Deadly Attack in Libya Was Major Blow to C.I.A. Efforts

WASHINGTON — The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time of increasing instability in the North African nation.

Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.

“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. “We got our eyes poked out.”

The C.I.A.’s surveillance targets in Benghazi and eastern Libya include Ansar al-Sharia, a militia that some have blamed for the attack, as well as suspected members of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Eastern Libya is also being buffeted by strong crosscurrents that intelligence operatives are trying to monitor closely. The killing of Mr. Stevens has ignited public anger against the militias, underscored on Friday when thousands of Libyans took to the streets of Benghazi to demand that the groups be disarmed. The makeup of militias varies widely; some are moderate, while others are ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis.

“The region’s deeply entrenched Salafi community is undergoing significant upheaval, with debate raging between a current that is amenable to political integration and a more militant strand that opposes democracy,” Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who closely follows Libya and visited there recently, wrote in a paper this month, “The Struggle for Security in Eastern Libya.”

American intelligence operatives also assisted State Department contractors and Libyan officials in tracking shoulder-fired missiles taken from the former arsenals of the former Libyan Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces; they aided in efforts to secure Libya’s chemical weapons stockpiles; and they helped train Libya’s new intelligence service, officials said.

Senior American officials acknowledged the intelligence setback, but insisted that information was still being collected using a variety of informants on the ground, systems that intercept electronic communications like cellphone conversations and satellite imagery. “The U.S. isn’t close to being blind in Benghazi and eastern Libya,” said an American official.

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., the State Department and the White House declined to comment on the matter on Sunday.

Within months of the start of Libyan revolution in February 2011, the C.I.A. began building a meaningful but covert presence in Benghazi, a locus of the rebel efforts to oust the government of Colonel Qaddafi.

Though the agency has been cooperating with the new post-Qaddafi Libyan intelligence service, the size of the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi apparently surprised some Libyan leaders. The deputy prime minister, Mustafa Abushagour, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal last week saying that he learned about some of the delicate American operations in Benghazi only after the attack on the mission, in large part because a surprisingly large number of Americans showed up at the Benghazi airport to be evacuated.

“We have no problem with intelligence sharing or gathering, but our sovereignty is also key,” said Mr. Abushagour.

The attack has raised questions about the adequacy of security preparations at the two American compounds in Benghazi: the American mission, the main diplomatic facility where Mr. Stevens and another American diplomat died of smoke inhalation after an initial attack, and an annex a half-mile away that encompassed four buildings inside a low-walled compound.

From among these buildings, the C.I.A. personnel carried out their secret missions. The New York Times agreed to withhold locations and details of these operations at the request of Obama administration officials, who said that disclosing such information could jeopardize future sensitive government activities and put at risk American personnel working in dangerous settings.

In Benghazi, both compounds were temporary homes in a volatile city teeming with militants, and they were never intended to become permanent diplomatic missions with appropriate security features built into them.

Neither was heavily guarded, and the annex was never intended to be a “safe house,” as initial accounts suggested. Two of the mission’s guards — Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty, former members of the Navy SEALs — were killed just outside the villa’s front gate. A mortar round struck the roof of the building where the Americans had scrambled for cover.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced last week the creation of a review board to examine the attacks. The board is to be led by a veteran diplomat and former undersecretary of state, Thomas R. Pickering.

The F.B.I. has sent investigators — many from its New York field office — to Benghazi, but they have been hampered by the city’s tenuous security environment and the fact that they arrived more than a day after the attack occurred, according to senior American officials.

Complicating the investigation, the officials said, is that many of the Americans who were evacuated from Benghazi after the attack are now scattered across Europe and the United States. It is also unclear, one of the officials said, whether there was much forensic evidence that could be extracted from the scene of the attacks.

Investigators and intelligence officials are now focusing on the possibility that the attackers were members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or at least were in communication with the group during the four hours that elapsed between the initial attack at the mission and the second one at the mission’s annex.

…

September 23, 2012
By ERIC SCHMITT, HELENE COOPER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Find this story at 23 September 2012

© 2012 The New York Times Company

Mexican official: CIA ‘manages’ drug trade

Spokesman for Chihuahua state says US agencies don’t want to end drug trade, a claim denied by other Mexican officials.

Juarez, Mexico – The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade”.

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico’s most violent states – one which directly borders Texas – going on the record with such accusations is unique.

“It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”

A spokesman for the CIA in Washington wouldn’t comment on the accusations directly, instead he referred Al Jazeera to an official website.

Accusations are ‘baloney’

Villanueva is not a high ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico’s foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as “baloney”.

“I think the CIA and DEA [US Drug Enforcement Agency] are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs,” Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told Al Jazeera during an interview inside his SUV. “We have excellent collaboration with the US.”

Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico’s political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of US drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Drug war ‘illusions’

“The war on drugs is an illusion,” Hugo Almada Mireles, professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a reason to intervene in Latin America.”

“The CIA wants to control the population; they don’t want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at [Operation] Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched US exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.

Blaming the gringos for Mexico’s problems has been a popular sport south of the Rio Grande ever since the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, when the US conquered most of present day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico from its southern neighbour. But operations such as Fast and Furious show that reality can be stranger than fiction when it comes to the drug war and relations between the US and Mexico. If the case hadn’t been proven, the idea that US agents were actively putting weapons into the hands of Mexican gangsters would sound absurd to many.

‘Conspiracy theories’

“I think it’s easy to become cynical about American and other countries’ involvement in Latin America around drugs,” Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House on drug control policy, told Al Jazeera. “Statements [accusing the CIA of managing the drug trade] should be backed up with evidence… I don’t put much stake in it.”

Villanueva’s accusations “might be a way to get some attention to his region, which is understandable but not productive or grounded in reality”, Sabet said. “We have sort of ‘been there done that’ with CIA conspiracy theories.”

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Dark Alliance, a series of investigative reports linking CIA missions in Nicaragua with the explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America’s ghettos.

In order to fund Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s socialist government, the CIA partnered with Colombian cartels to move drugs into Los Angeles, sending profits back to Central America, the series alleged.

“There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking,” US Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Other newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, slammed Dark Alliance, and the editor of the Mercury News eventually wrote that the paper had over-stated some elements in the story and made mistakes in the journalistic process, but that he stood by many of the key conclusions.

Widespread rumours

“It’s true, they want to control it,” a mid-level official with the Secretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico’s equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA’s policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with US officials working in Juarez.

Acceptance of these claims within some elements of Mexico’s government and security services shows the difficulty in pursuing effective international action against the drug trade.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

“Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada’s] father, Ismael Zambada and ‘Chapo’ Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs… into… the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels,” Zambada’s lawyers wrote as part of his defence. “Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico’s oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the US and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin “El Chapo”, the cartel’s billionaire leader and one of the world’s most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck – likely with collaboration from guards – further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

“It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo,” Mireles said. “But this is not the objective.” He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo’s escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

Political changes

After an election hit by reported irregularities, Enrique Pena Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to be sworn in as Mexico’s president on December 1.

He wants to open a high-level dialogue with the US about the drug war, but has said legalisation of some drugs is not an option. Some hardliners in the US worry that Nieto will make a deal with some cartels, in order to reduce violence.

“I am hopeful that he will not return to the PRI party of the past which was corrupt and had a history of turning a blind eye to the drug cartels,” said Michael McCaul, a Republican Congressman from Texas.

…

Find this story at 24 July 2012

Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 24 Jul 2012 14:16

Follow Chris Arsenault on Twitter: @AJEchris

Source:
Al Jazeera And Agencies

Hexagon KH-9, Top Secret Spy Satellite Project, Finally Outed After Decades Of Silence

DANBURY, Connecticut (AP) — For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret. And though they worked long hours under intense deadlines, sometimes missing family holidays and anniversaries, they could tell no one — not even their wives and children — what they did.

They were engineers, scientists, draftsmen and inventors — “real cloak-and-dagger guys,” says Fred Marra, 78, with a hearty laugh.

He is sitting in the food court at the Danbury Fair mall, where a group of retired co-workers from the former Perkin-Elmer Corp. gather for a weekly coffee. Gray-haired now and hard of hearing, they have been meeting here for 18 years. They while away a few hours nattering about golf and politics, ailments and grandchildren. But until recently, they were forbidden to speak about the greatest achievement of their professional lives.

“Ah, Hexagon,” Ed Newton says, gleefully exhaling the word that stills feels almost treasonous to utter in public.

It was dubbed “Big Bird” and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles (100 kilometers) of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth’s atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.

The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

Hexagon was declassified in September. Finally Marra, Newton and others can tell the world what they worked on all those years at “the office.”

“My name is Al Gayhart and I built spy satellites for a living,” announced the 64-year-old retired engineer to the stunned bartender in his local tavern as soon as he learned of the declassification. He proudly repeats the line any chance he gets.

“It was intensely demanding, thrilling and the greatest experience of my life,” says Gayhart, who was hired straight from college and was one of the youngest members of the Hexagon “brotherhood”.

He describes the white-hot excitement as teams pored over hand-drawings and worked on endless technical problems, using “slide-rules and advanced degrees” (there were no computers), knowing they were part of such a complicated space project. The intensity would increase as launch deadlines loomed and on the days when “the customer” — the CIA and later the Air Force — came for briefings. On at least one occasion, former President George H.W. Bush, who was then CIA director, flew into Danbury for a tour of the plant.

Though other companies were part of the project — Eastman Kodak made the film and Lockheed Corp. built the satellites — the cameras and optics systems were all made at Perkin-Elmer, then the biggest employer in Danbury.

“There were many days we arrived in the dark and left in the dark,” says retired engineer Paul Brickmeier, 70.

He recalls the very first briefing on Hexagon after Perkin-Elmer was awarded the top secret contract in 1966. Looking around the room at his 30 or so colleagues, Brickmeier thought, “How on Earth is this going to be possible?”

One thing that made it possible was a hiring frenzy that attracted the attention of top engineers from around the Northeast. Perkin-Elmer also commissioned a new 270,000-square-foot (25,000-square-meter) building for Hexagon — the boxy one on the hill.

Waiting for clearance was a surreal experience as family members, neighbors and former employers were grilled by the FBI, and potential hires were questioned about everything from their gambling habits to their sexuality.

“They wanted to make sure we couldn’t be bribed,” Marra says.

Clearance could take up to a year. During that time, employees worked on relatively minor tasks in a building dubbed “the mushroom tank” — so named because everyone was in the dark about what they had actually been hired for.

Joseph Prusak, 76, spent six months in the tank. When he was finally briefed on Hexagon, Prusak, who had worked as an engineer on earlier civil space projects, wondered if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

“I thought they were crazy,” he says. “They envisaged a satellite that was 60-foot (18-meter) long and 30,000 pounds (13,600 kilograms) and supplying film at speeds of 200 inches (500 centimeters) per second. The precision and complexity blew my mind.”

Several years later, after numerous successful launches, he was shown what Hexagon was capable of — an image of his own house in suburban Fairfield.

“This was light years before Google Earth,” Prusak said. “And we could clearly see the pool in my backyard.”

There had been earlier space spy satellites — Corona and Gambit. But neither had the resolution or sophistication of Hexagon, which took close-range pictures of Soviet missiles, submarine pens and air bases, even entire battalions on war exercises.

