American states to support US initiatives concerning Central America. The direct adverse impact in Central America, however, is not likely to be substantial”.
The State Department took a longer look later in the year, as part of an inter-agency review of “US Policy Towards South America in the Wake of the Falklands Crisis”. This study concluded: “Aside from Argentina, crisis-induced damage to U.S.-Latin American relations has varied widely from country to country and appears manageable on most matters”. Actions to “restore and assert US influence in South America” included a resumption of arms sales to Argentina (and Chile) by end 1982 – much upsetting MT, but the President was firm – and a decision to maintain “its diplomatic position on the fundamental Falklands issues as it was before the crisis: U.S. neutrality on the question of sovereignty over the islands and support for negotiations or other peaceful efforts to resolve this dispute”. An important distinction was drawn between US opposition to Argentine first use of force, “which was widely accepted in Latin America”, a region of many territorial disputes and small countries scared of bigger ones, and US support for the British military campaign “which was just as widely resented”. “Fortunately for us, Argentina’s reputation for arrogance, and the collapse of its forces on the ground, helped to cushion reactions”. Argentina’s nuclear weapons programme was the region’s most sophisticated and attracted a wary intelligence eye.
Amongst the handful of Pentagon documents on the war is a characteristically clear-eyed assessment of the “Military Lessons from the Falklands” from Caspar Weinberger, written for the President on 19 July. “In the final analysis, the battle for the Falklands appears to have been a closer call than many of us would believe. The British won primarily because their forces, inferior in numbers at first, were superior in training, leadership and equipment”. “But luck also played a significant part”. Unlike the CIA he was well-aware that Argentinian bombs had failed to explode.
Assessment of the war was an early task at the NSC for Marine Colonel Oliver North, who served there from 1981-86. This role perhaps explains an event a few years later, on the eve of MT’s visit to Camp David in December 1984, when the then National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, suggested to the President that he sound her out on “steps they could take to assist the Nicaraguan resistance. Through intermediaries we have been advised that the Chilean government is prepared to provide up to 48 BLOWPIPE surface-to-air missiles to the freedom fighters”. These British missiles had been “staged in Chile during the Falklands War”.
The probability of a long-term Argentinian tilt towards Moscow was judged low, as already noted above from the Interagency Study of 1 July 1983.

 

Find this story at January 2014

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2014

Thatcher received warning about CIA’s activities in UK, secret file reveals

Paddy Ashdown raised fears in 1984 about clandestine approaches made by US agents but allegations were dismissed

Margaret Thatcher told Paddy Ashdown there was no need for an inquiry and no evidence of improper activity. Photograph: Barbra Walton/Associated Press

Margaret Thatcher was warned that the CIA did not always give sufficient advance notice when it carried out operations in Britain, a secret file released on Friday shows.

Paddy Ashdown, a Liberal MP, complained to Thatcher about the US intelligence organisation’s activities in the UK in November 1984.

Ashdown was worried about clandestine approaches made by US agents to British computer firms in this country and abroad to prevent eastern bloc countries obtaining western computer secrets by stealth.

“My subsequent investigations have led me to conclude that the CIA got the information on the UK companies in the course of an operation which, it seems, is still continuing,” he told Thatcher.

The prime minister sent back a letter dismissing his allegations. “There is no evidence of improper activity by the CIA or that the law has been broken,” she wrote. “As you are aware, there is close co-operation between the British and American authorities on the enforcement of multilateraly agreed exports controls, which is in the national interest.” She said there was no need for an inquiry, but would expect police to investigate if there were any evidence of the law being broken.

The files now make clear that this was not the whole picture. The Foreign Office subsequently asked MI5 to investigate Ashdown’s complaints. Their report back to Downing Street said: “The security service are as confident as they can can be that the CIA are not involved in activities in the UK as alleged by Mr Ashdown.

“There is an agreement between the British and American agencies that neither will undertake clandestine activies in the country of the other without specific agreement.”

But, the FCO note, continued: “The security service have told us that there was a small number of isolated cases in 1983 when the CIA approached British individuals with a view to seeking information about cases in which hostile intelligence services were involved in attempts to acquire illegally western technology, without adequate consultation in advance with the British authorities.

“These cases were brought to the attention of the CIA (and FBI) and the security service are satisfied that such cases are not recurring. They emphasise, however, that such incidents are not relevant to the allegations being made by Mr Ashdown which relate to pressure being put on British companies to divulge information about their trading activies.”

MI5, the FCO added, “do not believe that the CIA are involved in clandestine activities in this field and have no cause for complaint”. But just to be sure, the last letter in the file notes, the CIA had given a specific assurance that they were not involved in in the UK as Ashdown had suggested.

The documents do not make clear what the difference was between the small number of isolated cases identified in 1983 and Ashdown’s concerns.

Owen Bowcott
theguardian.com, Friday 3 January 2014 00.01 GMT

Find this story at 3 January 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The US & the Falklands War (1): the US ’tilt’ towards Britain (30 Apr 1982)

On 2 Apr 1982 Argentina invaded the Falklands. This wholly unexpected event, the seizure by force of British people and territory, generated a crisis of great intensity in the UK, one almost existential in character.

margaretthatcher.org has already published many documents relating to the war from a range of sources, particularly the US, and we continue that process with the most significant to date: the newly-released record of the National Security Council meeting on 30 Apr 1982 that terminated the ‘Haig shuttle’ – explicit US mediation between the two sides – and decided on a ’tilt’ in US policy towards the UK

The key British files on the war are due for release at the end of 2012
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU: THE U.S. RESPONSE TO THE ARGENTINE INVASION

Minutes of 30 Apr 1982 NSC meeting

The US Government was as surprised by the invasion as anyone else. But even though it had for years taken a position of neutrality on the question of Falklands sovereignty, it had neither the option nor the inclination to play the bystander.

For one thing it had long-standing and exceptionally close military, intelligence and political ties to the UK, a front-line ally in the Cold War. On the other, the new Administation had cultivated good relations with the Galtieri junta in Argentina, hoping it might prove an important friend in the battle against Soviet influence in central America – a major concern for the new administration from the very first – and fearing that its fall might bring the return of a left-wing, Peronist government. The US also had significant interests in Argentina, financial and personal. As much as one fifth of US banking capital was exposed if Argentina defaulted on its debt and there were as many as 16,000 Americans resident in the country. And there was considerable US sensitivity to Latin American charges of “Yankee imperialism”, on right as well as left. Indeed during Ronald Reagan’s first meeting with MT as President he had talked of pursuing “a new approach to bring the [North and South American] continents together” and of fixing the southern perception of the US as “the Colossus of the north”. This stress seems to have surprised his visitors. The British Ambassador, Nico Henderson, professed not to understand what he meant and for once even MT was a little under-prepared: when it became apparent the President wanted to talk in detail about El Salvador more briefing had to be sent her. At this stage US policy in the region must have seemed rather remote from British interests.

On the flip side, US Embassy telegrams from London, available on this site, show no great understanding of the depth of the crisis the invasion had provoked in Britain. Symbolically enough the US Ambassador to Britain, J.J. Louis, was on a golfing holiday in Florida at the time of the invasion and saw no reason to return early. Preliminary analysis from the State Department assumed Britain’s imperial legacy lay at the heart of the issue. Although Secretary of State Al Haig swiftly grasped that the British saw the self-determination of the islanders as a make-or-break principle, he was quietly sceptical that this really applied in the case of the Falklands. In a closed session briefing to Congressmen, he said that while the principle was “very laudable and supportable, they [the British] have created conditions on the Islands which make free choice by the population less than balanced”. The Falklands were a ‘cocoon’, he said, because “the Argentinians cannot get in”, leaving the islands perpetually “the land of the Brits”. And he made a nasty joke about the islanders, which drew a laugh from his audience, but was particularly tasteless in the circumstances. (It is along the lines of, “too few women, too many sheep”.) It is hard to believe he felt much sympathy for their plight.

Many in Britain at the time and since have argued that there was a significant pro-Argentinian bias on the part of some in the Administration. The evidence does not really bear this out. Despite the above, such a charge can hardly be made against Haig, who was understandably exasperated by the junta and concluded that they were incapable of reaching a decision on any of the peace plans he put to them. His purpose throughout the Falklands crisis seems to have been to avoid an unnecessary war, as he saw it, and also to demonstrate his effectiveness as Secretary of State, something increasingly questioned, not least by the White House. In truth, his time was almost played out: less than a fortnight after the Argentinian defeat he had resigned and George Shultz had taken his place.

The charge of bias could be made with far greater justice against Mrs Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the UN and a Cabinet Member, but the salient point is that she was an isolated figure within the Administration. It is true that she was close to the President, who rated her highly and several times thought of her as a possible National Security Adviser. But she was blocked decisively by his powerful kitchen cabinet, who distrusted her influence and pegged her down; for that reason it is not quite clear how much she had the President’s ear, in the sense of ready access. Over the Falklands she was completely at odds with the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, and scarcely less so with the CIA. And her relationship with the State Department was very poor. Although her name is often linked to that Tom Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State, as if they constituted a kind of Argentinian faction in the Administration, this is far from convincing. Enders was responsible for “Inter-American Affairs” and to that degree shared her concerns, but the two fell well short of a shared outlook. Indeed, Kirkpatrick’s relationship was Enders was so bad that he was summarily dismissed by the President the following year for undermining her on a visit to Central America. The State Department’s complaint against her was one of amateurism as much as anything else. During the war itself Al Haig seems to have demanded that she be fired for making public statements at odds with declared policy, raising the issue again in his final interview with the President when he resigned on 25 June. Perhaps the most notorious of her off-beam statements was made on CBS’s Face the Nation when she appeared to question that the Argentine invasion constituted “armed aggression”:

The Argentines, of course, have claimed for two hundred years that they own these islands. Now, if the Argentines own the islands, then moving troops into them is not armed aggression.

Although the President refused Haig’s demand that Kirkpatrick should go, it is entirely plain that he did not share her views on this point, which bordered on the bizarre and might almost be called definitively un-Reaganite. He knew armed aggression when he saw it, publicly and unequivocally describing the invasion in those terms himself, most notably on 30 April:

we must remember that the aggression was on the part of Argentina in this dispute over the sovereignty of that little ice-cold bunch of land down there, and they finally just resorted to armed aggression, and there was bloodshed. And I think the principle that all of us must abide by is, armed aggression of that kind must not be allowed to succeed.

It is perhaps a measure of heightened British sensitivities at the time that this statement is remembered in the UK for the “little ice-cold bunch of land” reference – unfairly treated as an attempt to belittle the issue – rather than the point of substance, which could hardly have been more forcefully or helpfully put by the President.

That said, it mattered that anyone in the Administration spoke as Mrs Kirkpatrick did, particularly in Argentine eyes. A key question here is how Buenos Aires analysed the US position in advance of the war. It is certainly plausible that US neutrality as to sovereignty, along with who-knows-what friendly remarks in private from Mrs Kirkpatrick and lesser figures, led the junta to think a swift military takeover of the islands would not trouble Washington too much. At the very beginning of the crisis, on the eve of the invasion, the President wrote to MT saying that he had had no success in persuading Galtieri to hold off. Comfortingly he continued: “While we have a policy of neutrality on the sovereignty issue, we will not be neutral on the issue involving Argentine use of military force”.

But there was a problem: the Argentinians seem not to have got that message. Wishful thinkers can be hard of hearing. Would there have been an invasion if Washington had spoken louder, or at least with a single voice?
7-29 Apr 1982: the haig shuttle & its failure

The Administration decided at a hurried White House meeting on 7 April that Haig would make an attempt at mediation between the two sides. The “Haig shuttle” occupied the diplomatic space for the following three weeks while the British Task Force sailed south, in which respect if nothing else it was probably helpful from the British point of view, since far less attractive mediators would surely have emerged if the US had not already been in the frame. But in almost every other way London found it an uncomfortable experience.

Haig’s proposals went through many variations, but essentially focussed on three things:
arrangements for Argentine withdrawal and a winding down of the military presence, British included
the creation of some form of international “interim administration” for the islands following Argentine withdrawal, to operate while
long-term sovereignty was negotiated.

The inner nature of the proposals was always obscure, deliberately so. Who would end up owning the islands? The British side contended that self-determination should apply. The Argentinians of course rejected it. Haig and his people crafted clever and complicated bridging formulas, designed to save honour and face.

Haig diligently shuttled back and forth between London, Buenos Aires and Washington, selling his scheme in best Kissinger-style, but never achieved a solid commitment from the Argentinian side to any part of it, the junta developing a habit of withdrawing concessions at the last moment and generally operating in a chaotic way. Haig put it neatly himself: “A charade … a f***ing charade, these guys are diddling me”. Even second level commanders had an effective veto, it seemed, meaning as many as 40 or 50 senior officers needed to be squared.

Had the Argentinians been prepared to accept Haig’s proposals in some form, Britain would have been under huge pressure from the US and others to do so as well, no matter how large the concessions required of us. One of the messages Haig sent to President Reagan during his long shuttle referred to a “possible personal intervention by you with Mrs Thatcher”, as if it had been agreed between them in advance that Haig could trigger one if he felt the need. That would surely have been the mechanism.

Such an event was a great threat to MT’s political survival: had the concessions been large enough, she might well have resigned rather than put her name to them. Some more tractable figure would perhaps have emerged as Prime Minister to do the deed. But that point never came. The junta wouldn’t – probably couldn’t – agree to anything.
30 APR 1982: THE NSC MEETING

Haig’s mission was finally terminated on 29 April. The President wrote to MT:

I am sure you agree that it is essential now to make clear to the world that every effort was made to achieve a fair and peaceful solution, and that the Argentine Government was offered a choice between such a solution and further hostilities. We will therefore make public a general account of the efforts we have made. While we will describe the US proposal in broad terms, we will not release it because of the difficulty that might cause you. I recognize that while you see fundamental difficulties in the proposal, you have not rejected it. We will leave no doubt that Her Majesty’s Government worked with us in good faith and was left with no choice but to proceed with military action based on the right of self-defence.

He had been privately doubtful about the shuttle for some time. In his diary for 19 April, after noting that the junta couldn’t make up its collective mind on Haig’s proposals, he wrote: “I don’t think Margaret Thatcher should be asked to concede any more”.

A meeting of the NSC was called for 30 April to hear a report from Haig and to make decisions based on a paper from the State Department, “Next Steps on Falklands”, which we publish alongside the minutes. The paper set out a range of possible actions the US might take to sanction Argentina, all designed to “make clear our support for the UK”, but also (pointing the other way) to “preserve our ability to mediate”, “provide for the security of official and private Americans in Argentina” and “minimize adverse impact on our interests in Latin America”. It was acknowledged that none of the proposed steps – the main one was a suspension of arms sales – would have “significant material effect on Argentina”. In truth the most tangible element was the public declaration of a US ’tilt’, to be blamed on Argentinian intransigence. Some “high cost, high risk options” were also included – serious economic sanctions, movement of naval forces into the area – but plainly for form’s sake only.

The meeting itself was opened by the deputy National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, the President always preferring to listen and observe debate among his principals, intervening to elucidate when needed and then to announce his decision. On McFarlane’s invitation the deputy director of the CIA, Admiral Bobby Inman, opened with a review of the military position, correctly predicting early action by the British in an attempt to close the runway at Port Stanley. Inman had sparred with Kirkpatrick at the earlier meeting on 7 April that authorised the Haig mediation: he was out of sympathy with the whole approach and thought ties of language, alliance, tradition, and strategic interest should side the US overwhelmingly with the UK. But on this occasion he was not in contentious mode. Policy was going his way. He drily described US intelligence that the Soviets had moved a spy satellite into an orbit which gave them the capacity tracking the Task Force, supplementing TU-95 reconnaissance aircraft based in Angola. The Cold War was never entirely out of the picture in the Reagan White House and hovered at the edge of the Falklands, potentially a decisive consideration if it obtruded significantly. There are some handwritten notes of the meeting alongside the typed minute in the file. In these Inman concludes his downbeat assessment with the words: “no happy news”.

Haig then told the story of his mission. This was a meeting designed to tilt US policy towards the British, but he opened with an analogy that implied equivalence between Britain and Argentina – an equivalence in futulity – which anticipates Borges’s later remark that the Falklands War was like “a fight between two bald men over a comb”. It would have appalled the British had they heard it:

He began by describing the situation as tragic with both sides, similar to a demented man on a ledge ready to jump, reaching for help but unable to grab our hand.

Haig went on to explain the plan he had evolved in terms he could never have used in public or in the hearing of the British. If the Argentinians had accepted it, their flag would now be flying on the Malvinas. It is as simple as that:

He then described the elements of the American plan which in effect would give ultimate sovereignty to Argentina but under evolutionary conditions which the Islanders could ultimately accept. Unfortunately, the Argentine government which is, in fact, made up of many moving and conflicting parts could not agree to the plan.

How the islanders would be brought to accept such a transfer is not explained, but presumably because they had no alternative. We have seen already that he had no real use for the notion of Falklands self-determination. Haig characterises his plan even more frankly a little later:

Our proposals, in fact, are a camouflaged transfer of sovereignty, and the Argentine foreign minister knows this, but the junta will not accept it.

Here, of course, one comes up against a big problem. How could a “camouflaged transfer of sovereignty” be consistent with the President’s principled response to the invasion: “armed aggression of that kind must not be allowed to succeed?” Wouldn’t the transfer of sovereignty have been a success for aggression, a big success, camouflaged or not? Some in the room certainly felt that way, but there is no trace of an angry post mortem on the Haig proposals, very likely because from the critics’ point of view the outcome was the one they wanted. Haig, and the junta, had been given every chance.

The disfunctionality and irrationality of the Argentine government shines through at this point (if such things can be said to shine). It was a government too divided and disorganized to recognize or accept what it was being given – almost, but not quite, its own worst enemy.

Haig concluded:

Argentina is the opposite of a pluralistic, democratic government where the lowest common denominator is consensus; in the Argentine case the lowest common denominator is extremism. The Navy holds the veto and is even more intransigent after losing South Georgia, whose Argentine garrison surrendered without firing a shot – a fact known to the Argentine government, but not to the Argentine people.

Discussion then turned to the possibility that US nationals would need to be evacuated from Argentina. This might seem a far-fetched contingency, but in the aftermath of the Tehran embassy seizure it was taken seriously. Defense Secretary Weinberger took the lead role here. No one in the Administration was more favourable to the British than him, the President included. This was a man who had tried to join the RAF in 1940 when recruiters quietly turned up at a San Francisco hotel, only to be told he lacked depth perception. He attended Margaret Thatcher’s 80th birthday party in London in a wheelchair. Like Inman, he was content to let the meeting reach its preordained conclusion. Asked about British requests for military aid, he replied in low-key style: he thought “nothing was pending, but believed more fuel would be requested at Ascension”, surely an understatement. Later accounts of the war – for example by Nico Henderson – laid heavy stress on the helpfulness of the Pentagon. Interestingly the State Department likewise played down the British need for assistance in their covering paper for the meeting.

The President made a contribution on this topic. He “interjected that he had no objection to giving materiel support but wondered it that would not significantly undercut any future role for the U.S. as a mediator”. In the typed minute Haig responds: “the Argentines have been told what we would do if they refused this offer”. In the handwritten notes a frustrated tone comes through: “Argentines have been told & told & told”.

Inman had a further intervention to make. These newly-published minutes confirm something suspected since the war itself: the US had broken Argentine codes and was reading their military traffic. The press had leaked the fact, with inevitable results:

Admiral Inman emphasized that one sour note had come out of recent developments, namely, press leaks about the US ability to read Argentine military communications, which in turn have led to a changing of the Argentine cipher. Admiral Inman hoped we would soon be able to regain our capability in that area, but the leaks had been damaging.

Without admitting that the US had broken Argentine codes, Haig’s memoirs mention an unhelpful item on ABC Nightline which he had tried to stop (Caveat, p285) when Carl Bernstein had reported. A declassified CIA document points a finger in another direction: it includes an article from the New York Times from 15 April: “US Providing British a Wide Range of Intelligence”.

Kirkpatrick also spoke, sketching the situation at the UN, to which diplomatic attention would now turn, and hazarding a characteristically out-of-step opinion as to the ultimate outcome. There would be no fighting she thought, a fix of some sort would undoubtedly be found. “The Argentines will find a way to avoid war through a face-saving device in some forum perhaps by the weekend”. Haig immediately contradicted her: “Unless Argentina softens on sovereignty, the British will go ahead and do some damage”. He proved the better judge. Thousands of miles to the south the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano – in earlier years the USS Phoenix, a veteran of Pearl Harbor – was already in the sights of the British nuclear submarine, HMS Conqueror. Quite possibly Inman and Weinberger knew it.

And with that the President wrapped up the meeting, approving the measures proposed and making a wry comment: “it would be nice if, after all these years, the U.N. could do accomplish something as constructive as averting war between the U.K. and Argentina”. His firm words on the subject of Argentinian armed aggression against the Falklands were delivered at a prescheduled event in the State Dining Room a couple of hours later.

Find this story at January 2014

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2014

From COINTELPRO to Snowden, the FBI Burglars Speak Out After 43 Years of Silence (Part 2)

Watch Part 2 of our extended discussion with three of the antiwar activists who broke into an FBI office in 1971 in Media, Pennsylvania. The burglars, John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth, are speaking out this week for the first time following the publication of Betty Medsger’s book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.

Click here to watch Part 1 of this interview.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we bring you part two of this fascinating discussion, the solving of a mystery during the Vietnam War era that wasn’t solved ’til this week. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So we continue our discussion looking at how activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and disclosed secrets about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program—that is, Counterintelligence Program.

AMY GOODMAN: Until this week, their identities were not known. Joining us are two of the people who broke into the FBI’s offices, John and Bonnie Raines. John and Bonnie hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglaries at their home, where they were raising three children. Bonnie worked as a daycare director. She helped case the FBI office by posing as a college student interested in becoming an FBI agent. John Raines was a veteran of the Freedom Rides movement, a professor at Temple University. He used a Xerox machine at the school to photocopy many of the stolen documents.

We’re also joined by Betty Medsger. She is author of the new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. She first reported on the stolen documents while working at The Washington Post. The activists mailed the documents to her. She was the first to reveal them; The Washington Post, the first paper to agree to publish the information in these documents. She uncovered the identities of most of the burglars in her new book. So, 40 years ago, she broke the story, and now she’s breaking the story of the identities.

And we’re joined by David Kairys, who has worked as an attorney for the activists for over four decades, a civil rights attorney and law professor at Temple University, as well.

In the first part of our discussion, we talked about how March 8th, 1971, went down, the night of the Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali fight, using that as a cover because it would be a lot of noise and the belief that the guards would be watching this in the Media offices. But there was criticism leveled—or you feared there would be, John and Bonnie Raines—of why you did this, because you could have gone to jail for many, many years. You had three kids under 10. Professor John Raines, what was your thinking process leading up to this?

JOHN RAINES: Sure, that’s a great question. We were the only ones, out of the eight, who were not only husband and wife, but father and mother of three children under 10. And we were not into the being a martyr. We were not into jeopardizing the future of our children. We were pretty sure—if we weren’t pretty sure, we wouldn’t have, in fact, gone into that office and taken out those files. So we were pretty sure we could get away with it.

But the second thing that’s important to know is that we routinely ask, as a society, mothers and fathers to take on as part of their work highly dangerous kinds of activities. We ask that of all policemen. We ask that of everybody that works for the fire department. We ask that of mothers and fathers who are stationed overseas, sent overseas to defend our freedoms in the Army and Navy. We routinely ask of people to take on jobs that risk their families. Now, we were faced back in 1971 with nobody in Washington was going to do what had to be done if we were going to reveal what J. Edgar Hoover was doing with his FBI. We were the last line of defense. So, as citizens, we stepped forward and did what we had to do because nobody in Washington would do what they should have done. Then, after we did what we did, people in Washington, with the help of Betty’s revealing stories in the Post, then they began, finally, to oversee J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and things changed.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And you spoke to family members. In the event that you were caught and imprisoned, you spoke to some of your family members and asked them to care for your children. What exactly did you tell them you were about to do?

BONNIE RAINES: Well, we didn’t tell them exactly what we had planned. We did have to let them know the high level of jeopardy and that we were doing this after much careful thought and involved with other people who we thought were responsible and careful. And we asked them, if the worst happened and we were convicted and sent to prison, if they would care for our children. So we had that conversation with John’s older brother Bob and with my mother and father.

AMY GOODMAN: When did you tell your children?

BONNIE RAINES: It was later, when they were old enough, as teenagers, to put it in perspective. We’ve always been a political family and involved our children in political activities of various kinds. But we needed to wait until it could fit into what I describe as kind of the family lore. And it was very easy and very natural to tell them about it. And they were a little bit shocked, but also quite proud, I have to say.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you tell them? Can you describe the scene? Did you actually sit them down together?

BONNIE RAINES: Can you remember that?

JOHN RAINES: I’m not sure. Do you remember it? We waited until they were, I think, teenagers, so that they could understand kind of the larger political context.

AMY GOODMAN: But this makes it even more amazing that this secret has been kept for so long.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

JOHN RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: You had four children—

BONNIE RAINES: By that time.

AMY GOODMAN: —that you told.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: And you’re just two of the eight. There was also a ninth person. And if you could tell us about him, because he pulled out before the action took place, and you had further interactions with him.

JOHN RAINES: I did. He—I won’t name him, but he showed up on our front door, the door of our house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. And he said, “I need to talk with you, John.” I said, “Well, come on in.” And we went in, and he looked me in the eye, and he said, “I think I’m going to have to turn you in.”

AMY GOODMAN: When was this?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, it was the two or three weeks after, after the break-in. So, I, you know—and he knew all the names. I mean, if he had turned us in, we were going to jail.

AMY GOODMAN: He was in on all the planning meetings.

JOHN RAINES: He was.

AMY GOODMAN: He had pulled out just at the last second.

JOHN RAINES: That’s right. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did he say when he pulled out, by the way?

JOHN RAINES: Well, he said, “I’ve been told by my girlfriend that there are files that you still have that are highly dangerous files in terms of threatening national security, that name various missile sites, anti-missile sites, around Philadelphia and so on.” And I said, “No, no, no, there’s nothing like that in these files.” Then I said to him, “Well, why did you think there was?” And he said, “Well, my girlfriend,” and so on. I said, “Have you ever thought that maybe your girlfriend works for the FBI?” And, you know, his face went like that. And then he—he left. And he kept the secret to himself.

AMY GOODMAN: And that’s because then it’s not only him; it’s also his girlfriend who knew. We’re talking about 40 years of keeping this secret.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

JOHN RAINES: His girlfriend, I think, didn’t know who we were. I don’t think he said that. I think he simply—she gave him the information that was false information. It was fed, I think, by the FBI to him that there were these very dangerous files.

AMY GOODMAN: J. Edgar Hoover was desperate to get you.

JOHN RAINES: Oh—

AMY GOODMAN: He had over a hundred agents.

JOHN RAINES: Two hundred.

BONNIE RAINES: Two hundred agents.

AMY GOODMAN: Two hundred agents. It was your Xerox machine—

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —that they were—well, tell us about the Xerox machine at Temple University that you used to make Xerox—sounds a little like Dan Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, when he xeroxed the Pentagon Papers.

JOHN RAINES: Well, back then, nobody knew—or not many people knew—that every Xerox machine leaves its own fingerprint from the drum. Every drum on every Xerox machine has its own separate fingerprint. And therefore, anything that is xeroxed on that machine can be traced back exactly to that machine. Now, when we found that out, I very quickly, you know, phoned David—phoned—

BONNIE RAINES: Bill.

JOHN RAINES: Bill Davidon.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Bill Davidon, meanwhile, is being tapped, for other reasons, or—

JOHN RAINES: He’s being tapped.

AMY GOODMAN: —for very similar reasons.

JOHN RAINES: But he’s also using the Xerox machine at Haverford College. And I said, “Hey, hey, hey, Bill.” So he went and he scratched the surface of the drum at Haverford. And—

DAVID KAIRYS: You know, the main reason—

AMY GOODMAN: David Kairys.

DAVID KAIRYS: —they didn’t get caught—I mean, you’re right. There’s all these possibilities. Life is so contingent, and things could be so different than they turn out to be. But the main thing is the FBI used a typical American law enforcement approach. It was, instead of looking for who did it and investigating a range of people, the glommed onto one person, who they were sure, for whatever reasons, did it. And he was a leader of the Catholic Left, John Peter Grady. He had raided a lot of draft boards. They were sure he did it.

AMY GOODMAN: He was Camden, New Jersey.

DAVID KAIRYS: He also did Camden.

BETTY MEDSGER: He was a lot of things.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah, he did a lot of these.

AMY GOODMAN: From Camden.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah. And they thought that he did it, so they had 200 agents, but they’re all looking for the wrong thing. You see, they’re all misdirected and not—they thought there was a locksmith, so they investigated all the locksmiths in the Philadelphia area. They didn’t know all you needed was Keith.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to bring Keith Forsyth back in a minute.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But he just learned it in a course on—I can’t say online—

JOHN RAINES: Yeah.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —because you didn’t have the Internet at the time, right?

BONNIE RAINES: Correspondence.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, library.

AMY GOODMAN: Correspondence course.

DAVID KAIRYS: And he made his own tools rather than go to a store and buy them, which would be a record of that. So, see, they were extremely careful. And the FBI just let itself be completely misdirected.

BETTY MEDSGER: I’d also like to add that in addition—

AMY GOODMAN: Betty Medsger.

BETTY MEDSGER: In addition to focusing on John Peter Grady, they also focused on the ninth burglar. And they put him under 24-hour surveillance within 24 hours of the burglary and continued to monitor him for weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: The one who didn’t do it.

DAVID KAIRYS: Right.

BETTY MEDSGER: The one who didn’t do it.

DAVID KAIRYS: Who John just spoke of.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, yes. There were three main people that they targeted immediately: John Peter Grady—they thought he was the leader of the group—

AMY GOODMAN: And just very quickly, explain who he is. His children are well-known as activists today, especially—

DAVID KAIRYS: Yes.

BETTY MEDSGER: That’s right. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —upstate New York, taking on issues of drones.

BETTY MEDSGER: That’s right. Well, he was a—he was a leader, very prominent within the Catholic peace movement. He was the person in the Catholic peace movement who moved it from the Catonsville 9 method of going in in broad daylight and walking out and waiting for arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Catonsville 9 in Catonsville, Maryland, led by Dan—Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, who burned draft records, using napalm, that they had pulled out of the Catonsville draft office.

BETTY MEDSGER: Right. And John Grady was the leader of the part of the Catholic peace movement that then took things to another level, which was: Do these actions, but do them in order to actually do damage to the ability of the draft boards, so that they can’t operate and bring people into the service, and get away with it so you can go on and raid more draft boards. He was the key person in the Catholic peace movement who believed that that was needed, that things needed to be done that way. So, the FBI had not been successful in arresting many of the people. There were, you know, 350 draft board raids and hundreds of people involved in them. And they had not been very successful at finding these people. And he was somebody that they assumed was involved in many of them, and they immediately, for that reason, I think, assumed that he had led this group. So they focused on him, they focused on the ninth burglar, and they also focused on Bonnie. But they never knew Bonnie’s name.

DAVID KAIRYS: Never knew who she was.

BETTY MEDSGER: They knew her face, and they had that image, that art sketch that had been drawn based on the memories of the men in the office who saw her.

AMY GOODMAN: We touched on this in part one, but—of our discussion, but, Bonnie Raines, can you describe what you did before March 8th, the day that you all broke into the Media office? Talk about your experience.

BONNIE RAINES: Well, many of the planning meetings and the scheduling of what we called casing the building at night took place from our house. So I was involved in much of that, but not really one of the prominent members of the group, until we realized that we needed to have someone get inside the offices to look at the possibility that there would be security measures, burglar alarms over the doors, whether the file cabinets were locked. So I was elected to do that. And I was to pose as a Swarthmore College student and disguise myself, as much as I possibly could, and make an appointment to go in and interview the head of the office about opportunities for women in the FBI. And they were very cordial. They spent enough time with me to allow me to really look around to see everything, to gather all the information.

JOHN RAINES: They didn’t notice that you kept your gloves on.

BONNIE RAINES: I kept my gloves on the whole time I was taking those—

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And they never asked you your name, right?

BONNIE RAINES: No.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You never gave a name.

BONNIE RAINES: No. No, they never did. I think, in the course of conversation, I was asked where I was from. And I said, I think, “Hartford, Connecticut,” or something. But the good news was that I was able to get that last important piece of information about the inside of the office, and then that allowed us to make a decision to actually plan to go ahead with it on March 8th.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they—it was from that that they got the description of you with these fake glasses and—

BONNIE RAINES: Yes, yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —a hat on.

