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Die BND-Affäre und die Schweiz: BND und NSA sollen Swisscom-Kunden ausspioniert haben

27 januari 2017

Der deutsche Geheimdienst BND habe Daten aus der Schweiz an die NSA weitergeleitet: Das sagt ein österreichischer Politiker gestützt auf neu aufgetauchte Dokumente.
KOMMENTARE
Der österreichische Grünen-Politiker Peter Pilz präsentiert in mehreren europäischen Städten Enthüllungen über Spionagepraktiken der NSA – am Mittwoch auch in Bern.
Der österreichische Grünen-Politiker Peter Pilz präsentiert in mehreren europäischen Städten Enthüllungen über Spionagepraktiken der NSA – am Mittwoch auch in Bern. (Bild: Imago)
Der Abhörskandal um den deutschen Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) und die amerikanische NSA betreffe auch Schweizer Privatpersonen und Firmen. Das sagt Peter Pilz, grüner Abgeordneter im österreichischen Nationalrat, gestützt auf angebliche Geheimdokumente. Am Mittwoch präsentierte Pilz die Dokumente in Bern – zusammen mit der Co-Präsidentin und dem Fraktionschef der Schweizer Grünen, Regula Rytz und Balthasar Glättli.

Mit den Dokumenten glaubt Pilz belegen zu können, dass der BND Internetdaten aus der Schweiz ausspioniert und an die NSA weitergeleitet habe. Passiert sei das im Rahmen der «Operation Eikonal», die deutsche Medien im Oktober 2014 publik gemacht haben. Neu ist jetzt der Bezug zur Schweiz. Pilz präsentierte eine mit vielen technischen Details versehene Liste von über 250 Daten-Transitleitungen durch Deutschland. Dabei handle es sich um eine Prioritätenliste jener Leitungen, die der BND zwischen 2004 und 2008 im Auftrag der NSA ausgespäht habe. Neun der 250 Transitleitungen kommen aus der Schweiz und führen nach Prag, Sydney, Tokio, Seoul, Luxemburg, Warschau und Moskau. Auf Schweizer Seite wurden diese Leitungen laut Liste von der Swisscom betrieben. In Frankfurt, wo sich der grösste Internetknotenpunkt der Welt befindet, soll die deutsche Telekom dem BND Zugriff gewährt haben. Der BND habe die Daten an die NSA weitergegeben, gestützt auf ein Memorandum aus dem Jahr 2002.

Grüne planen Strafanzeige

Wenn die Liste authentisch ist, wäre die Schweiz eines von 64 Ländern, die vom BND/NSA-Lauschangriff betroffen wären. Der Zugriff auf die Leitungen stützt sich laut Pilz auf einen Vertrag zwischen BND und deutscher Telekom von 2004. Diesen Vertrag hat Pilz vor ein paar Tagen in Österreich veröffentlicht. Der Vertrag regelt die Aufklärung von «kabelgestützten leitungs- und paketvermittelten Fernmeldeverkehren, die ihren Ursprung und ihr Ziel nicht in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland haben (‹Transit›)». Über die Herkunft der Dokumente äussert Pilz sich unter Berufung auf den Quellenschutz nicht. Er habe ihre Echtheit jedoch zweifelsfrei verifiziert, sagt Pilz. In Österreich ist der 61-Jährige eine bekannte Grösse. Seit über 20 Jahren gehört er dem Parlament an. Einerseits ist er wegen seiner Streitbarkeit umstritten, andererseits ist er über die Parteigrenzen hinaus respektiert für Verdienste bei der Aufdeckung mehrerer Skandale – etwa bei der Eurofighter- und der Lucona-Affäre.

Im Unterschied zu anderen Grünen – notabene auch zu vielen Schweizer Grünen – hält Pilz Nachrichtendienste und Armee grundsätzlich für notwendig. Warum er sich trotzdem gegen die flächendeckende Überwachung wehrt, begründet Pilz ironisch mit einem Zitat der deutschen Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel: «Ausspähen unter Freunden – das geht gar nicht.» Derzeit befindet sich Pilz mit seinen Geheimdokumenten auf einem Medien-Marathon durch Europa. In Wien und Berlin ist er bereits vor den Medien aufgetreten; ein weiterer Auftritt ist in Brüssel geplant.

Den Schweizer Grünen spielt Pilz damit einen politischen Steilpass in der Debatte um das Nachrichtendienstgesetz zu, das der Ständerat am 11. Juni berät. Das Gesetz soll dem Schweizer Nachrichtendienst genau das erlauben, was der BND in Frankfurt gemacht haben soll: die Kabelaufklärung. Die Grünen bekämpfen diese Kompetenzausweitung für den Nachrichtendienst. Sie verlangen auch, dass «die offizielle Schweiz» gegenüber den deutschen Behörden dezidiert auf die mutmassliche Ausspionierung reagiere. Zudem bereitet die Partei laut Glättli vorsorglich eine Strafanzeige bei der Bundesanwaltschaft wegen Spionage vor.

«Keine Garantien abgeben»

Die Swisscom erklärt, sie habe von der möglichen Abhöraktion nur aus den Medien Kenntnis. Die Firma weist darauf hin, dass sie die Kommunikation nur innerhalb der Schweiz schützen könne. «Swisscom kann deshalb für Daten, die das Swisscom-Netz verlassen, keine Garantien abgeben.» Die von Pilz erwähnten neun Leitungen «gehören gemäss unserem Kenntnisstand aktuell nicht uns», teilt die Swisscom mit. Um die Situation vor zehn Jahren zu klären, würde man weitere Angaben brauchen.

Der Nachrichtendienst des Bundes (NDB) reagiert mit einer generellen Stellungnahme. «Der NDB untersucht die Veröffentlichungen betreffend die nachrichtendienstlichen Aktivitäten technischer Natur von ausländischen Nachrichtendiensten, die potenzielle Zusammenhänge mit der Schweiz haben könnten», sagt eine Sprecherin sibyllinisch. Zurzeit seien Abklärungen im Gange, «um Verbindungen zu unserem Land zu prüfen». Präziser wollte die Sprecherin nicht werden.

von Markus Häfliger, Bern27.5.2015, 21:42 Uhr
Find this story at 27 May 2015

David Headley: ISI Paid Me for Recon of 26/11 Targets

15 april 2016

A U.S. citizen convicted for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks told an Indian court on Thursday that the Pakistani intelligence service ISI paid him directly for reconnaissance of target for the 26/11 attacks (CNN-IBN). In his testimony given through video link from the United States, Headley claimed that he was given one hundred thousand Pakistani rupees to scout National Defence College, Chabad House, and other places in Mumbai. Last month, Headley also told the court that he had visited India seven times prior to the attack, on behalf of the banned Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), to gather information scouting potential target locations in Mumbai ahead of the attacks. Headley, 52, was captured in 2013 in the United States and plead guilty to charges of working with LeT and his involvement in the attacks, to avoid the death penalty and extradition to India. The November 2008 attacks in Mumbai were a coordinated set of strikes on the railway station, luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural center, and claimed 166 lives along with nine attackers.

PDP and BJP alliance government to be set up in Jammu and Kashmir

The ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) announced on Friday that it will continue its support to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state legislature of Jammu and Kashmir, and nominated Nirmal Singh to be the deputy chief minister in the state (Hindu, IBT). The PDP-BJP coalition came to power in 2014, but earlier this year PDP Chief Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed died at the age of 79. The state has been under governor rule since Jan. 8 and talks between PDP and BJP regarding the coalition have broken down a number of times over the past few weeks. But after a meeting last week between Sayeed’s daughter Mehbooba Mufti and Prime Minister Modi, the PDP on Thursday announced Mehbooba Mufti as the chief ministerial candidate.
— Shuja Malik

Pakistan

Pakistan arrests purported Indian intelligence officer

On Friday, Pakistani officials announced that they arrested an Indian intelligence officer in Balochistan (AP, ET, Dawn). Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry alleged that the man was involved in violence and lodged a complaint with India. A spokesperson for the ministry commented, “Kul Yadav Bhoshan, a commander-ranked officer in Indian Navy was working for RAW and was in contact with Baloch separatists and terrorists fueling sectarian violence in Pakistan and Balochistan.”

Pakistan debuts Chinese helicopter

On Wednesday, during a military parade for Pakistan Day, Pakistan debuted its acquisition of the Chinese made CAIC Z-10 helicopter gunship as well as its Shaheen III ballistic missile (DefenseNews). The Z-10 gunship had been under evaluation in Pakistan for the past year and reportedly received impressed reviews from the Pakistani military. On Wednesday, Pakistan also announced that the Z-10 was in service.

BY SHUJA MALIK
Find this story at 25 March 2016

Headley denies part of his statement given to NIA about Ishrat Jahan

15 april 2016

Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley on Saturday claimed that LeT commander Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi had told him about Ishrat Jahan ‘operation’ though he had also learnt about the case through the media.

Deposing via video conferencing from the U.S. before Judge G.A. Sanap in the 26/11 trial against Abu Jundal, one of the alleged plotters of the Mumbai attacks David Coleman Headley told the court that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge about Ishrat Jahan who was killed in a police encounter.

Headley denied part of his statement given to NIA about LeT operative Ishrat Jahan, who was killed in an alleged fake encounter. He clarified that LeT does not have women’s cell but has women’s wing for women’s social welfare and not for combat or fighting in India and Kashmir.

Headley said he told NIA that before Sajid Mir, Muzammil was the head of the group (LeT).

Talking further about the social cell, he added that the cell looks into women’s education and health and also looks after widows and provides religious education including Quranic classes.

Headley said that he believed that U.S., Israel and India were enemies of Islam. He also added that it is not true that he wanted Islamic rule for India.

Headley’s four days of cross examination concludes today.

MUMBAI, March 26, 2016
Updated: March 26, 2016 16:58 IST
Find this story at 26 March 2016

Ishrat Jahan was a LeT member, Headley tells court

15 april 2016

Nineteen-year-old college girl Ishrat Jahan was killed in 2004 in an encounter by the Gujarat police.

The Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley, deposing for the third day on Thursday, told the special court here that Ishrat Jahan, who was killed in an encounter in 2004 by Gujarat police, was working for LeT. The 19-year-old college girl and three others were killed in 2004 in an encounter by police in Gujarat.The four were accused of being involved in a plot to assassinate the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Headley, in the deposition, also said Lakhvi told him about the botched up operation in India by Lashkar operative Muzzabil Butt. He was told that a woman named Ishrat Jahan was killed in the shootout. He also stated that LeT has a women’s wing.

Headley, currently lodged in a U.S. prison, has been deposing as an approver through a video link in the November 2008 terror attacks case.

The police had claimed that Ishrat, a resident of Mumbra near Mumbai; Javed Sheikh, son of Gopinath Pillai of Kerala; and Pakistani citizens Amzad Ali Rana and Jishan Jauhar were connected with the LeT and were coming to Gujarat to assassinate Mr. Modi to avenge the 2002 communal riots.

However, a probe by Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate, S.P. Tamang, has ruled that the June 2004 killing was case of “fake encounter,” by Gujarat policemen including ‘encounter specialist’ D.G. Vanzara.

Mr. Tamang’s report said the Crime Branch police “kidnapped” Ishrat and the others from Mumbai on June 12, 2004 and brought them to Ahmedabad. The four were killed on the night of June 14 in police custody, but the police claimed that an “encounter” took place the next morning on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. That rigor mortis set in between 11 p.m. and midnight the previous night clearly pointed to the fact that the police pumped bullets into Ishrat’s lifeless body to substantiate the encounter theory.

Mr. Tamang said there was no evidence to link Ishrat Jahan and another victim, Javed Sheikh, with the Pakistan-based terror group, Lashkar-e-Taiba. Neither was there anything to establish that they had “come” to Gujarat to kill Mr. Modi.

Read: First day of deposition

Read: Second day of deposition

Here are some important highlights from today’s deposition:

>> Headley tells court that Ishrat Jehan was a member of LeT.19-year-old college girl Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed in 2004 in an encounter by cops in Gujarat.

>>Headley said Lakhvi told him about the botched up operation in India by Muzzamil Butt. He was told that a woman named Ishrat Jahan was killed in the shootout. “I don’t know any suicide bomber and I can’t name any,” he said. “Ishrat was an indian national and not a Pakistani and an LeT operative.”

>>He also said that LeT has a women’s wing.

>> LeT handler Sajid Mir gave Headley Rs 40,000 Pakistani Rupees.

>> He said that he knew Muzzamil had planned the attack at Akshardam temple at Gujarat. Muzzamil told him that after Babri Masjid was demolished it was allowed for them to attack Indian temples.

>> LeT handler Abu Khaffa’s nephew was one of the 10 terrorists involved in the 26/11 attacks.

>> Hazi Ashraf is in charge of finance wing of LeT at Lahore and his nephew was killed in Akshardam temple attack.

>> Then Major Iqbal gave Rs 3500 and also gave Headley counterfeit Indian currency once or twice.

>> Major Pasha also gave him Rs 80,000.

>> The RBI rejected Headley’s application to open an office in A/C market.

>> Headley paid Rs 13,500 per month as rent in 2006.

>> Dr. Tahuvurr Rana (was dr in military) who came to receive Headley and helped opened the office knew of his involvement with LeT.

>> Headley advised Dr Rana to leave Mumbai and return back to USA before the attacks.

>> Major Iqbal told Headley to vacate the office in January 2009.

Ishrat Jahan case: timeline

›
June 15, 2004:
Ishrat Jahan and three others killed in an encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Police claim they were Lashkar members planning to kill Narendra Modi.

›
September 2009:
Ahmedabad judge S.P. Tamang terms encounter ‘fake’. Mr. Tamang’s report said the Crime Branch police “kidnapped” Ishrat and the others from Mumbai on June 12, 2004 and brought them to Ahmedabad. The four were killed on the night of June 14 in police custody, but the police claimed that an “encounter” took place the next morning on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. That rigor mortis set in between 11 p.m. and midnight the previous night clearly pointed to the fact that the police pumped bullets into Ishrat’s lifeless body to substantiate the encounter theory.Read more

›
September 2010:
The Gujarat High Court constituted a new three-member Special Investigation Team for a fresh probe into the alleged fake encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan in 2004. Read more

›
January 28, 2011:
SIT member Satish Varma files affidavit stating it was a ‘fake’ encounter. Read more

›
›
November 2011:
SIT tells court the encounter was staged

›
December 2011:
High Court orders CBI probe.Read more

›
July 2013:
The CBI’s first charge sheet in the encounter case stated that the unlawful killing was a joint operation of the Gujarat police and the Intelligence Bureau and named seven Gujarat police officials as the accused. Read more

›
July 2013:
CBI court grants P.P.Pandey (an accused in the case) anticipatory bail for 48 hours after a hearing that lasted for over four hours. Read more

›
August 2013:
SC denies senior bail to Pandey. Read more

›
October 2013:
CBI quizzes BJP leader Amit Shah in connection with ‘fake’ encounters. Jailed IPS officer D.G. Vanzara who was later held in the Ishrat Jahan case, had alleged in his resignation letter that the government closely monitored every police action involving ‘terrorists’ during his tenure. Read more

›
March 2014:
A special Central Bureau of Investigation court here issued notices to Amit Shah in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. Read more

›
May 2014:
A Gujarat CBI court dismissed a plea seeking arraignment of Amit Shah and ex-police commissioner of Ahmedabad K.R. Kaushik as accused in the case. The plea was filed by Gopinath Pillai, father of Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Sheikh who was among the four victims.Read more

›
May 2014:
CBI gives a clean chit to Amit Shah. “There is no sufficient evidence against him. Hence CBI has not chargesheeted him,” CBI PI Vishwas Kumar Meena said in an affidavit filed before the special CBI court in Ahmedabad.Read more

February 2015:
Gujarat revokes suspension of P.P.Pandey.

February 2015:
DG Vanzara walks out of the Sabarmati jail in Ahmedabad eight years after he was jailed in connection with a series of encounter cases in Gujarat.Read more

David Headley arrest: Chronology of events

October 18, 2009: Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, a resident of Chicago and an accomplice of Headley, arrested by the FBI.
October 27, 2009: FBI files affidavit in a Chicago court alleging that Pakistan—based terror group Lashkar—e—Taiba was planning to use Headley to carry out a major terror attack in India and Danish newspaper ‘Jyllands—Posten’
November 30, 2009: Tahawwur Rana categorically denies any involvement in the Mumbai attacks. The detention hearing of Headley scheduled for December 4 at a Chicago court indefinitely deferred.
December 7, 2009: Headley charged in a Chicago court with criminal conspiracy in Mumbai terror attacks and having links with a retired Pakistani army Major who liaised between him and terror groups including LeT and HuJI.
December 8, 2009: US President Barack Obama says indictment of Headley, is an “important day” in his effort to protect the people from terrorists.
December 9, 2009: Headley pleads not guilty before a Chicago court where he was produced. Next hearing postponed till January 12.
December 14, 2009: Headley turns into FBI informant to avoid death penalty. FBI says the Somnath temple in Gujarat, Bollywood stars and Shiv Sena leaders in Mumbai were also the targets of LeT, which was planning to carry out strikes with the help of Headley and Rana.
December 29, 2009: FBI classifies arrest of Headley as its second biggest case for the year 2009.
January 11, 2010: The status hearing of Headley postponed till Feb 23.
January 15, 2010: Ilyas Kashmiri, the dreaded Pakistani terrorist, belonging to the Harakat—ul Jihad Islami, indicted in a U.S. court for the first time in connection with the plot to target the Danish newspaper.
January 26, 2010: Tahawwur Rana pleads not guilty to the charges of helping arrange the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and making plans for an attack on the Danish newspaper.
January 27, 2010: Headley pleads not guilty to all the charges of helping arrange the attack on targets in Mumbai and on the Danish paper.
February 23, 2010: A U.S. court adjourns till March 23 the status hearing of Headley.
March 10, 2010: Headley, who pleads guilty to 12-count of terror charges, including plotting the 26/11 Mumbai attacks at the behest of Pakistan-based LeT and conspiring to target a Danish newspaper, escapes death penalty.
January 24, 2013: U.S. federal court sentenced Headley to 35 years in prison for his role in the Mumbai attacks.
July, 2015: Mumbai police seeks to take a deposition of Headley by video-conference to provide evidence against Zabiuddin Ansari (Abu Jundal).
December 10, 2015: Mumbai court pardons David Headley, makes him an approver in 26/11 case.