According to the National Reconnaissance Office, a single Hexagon frame covered a ground distance of 370 nautical miles (680 kilometers), about the distance from Washington to Cincinnati. Early Hexagons averaged 124 days in space, but as the satellites became more sophisticated, later missions lasted twice as long.

“At the height of the Cold War, our ability to receive this kind of technical intelligence was incredible,” says space historian Dwayne Day. “We needed to know what they were doing and where they were doing it, and in particular if they were preparing to invade Western Europe. Hexagon created a tremendous amount of stability because it meant American decision makers were not operating in the dark.”

Among other successes, Hexagon is credited with providing crucial information for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

From the outset, secrecy was a huge concern, especially in Danbury, where the intense activity of a relatively small company that had just been awarded a massive contract (the amount was not declassified) made it obvious that something big was going on. Inside the plant, it was impossible to disguise the gigantic vacuum thermal chamber where cameras were tested in extreme conditions that simulated space. There was also a “shake, rattle and roll room” to simulate conditions during launch.

“The question became, how do you hide an elephant?” a National Reconnaissance Office report stated at the time. It decided on a simple response: “What elephant?” Employees were told to ignore any questions from the media, and never confirm the slightest detail about what they worked on.

But it was impossible to conceal the launches at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, and aviation magazines made several references to “Big Bird.” In 1975, a piece on the TV news magazine “60 Minutes” on space reconnaissance described an “Alice in Wonderland” world, where American and Soviet intelligence officials knew of each other’s “eyes in the sky” — and other nations did, too — but no one confirmed the programs or spoke about them publicly.

For employees at Perkin-Elmer, the vow of secrecy was considered a mark of honor.

“We were like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb,” said Oscar Berendsohn, 87, who helped design the optics system. “It was more than a sworn oath. We had been entrusted with the security of the country. What greater trust is there?”

Even wives — who couldn’t contact their husbands or know of their whereabouts when they were traveling — for the most part accepted the secrecy. They knew the jobs were highly classified. They knew not to ask questions.

“We were born into the World War II generation,” says Linda Bronico, whose husband, Al, told her only that he was building test consoles and cables. “We all knew the slogan ‘loose lips sink ships.'”

And Perkin-Elmer was considered a prized place to work, with good salaries and benefits, golf and softball leagues, lavish summer picnics (the company would hire an entire amusement park for employees and their families) and dazzling children’s Christmas parties.

“We loved it,” Marra says. “It was our life.”

For Marra and his former co-workers, sharing that life and their long-held secret has unleashed a jumble of emotions, from pride to nostalgia to relief — and in some cases, grief.

The city’s mayor, Mark Boughton, only discovered that his father had worked on Hexagon when he was invited to speak at an October reunion ceremony on the grounds of the former plant. His father, Donald Boughton, also a former mayor, was too ill to attend and died a few days later.

Boughton said for years he and his siblings would pester his father — a draftsman — about what he did. Eventually they realized that the topic was off limits.

“Learning about Hexagon makes me view him completely differently,” Boughton says. “He was more than just my Dad with the hair-trigger temper and passionate opinions about everything. He was a Cold War warrior doing something incredibly important for our nation.”

For Betty Osterweis the ceremony was bittersweet, too. Not only did she learn about the mystery of her late husband’s professional life. She also learned about his final moments.

…

Find this story at 13 August 2012

Helen O’Neill is a New York-based national writer for The Associated Press. She can be reached at features(at)ap.org.

August 13, 2012
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First Posted: 12/25/11 07:31 PM ET Updated: 12/27/11 08:50 AM ET

The Hexagon Story

This volume re-publishes The Hexagon Story as part of the Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance’s (CSNR) Classics series. The introductory information explains how this history of the Hexagon program focuses on the Air Force involvement with the program as it became operational and matured and contains limited discussion of the early Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contributions to development of the program.

Find the story 10 August 2012 

See the pictures 10 August 2012 

 

Spektakuläre Satelliten-Panne – Das versunkene Geheimnis der CIA

Mit Spionagesatelliten kundschafteten die USA während des Kalten Krieges die Militärgeheimnisse des Gegners aus. Dann stürzte plötzlich eine Kapsel mit Überwachungsfotos in den Pazifik – und eine panische Rettungsaktion begann. 40 Jahre später hat der CIA die spektakulären Bilder der Operation freigegen. Neun Monate und mehr als 100.000 Dollar hatte die CIA investiert – und alles, was die Geheimdienstler schließlich in Händen hielten, war ein verwischtes Foto. Wer wollte, sah Puderzucker auf einem dunklen Tisch oder die ersten Schreibversuche eines Kindes. Nur ganz entfernt erinnerte das Foto an das, was es eigentlich war: ein Luftbild, fotografiert von einem Satelliten. Das Foto war von KH-9 Hexagon aufgenommen worden, einem Spionagesatelliten, den die USA am 15. Juni 1971 ins All geschickt hatten. Der unsichtbare Knipser war eine Hightech-Waffe im Kalten Krieg, mit ihm sollten die militärischen Geheimnisse der Sowjetunion festgehalten werden: Häfen, Werften, Flugplätze, Radaranlagen. Jedenfalls war das der Plan. KH-9 Hexagon war neben den beiden Kameras auch mit vier Kapseln ausgerüstet, die die hochauflösenden High-Definition-Aerial-Filme des Typs 1414 der Firma Eastman Kodak zurück zum Boden befördern sollten. Das Transportprinzip war so genial wie spektakulär: Die Kapseln lösten sich vom Satelliten und fielen Richtung Erde. Irgendwann öffnete sich ein Fallschirm, die Fotofracht wurde abgebremst und schließlich mitten in der Luft von einer Militärmaschine eingesammelt. Doch schon bei der ersten Mission von KH-9 kam es am 10. Juli 1971 zu einer verhängnisvollen Panne: Der Fallschirm öffnete sich nicht. Statt eingefangen zu werden, stürzte die Kapsel mit der Bezeichnung RV 1201-3 bei Hawaii in den Pazifik. Wenig später begannen CIA, der Militärnachrichtendienst NRO und die US Navy mit der Suche nach dem versunkenen Schatz. Doch warum dauerte die Bergung fast neun Monate? Und was passierte genau in jener Zeit? Die CIA hat nach 40 Jahren jetzt Akten freigegeben, die einen seltenen Einblick in die Arbeit des Geheimdienstes bieten – und spektakuläre Fotos einer Mission zeigen, die beinahe gescheitert wäre. Auffällige Luftblasen In einem internen Geheimdienst-Memo vom Tag des Unfalls wird zunächst von einem Helikopter berichtet, der den Bremsfallschirm gesichtet habe. Und: Militärmaschinen hätten Funksignale der Kapsel empfangen – doch schon im nächsten Telegramm folgt die Ernüchterung: Die Funksignale stammen nicht von der Kapsel, sondern von einem Flugzeug. Die Suche an der mutmaßlichen Aufprallstelle wird ergebnislos abgebrochen. Während die Fotokapseln RV 1 und 2 sicher aufgenommen wurden, fehlt von Nummer 3 zunächst jede Spur. Erst die Meldung einer Militärmaschine über auffallend viele Luftblasen auf dem Ozean bringt eine erste Spur. Schließlich können die Koordinaten der Absturzstelle ungefähr festgestellt werden: 24 Grad 50 Minuten nördliche Breite. 164 Grad 0 Minuten westliche Länge. Zwei Wochen sind seit der Panne vergangen. Weitere zwei Wochen später steht ein grober Rettungsplan. In einem Memo an den Direktor des Militärnachrichtendienstes wird das Vermessungsschiff “USNS DeSteiguer” genannt, das in der Lage sei, “ein Suchgerät mehr als 20.000 Fuß in die Tiefe zu lassen.” Die Suche durchführen soll ein Expertenteam des Marine-Physik-Labors MPL – für die Bergung fällt in dem Memo der Name des Hightech-Tauchboots “Trieste II”, das seit 1964 für die Marine im Einsatz ist. Bergung in 5000 Metern Tiefe Vier Tage Suchzeit plant das NRO für die “DeSteiguer” ein, unmittelbar danach soll das bemannte Tauchboot den wertvollen Geheimnisträger sichern. Beginnen soll das Unternehmen am 1. Oktober 1971. Doch auch dieses Datum ist bald Makulatur. Erst im Dezember geht die “Trieste II” auf Tauchfahrt, sichtet die Kapsel – und kann doch nicht bergen. Stürme mit 40 bis 50 Knoten und mehr als vier Meter hohe Wellen peitschen über den Pazifik. Die Bergung der so wichtigen Fotokapsel hat fast schon komische Züge angenommen, als die Sicherung von RV 3 schließlich auf März 1972 verschoben wird. Grund dafür ist nicht das Wetter, sondern die anstehende Nachfolge-Satellitenmission “1202”. Wegen der seien auch die Druck-Kapazitäten beim Kooperationspartner Eastman Kodak “bis Februar 1972 belegt”, heißt es in einem Geheimschreiben vom Dezember 1971. Kodak hätte also ohnehin keine Zeit für die Fotos der versunkenen Kapsel. …

Find this story at 13 August 2012 Eingereicht von: Christian Gödecke © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2008 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Vervielfältigung nur mit Genehmigung der SPIEGELnet GmbH

CIA cracks down on sexual harassment in its ranks Spy agency reacts to complaints of sexual harassment by women working in CIA war zones. Former officers say trysts are part of the agency’s culture.

WASHINGTON — Spurred by complaints from women working for the CIA in war zones, the spy service is stepping up efforts to enforce what it calls a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment by supervisors and co-workers.

David Petraeus, the CIA director, sent a message to agency staff members last month to emphasize the initiative. He ordered a team of managers to meet with senior officers at stations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and possibly in Yemen, Somalia and other countries where the CIA has launched drone missile strikes against militants.

Petraeus also appointed a “counselor and investigator” to field sexual harassment complaints at those posts, CIA spokesman Preston Golson said.

The effort follows surveys of CIA officers in war zones in 2009 and 2011 by the agency’s office of medical services. The surveys, which sought “to capture perceptions” on a wide range of workplace issues, showed no improvement in alleged sexual harassment, Golson said in an email.

Numerous women, who were not identified in the surveys, reported having been harassed, often by supervisors, said two former CIA officials, who requested that they not be identified in discussing an internal matter. They did not know the numbers, and the CIA declined to provide them.

“This has been going on for years, but it seems to have become more serious,” one of the former officials said. “The agency has not come up with an effective tool to stop it.”

The majority of alleged incidents in the surveys “consisted of remarks or jokes of a sexual nature,” Golson said. “Survey results suggested that harassment of a more physical nature may also have occurred, but was not reported.”

Some CIA officials have been punished for sexual harassment in recent years, Golson said. He declined to disclose information about those cases, citing CIA policy of keeping personnel data secret.

A few have come to light, however. In 2010, for example, a senior manager in the National Clandestine Service, which conducts CIA operations, was forced to retire after he had an affair with a female subordinate and her husband complained toLeon E. Panetta, then the CIA director, the two former officials said.

Stories of sexual improprieties are infamous at some CIA stations, especially in high-stress areas. It is a civilian agency, and employees in war zones tend to work long hours, live in close quarters and let off steam by drinking alcohol after work.