BONNIE RAINES: I had long hair, and I tucked my hair all up inside—it was February, so I had a winter hat and looked a little shabby, like I might have been a student on a scholarship at Swarthmore. But I was very polite, and they were very cordial, and it went very, very well. And they never noticed that I never took my gloves off the whole time I was taking notes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And the night of the burglary, what did you actually do on the night, March 8th?

BONNIE RAINES: My role—we each had an assigned role, and my role was to be in a car on a side street at the building, so that if a police patrol came along on that street and would then turn around to be at the front of the building and might see our four fellow companions leaving the building, I was to pretend that my car had broken down and block the street so that they couldn’t come around to the front of the building. I didn’t have to do that, as it turned out.

AMY GOODMAN: And the other people involved, Betty Medsger, some have decided to come forward, and some haven’t. Bill Davidon, who wanted to come forward, has just recently died. He had Parkinson’s. Talk—since you spoke with him a lot—and, of course, all of you knew him, a professor at Haverford—I was actually wondering if you can tell us the story of his meeting with Henry Kissinger. This is astounding. Five days—I was talking to his daughter last night, and she said he sort of had a to-do list. You know, meet with Henry Kissinger at the White House, break into the Media offices and steal the FBI documents—that was his to-do list for the week.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah, that’s quite short.

AMY GOODMAN: But how did he end up meeting with the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah, it’s an amazing thing to think about, that just two days before the burglary there’s the leader of the burglary in the Situation Room of the White House. Well, Bill never missed an opportunity to make the case against the war. And he really didn’t want to go to the White House that morning, particularly, but it’s—an interesting person had set it up. Brian McDonald was a young Quaker from Philadelphia who the previous—immediately after Nixon announced that we were invading Cambodia, at the end of April in 1970, Brian came to Washington and sat on the street—sidewalk in front of the White House and was fasting and—in protest of what Nixon had done. And he was there for quite some time. And during that time, I remember Shirley MacLaine came to know him, and some other people, and they quietly introduced Kissinger to Brian. And a strange combination, but they actually became real friends, a friendship that lasted until Brian died about a decade ago. But it was Brian who knew all parties involved, the three people who came to that meeting, including Bill and Kissinger. And so, he asked Kissinger to be willing to meet with them to talk about the war. And Kissinger said—because he liked Brian so much, agreed that he would.

So, the three people were Bill and two other people, Tom Davidson and Sister Beverly Bell. All three of them were unindicted co-conspirators in an indictment that had just come down that January that involved J. Edgar Hoover. It was an indictment that charged Phil Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister and a few other people. They were indicted, and then there was a series of people, including Bill Davidon, who were unindicted co-conspirators in a conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger and to bomb tunnels under federal buildings in Washington.

Now, the Hoover involvement comes the previous November, when Hoover, against the advice of his officials, who hardly ever spoke up to urge him to not do something, Hoover went before a committee of two people, and then—on the Hill, a congressional committee, and then immediately distributed his statement to as many press as they could get it to afterwards. And in that statement, he announced that these people were conducting this conspiracy. And it was his typical method of trying to convince members of Congress to give him more money, which always happened. But this was a very alarming thing, the idea that these people—priests and nuns and their colleagues—were—who were known for being nonviolent activists, were planning this violent thing. And the Justice Department and the FBI had investigated this, and the FBI people had decided that there was no plan, there was no real plan, and that the case should be abandoned. And Hoover knew that, but nevertheless made that public accusation. And that was enormous news at the time.

And then, the Justice Department—again, knowing that there was no such plan—in order to save Hoover’s face, went forward with a grand jury and designed it in such a way, eventually, in a superseding indictment, that people could be found guilty if they had participated in plans not only to kidnap Kissinger or to bomb tunnels under Washington, but to raid draft boards—if they had done any one of those things. Well, they all had raided draft boards. But the impact of it all, of course, on the public was: They wanted to kidnap Kissinger or set off bombs. By the way, the case, two years later, failed, and there was no conviction. But at this time, when Bill goes to the White House with two of the other unindicted co-conspirators, they are sitting there with the person that they’re supposedly planning to kidnap. So that seemed—made it even more strange.

And what they—they had a discussion for about an hour in the Situation Room, where many aspects of the Vietnam War had been planned, and something that they were quite aware of. And it was in the—ultimately, it was a frustrating meeting, where they felt that they were meeting with a—having a civil conversation with a friendly enemy, who at that time was responsible for more bombing. But—

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Kissinger felt he was being smeared, is that right?

BETTY MEDSGER: Felt he was what?

AMY GOODMAN: Being smeared in the academic community.

BETTY MEDSGER: Oh, you mean not by them, but elsewhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Right.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: And part of why he wanted to meet with another professor, with Bill Davidon, to change the alienation he felt from the academic community that he valued.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, I think that’s true, although I—reading from Kissinger’s biography, I think he looked at this primarily as meeting with religious people, as he spoke of their high ideals and being in a spiritual world, whereas he was in the real world, and that they couldn’t really do anything, but he had to do something, whereas in fact they did not think of it as a religious confrontation or issue with him. They, too, were very much of the real world and wanted to see negotiations taking place and to stop the war, rather than the direction that he was taking it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And after the break-in on March 8th, 1971, Bill Davidon, whose idea it actually was, was in fact never questioned by the FBI, is that correct?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes, and that relates to the case that I was just talking about. The FBI was prepared to go after Bill Davidon very, very seriously. And the Justice—when the Justice Department found out about this, they put out an order that he should not be questioned—no questioning of Bill Davidon—which was quite amazing, given his situation and the fact that he was the leader of the group. And that went into effect. And for the entire length of the investigation, Bill was never questioned by the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did they put this out?

BETTY MEDSGER: Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to explain it. Because—they prohibited the FBI from questioning him because they were so intent on building a successful case in the Harrisburg indictment, and they didn’t want to bring any more confusion into the situation.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Harrisburg indictment was?

BETTY MEDSGER: And that—yes, the Harrisburg indictment was the case of the conspiracy—

AMY GOODMAN: Of the—to kidnap Henry Kissinger.

BETTY MEDSGER: —the alleged conspiracy to kidnap.

DAVID KAIRYS: And it was a big national publicity. And Hoover was being criticized for indicting people for a conspiracy that was just ridiculous.

BETTY MEDSGER: And this would have brought more attention that they did not want brought to that.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we bring Keith Forsyth back in to join his other co-conspirators here at the table, I wanted to ask you, David Kairys, about the legality of all of this.

DAVID KAIRYS: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, they had broken the law by breaking into the Media, Pennsylvania, FBI offices. Now, the statute of limitations is over. But can the authorities get around that, say, “New evidence has been presented: We now know their names”?

DAVID KAIRYS: That wouldn’t—that wouldn’t be a legitimate ground. There are things they could try, that, given the way they’ve been interpreted in law, would just not work. There’s really nothing they could do. Now, they do have discretion and a lot of power to put people through criminal trials even though they’re not going to win—the government. So, they could—and this is something you have to weigh in a situation like this—they could bring charges and just make you get lawyers and prepare a defense and disrupt your life, try to hold you on bail. There’s all those things they could do. But—and we would be arguing that it’s not being done in good faith, because there’s—the statute of limitations has run. So, I think, ultimately, it would work out that they are not convicted of anything, because of the statute of limitations, but you can’t—you can’t be sure that the government might not make you go through—

AMY GOODMAN: The FBI’s response today?

DAVID KAIRYS: Yesterday’s statement, I thought, was very positive. I actually had anticipated that they would say something like, “We’re looking into it. We’ll have to get back to you.” Instead of that, they seemed—they almost claimed credit for it. It’s like: Things happened that caused reforms, and we like these reforms. So, they’re—you know, they’re just reformers.

AMY GOODMAN: That could bode well for Edward Snowden.

DAVID KAIRYS: You’re—instead of FBI informers, you’re FBI reformers.

BETTY MEDSGER: They also said, I understand, to one reporter, “We didn’t have very good security.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is amazing. I mean, the actual quote of Michael Kortan, FBI spokesperson, “A number of events during that era, including the burglary, contributed to changes in how the FBI identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the FBI’s intelligence policies and practices, including the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.” I mean, this is very significant for Edward Snowden, because it’s saying—

DAVID KAIRYS: Oh, I think it is.

AMY GOODMAN: —if what you did led to reforms, then the good outweighed what they would consider the bad of the burglary.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this mean for Edward Snowden? The response has been enormous in terms of calls, not only in this country, but around the world, for reform.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: David, if you would like to weigh in on that—John, if you would like to weigh in on that, John Raines?

JOHN RAINES: Well, yeah, I think that what we were trying to do back in 1971, Snowden is trying to do right now. And that is to give the information that citizens need to decide, as citizens, what their government should do and should not do. And I think that we faced an FBI with a director called J. Edgar Hoover that was furious at us, and thank goodness we got away with it. Snowden faces governments, especially CIA and NSA, who want to make decisions about this massive kind of surveillance that they have. They vacuum up all our personal information, all of our emails, all of our correspondence. They say that they’re not listening to the emails. Well, they’ve got the technology to listen. Are we supposed to believe that they’re not listening to—you know, reading what we’re saying on our emails? That’s a—anyway, Snowden is facing the same kind of retribution of people of power, and he doesn’t deserve that. I see him as a public servant who, as a public servant, did serve the public, giving us the information we have a right to know, so that we can instruct the people in Washington what we, the people, think they should do and not do.

DAVID KAIRYS: The basic similarity in Snowden and the Media burglars, I think, for those of us who would have never had the courage to do such things, either one of them—and I include myself—they took this enormous risk, a really unbelievable personal risk, so that the rest of us could find out, in this case, what our FBI was doing or to expose wrongdoing. It’s the best American tradition. I mean, to go back to a group that’s got a different meaning these days, the original Tea Party was an illegal act. They didn’t stand there and say, “Arrest me for it.” They wanted to get away.

BETTY MEDSGER: And the Underground Railroad.

DAVID KAIRYS: Underground Railroad, the violations of the Fugitive Slave Acts. The Revolution itself, the American Revolution itself, was illegal under existing law. And I still—after 40 years of knowing these folks well, it still amazes me that they took the personal risk that they did. And this is something that, to me, should be praised.

AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we’re going to reunite those who were involved in the burglary that night. Some might talk about the liberation of these documents; others, the stealing of these documents. David Kairys, thanks for joining us.

DAVID KAIRYS: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to be joined now by Keith Forsyth, in addition to John and Bonnie Raines, and Betty Medsger, the author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. She is revealing this week, in this book, the names, the identities, of most of those involved with the burglary that night, March 8th, 1971. They called themselves—they, with five others—the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. And on March 8th, 1971, they broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and got—how many documents, ultimately?

JOHN RAINES: About a thousand.

AMY GOODMAN: About a thousand documents. Did you go through them, John Raines, before you sent them off to Betty Medsger at The Washington Post and Tom Wicker—

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, we were very careful about that.

AMY GOODMAN: —of The New York Times and Jack Nelson?

JOHN RAINES: We separated the files into what were clearly legitimate files, from our point of view—that is, they involved crime. And we didn’t want to release those files, because it had names of witnesses and things like that. That was about 40 percent of those files. Sixty percent of the files were clearly political in intent, and those were the ones we began to sort through. And we began to find—even on the morning, early morning, of the night, we began to find documents that were quite exciting.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

JOHN RAINES: Well, like the one that said, “Let’s increase the paranoia and have these folks be persuaded that there’s a FBI agent behind every mailbox.” I mean, that is—that’s not surveillance; that’s obviously intimidation. All right? Intimidation is a political act; it’s not an act of an investigative organization like the FBI.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Betty Medsger, when—one of the most damning programs that was revealed in these documents was COINTELPRO, but when you first received the documents, you had no idea what that program was. So how long after you got the documents did you find out what this program was and what it entailed?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah, the document that had COINTELPRO on it was just a routing slip. “COINTELPRO–New Left” was a label at the top. We had no idea what it was. None of us who received it had any idea what it was. The FBI was watching to see if that would ever be released. And because I wrote about something that was in that document, they knew, as of that day, that it had been released, and went into high gear. Hoover said, “We’ll stop this program.” And what he meant was, as he explained to agents, was, “We no longer use that name.” The program continued, but without that name. We had no idea what it was until, thanks to Carl Stern, by the end—at the end of 1973—

AMY GOODMAN: Of NBC.

BETTY MEDSGER: Carl Stern was the NBC reporter who covered the Department of Justice at that time. And he was in an office of the Senate committee, and they said, “Have you ever seen this?” And Carl had not seen it. And he was intrigued by the fact that at the bottom of the cover—of this routing slip were instructions for FBI agents to give the attached article on the need for control of students on campuses who were protesting the war—there was a note asking FBI agents to write anonymous letters and deliver this or mail it to unfriendly administrators, or to just hand it to friendly administrators. And Carl thought, “This is very strange.” And so, within a matter of days, he asked the FBI to tell him what COINTELPRO was and provide documentation of what it was. And they turned him down.

He went through attorney generals, various attorney generals at that time, because they were changing as a result of Watergate. And then, finally, he sued, under the Freedom of Information Act. Until then, Hoover had always instructed officials to ignore any applications under the Freedom of Information Act. But Carl pursued this through the courts and won, became the first person to succeed under the Freedom of Information Act in getting anything out of the FBI.

And what he received were the documents that immediately became news and explained that these dirty tricks operations had been going on since 1956. They were harassment. They were kind of activities that would seem to have nothing to do with law enforcement or intelligence gathering. Instead, they were secret harassment, sometimes quite violent and destroying people’s reputation.

AMY GOODMAN: Give us examples. And again, COINTELPRO means Counterintelligence Program.

BETTY MEDSGER: Counterintel. One example is what they did to actress Jean Seberg.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yeah.

BETTY MEDSGER: Jean Seberg, at that time, was a very popular actress. And she had made a contribution to the Black Panthers in Los Angeles, something that—and because the Panthers were under great surveillance, the FBI knew that. And she was pregnant. And a way COINTELPRO operated, agents were invited to submit proposals for these dirty tricks operations, and then the proposal would go back to Washington. And Hoover would read them and decide whether or not they should be carried out. And the proposal was to plant a rumor that the baby she was carrying, that the father of the baby was a Black Panther in Los Angeles. And Hoover was so happy with this proposal, and he wrote a response saying that he thought it was terrific. But he thought that they should wait until she was more noticeably pregnant, wait a few months, so that it would have a greater impact. The plan was to plant the rumor with a gossip columnist. And the people in Los Angeles were so eager to carry it forward that they didn’t wait until she was more noticeably pregnant. And what a freelance reporter, Allan Jallon, later revealed in the Los Angeles Times was that the FBI actually planted that rumor with editors of the Los Angeles Times, who then gave it to a gossip columnist.

AMY GOODMAN: And they knew they were getting this from an FBI source.

BETTY MEDSGER: They knew they were getting it from an FBI source. And they planted—they gave it to a gossip columnist. She wasn’t named, but the description was so obvious that people, especially in Los Angeles, knew, and she knew, that they would—I mean, Jean Seberg knew that it was she who everyone realized was the object of this. And the result was quite tragic. She was so upset when this was published in the Los Angeles Times that she gave birth very soon to a premature baby, who died very soon after birth, a white baby girl. And then, years later, on the anniversary of the birth of that dead child, Jean Seberg committed suicide. And at that time, Director Webster put out a statement that said, “We are out of this business forever. No more COINTELPRO.” But it is a dramatic illustration of how extreme many of the COINTELPRO operations were. And they were all kinds of people, not everyone well known.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He’s Institute Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2011, Chomsky spoke to Democracy Now! about COINTELPRO.

NOAM CHOMSKY: COINTELPRO, which you mentioned, is actually the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by the federal government. It maybe compares with Wilson’s Red Scare. But COINTELPRO went on from the late ’50s right through all of the ’60s; it finally ended, at least theoretically ended, when the courts terminated it in the early ’70s. And it was serious.

It started, as is everything, going after the Communist Party, then the Puerto Rican Independence Party. Then it extended—the women’s movement, the New Left, but particularly black nationalists. And it ended up—didn’t end up, but one of the events was a straight Gestapo-style assassination of two black organizers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, literally. I mean, the FBI set up the assassination. The Chicago police actually carried it out, broke into the apartment at 4:00 in the morning and murdered them. Fake information that came from the FBI about arms stores and so on. There was almost nothing about it. In fact, the information about this, remarkably, was released at about the same time as Watergate. I mean, as compared with this, Watergate was a tea party. There was nothing, you know?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Noam Chomsky, world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author, speaking to Democracy Now! Keith Forsyth, could you talk about the significance of what Professor Chomsky said? And also, Noam Chomsky was part of the group Resist, which was one of the groups to which those FBI documents had been sent by you.

KEITH FORSYTH: Correct. So, at some point in the process after the initial mailing, Bill eventually hand-delivered all of the political documents that we had selected for distribution to the Resist office in Boston.

AMY GOODMAN: This was Bill Davidon—

KEITH FORSYTH: Bill Davidon, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —the Haverford professor and well-known antiwar activist.

KEITH FORSYTH: Yes. And one of the examples that Mr. Chomsky cited was the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, which we all knew about, but we didn’t know the extent of the FBI involvement. That came out later. As it turned out, the FBI had an informant in the Chicago Black Panther organization who provided a map of the apartment where the Panther leadership was staying, including a big X on the location where Fred Hampton slept.

BETTY MEDSGER: Fred’s bed.

KEITH FORSYTH: Fred’s bed, yeah, Fred’s bed. This map was provided to Hanrahan, the—I believe he was a district attorney in Chicago, and a—had a special unit of police whose focus was to target the Panthers. And Fred Hampton was drugged one night and was sleeping very soundly when the police broke in early in the morning. And they—they killed Mark Clark, and they shot and killed Fred Hampton—excuse me—in his bed, while he was sleeping.

JOHN RAINES: He wasn’t dead.

KEITH FORSYTH: Oh, right. That’s right.

JOHN RAINES: He wasn’t dead.

AMY GOODMAN: John Raines.

JOHN RAINES: He was shot, he was wounded, but he wasn’t dead. And then his girlfriend, who was pregnant, was in the same room, in the bedroom. Two policemen came in—two Chicago policemen came in. And they said—and she heard them say, “Well, it looks like he’s going to make it.” And one of the guys took out his revolver, put the revolver on the back of Fred’s head and blew him away, and said, “Now he’s good and dead.”

AMY GOODMAN: This was December 4th, 1969, a year and a few months before you raided the FBI offices—

KEITH FORSYTH: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —in Media.

KEITH FORSYTH: And later on—

JOHN RAINES: That’s the kind of thing that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was involved in—I mean, radically unconstitutional, illegal. They—assassination, as Keith said.

BONNIE RAINES: Horrifying, horrifying, horrifying.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah.

KEITH FORSYTH: Later on, there was an FBI document discussing, evaluating this raid. And I no longer recall the exact wording, but it was words to the effect of: “The result was very satisfactory. We got the result that we wanted.”

AMY GOODMAN: You, Keith, had a wrench. You had tools to break in, and that’s what you used to get into the offices. Forty years later, Edward Snowden, you know, uses his digital skills in order to get these documents. Do you identify with him?

KEITH FORSYTH: I do. His skills are far more difficult to master than mine.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you learn?

KEITH FORSYTH: I started with a correspondence course in locksmithing, which I took originally to assist in the draft board raid movement, to try to facilitate getting in and out of draft boards. And then—then, I also—I was actually working part-time as a locksmith on the side, in addition to driving a cab, so I got some practice there. And then we practiced—I practiced quite extensively at John and Bonnie’s house, made up a little sort of fake door with a whole—five or six locks in it, so you could, you know, work different ones, and just practiced fairly diligently to try to get the time down. So…

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Betty Medsger, can you talk about FBI Agent Welch?

BETTY MEDSGER: Yes. Neil Welch played a number of important roles at that time and was an agent quite different from most FBI agents. While the culture of the FBI was dominant—dominated by Hoover’s personality and many offices of the FBI were dominated also by COINTELPRO demands and actions similar to those kinds of operations, political spying and so forth, there were a few agents who didn’t like that culture. It was very hard to resist it. But Neil Welch was an agent, a special agent in charge at various places, and he was, I think, the only special agent in charge in the FBI who refused to carry out Hoover’s orders that COINTELPRO programs take place. He refused to let his agents participate in them, and at times was placed on probation because of this.

A couple things about him later on. First of all, he happened to be the agent in charge of the Philadelphia office five years after the burglary, when the statute of limitations expired on the burglary. And it is he who signed the document closing the case. He claims—and I’m sure this is true—that it was a matter of routine; it was time to do that, since the burglars had not been found and there was no hope that they would be. I think he was also happy to do so, because he, years later, when I interviewed him, told me that although he doesn’t think that people should burglarize FBI offices, that he nevertheless thought that these people had done a heroic thing that was very important.

And something else that he did that shows the change that took place in the years immediately afterwards, Clarence Kelley became the director of the FBI, the first full director after J. Edgar Hoover. It was a—he came in at a critical time, when people in the Justice Department and Congress were first starting to look at the FBI and raise questions. And he at first defended COINTELPRO, later apologized for it. But at one point, he finally—he ordered Welch to come to Washington to go into the domestic intelligence files and go through every single one of them and test whether or not they should be held open. Very few were held open. Most of them were closed by Welch. And that was not reported at the time. It was not known. But it really symbolizes the dramatic change that did take place.

AMY GOODMAN: John Raines, can you—what did you teach at Temple University? And—

JOHN RAINES: Well, I taught Christian social ethics.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his significance, who he was?

JOHN RAINES: Well, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and theologian. And he spent a year or two at Union Theological Seminary, which is where I would later get my theological training. The Second World War was on, just beginning, and he decided he had to go back to Germany. He would be safe in this country, but he had decided that he was not going to choose safety. He would go back to his country, where his people were. And Hitler was very much against, of course, this theologian, this marvelous man. And finally, they decided, a group within this kind of religious underground, that they should undertake the assassination of Hitler. And his name was associated with that effort, and he was killed after that assassination failed.

AMY GOODMAN: And his influence on your decision to do what you did May 8th, 1971, with your wife Bonnie and the others?

JOHN RAINES: Well, it was a—it was an example of, one, significant identity with his nation; two, taking on grave personal risks in order to save that nation from what was happening to Germany under Hitler. And he paid the ultimate price for that. Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price for that. And that was a significant kind of inspiration for those of us, just like Martin Luther King was also, taking a risk for what you know to be right and following that risk, if you have to, all the way to the cross.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Betty Medsger, his influence on Bill Davidon?

BETTY MEDSGER: Well, I would just like to say something I learned about his—how both John and Bonhoeffer were influenced in their move toward resistance by African-American people. I didn’t realize, until I did the research for the book, that Bonhoeffer, after he returned to Germany and wrote about his move toward resistance, attributed his ability to decide to resist the government to what he learned here in Harlem from African Americans and about their struggle and their willingness to resist. And I found—when I discovered that, I mean, even his language in describing it was so similar to the way John described that working with African Americans, resisting with them in the South, was what gave John courage to resist.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: John, I was wondering if you could read the statement you read the morning after the burglary to a Reuters reporter. Now, this was what? March 9th, 1971.

BONNIE RAINES: About 5:30 in the morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it. Bonnie, what was going on? You were in the farmhouse?

BONNIE RAINES: No, we were headed back to our home in our car, and it was early morning. We had decided that the statement that the group had written should be released the very same day, if possible. And so, we stopped in our car headed back into the city at a public phone, and John called a reporter from Reuters whom we’d—I think Bill Davidon had arranged that—called him, woke him up and read the statement to him over the phone.

JOHN RAINES: OK, the statement is, that I read: “On the night of March 8, 1971, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI removed files from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI. These files will now be studied to determine: one, the nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on by this office of the FBI, particularly against groups and individuals working for a more just, humane and peaceful society; two, to determine how much of the FBI’s efforts are spent on relatively minor crimes by the poor and the powerless against whom they can get a more glamorous conviction rate, instead of investigating truly serious crimes by those with money and influence which cause great damage to the lives of many people—crimes such as war profiteering, monopolistic practices, institutional racism, organized crime, and the mass distribution of lethal drugs; finally, three, the extent of illegal practices by the FBI, such as eavesdropping, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informers.”

It goes on: “As this study proceeds, the results obtained along with the FBI documents pertaining to them will be sent to people in public life who have demonstrated the integrity, courage and commitment to democratic values which are necessary to effectively challenge the repressive policies of the FBI.

“As long as the United States government wages war against Indochina in defiance of the vast majority who want all troops and weapons withdrawn this year, and extends that war and suffering under the guise of reducing it, as long as great economic and political power remains concentrated in the hands of a small clique not subject to democratic scrutiny and control, then repression, intimidation, and entrapment are to be expected. We do not believe that this destruction of democracy and democratic society results simply from the evilness, egoism or senility of some leaders. Rather, this destruction is the result of certain undemocratic social, economic and political institutions.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to comments that Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday about—Glenn Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden and his NSA revelations. He wrote a piece yesterday, Tuesday, responding to the revelations about the 1971 FBI break-in. Greenwald writes, quote, “Just as is true of Daniel Ellsberg today, these activists will be widely hailed as heroic, noble, courageous, etc. That’s because it’s incredibly easy to praise people who challenge governments of the distant past, and much harder to do so for those who challenge those who wield actual power today.”

So, Betty, I’d like to ask you: How were your reports received then? How did people writing in response to the documents, the articles that you wrote, respond to the fact that these activists had broken into the FBI, taken these documents, and that The Washington Post had made the decision to publish them?

BETTY MEDSGER: Well, the letters to the editor were mixed. I think the majority were positive. People were shocked. They were also glad that evidence had been presented to them, that they had no idea of what existed. There were other—I mean, this was a time of Cold War attitudes still being very—so there were many people who accused us of being communist and trying to serve a communist purpose by making these documents public. There also was a very strong response among a few people in Congress that the adulation of Hoover in Congress needed to stop and questions needed to be asked for the first time—very strong effort to press for an investigation. Also, newspaper editorial writers at papers that had only written positive things about Hoover also called for investigations. I mean, that turned out to be a relatively long process, but those investigations did take place in 1975, when there was a buildup of additional revelations, including coming to understand what COINTELPRO was, and then Sy Hersh’s article in December 1974 that revealed that the CIA, in violation of its charter, was also engaged in massive domestic surveillance. That sort of was the tipping point. There was this string of things, and then Congress did. But this all started with the Media file release and the reaction.

AMY GOODMAN: And you, really, in pushing for your piece to be published, you laid the groundwork—though Katharine Graham first didn’t want to and then ultimately did—for Watergate, because the same thing was taking place with Woodward and Bernstein, but now she had the experience of releasing—releasing your piece.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah, I mean, I like to think that there was a buildup of—as she became more experienced with this through time. And certainly it was—she was making very tough decisions. I mean, it’s easy for those of us who are simply finding the stories and thinking, “Boy, this is a story there’s no way they could refuse to publish,” to realize that there were pressures. And in the instance of the press—I mean, of The Washington Post, the fact that they owned television stations and the Nixon administration could threaten them with loss of those licenses was a very real thing.

AMY GOODMAN: John and Bonnie Raines, so your name is known; Keith Forsyth, your name is now known. What are your thoughts about people knowing who you are?

BONNIE RAINES: Well, I can judge most immediately by the things that came in on my phone, my emails and responses from so many people who either read the Philadelphia story or The New York Times, overwhelmingly saying, “Wow! You did an amazing thing and never talked about it, never shared it all these years. And thank you very much for what you were able to accomplish.”

AMY GOODMAN: These are your close friends.

BONNIE RAINES: These are all colleagues, work colleagues. And I’m hopeful, too, that these are people who will want to see the film, as well, 1971, because it’s a wonderful documentary and very well done. But I just—it was a flood of responses that were overwhelmingly positive.

AMY GOODMAN: And John?

JOHN RAINES: Well, the same.

BONNIE RAINES: Former students.

JOHN RAINES: Former students, yes, and all of them saying, “You did a good job, Raines. Thank you for standing your watch.”

AMY GOODMAN: And how will you deal with the glare of the media spotlight?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, lights are a funny thing. They come on, and they go off. And knowing that that’s the way lights are, it helps you get ready when the lights go on, knowing that someday they’ll go off again. And that’s fine by me.

AMY GOODMAN: And those who are not named, maybe you could address this, Betty. Someone who is named is Bob Williamson. Tell us what happened with him.

BETTY MEDSGER: Bob Williamson was a defendant in the Camden trial after the Media burglary and then moved to New Mexico. And Bob has gone through many changes. He was eager to move away from total engagement with the movement, as he knew it, in Philadelphia and to get on with a new life. And he eventually did that. He was quite happy to recall his memories of what happened and what was a very important experience in his life. He’s become a Republican and stands in very different position from the rest of the burglars today, but he still looks back on that as a very important thing and regards it as something that caused positive change. And he came to New York yesterday to see the documentary and be with his fellow burglars and brought his adult daughter to share in the sense of celebration that they all felt.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it was fascinating to see him, because now he became a Republican speech writer, among other things. And with his daughter in the audience, he said, “I wanted her to know who I was before I was her father.”

BETTY MEDSGER: Right. He’s told her about some of the things that he did. I was fairly surprised to learn yesterday at lunch that he hadn’t told her about breaking into an FBI office until they were on the plane leaving Albuquerque on Tuesday.

AMY GOODMAN: And Bill Davidon died in November. He knew that his name would become known, but he was not shy about his antiwar activism, and he was out there all the way. Why didn’t he speak out before? Was it part of the vow you all took together?

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

BETTY MEDSGER: Yeah.

KEITH FORSYTH: Yes.

JOHN RAINES: Yeah, sure.

BONNIE RAINES: Yeah, it was. That was so, so important that we—we were going to trust each other to maintain a silence about it. And I think we knew that Bill would do everything possible to get the word out, but not as one of the burglars. He was—he was very anxious to continue to push for the changes that he thought were so important.

BETTY MEDSGER: I’d like to say something about Bill and the keeping of secrets. Bill’s personality was—he was a very humble, modest person, while at the same time being a very strong leader. And to some extent, that’s a reflection of the qualities of the other members of the group, and one of the things that I think made it possible for them to keep the secret all these years. I’ve covered a lot of people and a lot of different kind of movements, and there tend to be some pretty dramatic egos in movements of all kinds, where I think for most people, once that five-year period passed, it would have been very tempting to want to get credit. And I was amazed when I met them and to find out that they did not have that kind of ego need.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Keith Forsyth, before we conclude, how is it—how is it for you now that your name is out, after all these decades of secrecy?

KEITH FORSYTH: I’m the kind of person that’s not really comfortable talking about myself in public. And so, it’s been—it’s been a little difficult for me. But I was persuaded that, you know, by sharing our names, it helps give the story more weight, and it makes it more difficult for people who may not share our political views to dismiss it out of hand. You know, a book like this, with all unsubstantiated sources, unnamed sources, would be, I think, a different book, both as a historical record, which I think is important, and also in terms of the effect it can have to spark a political discussion. So, I’m not anxious to be even a little bit famous, but if it—if this will help spur the discussion that we need to have in this country, then I’m willing to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I mean, what is so astounding about this—and, Betty, you touched on this—is when the FBI set its sights on someone, as they did on John Grady, thinking he headed this plot, they’re blind to everything else—and maybe that woman they had a sketch of who ended up being Bonnie Raines. But as you show on page 150 of the book, The Burglary, there is a front-page headline, Delaware County Daily Times, a picture of Bill Davidon—this is five days after the break-in—with the headline, “Davidon Unveils Plot Against FBI.” Public remarks by William Davidon about the burglary reported in a front-page banner headline in a local newspaper four days, that is, after the burglary. “As guest speaker at a meeting of clergy in Swarthmore, he read the commission’s statement”—that’s your Commission to—Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI—”explaining why they broke into an FBI office.” In those five years, he was never investigated for this.

BETTY MEDSGER: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Betty.

BETTY MEDSGER: That amazing article sort of points to two things. First, the FBI was under orders at that point not to question him, his incredible immunity as a result of being investigated for Harrisburg.

AMY GOODMAN: Which protected you all in many ways.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

BETTY MEDSGER: Right, right.

BONNIE RAINES: Definitely.

AMY GOODMAN: Except for the one who dropped out. That’ll teach him. He becomes the suspect.

BETTY MEDSGER: But it also shows Bill, although I described him as this humble, unegotistical person, he also was so determined that this information become public. And the fact that the office had been burglarized wasn’t even getting attention. There were these tiny stories just saying, “Yes, not much was taken. Just a little burglary.” And he wanted it to be known that something had happened, and he was willing to go this far, but always standing back, never acknowledging that he was involved in it.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Betty Medsger has written the book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. And the activists themselves—professors, taxi cab drivers, a director of daycare—who were involved with this break-in, John Raines, Bonnie Raines, Keith Forsyth, they called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
GUESTS

John Raines, participated in the 1971 FBI break-in and helped photocopy many of the stolen documents. He and his wife Bonnie hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. He was a professor at Temple University.