Updated: February 12, 2016 13:06 IST

Find this story at 12 February 2016

David Headley deposition: Diclosures and revelations

15 april 2016

Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley deposed before a special court in Mumbai regarding his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. Headley, appearing from an undisclosed location via video conferencing, spilled the beans on LeT’s involvement with the 26/11 terror attacks.

Headley, who is serving 35-year prison sentence in the US for his role in the Mumbai attacks, spoke about the role of Saeed, another LeT commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi as well as his handler in the outfit Sajid Mir.

In his depositions till now, Headley has revealed important information about the planning behind the terror attacks and his role in the same.

Who is Headley? He was born Daood Gilani. His parents — the Philadelphia socialite Serill Headley and Pakistani poet and diplomat Syed Salim Gilani — divorced soon after they moved to Islamabad in 1960. Mrs. Headley returned to Philadelphia. Headley was admitted to a boarding school, where he first met Rana, but then moved to the United States in 1977. He rebelled against his mother’s heavy drinking and multiple sexual relationships by expressing a loathing for all non-Muslims.

Marital life Apart from Shazia Gilani, records show that he was married to Faiza Outhalla, a Lahore-based medical student. Headley divorced her to evade pressure from his family and then married her again after she filed a complaint with police in Lahore that led to his incarceration for several days.He also had another bigamous marriage with a New York-based make-up artist, Portia Gilani, ich ended in divorce in 2005.

His other life Headley married Shazia Gilani, daughter of a retired Pakistan soldier, in 1999. Ms. Gilani moved to the United States in 2008, along with their four children — Haider, Osama, Sumya and Hafsa.

Psychological problems Evidence also emerged that Headley was diagnosed in 1992 with multiple personality disorder — a condition which includes the possession of multiple mannerisms, attitudes and beliefs. His personal life could provide an explanation for why he sought psychological counselling..

26/11 Mumbai attacks Viewing the terror strikes unfold in Mumbai on television, David Headley’s first wife Shazia used code words like “I am watching cartoons” to convey to him that he had “graduated”, a term she used for success of the 26/11 strikes.“I’ve been watching these cartoons (attacks) all day and I am proud of you,” Ms. Shazia wrote in an email to 50-year-old Mumbai accused during the strikes.

Important revelations

“Ishrat was an Indian national and not a Pakistani and an LeT operative,” declares Headley

“The LeT made a mock of the Taj Hotel. However, the meeting of Indian Defence Scientists was cancelled ”

“Sajid Mir was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani Army and apparently also was in the ISI”

Ishrat Jahan case: timeline

›
June 15, 2004:
Ishrat Jahan and three others killed in an encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Police claim they were Lashkar members planning to kill Narendra Modi.

›
September 2010:
The Gujarat High Court constituted a new three-member Special Investigation Team for a fresh probe into the alleged fake encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan in 2004. Read more

›
January 28, 2011:
SIT member Satish Varma files affidavit stating it was a ‘fake’ encounter. Read more

›
November 2011:
SIT tells court the encounter was staged

›
December 2011:
High Court orders CBI probe.Read more

›
July 2013:
CBI court grants P.P.Pandey (an accused in the case) anticipatory bail for 48 hours after a hearing that lasted for over four hours. Read more

›
August 2013:
SC denies senior bail to Pandey. Read more

›
March 2014:
A special Central Bureau of Investigation court here issued notices to Amit Shah in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. Read more

February 2015:
Gujarat revokes suspension of P.P.Pandey.

February 2015:
DG Vanzara walks out of the Sabarmati jail in Ahmedabad eight years after he was jailed in connection with a series of encounter cases in Gujarat.Read more

David Headley arrest: Chronology of events

October 18, 2009: Pakistani-Canadian Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, a resident of Chicago and an accomplice of Headley, arrested by the FBI.
October 27, 2009: FBI files affidavit in a Chicago court alleging that Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba was planning to use Headley to carry out a major terror attack in India and Danish newspaper ‘Jyllands-Posten’
November 30, 2009: Tahawwur Rana categorically denies any involvement in the Mumbai attacks. The detention hearing of Headley scheduled for December 4 at a Chicago court indefinitely deferred.
December 7, 2009: Headley charged in a Chicago court with criminal conspiracy in Mumbai terror attacks and having links with a retired Pakistani army Major who liaised between him and terror groups including LeT and HuJI.
December 8, 2009: US President Barack Obama says indictment of Headley, is an “important day” in his effort to protect the people from terrorists.
December 9, 2009: Headley pleads not guilty before a Chicago court where he was produced. Next hearing postponed till January 12.
December 14, 2009: Headley turns into FBI informant to avoid death penalty. FBI says the Somnath temple in Gujarat, Bollywood stars and Shiv Sena leaders in Mumbai were also the targets of LeT, which was planning to carry out strikes with the help of Headley and Rana.
December 29, 2009: FBI classifies arrest of Headley as its second biggest case for the year 2009.
January 11, 2010: The status hearing of Headley postponed till Feb 23.
January 15, 2010: Ilyas Kashmiri, the dreaded Pakistani terrorist, belonging to the Harakat—ul Jihad Islami, indicted in a U.S. court for the first time in connection with the plot to target the Danish newspaper.
January 26, 2010: Tahawwur Rana pleads not guilty to the charges of helping arrange the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and making plans for an attack on the Danish newspaper.
January 27, 2010: Headley pleads not guilty to all the charges of helping arrange the attack on targets in Mumbai and on the Danish paper.
February 23, 2010: A U.S. court adjourns till March 23 the status hearing of Headley.
March 18, 2010: Headley, who pleads guilty to 12-count of terror charges, including plotting the 26/11 Mumbai attacks at the behest of Pakistan-based LeT and conspiring to target a Danish newspaper, escapes death penalty.
January 24, 2013: U.S. federal court sentenced Headley to 35 years in prison for his role in the Mumbai attacks.
July, 2015: Mumbai police seeks to take a deposition of Headley by video-conference to provide evidence against Zabiuddin Ansari (Abu Jundal).
December 10, 2015: Mumbai court pardons David Headley, makes him an approver in 26/11 case.

Sajid Mir
Lashkar-e-Taiba commander

“Sajid Mir was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistani Army and apparently also was in the ISI.”

Who is Sajid Mir?: Born in 1976, according to documents filed to obtain his Indian visa, Mir grew up in a middle-class ethnic Punjabi home.

Mir’s father, according to Indian intelligence officials, earned enough working in Saudi Arabia to build a comfortable family home near Lahore airport, set up a small textile business, and put his sons through college.

He married the daughter of a retired Pakistan army chaplain; the couple are thought to have two sons.

Role in LeT: Mir was made responsible for training the growing number of western jihadists knocking on the Lashkar’s doors.

Fluent in English, Urdu and Arabic, he was known to the foreign jihadists as “Uncle Bill” — a reference to Mir’s affable manner.

Mir and Headley: Intense pressure by the United States led the Lashkar to shut down its camps to foreigners. Headley had arrived at Mir’s camp just after the foreigners were evicted under ISI pressure — and was used to target India alone.

In an intercepted September 17, 2009 phone conversation with a former Pakistani military officer and military trainer called Abdur Rehman Hashim, Headley railed against Mir who, he asserted, had “rotten guts.” “I am just telling you,” he lectured Hashim “that the companies in your competition have started handling themselves in a far better way.”

Updated: February 15, 2016 09:06 IST

Find this story at 15 February 2016

Why David Headley’s coming clean puts the Modi government in a serious dilemma

15 april 2016

The disclosures force New Delhi to rethink its strategy in dealing with Pakistan.
Why David Headley’s coming clean puts the Modi government in a serious dilemma

The deposition by David Headley, the Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, has not been earth-shaking in its content. We already knew almost everything he said.

Nonetheless, it was important to hear things from the horse’s mouth.

Having said that, Headley also puts the Narendra Modi government in a serious dilemma.

What do we do now with what Headley has told us? That is the core issue. How exactly are we to follow up on his deposition?

The bureaucratic option is always there – share the contents of Headley’s deposition with the Pakistani authorities through diplomatic channels and seek follow-up action in good faith.

But it will be a cynical thing to do to rest oars thereafter, since we can be 100% certain that Pakistan will do nothing in the matter and will continue to parry.

Pakistan cannot and will not cooperate with India. It cannot cooperate with us because its culpability is crystal clear and those responsible for the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai included senior Pakistani military officers.

The Pakistani top brass’s involvement in terrorism implies that any action on the Indian demarche by their government will bring the roof crashing down on the Inter-Services Intelligence, better known as ISI, and irreparably damage the reputation of their army as an institution.

It is too much to expect any Pakistani government – or any country for that matter – to indulge in such brutal soul-searching. Those who advocate atonement by Pakistan are either ignorant of statecraft or are simply dissimulating.

What else can India do? Indeed, a blistering international campaign can be launched with India’s able diplomats firing on all six cylinders to expose the grotesque face of Pakistan to the world community.

The Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar promised recently to put Pakistan to “shame”.

Fine. But, where does that take us? For one thing, Pakistan’s reputation is already in the mud but it has been chugging along, nonetheless. Some more mud isn’t going to make any difference.

Besides, it is sheer naivety to believe we can put Pakistan to “shame”. The international community is not willing to join hands with us on such a track.

Second, to every fistful of mud we throw at Pakistan, one can be certain that Islamabad will return with an equal fist. And if past experience is anything to go by, Pakistan has a way of getting the better of us in a slugfest.

Two options

The real dilemma lies on two other counts. One, how do we handle the relations with Pakistan in the aftermath of Headley’s disclosures?

True, he didn’t add much to what we already knew. But he did bring the 26/11 attack back into focus.

The memory was getting jaded in our collective consciousness, which is overcrowded since 2008 with scams, beef-eating, air pollution, gang rapes, et cetera. But the jaded memory got burnished in the past 48 hours. The pain has returned.

For the government, which also happens to be rooted in nationalist sentiments, it becomes difficult to be seen constructively engaging Pakistan when that country’s enemy image is such a widely-shared public perception.

Simply put, it is even difficult to defend Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overtures to Pakistan as “statesmanlike”.

Equally, the Foreign Secretary’s expected trip to Islamabad for talks will not make sense to the Indian public – in a near future, at least. The government might as well roll down the shutter and close shop as if Pakistan never existed. This is one option.

The other option will be to punish Pakistan in the same coin. The present government unabashedly admires Israel. Ask Israel how best we can punish Pakistan.

Political assassination is a favourite weapon in the Israeli armoury. Commando raid is another. Outright invasion is yet another.

Choose the method best suited to our needs and circumstances. And hit Pakistan hard; hit so hard they cry for mercy. This is a second option.

Both these options are widely recommended by our pundits as mutually reinforcing options, too. But then, there is a catch in all this gung-ho attitude.

Ignoring Pakistan is actually a non-option, if only because we simply cannot choose our neighbour. And in this case, there isn’t any certainty that Pakistan is in any mood to “ignore” us. It will probably keep reminding us every now and then that it does remember us.

Again, even assuming we share the Israeli DNA, Pakistan is not Palestine. While Israel can use Gaza and West Bank as punch bags, if we punch Pakistan, make no mistake, it will punch back.

There is a moral in the story, after all, why Israel ceased to attack Lebanon once it transpired that Hezbollah has a stockpile of 40000 rockets to retaliate. That is the story of all “asymmetric” wars.

Besides, do we really want to get entangled in a futile war of attrition with Pakistan and make it our way of life?

India has so much going for it by way of manifest destiny as an emerging power if only it could sustain a high momentum of growth – for which, of course, a peaceful immediate external environment is a crucial pre-requisite. War and conflicts will be a drain on the resources.

Diplomatic embarrassment

All in all, therefore, Headley’s disposition poses a diplomatic embarrassment. He is an American citizen. What he divulged would already have been known to the US authorities.

On the other hand, the US has lately intensified its collaboration with Pakistan by forming an exclusive Quadrilateral Consultative Group to try to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban.

What emerges is that the US has specific interests to pursue in the region, which demands that Pakistan be cultivated as a key non-NATO regional ally.

The Obama administration continues to do business with the Pakistani military and the ISI despite their dalliance with Osama bin Laden who was responsible for the death of 2996 people in America.

Suffice it to say, the only option open to India too will be to remain engaged with Pakistan, to lower the tensions in the relationship and work toward eliminating the root causes behind this “asymmetric” war.

by MK Bhadrakumar
Published Feb 10, 2016 · 11:30 am. Updated Feb 11, 2016 · 04:35 pm.

Find this story at 10 February 2016

2008 Mumbai Attacks Plotter Says Pakistan’s Spy Agency Played a Role

15 april 2016

The Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai was ravaged by fire, gunshots and grenade explosions during the 2008 terrorist attacks. Credit Arko Datta/Reuters
NEW DELHI — A Pakistani-American man who helped plot the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai told an Indian court on Monday that he had met throughout the process with two handlers from Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, an Indian prosecutor said.

India has long sought to depose the man, David C. Headley, in hopes of establishing a direct link between the Pakistani government and the assaults in Mumbai, which left more than 163 people dead.

Mr. Headley gave the deposition via teleconference from an undisclosed location in the United States, where he is serving a 35-year sentence for his role in the attacks. The questioning, by Ujjwal Nikam, the Indian public prosecutor, will continue in the coming days.

India hopes to present evidence of official involvement in the attacks, in part to generate pressure on the Pakistani government to take action against the conspirators. Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a commander with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba who is believed to have overseen the Mumbai attacks, has been free on bail in Pakistan since 2014.

The group’s founder, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, lives openly in Lahore, in northern Pakistan, and moves freely throughout the country, impervious to the $10 million reward offered by the United States for information leading to his arrest.

Mr. Headley, who identified his contacts at the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of Pakistan, or ISI, as “Major Ali” and “Major Iqbal,” has linked the terrorist plots to that agency before. He previously told American prosecutors that Lashkar “operated under the umbrella of the ISI” and that an agency official had offered in 2006 to pay him to carry out reconnaissance trips to India before the attacks. He has made similar statements to Indian investigators who have interviewed him in the United States.

A few revelations emerged from Mr. Headley’s questioning on Monday, part of a case against a Lashkar operative, Zabiuddin Ansari. One is that the 10 gunmen who paralyzed Mumbai starting on Nov. 26, 2008, had botched two previous attempts on the city, one in September and one in October, in one case swimming back to shore after their boat hit a rock and their arms and ammunition sank.

Mr. Headley also said that on the advice of his contact in Lashkar, he had changed his birth name, Daood Gilani, to a more American-sounding one so that he could more easily enter India. He visited India seven times before the attacks, recording hours of video of the city for his handlers in Pakistan.

Mr. Headley, 55, the son of a Pakistani poet and diplomat, Syed Saleem Gilani, and a Philadelphia socialite, A. Serrill Headley, carved out a byzantine double game for himself during the years after the Sept. 11 , 2001, attacks in the United States. Convicted of distributing heroin in the United States, he made a deal with officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration to travel to Pakistan in 2002 to gather information on heroin trafficking.

He was swiftly picked up by the Pakistani authorities and decided to work with him.

In 2002, while he was still working as a D.E.A. informant, he began training with Lashkar. Three women — a girlfriend and two former wives of his — approached American officials over the course of several years, saying they suspected him of sympathizing with terrorist groups, but no action was taken.

Mr. Headley was arrested in 2009, when he was caught carrying plans for a terrorist attack on a Danish newspaper. On the basis of his cooperation with investigators, United States officials shielded him from the death penalty at his trial in 2011 and reduced his life sentence to 35 years. Counterterrorism officials have described him as “dangerously engaging,” and they warned about the need to guard against “being sucked into his mind games.”

The United States’ failure to act on warnings about Mr. Headley has been, at times, a source of tension between Washington and New Delhi. Mr. Headley’s appearance as a witness “gives the United States an opportunity to play the observer role in what is a South Asian conversation about terrorism and security,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a South Asia fellow at the New America Foundation.

Correction: February 8, 2016
An earlier version of this article misspelled the middle name of David C. Headley’s mother. She was A. Serrill Headley, not Serill.

By ELLEN BARRY and HARI KUMARFEB. 8, 2016

Find this story at 8 Februari 2016

26/11 attackers made two failed attempts, lost guns at sea: David Headley

15 april 2016

Headley told the court that he had changed his name from the original Dawood Gilani after instructions from the LeT commanders, including Lakhvi, and ISI officials.

AMERICAN national and 26/11 scout David Coleman Headley, who deposed before an Indian court on Monday, said that the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008 had attempted to carry out the strike earlier on two occasions, but failed to execute it.
He said the first attempt was made in September 2008 but it failed as the boat hit some rocks and the terrorists lost all the arms and ammunition at sea.
“The boat disintegrated. The men had life jackets on and came to shore. The weapons and explosives were lost in the ocean,” Headley told the court. He said he does not remember what happened during the second attempt, but it was made “a month or so later”.
“I don’t know exactly where the boat started from, but probably outside Karachi,” he told the court.