Partly as a result of that, former CIA officers said, what would be considered workplace sexual impropriety at corporations and other government agencies has been tolerated at the CIA, and trysts between supervisors and employees are not unusual.

Ilana Sara Greenstein, who served as a CIA case officer in Iraq in 2004-05, said a senior manager who was responsible for her promotions “hit on me” when she worked at CIA headquarters.

“He was married, quite aggressive and wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Greenstein said. “I said no, and it put me in a really awkward position.”

Greenstein, who quit the CIA and is now a lawyer, didn’t file a complaint at the time “because you know that’s the end of your career,” she said. “It sounds cliche, but it’s an old boys’ network, and that kind of comes with the territory.”

…

Find this story at 4 July 2012

By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times

3:04 PM PDT, July 4, 2012Advertisement

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

Times staff writer Brian Bennett contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Pentagon increasing spy presence overseas

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is beefing up its spy service to send several hundred undercover intelligence officers to overseas hot spots to steal secrets on national security threats after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The move comes amid concerns that the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy service, needs to expand operations beyond the war zones and to work more closely with the CIA, according to a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the classified program.

The new Defense Clandestine Service will comprise about 15% of the DIA’s workforce. They will focus on gathering intelligence on terrorist networks, nuclear proliferators and other highly sensitive threats around the world, rather than just gleaning tactical information to assist military commanders on the battlefield, the official said.

“You have to do global coverage,” the official said.

Some of the new spies thus are likely to be assigned to targets that now are intelligence priorities, including parts of Africa and the Middle East where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are active, the nuclear and missile programs in North Korea and Iran, and China’s expanding military.

The initiative, which Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta approved last Friday, aims to boost the Pentagon’s role in human intelligence collection, and to assign more case officers and analysts around the globe. The CIA has dominated that mission for decades, and the two agencies have long squabbled over their respective roles.

An internal study by the director of National Intelligence last year concluded that the DIA needed to expand its traditional role and should gather and disseminate more information on global issues. It also found that the DIA did not promote or reward successful case officers, and that many often left for the CIA as a result.

Find this story at 23 April 2012

By David S. Cloud

April 23, 2012, 10:37 a.m.

Former CIA spy boss made an unhesitating call to destroy interrogation tapes

The first and only time I met Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., he was still undercover and in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency’s all-powerful operations directorate. The agency had summoned me to its Langley headquarters and his mission was to talk me out of running an article I had just finished reporting about CIA secret prisons — the “black sites” abroad where the agency put al-Qaeda terrorists so they could be interrogated in isolation, beyond the reach and protections of U.S. law.

The scene I walked into in November 2005 struck me as incongruous. The man sitting in the middle of the navy blue colonial-style sofa looked like a big-city police detective stuffed uncomfortably into a tailored suit. His face was pockmarked, his dark mustache too big to be stylish. He was not one of the polished career bureaucrats who populate the halls of power in Washington.

In fact, he fit perfectly the description given by my sources: hardworking but not smooth, loyal to the institution and now, probably, beyond his depth. He was as surprised as anyone that he had risen so quickly to the senior ranks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to the account of his decades-long spy career in “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.” The book is due out Monday, after an exclusive interview Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” The Washington Post obtained a copy this week.

Shortly after the 2001 attacks, the CIA set up the secret prisons in Afghanistan, Thailand and several Eastern European countries for the explicit purpose of keeping detainees picked up on the battlefield or in other countries away from the U.S. justice system, which would grant them some protections against, among other things, torture or otherwise harsh treatment. In an effort to force these detainees to give their handlers information about terrorist plots, CIA interrogators subjected some of them to sleep and food deprivation, incessant loud noise and waterboarding.

By the time we met, those techniques were no longer in use. Rodriguez had not dealt with American reporters, he writes, but then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss had asked him to meet with me “to see if I could convince her that such a story would harm U.S. national security, put some of our allies around the world in a very difficult position, and potentially disrupt a program that was providing intelligence that was producing real results and helping to keep the country safe.”

What Rodriguez remembers from our conversation, according to his book, is that I brought him a copy of a book I had written about the U.S. military in an effort to butter him up. “That failed to soften my stance on the lack of wisdom of her proceeding with her article as planned,” he wrote, and “I could see I was not winning her over.” I remember bringing the book because I figured he didn’t know one reporter from the next, and I wanted him to know that I did in-depth work and didn’t want to just hear the talking points.

A blunt explanation

It became clear immediately that Rodriguez never even got the talking points, which was refreshing and surprising. Right away he began divulging awkward truths that other senior officers had tried to obfuscate in our conversations about the secret prisons: “In many cases they are violating their own laws by helping us,” he offered, according to notes I took at the time.

Why not bring the detainees to trial?

“Because they would get lawyered up, and our job, first and foremost, is to obtain information.”

(Shortly after our conversation, The Post’s senior editors were called to the White House to discuss the article with President George W. Bush and his national security team. Days later, the newspaper published the story, without naming the countries where the prisons were located.)

Rodriguez may have never felt the need to even reveal himself publicly or to write a book, complete with family photos, giving his version of many of the unconventional — and eventually repudiated — practices that the CIA engaged in after Sept. 11 had it not been for what happened shortly after our conversation.

Concerned that the location of one of the prisons was about to be revealed, Rodriguez writes that he ordered the facility closed immediately and the detainees moved to a new site. While dismantling the site, the base chief asked Rodriguez if she could throw a pile of old videotapes, made during the early days of terrorist Abu Zubaida’s interrogation and waterboarding, and now a couple of years old, onto a nearby bonfire that was set to destroy papers and other evidence of the agency’s presence.

Just at that moment, according to his account, a cable from headquarters came in saying: “Hold up on the tapes. We think they should be retained for a little while longer.”

“Had that message been delayed by even a few minutes,” Rodriguez writes, “my life in the years following would have been considerably easier.”

Those actions led to a lengthy and still ongoing investigation of the agency that produced no charges. Rodriguez retired in January 2008 and now works in the private sector.

A tough CIA veteran

Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico, the son of two teachers. He was educated at the University of Florida, where he also received a law degree before being recruited by the CIA. He once gained the confidence of a dictator in a Latin American country because of his gutsy horseback riding skills. He worked as the chief of station in several countries he does not name, and was sent to El Salvador during its bloody civil war (which he glosses over completely) and to Panama, where he pitched the idea of recruiting Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega’s witch doctor and putting him on the CIA payroll to persuade the dictator to retire to Spain. The CIA director at the time wasn’t impressed and instead, in 1989, “the United States followed a more traditional path: a military invasion.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, he did what legions of CIA officers not at work that day did: He rushed into headquarters, even as people were being evacuated, and pitched in. Rodriguez ended up in the Counterterrorism Center, which quickly went from a backwater posting to the center of the universe at the agency.

As CIA operations officers and analysts scrambled to figure out more about al-Qaeda and to plan a counterattack, Rodriguez was in the eye of the storm. “Hard Measures” takes readers through a highly sanitized — censored by the CIA, actually — version of events.

Although many details are left out and most of the outlines of what Rodriguez writes will not come as news to close readers of newspapers, he does not shy away from addressing the most controversial parts of what became the largest covert action program in U.S. history: the secret decisions to capture suspected terrorists on the battlefield or on the streets and make them disappear from the face of the Earth. Using a fleet of airplanes, the CIA bundled its captives into a netherworld no one else had access to, flew them around the world, deposited them in secret underground prisons where it could control their every move and use especially harsh interrogation methods on some of the most senior prisoners.

Many CIA officers had misgivings about these practices and what they might mean for America’s reputation around the world. Not Rodriguez. He is unabashedly confident that he and the agency did the right thing and saved lives in the process.

“I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques, approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government, certified by the Department of Justice, and briefed to and supported by bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence oversight committees, shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture of killing of Usama bin Ladin.”

Of course, it is impossible to know this for certain, and many people inside and outside government — some of them involved in interrogations — have argued that with better-trained interrogators and more patience, the same information could have been obtained without such harsh methods.

The most newsworthy part of the book is a chapter in which Rodriguez explains how he came to order the destruction of 92 videotapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaida.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has nearly completed a four-year-long review of the CIA’s post-Sept. 11 detention and interrogation practices.

Shredding the tapes

Rodriguez writes that he ordered the tapes’ destruction because he got tired of waiting for his superiors to make a decision. They had at least twice given him the go-ahead, then backed off. In the meantime, a senior agency attorney cited “grave national security reasons” for destroying the material and said the tapes presented ‘“grave risk” to the personal safety of our officers” whose identities could be seen on the recordings.

In late April 2004, another event forced his hand, he writes. Photos of the abuse of prisoners by Army soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ignited the Arab world and risked being confused with the CIA’s program, which was run very differently.

“We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT [enhanced interrogation techniques] ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs [military police] would be buried by the impact of the images.

“The propaganda damage to the image of America would be immense. But the main concern then, and always, was for the safety of my officers.”

Readers may disagree with much of what Rodriguez writes and with the importance of some of the facts he omits from his book, but the above sentence speaks volumes about why this book is important. In this case, a loyal civil servant — and the decision-makers above him who blessed these programs — were not thinking about the larger, longer-lasting damage to the core values of the United States that disclosure of these secrets might cause. They were thinking about the near term. About efficiency. About the safety of friends and colleagues. In their minds, they were thinking, too, about the safety of the country.

…

Find this story at 25 April 2012

By Dana Priest, Published: April 25

© The Washington Post Company

Researcher: CIA, NSA may have infiltrated Microsoft to write malware

Did spies posing as Microsofties write malware in Redmond? How do you spell ‘phooey’ in C#?

June 18, 2012, 2:46 PM — A leading security researcher has suggested Microsoft’s core Windows and application development programming teams have been infiltrated by covert programmer/operatives from U.S. intelligence agencies.

If it were true it would be another exciting twist to the stories of international espionage, sabotage and murder that surround Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame, the most successful cyberwar weapons deployed so far, with the possible exception of Windows itself.

Nevertheless, according to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of antivirus and security software vendor F-Secure, the scenario that would make it simplest for programmers employed by U.S. intelligence agencies to create the Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame viruses and compromise Microsoft protocols to the extent they could disguise downloads to Flame as patches through Windows Update is that Microsoft has been infiltrated by members of the U.S. intelligence community.

[ FREE DOWNLOAD: 68 great ideas for running a security department ]

Having programmers, spies and spy-supervisors from the NSA, CIA or other secret government agencies infiltrate Microsoft in order to turn its technology to their own evil uses (rather than Microsoft’s) is the kind of premise that would get any writer thrown out of a movie producer’s office for pitching an idea that would put the audience to sleep halfway through the first act.

Not only is it unlikely, the “action” most likely to take place on the Microsoft campus would be the kind with lots of tense, acronymically dense debates in beige conference rooms and bland corporate offices.

The three remarkable bits of malware that attacked Iranian nuclear-fuel development facilities and stole data from its top-secret computer systems – Flame Duqu and Stuxnet – show clear signs of having been built by the same teams of developers, over a long period of time, Hypponen told PC Pro in the U.K.

Flame used a counterfeit Microsoft security certificates to verify its trustworthiness to Iranian users, primarily because Microsoft is among the most widely recognized and trusted computer companies in the world, Hypponen said.

Faking credentials from Microsoft would give the malware far more credibility than using certificates from other vendors, as would hiding updates in Windows Update, Hypponen said.