Bonnie Raines, participated in the 1971 FBI break-in and helped survey the office prior to the burglary. She and her husband John hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. She was a mother of three at the time and worked as a daycare director.

Keith Forsyth, served as designated lock-picker in the 1971 FBI break-in by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. He was working as a cab driver at the time.

Betty Medsger, author of the new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. She is the former Washington Post reporter who received an anonymous package in 1971 that contained secret documents obtained by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. Her new book about the saga has just been published.

David Kairys, civil rights attorney and a law professor at Temple University. He has represented the activists for more than four decades.

Find this story at 8 January 2014

Democracy needs whistleblowers. That’s why I broke into the FBI in 1971

Like Snowden, we broke laws to reveal something that was more dangerous. We wanted to hold J Edgar Hoover accountable

I vividly remember the eureka moment. It was the night we broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in March 1971 and removed about 1,000 documents from the filing cabinets. We had a hunch that there would be incriminating material there, as the FBI under J Edgar Hoover was so bureaucratic that we thought every single thing that went on under him would be recorded. But we could not be sure, and until we found it, we were on tenterhooks.

A shout went up among the group of eight of us. One of us had stumbled on a document from FBI headquarters signed by Hoover himself. It instructed the bureau’s agents to set up interviews of anti-war activists as “it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

That was the first piece of evidence to emerge. It was a vindication.

Looking back on what we did, there are obvious parallels with what Edward Snowden has done in releasing National Security Agency documents that show the NSA’s blanket surveillance of Americans. I think Snowden’s a legitimate whistleblower, and I guess we could be called whistleblowers as well.
A look back at what happened

I was 29 when my husband John and I decided to join six other people to carry out the break-in. I was a mother of three children, aged eight, six and two, and I was working on a degree in education at Temple University, where John was a professor of religion.

We had both been heavily involved in the civil rights movement. John had been a freedom rider, and in Philadelphia we participated in anti-war protests against Vientnam. Through that activity we knew that the FBI was actively trying to squelch dissent, illegally and secretly. We knew that they were sending informants into university classrooms, infiltrating meetings, and tapping phones. The problem was that though we knew all this, there was no way to prove it.

A physics professor at Haverford College named Bill Davidon called a few of us together at his home. Bill, who died last November, floated the idea of doing something to obtain evidence. He just came out with it: “What do you think about breaking into an FBI office to remove the files?” If it hadn’t been for Bill, who was so smart and strategic, I’m not sure we would have taken it seriously. But we did.

Bill articulated for all of us the frustration over the foment of those times, and the feeling that we all had of being compelled to do something as ordinary citizens because no one in Washington was holding Hoover accountable. We started looking into the feasibility of a break-in. Right away, we found out the main FBI office in Philadelphia was in a high-rise in the center of the city, and that it was impregnable. Then we learned there were other field offices in the suburbs, and that lead us to Media.

John and I lived in a big old house in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, and we set aside a room in the third floor to be our base of operations. We lined the walls with maps of Media. We had to tell our elder children not to talk to anyone about the maps on the walls. Even though they knew nothing of our plans, we worried the detail might give something away.

We cased the FBI office in Media for about three months. Two of us would go and watch activity in and around that building, record people going in and out and the patterns of police patrols.

I was chosen to carry out the last piece of casing, which involved getting into the office during business hours to check out its security systems. I called and made an appointment to interview the head of the office, under the ruse that I was a Swarthmore College student researching opportunities for women in the FBI.

I tried not to arouse suspicions, tucking up my long hippy hair in a hat, wearing glasses and gloves throughout the interview even though I was taking notes. Through that visit I learned there was no security, none at all, in the office – even the filing cabinets were left unlocked.

I think it was Bill Davidon’s idea to choose 8 March 1971 as the operation’s date. It was the night of Muhammad Ali’s fight against Joe Frazier, and we thought people would be listening on their radios and that the police would perhaps be a little less vigilant.

As the day approached, we both grew anxious. We had three children, there was a lot at jeopardy. We knew that if things went wrong and we were convicted, we could go to federal prison for a long time. We talked to my husband’s brother and to my parents, without telling them the details, and asked them to take care of our children if the worst happened.

John wasn’t sleeping well. I was a little more bold and determined, a little gung-ho I guess. My association with good people in the movement gave me strength, and the idea that citizens have to take responsibility for when our rights are being abused.

Four of us broke into the FBI office. Keith Forsyth had trouble picking the lock, which was daunting. My job that night was to distract any patrolling police cars by pretending my own vehicle had broken down. Luckily, no police drove by.

We spent a week going through the documents and then mailing them out anonymously to congresspeople and some progressive journalists. All the journalists, including the New York Times, returned the documents to the FBI under pressure from the Nixon White House. Everyone was afraid of Hoover, except the Washington Post. After the Post published the documents, everyone else jumped on board.

We were so happy that, finally, the right kind of information was getting out, and that it was accurate information that could stir things up. It had that effect, too – it really did stir things up. When the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church from Idaho, was set up to look into FBI and intelligence operations and policies, we felt our work was done.
Democracy needs whistleblowers

Democracy needs whistleblowers. Snowden was in a position to reveal things that nobody could dispute. He has performed a legitimate, necessary service. Unlike us, he revealed his own identity, and as a result, he’s sacrificed a lot.

On our part, you could accuse us of being criminals – and Hoover did just that: he was apoplectic and sent 200 agents to try and find us in Philadelphia. “Find me that woman!” he screamed at them.

But to us there didn’t seem to be an alternative at that point. No one was going to be hurt. We hoped for the outcomes that we wanted. We knew, of course, that we were breaking law, but I think that sometimes you have to break laws in order to reveal something dangerous, and to put a stop to it.

For five years we lived under the threat of arrest. There was a sketch of me that the FBI circulated from when I impersonated a Swarthmore student, though I didn’t know it at the time. And the FBI interviewed John, luckily while I was out of the house. After five years, the statute of limitations fell for the burglary, and we were relieved. We didn’t celebrate on the fifth anniversary, though after that we were more relaxed. We now know they closed the case in 1976 for lack of any physical evidence.

Eventually, we told the children, and the story became part of family lore. We wanted them to know about that chapter in our history, and besides, you can’t ask your children to act according to their conscience unless you show them what you have done in your life, too.

I still worry a great deal about the state of our democracy. Back in 1971, the country was so divided, there was so much foment, but there was also much determination to change things, and people felt empowered to do so.

Nowadays, the country is divided once again, but I don’t see much concern about the abuses that are happening today, like the surveillance of mosques in America, using agent provocateurs. I hear people say, “I don’t care,” the government can do what it needs to do as long as it protects me from terrorism …” To me, that’s giving the authorities blanket permission to cross the line again.

Dissent and accountability are the lifeblood of democracy, yet people now think they just have to roll over in the name of “anti-terrorism”. Members of government thinks it can lie to us about it, and that they can lie to Congress. That concerns me for the future of my children and grandchildren, and that too makes me feel I can talk about, at my age, doing something as drastic as breaking-in to an FBI office in the search for truth.

Bonnie Raines
theguardian.com, Tuesday 7 January 2014 18.22 GMT

Find this story at 7 January 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Remembering an earlier time when a theft unmasked government surveillance

(Henry Burroughs/ AP ) – In his office in the Executive Office Building, President Richard Nixon meets with Attorney General John N. Mitchell, left, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in Washington on May 26, 1971.

On March 24, 1971, I became the first reporter to inform readers that the FBI wanted the American people to think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.” That rather alarming alert came from stolen FBI files I had found in my own mailbox at The Washington Post when I arrived at work the previous morning. ¶ It was the return address on the big tan envelope that prompted me to open it first: “Liberty Publications, Media, PA.” I had worked at the Evening Bulletin in Philadelphia before coming to The Post in January 1970, so I knew of Media, a small town southwest of Philadelphia. ¶ The letter inside the envelope informed me that on the night of March 8, 1971, my anonymous correspondents — they called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI — had broken into the Media FBI office and stolen every file. They did so, I learned later, in the dark and as the sounds of the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match filled the streets.

“Enclosed you will find,” the letter said, “copies of certain files from the Media, Pennsylvania, office of the FBI which were removed by our commission for public scrutiny. We are making these copies available to you and to several other persons in public life because we feel that you have shown concern and courage as regards issues which are, in part, documented in the enclosed materials.”

I wasn’t aware of having shown any courage, but I was, to put it mildly, eager to read those files — 14, as it turned out, of 1,000 files that they had taken.

For 43 years the people who sent those files to me then have remained unknown to the general public. This week, five of the Media FBI burglars — a group that pulled off an act that led to congressional investigations of all intelligence agencies, congressional oversight and significant reforms in the FBI — are coming forward for the first time.

In a book I have written and in “1971,” a documentary film by Johanna Hamilton, the burglars tell their story — the ultimate result of a chance encounter I had at a dinner party in 1989 with acquaintances in Philadelphia, who told me they were involved in the Media burglary.

There were eight of them. Seven have now explained why and how they broke into an FBI office, with five of them revealing their names: William C. Davidon, then a physics professor at Haverford College and the leader of the group, who died in November; John C. Raines, then and until recently a religion professor at Temple University; Bonnie Raines, a day-care center director then and since the director of organizations that advocate for children; Keith Forsyth, then a cabdriver and now an electrical engineer; Bob Williamson, then a social worker and now a life and business coach based in Albuquerque. The other surviving burglars who came forward live in Philadelphia.

‘Enhance the paranoia’

When I first looked at the contents of that envelope from Liberty Publications, I had no idea who might have done such a thing.

The first file I read grasped my attention. In it, FBI agents were encouraged to increase interviews with dissenters “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

If the FBI had paranoia as a goal of its intelligence operations, it was significant news.

Every document told a story about FBI power that was unknown to anyone outside the FBI. One, signed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on Nov. 4, 1970, had two subject headings — “Black Student Groups on College Campuses” and “Racial Matters.” It was the first of numerous FBI files I would receive from the anonymous burglars over the next two months that revealed Hoover’s programs targeting African Americans. The files revealed that African American citizens were watched by FBI informers everywhere they went — the corner store, classrooms, churches, bookstores, libraries, bars, restaurants. Every FBI agent was required to hire at least one informer to report to him regularly on the activities of black people. In the District, every agent was required to hire six informers for that purpose. On one campus in the Philadelphia area, Swarthmore College, every black student was under surveillance.

In these documents, Hoover conveyed a sense of urgency about the need to monitor black students: “Initiate inquiries immediately. I cannot overemphasize the importance of expeditious, thorough, and discreet handling of these cases. . . . Increased campus disorders involving black students pose a definite threat to the Nation’s stability and security.”

When I finished reading the files I received that day in March, I knew I held in my hands either a cruel hoax or information the American public needed to know about its most powerful law enforcement agency and the FBI director it had long adored.

Within an hour, the FBI confirmed that the files were, indeed, copies of the ones stolen from the Media office.

By late afternoon, when I submitted my article, I was surprised to learn that it might not make it into the paper. Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who would later serve time in prison for his role in the Watergate affair, had called two editors, executive editor Ben Bradlee and national managing editor Ben Bagdikian, multiple times that afternoon urging them not to publish.

Two members of Congress — Sen. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.) and Rep. Parren J. Mitchell (D-Md.) — and the Washington bureaus of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times had also received the files. All four of those recipients immediately handed them over to the FBI.

Late that afternoon, Mitchell called the publisher, Katharine Graham, and again demanded that The Post not publish an article. Finally, at 6:45 p.m., he released a statement urging “anyone with copies of the records to neither circulate them further nor publish them.” Disclosure of the files we possessed, he said, could endanger lives, disclose national defense information and give aid to foreign governments.

Tough words, especially for an attorney general who, I discovered years later from the 33,698-page record of the FBI’s official investigation of the Pennsylvania burglary, had neither read nor been briefed on the files before he issued those dramatic claims.

At first, Graham did not want to publish the article. The Post’s legal counsel, Tony Essaye, also opposed publication. After hours of heated discussion on the unprecedented question of whether to publicize secret government documents stolen by people outside the government, Graham approved publication at 10 p.m. The story was immediately released on The Post’s wire service and appeared the next day on the front pages of many papers, including The Post.

The editors had convinced Graham that the responsibility to reveal this information far outweighed concern about how it became available to us. It was important for people to have access to the information — even if it were the fruit of a burglary — that the FBI engaged in practices that had never been reported, probably were unconstitutional, and were counter to the public’s understanding of Hoover and the FBI.

The reaction to the story was swift and angry. Members of Congress who had never expressed anything but kind words for J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI now issued unprecedented calls for a congressional investigation of the bureau.

Covering up COINTELPRO

One of the most important Media files was a mere routing slip. On the top of it was the then-unknown term COINTELPRO. That program included clandestine efforts that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his closest associates interpreted at the time as a blackmail threat intended to persuade King to commit suicide. Hoover desperately wanted to keep the operation secret.

Because I wrote about the document attached to the routing slip, Hoover and his top aides knew on April 6, when that article was published, that the term COINTELPRO was known outside the department. Hoover immediately wrote to the heads of all field offices conducting these top-secret counterintelligence operations and ordered them to stop submitting status letters, apparently in an effort to increase security. At the same time, he told them they must “continue aggressive and imaginative participation in the program.”

Three weeks later, fear that the operations would one day become public convinced Hoover to take the more extreme step of eliminating the code name COINTELPRO. Officials were to say the program had been closed. Actually, it continued, but with no name.

The nature of the program was first revealed in 1973 by NBC journalist Carl Stern, who successfully sued the FBI for documents that defined the purpose of COINTELPRO, which was initiated by Hoover in 1956. Numerous such operations were revealed during the 1975 hearings of the Senate select panel known as the Church Committee, the first congressional investigation of all intelligence agencies.

A surprise at dinner

Many years after the Media burglars opened the door to Hoover’s secret FBI, I accidentally found two of them, John and Bonnie Raines. On a trip to Philadelphia in 1989, I had dinner at their home one evening. I had known them as acquaintances when I worked in Philadelphia in the late 1960s and had not seen them for many years. Their youngest child joined us briefly. John turned to her and said, “Mary, we want you to know Betty because many years ago, when your dad and mother had information about the FBI we wanted the American public to know, we gave it to Betty.”

That statement didn’t mean anything to Mary, but it almost knocked me off my chair. When she left the room, I asked the obvious question: “Are you saying you were the Media burglars?”

They happily admitted they were. John Raines had not planned to tell me, he says. He just happened to blurt it out. Among the many things I learned that night was that the eight burglars had all agreed to take the secret to their graves. A few weeks later, I asked them if they would find the others and together consider breaking that vow so that this important gap in history could be filled. Shortly after that, on a part-time basis while I continued to teach journalism, I started my research about them, the investigation into the burglary and the impact of what they had done.

As the Media burglars came forward this week, inevitably people have linked them to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who last year began releasing documents showing massive government surveillance.

There are similarities in their stated motivations: They all sought to give important information to the public about overreaching intelligence agencies.

Davidon, the leader of the Media group, thought that suppression of dissent was a crime against democracy. If documentary evidence was presented to Americans, he was confident they would take action to stop it. He was right. The burglars found the evidence and the public acted.

In the case of the Snowden files, it is not clear what action the public might demand that Congress take.

It is clear, though, that twice in the past half-century, Americans have had to rely on burglars — not official oversight by Congress, the Justice Department or the White House — for crucial information about their intelligence agencies’ operations.

Betty Medsger, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of “The Burglary: the Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”

By Betty Medsger, Published: January 11 E-mail the writer

Find this story at 11 January 2014

© 1996-2014 The Washington Post

NBC reporter recounts breaking FBI spying story

On the Dec. 6, 1973 “Nightly News,” Carl Stern becomes the first reporter to expose COINTELPRO, a now-notorious FBI program that infiltrated and disrupted civil rights, anti-war and other political dissident groups.

The files stolen from an FBI office outside Philadelphia in 1971 were stunning, describing secret efforts to spy on student protestors and infiltrate civil rights groups.

But one document proved especially interesting to the NBC News correspondent who would later break the news of the FBI’s most notorious secret program of nationwide domestic surveillance. It discussed a proposal from bureau headquarters that agents send letters “anonymously” to college professors who had “shown a reluctance to take decisive action” against left-wing protestors. And it included a cryptic acronym he’d never seen before: “COINTELPRO.”

“The first question that popped in my mind was, ‘By what authority do FBI agents write anonymous letters?’” recalls Carl Stern, who covered the Justice Department for NBC News for nearly 30 years. He also wanted to know what “COINTELPRO” stood for. But when he pressed those questions with top DOJ officials, “nobody would talk to me about it.”

Stern recalled his efforts to learn more about the document—and the mysterious reference to “COINTELPRO” — on Tuesday after the confession by three former peace activists that they had committed the unsolved burglary of the Media, Pa. office in order to document what they were convinced was “massive illegal surveillance” by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The identities of the burglars are revealed in a new book, “The Burglary,” by former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, and were reported Tuesday on the “Today” show.

Read the NBC News report on the burglars who came forward.

In the bombshell book, “The Burglary,” journalist Betty Medzger exposes the robbers behind the momentous theft from an FBI office outside Philadelphia over 40 years ago. The perpetrators have come forward in an interview with NBC News.

The burglars cracked open the door to exposing illicit FBI snooping by stealing the files and sending them to select journalists, but it was Stern who opened it all the way. Using a then-novel tool called the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from the government, Stern uncovered the long-running surveillance program known as COINTELPRO, a now-infamous effort at political intimidation and disruption that may have been Hoover’s biggest secret.

As Stern recalled it, when his initial inquiries about COINTELPRO were rebuffed, he refused to take no for an answer and sought an explanation over lunch with L. Patrick Gray, who had become acting director of the FBI after Hoover died in 1972. He got back a terse letter in Sept. 1972. “This matter involved a highly sensitive operation,” it read. “It has now been discontinued” and any further disclosures “would definitely be harmful to the Bureau’s operations and to the national security.”

So Stern filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. And with the help of a sympathetic judge, the late Barrington Parker, he finally got the first documents describing what COINTELPRO was, and broke the story on NBC’s “Nightly News” on Dec. 6, 1973. “Secret FBI memos made public today show the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left,” said John Chancellor that night introducing Stern’s report. “He ordered his agents not only to expose New Left groups, but to take action against them to neutralize them.”

Those documents opened the floodgates to hundreds more over the years as Congressional investigations followed. They showed that Hoover had started COINTELPRO in 1956, first targeting the Communist Party and then expanding the program over the years to include the Socialist Workers Party, black nationalists, New Left groups and the Ku Klux Klan. Agents were directed to harass and intimidate leaders, plant false stories and write anonymous letters aimed at discrediting them. In one case, the bureau planted a false story that film star Jean Seberg, known to have financially supported the Black Panther Party, had been impregnated by one of its leaders. In another, it sent a tape to Coretta Scott King, wife of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. containing secretly made audio recordings of her husband’s extramarital affairs.

“It was a very abusive program, it had no law enforcement purpose,” said Athan Theoharis, a leading scholar of the FBI’s history and a professor emeritus at Marquette University. “Clearly, what the bureau was doing was trying to contain organizations whose politics the FBI viewed as abhorrent.”

Stern agrees. “They made a decision about which individuals and organizations were doing things that they regarded as un-American and harmful,” he said, “and that’ s not the bureau’s job.”

Ironically, Hoover quietly terminated COINTELPRO shortly after the Media, Pa. break-in, afraid details of the program would come to light. Within a few years, prodded by the bad publicity and the findings of a Senate committee headed by the late Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the Justice Department issued new guidelines prohibiting the bureau from engaging in any such activities and barring investigations based on First Amendment-protected political activity.

By then, a later FBI director, Clarence Kelley, would do something Hoover is not known to have ever contemplated. He formally apologized for COINTELPRO. “We are truly sorry we were responsible for instances which are now subject to such criticism,” Kelley said in a 1976 speech at Westminster College in Missouri. “Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible.”

Theoharis said those changes might never have taken place if the Media burglars had not stolen the FBI’s secret files — and Stern had not followed up on what they did.

Wednesday Jan 8, 2014 2:00 AM
By Michael Isikoff, NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

Find this story at 8 January 2014

© NBCNews.com

How to Burglarise the FBI The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI did it back in 1971

For most of US history, spies didn’t have rules – even when they were targeting US citizens. The spymasters and their agents did whatever was necessary: blackbag break-ins, illegal phone taps, telegram and mail intercepts, plus the usual lying, stealing and killing. But in late 1970, a collection of ordinary citizens became so outraged by illegal government spying that they began to meticulously plan a daring mission: they would raid an FBI office.

On the 8th of March, 1971, a group of activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an office outside of Philadelphia, stole nearly all the FBI’s own documents and mailed them to Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger. This leak led to massive reforms of the rules of surveillance. Any limits on NSA and FBI actions inside the United States are thanks in part to these daring citizen burglars. They kept their story a secret for 43 years. Meet the men and women who burgled the FBI.

Their secret planning began with a spaghetti dinner. A pair of college professors, several university students, a social worker, a daycare worker and a taxi driver gathered around a homey dinner table, children underfoot at a three-story stone townhouse in Philadelphia. Some of the guests were on edge, while others laughed like old friends. Their leader, William “Bill” Davidon, a physics professor at nearby Haverford College, was the oldest at 43. He leaned back, quietly observing the crew that ranged in age down to 20. Several of the members had been arrested in earlier actions. But this operation was on a different scale of danger. Even sitting at the table slurping spaghetti and discussing plans was enough for conspiracy charges, perhaps up to ten years in federal prison. If the FBI catches you in the act, a friendly lawyer warned, you might be shot.

John and Bonnie Raines’s wedding photo, 1962

As they ate, Davidon outlined his plan. We are going to break into an FBI office, steal every document, mail the internal FBI files to the press and expose the FBI’s crimes to the nation. He was neither loud nor flashy. His was a leadership that came with the spark of conviction, the sensibilities of a lifelong educator.

But to attack the FBI meant directly confronting J Edgar Hoover, one of the most powerful men in America. For nearly five decades, Hoover had shaped the FBI to his liking, personally deciding who was a true American and who was an enemy of the state. “When Hoover was director, there were no guidelines. He was the guideline and he told agents what they can do and they can’t do,” said former FBI Special Agent Wes Swearingen, who was active from 1951 to 1977. “He did not ask any president or any attorney general what he could do. In fact, he kept it secret. That gave him a lot of power because everything was so secretive.”

Hoover used FBI agents to draw up a list of tens of thousands of “subversive” Americans to be rounded up and arrested in the event of a national emergency. He organised nationwide programmes to harass and disrupt political activists. “We used to set up Black Bag Jobs which were actually illegal searches because we did not have search warrants… and I did or knew about approximately 500 [of these] in the Chicago area alone,” Swearingen told me. “Hoover was very abusive because we were talking about innocent people being put in jail and people being assassinated, like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark [leaders of the Black Panther Party] in Chicago. That was a definite arrangement by the FBI for the Chicago Police to go in and kill all the members. And I was told personally by an agent that I used to work with, that that’s what happened.”

Despite his reign of abuse, no one in Washington dared challenge the man who knew too much. “Somebody had to do it. And those of us who referred to ourselves as the ‘Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI’ took that task as our task in the early months of 1971,” says John Raines, a professor of religion at Temple University and, along with his wife Bonnie, a former member of the Citizens’ Commission. “If we did not do it, it would not get done. And J Edgar Hoover would have continued to turn his FBI into a kind of proto-Gestapo.”

It had been Davidon’s idea that burglering the FBI would show how the venerated bureau was out of control, running illegal operations, ignoring the US Constitution and disrupting fundamental democratic rights. Secrecy was a must. They each knew that if even one of them talked, slipped up or got caught, the entire group was going down.

The FBI office was located on the second floor of the County Court Apartments in Media, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Betty Medsger)

An FBI office in the small town of Media, Pennsylvania caught Davidon’s attention. Media was just outside of Philly, and when he drove by the offices, Davidon was convinced that the three-story brick office building was vulnerable. These smaller FBI offices, known as “Resident Agencies”, often housed less than a half-dozen agents and had less sophisticated security measures. The Citizens’ Commission now had their target.

Throughout January and February of 1971, the Raines’s third floor attic morphed into a command centre. Sheetrock was hung on one wall and quickly filled with handwritten notes and operational details. Escape routes were planned. A large map of Media was hung on the wall and a diagram of the FBI office slowly took shape. Brainstorming sessions led to a chart with questions: How long does it take the courthouse guard to make rounds? Is it predictable? Are there regular police patrols?

Davidon wanted no detail left unstudied. He assigned each team member a specific set of tasks. John Raines was chosen to drive the getaway car – the family station wagon. He would wait in a parking lot miles from the operation, ready to receive the stolen goods. Once the documents were squirrelled away in a safe house, it would be John and Davidon who would write up the analysis. They were both in their early 40s, long-term strategic thinkers, men who had joined the Civil Rights Movement long before it was hip and risked their life by travelling to rural Mississippi in the early 1960s as part of a movement known as “The Freedom Riders”.

Keith Forsyth, part-time cabbie and lock picker

Forsyth was the one-man entry crew. While the others sat around a table up in the attic, Forsyth installed a board with multiple locks lined up like a hardware store collection. While the others debated entry strategies, escape routes and how to avoid being arrested, Forsyth picked locks. “Every lock is an individual, they all behave differently so I would go up and down practicing. I would do all [the locks] clockwise, rotating and going up and then back counterclockwise. Every so often I would either swap out a lock or I would take a lock out, take it apart and put a new combination in it. When I was really good, I probably could do most locks in about 30 seconds.”

As the burglary plan took shape, Forsyth was given another task: he would help with surveillance. The burglars began night operations, staking out the Media FBI office in pairs. They developed a formal routine. Every weeknight from 7PM to midnight the crew spied, took notes and honed the details of the operation.

“It was boring. You’re watching out the door, constantly waiting for a cop car to go by. A cop car goes [by] and then you wait another hour before you see the next one,” said Forsyth. “You have two people sitting in the back of a van with curtains over the windows in the dark, for hours at a time. It would be pretty hard to explain that if a cop actually saw your eye move behind the curtain.”

The activists were clear that the raid had to take place at night, after the agents had left but not so late as to raise suspicions. They found an ideal date. On the 8th of March, 1971, Joe Frazier was scheduled to fight Muhammad Ali. Millions would be watching and listening. While Ali and Frazier fought inside Madison Square Garden, the burglars could use the noise of the radio and TV broadcasts as cover.

After two full months of casing the FBI by night, the team understood well the outside routines. But what was happening inside the FBI offices? The Citizens’ Commission agreed that someone needed to spend some time undercover in the offices.

Bonnie Raines with her daughter, Lindsley, in 1971, the year of the robbery

Bonnie Raines volunteered. She looked younger than her 29 years, had a bubbly Midwestern charm and was extremely attractive. In late February, she disguised her long hair by carefully tucking it inside a woollen hat. She wore oversized glasses that were not part of her normal getup. A pair of leather gloves allowed her to take notes without leaving fingerprints. Under the guise of investigating work opportunities for women at the FBI, Bonnie set up an appointment to interview an agent inside the office. While Bonnie kept the conversation on track, she made a handful of mental notes. The filing cabinets did not appear to have sophisticated locks, and there was no visible alarm. There was also a second entryway, a door barricaded by huge filing cabinets. Loaded with information, Bonnie left the office surer than ever that the operation was possible.

As plans began to solidify, Jonathan Flaherty, one of the burglars, got cold feet. With little explanation, Flaherty left the group, hardly explaining his fears or motivations. The group was stunned. Flaherty could sink them all with a single phone call. Davidon pushed on. He tried to ignore the possibilities of the defector. He’d already hurdled dozens of challenges.

***

At 7PM, on the 8th of March, the burglars gathered at a Holiday Inn several miles from the FBI office. They arrived in separate cars and waited. Forsyth was sent to pick the locks. He had already scouted the premises, found a pair of locks he could pick, and figured his well-practiced routine would take approximately 30 seconds. He approached the office in a Brooks Brothers suit and tie, clean-shaven and confident, but when he saw the door, he panicked. A second, far more sophisticated lock had recently been added, one that would be impossible for him to pick. “I was very upset, because immediately my plan had been to go up there, open those two locks, make sure there was no alarms and leave. I planned to be out of there in five minutes or less. And so my immediate instinctive reaction was that this whole thing was down the tubes.”

Forsyth returned to the Holiday Inn, “I can’t do it,” he bluntly told the gathered crew. Davidon marshalled the frustration and began to think aloud. What other ways might work? Do we have a second door? During her casing mission, Bonnie had seen another door, but it was barricaded by a huge filing cabinet. Davidon thought it would work, while also warning that knocking over the file cabinet meant near-sure arrest. They decided to go for it and headed back to the office.

Now Forsyth’s bragging rights were tested. He found the barricaded door, which had just one lock. He picked that in his standard 30 seconds. Then using a crowbar and part of a car jack he painstakingly inched the massive file cabinet away from the door. Instead of a quick 30-second entry, it was closer to an hour of painstaking work. “My feet are braced up against the wall and I am pulling the jack very, very slowly trying to feel what is happening on the other side. Trying to feel whether this thing is slipping or tipping or not,” said Forsyth. “I was trying to stay calm but, you know, what are you going to say if somebody walks up and says, ‘By the way, young man, why are you laying on the floor with a four-foot steel bar in your hands stuck inside the FBI’s door?’”

While he strained, Forsyth silently thanked Ali as sounds of the heavyweight fight echoed throughout the building. Then he panicked. “I heard this sort of banging, a bang sound from inside, and of course I froze instantly. It was an old building. Was this the steam heat? Or was it an FBI agent who tripped over something? I had no way of knowing. “

Forsyth finally wedged the door open far enough to slip his skinny frame into the FBI offices. “I had this little moment where I thought, ‘Well, if they’re in there I’m going to find our right now.’ I squeezed through and tried to be as calm as I could. I looked around and there was nobody there.”

Next, a two-man, two-woman team entered the FBI offices carrying empty suitcases. They worked stealthily in the dark. A flashlight dimmed with tape was used sparingly. The “inside crew” methodically wrenched open desk drawers and file cabinets. Careful not to make noise or leave the slightest evidence, they quietly filled up their oversized suitcases with documents. They also grabbed an autographed photo of J Edgar Hoover as a trophy. The well-dressed burglars then strolled out to waiting cars in front of the offices, loaded up two vehicles with suitcases and were driven off.

The Quaker farmhouse 40 miles outside of Philadelphia, where the burglars reconvened after the robbery to examine the stolen documents. (Photo by Betty Medsger)

Davidon had long before decided that the documents should be kept at a central location, preferably rural. He didn’t want to risk an FBI raid in Philadelphia, so he quietly asked a friend to lend him the farmhouse at Friendship Farm, a Quaker retreat. Once the burglars reconvened at the farmhouse they immediately opened the suitcases and began sorting documents. From the onset they had agreed to destroy any legitimate criminal records – alerting bank robbery suspects that the FBI was after them was not part of the plan. They wanted evidence the FBI was harassing political activists. As Davidon had repeatedly stated to the group, if Hoover was trying to squash dissent in the United States, the documents would prove it.

The group spread the documents across the kitchen table, counters, a dining room table and even atop chairs as they began sorting. Within an hour they found evidence. In an internal FBI document, agents were taught that harassing and infiltrating legitimate political organisations was a particularly effective technique. It might help, the document suggested, to “enhance the paranoia… get across the point there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox”.

Another document was a routing slip with the word COINTELPRO – short for Counter Intelligence Programme – a top secret programme little known outside the FBI, which was at the heart of the Bureau’s dirty tricks and harassment campaigns versus political activists.

“We discovered very quickly that we had not acted in vain. Now we had documentation that proved our suspicions to be accurate,” said John Raines. “And then, with those documents, we were able to get the proof on what J Edgar Hoover was making his agents do.”

The burglary had literally turned the FBI inside out. The masters of covert entry and burglaries had themselves been targeted. “I don’t think anyone [at the FBI] ever thought anyone would have guts enough to try to break into the FBI,” said Swearingen, the former agent. “The frame of mind in the FBI was ‘Nobody’s going to break into an FBI office. They’ve got to be crazy.’ But hey, people break into banks all the time.”

Hoover’s paranoia flourished. Was Media the first of many attacks? Would all his secrets be revealed? Already weakened by age and losing his grip on power, he panicked. He ordered armed agents to sleep inside FBI offices nationwide. “I would go to the Santa Barbara [FBI] office and lock the door at night and I would sleep in there overnight. We had old army cots…and that was nationwide,” said former FBI agent Swearingen. “They spent millions of dollars putting in a security system for all these different resident agencies around the country. It’s like they locked up the barn after the horse was stolen.”