Headley told the court that Lashkar-e-Taiba member Sajid Mir had told him to change his name in 2005, and to set up an office in Mumbai and make a “general video” of the city. Headley also said one Major Iqbal, an agent of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), had told him that he could be “useful” for “intelligence work” in India.

Headleys diary names Pak Army officers,26/11 attack handlers
In New Delhi, Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said, “The difference between the state and non-state actors will come to an end after this statement. It is known who all were involved. Headley’s statement will lead to a logical conclusion. It will help us.”
Government sources said India will give Pakistan details of Headley’s testimony regarding Hafiz Saeed’s role as the LeT’s ideologue, and the involvement of ISI officers in training and directing the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai attack.
“While Pakistan has claimed that Saeed is associated with Jamaat ud Dawa, Headley’s testimony is evidence on record of Saeed’s role as an ideologue and indoctrinator for LeT,” said a government official.
Headley said Mir was his “main contact” in the LeT. Headley, originally named Dawood Geelani by his parents, had applied to have his name changed in Chicago in 2005. In 2006, his name was officially changed and he obtained a new passport so he could enter India under an American identity, he said.
Headley deposed via video-link from an undisclosed location in the US in the presence of lawyers Robert Seeder and John Theis and Assistant US Attorney Sarah Streicker.
Asked by special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam about the purpose of the office Mir wanted him to open, Headley said, “He did not specify at that time. He specified later what his intention was. Before my first visit, he gave me general instructions to make a general video of Mumbai.”
Headley’s questioning began at the Bombay City Civil and Sessions Court at 7.30 am, three-and-a-half hours before it officially opens, to accommodate the Americans. This comes nearly two months after the court framed charges against him in the ongoing trial of Zabiuddin Ansari, an accused in the 26/11 attack.
Headley, who was handed a 35-year jail term by a court in the US in 2013 for his role in the 26/11 attacks, had signed a plea agreement with the government there, under which he is bound to testify in a foreign court or face the death penalty.
Also Read | David Headley wanted to fight against Indian Army in Kashmir
Dressed in a grey sweater, Headley leaned back in his chair, looking into the court from a large television screen, facing another TV screen on which Ansari was visible, seated in Mumbai Central Prison.
Nikam addressed the 26/11 scout as Mr Headley throughout. When he referred to the LeT as a “military organisation”, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Atulchandra Kulkarni corrected him, “Nikam saheb, military nahi militant, militant.”
Headley, born in Washington DC, deposed that he had come into contact with an ISI agent named Major Ali after he was arrested in Landi Kotal in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Region (FATA), near the border with Afghanistan, on suspicion of being a foreigner.
While entry of foreigners is prohibited there, Headley was discharged after he produced a Pakistani identity card. “I was carrying in my possession literature about India which I was studying,” he said.
Accompanied by a former Pakistan Army Major named Abdur Rehman Pasha, Headley said he had ventured to FATA to meet a drug smuggler named Zaid Shah. “It had been suggested that Shah could smuggle weapons into India,” Headley said.
Headley said he was interrogated there by Ali, who works for the ISI in Landi Kotal. Headley said that when he disclosed to him that he planned to visit India, Ali introduced him to another ISI agent named Major Iqbal because “he thought I could be useful to him in some intelligence work there”.
Prior to the 26/11 attacks, Headley travelled to India on eight occasions — seven times to Mumbai and once to Delhi. “Most of those visits had been made from Pakistan. Only once or twice I arrived from the UAE or Dubai,” he said. He told the court that he visited India only once after the attacks, on March 7, 2009.
The applications he had submitted to the Consul General of India in Chicago to twice obtain visas contained personal information that was falsified “for the purpose of protecting my cover”, he said.
Dr Tahawwur Rana, a childhood friend of Headley, who was sentenced to 14-year imprisonment by a US court in 2013, had helped him obtain a five-year business visa to India in 2007. They had studied together for five years at a college in Pakistan’s Punjab Province.
In Mumbai, Headley set up a safe house “to live in an enemy country” and posed as an immigration consultant to “maintain my cover”.
In the two years that Headley trained with the LeT, he undertook five to six courses in paramilitary training, handling weapons, ammunition and explosives, and intelligence, at Muridke near Lahore and Muzaffarabad in “Azaad Kashmir”, he said. Training also included a leadership course in which Saeed and senior commander Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi delivered “religious speeches”, he said.
Towards the end of the day’s questioning, Headley told Nikam that he wanted to fight the Indian Army in Kashmir but was denied by Lakhvi, who said he was “too old” for it.
Soon afterwards, he was informed by Ali that a suitable task would be found for him, he said.
Nikam, who had started the day with the announcement that his examination of Headley would take at least two days, ended by asking him to identify seven LeT trainers. Headley admitted to knowing Abu Furkhan, Sanaullah, Abu Hanjala Pathan, Abu Usman, Abu Saeed and Abu Fahadullah.
He rejected Nikam’s suggestion that all trainers had served in the Pakistan Army in the past. “No, not at all, some of them could barely read and write,” Headley said to laughter in the courtroom.
Nikam went on, asking Headley if the men could handle sophisticated weapons. He replied: “If you can call an AK-47 a sophisticated weapon, then yes.”

Written by Srinath Rao | Mumbai | Updated: February 9, 2016 5:17 am

Find this story at 9 February 2016

American says he visited Mumbai 7 times before 2008 attack

15 april 2016

NEW DELHI (AP) — A Pakistani-American who helped plan a 2008 attack on India’s financial hub told a court Monday that he traveled to India seven times to scout potential targets for a Pakistan-based militant group.

David Coleman Headley gave the Indian court in Mumbai details of his role in planning the attack, in which more than 160 people were killed over three days when a group of 10 men rampaged across the city.

Headley repeated statements that he has made earlier that Pakistan’s main spy agency was deeply involved in planning the attack’s preparations and execution.

FILE- In this Nov. 29, 2008, file photo, an Indian soldier takes cover as the Taj Mahal hotel burns during gun battle between Indian military and militants i…
FILE- In this Nov. 29, 2008, file photo, an Indian soldier takes cover as the Taj Mahal hotel burns during gun battle between Indian military and militants inside the hotel in Mumbai, India. A Pakistani-American who helped plan a 2008 attack on India’s financial hub has told a court in India that he traveled to India seven times to scout potential targets for a Pakistan-based group. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)

Headley said he supplied his handlers in the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba with videos and maps of luxury hotels, a Jewish center and the city’s main railway station that were attacked, Prosecutor Ujwal Nikam told reporters after Monday’s five hours of testimony.

Headley testified that Lashkar-e-Taiba had tried to launch attacks in India twice earlier without success, said Nikam, who questioned him. The third attempt was the November 2008 attack, Headley said.

Nikam said Headley told the court that in one attempt, a boat in which the men were traveling overturned after hitting rocks and their weapons were lost at sea.

Headley said he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002 and he and other recruits underwent many years of training in Pakistan, where they were taught the use of weapons and bomb making.

Headley, born of a Pakistani father and an American mother, told the court that his name was Dawood Gilani, but he changed it to David Coleman Headley in 2006 to facilitate his travel to India.

Nikam said Headley used his U.S. passport to travel frequently to India without raising suspicion and was able to give Lashkar-e-Taiba information that was used to plan and carry out the attack.

He said Headley told the court that officials from Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence were involved. Pakistan insists that ISI has no links to Lashkar-e-Taiba and denies any connection to the Mumbai violence.

Nikam told reporters that “Headley has given us valuable information,” but declined to comment on the testimony about ISI, saying it was up to the government of India to take it up with the government of Pakistan.

Headley testified by video conference from an undisclosed location in the United States, where he is serving a 35-year prison term for his role in the Mumbai attack.

The Mumbai court investigating the attack gave Headley a conditional pardon in December, which allowed him to become a witness.

___

This story has been corrected to fix the spelling of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 10:33 GMT, 8 February 2016 | UPDATED: 10:33 GMT, 8 February 2016

Find this story at 8 Februari 2016

David Headley: Mumbai plotter ‘visited India’ before attacks

15 april 2016

A US man convicted for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks has told an Indian court that he visited Mumbai seven times in advance to gather information.
David Headley gave details of the planning to a court in Mumbai on Monday through a video link from a prison in the US.
Headley, 52, pleaded guilty and co-operated with the US to avoid the death penalty and extradition to India.
More than 160 people were killed by gunmen in the November 2008 attack.
Headley is serving a 35-year jail term in the US for his role in the attacks.
Indian prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam said that “this was for the first time that a foreign terrorist” had appeared through a video link in an Indian court to testify.
“This is a very crucial case… I am absolutely satisfied as to what David Headley has revealed in today’s deposition. I may quiz Headley on certain aspects, which were never asked by the FBI,” he added.
Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel under attack in November 2008Image copyrightAFP
Image caption
The Mumbai attack targeted a railway station, luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural centre
Mr Nikam added that Headley’s questioning would continue on Tuesday.
The Mumbai court gave him a conditional pardon in December and allowed him to turn witness.
Headley was sentenced in the US in 2013 on 12 counts, including conspiracy to aid militants from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) which India blames for carrying out the attacks.
After initially denying the charges, he eventually pleaded guilty and co-operated with the US to avoid the death penalty and extradition to India.
He admitted to scouting potential target locations in Mumbai ahead of the attacks.
Headley was born Daood Gilani to a Pakistani father and American mother but changed his name to David Coleman Headley in 2006 “to present himself in India as an American who was neither Muslim nor Pakistani”, US prosecutors had said.
Headley is alleged to have told US prosecutors that he had been working with LeT since 2002.
He was arrested by FBI agents in Chicago in October 2009 while trying to board a plane for Philadelphia.
The 60-hour assault on Mumbai began on 26 November 2008. Attacks on the railway station, luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural centre claimed 166 lives. Nine gunmen were also killed.
The only attacker captured alive, Pakistani Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, was executed in India in 2012.

8 February 2016

Find this story at 8 February 2016

Mumbai attack: David Headley deposes before Mumbai court; says failed in 2 attempts before 26/11 attack (2016)

15 april 2016

Mumbai attack: In the first deposition on a terror act from foreign soil, Pakistani-American Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative David Headley today told a court here via video-link that Pakistani terrorists attempted to attack Mumbai twice before the 26/11 strikes that killed 166 people but failed both times.

Mumbai attack, Mumbai terror attack, Mumbai attack 26/11, Mumbai attack mastermind, 26/11 attack, David Headley, David Headley latest news
Mumbai attack: David Headley reportedly visited India many times between 2006 and 2008, drew maps, took video footage and scouted several targets for the 26/11 attack including the Taj Hotel, Oberoi Hotel and Nariman House. (PTI)
Mumbai attack: In the first deposition on a terror act from foreign soil, Pakistani-American Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative David Headley today told a court here via video-link that Pakistani terrorists attempted to attack Mumbai twice before the 26/11 strikes that killed 166 people but failed both times.
In his deposition which began at 7 AM, David Headley said that he was a “true follower of LeT” and came to India eight times – 7 before the terror attack on November 26, 2008 and once after that.
Headley, who was made an approver in the 26/11 attack case, said that his main contact in LeT was Sajid Mir, also an accused in the case.
He told the court that LeT made two unsuccessful attempts to carry out terror attacks before finally striking in November 2008, once in September and another in October.
David Headley said that he joined LeT after being “influenced” by its head Hafeez Saeed and took his first “course” with them in 2002 at Muzaffarabad.
David Headley, who is currently serving 35 years prison sentence in the US for his role in the terror attacks, also said he changed his name from Dawood Gilani to David Headley in 2006 so that he could enter India and set up some business.
“I applied for change in name on February 5, 2006 in Philadelphia. I changed my name to David Headley to get a new passport under that name. I wanted a new passport so that I could enter India with an American identity.
“After I got a new passport I disclosed it to my colleagues in LeT of which one of them was Sajid Mir, the person with whom I was dealing with. The objective for coming to India was to set up an office/business so that I can live in India. Before the first visit, Sajid Mir gave me instructions to make a general video of Mumbai,” David Headley told the court here.
Headley also said that in his Indian visa application he had furnished all “wrong” information “to protect his cover”.
He reportedly visited India many times between 2006 and 2008, drew maps, took video footage and scouted several targets for the attacks including the Taj Hotel, Oberoi Hotel and Nariman House.
His reconnaissance provided vital information for the 10 LeT terrorists and their handlers, who launched the attack.
Speaking to reporters, Headley’s lawyer Mahesh Jethmalani said has “he (David Headley) has confirmed that he joined LeT after being influenced by Hafeez Saeed. He told the court that two unsuccessful attempts to carry out terror attacks were also made before 26/11″. He has not explained the role of LeT in attacks”.
The court is currently trying key plotter Sayed Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, who is facing trial for his alleged role in the terror attacks, which held the city to ransom for three days.
The deposition of David Headley, assumes significance as it may unravel the conspiracy behind the brazen terror strike, which left 166 people dead.
The court had on December 10, 2015, made David Headley an approver in the case and directed him to depose before the court on February 8.
He had then told Special Judge GA Sanap that he was “ready to depose” if granted pardon.
Judge Sanap had then made Headley an approver, subject to certain conditions and granted him pardon.
Last year, the Mumbai Police had on October 8 moved an application before the court saying that Headley deserves to be tried by this (Mumbai) court together with 26/11 key plotter Abu Jundal in the case as both of them are conspirators and abettors behind the dastardly act.
In the application, the Mumbai Police said that from the judgement passed by the US court against Headley, it was clear that he was a member of LeT and he had played an active role in the criminal conspiracy in the terror attack.
The application also said that Headley had entered into a plea agreement with US in 2010 and thereby willingly and voluntarily agreed that he had conspired.
It is evident, the police had said, that Headley has committed the offences of conspiring with LeT for committing illegal acts in India; waging war against the government of India and offences under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
He has also been accused of intentionally aiding and abetting the LeT in Pakistan for committing illegal acts in Mumbai, mischief by fire with intent to destroy Hotel Taj, Oberoi and Nariman House, offences under Explosives Act and Explosives Substances Act as also under the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.
“This is for the first time in the Indian legal history that a ‘foreign terrorist’ will appear before an Indian court and testify,” Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam had said yesterday.

By: PTI | Mumbai | Updated: February 8, 2016 12:38 PM

Find this story at 8 February 2016

David Headley writes memoir in prison, reveals details of 26/11 attack (2015)

15 april 2016

In one of the passages in the memoir, Headley writes about his first encounter with LeT militants in October 2000.
In one of the passages in the memoir, Headley writes about his first encounter with LeT militants in October 2000.
NEW YORK: Pakistani-American LeT terrorist David Headley, serving 35 years for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, has written a memoir in prison detailing how Lashkar’s “dedication” to the cause of the “liberation of Kashmir” inspired him to join the terror group.
American public affairs TV programme Frontline was given access to a draft of the memoir Headley, 54, wrote in jail.
Excerpts from the draft offer a “unique window” into Headley’s turn towards extremism, his training with Lashkar-e-Taiba and his preparations for the Denmark attack against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
In one of the passages in the memoir, Headley writes about his first encounter with LeT militants in October 2000.
“On one of my trips, October 2000, I made my first contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), quite by accident. I attended their annual convection in November. I was very impressed with their dedication to the cause of the liberation of Kashmir from Indian occupation,” Headley writes.
READ ALSO: Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi released from Adiala jail
He writes that for the terror attack on Mumbai, the plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel that would not raise alarm with the Indian Coast Guard as it transported the LeT terrorists to Mumbai’s shores.
“The plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel, which constantly strayed into Pakistani waters, and commandeer it all the way to Mumbai. The hope was that the Indian Coast Guard would not notice an Indian vessel. The boys would carry a GPS device which would guide them directly to the landing site, I had selected earlier,” he writes.
Headley also writes in detail about his decision to join Lashkar “full time” following the 9/11 attacks, and says that by 2002 the group asked him to take “the Daura Aamma, the basic military training course offered by LeT.”
In 2005, Lashkar asked him to change his name from Dawood Gilani to a “Christian sounding name” so that he could travel easily between the US, India and Pakistan and make it difficult for intelligence agencies to track his activities.
“Finally, in June, my immediate superior, Sajid Mir, instructed me to return to the US, change my Muslim name to a Christian sounding name and get a new US passport under that name. He now informed me I would be going to India, since I looked nothing like a Pakistani in appearance and spoke fluent Hindi and Urdu it would give me a distinct advantage in India,” he said.
Describing the training he got at Lashkar camps, Headley writes “we hid most of the day in caves and under trees, while we were given instructions on various lessons.”
He says most of the “practical aspects” of the lessons were carried out at night and during the course, he was trained in “infiltration, survival, camouflage, raid/ambush tactics, hide out, hiding and retrieving weapons caches, more than a dozen night marches, target practice with AK-47 and 9 mm pistol, RPG, grenades, among other training.
“We also went through an extensive indoctrination process and were required to study many Quaranic Chapters and Hadith,” Headley writes.
READ ALSO: David Headley involved in plot to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s office
In the memoir, he recalls the time in 1999 when after serving his sentence for drug trafficking, he had “decided to turn over a new leaf.”
“To make amends for my unrighteous ways I worked for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). I had spent the past fifteen years frequenting the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, on heroin procuring expeditions,” he says.
Headley writes that the “lawless land” had remained the same, “frozen in time”, since the 18th century. He started leaning more about his religion “as part of my change.”
Headley says he had not been a practicing Muslim for the past fifteen years, “but the seeds of Islam sown in me by my father and in school had never completely died out.”
Another change Headley made was to break away from his Canadian girlfriend, whom he had been planning to marry.
He agreed to an arranged marriage in Pakistan and he kept visiting the country “four times a year, without the knowledge of the DEA or my Probation Officer” to see his new wife, who he had decided to keep in Pakistan.
On his decision to marry a second time, Headley says that “polygamy was aggressively encouraged” by Lashkar and “they were really happy to see me take this step.”