The damage to Microsoft’s reputation and suspicion from international customers that it is a puppet of the CIA would be enough to keep Microsoft itself from participating in the operation, even if it were asked.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“It’s plausible that if there is an operation under way and being run by a US intelligence agency it would make perfect sense for them to plant moles inside Microsoft to assist in pulling it off, just as they would in any other undercover operation,” Hypponen told PC Pro. “It’s not certain, but it would be common sense to expect they would do that.”

The suggestion piqued the imaginations of conspiracy theorists, but doesn’t have a shred of evidence to support it.

It does have a common-sense appeal, however. Planting operatives inside Microsoft would probably be illegal, would certainly be unethical and could have a long-range disadvantage by making Microsofties look like tools of the CIA rather than simply tools.

“No-one has broken into Microsoft, but by repurposing the certificate and modifying it with unknown hash collision technologies, and with the power of a supercomputer, they were able to start signing any program they wanted as if it was from Microsoft,” Hypponen said. “If you combine that with the mechanism they were using to spoof MS Update server they had the crown jewels.”

Hypponen is one of a number of security experts who have said Stuxnet and Duqu have the hallmarks of software written by traditionally minded software engineers accustomed to working in large, well-coordinated teams.

After studying the code for Duqu, security researchers at Kaspersky Labs said the malware was most similar to the kind of work done by old-school programmers able to write code for more than one platform at a time, do good quality control to make sure the modules were able to install themselves and update in real time, and that the command-and-control components ahd been re-used from previous editions.

“All the conclusions indicate a rather professional team of developers, which appear to be reusing older code written by top “old school” developers,” according to Kaspersky’s analysis. “Such techniques are normally seen in professional software and almost never in today’s malware. Once again, these indicate that Duqu, just like Stuxnet, is a ‘one of a kind’ piece of malware which stands out like a gem from the large mass of “dumb” malicious program we normally see.”

Earlier this month the NYT ran a story detailing two years worth of investigations during which a range of U.S. officials, including, eventually, President Obama, confirmed the U.S. had been involved in writing the Stuxnet and Flame malware and siccing them on Iran.

That’s far from conclusive proof that the NSA has moved its nonexistent offices to Redmond, Wash. It doesn’t rule it out either, however.

Very few malware writers are able to write such clean code that can install on a variety of hardware systems, assess their new environments and download the modules they need to successfully compromise a new network, Kaspersky researchers said.

Stuxnet and Flame are able to do all these things and to get their own updates through Windows Update using a faked Windows Update security certificate.

No other malware writer, hacker or end user has been able to do that before. Knowing it happened this time makes it more apparent that the malware writers know what they are doing and know Microsoft code inside and out.

That’s still no evidence that Microsoft could be or has been infiltrated by spies from the U.S. or from other countries.

It does make sense, but so do a lot of conspiracy theories.

Until there’s some solid indication Flame came from inside Microsoft, not outside, it’s probably safer to write off this string of associative evidence.

Even in his own blog, Hypponen makes fun of those who make fun of Flame as ineffective and unremarkable, but doesn’t actually suggest moles at Microsoft are to blame.

…

Find this story at 18 June 2012

By Kevin Fogarty

© 1994 – 2012 ITworld. All rights reserved.

CIA agreement touted as evidence in ‘black sites’ investigation

A partially signed agreement between Poland’s intelligence service and CIA provides central evidence in the ongoing investigation into alleged ‘black sites’ in Poland.

According to a source at the Krakow Prosecutor’s Office that is handling the investigation, the document was prepared in late 2001, early 2002, in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the US.

The Americans “did not want to leave traces [of evidence]” the source told Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, commenting on the fact that the document was only signed by former head of Poland’s Intelligence Agency (ABW), Zbigniew Siemiatkowski.

When queried about the document, Siemiatkowski stated that if his signature is present, it means that the document is classified, and that he is unable to talk about it. He did not confirm the existence of such an agreement.

Meanwhile, Adam Bodnar of the Helsinki Foundation – a human rights body that is monitoring the case – told that the paper that lack of an American signature does not invalidate the document as key evidence.

“The simple fact that the document was prepared attests to the fact that it there was a will [to create the CIA prisons], and that people who were aware of it, also knew about its contents.”

Accusations and denials

In 2011, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, made an unequivocal statement on the matter.

“It is clear that Poland hosted secret CIA prisons between December 2002 and September 2003. We know who was held there and what interrogation methods were used. They can be described as torture.”

Leszek Miller was prime minister of Poland at that time, at the head of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) government.

He has repeatedly denied knowledge of such a site, which is alleged to have been located in a villa near the Stare Kiejkuty military base in north east Poland.

…

 

Find this story at 19 June 2012 

19.06.2012 10:58

Copyright © Polskie Radio S.A

Top Secret CIA Documents on Osama bin Laden Declassified

Washington, D.C., June 19, 2012 – The National Security Archive today is posting over 100 recently released CIA documents relating to September 11, Osama bin Laden, and U.S. counterterrorism operations. The newly-declassified records, which the Archive obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, are referred to in footnotes to the 9/11 Commission Report and present an unprecedented public resource for information about September 11.

The collection includes rarely released CIA emails, raw intelligence cables, analytical summaries, high-level briefing materials, and comprehensive counterterrorism reports that are usually withheld from the public because of their sensitivity. Today’s posting covers a variety of topics of major public interest, including background to al-Qaeda’s planning for the attacks; the origins of the Predator program now in heavy use over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; al-Qaeda’s relationship with Pakistan; CIA attempts to warn about the impending threat; and the impact of budget constraints on the U.S. government’s hunt for bin Laden.

Today’s posting is the result of a series of FOIA requests by National Security Archive staff based on a painstaking review of references in the 9/11 Commission Report.
DOCUMENT HIGHLIGHTS

The documents released by CIA detail the meticulousness of al-Qaeda’s plot against the United States and CIA attempts to counter the rising terrorist threat. A previously undisclosed raw intelligence report that became the basis for the December 4, 1998, President’s Daily Brief notes that five years before the actual attack, al-Qaeda operatives had successfully evaded security at a New York airport in a test-run for bin Laden’s plan to hijack a U.S. airplane. [1998-12-03]. CIA analytical reports also provide interesting insights into al-Qaeda’s evolving political strategies. “In our view, the hijackers were carefully selected with an eye to their operational and political value. For instance, the large number of Saudi nationals was most likely chosen not only because of the ease with which Saudi nationals could get US visas but also because Bin Ladin could send a message to the Saudi Royal family.” [2003-06-01]

Reports on early attempts to apprehend bin Laden detail the beginning of the U.S. Predator drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “First Predator mission over Afghanistan [excised] September 7, 2000.” [1] “Twice in the fall of 2000, the Predator observed an individual most likely to be Bin Ladin; however we had no way at the time to react to this information.” [2004-03-19] American UAVs did not have sufficient weapons capabilities at the time the CIA likely spotted bin Laden in 2000 to fire on the suspect using the UAV.

Al-Qaeda’s ties to Pakistan before September 11 are also noted in several documents. “Usama ((Bin Ladin))’s Islamic Army considered the Pakistan/Afghanistan area one region. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan serve as a regional base and training center for Islamic Army activities supporting Islamic insurgencies in Tajikistan, the Kashmir region and Chechnya. [Excised] The Islamic Army had a camp in Pakistan [Excised] purpose of the camp was to train and recruit new members, mostly from Pakistan.” [1997-07-14] While, “UBL elements in Pakistan reportedly plan to attack POTUS [U.S. President Clinton’s] plane with [excised] missiles if he visits Pakistan.” [2000-02-18]

Similar to the 9/11 Commission Report, the document collection details repeated CIA warnings of the bin Laden terrorist threat prior to September 11. According to a January 2000 Top Secret briefing to the Director of Central Intelligence, disruption operations against the Millennium plot “bought time… weeks… months… but no more than one year” before al-Qaeda would strike. [2000-01-07] “A UBL attack against U.S. interests could occur at any time or any place. It is unlikely that the CIA will have prior warning about the time or place.” [1999-08-03] By September 2001, CIA counterterrorism officials knew a plot was developing but couldn’t provide policymakers with details. “As of Late August 2001, there were indications that an individual associated with al-Qa’ida was considering mounting terrorist operations in the United States, [Excised]. No further information is currently available in the timing of possible attacks or on the alleged targets in the United States.” [2001-08-24]

Despite mounting warnings about al-Qaeda, the documents released today illustrate how prior to September 11, CIA counterterrorism units were lacking the funds to aggressively pursue bin Laden. “Budget concerns… CT [counterterrorism] supplemental still at NSC-OMB [National Security Council – Office of Management and Budget] level. Need forward movement on supplemental soonest due to expected early recess due to conventions, campaigning and elections. Due to budgetary constraints… CTC/UBL [Counterterrorism Center/Osama bin Laden Unit] will move from offensive to defensive posture.” [2000-04-05]

Although the collection is part of a laudable effort by the CIA to provide documents on events related to September 11, many of these materials are heavily redacted, and still only represent one-quarter of the CIA materials cited in the 9/11 Commission Report. Hundreds of cited reports and cables remain classified, including all interrogation materials such as the 47 reports from CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from March 24, 2003 – June 15, 2004, which are referenced in detail in the 9/11 Report.