The next hit on Hoover, however, came not from the burglars but from The Washington Post. The Citizens’ Commission sent the Post a packet of 14 government documents. Attorney General John Mitchell got wind and pressured executive editor Ben Bradlee to keep the information secret. Bradlee refused, citing the public interest in the FBI’s activities. It was clear to Bradlee and young reporter Betty Medsger that the original documents mailed to the Post were the tip of a far larger scandal. Medsger poured her energy into the story – the documents had been addressed to her, and she quickly figured that her previous job writing about anti-war activists for Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin was directly connected to the burglars choosing her.

The Burglary, by Betty Medsger, published through Alfred A Knopf

The Post supported her work with front-page exclusives and a harsh editorial condemning the FBI. For Medsger, it would be the story of her life. In her recently released book The Burglary, Medsger weaves together the tales of the burglars and the long history of Hoover’s disdain for democracy.

For Hoover, the lack of investigative leads in the burglary was infuriating. Particularly galling to the FBI director was the lack of arrests. Despite a six-year investigation and a file that stretched to 33,000 pages, no member of the Citizens’ Commission was ever charged. The case was eventually closed, but the FBI was never the same. “It brought the FBI to its senses. Up until that time, they were just kind of free-ruling and doing whatever they felt they might want to do or maybe should do,” said Swearingen, the former agent. “But [the Media break-in] brought that to a screeching halt.”

RetroReport just put out a short documentary on the Citizen’s Commission. Watch it right here.

Jonathan Franklin is an independent reporter who writes often for the Guardian. He can be followed @Franklinblog. Email inquiries, news tips and secret documents can be sent to chilefranklin2000@yahoo.com.

By Jonathan Franklin

Find this story at 9 January 2014

© 2014 Vice Media Inc.

Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows; Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets

One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.

PHILADELPHIA — The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.

So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

“Heroes. And a reminder to those who naively believe that the government can be trusted with the power to run a surveillance state. How quickly we forget Hoover and Nixon.”

The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.

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John and Bonnie Raines, two of the burglars, at home in Philadelphia with their grandchildren. Mark Makela for The New York Times

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.

“We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to hold on to what we did back then.”

A Meticulous Plan
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Keith Forsyth, in the early 1970s, was the designated lock-picker among the eight burglars. When he found that he could not pick the lock on the front door of the F.B.I. office, he broke in through a side entrance.

The burglary was the idea of William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of antiwar protests in Philadelphia, a city that by the early 1970s had become a white-hot center of the peace movement. Mr. Davidon was frustrated that years of organized demonstrations seemed to have had little impact.

In the summer of 1970, months after President Richard M. Nixon announced the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, Mr. Davidon began assembling a team from a group of activists whose commitment and discretion he had come to trust.

The group — originally nine, before one member dropped out — concluded that it would be too risky to try to break into the F.B.I. office in downtown Philadelphia, where security was tight. They soon settled on the bureau’s satellite office in Media, in an apartment building across the street from the county courthouse.

That decision carried its own risks: Nobody could be certain whether the satellite office would have any documents about the F.B.I.’s surveillance of war protesters, or whether a security alarm would trip as soon as the burglars opened the door.

The group spent months casing the building, driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines of its residents.
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Mr. Forsyth today. Mark Makela for The New York Times

“We knew when people came home from work, when their lights went out, when they went to bed, when they woke up in the morning,” said Mr. Raines, who was a professor of religion at Temple University at the time. “We were quite certain that we understood the nightly activities in and around that building.”

But it wasn’t until Ms. Raines got inside the office that the group grew confident that it did not have a security system. Weeks before the burglary, she visited the office posing as a Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women at the F.B.I.

The burglary itself went off largely without a hitch, except for when Mr. Forsyth, the designated lock-picker, had to break into a different entrance than planned when he discovered that the F.B.I. had installed a lock on the main door that he could not pick. He used a crowbar to break the second lock, a deadbolt above the doorknob.

After packing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.’s spying on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.

Other news organizations that had received the documents, including The New York Times, followed with their own reports.
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At The Washington Post, Betty Medsger was the first to report on the contents of the stolen F.B.I. files. Now, she has written a book about the episode. Robert Caplin for The New York Times

Ms. Medsger’s article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.

“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.

But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro.

Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro — shorthand for Counterintelligence Program — were revealed.

Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.
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The F.B.I. field office in Media, Pa., from which the burglars stole files that showed the extent of the bureau’s surveillance of political groups. Betty Medsger
Recent Comments
silentbear 28 days ago

In celebration of these folks actions, I’d like to share this song:http://youtu.be/4JIbCZen1Tg
Pat Shea 28 days ago

People in the movement knew they were getting spied on anyway. At UW – Madison, the COINTELPRO photographers would lurk in the alleys along…
Paul Lerch 28 days ago

Two thumbs up to the Rainses’, Keith Forsyth and the five others who had the courage to really put themselves at risk in order to take an…
See All Comments

“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”

Senator Church’s investigation in the mid-1970s revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I. abuses, and led to greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and other American intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected,” it read.

By the time the committee released its report, Hoover was dead and the empire he had built at the F.B.I. was being steadily dismantled. The roughly 200 agents he had assigned to investigate the Media burglary came back empty-handed, and the F.B.I. closed the case on March 11, 1976 — three days after the statute of limitations for burglary charges had expired.

Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said that “a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”

According to Ms. Medsger’s book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” only one of the burglars was on the F.B.I.’s final list of possible suspects before the case was closed.
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Afterward, they fled to a farmhouse, near Pottstown, Pa., where they spent 10 days sorting through the documents. Betty Medsger

A Retreat Into Silence

The eight burglars rarely spoke to one another while the F.B.I. investigation was proceeding and never again met as a group.

Mr. Davidon died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had planned to speak publicly about his role in the break-in, but three of the burglars have chosen to remain anonymous.

Among those who have come forward — Mr. Forsyth, the Raineses and a man named Bob Williamson — there is some wariness of how their decision will be viewed.

The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.

They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.

“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”

“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”

The Retro Report video with this article is the 24th in a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra Darnton, a former “60 Minutes” producer. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.

A version of this article appears in print on January 7, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows. Order Reprints|Today’s Paper|Subscribe

By MARK MAZZETTIJAN. 7, 2014

Find this story at 7 January 2014

© 2014 The New York Times Company

“It Was Time to Do More Than Protest”: Activists Admit to 1971 FBI Burglary That Exposed COINTELPRO

One of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era has been solved. On March 8, 1971, a group of activists — including a cabdriver, a day care director and two professors — broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every document they found and then leaked many to the press, including details about FBI abuses and the then-secret counter-intelligence program to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements, nicknamed COINTELPRO. They called themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. No one was ever caught for the break-in. The burglars’ identities remained a secret until this week when they finally came forward to take credit for the caper that changed history. Today we are joined by three of them — John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth; their attorney, David Kairys; and Betty Medsger, the former Washington Post reporter who first broke the story of the stolen FBI documents in 1971 and has now revealed the burglars’ identities in her new book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”

Click here to watch the one-hour Part 2 of this interview.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today, we will spend the rest of the hour unraveling one of the great mysteries of the Vietnam War era. On March 8th, 1971, a group of eight activists, including a cab driver, a daycare director and two professors, broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole every document they found. The activists, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, soon began leaking shocking details about FBI abuses to the media. Among the documents was one that bore the mysterious word “COINTELPRO.”

AMY GOODMAN: No one involved in the break-in was ever caught. Their identities remained a secret until this week. Today, three of the FBI burglars will join us on the show, but first I want to turn to a new short film produced by the nonprofit news organization Retro Report for The New York Times. It’s titled Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets.

NARRATOR: It’s the greatest heist you’ve never heard of and one of the most important.

HARRY REASONER: Last March, someone broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania, stole some records and mailed copies of them around to the several newspapers.

NARRATOR: Those records would help bring an end to J. Edgar Hoover’s secret activities within the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

JOHN CHANCELLOR: He ordered his agents not only to expose New Left groups, but to take action against them to neutralize them.

UNIDENTIFIED: Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI.

NARRATOR: The burglars were never caught, and the details have remained a mystery until now. A new book, The Burglary, reveals for the first time who did it and how they used a crowbar to pry open one of the best-kept and darkest secrets in American history.

JOHN RAINES: We were early whistleblowers before whistleblowers were known as such.

NARRATOR: The burglars are stepping out of the shadows just as new revelations about secret intelligence operations have many people asking, “How much is too much when personal privacy is at stake?”

In the spring of 1970, the war in Vietnam was raging.

JOHN CHANCELLOR: American battle deaths in Vietnam now number 40,142.

NARRATOR: And at home, antiwar protesters and law enforcement officers were violently clashing.

BONNIE RAINES: It felt like a nightmare was unfolding. I took what was outrage and horror about what was going on, and I realized that I had to take it somewhere.

NARRATOR: Bonnie Raines worked at a daycare center in Philadelphia. Her husband John taught religion at Temple University. They were the very picture of a golden couple.

BONNIE RAINES: We had an eight-year-old, a six-year-old and a two-year-old. We were family folks who also wanted to keep another track active in our lives, which was political activism.

NARRATOR: That activism attracted the attention of the FBI. Its director, the powerful and feared J. Edgar Hoover, perceived the antiwar movement, which ranged from radical revolutionaries to peaceful protesters, as a threat to national security.

BONNIE RAINES: At one rally, I had one of my children on my back, and not only did they take my picture, but they took her picture.

NARRATOR: Protesters like the Raines became increasingly convinced the FBI was conducting a covert campaign against them, tapping their phones and infiltrating antiwar groups.

JOHN RAINES: We knew the FBI was systematically trying to squash dissent. And dissent is the lifeblood of democracy.

NARRATOR: Determined to get proof, the FBI was crossing the line, fellow activist and Haverford physics professor William Davidon hatched a plan. He reached out to the Raines and six others, including a social worker, a graduate student and a taxi driver named Keith Forsyth.

KEITH FORSYTH: We agreed to meet someplace where we could talk. And he says, “What would you think about the idea of breaking into an FBI office?” And I look at him, and I’m like, “You’re serious, aren’t you?” I was pretty vehement in my opposition to the war, and I felt like marching up and down the street with a sign was not cutting it anymore. And it was like, OK, time to—time to kick it up a notch.

NARRATOR: The crew decided to break into a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania.

KEITH FORSYTH: Once I got over the shock of thinking that this was the nuttiest thing I’d ever heard in my life, I’m like, this is a great idea, because we’re not going to make any allegations; we’re going to take their own paperwork, signed by their own people, including J. Edgar Hoover, and give it to the newspapers. So, let’s see you argue with that.

NARRATOR: In the Raines’ third-floor attic, the team divvied up responsibilities and assigned tasks. They hung maps to learn about the neighborhood, planned escape routes, and they took extensive notes on the comings and goings in the building.

KEITH FORSYTH: I signed up for a correspondence course in locksmithing. That was my job, to get us in the door. Practiced several times a week. After a month, you get pretty good.

NARRATOR: Bonnie was assigned the job of going inside and casing the office.

BONNIE RAINES: I was to call the office and make an appointment as a Swarthmore student doing research on opportunities for women in the FBI. So they gave me an appointment. I tried to disguise myself as best I could, and I went to say goodbye, and I acted confused about where the door was, and that gave me a chance then to check out both rooms and know where the file cabinets were.

NARRATOR: Bonnie discovered there was no alarm system and no security guards. She also found a second door leading inside.

JOHN RAINES: When she came back with that news, we became convinced, yes, I think we can get this done. We had more to lose than anybody else in the group, because we had these kids.

BONNIE RAINES: We faced the reality of, if we were arrested and on trial, we would be in prison for very many years. He had to make some plans for that.

NARRATOR: With a solid understanding of how they would conduct the break-in, they now needed to figure out when.

JOHN RAINES: March 8th, 1971, Frazier and Ali were fighting for the championship of the world. And we had the feeling that maybe the cops might be a little bit distracted.

NARRATOR: While the crew waited at a nearby hotel, Forsyth arrived at the office alone.

KEITH FORSYTH: Pull up, walk up to the door, and one of the locks is a cylinder tumbler lock, not a pin tumbler lock. And I just about had a heart attack. Bottom line is, I could not pick that lock.

NARRATOR: They almost called it off. But that second door that Bonnie noticed gave them another chance.

KEITH FORSYTH: At that point, you know that you’re going to have to wing it. Knelt down on the floor, picked the lock in like 20 seconds. There was a deadbolt on the other side. I had a pry bar with me, a short crowbar. I put the bar in there and yanked that sucker. At one point, I heard a noise inside the office. And I’m like, “Are they in there waiting for me?” Basically said to myself, “There’s only one way to find out: I’m going in.”

NARRATOR: Next, the inside crew walked into an empty office wearing business suits and carrying several suitcases. They cleaned out file cabinets and then made their way downstairs to the getaway car and drove off unnoticed. The group reconvened at a farmhouse an hour’s drive away and started unpacking.

KEITH FORSYTH: We were like, “Oh, man, I can’t believe this worked.” We knew there was going to be some gold in there somewhere.

JOHN RAINES: Each of the eight of us were sorting files, and all of a sudden you’d hear one of them, “Oh, look! Look at this one! Look!”

NARRATOR: After several long nights digging for documents that looked the most revealing, the burglars sent copies to journalists, including Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.

BETTY MEDSGER: And the cover letter was from the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, and the first file that I read was about a group of FBI agents who were told to enhance the paranoia in the antiwar movement and to create an atmosphere that there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox.

NARRATOR: Attorney General John Mitchell asked the Post not to write about the stolen documents, saying it could endanger lives.

BETTY MEDSGER: The attorney general called two key editors and tried to convince them not to publish.

NARRATOR: But the Post did publish the story, on the front page. It was the first of several reports and told how agents turned local police, letter carriers and switchboard operators into informants.

BETTY MEDSGER: There were very strong editorials calling for an investigation of the FBI.

NARRATOR: Another stolen document would prove even more explosive: a routing slip marked with a mysterious word, “COINTELPRO.” While reporters tried to uncover its meaning, the FBI was desperate to find the burglars. The bureau put nearly 200 agents on the investigation. Hoover’s best lead was the college girl who had visited their office.

BONNIE RAINES: His command was “Find me that woman!”

NARRATOR: Agents actively searched for Bonnie, but there were many antiwar activists who fit her description.

JOHN RAINES: We could hide within, you know, thousands of people. There were so many of us who were active.

NARRATOR: Two years later, NBC reporter Carl Stern figured out the meaning of that word, COINTELPRO.

JOHN CHANCELLOR: Secret FBI memos made public today show that the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign to disrupt the activities of the New Left without telling any of his superiors about it.

CARL STERN: Many of the techniques were clearly illegal. Burglaries, forged blackmail letters and threats of violence were used.

NARRATOR: The FBI initially defended its actions.

CLARENCE KELLEY: The government would have been derelict in its duty, had it not taken measures to protect the fabric of our society.

NARRATOR: But the bureau’s techniques were worse and the targets more far-reaching than the burglars ever imagined.

DAVID BRINKLEY: Diplomats, government employees, sports figures, socially prominent persons, senators and congressmen.

WALTER CRONKITE: The FBI at one time sought to blackmail the late Martin Luther King into committing suicide.

UNIDENTIFIED: Marriages were destroyed. Violence was encouraged. Many Americans were tapped and bugged, had their mail opened by the CIA and the FBI, and their tax returns used illegally.

AMY GOODMAN: An extended excerpt from Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets, a short film produced by Retro Report for The New York Times. To watch the full video, visit RetroReport.org.

When we come back, three of the activists join us in studio—Keith Forsyth, Bonnie and John Raines—as well as the former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who first broke the story of the stolen FBI documents in 1971. This week, she revealed the identities of the burglars in her new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. We’ll go back in time and talk about today, as well. This is Democracy Now! Back in a moment.

[break]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Joining us now in our studio are three of the activists who broke into the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on March 8th, 1971. The break-in led to revelations about the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program that targeted activists across the country.

None of the burglars were ever caught. On Tuesday, their identities were revealed for the very first time. Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Raines and John Raines all lived in Philadelphia in 1971. Forsyth was working as a cab driver. He was chosen to pick the lock at the FBI office. Bonnie and John Raines hosted many of the planning meetings for the burglary at their home, where they were raising three children. Bonnie, who worked as a daycare director, helped case the FBI office by posing as a college student interested in becoming an FBI agent. John Raines was a veteran of the Freedom Rides movement and a professor at Temple University. He used a Xerox machine at the school to photocopy many of the stolen documents.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Betty Medsger, author of the new book, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. Medsger first reported on the stolen documents while working at The Washington Post. She uncovered the identities of most of the burglars in her new book.

And we welcome you all to Democracy Now! Keith, I want to begin with you. Talk about the time and how you ended up going into the FBI office. What spurred you on?

KEITH FORSYTH: So, at that time, we had just, within a few years, gone through the sort of peak of the civil rights movement, and many of the laws, like the Voting Rights Act, had been passed some years before, but the reality of racial justice was still far from complete. There were—the war in Vietnam was raging at that point in time. And so, there were many, many people who were working for change in those areas, in particular.

My main focus at that time was the antiwar movement. I was, you know, spending as much time as I could with organizing against the war, but I had become very frustrated with legal protest—didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. The government wasn’t listening. The war was escalating and not de-escalating. And I think what really pushed me over the edge was, shortly after the invasion of Cambodia, there were four students killed at Kent State and two more killed at—at Jackson State. And—I’m sorry, I’d think I’d have this down after all these years. And that really pushed me over the edge, that it was time to do more than just—than just protest and just march with a sign. And I joined the so-called Catholic Left, which is where I met John and Bonnie and also Bill Davidon. And from there, the next step was the Media action.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Keith, could you also talk about how you were invited to join this plan to break into—by William Davidon?

KEITH FORSYTH: If memory serves, he called me on the phone and asked—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who William Davidon was.

KEITH FORSYTH: Oh, I’m sorry. Bill Davidon, at that time, was a professor of physics at Haverford College, and I knew him mainly as a fellow activist in the peace movement. He was very prominent in Philadelphia in both the legal and the illegal peace movements. And he called me on the phone one day and asked me if I wanted to come to a party, which was code for an action. And I believe I said, “Sure, I’m always up for a party.” You can check the FBI transcript, because they were tapping his phone at the time. And so, we met at an outdoor location, where we couldn’t be bugged, and he presented the idea to me then.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Bonnie Raines, talk about your involvement. What motivated you? You were a young mother of three.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: How old were your children?

BONNIE RAINES: They were eight, six and two at that time. We’ve since had a fourth child. I became involved, as Keith said, beginning with the civil rights movement and when we lived in New York and were students. Then we moved to Philadelphia, very much opposed to the war in Vietnam, and found a whole community of activists in Philadelphia. We became acquainted with the—what was called the Catholic Left at that time. And the Berrigan brothers, Bill and Dan, were the leaders in that. And we participated with that group, called the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, in a draft board raid. We went into a draft board in the middle of the night as part of the draft resistance movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Where was that?

BONNIE RAINES: In North Philadelphia, a draft board in North Philadelphia. We targeted that draft board because it was in one of the poorest sections of the city, where they were bringing many, many, many young, poor young men into the armed forces to be sent as cannon fodder to Vietnam. Our government was lying to us about the casualties, both civilian and military casualties. So I participated, along with John, in going into a draft board and removing files and destroying those files so those young men could not be drafted.

AMY GOODMAN: And you mentioned the Berrigan brothers, the priests.

BONNIE RAINES: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Phil, the late Phil Berrigan—

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —and Father Dan Berrigan—

BONNIE RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —who’s still alive. Catonsville, how significant in 1969 was this for you? I wanted to go to a clip right now—

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —of the Catonsville action. That was Catonsville, Maryland, where a group of activists, led by Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, burned draft cards with napalm. They stole hundreds of draft records and torched them. They were sentenced to three years in prison, their action helping ignite a wave of direct actions against the draft in the Vietnam War.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We do not believe that nonviolence is dead, and that we don’t believe in interposing one form of violence for another, and that we believe that an action like this will still speak to our fellow Americans and bring home to them that a decent society is still possible, but it’s totally impossible if these files, and what they represent, are preserved and honored, and even defended, as those poor women tried to.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Father Dan Berrigan, as they stood around in a circle and burned, with napalm—napalm being used in Vietnam—draft records.

BONNIE RAINES: Yes, mm-hmm. That was a very dramatic moment for all of us, I believe. It took civil disobedience to another level and really brought us, clearly, to another level of protest against the war in Vietnam. And we followed their lead in targeting the draft as one of the real evil systems of that war. And that’s how we became involved in covert actions with draft boards in Philadelphia.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, John Raines, can you talk about your sense that the antiwar movement itself had been infiltrated by FBI informants?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, sure. I mean, that was obvious, for any of us who were involved in the civil rights movement, because it happened in the civil rights movement. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was all over the civil rights movement with infiltrators and surveillance, intense surveillance, and people that would report back on meetings and so on. And, of course, we’d all know that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI went after Martin Luther King, tried to discredit him—indeed, even sent him a note suggesting that because of his activities with other women besides his wife, he now had no option but to commit suicide. That note was sent to Dr. King, suggesting—and it was from the FBI, suggesting that Dr. King commit suicide. So that we knew, from the civil rights actions, that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were very much against anything that promised significant social change. We brought that information, that knowledge, north with us when we came to the antiwar movement. And it became clear that the tactics he used to disrupt and destroy—try to destroy the protest movement in the South, he was using once again against the protesters against the war in Vietnam.

The problem was, J. Edgar Hoover was untouchable. He was a national icon. I mean, he had presidents who were afraid of him. The people that we elected to oversee J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI were either enamored of him or terrified of him. Nobody was holding him accountable. And that meant that somebody had to get objective evidence of what his FBI was doing. And that led us to the idea that Bill Davidon suggested to us: Let’s break into an FBI office, get their files and get what they’re doing in their own handwriting.

AMY GOODMAN: You and Bill Davidon were professors.

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He a professor at Haverford, you a professor at Temple University.

JOHN RAINES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What did you feel about the risk that you were taking? Were you concerned about getting caught?

JOHN RAINES: Well, Bonnie and I were parents, and we had three kids under 10, and that was a very serious consideration. We had to be persuaded that we could get away with this. And we had learned nice burglar skills from priests and nuns. And we had cased the FBI office in Media very carefully.

AMY GOODMAN: You had thought about Philadelphia, but thought it was too secure?

JOHN RAINES: Oh, yes, it was a big building downtown, as—you couldn’t touch that. But Media, you could. And we felt quite confident that if we could get in there and get out without leaving any physical evidence behind, that we could then disappear into the very, very large antiwar movement, thousands of people in the Philadelphia area.

AMY GOODMAN: You had prepared, in case you were caught, to have your children taken care of?

BONNIE RAINES: We had. We had. We knew the risks. We knew the jeopardy. We weren’t going to be reckless. We weren’t going to move ahead with our involvement except with the leadership of Bill Davidon, who we all had so much admiration and respect for. But we did feel that it was necessary to speak to John’s older brother and his wife and to my mother and father about caring for our children if—should the worst happen and we would be convicted and sent to federal prison.

AMY GOODMAN: Keith Forsyth, you chose the night of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight—

KEITH FORSYTH: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: —to break in. Why? Why was this so significant, March 8th, 1971?

KEITH FORSYTH: Well, it was just—you know, there were many steps that we took to try to avoid getting caught, and this was one of them, because whoever suggested it—and I have no idea who it was—thought that it would add to the distraction, not only of the police, but of just people in general. The building in which the office was located had a live-in supervisor, and his apartment was directly below the FBI office. So, he was going to be on the next floor down while we were inside walking around opening cabinets. So, anything that could keep his mind off of the ambient sounds sounded like a good idea.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: How did you know that you would find what documents you would find, or did you know?

KEITH FORSYTH: We didn’t know. We were—we were pretty sure. You know, bureaucracies are the same everywhere. They love to keep records. But we really—we were taking a shot. So, in that sense, we got lucky that they did keep records.

AMY GOODMAN: This brings Betty Medsger into the story, whose book this week, The Burglary, reveals the identities of the activists involved in this burglary. Looks like J. Edgar Hoover found his match in this group of people. Talk about receiving in the mail the documents. You were a reporter at the time for The Washington Post.

BETTY MEDSGER: OK. I’d just like to say something about Bill Davidon, if I might, first, that the idea was Bill’s. And Bill participated in preparations for the book and the documentary that’s been made, 1971. And we should note that we’re all very sorry that Bill’s not with us. Bill died in November. But he was sort of a genius in coming up with this idea, because although many people in the various movements at that time thought that there was—there were FBI informers in their organizations, there was no evidence of that, and the public didn’t know. And Bill had this deep commitment that if the public could be presented with evidence, they would be very upset. Even though there—Hoover was an iconic figure, that if they knew that there was massive surveillance of the—political surveillance, that they would care and do something. And that’s what happened.

I was a reporter. And one day this envelope appeared in my mailbox. And it said it was from Liberty Publications—that was the return address—Media, Pennsylvania. That didn’t mean anything to me. But when I opened it, there was a cover letter, said it was from Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. That was a new organization to me. And there was—the letter explained that a group of eight people had burglarized an FBI office on the night of March 8th, and that enclosed were some of the files that they had removed from the office.

And some of those files were very shocking. I think the one—and you showed the excerpt from this on the Retro Report—the first shock—and this also resonated very much with the public when it was published and discussed—was the one that instructed agents to enhance the paranoia and then also make people think that there’s an FBI agent behind every mailbox. And that was a pretty stunning statement and said so much. And the burglars were—themselves, were shocked, I understand, when they found that the first—saw that document the first night after the burglary. So that stunned me.

And I guess the other files—there were many about individuals, and they were all serious, but the—one of the things that I remember most from those files was the truly blanket surveillance of African-American people that was described. It was in Philadelphia, but it also prescribed national programs. And it was quite stunning. First, it described the surveillance. It took place in every place where people would gather—churches, classrooms, stores down the street, just everything. But it also specifically prescribed that every FBI agent was supposed to have an informer, just for the purpose of coming back every two weeks and talking to them about what they had observed about black Americans. And in Washington, D.C., at the time, that was six informers for every FBI agent informing on black Americans. The surveillance was so enormous that it led various people, rather sedate people in editorial offices and in Congress, to compare it to the Stasi, the dreaded secret police of East Germany.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you talk about how the editors at The Washington Post responded when you showed them these documents?

BETTY MEDSGER: The editors responded very positively to them. I should point out that—two things. First, this was the first time that a journalist had ever received secret government documents from a source who had—from the outside, an outside source who had stolen the documents. So that tended to pose a different kind of consideration as to what you would do—in their minds, as to what you’d do with the documents. But it was a particularly tough decision for Katharine Graham, who until this time had never faced anything like this.

AMY GOODMAN: The publisher.

BETTY MEDSGER: The publisher, Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, because it was the first time that she had been faced with a demand from the Nixon administration that she suppress a story. And she did not want to publish. And the in-house counsel, the lawyers, also did not want to publish. But two editors, from the beginning, realized it was a very important story and pushed it—Ben Bradlee and Ben Bagdikian. I was just back there innocently writing my story, talking—I had been a reporter in Philadelphia and was talking to sources from the past, confirming information. Didn’t know until 6:00 that there was a question as to whether or not they would publish. By 10:00 that night, she decided to publish.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the reaction, and the reporters who did not get to publish the story, because you weren’t the only person that these activists sent the documents to.

BETTY MEDSGER: They sent them to five people. These are the first files that they released. They sent them to Senator George McGovern and Representative Parren Mitchell from Baltimore. And they immediately returned the files to the FBI when they received them and didn’t make them public. They sent them to three journalists. In addition to sending them to me, they sent them to Jack Nelson at the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times —

AMY GOODMAN: The great crusading reporter who wrote Terror in the Night about the Klan in the South.

BETTY MEDSGER: Right, and Tom Wicker, columnist then at The New York Times. Now, it’s also important to keep in mind, in addition to the fact that we didn’t really know—the public didn’t know what was happening inside the FBI, that very few journalists ever wrote investigative work or critical comment about the FBI. And Jack Nelson and Tom Wicker were two of about three or four who had, up until that point. At the L.A. Times, Jack never received the envelope, even though it was addressed to him, and it was delivered to the FBI immediately. I didn’t know this until years later, when I read the investigative report on the FBI’s investigation. It’s a little less clear what happened at the Times as to whether Tom Wicker received, and what they did do was the same thing: They immediately gave the files to the FBI. And—but they apparently kept them and copied them, unlike the L.A. Times, because the day after we broke the story, then they wrote stories on the same files.

AMY GOODMAN: Keith, before we go to break, can you talk about parallels to today? It is hard to look at—and for a moment, I want to turn to the Church Committee hearings that took place a few years later. Senator Frank Church of Idaho led this investigation. The Senate’s Church Committee investigated the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad. The multi-year investigation in the mid-’70s followed the exposure of COINTELPRO, which stands for Counterintelligence Program—and it was the first time people had seen that word, was in the documents you released—examining the FBI and CIA’s efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and much more. This is Senator Frank Church speaking during one of the committee’s hearings.

SEN. FRANK CHURCH: We have seen today the dark side of those activities, where many Americans, who were not even suspected of crime, were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, they were discredited, and, at times, endangered.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee hearings led to major changes in what the FBI could do, and also dealing with the press, as well. You listen to Frank Church, you could be hearing possible hearings today, though they haven’t started, to do with Edward Snowden.

KEITH FORSYTH: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts on Edward Snowden today?

KEITH FORSYTH: I think there are some parallels. It’s not an exact parallel. But, to me, one of the most significant ones is that not long before Edward Snowden released these documents, James Clapper went in front of Congress and the American public and was asked a direct question whether the NSA was engaged in this kind of surveillance, and he said no, which was obviously a lie. And I think if he had said, “Oh, we can’t talk about that because that’s national security,” I might have had some respect for that answer. But to come out and lie to the public about it—and, of course, not suffer any punishment as a result—so, to me, Edward Snowden—I’ve seen no evidence, personally, that Edward Snowden has released anything that was actually harmful to our national security. You know, certainly has been embarrassing, but, to me, the young man is definitely a whistleblower and has performed a great service by enabling us to have the conversation. You know, we couldn’t—we couldn’t have the conversation about whether this is right or wrong before, because we were not told about it. So he’s made that conversation possible, and I think—I think we owe him something, a debt for that.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and come back to this conversation. Our guests are Keith Forsyth and Bonnie and John Raines. They were part of the—what they called themselves, the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, activists during the Vietnam War era who broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and took the documents they got and sent them to The Washington Post and other publications to let people know what the FBI was doing. We’re also joined by the woman who has revealed the names of these activists—and we’ll talk about why they decided to come forward—Betty Medsger, former Washington Post reporter, author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh, as we continue our discussion looking at how activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and disclosed secrets about the FBI’s COINTELPRO program—that’s Counterintelligence Program—first came to public attention with the release of these documents. We are joined, as well as Bonnie and John Raines, who were among those who broke into the FBI office that day, March 8th, 1971, by the reporter who broke the story then and now, released the names of those involved with this break-in, Betty Medsger. She wrote The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI. We’re also joined by David Kairys, who has represented this group until this day for what, more than 40 years?

DAVID KAIRYS: Forty-three years.

AMY GOODMAN: Forty-three years. But, John Raines, why have you decided to come forward 43 years—what, 42 years later?

JOHN RAINES: Well, the simple answer is: A book came out. And, of course, that’s not accidental. We decided years ago that we would trust Betty with this story. And she’s done a wonderful job, spending years of research writing a very substantial book. It tells a very interesting story.

We decided that it was time to, once again, come forward with the question of government surveillance, government intimidation, and the right of citizens to vocally dissent. I think that the gasoline of democracy is the right to dissent, because wherever there’s power, wherever there’s privilege, power and privilege are going to try to remove, insofar as they can, from public discourse anything they want to do. That leaves the citizens’ right to dissent as the last line of defense for freedom. Now, that’s what we were faced with back in 1970s. I think that’s what we’re faced with once again today. It should not surprise us. I mean, it should not surprise us that those in power in Washington want to make the decisions that really count off stage, out of sight from the rest of us. But democracy depends upon the rights of citizens to have the information they need in order for them, the citizens—who are the sovereigns—for them to decide what the government should be doing and should not be doing. They must have that information so that they can make up their minds.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that moment that night when Betty Medsger came over and you revealed who you were. What year was it?

JOHN RAINES: I think that was in 1988. We had known Betty when she was a reporter there in Philadelphia.