“I was definitely ‘one of the guys’ now,” he writes. On the plans to attack the Danish newspaper, he says that after the 26/11 Mumbai attack he was told to “lay low.”
Instead, he eventually connects with al Qaida and with the assistance of a contact he has inside the organization he travels to Denmark to scout the Jyllands-Posten newspaper for a possible strike.
Headley’s contact took him to North Waziristan in 2009, where he met the “al Qaida number four” Ilyas Kashmiri.
“He gave me a further pep talk on the Denmark Project, saying that, both, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had stressed upon him the need to conclude this matter quickly. I agreed and assured him of my best effort,” Headley writes.
Headley says since he was “short on manpower” for the Denmark project, he decided to “modify the operation” and instead of assaulting the newspaper building, “just take out the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, and do this deed myself.”
He said all he needed to carry out the operation was a handgun, which he knew he could find in Europe.

Headley was arrested in October 2009 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on his way back to Pakistan.

PTI | Apr 22, 2015, 07.18 PM IST

Find this story at 22 April 2015

The Memoir of an “American Terrorist” (2015)

15 april 2016

David Coleman Headley is not exactly a household name, but his is one of the more unnerving terrorism cases in the post-9/11 era. White male. Government informant. American citizen. In other words, he had the perfect cover.

It was under the safety of that cover that Headley — a former drug smuggler turned informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration — helped stage the November 2008 siege in Mumbai, an audacious attack that left 166 people dead, including six Americans. Working with the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, Headley used his U.S. passport to travel to India, scout locations for the plot, film them and even find a landing site for the plot’s attackers.

Within weeks of Mumbai, Headley was working on another plot — this time working for Al Qaeda, planning an assault against a Danish newspaper that had published controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. The plan: A group of attackers would take hostages at the paper, shoot them, behead them and then throw their heads out the window. Again, Headley worked reconnaissance for the mission until his eventual arrest by the FBI at O’Hare International Airport in 2009.

Today, Headley is serving 35 years for his role in Mumbai. His case, however, has hardly gone away. In the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance, U.S. intelligence officials pointed to the Headley case as an example of how bulk data collection can thwart a terrorist attack. But tonight, in American Terrorist, ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigate that claim.

In the course of our investigation, FRONTLINE was given exclusive access to a draft of a memoir written by Headley after his arrest. Excerpts from the draft offer a unique window into Headley’s turn toward extremism, his training with Lashkar-e-Taiba and his preparations for the Denmark attack.

In one passage, for example, Headley writes about his first encounter with Lashkar militants, describing how he was “very impressed with their dedication to the cause of the liberation of Kashmir from Indian occupation. As Headley tells it:

In 1999, after serving my sentence for drug trafficking, I decided to turn over a new leaf. To make amends for my unrighteous ways I worked … for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) … I had spent the past fifteen years frequenting the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, on heroin procuring expeditions. This lawless land had remained the same, frozen in time, since the 18th century. The British had thought it wise to leave this place alone during their rule of India. I started leaning more and more on my religion as part of my change. I had not been a practicing Muslim the past fifteen years, but the seeds of Islam sown in me by my Father and in school had never completely died out. Another change I made was to break away from my Canadian girlfriend, who I had been planning to marry for the past five years, and agree to an arranged marriage in Pakistan. Still on probation, I kept visiting Pakistan four times a year, without the knowledge of the DEA or my Probation Officer, to see my new wife, who I had decided to keep in Pakistan.

On one of my trips, October 2000, I made my first contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT), quite by accident. I attended their annual convection in November. I was very impressed with their dedication to the cause of the liberation of Kashmir from Indian occupation.

In a later passage, Headley marks his decision to join Lashkar “full time” following the 9/11 attacks, and says that by 2002 the group asked him to take “the Daura Aamma, the basic military training course offered by LT.” It was one of several training programs he writes about. In a separate section, he recalls a second course that he attended:

We hid most of the day in caves and under trees, while we were given instructions on various lessons. Most of the practical aspects of the lessons were carried out at night. During this course, I was trained in infiltration, survival, camouflage, raid/ambush tactics, hide out, hiding and retrieving weapons caches, more than a dozen night marches, target practice with AK-47 and 9 mm pistol, RPG, grenades, among other training. We also went through an extensive indoctrination process and were required to study many Quaranic Chapters and Hadith.

By 2005, Lashkar’s plans for Headley are coming into focus. He is trained in explosives, but perhaps most importantly, Lashkar asks him to change the name given to him at birth by his Pakistani father and American mother — Daood Gilani. He chooses David, which is English for Daood; Coleman, which was his grandfather’s name; and Headley, which was his mother’s maiden name. It was a bureaucratic act, but intelligence officials say the change made Headley that much more difficult to track.

Finally, in June, my immediate superior, Sajid Mir, instructed me to return to the United States, change my Muslim name to a Christian sounding name and get a new U.S. passport under that name. He now informed me I would be going to India, since I looked nothing like a Pakistani in appearance and spoke fluent Hindi and Urdu it would give me a distinct advantage in India.

As his training continued, so did his embrace of the Lashkar lifestyle. In 2007, for example, Headley takes a second wife. He describes the decision by saying:

Polygamy was aggressively encouraged by LT and they were really happy to see me take this step. I was definitely “one of the guys” now.

Around the same time, Headley was conducting regular reconnaissance of targets in Mumbai. On one trip, he checks into the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which would later be the epicenter of the Mumbai attack, with his new wife for a “honeymoon.” As he cases locations on his trips to the city, Headley says he takes “extensive video.”

The plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel, which constantly strayed into Pakistani waters, and commandeer it all the way to Mumbai. The hope was that the Indian Coast Guard would not notice an Indian vessel. The boys would carry a GPS device which would guide them directly to the landing site, I had selected earlier.

After the attack, Headley says he was told to “lay low.” Instead, he eventually connects with Al Qaeda and with the assistance of a contact he has inside the organization he travels to Denmark to scout the Jyllands-Posten newspaper for a possible strike.

This paper had published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad and was on the top of the hit list for Al Qaeda. The Major told me that the leadership desired the attack to be carried out ASAP on the Newspaper Head Office. I visited Copenhagen in January 2009 and conducted detailed surveillance of the office there as well as their location in Arhus. I was able to make entry into both locations. …

A few days later he took me to North Waziristan, where I met Ilyas Kashmiri, the Al Qaeda number four. He gave me a further pep talk on the Denmark Project, saying that, both, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri had stressed upon him the need to conclude this matter quickly. I agreed and assured him of my best effort.

Western intelligence would soon learn of the plot, and close in on Headley. At the end of his draft, he describes the days leading up to his arrest.

I received final instructions in Denmark and left for the United States. in July 2009, I flew to England from Chicago and met Kashmiri’s friends. … Both of these men were also under surveillance by British Police, as a result of which I too came under surveillance. They forwarded their information to the F.B.I. From England, I checked out Denmark one last time and returned to the United States. I had now reached the conclusion that since I was short on man power, I would modify the operation and, instead of assaulting the newspaper building, just take out the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, and do this deed myself. All I would need was a handgun, which I knew I could find in Europe … I was finally arrested on 3 October 2009, at O’Hare Airport, on my way back to Pakistan.

APRIL 21, 2015 / by JASON M. BRESLOW

Find this story at 21 April 2015
Copyright http://www.pbs.org/

Headley writes memoir in prison on 26/11 attacks, Lashkar PTI (2015)

15 april 2016

He writes that for the terror attack on Mumbai, the plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel that would not raise alarm with the Indian Coast Guard as it transported the LeT terrorists to Mumbai’s shores. File photo
AP He writes that for the terror attack on Mumbai, the plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel that would not raise alarm with the Indian Coast Guard as it transported the LeT terrorists to Mumbai’s shores. File photo

Pakistani-American LeT terrorist David Headley, serving 35 years for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, has written a memoir in prison detailing how Lashkar’s “dedication” to the cause of the “liberation of Kashmir” inspired him to join the terror group.

American public affairs TV programme Frontline was given access to a draft of the memoir Headley, 54, wrote in jail.

Excerpts from the draft offer a “unique window” into Headley’s turn toward extremism, his training with Lashkar-e-Taiba and his preparations for the Denmark attack against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

In one of the passages in the memoir, Headley writes about his first encounter with LeT militants in October 2000.

“On one of my trips, October 2000, I made my first contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), quite by accident. I attended their annual convection in November. I was very impressed with their dedication to the cause of the liberation of Kashmir from Indian occupation,” Headley writes.

“The plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel, which constantly strayed into Pakistani waters, and commandeer it all the way to Mumbai. The hope was that the Indian Coast Guard would not notice an Indian vessel. The boys would carry a GPS device which would guide them directly to the landing site, I had selected earlier,” he writes.

Headley also writes in detail about his decision to join Lashkar “full time” following the 9/11 attacks, and says that by 2002 the group asked him to take “the Daura Aamma, the basic military training course offered by LeT.”

In 2005, Lashkar asked him to change his name from Dawood Gilani to a “Christian sounding name” so that he could travel easily between the US, India and Pakistan and make it difficult for intelligence agencies to track his activities.

“Finally, in June, my immediate superior, Sajid Mir, instructed me to return to the US, change my Muslim name to a Christian sounding name and get a new US passport under that name. He now informed me I would be going to India, since I looked nothing like a Pakistani in appearance and spoke fluent Hindi and Urdu it would give me a distinct advantage in India,” he said.

Describing the training he got at Lashkar camps, Headley writes “we hid most of the day in caves and under trees, while we were given instructions on various lessons.”

He says most of the “practical aspects” of the lessons were carried out at night and during the course, he was trained in “infiltration, survival, camouflage, raid/ambush tactics, hide out, hiding and retrieving weapons caches, more than a dozen night marches, target practice with AK-47 and 9 mm pistol, RPG, grenades, among other training.

NEW YORK, April 22, 2015
Updated: April 22, 2015 18:23 IST

Find this story at 22 April 2015

AMERICAN TERRORIST (2015)

15 april 2016

FRONTLINE investigates American-born terrorist David Coleman Headley, who helped plan the deadly 2008 siege on Mumbai. In collaboration with ProPublica, the film — an updated and expanded version of A Perfect Terrorist — reveals how secret electronic surveillance missed catching the Mumbai plotters, and how Headley planned another Charlie Hebdo-like assault against a Danish newspaper.

APRIL 21, 2015 // 01:23:48
REUTERS/Arko Datta
Find this story at 21 April 2015

AMERICAN TERRORIST A PERFECT TERRORIST (2014)

15 april 2016

In 2008 Mumbai Attacks, Piles of Spy Data, but an Uncompleted Puzzle

In the fall of 2008, a 30-year-old computer expert named Zarrar Shah roamed from outposts in the northern mountains of Pakistan to safe houses near the Arabian Sea, plotting mayhem in Mumbai, India’s commercial gem.

Mr. Shah, the technology chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terror group, and fellow conspirators used Google Earth to show militants the routes to their targets in the city. He set up an Internet phone system to disguise his location by routing his calls through New Jersey. Shortly before an assault that would kill 166 people, including six Americans, Mr. Shah searched online for a Jewish hostel and two luxury hotels, all sites of the eventual carnage.

But he did not know that by September, the British were spying on many of his online activities, tracking his Internet searches and messages, according to former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

They were not the only spies watching. Mr. Shah drew similar scrutiny from an Indian intelligence agency, according to a former official who was briefed on the operation. The United States was unaware of the two agencies’ efforts, American officials say, but had picked up signs of a plot through other electronic and human sources, and warned Indian security officials several times in the months before the attack.

What happened next may rank among the most devastating near-misses in the history of spycraft. The intelligence agencies of the three nations did not pull together all the strands gathered by their high-tech surveillance and other tools, which might have allowed them to disrupt a terror strike so scarring that it is often called India’s 9/11.

“No one put together the whole picture,” said Shivshankar Menon, who was India’s foreign minister at the time of the attacks and later became the national security adviser. “Not the Americans, not the Brits, not the Indians.”

Mr. Menon, now retired, recalled that “only once the shooting started did everyone share” what they had, largely in meetings between British and Indian officials, and then “the picture instantly came into focus.”

The British had access to a trove of data from Mr. Shah’s communications, but contend that the information was not specific enough to detect the threat. The Indians did not home in on the plot even with the alerts from the United States.

Clues slipped by the Americans as well. David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American who scouted targets in Mumbai, exchanged incriminating emails with plotters that went unnoticed until shortly before his arrest in Chicago in late 2009. United States counterterrorism agencies did not pursue reports from his unhappy wife, who told American officials long before the killings began that he was a Pakistani terrorist conducting mysterious missions in Mumbai.

That hidden history of the Mumbai attacks reveals the vulnerability as well as the strengths of computer surveillance and intercepts as a counterterrorism weapon, an investigation by The New York Times, ProPublica and FRONTLINE has found.

Although electronic eavesdropping often yields valuable data, even tantalizing clues can be missed if the technology is not closely monitored, the intelligence gleaned from it is not linked with other information, or analysis does not sift incriminating activity from the ocean of digital data.

This account has been pieced together from classified documents, court files and dozens of interviews with current and former Indian, British and American officials. While telephone intercepts of the assault team’s phone calls and other intelligence work during the three-day siege have been reported, the extensive espionage that took place before the attacks has not previously been disclosed. Some details of the operations were withheld at the request of the intelligence agencies, citing national security concerns.

“We didn’t see it coming,” a former senior United States intelligence official said. “We were focused on many other things — Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, the Iranians. It’s not that things were missed — they were never put together.”

After the assault began, the countries quickly disclosed their intelligence to one another. They monitored a Lashkar control room in Pakistan where the terror chiefs directed their men, hunkered down in the Taj and Oberoi hotels and the Jewish hostel, according to current and former American, British and Indian officials.

That cooperation among the spy agencies helped analysts retrospectively piece together “a complete operations plan for the attacks,” a top-secret N.S.A. document said.

The Indian government did not respond to several requests for official comment, but a former Indian intelligence official acknowledged that Indian spies had tracked Mr. Shah’s laptop communications. It is unclear what data the Indians gleaned from their monitoring.

Asked if Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, Britain’s eavesdropping agency, should have had strong suspicions of a looming attack, a government official responded in a statement: “We do not comment on intelligence matters. But if we had had critical information about an imminent act of terrorism in a situation like this we would have shared it with the Indian government. So the central allegation of this story is completely untrue.”

The attacks still resonate in India, and are a continuing source of tension with Pakistan. Last week, a Pakistani court granted bail to a militant commander, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused of being an orchestrator of the attacks. He has not been freed, pending an appeal. India protested his release, arguing it was part of a Pakistani effort to avoid prosecution of terror suspects.

The story of the Mumbai killings has urgent implications for the West’s duel with the Islamic State and other groups. Like Lashkar, the Islamic State’s stealthy communications and slick propaganda make it one of the world’s most technologically sophisticated terror organizations. Al Qaeda, which recently announced the creation of an affiliate in India, uses similar tools.

Although the United States computer arsenal plays a vital role against targets ranging from North Korea’s suspected assault on Sony to Russian cyberthieves and Chinese military hacking units, counterterrorism requires a complex mix of human and technical resources. Some former counterterrorism officials warn against promoting billion-dollar surveillance programs with the narrow argument that they stop attacks.

That monitoring collects valuable information, but large amounts of it are “never meaningfully reviewed or analyzed,” said Charles (Sam) Faddis, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief. “I cannot remember a single instance in my career when we ever stopped a plot based purely on signals intelligence.”

The targeting of Mr. Shah’s communications also failed to detect Mr. Headley’s role in the Mumbai attacks, and National Security Agency officials did not see for months that he was pursuing a new attack in Denmark.

“There are small successes in all of this that don’t make up for all the deaths,” said Tricia Bacon, a former State Department intelligence analyst, referring to intelligence and broader efforts to counter Lashkar. “It’s a massive failure and some small successes.”

Lashkar’s Computer Chief
Zarrar Shah was a digitally savvy operative, a man with a bushy beard, a pronounced limp, strong ties to Pakistani intelligence and an intense hatred for India, according to Western and Indian officials and court files. The spy agencies of Britain, the United States and India considered him the technology and communications chief for Lashkar, a group dedicated to attacking India. His fascination with jihad established him as something of a pioneer for a generation of Islamic extremists who use the Internet as a weapon.

According to Indian court records and interviews with intelligence officials, Mr. Shah was in his late 20s when he became the “emir,” or chief, of the Lashkar media unit. Because of his role, Mr. Shah, together with another young Lashkar chief named Sajid Mir, became an intelligence target for the British, Indians and Americans.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which translates as “the Army of the Pure,” grew rapidly in the 1990s thanks to a powerful patron: the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the Pakistani spy agency that the C.I.A. has worked with uneasily for years. Lashkar conducted a proxy war for Pakistan in return for arms, funds, intelligence, and training in combat tactics and communications technology. Initially, Lashkar’s focus was India and Kashmir, the mountainous region claimed by both India and Pakistan.

But Lashkar became increasingly interested in the West. A Qaeda figure involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center was arrested in a Lashkar safe house in 2002. Investigators dismantled a Lashkar network as it plotted a bombing in Australia in 2003 while recruiting, buying equipment and raising funds in North America and Europe. In 2007, a French court convicted in absentia the ringleader, Mr. Mir. He remained at large in Pakistan under ISI protection, investigators say.