Highlights of the CIA September 11 Document Collection Include:
The 1998 Raw Intelligence Report on UBL’s Plans to Hijack an Airplane that Became an Item in the December 4, 1998 President’s Daily Brief [1998-12-03].
The report details how bin Laden was planning “new operations against the United States (U.S.) targets in the near future. Plans to hijack a U.S. aircraft were proceeding well. Two individuals from the relevant operational team in the U.S. had successfully evaded security checks during a trial run at “New York airport [excised].”
Internal CIA E-mails on Osama bin Laden
1998-05-05 – “[Title Excised]” “Planning for the UBL Rendition is Going Very Well,” To: Michael F. Scheuer, From: [Excised], Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Capture Op,” “[Gary] Schroen to Mike.” [Chapter 4, Endnote 22 9/11 Commission Report]
1998-12-20 – “Re: urgent re ubl,” Note For: Michael F. Scheuer, From: [Excised], Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “[Gary] Schroen to Mike” [Chapter 4, Endnotes 117, 119 9/11 Commission Report]
1998-12-21 – “your note,” Note For: [Excised], From: Michael F. Scheuer, Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Mike to [Gary] Schroen,” [Chapter 4, Endnote 119 9/11 Commission Report]
1999-05-17 – “your note,” From Michael F. Scheuer, To [Excised], Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Mike to [Gary] Schroen” [Chapter 4, Endnote 174 9/11 Commission Report]
2001-05-15 – “[Excised] Query [Excised].” Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Dave to John.” [Chapter 8, Endnote 72 9/11 Commission Report]
2001-05-24 – [Title Excised] “Agee (sic) we need to compare notes,” Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Dave to John.” [Chapter 8, Endnote 64 9/11 Commission Report]
2001-07-13 – “[Excised] Khalad [Excised],” Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Richard to Alan” [Chapter 8, Endnote 64 9/11 Commission Report]
2001-08-21 – “Re: Khalid Al-Mihdhar,” Memorandum, Central Intelligence Agency Email. Cited in 9/11 Commission Report as “Mary to John.” [Chapter 8, Endnote 106 9/11 Commission Report]
Two Definitive CIA Reports on the September 11, 2001 Attacks
2003-06-01 – “11 September: The Plot and the Plotters,” CTC 2003-40044HC, Central Intelligence Agency Intelligence Report.
[Chapter 5, Endnotes 42, 60, 61, 64, 70, 105, Chapter 7, Endnotes 45, 52, 60, 83, 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 105 9/11 Commission Report]
This document is a comprehensive CIA history of the 9/11 attack. Analysis includes notes on al-Qaeda, the evolution of the plot, terrorist techniques, timelines and detailed hijacker profiles.
2004-03-19 – “DCI Report: The Rise of UBL and Al-Qa’ida and the Intelligence Community Response,” Draft, Central Intelligence Agency Analytic Report. [Chapter 2, Endnote 67]
This document is a detailed summary of CIA efforts to apprehend Osama bin Laden from 1989-2004. Highlights include:
Agency notes on bin Laden’s evolution from “terrorist financier” in the early 1990s to a significant threat to U.S. interests by mid-1990.
Discussions and debates regarding the use of Predator drones as early as 2000. [2]
Critiques of FBI information systems as impediments to counterterrorism efforts – “A major, ongoing concern is FBI’s own internal dissemination system. CIA officers still often find it necessary to hand-deliver messages to the intended recipient within the FBI. In additional FBI has not perfected its FI reporting system and headquarters-field communications so dissemination of intelligence outside of FBI is still spotty.” And the report confirms suggestions by the 9/11 Commission Report that “the different organizational culture and goals of the FBI and CIA sometimes get in the way of desired results.” (p. 22)
A group of Afghan trial leaders worked with the CIA on the UBL issue, but “[Excised] judged to be unlikely to successfully attack a heavily guarded Bin Ladin.” “Masood has to be engaged to help in the attempt to capture Bin Ladin, but with the understanding that he would be his own man, never an agent of surrogate of the US government… Even if he agreed to do so, his chances of success against the Taliban were judged to be less than five percent.” (p. 58)

Note “DIF” written on multiple pages stands for “Denied in Full”
A Series of CIA Senior Executive Intelligence Briefs (SEIBS) from June-September 2001 Warning of “Imminent” Al-Qaeda Attacks:
2001-06-23 – “International: Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent [Excised]” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnote 14, See also p. 257 9/11 Commission Report]
2001-06-25 – “Terrorism: Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats,” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnotes 12, 14]
2001-06-30 – “Terrorism: Bin Laden Planning High Profile Attacks [Excised],” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnote 12]
2001-07-02 – “Terrorism: Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delay [Excised],” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnote 18]
2001-07-13 – “Terrorism: Bin Ladin Plans Delayed but Not Abandoned [Excised],” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnote 28]
2001-07-25 – “Terrorism: One Bin Ladin Operation Delayed, Others Ongoing [Excised],” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnote 28]
2001-08-07 – “Terrorism: Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the US,” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief. [Chapter 8, Endnote 38. Chapter 11, Endnote 5. Page 342]
Detailed Reports on Al-Qaeda Organization
“The spike in the network’s activity stems in part from changes in Bin Ladin’s practices. To avoid implicating himself and his Taliban hosts, Bin Ladin over the past two years has allowed cells in his network, al-Qa’ida, to plan attacks more independently of the central leadership and has tried to gain support for his agenda outside the group. – The network also has benefited from a sharp increase in mujahidin recruitment since the resumption of the conflict in Chechnya in 1999, which exposed a new generation of militants to terrorist techniques and extremist ideology through training at al-Qai’da-run camps in Afghanistan. – Violence between Israelis and the Palestinians, moreover is making Sunni extremists more willing to participate in attacks against US or Israeli interests.” 2001-02-06 – “Sunni Terrorist Threat Growing,” Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, The Central Intelligence Agency. [Chapter 8, Endnote 4 9/11 Commission Report]
Bin Laden’s Attempts to Acquire Weapons of Mass Destruction
“Bin Ladin and his associates have experimented by crude means to make and deploy biological agents… Bin Ladin has sought to acquire military-grade biological agents or weapons.” 2001-02-14 –”Afghanistan: Bin Ladin’s Interest in Biological and Radiological Weapons,” Central Intelligence Agency Analytical Report [Chapter 11, Endnote 5. 9/11 Commission Report Page 342]
A Positive CIA Assessment of CIA Counterterrorism Capabilities in August 2001
In contrast to the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report and a 2004 CIA Office of Inspector General’s review of its pre-9/11 counterterrorism practices, a report completed in August 2001 by the CIA Inspector General gives very positively reviews to CIA counterterrorism practices, the management of information and interagency cooperation. “CTC fulfills inter-agency responsibilities for the DCI by coordinating national intelligence, providing warning, and promoting the effective use of Intelligence Community resources on terrorism issues. The Center has made progress on problems identified at the time of the last inspection in 1994 – specifically its professional relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Find this story at 19 June 2012

The Central Intelligence Agency’s 9/11 File

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 381

Posted – June 19, 2012

Edited by Barbara Elias-Sanborn with Thanks to Archive Senior Fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson

For more information contact:
Barbara Elias-Sanborn – 202/994-7000
belias@gwu.edu

Exclusive: Senate probe finds little evidence of effective “torture”

(Reuters) – A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques” the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.

 

People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

 

The backers of such techniques, which include “water-boarding,” sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders.

 

One official said investigators found “no evidence” such enhanced interrogations played “any significant role” in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.

 

President Barack Obama and his aides have largely sought to avoid revisiting Bush administration controversies. But the debate over the effectiveness of enhanced interrogations, which human rights advocates condemn as torture, is resurfacing, in part thanks to a new book by a former top CIA official.

 

In the book, “Hard Measures,” due to be published on Monday, April 30, the former chief of CIA clandestine operations Jose Rodriguez defends the use of interrogation practices including water-boarding, which involves pouring water on a subject’s face, which is covered with a cloth, to simulate drowning.

 

“We made some al-Qaeda terrorists with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days,” Rodriguez says in an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday, April 29. “I am very secure in what we did and am very confident that what we did saved American lives.”

 

For nearly three years, the Senate intelligence committee’s majority Democrats have been conducting what is described as the first systematic investigation of the effectiveness of such extreme interrogation techniques.

 

NO SCIENTIFIC ASSESSMENT

 

The CIA gave the committee access to millions of pages of written records charting daily operations of the interrogation program, including graphic descriptions of how and when controversial techniques were employed.

 

Sources agreed to discuss the matter on condition of anonymity because the report has not been finalized.

 

The committee members’ objective is to conduct a methodical assessment of whether enhanced interrogation techniques led to genuine intelligence breakthroughs or whether they produced more false leads than good ones.

 

U.S.intelligence officials have acknowledged that while the harshest elements of the interrogation program, including water-boarding and other tactics which cause severe physical stress, were in use, the CIA never carried out a scientific assessment of the program’s effectiveness.

 

The Bush Administration only used water-boarding on three captured suspects. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

 

Other coercive techniques included sleep deprivation, making people crouch or stretch in stressful positions and slamming detainees against a flexible wall.

 

The CIA started backing away from such techniques in 2004. Obama banned them shortly after taking office.

 

One source cautioned there could still be lengthy delays before any information or conclusions from the Senate committee’s report are made public.

 

One reason the inquiry has taken so long is that in 2009, committee Republicans withdrew their participation, saying the panel would be unable to interview witnesses to ensure documentary material was reported in appropriate context due to ongoing criminal investigations.

 

People familiar with the inquiry said it consisted of as much as 2,000 pages in narrative accounts of how the CIA interrogation program worked, including specific case histories in which enhanced interrogation tactics were used.

 

‘PROCEDURES’ UNJUSTIFIED: FEINSTEIN

 

The Intelligence committee has not issued any official statements about what its inquiry has found or when it expects to wrap up. But committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein has made relatively strong statements about the lack of evidence that enhanced interrogations played any material role in generating information leading to bin Laden’s killing.

 

Only days after the commando raid in which bin Laden was killed, Feinstein told journalists: “I happen to know a good deal about how those interrogations were conducted, and, in my view, nothing justifies the kind of procedures that were used.”

 

Current and formerU.S.officials have said one key source for information about the existence of the al Qaeda “courier” who ultimately ledU.S.intelligence to bin Laden was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

 

KSM, as he was known toU.S.officials, was subjected to water-boarding 183 times, theU.S.government has acknowledged.

 

Officials said, however, that it was not until sometime after he was water-boarded that KSM told interrogators about the courier’s existence. Therefore a direct link between the physically coercive techniques and critical information is unproven, Bush administration critics say.

 

Supporters of the CIA program, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have portrayed it as a necessary, if distasteful, step that may have stopped extremist plots and saved lives.

 

…

 

 

Find this story at 27 April 2012

 

Fri, Apr 27 2012

By Mark Hosenball

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

 

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Prostitutes, drunken behaviour and illegal wiretaps: US reveals accusations against Secret Service

The US government has revealed details of serious allegations since 2004 against Secret Service agents and officers, including claims of involvement with prostitutes, leaking sensitive information, publishing pornography, sexual assault, illegal wiretaps, improper use of weapons and drunken behavior. It was not immediately clear how many of the accusations were confirmed to be true.

The heavily censored list — which runs 229 pages — was quietly released today under the US Freedom of Information Act to The Associated Press and other news organizations following the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia. It describes accusations filed against Secret Service employees with the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general. The service protects the president and those close to him.

In many cases, the government noted that some of the claims were resolved administratively, and others were being formally investigated.

Basic details of the dozens of complaints were first revealed last month during a Senate hearing about the Colombia scandal, as senators questioned whether the Colombia incident was a sign of a broader culture problem at the storied agency tasked with protecting the president.

Secret Service Direct Mark Sullivan apologized for the incident during the May hearing, but insisted that it was an isolated case.

The list of complaints, however, suggested otherwise senators said at the time.

Secret Service officials did not immediately comment today.

…

AP

Find this story at 15 June 2012

Alicia A Caldwell
Friday, 15 June 2012

© independent.co.uk

Intelligent kill: The dirty art of secret assassination

State-sponsored foreign assassinations of military, religious, ideological and political figures are an ugly reality of world history.

By means of sudden, irregular or secret attack, there is even a common euphemism in international law which bluntly describes the practice: targeted killing.

According to a UN special report on the subject, targeted killings are “premeditated acts of lethal force employed by states in times of peace or during armed conflict to eliminate specific individuals outside their custody”.

And it works something like this.

A state deems a certain individual wanted or a danger to its national security. After ruling out any feasible attempt to bring them to their own jurisdiction, usually because they are based in a third country, it deems itself responsible with silencing them by whatever means necessary.

The operational dynamics are then conducted under the auspices of one of two possible dimensions.

Either to eliminate the target under a fog of plausible deniability, in order for the state authorities to wash their hands clean of any discreditable action in a foreign land, and by extension any prosecution should its agents be captured; or to have blatant disregard to the norms of international law by reference to domestic constitutions that empower them to act under the guise of self-defence – in order to protect themselves from imminent threats of attack.

The use of targeted killing has become quite common in the aftermath of 9/11. U.S. Predator drones strikes against Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan and the Yemen, Israeli airstrikes against Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories and Russian targeting of Chechen separatists in the Caucasus — are just a few recent examples.