AMY GOODMAN: That was more than 20 years ago.

JOHN RAINES: Oh, more than 20 was ago. And Betty was then living in San Francisco, but she was on a trip to the East Coast. And we invited her for supper, and Betty was nice enough to say, “Sure, I’ll come.” And I think it was—we had had supper, and finally, our youngest daughter, Mary, came down. She was, I think, 12 or 13, something like that. And without thinking about it, I just said, “Mary, come on in. We want you to meet Betty Medsger, because she was the one that we sent those FBI files to.” And Betty’s chin dropped down to her chest, and it was out of the bag. That’s how it started.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: David Kairys, as the attorney who has worked on this case for so long, could you talk about the significance of the statute of limitations on the case, as well as what you saw as the illegality—what was indeed the illegality of what these documents exposed about what the FBI was doing?

DAVID KAIRYS: Well, sure. The statute of limitations, by any fair reading, is five years. The FBI themselves closed the file in 1976, because five years had elapsed and there was no charges. Excuse me. There are arguments one can make, but there’s really no legitimate or good-faith basis to bring any legal—any legal charges at this point.

As for the illegality of the FBI, they’re supposed to enforce the law. Here they are interposing themselves as almost a political counterforce to stop certain movements. And it had a direction to it: They were stopping left-liberal movements. And they were using techniques that we usually associate with state police in countries and systems that we usually think of as alien.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And how did you come to become involved in the case?

DAVID KAIRYS: Well, I was regularly doing civil rights work, and I was—I would represent demonstrators of all kinds. And so, two of them checked with me before, what’s my home number. And they—Keith kids me that he’s still got my phone number from back then on his arm. And so, that was the beginning. I didn’t know then exactly what they were going to do, but then two of them got arrested in the Camden 28 case, where I was lead counsel.

AMY GOODMAN: And, in fact, remarkably, five days before this break-in, Bill Davidon met with Henry Kissinger at the White House, the national security adviser for Richard Nixon.

DAVID KAIRYS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We don’t have time for the story, but we’re going to talk about it in our post-show interview, and we’ll post it online at democracynow.org. How was this secret kept for so many decades? It’s not just the two of you, John and Bonnie Raines; there were nine of you. One person dropped out. There were eight of you. This is decades later. How did you keep this secret?

BONNIE RAINES: Well, we—

AMY GOODMAN: A hundred FBI agents looking for you. And, Bonnie, you had gone into the FBI office in Media to case it out and pretend you were a young woman looking for an FBI job and sat with the official there.

BONNIE RAINES: Mm-hmm, and did not know, following that, that there was a sketch that was then circulated of me by the FBI. It was—we knew—

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

BONNIE RAINES: We knew that we had to pull the curtain down, not meet after we did our work, and just not talk about it with anybody at all, because our work was done at that point, and we were not looking for anything more than for the general public and Congress to follow suit in a way that we hoped they would.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel it accomplished what you wanted?

BONNIE RAINES: I think, in certain ways. In certain ways, it did. We were encouraged when there was a Church Committee that was—that was taking their task seriously, and there were reforms that did take place.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for all being with us, and also thank Johanna Hamilton. Her film, 1971, on the same subject, is just coming out. We’ll be interviewing her. The book is The Burglary. Thanks so much, all, for joining us.

Find this story at 8 January 2014

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Exclusive: U.S. Fingers Iranian Commandos for Kidnapping Raid Inside Iraq (2013)

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Iranian commandos took part in a deadly attack on a compound of dissidents inside Iraq and then spirited seven members of the group back to Iran, highlighting Tehran’s increasingly free hand inside Iraq in the wake of the U.S withdrawal from the country.

The Sept. 1 attack on a base called Camp Ashraf killed at least 50 members of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, or MEK, which had disarmed at the request of the U.S. military after the American invasion of Iraq and received explicit promises of protection from senior commanders. Instead, gory videos released by the group showed that many of its members had been shot with their hands tied behind their backs or in one of the camp’s makeshift hospitals. MEK leaders, backed by an array of U.S. lawmakers, said Iraqi security forces carried out the attack.

Baghdad has long denied the charge, and U.S. officials have now concluded that a small number of Iranian paramilitaries from its feared Islamic Revolution Guards Corps helped plan and direct the assault on the camp. Three officials, speaking to Foreign Policy for the first time, said gunmen from two of Tehran’s Iraqi-based proxies, Kitab Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, then carried out the actual attack. The Iranian involvement in the Ashraf massacre hasn’t been reported before.

“Iraqi soldiers didn’t get in the way of what was happening at Ashraf, but they didn’t do the shooting,” a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence community’s assessment of the attack said in an interview. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

U.S. officials say that Iran’s role in the attack didn’t end with the killings of the MEK members at Ashraf. Instead, officials believe that Iranian commandos and fighters from the country’s Iraqi proxies also abducted seven MEK members and smuggled them back to Iran. The missing MEK supporters haven’t been seen or heard from since the attack.

Direct Iranian involvement in the Ashraf assault is one of the clearest signs yet of Tehran’s growing power within Iraq, a dynamic of deep concern to American policymakers. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government has long maintained close ties with top Iranian leaders, and U.S. officials believe that Tehran prodded Maliki to refuse to sign a bilateral security pact in the fall of 2010 that would have kept some U.S. troops in the country. Perhaps under Iran’s influence, Maliki has alienated Iraq’s sizable Sunni and Kurdish minorities by centralizing power in Baghdad and refusing to share power or fairly divvy up the country’s oil revenues.

The timing of the attack also raises questions about whether Iran’s security services are as committed to finding a rapprochement with Washington as its civilian government appears to be. The assault took place in September, several months after negotiators from the two governments had begun secret nuclear talks in Oman that ultimately led to last month’s landmark nuclear pact between the Obama administration and the government of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani. The deadly attack on a U.S.-allied group inside Iraq suggests that at least some elements within Tehran are willing to take steps that risk upsetting that fragile equilibrium.

MEK leaders in Washington strongly disagree with the U.S. conclusions about the Ashraf attack. They point out that the facility is guarded by fences, checkpoints and more than 1,200 Iraqi troops, making it extremely difficult for gunmen to reach the camp without, at a minimum, the active cooperation of Iraqi forces. They also note that survivors said the masked gunmen spoke Arabic and argue that the group’s own operatives within Iran would know if the seven missing members had been brought into the country. They believe that Tehran ordered the attack, but say that it was carried out by Iraqi soldiers loyal to Maliki.

“The repeated statements by U.S. officials that Iraq has had no role in the September 1 massacre at Ashraf are only designed to exonerate the Iraqi prime minister and his senior officials from any responsibility in this manifest case of crime against humanity and to help him elude justice,” Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the National Council of Iran Resistance, said in a written statement.

U.S. officials, for their part, say that the Iranian commandos could have used Arabic to mask their identities or stayed just outside the camp while the Iraqi gunmen carried out the assault. They also say at the missing MEK members might have been executed shortly after being brought into Iran or imprisoned in secret facilities for interrogation.

The Obama administration has largely declined to publicly address Iranian involvement in the Ashraf attack. During a contentious hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs earlier this month, Secretary of State John Kerry said he couldn’t respond to a question about the missing MEK members in an open, unclassified session.

Still, other senior officials have provided hints about their whereabouts. At a sparsely-attended congressional hearing in mid-November, Brett McGurk, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran, told lawmakers that the seven MEK members “are not in Iraq.”

McGurk told the lawmakers that the remaining 2,900 MEK members in Iraq wouldn’t be safe until they could be brought out of the country and resettled elsewhere.

“The Iraqi government needs to do everything possible to keep those people safe, but they will never be safe until they’re out of Iraq,” McGurk said at the time. “And we all need to work together — the MEK, us, the committee, everybody, the international community — to find a place for them to go.”

Tehran’s antipathy towards the MEK isn’t surprising. The group has spent years publicly decrying the Iranian government and telling lawmakers that it has broad support within Iran and could help turn the country into a democracy. It has also revealed key details about the country’s nuclear program. In response, Iranian-backed forces inside Iraq have frequently targeted the group. In February, six of its members were killed and dozens were wounded when mortar shells landed at an MEK refugee camp on the grounds of a former U.S. base called Camp Liberty. A Hezbollah affiliate claimed responsibility.

Outgunned in Iraq, the MEK has tried to score points in the Washington influence game. It has enlisted former members of the military and both the Bush and Obama administrations as public advocates and unofficial lobbyists. The State Department designated it as a “foreign terrorist organization” in 1997, but removed the listing in September 2012 after strong pressure from MEK supporters like retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, Obama’s first national security advisor, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey. Most of the MEK’s most prominent backers are paid for making public appearances on the group’s behalf, but they also do pro bono work for the organization and say they genuinely believe in its cause.

The group also enjoys strong support on Capitol Hill. In the weeks after the Ashraf assault, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a staunch MEK supporter, told Wendy Sherman, the No. 3 official at the State Department, that he would suspend U.S. weapons sales to Iraq until Maliki’s government did more to protect the MEK members still in the country.

The Obama administration, for its part, says the MEK’s members will only be safe once they’ve left Iraq. It’s not clear, however, if or when other countries will step forward and announce a willingness to accept them.

BY Yochi Dreazen DECEMBER 17, 2013 – 06:11 PM

Find this story at 17 December 2013

Copyright foreignpolicy.com

US-Protected Iran Exile Group in Line for Huge Cash Windfall (2009)

The MEK can use some of that cash to pay legal settlements with former members that
they tortured, as well as the families of Iranians they killed when they fought on the side of
Saddam against Iran.

The controversial Iranian exile organization MEK, which the United States calls a terrorist
group, could soon see a windfall of tens of millions of dollars as the result of the European
Union’s decision Monday to take it off its list of terrorist organizations.
If so, it will mark dramatic turnaround the group’s fortunes.

The MEK, shorthand for the Mujahedin-e Khalq, and also known as the People’s
Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, looked like it was on the ropes only days ago, when Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he wanted its U.S.-protected military base near the
Iranian border closed within two months.

But the E.U.’s Jan. 26 decision not only unlocks untold millions of dollars frozen in
European banks, it allows the militant anti-Iran organization to go public with appeals for
millions more, perhaps catapulting it into a leading role in the Iranian opposition abroad.
The MEK could claim $9 million held in France alone, along with “tens of millions of
dollars” worth of assets locked away in other EU countries, its spokesman told Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty.

What will it do with the windfall?

“Set off car bombs around Iran,” jibed former CIA operative Robert Baer, whose pursuit
was dramatized by George Clooney in the 2005 movie “Syriana.”
The group says it has renounced violence, but the MEK has carried out dozens of terrorist
attacks and assassinations against Iranian targets both inside and outside of the country.
Some of those were launched from its base in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, before the 2003
U.S. invasion.

MEK leader Maryam Rajavi said the unfrozen millions “will be used to increase our political
activities … including to further disclose the mullah regime’s secret nuclear weapons sites.”
Since Hussein’s overthrow, the 3,000 MEK fighters in Camp Ashraf, as it’s called, have
been under the “protection” of U.S. troops, even though they’re still officially labeled
terrorists by the State Department.

The seeming anomaly can be at least party explained by frequent reports that the MEK
has been secretly helping the CIA run operations against the Islamic regime from its base
in southeastern Iraq.

Its terrorist label was earned before the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, when the group,
which bills itself as Marxist-Islamist, targeted Americans working in Iran. Indeed, 30 years
ago this month the group helped overthrow the U.S.-backed shah and take 52 American
hostages.

But eventually it turned against the religious regime. In 2001 its sustained opposition to
Iran, its supposed renunciation of violence, and its portrayal of itself as a “progressive”
political force won it admirers in the Bush administration and pro-democracy groups in
Europe. Of no small note, it has also played a major role in exposing Iran’s nuclear
activities.

Walid Phares, a scholar on terrorism and American of Lebanese descent, called the
closing of Camp Ashraf “a significant Iranian victory.”
“Ashraf was the only base for the MEK against Iran’s regime,” he said by e-mail. “If it is
shut down, they will lose the only base they have.”
“More than a military base of the opposition against Tehran,” he added, “Ashraf was a
political base for broadcast and political outreach to the opposition in the inside.”
On the other hand, the E.U.’s decision will conceivably allow MEK fighters entry into
Europe, at least temporarily solving the problem of what to do with them once Ashraf is
closed.

That, and the new money, can only add to the MEK’s political clout, which was put on
display last year when the group drew 85,000 people to an anti-Iran protest outside Paris.
To date, exile communities have been divided over the MEK because of its attacks on
Iranian troops from Iraqi soil during the two nations’ 10-year war. Some call the
organization a puritanistic “cult,” because of its iron-fist leadership by a husband and wife
team who have been accused of violating the human rights of their own followers.
But the E.U.’s decision could give the MEK a big boost over its rivals, Phares suggests.
“Once they are decertified [as a terrorist group] they will act as an international NGO [nongovernmental organization] and will most likely receive even more donations from Iranian
exiles,” said Phares, a senior fellow at the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies in Washington.

“De-certification by itself will strengthen the group within the Iranian diaspora,” he
continued. “Will they access to frozen funds in EU banks? This is another issue and will
have to be negotiated. But certainly they will have a legal base. They will spend it to widen
their base, and on strategic communications regarding Iran.”
All things considered, it’s not hard to suspect a hidden American hand in the E.U. decision,
or at least acquiescence in it, since it so neatly finesses the eviction notice served on
Camp Ashraf by Prime Minister Maliki.

In any event, it keeps MEK alive — and more — despite the threatened closing of its
longtime base in Iraq.

The Iranian regime reacted sharply to the E.U. move, accusing the union of a “double
standard” on terrorism. It also said it was drafting a plan to put MEK members on trial,
“either in the Islamic Republic or outside the country,” according to Press TV, an Iranian
news service.

By Jeff Stein | January 28, 2009

Find this story at 28 January 2009

Copyright Jeff Stein

Iranian dissidents killed in Iraq camp, U.N. demands inquiry (2013)

(Reuters) – At least 47 people were reported killed at an Iranian dissident camp in Iraq on Sunday, the United Nations said, urging Baghdad to investigate the “tragic events” at a site north of the capital.

The violence took place hours after a mortar bomb attack on the camp which the dissent group Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MEK) blamed on the Iraqi army.

Two Iraqi security sources said that army and special forces had opened fire on residents who had stormed a post at the entrance to Camp Ashraf, a site that Iraq’s government wants closed down. They said at least 19 were killed, 52 wounded and 38 arrested and that they believed residents were not armed.

However, the U.N. statement had a figure closer to the toll given by MEK, which said 52 of its roughly 100 members at the camp had been killed.

An advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said reports that security forces had opened fire on the residents were baseless and said that Maliki had ordered an investigation into what had happened.

“We want to know the truth,” advisor Ali al-Moussawi said. He said it was unclear what had caused the blast in the morning. Residents could have been killed in the explosion or through infighting at the camp, he said. He gave no casualty figures.

In a statement, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appealed for the urgent restoration of security in the camp.

“The United Nations deplores the tragic events at Camp Ashraf today that have reportedly left 47 killed,” he said. Baghdad should “promptly investigate the incident and disclose the findings.”

MEK, which the U.S. State Department removed from its list of terrorist organizations last year, said some residents were machine-gunned with their hands tied behind their backs.

The U.S. embassy in Iraq condemned “the terrible events that took place in Camp Ashraf” and the UN said it would send in a team from its Iraq office to carry out its own probe.

“We further call on Iraqi authorities to act with urgency to immediately ensure medical assistance to the wounded and to secure the camp against any further violence or harm to the residents,” the U.S. embassy statement said, calling for a full, independent investigation.

MALIKI ORDERS PROBE

MEK emailed photos of people it said had been shot in the head during the clashes. Men and women were shown lying on blood-covered floors. It was not possible for Reuters independently to verify the images.

“The Iraqi government stresses the need for help to deport elements of the Mujahadin-e-Khalq who are on Iraqi soil illegally but at the same time confirms its commitment to the safety of souls on its territory,” Maliki’s office said in a statement referring to “events” at Camp Ashraf.

It gave no further details.

MEK wants Iran’s clerical leaders overthrown and fought with former Iraqi Sunni Muslim leader Saddam Hussein’s forces in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

It has been seeking to recast itself as an Iranian opposition force but is no longer welcome in Iraq under the Shi’ite Muslim-led government that came to power after U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam in 2003. Iraq’s current government is close to Iranian authorities.

Mortar bomb attacks on a newer MEK camp in a former military compound in western Baghdad, where authorities had relocated most Camp Ashraf MEK members, took place in February and June. At the time, MEK blamed Iran’s Quds force – an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guards with a special focus on foreign operations.

MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, led a guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-backed Iranian Shah during the 1970s that included attacks on U.S. targets.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed and a Reuters reporter in Diyala, Iraq; Writing by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Jon Boyle)

By Kareem Raheem and Sylvia Westall
BAGHDAD Sun Sep 1, 2013 4:47pm EDT

Find this story at 1 September 2013

Copyright Thomson Reuters

EU Takes Iranian Group Off Terror List, But Status Still Disputed (2009)

Iraq has threatened to send MKO members at Camp Ashraf back to Iran, where many fear imprisonment or death.

At its monthly meeting of foreign ministers, the European Union has decided to remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) from its list of terrorist organizations.

The decision marks the first time the EU has “de-listed” an organization from its terrorist index, and could free the MKO, also known as the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, to expand its activities in Europe. It is also likely to further strain Tehran’s already damaged relations with the West.

Formed in the 1960s to fight the shah’s regime, the Islamic-socialist MKO joined the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew him, but later fell out with the new clerical regime and fought with Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s 1980-88 war with Iran. Major attacks by the MKO against Tehran ceased by the early 1990s and the group renounced violence in 2001, but Tehran continues to seek MKO members’ extradition.

Maryam Rajavi, the France-based leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political branch of the MKO that has been active in Europe in recent years, characterized the EU move as a “stinging defeat for Europe’s policy of appeasement” of Tehran.

And Said Mahmudi, a professor of international law at the University of Stockholm, says it will end the MKO’s difficulties in raising funds in Europe.

“Even though they had the possibility to contact different political organizations, there were some groups and bodies — particularly some individuals — who, because of the terrorist branding of the group, avoided it and didn’t give it public backing,” Mahmudi says.

“Now that the MKO has been removed from the EU terror list, all the groups that are sympathetic to the MKO will be able to support them publicly and help them without any problem,” he adds.

Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the group, says that $9 million had been frozen in France alone, with “tens of millions of dollars” worth of assets also locked away in other EU countries.

History Of Opposition

The development marks a striking turnaround for an organization that remains on the United States’ terrorism list, while remaining a fierce enemy of Tehran.

After its founding in 1965, members of the group took up arms against the Iranian shah and were involved in the killings of several U.S. citizens working in Iran in the 1970s. The group initially supported the 1979 revolution, but then went underground when an uprising against the newly established Islamic regime went awry.

Iranian protesting the decision outside the French Embassy in Tehran
Within years of the revolution, many MKO members were jailed, some were executed, and others fled Iran and went into exile.

The MKO later helped orchestrate a number of attacks against Iran’s leaders, including a 1981 bombing in which Iran’s prime minister and president were killed. In 1986, in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, the organization’s leaders and members relocated to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein granted them refuge.

The MKO’s support for Iraq in the 1980-88 war is today seen by observers as the main reason for its limited support among Iranians. It is also accused by critics of collaborating with Saddam during his bloody campaign against the Kurds, charges that the MKO denies.

But the militant group renounced violence in 2001 and has not kept arms since 2003. It has also long sought to be removed from the EU and U.S. terror lists as Tehran continued its efforts to oust the group from Iraq.

Renouncing Violence

Iran’s largest opposition group in exile, the MKO follows an ideology that combines Islam and Marxism and says it is the best hope for establishing democracy in Iran. In 2002, the MKO exposed Iran’s covert nuclear activities.

But critics cast doubt on its effectiveness in opposing the Iranian regime, while organizations such as Human Rights Watch (in a 2005 report) have accused it of subjecting dissident members to torture and prolonged solitary confinement.

Massoud Khodabandeh, a former MKO member who currently works as an analyst with the French Center for the Study of Terrorism and an adviser to Iraq’s government, describes the MKO as a personality cult obsessed with celibacy.

“I witnessed forced divorces amid cries and shouts. I witnessed how 150 children under the age of 7 — the youngest was only two months old — were separated from their mothers and sent to other countries because the MKO leader had said [the children] are disrupting my relations with you,” Khodabandeh says.

MKO leaders have in the past rejected similar charges, but the reputation that precedes the group has opened questions about whether Brussels’s move fits with its efforts to promote human rights and to fight terrorism.

“If a group makes a pronouncement that it is abandoning violence, then I think we should be able to give them the chance to prove the case, so I think that’s what the European policy on these matters should be,” says professor John Wilkinson, chairman of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews.

“Let us find political pathways away from violence where we can,” he continues. “If a group proves that it has not lived up to its claim to abandon violence then, of course, we must revert to using the instruments of criminal justice and law enforcement to deal with it.”

Future Of The People’s Mujahedin

Some 3,000 MKO members are currently based at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Their presence there has led to increased concern over their fate since the Iraqi government took over responsibility for the camp from U.S. forces earlier this month.

Washington, while keeping the MKO on its list of terrorist organizations, has given members of the group who stay at Ashraf the status of “protected persons” under the Geneva Conventions.

Iraqi officials have made it clear that the group “is not wanted” on Iraqi territory, and have called on MKO members to leave voluntarily. This, in turn, led supporters and rights groups to warn that they could face torture or death if they returned to Iran.

Khodabandeh believes that the EU decision could mean a way out for those MKO members who are willing to leave Ashraf, including a number of his “friends.”

“I hope that the removal of MKO from the EU terror list will enable some of those individuals to be saved from the situation they’re facing in Iraq,” he says. “About 1,000 of them were based in [Europe] before; they should be given the right to return to their families.”

It’s not clear whether the EU decision will have an impact on Washington’s designation of the group as a foreign terrorist organization. The NCRI’s Rajavi, for one, urges the United States to follow the EU’s example.

The former U.S. administration reaffirmed its designation of the MKO as a foreign terrorist organization on January 7.

But Iran, which has said that nothing has changed “in the terrorist nature” of the group, can be expected to take some sort of action against the EU ruling.

In a possible hint at what might come, the head of the National Security Committee of the Iranian parliament on January 25 warned the EU against making a “mistake.”

“There is no reason for Iran to continue tens of billions of euros in economic and trade ties with the EU in this case,” Alaeddin Borujerdi said, adding that Iran has “many options” for new partners.

The Iranian parliament is expected on January 27 to discuss a draft bill “to authorize the government and the judiciary to bring those MKO members who have committed crimes to justice.”

By Golnaz Esfandiari

January 26, 2009

Find this story at 29 January 2009

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty © 2014 RFE/RL, Inc.

U.S. protects Iranian opposition group in Iraq (2007)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — An Iranian opposition group based in Iraq, labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, gets protection from the U.S. military despite Iraqi pressure to leave the country.

The U.S. considers the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, a source of valuable intelligence on Iran.

The group also is credited with helping expose Iran’s secret nuclear program through spying on Tehran for decades.

Iranian officials tied the MEK to an explosion in February at a girls school in Zahedan, Iran. (Full story)

The U.S. State Department considers the MEK a terrorist organization — meaning no American can deal with it; U.S. banks must freeze its assets; and any American giving support to its members is committing a crime.

The U.S. military, though, regularly escorts MEK supply runs between Baghdad and its base, Camp Ashraf.

“The trips for procurement of logistical needs also take place under the control and protection of the MPs,” said Mojgan Parsaii, vice president of MEK and leader of Camp Ashraf.

That’s because, according to U.S. documents, coalition forces regard MEK as protected people under the Geneva Conventions.

“The coalition remains deeply committed to the security and rights of the protected people of Ashraf,” U.S. Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner wrote in March 2006.

The group also enjoys the protection of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The ICRC has made clear that the residents of Camp Ashraf must not be deported, expelled or repatriated,” according to an ICRC letter.

Despite repeated requests, neither Iran’s ambassador in Baghdad nor the U.S. military would comment on MEK, also known as Mojahedin Khalq Organization, or MKO.

The State Department said Friday the Geneva Conventions protections apply only to MEK residents of Camp Ashraf, and the organization as a whole and its members elsewhere are subject to prosecution for terrorist or criminal acts.

“We still regard them as a terrorist organization,” former U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Green Berets arrived at Camp Ashraf to find gardens and monuments, along with more than 2,000 well-maintained tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns and vehicles.

All 3,800 camp residents were questioned by Americans. No arrests were made, and the camp quickly surrendered under a cease-fire agreement — an agreement that also guaranteed its safety.

“Everyone’s entry to the camp and his departure are controlled by the U.S. military police force,” Parsaii said.

The MEK denies it is a terrorist group. Both Iran and the Iraqi government, however, accuse the group of ongoing terrorist attacks, and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government wants it out.

“We gave this organization a six-month deadline to leave Iraq, and we informed the Red Cross,” said Shirwan al-Wa’eli, Iraq’s national security minister. “And presumably, our friends the Americans will respect our decision and they will not stay on Iraqi land.”

For now, however, the United States continues to protect MEK.

“There are counter-pressures, too,” Khalilzad said. “There are people who say, ‘No, they should be allowed to stay here.’ And as you know, around the world there are people with different views toward them.”

POSTED: 1553 GMT (2353 HKT), April 6, 2007

Find this story at 6 April 2007

© 2007 Cable News Network.

Deadly violence hits Iran exiles’ Camp Ashraf in Iraq

Camp Ashraf once housed more than 3,000 exiles, but most have moved to another camp (file photo)

Violence has erupted at a camp in Iraq for dissident Iranians, who say dozens of residents have lost their lives.

The Mujahideen-e Khalq group accused Iraqi forces of attacking Camp Ashraf north-east of Baghdad, killing at least 52 of its members – some shot in the head at close range.

However Iraqi officials said no soldiers entered the camp.

UN representatives have condemned the bloodshed and urged Iraq swiftly to establish the facts.

A statement from the UN mission in Iraq also called on Iraqi officials to ensure security for residents at the camp and urged an end to the violence so medical help could reach the wounded.

“The only thing we can confirm is there are a lot of casualties,” Eliana Nabaa, a spokeswoman for the UN mission to Iraq was quoted as saying.

The population of Camp Ashraf, once home to more than 3,000 members of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), was believed to have dwindled to about 100 before the violence.

In recent years, Iraqi authorities have been trying to dismantle the camp and eject the group, which has been based in Iraq since the 1980s.
Mortars

Accounts of the violence given by MEK spokesmen and different local officials vary.

MEK officials said Iraqi forces attacked Camp Ashraf early on Sunday, firing mortar rounds.

Some Iraqi reports confirmed that mortar rounds had been fired without identifying their origin, but said the deaths came during subsequent clashes. Others said the blasts heard at the camp were caused by oil and gas canisters exploding.

Another source said there had been a raid on the camp overnight, but put the death toll at 19.

One source said Iraqi security forces opened fire after a crowd stormed a post at the camp entrance, wounding about 50 people, Reuters reported.

Local hospitals reported that three Iraqi soldiers were killed and four wounded in the violence, AFP said.

MEK officials sent out photographs and a video of people said to have been shot in the head during the clashes, but the images have not been independently verified.

A spokesman for the Iraqi prime minister confirmed there had been deaths among camp residents, but said initial investigations suggested they had resulted from infighting, AP reported.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has ordered an investigation, Reuters said.

Camp Ashraf was set up in the late 1980s to launch raids on Iran. It was welcomed by Iraq’s then president, Saddam Hussein, who was fighting a war against Iran.

Most members of the MEK – also known as the People’s Mujahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) – were moved to a new camp last year.

Iran considers the MEK a terrorist group

The group was removed from the US State Department’s list of terrorist organisations last year.

1 September 2013 Last updated at 19:57 ET

Find this story at 1 September 2013

BBC © 2014

Rwandan’s death is sinister

Johannesburg – At the time of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda a horrified missionary was famously reported as exclaiming there were devils left in hell and they had all gone to Rwanda.

The political legacy of that horror now appears to have moved to greater Johannesburg, as came into focus this week with the apparent assassination of shadowy former Rwandan spymaster ex-Colonel Patrick Karegeya in lurid circumstances in a room in Sandton’s top-end Michelangelo Towers Hotel.

Though the one-time head of Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame’s sinister external intelligence operation was apparently strangled – a bloodied towel and curtain cord were discovered in the hotel room’s safe together with the lifeless body on New Year’s Day – detectives were also investigating the possibility he had been drugged before the actual commission of the murder.

While the South African government has yet to point a finger of blame at Kagame’s government and officially continues to investigate the killing as an ordinary and not political murder, details that have come to light around Karegeya’s last hours strongly suggest a connection with the Rwandan regime.

According to Karegeya’s political associates, at the time of his death Karegeya had been in the company of a Rwandan national, a businessman called Appolo Kiririsi Gafaranga. A figure with a chequered history – a poly-linguist and dealer in grey weapons, and also drug trafficker convicted under UK law – Kiririsi had apparently convinced Karegeya of his bona fides as a fellow conspirator against Kagame’s authoritarian rule.

Though as yet no evidence has come to light of the presence of accomplices in the murder, Karegeya’s close associate and controversial fellow Rwandan dissident and former army chief General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa has said there was evidence that “no less than three or four men” had been present at the killing.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, left, and his army chief of staff Maj. General Kayumba Nyamwisa consult their watches soon after addressing the first contingent of a Rwandan battalion who were pulled out of Congo at Kigali, the Rwandan capital in this file picture. (AP Photo/Rodrique NgowiI)

AP

Rwanda has emphatically denied any involvement in the murder.

The country’s high commissioner to South Africa, Vincent Karega, this week told sister paper, The Star, it did not make sense to blame his government for Karegeya’s death.

“Why would we have waited six years?” Karega asked, referring to the years Karegeya had stayed in South Africa.

Meanwhile allegations have surfaced in intelligence circles of a series of high-level meetings in the area of Gikondo in Rwanda late last year – including a briefing by Kagame himself on December 20 – at which the assignation was apparently planned and directed. Involving a hand-picked group of close Kagame associates, including members of his immediate family, the claimed killing network is allegedly co-ordinated by the head of Kagame’s military intelligence, Jack Nziza, and has been linked in the past to several kidnappings and attempted assassinations both inside Rwanda and in other African states, notably Kenya and Tanzania.

The dissident exile publication Ikaze Iwacu goes so far as to name the alleged six-man hit squad dispatched from Kigali to back up Kiririsi on his mission.

The same general network has been linked to two attempted assassinations on Nyamwasa in South Africa in 2010. In the same year, Karegeya – who had been living in exile in South Africa since fleeing Rwanda in 2007 – together with Nyamwasa and two other prominent former Kagame insiders established the Rwanda National Congress (RNC) in Johannesburg as an opposition in exile to their former political master.

17\03\06 Michelangelo tower in Sandton.Pic:Mike Dibetsoe 493

INLSA

Two men arrested in connection with the attempted assassinations will appear in court later this month. In the wake of the attempted assassinations and the ongoing refusal of the government to accede to Rwandan demands that the dissidents be extradited to face Rwandan justice after being convicted in absentia, diplomatic relations descended to an all-time low with the recall of South Africa’s ambassador to the Great Lakes country. More recently, South Africa emerged as a major driving force on the African stage in the deployment under the UN banner of a peace-keeping mission in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with an unprecedented mandate to use force against militants threatening stability in the region. Especially targeted by the highly effective UN intervention force – whose major military asset emerged as the South African Rooivalk helicopter gunship – was the M23 rebel grouping. Though Rwanda continues to deny any involvement in M23, observers as well as UN analysts have consistently linked the insurgency to Kagame’s expansionist ambitions.

For its part, the Kagame administration – which, despite mounting evidence of human rights abuses and Machiavellian intrigue, presides over a strongly performing economy – accuses South Africa of meddling in its internal affairs and sponsoring its enemies. The claim is backed up by the fact that until 2011, Karegeya was under official South African protection and quietly furnished with political asylum. In the fallout from the 2010 assassination attempts, Nyamwasa continues to fall under the protection of the South African security apparatus, and no action has been taken against the RNC since its formation.

The International Crisis Group said Karegeya’s killing raised more questions on the safety of exiled Rwandese. The group’s Piers Pigou said South Africa and Rwanda “should engage” on the attacks.

“All we hear from the Rwanda government is denials and more denials. But there seems to be a pattern of attempts on lives of Rwandese in exile,” Pigou said.

In the meantime, the official protest against the dissident grouping has been strengthened by reports of links between the RNC and Hutu billionaires and other fugitive power-players linked to the Hutu genocide of Tutsis in the 1994 horrors.