Lashkar’s alliance with the ISI came under strain as some of the militants pushed for a Qaeda-style war on the West. As a result, some ISI officers and terror chiefs decided that a spectacular strike was needed to restore Lashkar’s cohesion and burnish its image, according to interviews and court files. The plan called for a commando-style assault in India that could also hit Americans, Britons and Jews there.

The target was the centerpiece of Indian prosperity: Mumbai.

Hatching a Plot
Lashkar’s chiefs developed a plot that would dwarf previous operations.

The lead conspirators were alleged to be Mr. Mir and Mr. Lakhvi, according to interviews and Indian court files, with Mr. Shah acting as a technical wingman, running the communications and setting up the hardware.

In early 2008, Indian and Western counterterrorism agencies began to pick up chatter about a potential attack on Mumbai. Indian spy agencies and police forces gathered periodic leads from their own sources about a Lashkar threat to the city. Starting in the spring, C.I.A. warnings singled out the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and other sites frequented by Westerners, according to American and Indian officials. Those warnings came from electronic and human sources, not from tracking Mr. Shah, other officials said.

“The U.S. intelligence community — on multiple occasions between June and November 2008 — warned the Indian government about Lashkar threats in Mumbai,” said Brian Hale, a spokesman for the director of the Office of National Intelligence. “The information identified several potential targets in the city, but we did not have specific information about the timing or the method of attack.”

United States spy agencies also alerted their British counterparts, according to a senior American intelligence official. It is unclear if the warnings led to the targeting of Mr. Shah’s communications, but by the fall of 2008, the British had found a way to monitor Lashkar’s digital networks.

So had the Indians. But until the attacks, one Indian official said, there was no communication between the two countries on the matter.

Western spy agencies routinely share significant or “actionable” intelligence involving threats with allies, but sometimes do not pass on less important information. Even friendly agencies are typically reluctant to disclose their sources of intelligence. Britain and India, while cooperative, were not nearly as close as the United States and Britain. And India is not included in the tightest intelligence-sharing circles of international, eavesdropping agencies that the two countries anchor.

Intelligence officials say that terror plots are often discernible only in hindsight, when a pattern suddenly emerges from what had been just bits of information. Whatever the reason, no one fully grasped the developing Mumbai conspiracy. “They either weren’t looking or didn’t understand what it all meant,” said one former American official who had access to the intelligence and would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “There was a lot more noise than signal. There usually is.”

Leaving a Trail
Not long after the British gained access to his communications, Mr. Shah contacted a New Jersey company posing online as an Indian reseller of telephone services named Kharak Singh, purporting to be based in Mumbai. His Indian persona started haggling over the price of a voice-over-Internet phone service — also known as VoIP — that had been chosen because it would make calls between Pakistan and the terrorists in Mumbai appear as if they were originating in Austria and New Jersey.

“its not first time in my life i am perchasing in this VOIP business,” Mr. Shah wrote in shaky English, to an official with the New Jersey-based company when he thought the asking price was too high, the GCHQ documents show. “i am using these services from 2 years.”

Mr. Shah had begun researching the VoIP systems, online security, and ways to hide his communications as early as mid-September, according to the documents. As he made his plan, he searched on his laptop for weak communication security in Europe, spent time on a site designed to conceal browsing history, and searched Google News for “indian american naval exercises” — presumably so the seagoing attackers would not blunder into an overwhelming force.

Ajmal Kasab, the only terrorist who would survive the Mumbai attacks, watched Mr. Shah display some of his technical prowess. In mid-September, Mr. Shah and fellow plotters used Google Earth and other material to show Mr. Kasab and nine other young Pakistani terrorists their targets in Mumbai, according to court testimony.

The session, which took place in a huge “media room” in a remote camp on the border with Kashmir, was part of an effort to chart the terrorists’ route across the Arabian Sea, to a water landing on the edge of Mumbai, then through the chaotic streets. Videos, maps and reconnaissance reports had been supplied to Mr. Mir by Mr. Headley, the Pakistani-American who scouted targets.

“The gunmen were shown all this data from the reconnaissance,” said Deven Bharti, a top Mumbai police official who investigated the attacks, adding that the terrorists were trained to use Google Earth and global positioning equipment on their own. “Kasab was trained to locate everything in Mumbai before he went.”

If Mr. Shah made any attempt to hide his malevolent intentions, he did not have much success at it. Although his frenetic computer activity was often sprawling, he repeatedly displayed some key interests: small-scale warfare, secret communications, tourist and military locations in India, extremist ideology and Mumbai.

He searched for Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” previous terror strikes in India and weather forecasts in the Arabian Sea, typed “4 star hotel in delhi” and “taj hotel,” and visited mapsofindia.com to pore over sites in and around Mumbai, the documents show.

Still, the sheer scale of his ambition might have served as a smokescreen for his focus on the city. For example, he also showed interest in Kashmir, the Indian Punjab, New Delhi, Afghanistan and the United States Army in Germany and Canada.

He constantly flipped back and forth among Internet porn and entertainment sites while he was carrying out his work. He appeared to be fascinated with the actor Robert De Niro, called up at least one article on the singer Taylor Swift, and looked at funny cat videos. He visited unexplainable.net, a conspiracy theory website, and conducted a search on “barak obama family + muslim.”

In late September and again in October, Lashkar botched attempts to send the attackers to Mumbai by sea. During that period, at least two of the C.I.A. warnings were delivered, according to American and Indian officials. An alert in mid-September mentioned the Taj hotel among a half-dozen potential targets, causing the facility to temporarily beef up security. Another on Nov. 18 reported the location of a Pakistani vessel linked to a Lashkar threat against the southern coastal area of Mumbai, where the attack would occur.

Eventually Mr. Shah did set up the VoIP service through the New Jersey company, ensuring that many of his calls to the terrorists would bear the area code 201, concealing their actual origin. But in November, the company’s owner wrote to the fictitious Indian reseller, Mr. Singh, complaining that no voice traffic was running on the digital telephone network. Mr. Shah’s reply was ominous, according to Indian law enforcement officials, who obtained evidence from the company’s communications records with F.B.I. assistance after the attack.

“Dear Sir,” Mr. Shah replied, “i will send trafic by the end of this month.”

By Nov. 24, Mr. Shah had moved to the Karachi suburbs, where he set up an electronic “control room” with the help of an Indian militant named Abu Jundal, according to his later confession to the Indian authorities. It was from this room that Mr. Mir, Mr. Shah and others would issue minute-by-minute instructions to the assault team once the attacks began. On Nov. 25, Abu Jundal tested the VoIP software on four laptops spread out on four small tables facing a pair of televisions as the plotters, including Mr. Mir, Mr. Shah and Mr. Lakhvi, waited for the killings to begin.

In a plan to pin the blame on Indians, Mr. Shah typed a statement of responsibility for the attack from the Hyderabad Deccan Mujahadeen — a fake Indian organization. Early on Nov. 26, Mr. Shah showed more of his hand: he emailed a draft of the phony claim to an underling with orders to send it to the news media later, according to American and Indian counterterrorism officials.

Before the attacks started that evening, the documents show, Mr. Shah pulled up Google images of the Oberoi Hotel and conducted Wikimapia searches for the Taj and the Chabad House, the Jewish hostel run by an American rabbi from Brooklyn who would die in the strike along with his pregnant wife. Mr. Shah opened the hostel’s website. He began Googling news coverage of Mumbai just before the attacks began.

An intercept shows what Mr. Shah was reading, on the news website NDTV, as the killings proceeded.

“Mumbai, the city which never sleeps, was brought to its knees on Wednesday night as it came under an unprecedented multiple terror attack,” the article said. “Even as heavily armed police stormed into Taj Hotel, just opposite the Gateway of India where suspected terrorists were still holed up, blood-soaked guests could be seen carried out into the waiting ambulances.”

A Trove of Data
In the United States, Nov. 26 was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

A long presidential election fight was over, and many officials in Washington had already drifted away for their long weekend. Anish Goel, director for South Asia at the National Security Council in the White House, left around 6 a.m. for the eight-hour drive to his parents’ house in Ohio. By the time he arrived, his BlackBerry was filled with emails about the attacks.

The Pakistani terrorists had come ashore in an inflatable speedboat in a fishermen’s slum in south Mumbai about 9 p.m. local time. They fanned out in pairs and struck five targets with bombs and AK-47s: the Taj, the Oberoi Hotel, the Leopold Cafe, Chabad House, and the city’s largest train station.

The killing was indiscriminate, merciless, and seemingly unstoppable over three horrific days. In raw, contemporaneous notes by analysts, the eavesdroppers seem to be making a hasty effort to understand the clues from the days and weeks before.

“Analysis of Zarrar Shah’s viewing habits” and other data “yielded several locations in Mumbai well before the attacks occurred and showed operations planning for initial entry points into the Taj Hotel,” the N.S.A. document said.

That viewing history also revealed a longer list of what might have been future targets. M.K. Narayanan, India’s national security adviser at the time, appeared to be concerned with that data from Mr. Shah in discussions with American officials shortly after the attacks, according to the WikiLeaks archive of American diplomatic cables.

A top secret GCHQ document described the capture of information on targets that Mr. Shah had identified using Google Earth.

The analysts seemed impressed by the intelligence haul — “unprecedented real-time active access in place!” — one GCHQ document noted. Another agency document said the work to piece the data together was “briefed at highest levels nationally and internationally, including the US National Security Adviser.”

As early reports of many casualties came in, Mr. Goel said the focus in Washington shifted to a question already preoccupying the White House: “Is this going to lead to a war between Pakistan and India?” American officials who conducted periodic simulations of how a nuclear conflict could be triggered often began with a terror attack like this one.

On Nov. 30, Mr. Goel was back at his office, reading a stack of intelligence reports that had accumulated on his desk and reviewing classified electronic messages on a secure terminal.

Amid the crisis, Mr. Goel, now a senior South Asia Fellow at the New America Foundation, paid little attention to the sources of the intelligence and said that he still knew little about specific operations. But two things stood out, he said: The main conspirators in Pakistan had already been identified. And the quality and rapid pacing of the intelligence reports made it clear that electronic espionage was primarily responsible for the information.

“During the attacks, it was extraordinarily helpful,” Mr. Goel said of the surveillance.

But until then, the United States did not know of the British and Indian spying on Mr. Shah’s communications. “While I cannot comment on the authenticity of any alleged classified documents, N.S.A. had no knowledge of any access to a lead plotter’s computer before the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008,” said Mr. Hale, the spokesman for the Office of the director of National Intelligence.

As N.S.A. and GCHQ analysts worked around the clock after the attacks, the flow of intelligence enabled Washington, London and New Delhi to exert pressure on Pakistan to round up suspects and crack down on Lashkar, despite its alliance with the ISI, according to officials involved.

In the stacks of intelligence reports, one name did not appear, Mr. Goel clearly recalls: David Coleman Headley. None of the intelligence streams from the United States, Britain or India had yet identified him as a conspirator.

The Missing American
Mr. Headley’s many-sided life — three wives, drug-smuggling convictions and a past as an informant for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration — would eventually collapse. But for now, he was a free man, watching the slaughter on television in Lahore, Pakistan, according to his later court testimony. At the time, he was with Faiza Outalha, his Moroccan wife, having reconciled with her after moving his Pakistani wife and four children to Chicago.

Mr. Headley’s unguarded emails reflected euphoria about Lashkar’s success. An exchange with his wife in Chicago continued a long string of incriminating electronic communications by Mr. Headley written in a transparent code, according to investigators and case files.

“I watched the movie the whole day,” she wrote, congratulating him on his “graduation.”

About a week later, Mr. Headley hinted at his inside information in an email to fellow alumni of a Pakistani military school. Writing about the young terrorists who carried out the mayhem in Mumbai, he said: “Yes they were only 10 kids, guaranteed. I hear 2 were married with a daughter each under 3 years old.” His subsequent emails contained several dozen news media photos of the Mumbai siege.

Almost immediately, Mr. Headley began pursuing a new plot with Lashkar against a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He went to Denmark in January and cased the newspaper, meeting and exchanging emails with its advertising staff, according to his later testimony and court records. He sent messages to his fellow conspirators and emailed himself a reconnaissance checklist of sorts, with terms like “Counter-Surveillance,” “Security (Armed?)” and “King’s Square” — the site of the newspaper.

Those emails capped a series of missed signals involving Mr. Headley. The F.B.I. conducted at least four inquiries into allegations about his extremist activity between 2001 and 2008. Ms. Outalha had visited the United States Embassy in Islamabad three times between December 2007 and April 2008, according to interviews and court documents, claiming that he was a terrorist carrying out missions in India.

Mr. Headley also exchanged highly suspicious emails with his Lashkar and ISI handlers before and after the Mumbai attacks, according to court records and American counterterrorism officials. The N.S.A. collected some of his emails, but did not realize he was involved in terrorist plotting until he became the target of an F.B.I. investigation, officials said.

That inquiry began in July 2009 when a British tip landed on the desk of a rookie F.B.I. counterterrorism agent in Chicago. Someone named “David” at a Chicago pay phone had called two suspects under surveillance in Britain, planning to visit.

He had contacted the Britons for help with the plot, according to testimony. Customs and Border Protection used his flight itinerary to identify him while en route, and after further investigation, the F.B.I. arrested him at Chicago O’Hare Airport that October, as he was preparing to fly to Pakistan. For his role in the Mumbai attacks, he pleaded guilty to 12 counts and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

After disclosures last year of widespread N.S.A. surveillance, American officials claimed that bulk collection of electronic communications led to Mr. Headley’s eventual arrest. But a government oversight panel rejected claims giving credit to the N.S.A.’s program to collect Americans’ domestic phone call records. Case files and interviews with law enforcement officials show that the N.S.A. played only a support role in the F.B.I. investigation that finally identified Mr. Headley as a terrorist and disrupted the Danish plot.

The sole surviving attacker of the Mumbai attack, Mr. Kasab, was executed in India after a trial. Although Pakistan denies any role in the attacks, it has failed to charge an ISI officer and Mr. Mir, who were indicted by American prosecutors. Though Mr. Shah and other Lashkar chiefs had been arrested, their trial remains stalled six years after the attack.

Mr. Menon, the former Indian foreign minister, said that a lesson that emerged from the tragedy in Mumbai was that “computer traffic only tells you so much. It’s only a thin slice.” The key is the analysis, he said, and “we didn’t have it.”

James Glanz, of The New York Times, reported from India, New York and Washington; Sebastian Rotella, of ProPublica, reported from Chicago, India, New York and Washington; and David E. Sanger, of The New York Times, reported from Washington. Andrew W. Lehren, of The New York Times, contributed reporting from New York, and Declan Walsh, of The New York Times, from London. Jeff Larson, of ProPublica, and Tom Jennings and Anna Belle Peevey, of FRONTLINE, contributed reporting from New York.

Related Film: A Perfect Terrorist
FRONTLINE and ProPublica teamed up in 2011 to investigate the mysterious circumstances behind David Coleman Headley’s rise from heroin dealer and U.S. government informant to master plotter of the 2008 attack on Mumbai. Also explore our interactive look at Headley’s web of betrayal.