But the covert practice of this art has always been a lot murkier.

In 1942, formerly secret memos now reveal how the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) secretly trained Czechoslovakian volunteers to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany, in a daring ambush on his motorcade.

Alternatively, the main security services of the Third Reich, the RSHA, had in place its own clandestine unit which planned to target Allied soldiers with poisoned coffee, chocolate and cigarettes; as part of a ruthless terrorist campaign.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of the CIA, the KGB, poisoned two of its dissidents abroad, once by firing a tiny Ricin-infested pellet from a specially designed umbrella into the target’s leg; and on another occasion by a spray gun firing a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide ampoule.

But even when the intended targets happen to miraculously survive a surreptitiously planned death, the devil that’s in the detail can be just as intriguing.

The CIA attempted to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro on numerous occasions by utilizing everything from exploding cigars, mafia contractors and femmes fatales — albeit without success.

On another occasion, the CIA unsuccessfully attempted to kill the Republic of Congo’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, using a tube of doctored toothpaste which would have left him dead, apparently of Polio.

In 2004, Ukrainian opposition leader Victor Yushenko was poisoned with TCDD, the most toxic form of Polychlorinated Dibenzodioxins, otherwise known as Dioxins, by what is largely suspected were pro-Russian individuals within the state’s security apparatus.

Although many of the shrewd techniques that have been secretly used in the murder of dissidents and enemies abroad have long been acknowledged in the post-cold war era, many practices may still be eluding us by virtue of remaining shrouded in anonymity, even to this day.

But generally speaking, secret state-sponsored targeted killings are still synonymous with booby-trapped car bombs, sniper hits, exploding cell phones and even small arms fire.

In recent years, however, the art of these smart assassinations – designed in the most part to make a person’s death look somewhat natural – have now been refined by the most unthinkable of materials.

And you don’t have to look beyond what happened to Alexander Litvenenko, a former officer in Russia’s internal security force, FSB, and critic of Vladimir Putin’s rule, in London on November 2006.

After meeting what he ostensibly thought were two former KGB officers for tea in a hotel bar, within hours he was hospitalized with mysterious symptoms including progressively severe hair loss, vomiting and diarrhea for three weeks — before he ultimately succumbed to his horrible death.

His post-mortem finally furnished us with details. He was poisoned it turns out, with tiny a nuclear substance, the radioactive isotope, Polonium-210. Its acute radiation syndrome that he ingested virtually meant he had no chance of survival.

The UK authorities were able to piece together trails of the material as left by the culprits, incidentally right back to Russia itself, where almost all the world’s polonium is produced.

The logic of administering such toxic materials was in fact deliberate. Polonium-210 is something which is normally undetectable; as a rare radioactive isotope it emits alpha particles, not the common gamma radiation that standard radiological equipment would detect in hospitals.

The accused culprits may have underestimated the determination of the British authorities to uncover the whole plot, but simultaneously the incident also told us something; the Russians were not going to play by the old rules – they were going to rewrite them.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that biological poisons, chemical agents and nuclear materials are the only things used in smart killings. In fact, the use of materials designed for rudimentary medical procedures have also taken on a new course.

Israel’s Mossad, long considered the most effective intelligence agency in the world per magnitude, and no stranger to the world of targeted killing in foreign countries, has two shiny examples.

In September 1997, Mossad agents sprayed Hamas Leader Khaled Meshal with the poison Levofentanyl – a modified version of the widely-used painkiller Fentany – by using a small camera which served as a trajectory. Although the agents were later apprehended, and eventually exchanged the antidote (following lengthy behind-the-scenes negotiations before it was eventually given to the victim), the audacity of the materials they used spoke volumes: it was designed not to leave any visible or tell-tale signs of harm on the target’s body.

In January 2010, Hamas military commander Mohammad Al Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room in what initially appeared to be death by natural causes.

However, upon thorough investigation, not only were 26 suspects (believed to have emanated from Israel) fingered, but the circumstances surrounding his death also soon transpired.

Al Mabhouh was injected in his leg with Succinylcholine, a quick-acting, depolarizing paralytic muscle relaxant. It causes almost instant loss of motor skills, but does not induce loss of consciousness or anesthesia. He was then apparently suffocated — ostensibly to quicken the pace of his death.

In his bestselling book, Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, gives a chilling and detailed account of how the Mossad uses Biochemists and genetic scientists in order to develop lethal cocktails as bottled agents of death.

This includes the development of nerve agents, choking agents, blood agents, and blister agents – including Tuban (virtually odorless and invisible when dispensed in aerosol or vapor form), Soman (the last of the Nazi nerve gasses to be discovered which also has a slightly fruity odour and is invincible in vapour format), blister agents (which include chlorine, phosgene and diphosgene, and smell of new-mown grass) and blood agents (including those with a cyanide base).

The point to extrapolate is clear. States that employ the practice of smart assassination techniques see them as effective strategies that are justified. They don’t need to admit to carrying them out, but we know they are happening.

An obvious concern raised here is that their almost pathological unwillingness to answer questions about the consequences of resorting to such assassinations – or covert targeted killings – will result in the practice becoming more widespread.

The arbitrary stretching of legal justifications for such assassinations, premised on what an individual country recognizes as self-defence, indirectly renders them to be bound by no limits — and by extension may serve as encouragement for other nations to follow suit, if they interpret their national security considerations being failed by international treaty and cooperation.

Just last month, British Police warned two outspoken Rwandan dissidents of threats to their lives by the Rwandan government, which could come in ‘any form’ or by ‘unconventional means’.

…

Find this story at 19 June 2012

By Mohammad I. Aslam
Tuesday, 19 June 2012 at 3:00 am

©independent.co.uk

 

U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project. At the heart of the surveillance operations are small, unarmed turboprop aircraft disguised as private planes. Equipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals, the planes refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles. About a dozen air bases have been established in Africa since 2007, according to a former senior U.S. commander involved in setting up the network. Most are small operations run out of secluded hangars at African military bases or civilian airports. The nature and extent of the missions, as well as many of the bases being used, have not been previously reported but are partially documented in public Defense Department contracts. The operations have intensified in recent months, part of a growing shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups. The surveillance is overseen by U.S. Special Operations forces but relies heavily on private military contractors and support from African troops. The surveillance underscores how Special Operations forces, which have played an outsize role in the Obama administration’s national security strategy, are working clandestinely all over the globe, not just in war zones. The lightly equipped commando units train foreign security forces and perform aid missions, but they also include teams dedicated to tracking and killing terrorism suspects. The establishment of the Africa missions also highlights the ways in which Special Operations forces are blurring the lines that govern the secret world of intelligence, moving aggressively into spheres once reserved for the CIA. The CIA has expanded its counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations in Africa, but its manpower and resources pale in comparison with those of the military. U.S. officials said the African surveillance operations are necessary to track terrorist groups that have taken root in failed states on the continent and threaten to destabilize neighboring countries. A hub for secret network A key hub of the U.S. spying network can be found in Ouagadougou (WAH-gah-DOO-goo), the flat, sunbaked capital of Burkina Faso, one of the most impoverished countries in Africa. Under a classified surveillance program code-named Creek Sand, dozens of U.S. personnel and contractors have come to Ouagadougou in recent years to establish a small air base on the military side of the international airport. The unarmed U.S. spy planes fly hundreds of miles north to Mali, Mauritania and the Sahara, where they search for fighters from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a regional network that kidnaps Westerners for ransom. The surveillance flights have taken on added importance in the turbulent aftermath of a March coup in Mali, which has enabled al-Qaeda sympathizers to declare an independent Islamist state in the northern half of the country. Elsewhere, commanders have said they are increasingly worried about the spread of Boko Haram, an Islamist group in Nigeria blamed for a rash of bombings there. U.S. forces are orchestrating a regional intervention in Somalia to target al-Shabab, another al-Qaeda affiliate. In Central Africa, about 100 American Special Operations troops are helping to coordinate the hunt for Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of a brutal guerrilla group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. The results of the American surveillance missions are shrouded in secrecy. Although the U.S. military has launched airstrikes and raids in Somalia, commanders said that in other places, they generally limit their involvement to sharing intelligence with allied African forces so they can attack terrorist camps on their own territory. The creeping U.S. military involvement in long-simmering African conflicts, however, carries risks. Some State Department officials have expressed reservations about the militarization of U.S. foreign policy on the continent. They have argued that most terrorist cells in Africa are pursuing local aims, not global ones, and do not present a direct threat to the United States. The potential for creating a popular backlash can be seen across the Red Sea, where an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen is angering tribesmen and generating sympathy for an al-Qaeda franchise there. In a response to written questions from The Washington Post, the U.S. Africa Command said that it would not comment on “specific operational details.” “We do, however, work closely with our African partners to facilitate access, when required, to conduct missions or operations that support and further our mutual security goals,” the command said. Surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations, it added, are “simply a tool we employ to enable host nation militaries to better understand the threat picture.” Uncovering the details The U.S. military has largely kept details of its spy flights in Africa secret. The Post pieced together descriptions of the surveillance network by examining references to it in unclassified military reports, U.S. government contracting documents and diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group. Further details were provided by interviews with American and African officials, as well as military contractors. In addition to Burkina Faso, U.S. surveillance planes have operated periodically out of nearby Mauritania. In Central Africa, the main hub is in Uganda, though there are plans to open a base in South Sudan. In East Africa, U.S. aircraft fly out of bases in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Seychelles. Army Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command, which is responsible for military operations on the continent, hinted at the importance and extent of the air bases while testifying before Congress in March. Without divulging locations, he made clear that, in Africa, he wanted to expand “ISR,” the military’s acronym for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Without operating locations on the continent, ISR capabilities would be curtailed, potentially endangering U.S. security,” Ham said in a statement submitted to the House Armed Services Committee. “Given the vast geographic space and diversity in threats, the command requires increased ISR assets to adequately address the security challenges on the continent.” Some of the U.S. air bases, including ones in Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Seychelles, fly Predator and Reaper drones, the original and upgraded models, respectively, of the remotely piloted aircraft that the Obama administration has used to kill al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and Yemen. “We don’t have remotely piloted aircraft in many places other than East Africa, but we could,” said a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters. “If there was a need to do so and those assets were available, I’m certain we could get the access and the overflight [permission] that is necessary to do that.” Common aircraft Most of the spy flights in Africa, however, take off the old-fashioned way — with pilots in the cockpit. The conventional aircraft hold two big advantages over drones: They are cheaper to operate and far less likely to draw attention because they are so similar to the planes used throughout Africa. The bulk of the U.S. surveillance fleet is composed of single-engine Pilatus PC-12s, small passenger and cargo utility planes manufactured in Switzerland. The aircraft are not equipped with weapons. They often do not bear military markings or government insignia. The Pentagon began acquiring the planes in 2005 to fly commandos into territory where the military wanted to maintain a clandestine presence. The Air Force variant of the aircraft is known as the U-28A. The Air Force Special Operations Command has about 21 of the planes in its inventory. In February, a U-28A crashed as it was returning to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa. Four airmen from the Air Force Special Operations Command were killed. It was the first reported fatal incident involving a U-28A since the military began deploying the aircraft six years ago. Air Force officials said that the crash was an accident and that they are investigating the cause. Military officials declined to answer questions about the flight’s mission. Because of its strategic location on the Horn of Africa, Camp Lemonnier is a hub for spy flights in the region. It is about 500 miles from southern Somalia, an area largely controlled by the al-Shabab militia. Lemonnier is even closer — less than 100 miles — to Yemen, where another al-Qaeda franchise has expanded its influence and plotted attacks against the United States. Elsewhere in Africa, the U.S. military is relying on private contractors to provide and operate PC-12 spy planes in the search for Kony, the fugitive leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a group known for mutilating victims, committing mass rape and enslaving children as soldiers. Ham, the Africa Command chief, said in his testimony to Congress in March that he was seeking to establish a base for surveillance flights in Nzara, South Sudan. Although that would bolster the hunt for Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, it would also enable the U.S. military to keep an eye on the worsening conflict between Sudan and South Sudan. The two countries fought a civil war for more than two decades and are on the verge of war again, in part over potentially rich oil deposits valued by foreign investors. Other aviation projects are in the offing. An engineering battalion of Navy Seabees has been assigned to complete a $10 million runway upgrade this summer at the Manda Bay Naval Base, a Kenyan military installation on the Indian Ocean. An Africa Command spokeswoman said the runway extension is necessary so American C-130 troop transport flights can land at night and during bad weather. About 120 U.S. military personnel and contractors are stationed at Manda Bay, which Navy SEALs and other commandos have used as a base from which to conduct raids against Somali pirates and al-Shabab fighters. About 6,000 miles to the west, the Pentagon is spending $8.1 million to upgrade a forward operating base and airstrip in Mauritania, on the western edge of the Sahara. The base is near the border with strife-torn Mali. The Defense Department also set aside $22.6 million in July to buy a Pilatus PC-6 aircraft and another turboprop plane so U.S.-trained Mauritanian security forces can conduct rudimentary surveillance operations, according to documents submitted to Congress. Crowding the embassy The U.S. military began building its presence in Burkina Faso in 2007, when it signed a deal that enabled the Pentagon to establish a Joint Special Operations Air Detachment in Ouagadougou. At the time, the U.S. military said the arrangement would support “medical evacuation and logistics requirements” but provided no other details. By the end of 2009, about 65 U.S. military personnel and contractors were working in Burkina Faso, more than in all but three other African countries, according to a U.S. Embassy cable from Ouagadougou. In the cable, diplomats complained to the State Department that the onslaught of U.S. troops and support staff had “completely overwhelmed” the embassy. In addition to Pilatus PC-12 flights for Creek Sand, the U.S. military personnel in Ouagadougou ran a regional intelligence “fusion cell” code-named Aztec Archer, according to the cable. Burkina Faso, a predominantly Muslim country whose name means “the land of upright men,” does not have a history of radicalism. U.S. military officials saw it as an attractive base because of its strategic location bordering the Sahel, the arid region south of the Sahara where al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate is active. Unlike many other governments in the region, the one in Burkina Faso was relatively stable. The U.S. military operated Creek Sand spy flights from Nouakchott, Mauritania, until 2008, when a military coup forced Washington to suspend relations and end the surveillance, according to former U.S. officials and diplomatic cables. In Ouagadougou, both sides have worked hard to keep the partnership quiet. In a July 2009 meeting, Yero Boly, the defense minister of Burkina Faso, told a U.S. Embassy official that he was pleased with the results. But he confessed he was nervous that the unmarked American planes might draw “undue attention” at the airport in the heart of the capital and suggested that they move to a more secluded hangar. “According to Boly, the present location of the aircraft was in retrospect not an ideal choice in that it put the U.S. aircraft in a section of the airfield that already had too much traffic,” according to a diplomatic cable summarizing the meeting. “He also commented that U.S. personnel were extremely discreet.” U.S. officials raised the possibility of basing the planes about 220 miles to the west, in the city of Bobo Dioulasso, according to the cable. Boly said that the Americans could use that airport on a “short term or emergency basis” but that a U.S. presence there “would likely draw greater attention.” In an interview with The Post, Djibril Bassole, the foreign minister of Burkina Faso, praised security relations between his country and the United States, saying they were crucial to containing al-Qaeda forces in the region. “We need to fight and protect our borders,” he said. “Once they infiltrate your country, it’s very, very difficult to get them out.” Bassole declined, however, to answer questions about the activities of U.S. Special Operations forces in his country. “I cannot provide details, but it has been very, very helpful,” he said. “This cooperation should be very, very discreet. We should not show to al-Qaeda that we are now working with the Americans.” Discretion is not always strictly observed. In interviews last month, residents of Ouagadougou said American service members and contractors stand out, even in plainclothes, and are appreciated for the steady business they bring to bars and a pizzeria in the city center. … Find this story at 14 June 2012 By Craig Whitlock, Thursday, June 14, 4:02 AM © The Washington Post Company