In offering shelter to the Rwandan dissidents, South Africa also appears to be playing host to what seems a deeply sinister spook culture. The role attributed by Kagame’s critics to Jack Nziza was pioneered by Karegeya in his position as head of Rwanda’s external intelligence – co-ordinating cross-border kidnappings and alleged assassinations, before falling out with the Tutsi strongman in 2006 and serving an 18-month sentence in prison before his South African exile.

In 2011, a curious report appeared in the Burundian press around the death in Johannesburg of Rwandan singer Jean Christophe Matata on a concert tour in Johannesburg. Though no foul play was reported at the time, an unnamed woman said the death had followed a sequence of events springing from a sexual triangle with Karegeya as the third point of reference.

As she narrated it, she had revived, on a clandestine basis, a long-standing relationship with the singer, while at the same time offering sexual favours to Karegeya, whom she described as her “Boss” since he paid her for sex.

Thinking her dalliance with Matata was unknown, she went to see Karegeya, who confronted her with details of the illicit affair. He then proceeded, she says, to say he suspected Matata had been sent as a spy by Kagame to infiltrate his networks, and he was looking to access evidence to this effect.

At this point, she claims, he tasked her with slipping a drug (which he provided) into the singer’s drink at their next meeting, which would knock him out and allow for his baggage to be searched while he slept.

This, the woman claims, she did and Karegeya’s agents duly searched Matata’s effects. The plan, as she understood it, however, went awry when the singer never recovered from the sleeping draught, finally booking himself into hospital in Johannesburg where he breathed his last.

Hawks spokesman, Paul Ramaloko, could not be reached for comment yesterday. But on Friday he told the media the hunt for the killer of Karegeya was continuing. – The Sunday Independent

January 5 2014 at 11:55am

Find this story at 5 January 2014

© Copyright 1999 – 2012 Independent Online

Patrick Karegeya: Rwanda exile ‘murdered’ in Johannesburg

Patrick Karegeya formed an opposition party in 2010

Exiled former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya has been apparently murdered in a Johannesburg hotel room, South African police say.

They say the dissident might have been strangled, with a rope and bloodied towel found in the hotel room safe.

Mr Karegeya was stripped of the rank of colonel after falling out with his former ally, President Paul Kagame.

President Kagame’s allies have previously denied accusations of links to a series of dissident attacks.

Mr Karegeya, 53, formerly head of Rwanda’s foreign intelligence service, had lived for the past six years in South Africa, where he had been granted political asylum.

Ex-general Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa: “He must have been strangled”

A fellow exiled dissident, former army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, has survived two assassination attempts since fleeing to South Africa in 2010.
Critics of Rwandan President Paul Kagame tend to flee the country as soon as they fall out with him because they fear it is too dangerous to stay.

But many have met mysterious deaths abroad, although the president and his allies have always denied any responsibility.

Rwanda’s first post-genocide Interior Minister, Seth Sendashonga, was shot dead in Nairobi shortly after resigning in 1996, leading to a diplomatic row between Kenya and Rwanda. The Metropolitan Police has warned two dissidents based in London of threats to kill them. And there were two attempts to kill former army chief Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in South Africa.

The apparent murder of Patrick Karegeya, also in South Africa, will make Rwandan dissidents feel even less safe. His death is a big blow to the opposition party he founded, the Rwanda National Congress. But it also has the potential to be a huge embarrassment for President Kagame.

The pair formed a new opposition party – the Rwanda National Congress – in 2010.

Gen Nyamwasa told the BBC that Mr Karegeya had gone to the upmarket Michelangelo Towers hotel to meet “somebody he knew very well, somebody who had come from Kigali”.

He accused the Rwandan government of being behind the killing.

Rwanda’s ambassador to South Africa, Vincent Karega, dismissed this as an “emotional reaction and opportunistic way of playing politics”, reports The Associated Press news agency.

“We encourage the authorities to really look into the matter so that we know exactly what happened,” the Reuters news agency quotes him as telling local radio.

A police statement on Mr Karegeya’s death said: “Preliminary investigations revealed that his neck [was] swollen – there is a possibility that he might have been strangled.”

He leaves a widow and three children.

Rwandan exiles in several Western countries including the UK and US say local security agents have warned them of plots to kill them.

The Rwandan government has denied trying to kill its opponents.

Mr Karegeya and Gen Nyamwasa were among four exiled former top officials for whom Rwanda issued international arrest warrants in 2011.

A military court earlier sentenced them to long jail terms in absentia for threatening state security and promoting ethnic divisions.

Both men were part of Mr Kagame’s rebel forces which came to power in 1994, ending the genocide of their fellow ethnic Tutsis.

Mr Kagame has been accused of not tolerating opposition.

He maintains that Rwanda needs a strong government to prevent a return to ethnic conflict.

2 January 2014 Last updated at 09:07 ET

Find this story at 2 January 2014

BBC © 2014

Slain ex-spy scrapped SA security detail

Patrick Karegeya,Rwanda’s former spy chief, who was found dead, possibly strangled, in a hotel in Joburg.

Johannesburg – Rwanda’s murdered ex-intelligence chief agreed to scrap his South African security detail before he was strangled to death in a Johannesburg hotel room, according to a political ally.

Patrick Karegeya, 53, was discovered slumped on a bed by staff at the hotel on New Year’s Day, prompting accusations that Rwandan President Paul Kagame had ordered a hit.

Karegeya was the former head of Rwanda’s external intelligence service and once a close ally of Kagame. But after a decade spent as the gatekeeper to Rwanda’s foreign intelligence network he fell out of favour.

In 2007 he fled into exile in South Africa, where he became a fierce critic, describing Kagame as a dictator and alleging he had first-hand knowledge of the state killing of Rwandan dissidents abroad.

“When Karageya first entered this country… the South African government put him under state protection,” political ally Frank Ntwali told AFP late Thursday.

The decision was influenced by assassination attempts against former army chief of staff Kayumba Nyamwasa, another Rwandan exile in South Africa, according to Ntwali.

But in 2012 Karageya and the South African government had agreed to end the close protection, said Ntwali, who heads the Rwanda National Congress in Africa

“They agreed that they would allow him to walk without bodyguards or without protection, which has turned out to be a miscalculation,” said Ntwali.

“He was on his own,” he said.

Ntwali said his friend had expressed fears for his safety, but after years in South Africa became comfortable.

“He knew that his life definitely was in danger… that’s why he fled Rwanda, but I think he got to a level where he thought that here he would be able to evade them.”

In a last ill-fated meeting, Karageya had visited Johannesburg’s luxurious Michelangelo Towers hotel to talk with a man Ntwali named as a Rwandan national.

“This individual… was claiming to be running away as well from the regime of the Rwanda. He was claiming harassment, detention, expropriation of his properties.”

South African police did not respond to inquiries about the identity of the man. – AFP

January 3 2014 at 03:59pm

Find this story at 3 January 2014

© Copyright 1999 – 2012 Independent Online

Covert action in Colombia; U.S. intelligence, GPS bomb kits help Latin American nation cripple rebel forces

The 50-year-old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), once considered the best-funded insurgency in the world, is at its smallest and most vulnerable state in decades, due in part to a CIA covert action program that has helped Colombian forces kill at least two dozen rebel leaders, according to interviews with more than 30 former and current U.S. and Colombian officials.

The secret assistance, which also includes substantial eavesdropping help from the National Security Agency, is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It is not a part of the public $9 billion package of mostly U.S. military aid called Plan Colombia, which began in 2000.

Above: A Colombian Air Force member cleans an A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft typically involved in strikes on FARC targets. (Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images)

The previously undisclosed CIA program was authorized by President George W. Bush in the early 2000s and has continued under President Obama, according to U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program is classified and ongoing.

The covert program in Colombia provides two essential services to the nation’s battle against the FARC and a smaller insurgent group, the National Liberation Army (ELN): Real-time intelligence that allows Colombian forces to hunt down individual FARC leaders and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which to kill them.

That weapon is a $30,000 GPS guidance kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity bomb into a highly accurate smart bomb. Smart bombs, also called precision-guided munitions or PGMs, are capable of killing an individual in triple-canopy jungle if his exact location can be determined and geo-coordinates are programmed into the bomb’s small computer brain.

In March 2008, according to nine U.S. and Colombian officials, the Colombian Air Force, with tacit U.S. approval, launched U.S.-made smart bombs across the border into Ecuador to kill a senior FARC leader, Raul Reyes. The indirect U.S. role in that attack has not been previously disclosed.

The covert action program in Colombia is one of a handful of enhanced intelligence initiatives that has escaped public notice since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of these other programs, small but growing, are located in countries where violent drug cartels have caused instability.

Sources: U.S. State Department, Pais Libre, Colombian Defense Ministry and the Air Force. Research and data compiled by Elyssa Pachico. Graphic by Cristina Rivero. Map by Gene Thorp.

The roster is headed by Mexico, where U.S. intelligence assistance is larger than anywhere outside Afghanistan, as The Washington Post reported in April. It also includes Central America and West Africa, where trafficking routes have moved in response to U.S. pressure against cartels elsewhere.

Asked to comment on U.S. intelligence assistance, President Juan Manuel Santos told The Post during a recent trip to Washington that he did not wish to speak about it in detail, given the sensitivities involved. “It’s been of help,” he said. “Part of the expertise and the efficiency of our operations and our special operations have been the product of better training and knowledge we have acquired from many countries, among them the United States.”

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.

Colombia and the FARC have been in peace negotiations in Havana for a year. They have agreed so far on frameworks for land reform, rural development and for allowing insurgents to participate in the political process once the war ends. The two sides are currently discussing a new approach to fighting drug trafficking.

Police outside El Nogal nightclub after the FARC destroyed it with a car bomb in February 2003. More than 20 people were killed. The bombing further united Colombia against the insurgents. (Javier Galeano/AP)
Instability in Colombia

Over the past decade, many indicators of insecurity have improved . . .

. . . as terrorist group strength has weakened and extraditions to the United States for criminal trials have increased.

2004, 2005 and 2010 not available.

*Includes FARC-related kidnappings and killings.

Sources: U.S. State Department, Pais Libre, Colombia Defense Ministry, Colombian Air Force, compiled by Elyssa Pachico
On the verge of collapse

Today, a comparison between Colombia, with its vibrant economy and swanky Bogota social scene, and Afghanistan might seem absurd. But a little more than a decade ago, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. Random bombings and strong-arm military tactics pervaded daily life. Some 3,000 people were kidnapped in one year. Professors, human rights activists and journalists suspected of being FARC sympathizers routinely turned up dead.

The combustible mix of the FARC, cartels, paramilitaries and corrupt security forces created a cauldron of violence unprecedented in modern-day Latin America. Nearly a quarter-million people have died during the long war, and many thousands have disappeared.

The FARC was founded in 1964 as a Marxist peasant movement seeking land and justice for the poor. By 1998, Colombia’s president at the time, Andres Pastrana, gave the FARC a Switzerland-sized demilitarized zone to encourage peace negotiations, but its violent attacks only grew, as did its links with the narcotics trade.

By 2000, the emboldened insurgency of 18,000 took aim at Colombia’s political leaders. It assassinated local elected officials. It kidnapped a presidential candidate and attempted to kill a presidential front-runner, hard-liner Alvaro Uribe, whose father the FARC had killed in 1983.

Fearing Colombia would become a failed state with an even greater role in drug trafficking into the United States, the Bush administration and Congress ramped up assistance to the Colombian military through Plan Colombia.

By 2003, U.S. involvement in Colombia encompassed 40 U.S. agencies and 4,500 people, including contractors, all working out of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, then the largest U.S. embassy in the world. It stayed that way until mid-2004, when it was surpassed by Afghanistan.

“There is no country, including Afghanistan, where we had more going on,” said William Wood, who was U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2003 to 2007 before holding the same post in war-torn Afghanistan for two years after that.

When Bush became president, two presidential findings were already on the books authorizing covert action worldwide. One allowed CIA operations against international terrorist organizations. The other, signed in the mid-1980s by President Ronald Reagan, authorized action against international narcotics traffickers.

A presidential finding is required for the CIA to do things other than collect and analyze overseas intelligence. Giving spy equipment to a partner, supporting foreign political parties, planting propaganda, and participating in lethal training or operations all require a finding and a notification to congressional intelligence committees.

The counternarcotics finding had permitted the CIA and a technical unit of the clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to provide support to the years-long hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, killed by Colombian forces 20 years ago this month. It also made possible CIA-supported operations against traffickers and terrorists in Bolivia and Peru years ago.

Under the Colombian program, the CIA is not allowed to participate directly in operations. The same restrictions apply to military involvement in Plan Colombia. Such activity has been constrained by members of Congress who had lived through the scandal of America’s secret role in Central America’s wars in the 1980s. Congress refused to allow U.S. military involvement in Colombia to escalate as it had in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama.

In February 2003, the FARC took three U.S. contractors hostage after their single-engine Cessna, above, crashed in the jungle near La Esperanza. A covert CIA program was launched to find them. (El Tiempo via AP)
The FARC miscalculates

The new covert push against the FARC unofficially began on Feb. 13, 2003. That day a single-engine Cessna 208 crashed in rebel-held jungle. Nearby guerrillas executed the Colombian officer on board and one of four American contractors who were working on coca eradication. The three others were taken hostage.

The United States had already declared the FARC a terrorist organization for its indiscriminate killings and drug trafficking. Although the CIA had its hands full with Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush “leaned on [CIA director George] Tenet” to help find the three hostages, according to one former senior intelligence official involved in the discussions.

The FARC’s terrorist designation made it easier to fund a black budget. “We got money from a lot of different pots,” said one senior diplomat.

One of the CIA officers Tenet dispatched to Bogota was an operator in his forties whose name The Washington Post is withholding because he remains undercover. He created the U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell, dubbed “the Bunker.”

It was a cramped, 30-by-30-foot room with a low ceiling and three rows of computers. Eight people sat at each row of consoles. Some scoured satellite maps of the jungle; others searched for underground FARC hiding places. Some monitored imagery or the movement of vehicles tagged with tracking devices. Voice intercepts from radio and cellphone communications were decrypted and translated by the National Security Agency.

Bunker analysts fused tips from informants and technically obtained information. Analysts sought to link individuals to the insurgency’s flow of drugs, weapons and money. For the most part, they left the violent paramilitary groups alone.

The Bunker’s technical experts and contractors built the Colombians their own nationwide intelligence computer system. They also later helped create regional fusion centers to push tactical intelligence to local commanders. The agency also paid for encrypted communications gear.

“We were very interested in getting the FARC, and it wasn’t so much a question of capability, as it was intelligence,” said Wood, “specifically the ability to locate them in the time frame of an operation.”

Outside the Bunker, CIA case officers and contractors taught the art of recruiting informants to Colombian units that had been vetted and polygraphed. They gave money to people with information about the hostages.

Meanwhile, the other secret U.S. agency that had been at the forefront of locating and killing al-Qaeda arrived on the scene. Elite commandos from JSOC began periodic annual training sessions and small-unit reconnaissance missions to try to find the hostages.

Despite all the effort, the hostages’ location proved elusive. Looking for something else to do with the new intelligence equipment and personnel, the Bunker manager and his military deputy from the U.S. Special Operations Command gave their people a second mission: Target the FARC leadership. This was exactly what the CIA and JSOC had been doing against al-Qaeda on the other side of the world. The methodology was familiar.

“There was cross-pollination both ways,” said one senior official with access to the Bunker at the time. “We didn’t need to invent a new wheel.”

At the urging of President George W. Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, left, the CIA program to find the U.S. hostages began targeting FARC leaders with U.S.-provided intelligence and smart bombs. (Charles Dharapak/AP)
A request from Colombia’s president

Locating FARC leaders proved easier than capturing or killing them. Some 60 times, Colombian forces had obtained or been given reliable information but failed to capture or kill anyone senior, according to two U.S. officials and a retired Colombian senior officer. The story was always the same. U.S.-provided Black Hawk helicopters would ferry Colombian troops into the jungle about six kilometers away from a camp. The men would creep through the dense foliage, but the camps were always empty by the time they arrived. Later they learned that the FARC had an early-warning system: rings of security miles from the camps.

By 2006, the dismal record attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force’s newly arrived mission chief. The colonel was perplexed. Why had the third-largest recipient of U.S. military assistance [behind Egypt and Israel] made so little progress?

“I’m thinking, ‘What are we killing the FARC with?’ ” the colonel, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview.

The colonel, a cargo plane expert, said he “started Googling bombs and fighters” looking for ideas. Eventually he landed on the Enhanced Paveway II, a relatively inexpensive guidance kit that could be strapped on a 500-pound, Mark-82 gravity bomb.

The colonel said he told then-defense minister Santos about his idea and wrote a one-page paper on it for him to deliver to Uribe. Santos took the idea to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In June 2006, Uribe visited Bush at the White House. He mentioned the recent killing of al-Qaeda’s chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. An F-16 had sent two 500-pound smart bombs into his hideout and killed him. He pressed for the same capability.

“Clearly this was very important” to Uribe, said retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who had taken over as CIA director just months earlier.

First, there was the matter of fitting the smart bombs onto a Colombian aircraft. Colombia did not have F-16s. Raytheon, the kit manufacturer, sent engineers to figure out how to mount the equipment on a plane. First they tried mounting it on a Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Super Tucano, a turboprop aircraft designed for low-flying counterinsurgency missions. But affixing the cable that ran from the bomb’s computer brain to the cockpit meant drilling too close to the fuel cell. Instead, they jerry-rigged it to an older Cessna A-37 Dragonfly, a light attack aircraft first developed by the U.S. Special Operations air force for Vietnam and later used in the Salvadoran civil war.

Then the engineers and Colombian pilots tested the first of three PGMs in a remote airfield near the Venezuelan border. The target was a 2-by-4 stuck in the ground. The plane launched the bomb from 20,000 feet. “It landed about a foot from it,” the colonel said. The results were so good, he thought, “why waste two more kits?” The smart bombs were ready for use.

But White House lawyers, along with their colleagues from the CIA and the departments of Justice, Defense and State, had their own questions to work through. It was one thing to use a PGM to defeat an enemy on the battlefield — the U.S. Air Force had been doing that for years. It was another to use it to target an individual FARC leader. Would that constitute an assassination, which is prohibited by U.S. law? And, “could we be accused of engaging in an assassination, even if it is not ourselves doing it?” said one lawyer involved.

The White House’s Office of Legal Counsel and others finally decided that the same legal analysis they had applied to al-Qaeda could be applied to the FARC. Killing a FARC leader would not be an assassination because the organization posed an ongoing threat to Colombia. Also, none of the FARC commanders could be expected to surrender.

And, as a drug-trafficking organization, the FARC’s status as a threat to U.S. national security had been settled years earlier with Reagan’s counternarcotics finding. At the time, the crack cocaine epidemic was at its height, and the government decided that organizations that brought drugs to America’s streets were a threat to national security.

There was another concern. Some senior officials worried that Colombian forces might use the PGMs to kill their perceived political enemies. “The concerns were huge given their human rights problems,” said a former senior military officer.

To assure themselves that the Colombians would not misuse the bombs, U.S. officials came up with a novel solution. The CIA would maintain control over the encryption key inserted into the bomb, which unscrambled communications with GPS satellites so they can be read by the bomb’s computers. The bomb could not hit its target without the key. The Colombians would have to ask for approval for some targets, and if they misused the bombs, the CIA could deny GPS reception for future use.

“We wanted a sign-off,” said one senior official involved in the deliberations.

To cut through the initial red tape, the first 20 smart bomb kits — without the encryption keys — came through the CIA. The bill was less than $1 million. After that, Colombia was allowed to purchase them through the Foreign Military Sales program.
Secretly assisting Colombia against rebels
Bomb
Guidance
Air Foil
Warhead
Next

Raytheon’s Enhanced Paveway II is a laser-guided bomb upgraded with a GPS-guided capability, which works better against targets in the thick jungle. An encryption key inserted into the guidance system allows the bomb’s computer to receive military-grade GPS data used to guide a bomb to its target.

Anatomy of Lethal Air Operations in Colombia

First strike: In a typical mission, several Cessna A-37 Dragonflys, a light attack aircraft first developed by the U.S. Special Operations for Vietnam, fly at 20,000 feet carrying smart bombs. They can be launched once the planes get within three miles of the target. The bombs communicate with GPS satellites to know where they are at all times and to hit the target.

Bombardment: Several Brazilian-made Embraer A-29 Super Tucanos, a turboprop aircraft flown at a much lower altitude, follow the A-37s. They drop conventional gravity bombs in a pattern near the smart bombs to flatten the jungle and kill other insurgents in the FARC camp.

Gunship strike: Low-flying Vietnam era AC-47 gunships, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, strafe the area with machine guns, shooting the survivors, according to one of several officials who described the scenario.

Ground units Finally, if the camp is far into the jungle, Colombian army troops are usually ferried in by U.S.-provided Black Hawk troop-carrying helicopters. Troops would collect the remains of the killed FARC leader if possible, round up survivors and gather electronic equipment like cellphones and computers that could yield valuable information about FARC operations.
A first strike

Tomas Medina Caracas, also known as Negro Acacio, the FARC’s chief drug trafficker and commander of its 16th Front, was the first man the U.S. Embassy Intelligence Fusion Cell queued up for a PGM strike.

At about 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 2007, pilots wearing night vision goggles unleashed several Enhanced Paveway II smart bombs into his camp in eastern Colombia as officials in both capitals waited. Troops recovered only a leg. It appeared by its dark complexion to belong to Acacio, one of the few black FARC leaders. DNA tests confirmed his death.

“There was a great deal of excitement,” recalled William Scoggins, counternarcotics program manager at the U.S. military’s Southern Command. “We didn’t know the impact it would have, but we thought this was a game changer.”

Six weeks later, smart bombs killed Gustavo Rueda Díaz, alias Martin Caballero, leader of the 37th Front, while he was talking on his cellphone. Acacio’s and Caballero’s deaths caused the 16th and 37th fronts to collapse. They also triggered mass desertions, according to a secret State Department cable dated March 6, 2008, and released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010. This was just the beginning of the FARC’s disintegration.

To hide the use of the PGMs from public discovery, and to ensure maximum damage to a FARC’s leaders’ camp, the air force and U.S. advisers developed new strike tactics. In a typical mission, several A-37 Dragonflys flying at 20,000 feet carried smart bombs. As soon as the planes came within a three-mile “basket” of the target, a bomb’s GPS software would automatically turn on.

The Dragonflys were followed by several A-29 Super Tucanos, flying at a much lower altitude. They would drop a series of dumb bombs in a pattern nearby. Their blast pressure would kill anyone close in and also flatten the dense jungle and obscure the use of the smart bombs.

Then, low-flying, Vietnam-era AC-47 gunships, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, would strafe the area with mounted machine guns, “shooting the wounded trying to go for cover,” according to one of several military officials who described the same scenario.

Only then would Colombian ground forces arrive to round up prisoners, collecting the dead, as well as cellphones, computers and hard drives. The CIA also spent three years training Colombian close air support teams on using lasers to clandestinely guide pilots and laser-guided smart bombs to their targets.

Most every operation relied heavily on NSA signal intercepts, which fed intelligence to troops on the ground or pilots before and during an operation. “Intercepts . . . were a game changer,” said Scoggins, of U.S. Southern Command.

The round-the-clock nature of the NSA’s work was captured in a secret State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. In the spring of 2009, the target was drug trafficker Daniel Rendon Herrera, known as Don Mario, then Colombia’s most wanted man and responsible for 3,000 assassinations over an 18-month period.

“For seven days, using signal and human intelligence,” NSA assets “worked day and night” to reposition 250 U.S.-trained and equipped airborne commandos near Herrera as he tried to flee, according to an April 2009 cable and a senior government official who confirmed the NSA’s role in the mission.

The CIA also trained Colombian interrogators to more effectively question thousands of FARC deserters, without the use of the “enhanced interrogation” techniques approved for use on al-Qaeda and later repudiated by Congress as abusive. The agency also created databases to keep track of the debriefings so they could be searched and cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the organization.

The Colombian government paid deserters and allowed them to reintegrate into civil society. Some, in turn, offered valuable information about the FARC’s chain of command, standard travel routes, camps, supply lines, drug and money sources. They helped make sense of the NSA’s voice intercepts, which often used code words. Deserters also sometimes were used to infiltrate FARC camps to plant listening devices or beacons that emitted a GPS coordinate for smart bombs.

“We learned from the CIA,” a top Colombian national security official said of the debriefing program. “Before, we didn’t pay much attention to details.”

FARC commander Raul Reyes in 2002 in Los Pozos, Colombia. In 2008, Colombia, with tacit U.S. approval, launched U.S.-made smart bombs into Ecuador, killing Reyes, considered to be the group’s No. 2 leader. (Scott Dalton/AP)
Ecuador and the not-forgotten hostages

In February 2008, the U.S.-Colombian team got its first sighting of the three U.S. hostages. Having waited five years, the reaction was swift at U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, which began sending JSOC commandos down, said a senior U.S. official who was in Colombia when they arrived.

The JSOC team was headed by a Navy SEAL Team Six commander. Small units set up three operational areas near the hostages and conducted long-range reconnaissance, the senior official said. The NSA increased its monitoring. All eyes were on the remote jungle location. But as initial preparations were underway, operations were heating up elsewhere.

Just across the Putumayo River, one mile inside Ecuador, U.S. intelligence and a Colombian informant confirmed the hideout of Luis Edgar Devia Silva, also known as Raul Reyes and considered to be the No. 2 in the seven-member FARC secretariat.

It was an awkward discovery for Colombia and the United States. To conduct an airstrike meant a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would hit the camp using a U.S.-made bomb with a CIA-controlled brain.

The Air Force colonel had a succinct message for the Colombian air operations commander in charge of the mission. “I said, ‘Look man, we all know where this guy is. Just don’t f— it up.’ ”

U.S. national security lawyers viewed the operation as an act of self-defense. In the wake of 9/11, they had come up with a new interpretation of the permissible use of force against non-state actors like al-Qaeda and the FARC. It went like this: If a terrorist group operated from a country that was unable or unwilling to stop it, then the country under attack — in this case, Colombia — had the right to defend itself with force, even if that meant crossing into another sovereign country.

This was the legal justification for CIA drone strikes and other lethal operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and, much later, for the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.

So minutes after midnight on March 1, three A-37 Dragonflys took off from Colombia, followed by five Super Tucanos. The smart bombs’ guidance system turned on once the planes reached within three miles of Reyes’s location.

As instructed, the Colombian pilots stayed in Colombian airspace. The bombs landed as programmed, obliterating the camp and killing Reyes, who, according to Colombian news reports, was asleep in pajamas.

Above: The 2008 bombing of Raul Reyes’s camp in Ecuador sparked a diplomatic dispute. Ecuador moved troops to border towns such as Puerto Nuevo. (Rodrigo Buendia/AFP via Getty Images; Dolores Ochoa/AP)

Colombian forces rushed across the border into Ecuador to retrieve Reyes’s remains and also scooped up a large treasure trove of computer equipment that would turn out to be the most valuable FARC intelligence find ever.

The bombing set off a serious diplomatic crisis. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez called Colombia “a terrorist state” and moved troops to the border, as did Ecuador. Nicaragua broke off relations. Uribe, under pressure, apologized to Ecuador.

The apology, while soothing relationships in Latin America, angered the small circle of U.S. officials who knew the back story, one of them said. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe they’re saying this,’ ” he said. “For them to be giving up an important legal position was crazy.”

But the flap did not damage the deep ties between U.S. and Colombian forces or deter the mission to rescue the hostages. In fact, the number of JSOC troops continued to mount to more than 1,000, said the senior official then in Colombia. Officials thought for sure they would be spotted, but they never were. A U.S.-Colombian military exercise provided sufficient cover when the International Committee of the Red Cross showed up at isolated bases and stumbled upon some burly Americans, said two U.S. officials.

After six weeks of waiting to find the hostages, most of the JSOC troops left the country for pressing missions elsewhere. One unit remained. On July 2, 2008, it had the role of unused understudy in the dramatic and well-documented Operation Checkmate, in which Colombian forces pretending to be members of a humanitarian group tricked the FARC into handing over the three U.S. hostages and 12 others without a shot fired. The JSOC team, and a fleet of U.S. aircraft, was positioned as Plan B, in case the Colombian operation went awry.

A Colombian pilot boards a Super Tucano in Bogota in 2006. Recently, Colombia has fitted smart bombs onto some of its Super Tucanos, which have been largely used to drop dumb bombs during airstrikes. (Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters)
Santos continues the smart-bomb war

As a sign of trust, in early 2010 the U.S. government gave Colombia control over the GPS encryption key. There had been no reports of misuse, misfires or collateral damage from the smart bombs. The transfer was preceded by quick negotiations over the rules of engagement for smart-bomb use. Among the rules was that they would be launched only against isolated jungle camps.

President Santos, who was defense minister under Uribe, has greatly increased the pace of operations against the FARC. Almost three times as many FARC leaders — 47 vs. 16 — have been killed under Santos as under Uribe. Interviews and analysis of government Web sites and press reporting show that at least 23 of the attacks under Santos were air operations. Smart bombs were used only against the most important FARC leaders, Colombian officials said in response to questions. Gravity bombs were used in the other cases.

President Juan Manuel Santos, who was Colombia’s defense minister when the CIA covert program ramped up, has increased efforts to weaken the FARC. (Jose Cendon/Bloomberg)

Colombia continues to upgrade its air capabilities. In 2013, the air force upgraded its fleet of Israeli-made Kfir fighter jets, fitting them with Israeli-made Griffin laser-guided bombs. It has also fitted smart bombs onto some of its Super Tucanos.

Having decimated the top FARC leadership and many of the front commanders, the military, with continued help from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, appears to be working its way through the mid-level ranks, including mobile company commanders, the most battle-hardened and experienced remaining cadre. One-third of them have been killed or captured, according to Colombian officials.

The Santos administration has also targeted the financial and weapons networks supporting the FARC. Some critics think the government has been too focused on killing leaders and not enough on using the army and police to occupy and control rebel territory.

Killing an individual has never been a measure of success in war, say counterinsurgency experts. It’s the chaos and dysfunction that killing the leadership causes to the organization that matters. The air operations against the FARC leadership “has turned the organization upside down,” said a senior Pentagon official who has studied the classified U.S. history of Colombia’s war.

Some have fled to Venezuela. One member of the secretariat hides out intermittently in Ecuador, according to senior Colombia officials, breaking the important psychological bond with ground troops and handicapping recruitment.

For fear of being located and targeted, units no longer sleep in the same place two days in a row, so camps must be sparser. “They know the government has so much information on them now, and real-time intelligence,” said German Espejo, security and defense counselor at the Colombian Embassy. Worried about spies in their midst, executions are common.

The FARC still mounts attacks — a car bombing of a rural police station Dec. 7 killed six police officers and two civilians — but it no longer travels in large groups, and it limits most units to less than 20. No longer able to mount large-scale assaults, the group has reverted to hit-and-run tactics using snipers and explosives.

The weariness of 50 years of transient jungle life has taken its toll on the FARC negotiating team, too. Those who have lived in exile seem more willing to continue the fight than those who have been doing the fighting, said Colombian officials. The negotiations, Santos said in the interview, are the result of the successful military campaign, “the cherry on the cake.”

On Dec. 15, the FARC said it would begin a 30-day unilateral cease-fire as a sign of good will during the holiday season. The Santos administration rebuffed the gesture and vowed to continue its military campaign. Later that day, security forces killed a FARC guerrilla implicated in a bomb attack on a former minister. Three days later, the army killed another five.