DECEMBER 21, 2014 / by JAMES GLANZ • SEBASTIAN ROTELLA • DAVID E. SANGER The New York Times

Find this story at 21 December 2014
Copyright http://www.pbs.org/

America sacrificed Mumbai to keep Headley in play (2013)

15 april 2016

Five years on, this is what we now know. A valued CIA proxy, who infiltrated the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), a banned Pakistani Islamist outfit, planned the Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed, and more than 300 injured. David Headley, an American citizen, conceived, scoped and ran supplies for the terrorist ‘swarm’ operation, so called because several independent units simultaneously hit their enemy in multiple locations, coming out of nowhere, multiplying fear and panic.
Headley selected Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, as the theatre of operations while acting as a ‘prized counter-terrorism asset’ for the United States, according to senior officers in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, who described his covert career as running for eleven years. When the LeT’s ten-man suicide squad sailed from a creek in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi, at dawn on 22 November 2008, they navigated towards a landing spot in Mumbai, marked on a GPS provided by the Washington DCborn maverick. Reaching the world’s fourth largest metropolis four nights later, LeT’s team fanned out, following routes plotted by Headley over an intense two-year period of surveillance . Shortly before 10pm, the gunmen shot dead tourists at the Leopold Cafe, massacred more than 60 Indian commuters at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) railway station, and then laid siege to a Jewish centre and two five-star hotels, including the luxurious Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai’s most famous landmark. Ten men would keep the mega-city burning for more than three days.
This month sees the fifth anniversary of the Mumbai attacks, and the most complete survey to date of former and serving intelligence agents, diplomats, police, and survivors from 12 countries, reveals that the CIA repeatedly tipped off their counterparts in India to an imminent attack, using intelligence derived from their prize asset Headley. What they did not reveal was that their source, a public school educated Pakistani-American dilettante and entrepreneur, was allowed to remain in place even as the attack was realized. His continuing proximity to the terrorist outfit would eventually lead to a showdown between Washington and New Delhi.
Researching ‘The Siege’, we learned that Indian intelligence agents accused their US counterparts of protecting Headley and leaving him in the field, despite the imminent threat to Mumbai. Irate Indian officials claimed that Headley’s Mumbai plot was allowed to run on by his US controllers, as to spool it in would have jeopardized his involvement in another critical US operation . Having infiltrated the LeT, Headley also won access to al-Qaida, making him the only US citizen in the field who might be able to reach Osama bin Laden. Three years before America’s most wanted terrorist was finally run to ground in Abbottabad, this was an opportunity that some in the US intelligence community were not willing to give up.
Phone and email intercepts seen by us confirm how Headley had become trusted by Ilyas Kashmiri, a former LeT commander and senior al-Qaida operative, who led an al-Qaida military affiliate, known as Brigade 313. Based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, Ilyas Kashmiri was, at one point, considered as a potential successor to Osama bin Laden until his death in June 2011.
In 2009, several months after the Mumbai atrocity, agents from the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s foreign intelligence agency, confronted the CIA with these claims, according to accounts seen by us. India is said to have accused the US of pursuing ‘a narrow self-interest’ and having some responsibility in the deaths in Mumbai.
However, the CIA stood firm, one senior agent claiming that ‘Indian incompetence’ was to blame for the attack. In 2006, the US had warned India that the LeT was forming a suicide squad to attack India from the sea. More than 25 increasingly detailed bulletins followed that named Mumbai as the prime objective, and identified several targets, including the Taj hotel. Additional bulletins suggested that a team of highly trained gunmen using AK47s and RDX, military-grade explosives, would seek to prolong the attack by taking hostages and establishing a stronghold, before a final shoot-out that they hoped would be broadcast live around the world on TV.
Some of these bulletins were eventually distilled into notices that reached the police patrolling Mumbai . However, the assessments were ‘ignored or downplayed’ until July 2008 when a senior police officer, a Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) with responsibility for security in the district of South Mumbai where the Taj was located, took action . On 12 August 2008, DCP Vishwas Nangre Patil spent nine hours with the Taj’s security staff, writing a report to his seniors that concluded: ‘Overall, the [Taj] management has done very little to adapt the hotel to the changing security environment in the city.’ When a truck bomb devastated the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, on 20 September 2008, Patil drew up an urgent list of enhanced security measures for the Taj, including snipers on the roof, blast barriers on the driveway and armed guards on all doors. Although security was tightened as a result, most of these measures were withdrawn again after DCP Patil went on leave in the second week of October 2008.
David Headley was a bizarre mix of Eastern and Western cultures and made for a near-perfect mole. His mother was Serrill Headley, a socialite and adventuress from Maryland, whose great-aunt had funded women’s rights and Albert Einstein’s research . His father was Syed Gilani, a renowned radio broadcaster and diplomat from Lahore, who had been seconded to Voice of America. When Headley was born in Washington DC in 1960, he was initially named Daood Saleem Gilani. Within a year, the family had relocated to Pakistan, where Gilani was brought up as a Muslim and schooled at an exclusive military academy. After his parents divorced and Serrill returned to the US to open a bar in Philadelphia, named, suitably, the Khyber Pass, Gilani, aged 17, rejoined her. He lived with her in a flat above the Khyber Pass — and soon immersed himself in the American way of life. Later he moved to the Upper West Side in New York, where he opened a video rental shop, Fliks.
By 1984, Gilani was a six-foot-two American boy, with a fair complexion, broad shoulders and an impressive mop of curly blond hair. Only his distinctively mismatched eyes — one blue one brown —hinted at his mixed heritage and muddled ancestry. Dressed in crumpled Armani jeans, a leather jacket slung over his shoulder, and a £10,000 Rolex Submariner poking out of his cuff, he was already looking for more lucrative opportunities than video rental. That year, he used his dual identities to smuggle half a kilogram of heroin from Pakistan’s tribal areas to New York, selling it through the video store. When German customs officers caught him four years later at Frankfurt airport en-route to Philadelphia, with two kilograms of heroin, Gilani informed on his co-conspirators to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). While, his accomplices were jailed for between eight and ten years, he became a paid DEA informer, infiltrating Pakistan’s drug syndicates . Some US agents warned that Gilani was too volatile to be trusted, and in 1997, he was arrested again in New York for trafficking. He offered another deal, suggesting he infiltrate Islamist radicals who were starting to worry the CIA and FBI.
A letter put before the court reveals prosecutors conceded that while Gilani might have supplied up to fifteen kilograms of heroin worth £947,000, he had also been ‘reliable and forthcoming’ with the agency about ‘a range of issues’ . Sentenced to fifteen months in the low-security Fort Dix prison, New Jersey, while his co-conspirator received four years in a high-security jail, he was freed after only nine months. In August 1999, one year after hundreds had been killed in simultaneous Al-Qaeda bomb attacks on American embassies in Africa, he returned to Pakistan, his ticket paid for by the US government.
By 2006, Daood had joined the inner circle of Lashkar-e-Toiba, which had been proscribed by the UN five years earlier. Coming up with the plan to attack Mumbai and launch LeT onto the international stage, he changed his name to David Headley and applied for a new US passport. He would use it to travel incognito to India on seven surveillance trips, selecting targets in Mumbai which he photographed using a camera he borrowed from his mother-in-law .
Headley was chaotic and his Mumbai plan was almost undermined by his private life. By 2008, he was married to three women, none of who knew of the others’ existence, two living apart in Pakistan and one in New York. The wife in the US, however, grew suspicious after he championed the 9/11 attackers, reporting him to the authorities. Shortly before the Mumbai operation, his cousin Alex Headley, a soldier in the US Army also considered reporting him after Headley announced that he was naming his newborn son Osama and described him as ‘my little terrorist’ . His Pakistani half-brother Danyal Gilani, who worked as a press officer for the Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, disowned him.
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Eventually, Headley’s mother informed on him to the FBI. Her son was only ever interested in himself, she warned, arguing that his selfishness was born out of his lack of a sense of self. None of the complainants heard anything back, with Serrill Headley, who died ten months before Mumbai, confiding in a friend that her son ‘must have worked for the US government’ .
Five years on, with American officials continuing to remain silent over Headley (and the conflict of interest that enabled him to run amok in the field), and with New Delhi still prevented from accessing him, the full truth about Washington’s culpability in 26/11 remains muddied. In India, where no postmortem of any depth has been carried out into Mumbai, the scale of the intelligence failings — the inability of IB and RAW to develop the leads passed them by the CIA and others — will also never be fully exposed.

Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott Clark | Nov 24, 2013, 05.15 AM IST

Find this story at 24 November 2013

A PERFECT TERRORIST (2011)

15 april 2016

It has been called the most spectacular terror attack since 9/11. On the night of Nov. 26, 2008, 10 men armed with guns and grenades launched an assault on Mumbai with a military precision that left 166 dead. India quickly learned the attackers belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani militant group associated with Pakistan’s secretive intelligence agency, the ISI. But what wasn’t known then was that a Lashkar/ISI operative had been casing the city for two years, developing a blueprint for terror. His name was David Coleman Headley, and he’d been chosen for the job because he had the perfect cover: he was an American citizen. FRONTLINE and ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella team up to investigate the mysterious circumstances behind Headley’s rise from heroin dealer and U.S. government informant to master plotter of the 2008 attack on Mumbai.

NOVEMBER 22, 2011 // 53:40

Find this story at 22 November 2011
Copyright http://www.pbs.org/

AMERICAN TERRORIST

23 december 2015

APRIL 21, 2015 // 01:23:48

Find this story at 21 April 2015

US neither confirms nor denies tapping Turkey’s intelligence head Hakan Fidan

23 oktober 2015

US Department of State Spokesperson John Kirby refused to comment during Thursday’s daily press briefing on a German magazine’s claim that the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on Hakan Fidan, the chief of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT), in order to collect information on a high level security meeting about the possible Turkish intervention in Syria to protect a Turkish enclave there last year.
When asked about a report by the Germany-based Focus magazine asserting the NSA tapped Fidan’s phone and therefore collected the audio from the meeting, Kirby said: “We’re not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence or disclosure activity. I just — I would refer you to the National Security Agency for anything more.”
Kirby was also asked to comment on this week’s meeting in Ankara between Turkish officials and a US delegation led by US Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Gen. John Allen. In response to the question, Kirby said the US delegation and the Turks held a series of constructive meetings, in which the parties discussed their mutual efforts in the coalition against ISIL. He added, “I’m not going to detail all the various things that were discussed, but I think you can understand that — I mean, again, it was a pretty wide-ranging sets of discussions about all the different challenges we’re facing against ISIL.”
Kirby did not confirm or deny allegations that the Turkish government had agreed during the talks to allow its military air base in İncirlik, Adana, to be used by US drones to strike ISIL targets in Syria. “I’m in no position to confirm any kind of decision in that regard,” said the spokesman on the claim.
With regards to the differences between Turkey and the US on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, Kirby stated that the US understands Turkish concerns, adding “It’s not something that we ignore. What our focus [is] on inside Syria is against ISIL. That’s the focus of the coalition effort. And I’d like to remind everybody that Turkey is a part of that coalition, not just a NATO ally but a part of that coalition, and they’re contributing to the effort.”
Kirby also pointed out Turkey’s “significant refugee problem” from Syria. Gen. Allen and US Department of Defense Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth, along with a large delegation from the Pentagon, have been in Ankara this past week meeting with their Turkish counterparts, including Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu. The Turkish and US delegations had an eight-hour-long meeting on Tuesday and continued their discussions on Wednesday and Thursday.
The Turkish daily Cumhuriyet reported on Thursday that Ankara agreed to let US armed drones that are deployed at İncirlik Air Base be used against ISIL. Speaking to the A Haber TV channel in late June, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu talked about the presence of armed US drones at İncirlik, adding that the drones were being used for gathering intelligence and that it was natural that they were armed, given the threats in the region.
According to Cumhuriyet, Turkey and the US are close to a deal on using the base, but Ankara wants the US to support the Syrian opposition, especially around Aleppo, as a precondition to its assistance.

July 10, 2015, Friday/ 12:17:03/ TODAYSZAMAN.COM / ISTANBUL

Find this story at 10 July 2015

A DEATH IN ATHENS Did a Rogue NSA Operation Cause the Death of a Greek Telecom Employee?

23 oktober 2015

JUST OUTSIDE THE MAIN DOWNTOWN part of Athens lies Kolonos, an old Athenian neighborhood near the archaeological park of Akadimia Platonos, where Plato used to teach. Along the maze of narrow streets, flower-filled balconies hang above open-air markets, and locals gather for hours at lazy sidewalk cafes, sipping demitasse cups of espresso and downing shots of Ouzo in quick gulps.

It was a neighborhood Costas Tsalikidis knew well. He lived at No. 18 Euclid Street, a loft apartment just down the hall from his parents. Slim and dark-haired, with a strong chin and a sly smile, he was born in Athens 38 years earlier to a middle-class family in the construction business. Talented in math and physics from an early age, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, considered the most prestigious college in Greece, where he specialized in telecommunications, and later obtained his master’s in computer science in England. Putting his skills to good use, for the last 11 years he had worked for Vodafone-Panafon, also known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cell phone company, and was promoted in 2001 to network-planning manager at the company’s headquarters in the trendy Halandri section of Athens.

On March 9, 2005, Costas’ brother, Panagiotis, dropped by the apartment. He thought he’d have a coffee before a business meeting scheduled for that morning. But as he entered the building, he found his mother, Georgia, running up and down the corridor yelling for help.

“Cut him down!” she was saying. “Cut him down!”

Panagiotis had no idea what she was talking about until he went inside his brother’s apartment and saw Costas hanging from a rope tied to pipes above the lintel of his bathroom door, an old wooden chair nearby. He and his mother cut the rope and laid Costas down on the bed.

Costas Tsalikidis Photo: Courtesy of the Tsalikidis familyThe day before his death, Costas’ boss at Vodafone had ordered that a newly discovered code — a powerful and sophisticated bug — be deactivated and removed from its systems. The wiretap, placed by persons unknown, targeted more than 100 top officials, including then Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and his wife, Natassa; the mayor of Athens; members of the Ministerial Cabinet; as well as journalists, capturing not only the country’s highest secrets, but also its most intimate conversations. The question was, who did it?
For a year, the eavesdropping case remained secret, but when the affair finally became public, it was regarded as Greece’s Watergate. One newspaper called it “a scandal of monumental proportions.” And at its center was the dark underside of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. While the athletes were competing for medals as millions watched, far in the shadows spies had hacked into the country’s major telecom systems to listen and record.

A decade later, Costas’ death is caught up in an investigation into what now appears to have been a U.S. covert operation in Greece. Last February, Greek authorities took the extraordinary step of issuing an international arrest warrant for a CIA official the Greeks believe was a key figure in the operation while based in Athens. Unnoticed by the U.S. press, the warrant was a nearly unprecedented action by an allied country. The intelligence official, identified as William George Basil, was accused of espionage and eavesdropping. But by then he had already left the country, and the U.S. government, as it has done for the past 10 years, continues to stonewall Greek authorities on the agency’s involvement.

The Greek charges only touch the surface, however, and Basil may be less a key figure than simply a spy guilty of poor tradecraft. An investigation by The Intercept has uncovered not only the role of the CIA, but also that of the NSA, as well as how and why the operation was carried out. The investigation began while I was producing a documentary for PBS NOVA on cyberwarfare, scheduled to air on October 14, for which some of the interviews were conducted. In addition, I have had exclusive access to highly classified and previously unreported NSA documents released by Edward Snowden.

The Intercept, along with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, interviewed over two dozen people familiar with the wiretapping case, ranging from U.S. intelligence officials and Greek government officials to those involved in the investigation and its aftermath. Many of those interviewed agreed to talk on condition that their names not be used, fearing criminal prosecution for speaking on intelligence matters or professional retribution. While some questions remain, the evidence points to a massive illegal eavesdropping program that may have led to Costas’ tragic death.

“COSTAS WAS ENGAGED,” his brother, Panagiotis, told me last year. “He was planning to get married.” Like Costas, who was three years younger, Panagiotis spoke fluent English, the product of frequent trips to the U.S., both on business and vacation.

After a dinner of lamb and hummus at a restaurant not far from the apartment where Costas died, Panagiotis spoke emotionally about his brother. “He had met the woman of his life and they were planning to get married really soon. And for that reason, they were looking to get a house and they had already started buying things that they could use in their new household. Costas was happy and optimistic and things had been working out really good for him.”

At the time, Panagiotis couldn’t understand what had happened; Costas was in good health and, at least until recently, seemed to love his job at Vodafone. “I thought there was no reason for him to commit suicide,” he said, although he acknowledged Costas had been under more pressure than usual. “In the last year of his life, he was working very hard because Greece had undertaken the Olympic Games of 2004,” he said. “And that meant a lot of hours at work and a lot of planning to beef up the networks.”

Given the enormous numbers of journalists and tourists who were planning to attend the events, all wanting to communicate, Costas’ workload increased enormously in the months before the games were to begin. Eventually, the technical infrastructure created by the Athens Olympics Organizing Committee for staff and media involved more than 11,000 computers, 23,000 fixed-line telephone devices, and 9,000 mobile phones. But the Olympics ended more than six months before Costas’ death, so there had to be another reason.

At work, things suddenly began to change. Costas told his brother that he wanted to quit. “He tendered his resignation to the company, but it wasn’t accepted,” Panagiotis told me. “He wanted to get out.” And he sent a text to his fiancée, a piano teacher named Sara Galanopoulou, saying he had to leave his job, adding cryptically that it was a “matter of life and death.”

As Costas Tsalikidis and his colleagues at Vodafone worked overtime in the months leading up to the games, thousands of miles away another group was also getting ready for the Summer Olympics in Greece: members of the U.S. National Security Agency. But rather than communicating, they were far more interested in listening. According to previously undisclosed documents from the Snowden archive, NSA has a long history of tapping into Olympic Games, both overseas and within the U.S. “NSA has had an active role in the Olympics since 1984 Los Angeles games,” according to a classified document from 2003, “and has seen its involvement increase with the recent games in Atlanta, Sydney, and Salt Lake City. During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the focus was on counterterrorism, and NSA acted largely in support of the FBI in a fusion cell known as the Olympics Intelligence Center (OIC). … NSA’s support to the 2004 Olympics in Athens will be much more complicated.”

In 2004, for the first time since the 9/11 attacks of 2001, the Summer Olympic Games would be held outside the U.S., and thus the difficulties would be far greater. “Several factors will make the Athens Olympics vastly different,” the document continued, “not the least of which is the fact these Olympics will not be held at a domestic location. Also different is that the security organization that NSA will support is the EYP, or Greek National Intelligence Service. NSA will gather information and tip off the EYP of possible terrorist or criminal actions. Without a doubt, the communication between NSA and EYP will take some coordination, and for that reason preparations are already underway.”

According to a former senior U.S. intelligence official involved with the operation, there was close cooperation between NSA and the Greek government. “The Greeks identified terrorist nets, so NSA put these devices in there and they told the Greeks, OK, when it’s done we’ll turn it off,” said the source. “They put them in the Athens communications system, with the knowledge and approval of the Greek government. This was to help with security during the Olympics.”

The Olympic Games ran smoothly — there were no serious terrorist threats and Greece had its best medal tally in more than a century. On August 29, 16 days after the games began, closing ceremonies were held at the Athens Olympic Stadium. As 70,000 people watched, Greek performers displayed traditional dances, a symbolic lantern was lit with the Olympic Flame, and Dr. Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympics Committee, gave a short speech and then officially closed the games.

Two weeks later, the Paralympics ended, and at that point, keeping their promise to the Greek government, the NSA employees should have quietly disconnected their hardware and deleted their software from the local telecommunications systems, packed up their bugging equipment, and boarded a plane for Fort Meade. The problem was, they didn’t. Instead, they secretly kept the spying operation active, but instead of terrorists, they targeted top Greek officials. According to the former U.S. intelligence official involved with the operation, the NSA began conducting the operation secretly, without the approval or authorization of the CIA chief of station in Athens, the U.S. ambassador, or the Greek government.

“We had a huge problem right after the Greek Olympics,” the source said. “They [NSA] said when the Olympics is over, we’ll turn it off and take it away. And after the Olympics they turned it off but they didn’t take it away and they turned it back on and the Greeks discovered it. They triangulated some signals, anonymous signals, and it all pointed back to the embassy.”