The C.I.A.’s Misuse of Secrecy

In Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere the C.I.A. has used drones to kill thousands of people — including several Americans. Officials have aggressively defended the controversial program, telling journalists that it is effective, lawful and closely supervised.

But in court, the Central Intelligence Agency refuses even to acknowledge that the targeted killing program exists. The agency’s argument is based on a 35-year-old judicial doctrine called Glomar, which allows government agencies to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of the records that have been requested.

The doctrine sometimes serves a legitimate purpose, but the C.I.A. has grossly abused it, in cases relating to the targeted killing program and other counterterrorism operations. It is invoking the doctrine not to protect legitimately classified information from disclosure, but to shield controversial decisions from public scrutiny and to spare officials from having to defend their policies in court.

The doctrine owes its name to a ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which the C.I.A. used in the early 1970s to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine. When The Los Angeles Times exposed the effort in 1975, the agency tried to suppress coverage, asking news organizations not to publish follow-up stories. Harriet A. Phillippi, a journalist for Rolling Stone, filed a FOIA request to learn more about the C.I.A.’s effort. The C.I.A. refused to confirm or deny the existence of the records Ms. Phillippi had requested.

The C.I.A.’s response was unusual. Ordinarily, an agency served with a FOIA request is required to produce a list of relevant records. The agency must then release the listed records or cite specific legal justifications for keeping them secret. In the Glomar case, the C.I.A. argued that there were circumstances in which it was impossible for an agency to acknowledge even the existence of relevant records without also revealing some fact that the government had a right to withhold.

There are indeed cases in which merely confirming or denying the existence of certain records would reveal a classified fact, such as whether a particular person is a covert intelligence agent or the current target of lawful surveillance.

Those cases, however, are far less common than the C.I.A.’s increasingly frequent reliance on the Glomar doctrine would suggest. A study by the National Security Archive shows that federal court opinions cited the doctrine three times as often in the decade after 9/11 as in the quarter-century preceding it.

There has been a qualitative shift, too. Most of the cases before 2001, including the 1976 Glomar case, involved relatively narrow intelligence-gathering programs that were plainly within the C.I.A.’s mandate. More recently, the agency has used the Glomar doctrine to shield exceptionally controversial programs, and even unlawful conduct, including the torture and rendition of terrorism suspects.

The doctrine has also been invoked since 9/11 to shape public debate. A slew of administration officials have already spoken about the targeted killing program to reporters, both anonymously and on the record, and President Obama himself answered questions about the program during an online town hall. Thus the Glomar doctrine is not serving to keep the targeted killing program a secret, but rather to control which facts about the program are made public, and when. Not coincidentally, the C.I.A.’s reliance on the Glomar doctrine also makes it more difficult for individuals injured by the agency’s counterterrorism policies to challenge those policies in court.

Without pressure from outside, the C.I.A. is unlikely to end its manipulation of the classification system. But the Justice Department, which represents the C.I.A. in court, could decline to defend questionable invocations of the doctrine. President Obama, who at some important junctures has been receptive to arguments for transparency, could direct the C.I.A. to answer FOIA requests that it would prefer to evade.

In one of the American Civil Liberties Union’s cases relating to the targeted killing program (a case in which The New York Times is also involved), the government recently told the court that officials “at the highest level” are re-evaluating the government’s stance on the secrecy of the targeted killing program. This is a noncommittal statement, but perhaps a promising one. The administration should direct the C.I.A. to abandon its pretense that the very existence of the targeted killing program is a secret. It should also direct the C.I.A. to release the legal memos that authorized the program and the evidence it relied on to carry out the drone strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen last year.

…

Find this story at sp April 2012 

By JAMEEL JAFFER and NATHAN FREED WESSLER

April 29, 2012

© 2012 The New York Times Company

How CIA blood money led to family killing in Pakistan

Man suspected of shooting wife and daughter dead linked to US payout for Raymond Davis killings

A relative holds a picture of Faizan Haider, a 21-year-old Pakistani man whose family received a payout after he was killed by CIA contractor Raymond Davis. Photograph: Declan Walsh for the Guardian

In a neighbourhood where houses can cost up to £70,000, Shehzad Butt and his family stuck out from the moment they moved in. Unlike the privately educated children who spoke flawless English with American accents, Butt’s seven children spoke only Urdu. Butt himself – a former mechanic living alongside doctors and lawyers – would occasionally startle the Johar Town neighbourhood, in the south of Lahore, by climbing on to his roof and firing guns into the air.

But one thing the Butts did have in common with their genteel neighbours was money: a six-figure sum settled with the family when Butt’s son-in-law, Faizan Haider, was gunned down along with another man by a CIA contractor called Raymond Davis last year.

The money helped the Butts resettle, but, according to people who know the family, it ultimately destroyed them. Last month Butt’s wife, Nabeela, and his widowed daughter, Zohra Haider, were shot dead. Police suspect Butt killed the two women after a domestic row. He is believed to be on the run.

Relatives and the police all say the family’s misfortune stemmed from the compensation. The two families were reportedly paid 200m rupees, $2.22m, with around $250,000 going to the two widows. It, transformed the lives of Ms Haider’s parents and siblings when she returned to live with her family after her husband’s death.

“These people were low-status, both financially and in terms of caste,” said Asad Manzoor Butt, the family’s former lawyer. “They had no idea how to cope with that sort of money.”

Shehzad Butt, 55, who had been working for decades in the Gulf as a mechanic, returned to Lahore, invested in a small car dealership and moved his family from their old home on the grimy industrial fringes of Lahore. Where Johar Town is airy and green, their old neighbourhood of Ferozewala is a world of gloomy, narrow streets packed with rundown shops and overcrowded houses.

“If we hadn’t been forced into taking the money we would never be in this position,” said his nephew Mahzar Butt, sitting amid the gloom of a power cut in a cramped room in the family’s original home. “Zohra wanted justice, not money. The money led to disintegration within our family.”

Butt and his wife were said to have been fighting for weeks over the remarriage of their wealthy daughter, who had an infant son. Butt wanted one of his relatives to be her new husband but his wife preferred a man from her own family – a 45-year-old who lived in Dubai. Meanwhile, the parents of her dead husband wanted her to marry one of their other sons.

“Zohra controlled a lot of blood money that was in her name,” said Khalid Farooqi, the police inspector investigating the incident. “If she agreed to marry someone on her mother’s side the money would go there and her father would lose control over it. Perhaps he wanted to use it for some investment.”

Farooqi says domestic disputes leading to killings are not uncommon in Pakistan, “but not in these nice areas, only in the townships and poor localities”.