Elyssa Pachico and Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Find this story at 21 December 2013

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$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida records every expense

FILE – In this July 23, 2013 file photo, United Nations peacekeepers stop to greet Malian soldiers at a checkpoint, during a patrol on the outskirts of Timbuktu, Mali. For 10 months until January 2013, the city of Timbuktu was occupied by al-Qaida’s branch in North Africa. When they fled, they left behind thousands of pages of documents, including over 100 receipts, showing that they assiduously tracked their cash flow, down to the $0.60 cents one of them spent for a single light bulb. The accounting system on display suggests that far from being a fly-by-night terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a corporation. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

This receipt for groceries, which includes prices paid for tomatoes, onions, charcoal, meat and a lightbulb, was retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali. The receipt is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. (AP Photo)

This receipt for house-cleaning equipment and labor, air conditioner repairs and security guards, which was retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. The al-Qaida fighters threw themselves into construction projects, making frequent trips to the hardware store to buy everything from bags of cement, to parts for a new shower, to tubes of superglue. (AP Photo)

FILE – In this July 23, 2013 file photo, French soldiers patrol through the central market in Timbuktu, Mali. A branch of al-Qaida occupied Timbuktu for 10 months, up until January 2013, when France sent soldiers to flush out the extremists. When they fled, they left behind thousands of pages of documents, including over 100 receipts, showing that they assiduously tracked their cash flow, down to the $0.60 one of them spent for a single light bulb. The open-air market pictured here is one of many where the fighters bought supplies, carefully tracking their expenses on a notepad. The accounting system on display suggests that far from being a fly-by-night terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a corporation. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

FILE – In this July 23, 2013 file photo, a French soldier stands guard during a patrol through the central market in Timbuktu, Mali. A branch of al-Qaida occupied Timbuktu for 10 months, up until French soldiers intervened in January 2013. When they fled, they left behind thousands of pages of documents, including over 100 receipts, showing that they assiduously tracked their cash flow, down to the $0.60 one of them spent for a single light bulb. The accounting system on display suggests that far from being a fly-by-night terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a corporation. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

This document retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, outlines the budget for an Islamic Tribunal, which handed down sentences, including public amputations for theft. Included within this budget are the expenses for members of the tribunal, their guardians and cooks, support staff, transportation and telecommunications. It is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. (AP Photo)

ADVANCE FOR USE MONDAY, DEC. 30, 2013 AND THEREAFTER – This document retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is a list of advances for top leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, including Yahya Abou el-Hammam, the head of operations for al-Qaida in the Sahara Desert. The document is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on detailing even the most minor expenses. Several receipts, including this one, show that Ansar Dine, a Malian jihadist group that initially refused to acknowledge ties to al-Qaida, was on al-Qaida’s payroll. (AP Photo)

This document retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is a signed advance to the terror group’s fighters. It says: “In the name of Allah, the most Clement, I gave Omar Mohamed Abou Khalid, the emir of Tashara Zarho, 460,000 fcfa ($920) for his monthly expenses from September 21, 2012 to October 21, 2012 for 34 soldiers.” The document, signed by the fighter, is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. (AP Photo)

This receipt for car expenses, which was retrieved from a building occupied by al-Qaida’s North African branch in Timbuktu, Mali, is one of more than 100 receipts and invoices that show an organization intent on documenting even the most minor expenses. In addition to oil, this receipt includes milk, tea, soap, and other grocery items. Many of the receipts include both car repairs and groceries, suggesting that cars were out for long periods of time, and mechanics or sidelined fighters needed to be fed. (AP Photo)

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TIMBUKTU, Mali (AP) — The convoy of cars bearing the black al-Qaida flag came at high speed, and the manager of the modest grocery store thought he was about to get robbed.

Mohamed Djitteye rushed to lock his till and cowered behind the counter. He was dumbfounded when instead, the al-Qaida commander gently opened the grocery’s glass door and asked for a pot of mustard. Then he asked for a receipt.

Confused and scared, Djitteye didn’t understand. So the jihadist repeated his request. Could he please have a receipt for the $1.60 purchase?

This transaction in northern Mali shows what might seem an unusual preoccupation for a terror group: Al-Qaida is obsessed with documenting the most minute expenses.

In more than 100 receipts left in a building occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu earlier this year, the extremists assiduously tracked their cash flow, recording purchases as small as a single light bulb. The often tiny amounts are carefully written out in pencil and colored pen on scraps of paper and Post-it notes: The equivalent of $1.80 for a bar of soap; $8 for a packet of macaroni; $14 for a tube of super glue. All the documents were authenticated by experts.

The accounting system on display in the documents found by The Associated Press is a mirror image of what researchers have discovered in other parts of the world where al-Qaida operates, including Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. The terror group’s documents around the world also include corporate workshop schedules, salary spreadsheets, philanthropy budgets, job applications, public relations advice and letters from the equivalent of a human resources division.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that far from being a fly-by-night, fragmented terror organization, al-Qaida is attempting to behave like a multinational corporation, with what amounts to a company-wide financial policy across its different chapters.

“They have to have bookkeeping techniques because of the nature of the business they are in,” said Brookings Institution fellow William McCants, a former adviser to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. “They have so few ways to keep control of their operatives, to rein them in and make them do what they are supposed to do. They have to run it like a business.”

The picture that emerges from what is one of the largest stashes of al-Qaida documents to be made public shows a rigid bureaucracy, replete with a chief executive, a board of directors and departments such as human resources and public relations. Experts say that each branch of the terror group replicates the same corporate structure, and that this strict blueprint has helped al-Qaida not just to endure but also to spread.

AL-QAIDA’S GROCERY LIST

Among the most revealing documents are the receipts, which offer a granular view of how al-Qaida’s fighters lived every day as well as its larger priorities.

“For the smallest thing, they wanted a receipt,” said 31-year-old Djitteye, who runs the Idy Market on the sand-carpeted main boulevard in Timbuktu. “Even for a tin of Nescafe.”

An inordinate number of receipts are for groceries, suggesting a diet of macaroni with meat and tomato sauce, as well as large quantities of powdered milk. There are 27 invoices for meat, 13 for tomatoes, 11 for milk, 11 for pasta, seven for onions, and many others for tea, sugar, and honey.

They record the $0.60 cake one of their fighters ate, and the $1.80 bar of soap another used to wash his hands. They list a broom for $3 and bleach for $3.30. These relatively petty amounts are logged with the same care as the $5,400 advance they gave to one commander, or the $330 they spent to buy 3,300 rounds of ammunition.

Keeping close track of expenses is part of al-Qaida’s DNA, say multiple experts, including FBI agents who were assigned to track the terror group in the years just after its founding.

This habit, they say, can be traced back more than three decades to when a young Osama bin Laden entered King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia in 1976 to study economics, and went on to run part of his millionaire father’s construction company.

After he was exiled to Sudan in 1992, bin Laden founded what became the country’s largest conglomerate. His companies and their numerous subsidiaries invested in everything from importing trucks to exporting sesame, white corn and watermelons. From the get-go, bin Laden was obsessed with enforcing corporate management techniques on his more than 500 employees, according to al-Qaida expert Lawrence Wright, author of a well-known history of the terror group. Workers had to submit forms in triplicate for even the smallest purchases — the same requirement bin Laden later imposed on the first al-Qaida recruits, he said.

In Afghanistan, detailed accounting records found in an abandoned al-Qaida camp in 2001 included salary lists, stringent documentation on each fighter, job application forms asking for level of education and language skills, as well as notebook after notebook of expenses. In Iraq, U.S. forces recovered entire Excel spreadsheets, detailing salaries for al-Qaida fighters.

“People think that this is done on the back of an envelope. It isn’t,” says Dan Coleman, a former FBI special agent who was in charge of the bin Laden case file from 1996 to 2004.

One of the first raids on an al-Qaida safe house was led by Coleman in 1997. Among the dozens of invoices he found inside the operative’s home in Kenya were stacks of gas station receipts, going back eight years.

TERRORIST EXPENSE REPORTS

This detailed accounting system allows al-Qaida to keep track of the significant sums of money involved in feeding, training and recruiting thousands of fighters. It’s also an attempt to keep track of the fighters themselves, who often operate remotely.

The majority of the invoices found on a cement floor in a building in Timbuktu are scribbled by hand, on post-it notes, on lined math paper or on the backs of envelopes, as if operatives in the field were using whatever writing surface they could find. Others are typed, sometimes repeating the same items, in what may serve as formal expense reports for their higher-ups. Al-Qaida clearly required such expense reports — in a letter from the stash, middle managers chide a terrorist for not handing his in on time.

In informal open-air markets such as those of Timbuktu, vendors didn’t have receipts to hand out. So, traders say, members of al-Qaida came in pairs, one to negotiate the sale, and the other to record prices on a notepad. This practice is reflected in the fact that almost all the receipts are written in Arabic, a language few residents of Timbuktu know how to write.

The fighters would ask for a price, and then write it down in their Bloc Note, a notebook brand sold locally, said pharmacist Ibrahim Djitteye.

“It surprised me at first,” he said. “But I came to the conclusion that they are here for a very specific mission…. And when you are on assignment, you need to give a report. They have their own higher-ups, who are expecting them to account for what they spent.”

The corporate nature of the organization is also on display in the types of activities they funded.

For example, two receipts, for $4,000 and $6,800, are listed as funds for “workshops,” another concept borrowed from business. A flier found in another building occupied by their fighters confirms that al-Qaida held the equivalent of corporate training retreats. It lists detailed schedules: Early morning exercise from 5 to 6:30 a.m.; lessons on how to use a GPS from 10 to 10:30 a.m.; arms training from 10:30 a.m. to noon; and various afternoon classes on preaching to other Muslims, nationalism and democracy.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF GOVERNING

A relatively small ratio of the receipts are expense reports for fighters and weapons. One unit presented a politely worded request for funds, entitled: “The list of names of mujahideen who are asking for clothes and boots to protect themselves from the cold.”

Far more deal with the mundane aspects of running a state, such as keeping the lights on. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb invaded Timbuktu in April 2012, and took over its state-run utilities, paying to have fuel trucked in from neighboring Algeria. One invoice shows they paid $3,720 for 20 barrels of diesel for the city’s power station.

There’s also an advance for the prison and a detailed budget for the Islamic Tribunal, where judges were paid $2 per day to hear cases.

Along with the nuts and bolts of governing, it’s clear that the fighters were actively trying to woo the population. They set aside money for charity: $4 for medicine “for a Shiite with a sick child,” and $100 in financial aid for a man’s wedding. And they reimbursed residents for damages, such as $50 for structural repairs, with a note that the house in question “was hit by mujahideen cars.”

And it’s obvious that the fighters spent a good part of their time proselytizing, with expense reports for trips to distant villages to impart their ultra-strict vision of Islam. One receipt bluntly lists $200 for a “trip for spreading propaganda.”

While not overtly explained, the sizable receipts for car repairs suggest regular missions into the desert. The many receipts for oil changes, car batteries, filters and parts indicate the tough terrain battered the fighters’ Toyota Land Cruisers.

Finally, the names on the receipts reveal the majority of fighters on the group’s payroll were foreign-born. There’s a $1,000 advance to a man identified as “Talhat the Libyan.” Another is issued to “Tarek the Algerian.”

The names furthermore confirm that the top leaders of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb were based in Timbuktu. Among them is Abou Zeid, probably the most feared of al-Qaida’s local commanders who orchestrated the kidnappings of dozens of Westerners until his death this spring.

“In the name of Allah, the most merciful,” begins a request for funds dated Dec. 29, 2012, and addressed to Abou Zeid. “We are writing to inform you that we need rockets for our camp — a total of 4 is needed. May God protect you.”

The extent of the documentation found here, as well as in the other theaters where al-Qaida operates, does not mean the terror group runs as a well-oiled machine, cautions Jason Burke, author of the book “Al-Qaida.”

“Bureaucracy, as we know, gives senior managers the illusion they are in control of distant subordinates,” Burke said. “But that influence is much, much less than they would like.”

Al-Qaida’s accounting practices left a strong impression on at least one person in Timbuktu: Djitteye, the convenience store manager.

The al-Qaida commander who came in for mustard was Nabil Alqama, the head of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb’s “Southern Command.” He became a regular. One day, he asked the store employee to get a receipt book printed so he could provide more official-looking invoices.

Djitteye obliged.

The green receipt book with neat boxes now sits under his cash register. These days, whenever customers come in, he always asks if they would like a receipt.

No one ever does.

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
— Dec. 30, 2013 11:36 AM EST

Find this story at 30 December 2013
The documents can be viewed here

AP News | © 2014 Associated Press

NSA program stopped no terror attacks, says White House panel member

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”

While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”

“We found none,” said Stone.

Under the NSA program, first revealed by ex-contractor Edward Snowden, the agency collects in bulk the records of the time and duration of phone calls made by persons inside the United States.

Stone was one of five members of the White House review panel – and the only one without any intelligence community experience – that this week produced a sweeping report recommending that the NSA’s collection of phone call records be terminated to protect Americans’ privacy rights.

The panel made that recommendation after concluding that the program was “not essential in preventing attacks.”

“That was stunning. That was the ballgame,” said one congressional intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified. “It flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us.”

Despite the panel’s conclusions, Stone strongly rejected the idea they justified Snowden’s actions in leaking the NSA documents about the phone collection. “Suppose someone decides we need gun control and they go out and kill 15 kids and then a state enacts gun control?” Stone said, using an analogy he acknowledged was “somewhat inflammatory.” What Snowden did, Stone said, was put the country “at risk.”

“My emphatic view,” he said, “is that a person who has access to classified information — the revelation of which could damage national security — should never take it upon himself to reveal that information.”

Stone added, however, that he would not necessarily reject granting an amnesty to Snowden in exchange for the return of all his documents, as was recently suggested by a top NSA official. “It’s a hostage situation,” said Stone. Deciding whether to negotiate with him to get all his documents back was a “pragmatic judgment. I see no principled reason not to do that.”

The conclusions of the panel’s reports were at direct odds with public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence officials. “Lives have been saved,” Obama told reporters last June, referring to the bulk collection program and another program that intercepts communications overseas. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information.”

White House Jay Carney is pressed Thursday over whether President Barack Obama believes that the NSA surveillance program saved lives.

But in one little-noticed footnote in its report, the White House panel said the telephone records collection program – known as Section 215, based on the provision of the U.S. Patriot Act that provided the legal basis for it – had made “only a modest contribution to the nation’s security.” The report said that “there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome [of a terror investigation] would have been any different” without the program.

The panel’s findings echoed that of U.S. Judge Richard Leon, who in a ruling this week found the bulk collection program to be unconstitutional. Leon said that government officials were unable to cite “a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk collection metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.”

Stone declined to comment on the accuracy of public statements by U.S. intelligence officials about the telephone collection program, but said that when they referred to successes they seemed to be mixing the results of domestic metadata collection with the intelligence derived from the separate, and less controversial, NSA program, known as 702, to intercept communications overseas.

The comparison between 702 overseas interceptions and 215 bulk metadata collection was “night and day,” said Stone. “With 702, the record is very impressive. It’s no doubt the nation is safer and spared potential attacks because of 702. There was nothing like that for 215. We asked the question and they [the NSA] gave us the data. They were very straight about it.”

He also said one reason the telephone records program is not effective is because, contrary to the claims of critics, it actually does not collect a record of every American’s phone call. Although the NSA does collect metadata from major telecommunications carriers such as Verizon and AT&T, there are many smaller carriers from which it collects nothing. Asked if the NSA was collecting the records of 75 percent of phone calls, an estimate that has been used in briefings to Congress , Stone said the real number was classified but “not anything close to that” and far lower.

The heads of top tech companies in the U.S. have ask President Obama to reform government’s surveillance laws and practices. NBC’s Steve Handelsman reports.

When panel members asked NSA officials why they didn’t expand the program to include smaller carriers, the answer they gave was “money,” Stone said. “They were setting financial priorities,” said Stone, and that was “really revealing” about how useful the bulk collection of telephone calls really was.

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment on any aspect of the panel’s report, saying the agency was deferring to the White House. Asked Wednesday about the surveillance panel’s conclusions about telephone record collection, White House press secretary Jay Carney said that “the president does still believe and knows that this program is an important piece of the overall efforts that we engage in to combat threats against the lives of American citizens and threats to our overall national security.”

By Michael Isikoff
NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

Find this story at 20 December 2013

© 2013 NBCNews.com

NSA surveillance played little role in foiling terror plots, experts say

Obama administration says NSA data helped make arrests in two important cases – but critics say that simply isn’t true

A new NSA data farm is set to open in the fall in Bluffdale, Utah. A former CIA agent said: ‘[Data-mining] played no role in the Headley case.’ Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images

Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA’s vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks.

The defence of the controversial data collection operations, highlighted in a series of Guardian disclosures over the past week, has been led by Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers. The two politicians have attempted to justify the NSA’s use of vast data sweeps such as Prism and Boundless Informant by pointing to the arrests and convictions of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Rogers told ABC’s This Week that the NSA’s bulk monitoring of phone calls and internet contacts was central to intercepting the plotters. “I can tell you, in the Zazi case in New York, it’s exactly the programme that was used,” he said.

A similar point was made in anonymous briefings by administration officials to the New York Times and Reuters.

But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programmes played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots. Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.

In the case of Zazi, an Afghan American who planned to attack the New York subway, the breakthrough appears to have come from Operation Pathway, a British investigation into a suspected terrorism cell in the north-west of England in 2009. That investigation discovered that one of the members of the cell had been in contact with an al-Qaida associate in Pakistan via the email address sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.

British newspaper reports at the time of Zazi’s arrest said that UK intelligence passed on the email address to the US. The same email address, as Buzzfeed has pointed out, was cited in Zazi’s 2011 trial as a crucial piece of evidence. Zazi, the court heard, wrote to sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com asking in coded language for the precise quantities to use to make up a bomb.

Eric Jurgenson, an FBI agent involved in investigating Zazi once the link to the Pakistani email address was made, told the court: “My office was in receipt – I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several email messages, email communications. Those email communications, several of them resolved to an individual living in Colorado.”

Michael Dowling, a Denver-based attorney who acted as Zazi’s defence counsel, said the full picture remained unclear as Zazi pleaded guilty before all details of the investigation were made public. But the lawyer said he was sceptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.

“The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi’s contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan,” Dowling said.

Further scepticism has been expressed by David Davis, a former British foreign office minister who described the citing of the Zazi case as an example of the merits of data-mining as “misleading” and “an illusion”. Davis pointed out that Operation Pathway was prematurely aborted in April 2009 after Bob Quick, then the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, was pictured walking into Downing Street with top secret documents containing details of the operation in full view of cameras.

The collapse of the operation, and arrests of suspects that hurriedly followed, came five months before Zazi was arrested in September 2009. “That was the operation that led to the initial data links to Zazi – they put the clues in the database which gave them the connections,” Davis said.

Davis said that the discovery of the sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com email – and in turn the link to Zazi – had been made by traditional investigative work in the UK. He said the clue-driven nature of the inquiry was significant, as it was propelled by detectives operating on the basis of court-issued warrants.

“You can’t make this grand sweeping [data collection] stuff subject to warrants. What judge would give you a warrant if you say you want to comb through vast quantities of data?”

Legal documents lodged with a federal court in New York’s eastern district shortly after Zazi’s arrest show that US counter-intelligence officials had been keeping watch over him under targeted surveillance with the warranted approval of the special intelligence court. During the course of the prosecution, the US served notice that it would be offering evidence “obtained and derived from electronic surveillance and physical search conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (Fisa).”

Feinstein and Rogers have also pointed to the case of David Headley, who in January was sentenced to 35 years in jail for having made multiple scouting missions to Mumbai ahead of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 168 people. Yet the evidence in his case also points towards a British tip-off as the inspiration behind the US interception of him.

In July 2009, British intelligence began tracking Headley, a Pakistani American from Chicago, who was then plotting to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in retaliation for its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Information was passed to the FBI and he was thereafter, until his arrest that October, kept under targeted US surveillance.

An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. “That’s nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That’s not the way it happened at all,” he said.

The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.

The Headley case is a peculiar choice for the administration to highlight as an example of the virtues of data-mining. The fact that the Mumbai attacks occurred, with such devastating effect, in itself suggests that the NSA’s secret programmes were limited in their value as he was captured only after the event.

Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA’s data sweeps behind his arrest. In a long profile of Headley, the investigative website ProPublica pointed out that he had been an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration perhaps as recently as 2005. There are suggestions that he might have then worked in some capacity for the FBI or CIA.

Headley was also, ProPublica found, the subject of several inquiries by agents of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. A year before the Mumbai attacks his then wife, Faiza Outalha, reported on him to the US embassy Islamabad, saying he was on a secret mission in India and was a “drug dealer, terrorist and spy”.

Ed Pilkington in New York and Nicholas Watt in London
theguardian.com, Wednesday 12 June 2013 15.51 BST

Find this story at 12 June 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Claim on “Attacks Thwarted” by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence

During Keith Alexander’s presentation in Las Vegas, two slides read simply “54 ATTACKS THWARTED.” The NSA, President Obama, and members of Congress have all said NSA spying programs have thwarted more than 50 terrorist plots. But there’s no evidence the claim is true.

UPDATE Dec. 17, 2013: In a new ruling that calls the NSA’s phone metadata surveillance likely unconstitutional, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon cited this article in his assessment of the agency’s claims about thwarted terrorist attacks. Read the ruling here.

Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany,” Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. “So lives have been saved.”

In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.
Interactive: How the NSA’s Claim on Thwarted Terrorist Plots Has Spread

“Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe — saving real lives,” Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. “This isn’t a game. This is real.”

But there’s no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate.

The NSA itself has been inconsistent on how many plots it has helped prevent and what role the surveillance programs played. The agency has often made hedged statements that avoid any sweeping assertions about attacks thwarted.

A chart declassified by the agency in July, for example, says that intelligence from the programs on 54 occasions “has contributed to the [U.S. government’s] understanding of terrorism activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad” — a much different claim than asserting that the programs have been responsible for thwarting 54 attacks.

NSA officials have mostly repeated versions of this wording.

When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander spoke at a Las Vegas security conference in July, for instance, he referred to “54 different terrorist-related activities,” 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in which individuals provided “material support” to terrorism.

But the NSA has not always been so careful.

During Alexander’s speech in Las Vegas, a slide in an accompanying slideshow read simply “54 ATTACKS THWARTED.”

And in a recent letter to NSA employees, Alexander and John Inglis, the NSA’s deputy director, wrote that the agency has “contributed to keeping the U.S. and its allies safe from 54 terrorist plots.” (The letter was obtained by reporter Kevin Gosztola from a source with ties to the intelligence community. The NSA did not respond when asked to authenticate it.)

Asked for clarification of the surveillance programs’ record, the NSA declined to comment.

Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

“Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?” Leahy said at the hearing. “Would you agree with that, yes or no?”

“Yes,” Alexander replied, without elaborating.

It’s impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains classified.

Officials have openly discussed only a few of the cases (see below), and the agency has identified only one — involving a San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to Somalia to support the militant group Al Shabab — in which NSA surveillance played a dominant role.

The surveillance programs at issue fall into two categories: The collection of metadata on all American phone calls under the Patriot Act, and the snooping of electronic communications targeted at foreigners under a 2007 surveillance law. Alexander has said that surveillance authorized by the latter law provided “the initial tip” in roughly half of the 54 cases. The NSA has not released examples of such cases.

After reading the full classified list, Leahy concluded the NSA’s surveillance has some value but still questioned the agency’s figures.
“We’ve heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted … That’s plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements.”

— Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
 

‘The Only Thing We Have to Fear…’ is the CIA; President Truman’s true warning on the CIA

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”President Harry S. Truman.

It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.

Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.

Truman began his article by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations.”

Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things bothering him. He wrote “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”

It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support.

Wallowing in the Bay of Pigs

Arch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles had been offended when young President Kennedy had the temerity to ask questions about CIA plans before the Bay of Pigs debacle, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to mousetrap the President.

Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes, Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” Kennedy would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”

The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to how the Russians might react. The reckless Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball later described as a “sewer of deceit,” relished any chance to confront the Soviet Union and give it, at least, a black eye.

But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual.

When Kennedy himself was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman – as it did to many others – that the disgraced Dulles and his unrepentant associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a president they felt was soft on Communism and get even for their Bay of Pigs fiasco.

‘Cloak and Dagger’

While Truman saw CIA’s attempted mousetrapping of President Kennedy as a particular outrage, his more general complaint is seen in his broader lament that the CIA had become “so removed from its intended role … I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. … It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” Not only shaping policy through its control of intelligence, but also “cloak and dagger” operations, presumably including assassinations.

Truman concluded the op-ed with an admonition that was as clear as the syntax was clumsy: “I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field – and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” The importance and prescient nature of that admonition are even clearer today, a half-century later.

But Truman’s warning fell mostly on deaf ears, at least within Establishment circles. The Washington Post published the op-ed in its early edition on Dec. 22, 1963, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media ignored it. The long hand of the CIA?

In Truman’s view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles as CIA director. Dulles’s forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, “regime change”), and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high by the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.

The Truman Papers

Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only “when I had control.”

Five days after the op-ed appeared, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a “Dear Boss” letter applauding Truman’s outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA “a different animal than the one I tried to set up for you.”

Souers specifically lambasted the attempt “to conduct a ‘war’ invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover.” He also lamented the fact that the agency’s “principal effort” had evolved into causing “revolutions in smaller countries around the globe,” and added: “With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some.” (Again, as true today as it was 50 years ago.)

Clearly, the operational tail of the CIA was wagging its substantive dog — a serious problem that persists to this day.

Fox Guarding Hen House

After Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the patrician, well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that Dulles also mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.

So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour one-on-one with the former president, trying to get him to retract what he had written in his op-ed. Hell No, said Harry.

Not a problem, Dulles decided. Four days later, in a formal memorandum of conversation for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA general counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction for Truman, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”

A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”

Dulles and Dallas

Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA files a fabricated retraction? I believe the answer lies in the fact that in early 1964 Dulles was feeling a lot of heat from many who were suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination. Columnists were asking how the truth could ever be reached, with Allen Dulles as de facto head of the Warren Commission.

Dulles had good reason to fear that Truman’s limited-edition Washington Post op-ed of Dec. 22, 1963, might garner unwanted attention and raise troublesome questions about covert action, including assassination. He would have wanted to be in position to dig out of Larry Houston’s files the Truman “retraction,” in the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud.

As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to protect himself and his associates, were any commissioners or investigators — or journalists — tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played a role in killing Kennedy.

And so, the question: Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and in then covering it up? In my view, the best dissection of the evidence pertaining to the murder appeared in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer is Yes.

Obama Intimidated?

The mainstream media had an allergic reaction to Douglass’s book and gave it almost no reviews. It is, nevertheless, still selling well. And, more important, it seems a safe bet that President Barack Obama knows what it says and maybe has even read it. This may go some way toward explaining why Obama has been so deferential to the CIA, NSA, FBI and the Pentagon.

Could this be at least part of the reason he felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief Leon Panetta to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than leader.

Is this why the President feels he cannot fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony in March? Is this why he allows National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the intermittent snow showers from Snowden show our senior national security officials to have lied — and to have been out of control?

This may be small solace to President Obama, but there is no sign that the NSA documents that Snowden’s has released include the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report on CIA torture. Rather, that report, at least, seems sure to be under Obama’s and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein’s tight control.

But the timorous President has a big problem. He is acutely aware that, if released, the Senate committee report would create a firestorm – almost certainly implicating Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and many other heavy-hitters of whom he appears to be afraid. And so Obama has allowed Brennan to play bureaucratic games, delaying release of the report for more than a year, even though its conclusions are said to closely resemble earlier findings of the CIA’s own Inspector General and the Constitution Project (see below).

Testimony of Ex-CIA General Counsel

Hat tip to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who took the trouble to read the play-by-play of testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by former CIA General Counsel (2009-2013) Stephen W. Preston, nominated (and now confirmed) to be general counsel at the Department of Defense.

Under questioning by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, Preston admitted outright that, contrary to the CIA’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the committee included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”

That “inaccurate information” apparently is thoroughly documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report which, largely because of the CIA’s imaginative foot-dragging, cost taxpayers $40 million. Udall has revealed that the report (which includes 35,000 footnotes) contains a very long section titled “C.I.A. Representations on the C.I.A. Interrogation Program and the Effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Congress.”

Preston also acknowledged that the CIA inadequately informed the Justice Department on interrogation and detention. He said, “CIA’s efforts fell well short of our current practices when it comes to providing information relevant to [the Office of Legal Counsel]’s legal analysis.”

As Katherine Hawkins, the senior investigator for last April’s bipartisan, independent report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, noted in an Oct. 18, 2013 posting, the memos from acting OLC chief, Steven Bradbury, relied very heavily on now-discredited CIA claims that “enhanced interrogation” saved lives, and that the sessions were carefully monitored by medical and psychological personnel to ensure that detainees’ suffering would not rise to the level of torture.

According to Hawkins, Udall complained – and Preston admitted – that, in providing the materials requested by the committee, “the CIA removed several thousand CIA documents that the agency thought could be subjected to executive privilege claims by the President, without any decision by Obama to invoke the privilege.”

Worse still for the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently destroys the agency’s argument justifying torture on the grounds that there was no other way to acquire the needed information save through brutalization. In his answers to Udall, Preston concedes that, contrary to what the agency has argued, it can and has been established that legal methods of interrogation would have yielded the same intelligence.

Is anyone still wondering why our timid President is likely to sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee report for as long as he can? Or why he will let John Brennan redact it to a fare-thee-well, if he is eventually forced to release some of it by pressure from folks who care about things like torture?

It does appear that the newly taciturn CIA Director Brennan has inordinate influence over the President in such matters – not unlike the influence that both DNI Clapper and NSA Director Alexander seem able to exert. In this respect, Brennan joins the dubious company of the majority of his predecessor CIA directors, as they made abundantly clear when they went to inordinate lengths to prevent their torturer colleagues from being held accountable.

A version of this article also appeared at Consortium News.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

Published on Monday, December 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
by Ray McGovern

Find this story at 23 December 2013

Senate Asks C.I.A. to Share Its Report on Interrogations

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the C.I.A. for an internal study done by the agency that lawmakers believe is broadly critical of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program but was withheld from congressional oversight committees.

The committee’s request comes in the midst of a yearlong battle with the C.I.A. over the release of the panel’s own exhaustive report about the program, one of the most controversial policies of the post-Sept. 11 era.

The Senate report, totaling more than 6,000 pages, was completed last December but has yet to be declassified. According to people who have read the study, it is unsparing in its criticism of the now-defunct interrogation program and presents a chronicle of C.I.A. officials’ repeatedly misleading the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal methods that, in the end, produced little valuable intelligence.

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, disclosed the existence of the internal C.I.A. report during an Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. He said he believed it was begun several years ago and “is consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report” although it “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.”

“If this is true,” Mr. Udall said during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline D. Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, “this raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”

The agency responded to the committee report with a vigorous 122-page rebuttal that challenged both the Senate report’s specific facts and its overarching conclusions. John O. Brennan, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers before taking over the C.I.A. this year — and who denounced the interrogation program during his confirmation hearing — delivered the agency’s response to the Intelligence Committee himself.

It is unclear what the agency specifically concluded in its internal review.

Mr. Udall, whose public criticisms of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data has raised his profile in Congress and won him praise from privacy advocates, said he would not support Ms. Krass’s nomination until the C.I.A. provided more information to the committee about the interrogation program.

Ms. Krass did not respond directly to Mr. Udall’s statements about the internal C.I.A. review. Dean Boyd, an agency spokesman, said the agency was “aware of the committee’s request and will respond appropriately.”

Mr. Boyd said that the C.I.A. agreed with a number of the conclusions of the voluminous Senate investigative report, but found “significant errors in the study.”

“C.I.A. and committee staff have had extensive dialogue on this issue, and the agency is prepared to work with the committee to determine the best way forward on potential declassification,” he said.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is the Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, said recently that her committee would soon vote to adopt the report’s executive summary and conclusion, which would then be subject to a formal declassification process before it was publicly released.

Republican members of the committee, angry about what they see as a biased and shoddy investigation by their Democratic colleagues, are planning to make public a rebuttal of their own.

The Senate report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million to produce, began as an attempt to document what was perhaps the most divisive of the Bush administration’s responses to the Sept. 11 attacks. But it has since become enmeshed in the complex politics of the Obama administration.

President Obama ended the detention program as one of his first acts in the Oval Office, and has repeatedly denounced the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods under the program. During a speech in May, he said that the United States had “compromised our basic values by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”

And yet Mr. Obama has repeatedly resisted demands by human rights groups to seek prosecutions for the lawyers who approved the interrogation methods or the people who carried them out, and the White House has been mostly silent during the debate over the past year about declassifying the Senate report.

For all his criticisms of the counterterrorism excesses during the Bush administration, Mr. Obama has put the C.I.A. at the center of his strategy to kill militant suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.

Human rights groups have tried to pressure the White House to intervene to get the Senate report declassified.

“Whether it’s stalling or concealing, the C.I.A. is trying to avoid reckoning with its past abuse,” said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA. “And that’s what makes declassifying the Senate’s report so crucial right now.”

Ms. Krass is a career government lawyer who works at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the arm of the department that advises the White House on the legality of domestic and foreign policies.

The office was particularly controversial during the Bush administration, when lawyers there wrote lengthy memos approving C.I.A. interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as well as signing off on the expansion of surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Under Mr. Obama, the office has approved other controversial practices, including the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric living in Yemen who was an American. Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011 by a C.I.A. drone strike, launched from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.

Much of Tuesday’s hearing was consumed by a debate about whether the White House should be forced to share Justice Department legal memos.

Under polite but persistent questioning by members of both parties, Ms. Krass repeatedly said that while the two congressional intelligence committees need to “fully understand” the legal basis for C.I.A. activities, they were not entitled to see the Justice Department memos that provide the legal blueprint for secret programs.