At that point, the source said, someone from the Greek government called Richard Eric Pound, the CIA chief of station at the embassy in Athens and the person officially responsible for all intelligence operations in the country. Pound had arrived in May 2004, replacing Michael F. Walker, the agency’s former deputy director of the paramilitary Special Activities Division, as chief of station in Athens. Describing himself as “a small town boy from Indiana who set off to see the world,” Pound had joined the agency in 1976. Hefty and mustachioed, he was a veteran of the agency’s backwater posts in Africa.

Pound, according to the source, knew nothing about the operation having been turned back on, so he called his boss at CIA headquarters to ask about it. “He says, ‘What in God’s name is this all about?’” said the source (Pound declined to speak to The Intercept). Pound’s boss then immediately called his NSA counterpart. “Oh, yeah, we were going to tell you about that,” the NSA official told Pound’s CIA boss, according to the source. “They didn’t take it out and they turned it back on.”

National Security Agency Deputy Director John Chris Inglis testifies before the House Select Intelligence Committee on the NSA’s PRISM program, which tracks web traffic and US citizens’ phone records, during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 18, 2013. AFP PHOTO / Saul LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images) National Security Agency Deputy Director John Chris Inglis in Washington, D.C., June 18, 2013. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty ImagesNot informing the chief of station and the ambassador was an enormous breach of protocol. The chain of events surprised another source, a long-time veteran of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, who was once a colleague of Basil in Athens. “I can’t think of another time in my experience when that ever happened, that’s how unusual it is,” the source said. “I’m astounded by that.”
In 2006, Chris Inglis became the NSA’s deputy director, the agency’s No. 2 official, who was thus in a position to discover what had happened. In an interview, I questioned him about the scandal and the illegal bugging operation. “Was the NSA involved?” I asked. Inglis offered no denial. “I couldn’t say whether NSA was involved in that or any other activity that might have been alleged to be conducted by an intelligence service, let alone NSA.”

Inglis did confirm, however, that NSA operations in foreign countries would normally have the approval of the CIA chief of station. “The chief of station,” he said, “would speak on intelligence matters for the nation, or essentially be expected to adjudicate matters on behalf of the nation.” He added, “So if NSA was expected to conduct an intelligence operation physically in some particular place of the world, I would expect that the chief of mission — the ambassador — and that the chief of station — the intelligence rep — would have some influence on that, some kind of ability to understand what it was and to ensure that it was done in the proper way.”

I also put the question to Gen. Michael Hayden, the NSA director at the time. “Do you remember the incident that came up involving Greece?” I asked. “Not anything we’re going to talk about here,” he said. “Did that come to your attention?” I pressed. “Not something I can talk about,” he replied.

At the time of the Greek bugging operation, Hayden was also secretly running the NSA’s illegal warrantless eavesdropping and metadata dragnet surveillance programs, the largest domestic spying operations in U.S. history.

FILE – In this Dec. 6, 2002 an aerial file photo of the US embassy in Athens, Greece. Theodoros Pangalos a former foreign minister of Greece said on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2013 the U.S. is not the only country eavesdropping on foreign diplomats: his country’s secret services did that to U.S. ambassadors in Athens and Ankara in the 1990s. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis, File) An aerial file photo of the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece, Dec. 6, 2002. Photo: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP
Stonewalled by the U.S., over the past decade Greek investigators were nevertheless able to follow a digital trail right to the front door of the U.S. Embassy in Athens, and then to William George Basil, a mysterious embassy official with a Greek background.

Although very little is publicly known about Basil, interviews with his relatives and childhood friends in Greece, as well as fellow embassy employees and intelligence officials in Athens and the U.S., shed light on his background.

Basil was born on December 10, 1950, in Baltimore, where many of his relatives had settled after emigrating from Greece. Much of his extended family came from the small Greek island of Karpathos in the Aegean Sea, a port of call for the Argonauts traveling between Libya and Crete, and mentioned in Homer’s Iliad. There, his ancestors worked as stonemasons and as farmhands in mountainside wheat fields.

His father, George, had emigrated to the U.S. where Basil and his sister, Maria, spent their early years. But when Basil was 9, his now-divorced father became engaged to a woman from Karpathos and they all traveled to the island for the wedding. An old snapshot shows a young Basil in a suit jacket sitting uneasily on the back of a donkey. After a few months, the family returned to the U.S., then in the 1960s, when Basil was in his early teens, moved back to Karpathos for good.

Today, childhood friends there still remember Basil as “Billy,” an Americanized youth who liked to spend time on the beach. His cousin Nikos Kritikos often played sports with him. “He played rugby when he was young,” Nikos said. “He was amazingly smart. … We grew up in the same house; his stepmother, Marigoula, raised us.” And Basil’s uncle Manolis Kritikos, a local schoolteacher, remembered him as “a happy kid who smiled.” “He was always restless as a young man, he searched things,” he said. “Most of all he liked the history of this place, the folklore. … And he loved Greece and [the Karpathos village of] Olympos more than anything.”

Basil 9 years old attending his father’s wedding on Karpathos Basil, 9 years old, attending his father’s wedding on Karpathos. After graduating from high school at the American Community Schools in Athens in 1968, Basil joined the Army for five years and was posted to Alaska. Then, according to Basil’s former CIA colleague, he took a job as a Baltimore County deputy sheriff and later joined the CIA’s Office of Security as a polygraph expert. But, after nearly two decades, said the colleague, he grew bored with strapping recruits and potential agents to lie detector machines and sought a position in the agency’s Directorate of Operations. Largely based on his Greek heritage and fluency in the language, he was accepted and quickly disappeared behind the agency’s heavy black curtain, emerging undercover as a Foreign Service Officer with the State Department.
With a black diplomatic passport in his pocket, he was soon on his way to Athens, a city he knew well; he had owned an apartment in the city for many years, which he rented out. Soon after arriving, he moved into an apartment near the beach in Glyfada, one of the most exclusive areas of the city, home to ship owners and wealthy business executives. A long-time biker, he would often cruise around the city on his motorcycle.

At the U.S. Embassy in Athens, he was officially a second secretary in the regional affairs section, later promoted to first secretary. In reality, he joined the CIA station as a terrorism expert. The station, located on the embassy’s top floor (with the forgery section in the basement), was one of the largest in Europe, because it often served smaller Middle East stations with logistical help and temporary personnel. Protected by a bulletproof vest under his shirt, a 9 mm pistol strapped to his belt, and a small M38 handgun on his ankle, Basil, who had a reputation as an Olympic-level shooter, drove around the city in an armored car looking for informants to recruit and liaising with the Greek police organization. According to a confidential report by Greek prosecutor Yiannis Diotis, obtained by The Intercept, Basil played a role in a March 2003 operation — just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq — that involved an informant recruited by the embassy’s CIA station. The operation, code-named “Net,” led to the discovery, by a joint U.S.-Greek team, of a small cache of guns and explosives in the basement of the Iraq Embassy in Athens.

While most CIA assignments to Athens were two years, Basil kept extending his tour, giving him an opportunity to spend time on Karpathos, visiting friends and relatives and playing backgammon. “He never withheld where he was working or what he was doing,” recalled his cousin Nikos. “A lot of times we would call each other and he would tell me, ‘I am in the Middle East.’ His job was to report on the sentiment of those countries’ society. … From what he said he had a lot of friends in high places. I understood that he was acquainted with Ministers of Interior and Ministers of Public Order in Greece.”

One person who knew Basil in passing was John Brady Kiesling, a now-retired career Foreign Service Officer who had worked as the embassy’s political officer from July 2000 to March 2003. I spoke to him in his apartment in the historic Plaka section of Athens, a labyrinth of winding streets and colorful shops in the shadow of the Acropolis. After leaving his post at the embassy, he decided to remain in Greece, where he has followed the bugging case closely. When I brought up the possibility of the NSA conducting a covert operation out of the embassy, without the knowledge of either the ambassador or the CIA chief of station, he looked surprised. “I would say that a rogue agency was performing it if it was performed without the prior clearance with the ambassador, as the president’s representative in Greece,” he said. “It definitely is something that is hanging as a sort of swinging sword blade over the U.S.-Greek relationship.”

But according to Basil’s former CIA colleague in Athens, there are occasions when an ambassador is not informed by the agency because of the sensitivity of the operation. However, there was never a time when a chief of station was kept in the dark. “There were times we didn’t inform the ambassador — it was just too sensitive — and we would have to get a waiver signed,” the source said.

william-george-basil Visa from U.S. passport of William George Basil. A half-dozen miles southwest of Athens is the city of Piraeus. The largest passenger port in Europe and the third largest in the world, it services about 20 million passengers a year. Piraeus is to ships what Chicago’s O’Hare Airport is to planes. There are long rows of ferries, endless quays, hydrofoils and mega-yachts, tankers and cruise ships. It was here, not far from the pier for ferries to Karpathos that the planning ended and the operation began. According to the Greek prosecutor’s report, on June 8, 2004, someone entered the Mobile Telecommunication Center at 31 Akti Miaouli Street, and in the name of a “Markos Petrou,” purchased the first four of what would eventually be 14 prepaid cell phones.
They would become the “shadow” phones. As normal calls from Vodafone went to and from legitimate parties, a parallel stream of digitized voice and data — an exact copy — was directed to the NSA’s shadow phones. The data would then be automatically transferred miles away to NSA receivers and computers for monitoring, analysis, and storage.

Not long after, according to the Snowden documents I reviewed, the NSA contingent began arriving at US-966G, the surveillance agency’s code for the Athens embassy. The planning had already been underway. “Although the first race, dive, and somersault are still a year away,” noted a Signals Intelligence Directorate document, “SID Today,” dated August 15, 2003, “in truth, NSA has been gearing up for the 2004 Olympics for quite some time, in anticipation of playing a larger role than ever before at the international games.” The document then noted that NSA would be sending “the largest contingent of personnel in support of the games in our history. A team of 10 NSA analysts will arrive in Greece anywhere from 30-45 days before the Olympics and stay until the flame is extinguished. … The scope of the Olympics is tremendous, and so will be the support of SID [Signals Intelligence Directorate] and NSA.”

Then, in a note of unintended irony, the writer added, “The world will be watching and so will NSA!”

A key part of the operation would be obtaining secret access to the Greek telecom network. And it is here that Costas Tsalikidis may have entered the picture. As a senior engineer in charge of network planning, working for the country’s largest cellular service provider, he would have been one of those in a position to become the team’s inside person. But he was also far from the only one. “Of course, it could have even been me,” said another Vodafone technician interviewed.

The operation could have been accomplished a number of ways. At the beginning, the installation of the bugging software, while illegal according to Greek law, had been secretly authorized by the Greek government. Thus, an inside person would have been operating outside the law in providing assistance to U.S. intelligence, but with the patriotic objective of helping protect Greece from terrorists. Also, the person may never have been told that the software was supposed to be removed following the conclusion of the games. In any case, it is unlikely that the person would have known who the targets were since they were just lists of phone numbers.

In fact, recruiting a foreign telecom employee as an “inside person” for a major bugging operation was standard operating procedure for both the NSA and the CIA, according to the senior intelligence official involved with the Athens operation. “What the NSA really doesn’t like to admit, about 70 percent of NSA’s exploitation is human enabled,” the former official said. “For example, at a foreign Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, if NSA determines it needs to get access to that system, NSA and/or the CIA in coordination would come up with a mechanism that would allow them to replicate the existing switch to be swapped out. The CIA would then go and seek out the person who had access to that switch — like a Nortel switch or a router — go in there, and then it would be the CIA that would effect the operation. And then the take from it would be exploited by the NSA.”

And according to a highly classified NSA document provided by Snowden and previously published by The Intercept, covertly recruiting employees in foreign telecom companies has long been one of the NSA’s deepest secrets. A program code-named “Sentry Owl,” for example, deals with “foreign commercial platform[s]” and “human asset[s] cooperating with the NSA/CSS [Central Security Service].” The document warns that information related to Sentry Owl must be classified at an unusually high level, known as ECI, or Exceptionally Controlled Information, well above top secret.

“Human intelligence guys can provide sometimes the needed physical access without which you just can’t do the signals intelligence activity,” Gen. Hayden, the NSA head at the time of the Athens bugging, who later ran the CIA, told me.

Basil’s ties to Greece made him very good at developing local agents. “He was the best recruiter the station had, the best,” said the former CIA associate in Athens. “[Basil] may have been in charge of recruiting the guy on the inside. He may have made the initial recruitment.”

With an agent in place inside the network, the next step would be to implant spyware capable of secretly transmitting the conversations of the NSA’s targets to the shadow phones where they could be resent to NSA computers. Developing such complex malware is the job of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) organization. And, according to the previously undisclosed Snowden documents, members of the group “performed CNE [Computer Network Exploitation] operations against Greek communications providers” as part of the preparations for the Olympics. In lay terms, this means they developed malware to secretly extract communications data. Also involved were members of the Special Source Operations (SSO) group, the specialists who work covertly with telecom companies, such as AT&T — or in this case Vodafone — to get secret access to their networks.

The key to the operation was hijacking a particular piece of software, the “lawful intercept” program. Installed in most modern telecom systems, it gave a telecom company the technical capability to respond to a legal warrant from the local government to monitor a suspect’s communications. Vodafone’s central switching equipment was made by Ericsson, the large Swedish company, and on January 31, 2002, Ericsson delivered to Vodafone an upgrade containing the lawful intercept program, a piece of software known as the Remote Control Equipment Subsystem (RES). According to a report by Greece’s Authority for Communication Security and Privacy (ADAE), Costas was the Vodafone employee who accepted delivery of the upgrade.

Normally, when a lawful warrant is submitted to a company such as Vodafone Greece, the information, including the target phone numbers, would first be logged into a program called the Interception Management System (IMS). This creates a permanent record of the request that can later be audited. The information is then sent to the RES, which initiates the actual monitoring by secretly creating a duplicate communications stream for the targeted number. That duplicate stream is then transmitted, along with the metadata — date, time, and number calling or being called — to the law enforcement agency.

But despite having the capability to initiate wiretaps with the RES program, at the time of the Olympics Greece did not have laws in place to permit them. As a result, Vodafone never paid the additional fee to Ericsson for the IMS program and the digital key to activate the system. Far behind the NSA, the Greek government had only simple wiretap technology. “All they had was some primitive suitcase methods that would allow very limited surveillance of very specific targets,” said Kiesling, the former U.S. Embassy official. “From an American point of view, that was terrifyingly primitive.”

Thus, according to Greek sources, prior to the Olympics U.S. officials began asking the Greek government for permission to secretly activate the lawful intercept program, which led to the government agreeing to the U.S. bugging operation. Ironically, the presidential decree permitting widespread eavesdropping was finally enacted on March 10, 2005, the day after Costas’ death.

For NSA, the missing IMS program was the technical opening its operatives needed. In essence, they created malware that would secretly turn on the RES program and begin tapping. But without the IMS program there would be no audit trail, no indication or evidence that eavesdropping was going on as the target numbers were being tapped and transmitted to the shadow phones by the RES. “It was a very complex system, because it was invisible to detection,” Vodafone Greece CEO George Koronias told investigators. “It functioned independently of whether the lawful interception system was activated, and bypassed the security alarm.”

Exploiting the weaknesses associated with lawful intercept programs was a common trick for NSA. According to a previously unreleased top-secret PowerPoint presentation from 2012, titled “Exploiting Foreign Lawful Intercept Roundtable,” the agency’s “countries of interest” for this work included, at that time, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, and others. The presentation also notes that NSA had about 60 “Fingerprints” — ways to identify data — from telecom companies and industry groups that develop lawful intercept systems, including Ericsson, as well as Motorola, Nokia, and Siemens.

There are also a variety of “Access Methods” used to penetrate other countries’ lawful intercept programs. These include using the highly secret Special Collection Service. Known internally as “F-6,” it is described in another Snowden document as “a joint NSA-CIA organization whose mission is to covertly collect SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] from official U.S. establishments abroad, such as embassies and consulates.” The organization’s job, according to the PowerPoint, is to intercept microwaves, the thousands of communications-packed signals that crisscross a city. The PowerPoint also suggested using the Special Source Operations unit, the people who work out secret arrangements with the local telecom companies. And with the Tailored Access Operations unit, techniques could be developed to hack into the country’s telecom systems. For the Athens Olympics operation, it would be a full house.

With the malware installed, the NSA was set to go, with more than a dozen shadow phones purchased and a contingent of employees from at least 11 different NSA organizations poised to begin eavesdropping during “24-hour watches.” According to the ADAE report, the tappers first activated the malware at Vodafone’s communications centers on August 4, 2004, and five days later they began inserting the target phone numbers. Then on September 28, following the conclusion of the Paralympic Games, some of the malware was removed. But less than a week later, long after the Olympic Torch had been extinguished, new malware was implanted.

“And then,” said Kiesling, looking both troubled and perplexed, “the mystery becomes why it continued after the Olympics, and that’s a mystery that still has not been solved.” It was a question I asked a former senior NSA official with long involvement in worldwide eavesdropping operations. “They never [remove it],” the official said with a laugh. “Once you have access, you have access. You have the opportunity to put implants in, that’s an opportunity.”

“FEVER,” COSTAS WROTE. Several of the antennas used for the bugging operation were heating up, and to Costas, it was as if they had a fever. After the Olympic Games concluded, Costas started having problems at work. In the weeks following Costas’ death, his brother discovered one of his notebooks, dating from October and November 2004, after the Olympics, and it described a number of incidents. “In his notes he said that at certain points in time certain antennas seemed to get overworked and they were trying to figure out why that was happening,” said Panagiotis. “Now it turned out that those antennas were the same antennas that were connected with the system of the wiretapping.” In another entry, which Panagiotis submitted to the prosecutor, Costas wrote about a month before he died: “Something is not right at the company.”