It was claimed that the daughter’s in-laws once turned up at the house in Johar Town to make their case for marriage, prompting a row. Fear of the in-laws was the reason why Butt kept weapons in the house, claimed Sheikh Asif, a childhood friend.

He also said Ms Haider’s fortune destroyed Butt’s once unchallenged position within the household. “He worked hard to support them, day and night, sending money back from the Gulf,” he said. “But then suddenly he was no one to them and they were out of his control.”

After the Davis shootout in Lahore, which the American claimed was an act of self-defence, the family came under enormous pressure to accept a blood-money payment that would let Davis go free, as allowed by Pakistani law. Barack Obama publicly insisted Davis was covered by diplomatic immunity and should be released, something the Pakistani government could not countenance, given public outrage and widespread anti-American feeling.

Manzoor Butt said he was thrown off the case and the family were bullied into making a decision by the “agencies”. “The family were told they could not stop this man from being released,” he said. “Either they take the money and Davis goes home, or Davis goes home anyway and you get nothing.”

…

Find this story at 15 may 2012

Jon Boone in Lahore
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 May 2012 12.50 BST

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

 

CIA Prepares Iraq Pullback – U.S. Presence Has Grown Contentious; Backers Favor Focus on Terror Hot Spots

The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to cut its presence in Iraq to less than half of wartime levels, according to U.S. officials familiar with the planning, a move that is largely a result of challenges the CIA faces operating in a country that no longer welcomes a major U.S. presence.

Under the plans being considered, the CIA’s presence in Iraq would be reduced to 40% of wartime levels, when Baghdad was the largest CIA station in the world with more than 700 agency personnel, officials said.

The CIA had already begun to pull back in Iraq since the height of the war, officials said. But the drawdown, coming six months after the departure of American military forces, would be significant. The officials declined to provide exact numbers, give a breakdown of levels of analysts versus covert operators or say where agency workers would be redeployed, all of which are classified.

Proponents of the change say the CIA can make better use of its personnel in other areas. Those could include emerging terrorist hot spots such as Yemen, home to the al Qaeda affiliate the U.S. considers to pose the greatest threat to the homeland, and Mali, where an unstable government has fanned concerns.

The move comes amid worries over possible gaps in U.S. intelligence about the threat posed by al Qaeda in Iraq. Administration officials, diplomats and intelligence analysts have in recent weeks debated whether the militant organization is a growing threat after an internal government report pointed to a rise in the number of attacks this year, officials said.

The plan would also reduce the U.S. intelligence presence in the region as neighboring Syria appears to be verging on civil war. Al Qaeda in Iraq is also sending fighters to Syria to battle the Assad regime, Pentagon officials say.

The spy drawdown is part of a broader shift in U.S.-Iraq relations, with Washington moving to scale back diplomatic and training missions in the country. But it illustrates the limits of the Obama administration’s national-security strategy, as it steers away from ground wars and toward smaller operations that combine intelligence and special-operations capabilities.

Such a strategy relies heavily on cooperation from host governments, and as the CIA’s Iraq experience shows, cooperation can wane even where the U.S. has invested billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives.

The Iraqi government, including Iraq’s intelligence service, has scaled back its counterterrorism cooperation with the U.S. as it asserts its sovereignty, U.S. officials say.

“If you don’t have that cooperation, you are probably wasting the resources you are allocating there and not accomplishing much,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Near East analyst.

Backers of the drawdown say al Qaeda in Iraq doesn’t pose a direct threat to the U.S. “This is what success is supposed to be like,” said a senior U.S. official who has worked closely with the Iraqis. “Of course we don’t want to have the same number of people after all U.S. troops go home that we had at the height of the war.”

A senior Obama administration official said the U.S. is in the process of “right-sizing” its presence in Iraq. Both President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have “made very clear that we’re going to continue to have a close and strong security partnership,” this official said.

The planned reductions at the CIA represent a major shift from the approach under consideration just six months ago. Late last year, the CIA and Pentagon were considering several options for CIA and special-operations commandos to team up in Iraq, according to current and former officials. One option was to have special-operations forces operate under covert CIA authority, similar to the arrangement used in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

“There was a general consensus,” said a former intelligence official, “that there was a need for this in Iraq.”

But as it became clear that the U.S. would withdraw all troops and that the Iraqi government was less inclined to accept an expansive CIA-special operations role, those plans were tabled. “It’s not going to happen,” said a U.S. official.

Iraq requires CIA officers to make appointments to meet with officials who were previously easily accessible, one of several obstacles that add to a mood of growing distance between the sides. The result is a degraded U.S. awareness about the activities of al Qaeda in Iraq, particularly at a tactical level, officials said.

“Half of our situational awareness is gone,” said one U.S. official.

Iraqi officials said they continue to cooperate with the U.S. on counterterrorism. Hassan Kokaz, deputy head of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior’s intelligence service, said the U.S. may be adjusting to the new “state-to-state” relationship between the countries since the military withdrawal in December.

“We have asked them to wear civilian clothes and not military uniforms and to be searched when they visit Iraqi institutions,” he said. “Perhaps they are not used to this.”

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, police are pursuing al Qaeda-linked militants without needing U.S. special-operations forces or the CIA, said Gen. Sarhad Qadir, a local police commander.

Another senior Iraqi security official, however, said Iraqis don’t have the necessary surveillance and other technical capabilities. Iraqi forces also are plagued by clashing sectarian and political loyalties, the official added. “We need the Americans because they were able to work with all the [Iraqi] forces without exception,” he said.

The CIA drawdown would recalibrate the agency’s responsibility in the country away from counterterrorism operations and back toward traditional intelligence collection, with a sharpened focus on neighboring Iran, officials say. Baghdad will remain one of the agency’s largest stations, they say; Kabul is currently the largest.

The plan comes with risks, however, because al Qaeda in Iraq still presents a threat to the region.

“A further diplomatic or intelligence drawdown in Iraq could jeopardize U.S. national security down the road if al Qaeda in Iraq is able to sustain—or increase—its activity,” said Seth Jones, a Rand Corp. counterterrorism specialist who has written extensively about al Qaeda. “The concern is that al Qaeda is able to use its Iraq branch to destabilize other countries in the region, and they are able to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters.”

Al Qaeda in Iraq’s activities against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also complicates the U.S. government’s ability to support the opposition, Pentagon officials say.

A recent assessment by the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. intelligence community’s central clearinghouse for counterterrorism analysis, pointed to an uptick in attacks by al Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate since the U.S. troop withdrawal in December, according to officials briefed on the document’s contents.

During high-level Obama administration discussions last month, some senior counterterrorism officials seized on the NCTC assessment as evidence of a growing threat from al Qaeda in Iraq, touching off a debate about the dangers posed by the group, officials said. A spokesman refused to comment on questions about the report.

…

Find this story at 5 june 2012

By SIOBHAN GORMAN And ADAM ENTOUS

—Ali A. Nabhan
contributed to this article.

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com and Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 5, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: CIA Prepares Iraq Pullback.

Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Fidel Castro was a ‘supreme, unchallenged spymaster whose double agents duped the CIA for decades’, according to new book

For almost three decades after Fidel Castro took power, Cuba’s budding intelligence service fielded four dozen double agents in a world-class operation under the nose of the CIA, according to a new book by a veteran CIA analyst.

It was not until June 1987, when a Cuban spy defected to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, blind-siding U.S. intelligence services, that the CIA learned how badly it had been duped, writes Brian Latell, a retired veteran CIA analyst and Cuba specialist.
‘Castro was a supreme, unchallenged spy master,’ Latell told an audience at a recent book reading.

The revelations in Latell’s book help explain how Castro survived several well-documented assassination attempts and the impoverished island of Cuba weathered the changes that toppled other communist regimes in the late 20th Century.

‘In the annals of modern spycraft it’s a pretty extraordinary accomplishment. It’s difficult to keep one double agent in play, and he managed them all … down to the minute details,’ added Latell, author of Castro’s Secrets, the CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine.

Latell began watching Cuba in the mid-1960s and served as U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Latin America before retiring from the CIA in 1998.

All four dozen double agents were recruited in Cuba and other parts of the world and personally run by Castro. He favored young, rough-hewn, impressionable teens without a university education.

‘Castro wanted them to be uncontaminated by the old Cuba. He wanted them to be malleable and enthusiastic,’ Latell says.

While Cuba has trumpeted its success with double agents in the past, Latell’s book shows the penetration was more extensive than previously known, and compromised U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

The defection in 1987 of Florentino Aspillaga finally alerted the CIA to the extent of Castro’s spy network. ‘They were in a state of shock. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before,’ said Latell.

Aspillaga was ’the most informed and highly decorated officer ever to defect from Cuban intelligence’, Latell says, and his defection was a turning point in the CIA’s attitude toward Cuba.

‘Until that point we grossly underestimated the Cubans. We never imagined that little Cuba could run an intelligence service that was world class,’ he says.

Counter-intelligence operations were subsequently stepped up. After only four Cubans spies were arrested between 1959 and 1995, that number rose more than ten-fold between 1998 and 2011, Latell writes in his book.

Aspillaga was recruited as a spy at age 16 and spent 25 years in Cuban intelligence. His defection provided ‘some of the most precious secrets including the double agents,’ says Latell, who interviewed him over several days in 2007.

The interview was conducted at the request of Aspillaga, who said he simply wanted to tell his story.

Aspillaga also shared an unpublished memoir with Latell, asking for no payment or favor in return.

The former agent now lives with a new identity after surviving an assassination attempt in London in 1988.

Aspillaga is just one of a dozen defectors Latell interviewed in the book, which relies on thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents the author reviewed at the National Archives in Maryland, as well as interviews with several CIA officers.

In the book, Latell reveals that Cuban intelligence knew more about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy than they admitted at the time, including information about the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Aspillaga told the CIA that in his first year he was trained to do radio intercept work, listening for CIA transmissions to spies on the island and incursions by sea.

On November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination, he was ordered to stop all CIA tracking efforts and redirect his antennas away from Miami and direct them toward Texas.

Castro knew Kennedy was to be fired upon, Latell says Aspillaga told him.

The Warren Commission never attributed a motive to Oswald but Latell argues Oswald was fascinated with Castro and ‘his motive was to protect Fidel’.

It is well known Oswald met Cuban officials during visits to Cuba’s Mexican consulate in the summer of 1963, but there is no evidence he ever worked directly for Cuban intelligence.

Latell says that while Cuban agents had kept track of Oswald, his research found no evidence linking Castro to the assassination. Instead, Latell has his own more nuanced theory.

Castro and his intelligence officers ‘were complicit in Kennedy’s death’, Latell writes, ‘but … their involvement fell short of an organized assassination plot’.

Cuban intelligence officers ‘exhorted Oswald’ and ‘encouraged his feral militance’, he writes, ‘but it was his Oswald’s plan and his rifle, not theirs’.

Castro had plenty of reason to want Kennedy out of the way. A Senate Committee found in 1975 that the CIA had pursued assassination as an instrument of foreign policy, with Fidel Castro as one of its prime targets.

The Committee’s first documented plots against Castro began in 1960, when the CIA contacted organized crime figures eager to return to the good old days of gambling, extortion and corruption in Cuba.

Subsequent plots involved poison, an exploding seashell and marksmen with high-powered rifles.

…

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