The opinions “represent pre-decisional, confidential legal advice that has been provided,” she said, adding that the confidentiality of the legal advice was necessary to allow a “full and frank discussion amongst clients and policy makers and their lawyers within the executive branch.”

Senator Feinstein appeared unmoved. “Unless we know the administration’s basis for sanctioning a program, it is very hard to oversee it,” she said.

Still, it is expected that the committee will vote to approve Ms. Krass.

December 17, 2013
By MARK MAZZETTI

Find this story at 17 December 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

British spies ‘knew of detainee abuse’

Aborted inquiry found that British spies knew detainees were abused, deprived of sleep and made to wear hoods.

The Obama Administration has repeatedly said it wishes to close the Guantanamo detention facility [AP]

British spies knew about detainee abuse but were told they did not have to intervene because they might damage relations with the US, a senior British judge has found.

The report, from Peter Gibson, comes from an inquiry intended to examine whether Britain was implicated in the mistreatment of detainees following the 9/11 attacks.

But it was scrapped earlier this year after Libya alleged that Britain was complicit in “rendition” – capturing people suspected of terrorism and transferring them to third countries without legal process.

Gibson found evidence that British spies had been aware of physical assault, sleep deprivation and the use of hoods.

“Officers were advised that, faced with apparent breaches of Geneva Convention standards, there was no obligation to
intervene,” he said in the report.

Britain had been reluctant to complain about the ill-treatment of detainees for fear of damaging relations with allies, including the US, the report said.

Allegations of torture

In some cases, British officials failed to raise objections about renditions when they should have, while ministers were unaware of the operations.
Britain’s MI6 linked to Libya torture scandal

After reviewing 20,000 documents, Gibson said he had found 27 issues that needed further investigation, including allegations of torture.

“Documents indicate that in some instances UK intelligence officers were aware of inappropriate interrogation techniques,” the report said.

“(The) government or its agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.”

In response the British government said on Thursday that a parliamentary committee would take over from Gibson’s role and look at Gibson’s outstanding concerns.

Cabinet minister Ken Clarke said the inquiry’s findings showed Britain’s spy agencies had struggled to come to terms with the threat from armed groups after the 9/11 attacks.

Unprepared and inadequate

“It is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly
placed upon them,” Clarke told parliament.

“Guidance regulating how intelligence officers should act was inadequate, the practices of some of our international partners should have been understood much sooner. Oversight was not robust enough.”

The heads of MI5 and MI6, Britain’s domestic and overseas intelligence agencies, have repeatedly said they would never use, or encourage others to use, torture to gain information.

In November 2010, however, Britain agreed to make payments to 16 former Guantanamo Bay detainees in settlements over claims they were mistreated abroad with the knowledge and in some cases complicity of British spies.

Last updated: 19 Dec 2013 20:22
Source:
AP

Find this story at 19 December 2013

Copyright Aljazeera

Statement by the Detainee Inquiry on publication of its report on 19 December 2013

Today the Government has published a report submitted to the Prime Minister by Sir Peter Gibson and Dame Janet Paraskeva, the Panel of the Detainee Inquiry, on the Inquiry’s work.

The Inquiry’s Report speaks for itself. It is a rigorous, thorough and independent piece of work. It reveals more information than ever before about the workings of Government and the Agencies, on the issues highlighted in the report.

Sir Peter said:

“There are matters which deserve further investigation. That is what the documents have disclosed and we explain why in our report.”

Dame Janet said:

“We have worked hard to put as much as possible into the public domain. I do hope the Government will decide to build on our work in a future Inquiry and give the detainees a chance to have their say.”

The library of documents, the analysis of information and preliminary identification of potential witnesses the Inquiry carried out, will save any subsequent Inquiry a huge amount of time and resource.

The report does not find facts or reach conclusions. It is based on the scrutiny of documents, no witness has yet had the opportunity to explain or add to this information. But the Inquiry has shone a bright light onto issues which might be investigated further by a future Inquiry or on which the Government can take action now.

The Inquiry covered four separate themes: interrogation and treatment issues, rendition, training and guidance as well as policy and communications. Its work revealed 27 separate issues the Inquiry would like to have investigated further and which might be followed up by a future Inquiry.

In summary the report says:

Interrogation and Treatment issues:
Documents indicate that in some instances UK intelligence officers were aware of inappropriate interrogation techniques and mistreatment or allegations of mistreatment of some detainees by liaison partners from other countries.

Rendition
Documents indicate that Government or its Agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.

Training and Guidance
No reason to doubt that instruction to personnel was that detainees must be treated humanely and consistently with UK’s international legal obligations. But officers on the ground needed clear guidance on when and with whom to raise concerns.

Policy and Communications
Documents raise the question whether the Agencies could have identified possible patterns of detainee mistreatment more quickly and whether or not sufficient information was given to the ISC to enable it to perform its duties.

Notes for editors:

The Inquiry’s original task was set out by the Prime Minister when he announced its establishment on 6 July 2010, to: “….look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11”

On 18 January 2012, the then Justice Secretary, told the House: “….. following consultations with Sir Peter Gibson, the chair of the Inquiry we have decided to bring the work of his Inquiry to a conclusion. We have agreed with Sir Peter that the Inquiry should provide Government with a report on its preparatory work to date, highlighting particular themes or issues which might be the subject of further examination. The Government are clear that as much of this report as possible will be made public.”

As the Justice Secretary made clear in his statement to the House, the CPS’ announcement of new criminal investigations to be carried out by the Metropolitan Police meant that the Inquiry start its mandate as originally envisaged.

The Inquiry examined some 20,000 documents and as a result has raised a number of robust questions for a future Inquiry to investigate further and a number of areas where the Government can act now. The vast majority of the documents the Inquiry examined were highly classified.

For more information including the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, Protocol, biographies of Sir Peter Gibson and Dame Janet Paraskeva, and a link to the report please visit: www.detaineeinquiry.org.uk

Find this story at 19 December 2013

Find the report at

© UK Crown Copyright 2013

MI6 officers told to ignore Geneva convention breaches, Gibson report finds

British intelligence officers were told to ignore evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention when detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan were being interrogated in 2002, a report by the aborted inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture has found.
The inquiry was axed earlier this year after fresh criminal investigations were launched into allegations involving Libyan victims Photo: EPA

British intelligence officers were told to ignore evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention when detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan were being interrogated in 2002, a report by the aborted inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture has found.

The orders from MI6’s head quarters to intelligence officers came as Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was telling MPs that anyone who is captured “should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention”.

The report published by Sir Peter Gibson disclosed that in 2002 spies working for MI6 overseas were told to turn a “blind eye” to any evidence they witnessed of breaches of the Convention, which sets out how prisoners should be treated.

Documents uncovered by the inquiry showed that “officers were advised that, faced with apparent breaches of Geneva Convention standards, there was no obligation to intervene”, the report said.

“Officers were also advised that such conduct should only be raised with the detaining authority ‘if circumstances allow’. Officers were not advised to cease any interview immediately if they felt that the detainee was not being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards.”
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Mr Blair had told MPs on January 16, 2002 : “I totally agree that anybody who is captured by American troops, British troops or anyone else should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention and proper international norms.”

Yet two days later, Mr Blair wrote on the bottom of a Number 10 note about detainees in Guantanamo: “The key is to find out how they are being treated.

“Though I was initially sceptical about claims of torture, we must make clear to the US that any such action wd be totally unacceptable & v. quickly establish that it isn’t happening” [sic].

The partly-redacted report recommended 27 areas which should be examined further, adding that it “would also want to put on its recognition of the extreme harshness of the conditions and the treatment experienced by the detainees”.

One area it wanted to examine was whether “UK officers may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee”.

The inquiry was axed earlier this year after fresh criminal investigations were launched into allegations involving Libyan victims. The report also found that Britain “may have become inappropriately” involved in some cases of rendition of suspected terrorists.

The heads of both MI5 and MI6 have been asked to give their responses to MPs on the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is investigating the claims, by February.

Ken Clarke, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of the inquiry, said the report “finds no evidence in the documents to support any allegation that UK intelligence officers were directly responsible for the mistreatment of detainees held by other countries overseas”.

He added that it was important when considering the report to bear in mind it was a period “when we and our international partners were suddenly adapting to a completely new scale and type of threat from fundamentalist religious extremists.

Mr Clarke said: “It is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly placed on them.”

He said: “There is some damage to our reputation which prides itself as a beacon of justice, human rights and the rule of law. If failures and mistakes were made in this period that is a matter of sincere regret.”

Jack Straw, who was Labour foreign secretary at the time, flatly denied that he knowingly facilitated the torture of British citizens by US authorities, even though he authorised their transfer to Guantanamo Bay.

By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent
4:34PM GMT 19 Dec 2013

Find this story at 19 December 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

Sir Christopher Curwen -obituary; Sir Christopher Curwen was the MI6 Chief who oversaw one of his Service’s greatest coups — getting Oleg Gordievsky out of Moscow

Sir Christopher Curwen , who has died aged 84, was head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) from 1985 to 1988, and it was under his aegis that the Service brought off one of its most spectacular coups, the exfiltration from Moscow of the agent Oleg Gordievsky.

Successively code-named FELIKS and OVATION after being recruited by SIS in 1974, Gordievsky was its star source inside the KGB. He had provided valuable reports at a critical time in the Cold War, a period in which paranoia at the Kremlin had become so pronounced that Nato’s 1983 ABLE ARCHER exercise had been misinterpreted in Moscow as a possible cover for a surprise attack on the Soviet Bloc.

As well as producing enormous quantities of documents from the rezidentura (KGB station) in London, where he had been posted in June 1982 , Gordievsky had identified KGB personnel in the First Chief Directorate ’s British and Scandinavian department and had shed light on dozens of past cases.

While posted to Copenhagen, Gordievsky had alerted SIS to two of the KGB’s most important sources in Norway: Gunvar Haavik and Arne Treholt. Code-named GRETA, Haavik was a secretary in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had been spying since she had conducted a love affair in 1947 with a Soviet while she was working at the Norwegian embassy in Moscow. Haavik had been arrested in January 1977 in the act of passing information to her KGB case officer in an Oslo suburb, and confessed to having been a spy for almost 30 years. Arne Treholt, also employed by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, was arrested in January 1984 in possession of 66 classified documents . He was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment.

Gordievsky’s greatest triumph, however, was to prevent a potentially massive breach of security in MI5. This was the unmasking of Michael Bettaney, who since December 1982 had been working for the Soviet counter-espionage section, and had made three anonymous approaches to the KGB rezident (head of station) in London, Arkadi Gouk, offering to supply him with MI5 secrets. SIS’s tip from Gordievsky led to a discreet mole-hunt, swiftly conducted inside MI5 by Eliza Manningham-Buller, who identified the culprit without compromising the source of the original tip. In April 1984 Bettaney was sentenced to 23 years’ imprisonment .

With scalps such as these, Gordievsky was considered SIS’s most valuable source, and elaborate measures had been taken to protect him. He was, for example, given the front-door key to a flat, close to the Soviet embassy in London, to which he could disappear with his family should the need arise.

Curwen’s appointment as “C” (as the head of MI6 is known) coincided with just such a crisis. On Friday May 17 1985, having just been promised the job of rezident (head of station) in London , Gordievsky was suddenly summoned back to Moscow, supposedly for consultations.

On his arrival Gordievsky realised that his apartment had been searched; and when he reached FCD headquarters he was accused of being a spy. When he denied it, his interrogators used drugs in an unsuccessful attempt to extract a confession, and he concluded that, although the KGB had been tipped off to his dual role, there was insufficient evidence to justify an arrest. Although he remained under constant surveillance, in late July Gordievsky was able to shake off his watchers while jogging in a park and send an emergency signal to SIS requesting a rescue .

The “signal” was nothing more elaborate than Gordievsky’s appearing on a pre-arranged street corner, at a particular time, carrying a Harrods shopping bag — but it was enough to prompt Curwen to brief Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Office private secretary, Charles Powell, who immediately flew to Scotland, where the Prime Minister was staying with the Queen at Balmoral. After consultation with the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, Mrs Thatcher approved a high-risk plan to get Gordievsky out of Moscow and into the West.

The ruse — originally conceived by John Scarlett, himself a future Chief of SIS — was for MI6’s Moscow station commander, Viscount Asquith, to play the “Good Samaritan” by driving a pregnant member of the embassy staff in his Saab for medical treatment in Helsinki; Gordievsky — having evaded his KGB watchers — joined the car at a rendezvous outside Leningrad and was driven over the frontier with Finland at Viborg. He was then driven to Trömso in Norway, and the next day flew from Oslo to London.

Gordievsky was briefly accommodated at a country house in the Midlands, where Curwen visited him, and then at Fort Monckton, Gosport, where he underwent an 80-day debriefing conducted by SIS’s principal Kremlinologist, Gordon Barrass. Among Gordievsky’s other visitors was the US Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Casey, who was flown down to the fort for a lunch hosted by Curwen, a celebration of one of SIS’s most impressive post-war coups.

Although Gordievsky’s safe exfiltration was a source of great pride for Curwen and his staff, there remained considerable concern about precisely how the agent had been compromised. One possibility was that, after so many setbacks, the KGB had worked out for itself that a mole had been at work within the organisation. Or had Gordievsky’s dual role somehow been leaked by a mole?

It was not until the CIA arrested the Soviet spy Aldrich Ames in February 1994 that an explanation was offered. Ames claimed to having identified Gordievsky to the Soviets as a source who had penetrated the KGB in Denmark and London — although there were doubts that he was telling the truth.

Gordievsky’s defection was nevertheless a devastating blow for the KGB, and the expulsion of the London rezidentura, ordered on the basis of his information, had a colossal impact on the organisation .

Resettled under a new identity near London, Gordievsky published his memoirs, Last Stop Execution, in 1994. As well as describing his role in compromising KGB spies in Norway and in Sweden, he revealed that the KGB rezidentura in London had cultivated several highly-placed trade union leaders (among them Richard Briginshaw and Ray Buckton), and that the Soviet embassy had been in touch with what he termed “confidential contacts” – influential individuals (including three Left-wing Labour MPs, Joan Lester, Jo Richardson and Joan Maynard) who could be relied upon to take the Kremlin’s lead on political controversies.

The constitutional implications of Gordievsky’s disclosures were considered sufficiently important for Curwen to brief the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, who in turn called in Tony Blair, as leader of the Opposition, to explain the situation to him.

The son of a vicar, Christopher Keith Curwen was born on April 9 1929 and educated at Sherborne, where he was a friend of David Sheppard, later the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. During National Service as a second-lieutenant with the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars in Malaya, Curwen was mentioned in dispatches for his gallantry in jungle warfare against communist guerrillas. An officer who served alongside him in Malaya said of Curwen: “There are some people you’d go into the jungle with and some you wouldn’t. I would be very happy to go back into the jungle with Chris… He was tough and fair. He was an excellent officer and his men liked him very much.”

Curwen went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was a keen rower and occasional rugby player. He joined the Cambridge Union but seems to have shown little interest in politics. In the summer of 1951 he drove across the Sahara after visiting his elder brother, then working in the Colonial Service in Nigeria.

In July 1952 he joined SIS and two years later, in 1954, was posted to Thailand to work for Robert Hemblys-Scales, where he became fluent in Thai. In July 1956 he was moved to Vientiane, where he married his first wife, Vera Noom Tai, a physiotherapist who later worked at St Thomas’s Hospital.

Curwen returned to head office in Broadway in 1958, but by 1961 he was back in Bangkok, before spending two years in Kuala Lumpur. After another spell in London , in May 1968 he began a three-year appointment as SIS’s liaison officer in Washington, DC . A Washington colleague described him as “a very gentle chap. I can’t think of anyone more low-key than him.”

Other diplomats who worked alongside Curwen described him as hardworking and discreet. “[He] was very scrupulous,” one recalled. “He used to refer all his activities for approval to me and I give him full marks for that. Of course, there may have been some that he didn’t refer to me.”

In 1977 Curwen’s first marriage was dissolved, and in the same year he married his former secretary, Helen Stirling. He was posted to Geneva as head of station, and in May 1980 was back in London as “C”’s Deputy, succeeding Sir Colin Figures in July 1985 — just in time to be confronted by the Gordievsky crisis.

Mrs Thatcher had been less than impressed by MI6’s performance in the months leading up to the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982. It is said that Curwen’s appointment as C was promoted by Sir Antony Duff, the director-general of MI5.

His selection as “C” was unusual in that “Far East Hands” are rarely appointed to the post, which more usually goes to a Kremlinologist or Middle East specialist. Curwen’s four-year tenure had the advantage of a burgeoning budget, after the Prime Minister insisted that more funds be made available for SIS after years of financial cuts.

Curwen was appointed CMG in 1982 and KCMG in 1986.

On his retirement in November 1988, Curwen succeeded Colin Figures as the Cabinet Intelligence Coordinator, helping the Prime Minister to manage administrative issues across the whole of the intelligence community. In 1991 he recommended in a review, undertaken on behalf of the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence Committee, that MI5 should continue to lead the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in operations against the Provisional IRA.

He finally retired in 1991, when he took on a part-time role as a member of the Security Commission, a body which became redundant when the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee was created three years later .

Sir Christopher Curwen, who retired near Bath, listed his interests in Who’s Who as books, gardening and motoring.

He had five children: a son and two daughters with his first wife, and a son and a daughter with his second.

Sir Christopher Curwen, born April 9 1929, died December 18 2013

7:25PM GMT 23 Dec 2013

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Gibson report: British role in al-Qa’ida renditions exposed

MI6 agents in Afghanistan were told they were not obliged to intervene if they witnessed suspected terrorists being harmed by their American captors, an official inquiry into allegations Britain was complicit in torture has disclosed.

It also concluded that UK operatives “may have become inappropriately” involved in some cases of rendition of captives who were believed to be al-Qa’ida fighters.

Sir Peter Gibson’s investigation listed 27 areas he believed needed further inquiry, including whether the Government should have done more to obtain the release of UK nationals locked up at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

It suggested that the Labour minister Jack Straw should have asked more questions when he was Foreign Secretary about the UK’s possible involvement in activities in breach of the Geneva Convention.

Documents released by Sir Peter, a former High Court judge, showed an MI6 officer reported back to headquarters in London what he had seen as American officers interrogated captives at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, in January 2002.

A telegram he received in reply read: “It appears from your description that they may not be being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards. Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.”

He was reminded that the “Americans understand that we cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it”.

But the telegram made clear there was no automatic requirement to intervene if UK officers witnessed inhuman treatment of captives. It said: “If circumstances allow, you should consider drawing this to the attention of a suitably senior US official locally.”

No official complaint over the episode was passed to the American authorities and seven days later Tony Blair reassured MPs that detainees in the US detention camp of Guantanamo were being treated humanely.

Sir Peter said he wished he has been able to investigate further “whether in some cases, UK officers may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee”.

The inquiry was set up two and a half years ago by David Cameron but was heavily criticised by human rights lawyers who abandoned co-operation.

It was scrapped last year and responsibility for examining alleged complicity transferred to a parliamentary committee. Human rights groups denounced the decision as a “whitewash”.

Sir Peter on Thursday published an interim report setting out the reasons he believed his inquiry should be re-established.

In a damaging finding, he said: “A theme that runs through a number of the lead cases considered by the inquiry is whether treatment issues – such as sleep deprivation, hooding and media reports of waterboarding – were raised appropriately with the relevant liaison partner responsible for the detention and treatment in question”.

He said the inquiry had received papers suggesting that in “some instances there was a reluctance to raise treatment issues” for fear of harming relations with the United States.

The inquiry also found that while no formal request was put to the UK, records show the Government was aware that US officials were considering the use of Diego Garcia, an island in the British Indian Ocean Territory, for holding or transiting detainees between November 2001 and January 2002.”

The report said: “There is an issue as to whether the Government and the Agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.”

Mr Straw told MPs on Thursday: “As Foreign Secretary I acted at all times in a manner which was fully consistent with my legal duties with national and international law. And I was never in any way complicit with the unlawful rendition or detention of individuals by the United States or any other state.”

Nigel Morris
Thursday, 19 December 2013

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Britain’s MI6 linked to Libya torture scandal

Al Jazeera investigates how information gathered through torture of Gaddafi dissidents was used to track Libyans in UK.
Last updated: 18 Dec 2013 18:04

Intelligence extracted by torture in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison has been linked to arrests of Libyan dissidents in the United Kingdom, an investigation by Al Jazeera’s People and Power has revealed.

In this exclusive report, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the anti-Gaddafi resistance group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), explains that he and fellow leader Sami al-Saadi were subjected to torture by his Libyan interrogators, which forced them to give up the names of innocent residents in the UK.

Al-Saadi and Belhaj also claim foreign agents, including British agents, questioned them in Abu Salim prison. These allegations form the basis of a lawsuit against the British government.

According to Belhaj’s lawyers, the men and their families were pawns in a deal struck by Britain in 2004.

After Gaddafi’s fall, the role played by British intelligence agencies was discovered.

“When the rebels came to Tripoli they ransacked all sorts of buildings … associated with Gaddafi’s old regime,” said Al Jazeera’s Juliana Ruhfus, who was involved in the investigation.

“It was in the office of spy chief Moussa Koussa that they found a stash of documents that revealed, in startling detail, the collaboration between British and Libyan intelligence services.”

Belhaj says he was pressured by Gaddafi’s interrogators to give up information about Libyans living in Britain.

“Sometimes they would come to me with the questions and answers already done and force me to sign it. They would mention names to me and say that these people supported armed activities,” he said.

One of the men named under torture was Ziad Hashem, a Libyan who obtained asylum in the UK after Belhaj’s rendition. Hashem claims he was arrested in Britain without any charges: “We were just put in prison arbitrarily without any explanation.”

Hashem is part of yet another law suit against the British government. One of the things he is hoping to reveal is the flow of information between Libyan and British intelligence agencies which led to his detention.

The British government says it is committed to investigating allegations of mistreatment, that it stands firmly against torture and that it never asks any other country to carry it out.

But the dissidents accuse the British government of being complicit in their rendition into Gaddafi’s prisons, showing Al Jazeera documents from MI6 tipping off Gaddafi’s intelligence apparatus about their flight movements.

Libya: Renditions airs on People & Power on Al Jazeera English from Wednesday 18 December at 10.30pm London time (22.30 GMT) and is available online at aje.me/libyarenditions

 

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U.S. Lionizes Mandela In Death … But Labeled Him a Terrorist While He Was Alive

CIA Central In Mandela’s Arrest … Kept Him On Terrorist List Until 2008

Everyone from President Obama to the mainstream news is lionizing Nelson Mandela.

But the New York Times reported in 1990:

The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.

The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress, provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.

***

Newsweek reported in February that the agency was believed to have been involved.

***

At the time of Mr. Mandela’s arrest in August 1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups like the African National Congress than did South Africa’s then-fledgling security service.

***

A retired South African intelligence official, Gerard Ludi, was quoted in the report as saying that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s capture, the C.I.A. had put an undercover agent into the inner circle of the African National Congress group in Durban.

Newsweek confirmed this story yesterday.

The Daily Beast notes:

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

…In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”

Indeed, Nelson Mandela was only removed from the U.S. “terrorist” list in 2008.

Mandela was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy. And anyone – even U.S. citizens – critical of U.S. policy may be labelled a bad guy.

Posted on December 6, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

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© 2007 – 2013 Washington’s Blog

Dark Legacy: The CIA Helped South Africa Put Nelson Mandela in Prison [DOCUMENTS]

As the United States mourns the loss of one of the world’s greatest leaders, it’s important to remember the long and tenuous relationship between the U.S. and Nelson Mandela. Long before Mandela was South Africa’s first black president, he was considered a radical and a terrorist by both the white South African regime and the United States. His close association with South African communists, as well as his encouragement of civil disobedience and sabotage, was enough to convince the CIA to get involved. Shortly after he was released in 1990 from a 28-year stint in prison, the New York Times reported that an undercover CIA agent within Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was pivotal in Mandela’s 1962 arrest. The agent provided “South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him.” An unidentified source from within the CIA also told the New York Times, We have turned Mandela over to the South African Security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. The CIA maintained an extensive file on Mandela, even while he was in prison. The document below, declassified in 2001, shows how in 1986 the CIA ran hypothetical scenarios to see what South Africa would be like if Mandela were free. The documents also show an analysis of how prison may have changed Mandela’s view on violence as a protest tactic. The next document, seen below, was declassified by the CIA in 2003 and dates back to 1961. One year before Mandela was arrested, the CIA wrote of him: Nelson Mandela, who led the strike campaign in May, reportedly stated in mid-September that an ANC sabotage campaign would begin in the near future. Mandela said that the campaign would concentrate initially on telephone lines and government offices but later might include roadblocks and railroad sabotage. Nelson Mandela is a world hero for his work in the fight against racial and economic inequality and oppression. This week, as the United States reflects back on Mandela and his struggle, it must also remember the role that it played in maintaining the status-quo in South Africa.

Published:9:23 pm EST, December 7, 2013| Updated:10:03 am EST, December 8, 2013| Comment | 1.2k By Matthew Guariglia

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Document 1

Document 2

“One of Our Greatest Coups”: The CIA & the Capture of Nelson Mandela

As South Africa prepares to hold a state funeral for Nelson Mandela, we look at how the CIA helped the South African government track down and capture Mandela in 1962. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.” Several news outlets have reported the actual source of the tip that led to the arrest of Mandela was a CIA official named Donald Rickard. On Thursday, Democracy Now! attempted to reach Rickard at his home in Colorado. On two occasions, a man who picked up the phone hung up when we asked to speak with Donald Rickard. The activist group RootsAction has launched a campaign to urge the CIA to open its files on Mandela and South Africa, and the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has questioned why corporate media outlets have largely ignored the story. We speak to journalist Andrew Cockburn, who first reported on the CIA link to Mandela’s arrest in 1986 in The New York Times.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As South Africa prepares to hold a state funeral for Nelson Mandela, we end today’s show looking back at what happened on the day of August 5th, 1962, when South African police captured Mandela. On that day, Mandela was arrested while traveling disguised as a chauffeur. He would be held in jail for the next 27 years. On Tuesday, President Obama referenced Mandela’s time in jail during his speech at the memorial.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: He would endure a brutal imprisonment that began in the time of Kennedy and Khrushchev, and reached the final days of the Cold War. Emerging from prison, without the force of arms, he would, like Abraham Lincoln, hold his country together when it threatened to break apart.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: While Obama referenced the Kennedy administration in his memorial, he made no mention of the multiple reports that the CIA, under Kennedy, tipped off the apartheid South African regime in 1962 about Mandela’s whereabouts. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest, a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, quote, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.”

AMY GOODMAN: Several news outlets have reported the actual source of the tip that led to the arrest of Mandela was a CIA official named Donald Rickard. On Thursday, Democracy Now! attempted to reach Rickard at his home in Colorado. On two occasions, a man who picked up the phone hung up when we asked to speak with Donald Rickard. Last year, Rickard denied the reports in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, but refused to talk about his time in South Africa.

Meanwhile, the activist group RootsAction has launched a campaign to urge the CIA to open its files on Mandela and South Africa.

We go now to Andrew Cockburn. He first reported on the CIA link to Mandela’s arrest in 1986 in The New York Times. He’s now the Washington editor for Harper’s magazine. His latest piece, on John Kerry and U.S. foreign policy, is called “Secretary of Nothing.” It’s out now in Harper’s.

Andrew, welcome back to Democracy Now!

ANDREW COCKBURN: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you found out in the mid-’80s. At this point, Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for over 20 years.

ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. He had been—I found out—I reported that he had been—as you mentioned, that he had been arrested, thanks to a tip from the CIA, while disguised as a chauffeur. He was actually—what I had heard at the time was he was actually on his way to meet an undercover CIA, an American diplomat who was actually a CIA official. So it made it rather easy for them to alert the South Africans where to find him.

I mentioned—I thought it was particularly interesting to report when I did in 1986, because at that point it was just when the sanctions were being introduced over—voted through by the Congress over President Reagan’s veto. So, and I had noticed that in the sanctions legislation, it said there should be no contact, official contact, with the South African military, and so on and so forth, except when intelligence required that, you know, they did have to have contact. So it was ongoing, this unholy relationship, which had led to Mandela being arrested and locked up for all those years, continued on through the ’60s, through the ’70s, through the ’80s, absolutely flourished, with the—for example, the NSA routinely handing over intercepts of the ANC to the South African secret police. And it was absolutely outrageous.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the National Security Agency that is, of course, the subject of so much global controversy right now, the NSA gathering this intelligence to give to the apartheid regime.

ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. I mean, it was—it was just absolutely routine. And, you know, we have to—this was all—maybe they would have done it anyway, but it was certainly in the Cold War context. I mean, there was—it’s hard to remember now what a sort of lather people got into about, you know, the Soviet threat to the trade routes. And there was a naval base, African naval base—or there is one at Simon’s Town, near the Cape. And there was, I remember, sort of the right—the defense lobby were continually going on about the terrible threat of the Soviets maybe getting hold of, you know, Simon’s Town, seizing vital facilities.

And it was an absolute—I mean, people, not surprising—well, people have sort of forgotten just how—what a Cold War battleground southern Africa was. Not only did they turn over Mandela, but they had this very close relationship. U.S. military intelligence cooperated very closely with South African military intelligence, giving them information about what was going on, what they were collecting in the rest of southern Africa. And, in fact, you know, the two countries—CIA and the South Africans collaborated on, you know, assisting the UNITA in the horrible civil war in Angola that went on for years and years with thousands of people dying. So, you know, this wasn’t just a flash in the pan, the tip-off that led to the coordination on the arrest of Mandela. It was absolutely a very deep, very thorough relationship that went on for decades.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in that vein, I wanted to ask you about the 1996 report by Jeff Stein in Salon that the CIA was involved in sabotaging the ANC for years.

ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stein quotes Mike Leach, a former South African intelligence operative who worked closely with the CIA, and Leach claimed that the CIA shared the recipe for a prussic acid, a, quote, “clear compound which, if inhaled, would give a massive coronary. If a doctor’s not looking for [prussic] acid he’ll put (the cause of death) down to natural causes.” Another trick, Stein writes, was to, quote, “launder anti-apartheid T-shirts in a fiberglass solution and hand them out to demonstrators, who would soon be convulsed in uncontrollable itching.” The CIA reportedly also offered training in bugging and wiretaps.

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, that’s right. It shows that, you know, this is the agency that gave us the exploding cigar sent to Fidel Castro, or designed to be sent to Fidel Castro. You know, the sort of fascination with these rather puerile tricks went on and, yeah, were considered. I’d never heard any report that they actually did manage to give anyone a coronary or cause them frantic itching, but it was certainly, certainly in the scheme.

I mean, there was, you know, the CIA—and the other side of it is, of course, the CIA was meanwhile spying on the South Africans and had very good report on the, for instance, the South African nuclear program and the collaboration, the very active collaboration, of the Israelis in that program, which they fed back to Washington, when of course nothing was ever done about it. So, you know, they knew perfectly well what was going on, but no action was ever taken.

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Cockburn, you write in your 1986 piece that the clause in the new law, the comprehensive anti-sanctions—the comprehensive anti-apartheid sanctions bill that was introduced by Ron Dellums, the clause in it exempted intelligence cooperation from sanctions. That’s very important.

ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. I mean, that was slipped in—well, not slipped, I don’t know—inserted, obviously, in the legislation by the intelligence people here. Even though they may have regretted the whole imposition of sanctions anyway, they made sure that their unholy relationship was ongoing. And this, you know, 1986, and as I said, we know—we saw the fruits of it ongoing through the rest of that decade with the war in Angola. I mean, it was a huge operation that people have completely forgotten about now.

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew, we have to wrap up, but the Philadelphia journalist and professor Linn Washington wrote a piece this week, “Obama Failed to Deliver Long-Overdue Apology to Mandela.” Your thoughts, as we wrap?

ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, I think, yeah, he did, certainly. And it would be nice if, you know, there was some acknowledgment of just how—you know, of the relationship that helped sustain apartheid for all those years. I mean, it couldn’t—I don’t think it would have existed or survived with such force, let alone keeping—you know, sending Mandela to jail, if it hadn’t had such thoroughgoing support from this end, from here in Washington.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Andrew Cockburn, I want to thank you for being with us. And, of course, President Obama has continually talked about the inspiration Nelson Mandela was in his own life and activism. Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s magazine, in 1986 wrote a piece about the CIA’s involvement in the capture of Nelson Mandela. His latest piece, on John Kerry and U.S. foreign policy, which we hope to talk to you about at a future time, “Secretary of Nothing,” it’s out now in Harper’s.

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Friday, December 13, 2013

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