Then, at 7:56 p.m. on January 24, 2005, someone installed a routine update in the NSA’s bugging software at Vodafone’s facility in the Paiania section of the city. It would turn out to be anything but routine. Within seconds, errors appeared, which caused hundreds of text messages from customers to go undelivered, and people began complaining. At the same time, an automatic failure report was sent to Vodafone management. It was as if a burglar alarm had gone off during a robbery. As normally happens, Vodafone sent the voluminous logs and data dumps to Ericsson for analysis, while those involved quietly waited — and worried. The once cheerful and upbeat Costas turned glum and angry. “We have heard that Costas was in meetings inside the company, in meetings that were very loud and a lot of people were arguing,” said Panagiotis. “He tendered his resignation to the company, but it wasn’t accepted. … He wanted to get out.”

On March 4, after weeks of investigation, Ericsson notified Vodafone that it had discovered a sophisticated piece of malware, containing a hefty 6,500 lines of code — evidence of a large bugging operation. The company also turned up the target phone numbers of the prime minister and his wife, the mayor of Athens, members of the Ministerial Cabinet, and scores of high officials, as well as the numbers for the shadow phones and the metadata describing when the calls were made.

Three days later, Vodafone technicians isolated the malware. Then on March 8, before law enforcement had an opportunity to get involved, Koronias, the Vodafone Greece CEO, ordered the software deactivated and removed, thus hampering any future investigation. Apparently alerted, those involved in the bugging operation immediately turned off their shadow phones. “Vodafone’s decision to deactivate the software meant our hands were tied,” Yiannis Korandis, the chief of the EYP, the Greek National Intelligence Service, told investigators.

The next morning Panagiotis discovered his brother’s body hanging from a white rope tied to a pipe above the bathroom doorway. To this day, he is convinced that Costas was murdered to keep him quiet and prevent him from quitting and going public with the details. “He probably wanted answers there and then and I think that led to his demise,” he said. The bugging, Panagiotis suspects, may have been the reason Costas sent the text to his fiancée about leaving his job being a “matter of life and death.”

Athens, GREECE: Vodafone Greece Chief Executive Officer George Koronias holds documents 06 April 2006 before the start of a parliamentary committee hearing investigating the case of a phone-tapping scandal, which targeted Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and top officials during and after the 2004 Athens Olympics games. AFP PHOTO / Louisa Gouliamaki (Photo credit should read LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images) Vodafone Greece CEO George Koronias holds documents in April 2006 before the start of a parliamentary committee hearing investigating the phone-tapping scandal. Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki /AFP/Getty ImagesWithin hours of Costas’ death, Ericsson prepared a formal “Incident Case Description,” outlining technical details about the malware and how it worked. It contained the warning: “This document is to be treated as highly confidential and … all necessary steps to protect this information must be taken, including the mandatory use of Entrust encryption within Ericsson.” After seven pages of technical detail, the report concluded that someone had loaded unauthorized “corrections,” i.e. malware implants, “designed to introduce RES functionality in such a way that it is not visible to any observer. Neither Ericsson nor Vodafone have any knowledge of the corrections. Nor is it known who supplied the correction, who loaded them or how long they have been loaded in the network.” In other words, someone had introduced malware to secretly activate the lawful intercept’s tapping function while at the same time hiding the fact that it had been turned on. On March 10, the report was turned over to Vodafone Greece CEO Koronias.
The Tsalikidis family’s former lawyer, Themistoklis Sofos, believes that Costas discovered the spy software by chance and then reported it. “Some people were afraid that he would talk so they killed him in a professional manner,” he told a Greek newspaper. Although the official coroner’s report said he took his own life, no suicide note was ever found, and the initial forensic report was inconclusive.

Nevertheless, Supreme Court prosecutor Dimitris Linos said that Costas’ death was clearly tied to the eavesdropping operation. “If there had not been the phone tapping, there would not have been a suicide,” he said in June 2006. In his report, prosecutor Yiannis Diotis also said that Costas had knowledge of the illegal phone-tapping software. And Giorgos Constantinopoulos, a former colleague in charge of communications security for Vodafone, reportedly told prosecutors that he was sure Costas was in a position to know about the spy software, and that his death was likely connected to that discovery.

THROUGHOUT THIS PAST SUMMER in Athens as the debt crisis mounted, crowds of pro-government demonstrators filled Syntagma Square shouting angry chants against European creditors. A few blocks away on Panepistimiou Street, an anarchy symbol was spray-painted on the walls of the headquarters of the Bank of Greece. And behind the Doric columns and yellow neo-classical façade of the Parliament Building, nervous politicians huddled and debated what to do next.

But a mile and a half away, in a heavily guarded compound near Pedion tou Areos, one of the largest parks in Athens, prosecutors were finally bringing to a close a decade of investigations. And on June 26 the finger of guilt was pointed directly at America’s Central Intelligence Agency. Now it is up to the Justices’ Council to decide how to proceed, and it may prove very embarrassing for the United States.

From the very start, according to a former senior Greek official involved in the investigation, there was no doubt within the highest levels of government that the U.S. was behind the bugging. On Friday, March 25, 2005, two weeks after Panagiotis cut the rope from his brother’s neck, Greeks celebrated Independence Day, followed by a weekend of festivities. But in Maximos Mansion, the Greek White House, the talk was far from jubilant. As Greek Navy helicopters flew low over the Acropolis during a military parade, members of the Greek inner circle were meeting with Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis about the bugging scandal that had targeted him and his wife.

A few days before, Foreign Minister Petros Molyviatis was in Washington engaged in high-level meetings with top officials. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of the “excellent state of relations between Greece and the United States,” and President George W. Bush issued a proclamation declaring “our special ties of friendship, history, and shared values with Greece.” He noted, “Our two Nations are founded on shared ideals of liberty.” But based on the investigation up to that point, close aides, including Foreign Minister Molyviatis, were convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the operation. Although at least one member of the group wanted to bury the whole matter rather than cause a rupture in relations with the U.S., Karamanlis disagreed, according to the source. “No way,” Karamanlis said. “If they find this on us 10 years from now, things will prove really difficult.”

The decision was made to have the police and the EYP intelligence service launch an investigation. Although far from exhaustive, with many questions left unanswered, Minister of Public Order George Voulgarakis and several other officials finally held a televised press conference in February 2006. Scribbling with a blue marker on a white board, they noted that the 14 shadow cell phones were using four mobile phone antennas with a radius of about 2 kilometers in central Athens.

Within that area was the U.S. Embassy on Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, which turned out to be a matter of great embarrassment for both the U.S. and Greek governments. “The U.S. has been fingered in the media as the culprit,” U.S. Ambassador Charles P. Ries noted in a classified memo to Washington, released by WikiLeaks. Ries suspected Voulgarakis of the leak. Calling him “a less reliable ally,” Ries said Voulgarakis “has allowed rumors to circulate that the U.S. is behind [the] major eavesdropping case in Greece.” Nevertheless, both sides wanted to pretend all was normal. Thus, Foreign Minister Molyviatis suggested to Ries that they move a previously scheduled meeting between them from the ambassador’s residence to the very public Grande Bretagne Hotel in central Athens. There, Ries noted in his memo, “All could see that the U.S.-Greece relationship was unimpaired.”

It was an odd lunch. Molyviatis was sitting across from the man whose embassy, he believed, had been listening in on his cell phone for months. And Ries, out of the loop because it was a rogue NSA/CIA operation, still may not have known of his embassy’s involvement. “Addressing the eavesdropping case,” Ries said in his memo, “Molyviatis gave his opinion that the whole hullabaloo [the press conference] had been unnecessary. It would have been sufficient to hand the matter to the judicial authorities for investigation and, if appropriate, prosecution, he said. But now, both he and the Prime Minister were keen to show that the current hysteria did not detract from excellent U.S.-Greece relations.”

For some, however, the cozy relations only seemed to increase the anger. In May, a Greek terrorist organization, “Revolutionary Struggle,” attempted to assassinate Voulgarakis with a remote-controlled bomb. Pointing to the wiretapping scandal and weakening Greek sovereignty as a key reason for the attack, the group said it opposed state-sponsored “terrorism of mass surveillance.” At the U.S. Embassy, the deputy chief of mission sent a classified cable to Washington, released by WikiLeaks, with a warning. “This group is to be taken seriously,” he said. “While there is no mention thus far of targeting foreign ‘capitalist-imperialists,’ it would not be a leap of faith for RS to focus its attention on the U.S. presence in Greece.” Ten months later, the group fired a rocket at the embassy.

Around the time the eavesdropping was discovered, Basil left the country, apparently with a quick reassignment by CIA to Sudan. Then, according to Greek documents obtained by The Intercept, on August 4, as things quieted down, he obtained a visa at the Greek Embassy in Khartoum and returned 10 days later to Athens and his cover job as first secretary for regional affairs. The diplomatic position gave him immunity from arrest.

The investigation was the first of what would be five major probes stretching over a decade in which more than 500 witnesses would be questioned, including agents of the EYP. Evidence built up slowly as investigators picked apart the telltale computer logs, traced the cell phone signals, and dissected layers and layers of software. Over the years, piece after piece, the puzzle began to come together.

In his testimony, Ericsson’s managing director for Greece, Bill Zikou, laid out the “how,” describing the method by which the bugging was accomplished. “What happened in this incident,” he said, “is that a complex, sophisticated, non-Ericsson intruder piece of software was planted into the Vodafone Greece network,” which by activating the RES function “thus made illegal interceptions possible.”

william-basil200 William George Basil. Date unknown. Photo: FacebookThen investigators turned to the “who.” At the conclusion of its operation, the NSA was hoping that it could disappear into the night without leaving a trace. “Unlike the athletes, when the Olympics are over, the NSA team is hoping you won’t even know they were there,” said one of the classified documents. It bore the ironic title, “Another Successful Olympics Story.” But as a result of sloppy intelligence tradecraft by the American spies, each step pointed the investigators closer and closer to the U.S.
One person who spent a great deal of time buying shadow phones was William Basil. “We used to call him the telephone man,” said the former CIA colleague in Athens. “All we do is we buy burner phones. Just drive in any direction you want and go to a random phone store and just buy a phone, make a call, and throw the phone away.”

But Basil wasn’t the only one buying shadow phones. According to the prosecutor’s confidential report, issued June 26, 2015 and obtained by The Intercept, investigators traced four of the shadow cell phones to the shop in Piraeus. There, the prosecutor showed pictures of Basil and his wife, Irene, to the store’s manager. “She is known” to the store, the manager said. The prosecutor then noted in his report that Irene was “acting as designated by him [Basil] and on his behalf.” And according to registered deeds, the family of Irene Basil has long owned a home in Piraeus just a few miles from the shop.

Things got even sloppier. After purchasing the four shadow phones, meant to be untraceable, the SIM card from one of them was removed and placed in a cell phone registered to the U.S. Embassy. It was a direct link between the covert operation and the U.S. government. Investigators then traced more than 40 calls to and from the U.S. Embassy involving the phone. The numbers listed in the ADAE report include the embassy’s main number, the emergency after-hours number, the Marine guard, and the FBI office. There was even a call to a women’s clothing store in Athens, Rouge Paris.

Then, on the same shadow phone using another SIM card, investigators found calls to Maryland. Based on the phone numbers, The Intercept was able to determine that those calls were made to Ellicott City, where Basil and his wife used to own property, and to neighboring Cantonsville, both bedroom communities for NSA. The implications greatly worried the investigators. “We were scared,” one told a parliamentary committee. “This is something that the Foreign and Justice Ministries should investigate.”

Finally, after years of slow, ineffective, and politically hindered investigations that produced more fog than clarity, the determined work of the ADAE and a few others began paying off. The evidence pointed at the U.S. Embassy, and with a bit of luck and thanks to the American spies’ mistakes, prosecutors came up with a name, William Basil, and the international arrest warrant was issued last February.

But by then, he was long gone. After Athens, Basil was promoted to deputy chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, then sent back to a desk job at headquarters, that of director of human resources at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. Now retired and no longer protected by diplomatic immunity, he may never see Greece again, the country where his wife currently lives in her family’s home in Piraeus. In 2012, according to a petition he signed protesting a planned marine park on Karpathos, he wrote, “I own property in Karpathos and plan to retire there next year.”

Today the two-story house near the beach in Diafani sits empty; construction materials are stacked on the porch, its exterior unpainted. Nearby, friends and relatives can’t believe that Billy from Karpathos could have secretly wiretapped their top officials, or spied on their government. “There’s no way he did what they say he did,” said Basil’s cousin Nikos. “Because of his love [for] Greece, they would know that if that thing [the wiretapping] needed to be done, they would most certainly ask somebody else to do it. No way he did it. It is well known that he was first and foremost a Greek patriot.”

Months before the arrest warrant was issued, Basil had been in touch by phone with a prominent criminal lawyer in Athens, Ilias G. Anagnostopoulos, according to a Greek source, who asked not to be named because of the confidential nature of the information. When asked by the attorney if he would be willing to testify if it came to that, Basil, according to the source, replied: “If there are questions, of course I can answer them.” The attorney met with the prosecutor, but after leaks to the press, Basil told Anagnostopoulos to drop the matter for the time being. Complicating matters, the prosecutor has filed the eavesdropping case alongside a much larger, but unconnected, conspiratorial case involving an assassination attempt on former Prime Minister Karamanlis, a key target of the wiretapping operation.

CIA Chief of Station Eric Pound left Athens in 2007, returning to headquarters to become chief of the External Operations and Cover Division, the organization responsible for creating front companies overseas for clandestine officers masquerading as business executives or other occupations. After he retired in September 2009, Pound mentioned to a college audience that the CIA has an obsession to learn the truth. He added, “But obsession does not always lead to success.”

Costas Tsalikides March 9, 2005 Costas Tsalikidis, March 9, 2005.
Panagiotis and other family members also want the truth. In 2011, Costas’ family asked two coroners to reexamine the medical records. One was Dr. Steven Karch, a forensic pathologist and former medical examiner in San Francisco, and the other was Dr. Theodoros Vougiouklakis, an associate professor of forensic medicine in Greece. Karch called the original autopsy “farcical.” Based on pictures of the body, the coroners concluded that the marks to Costas’ neck couldn’t have come from simply jumping off the chair. “Something was done to him prior,” Karch told The Intercept.
The family agrees with this conclusion. “I believe there are people who know what happened, what exactly and who exactly did it and they will give us those facts,” said Panagiotis. “I believe that as time goes by the reasons for protecting the perpetrators will fade and mouths will open.” Last March, on the 10th anniversary of Costas’ death, his mother spoke to a local Greek reporter for the first time. “I want to know what happened to my child and nobody that investigated until now, 10 years [later], gave me the slightest response,” she said. “As long as I live I will live with this suffering. I want to punish those who are guilty for what happened, and those who know [but] do not speak.”

There appears little chance that her questions will be answered, however. It is extremely unlikely the Obama administration will ever allow Basil, or any other intelligence official, to be extradited. Nor is it likely that Basil will return to Greece voluntarily with an arrest warrant waiting for him. Around 2009 he appeared in a Facebook picture, seemingly in disguise, sporting a long white beard and moustache. “Dude, Santa’s job isn’t available for what … another seven months,” a friend joked on Facebook. Though he has not responded to requests for an interview, pictures online show him in Greece in 2013 attending his daughter’s wedding, without the beard, in the Glyfada section of Athens. Multiple attempts to reach Basil by phone, and through family members, were unsuccessful. Both the CIA and NSA declined to comment on any issue surrounding the Athens wiretapping, including Basil’s indictment.

As for the NSA, a classified review of the Greek Olympics asked the now ironic question, “After this year’s gold medal performance, what comes next?” Next will certainly be the Olympics scheduled for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, next summer. According to a previously published top-secret NSA slide, the agency has already planted malware throughout the country’s telecommunications system. And, if history is any guide, in the weeks leading up to the start of the games, teams from the SCS, SSO, TAO, and other organizations will arrive once again to begin 24/7 eavesdropping. And as in Greece, they may just happen to leave some of their monitoring equipment behind.

Sitting in his apartment overlooking Athens’ Plaka, John Brady Kiesling could make little sense of it all. “I don’t see a shred of evidence that this wiretapping did the U.S. government any good,” he said. “I think it’s just important to underscore that intelligence gathering is never free. It always comes at a human and political cost to someone. In this case it was paid by an innocent Vodafone technician.”

Aggelos Petropoulos of the Athens-based newspaper Kathimerini contributed reporting from Greece, and Ryan Gallagher, senior reporter at The Intercept, contributed research and reporting from the Snowden Archive.

Documents published with this story:

Another Successful Olympics Story
Exploiting Foreign Lawful Intercept Roundtable
Gold Medal Support for Olympic Games
NSA Team Selected for Olympics Support
SID Trains for Athens Olympics

James Bamford
Sep. 29 2015, 4:01 a.m.

Find this story at 29 September 2015
Copyright https://theintercept.com/

German spy scandal deepens

16 oktober 2015

The German intelligence service has spied on European and American embassies in ways that may have been beyond its mandate, German media ARD and Spiegel Online reported on Wednesday (14 October).
The Bundesnachtrichtendienst (BND) reportedly targeted French and US institutions and eavesdropped on them to acquire information about countries like Afghanistan.

The news follows reports in April that the BND spied on France and the European Commission on behalf of the US’ National Security Agency (NSA). But according to the new reports, BND also spied on allies on its own initiative.
For its spying programme, the BND used thousands of search queries, so-called selectors, including phone numbers and IP addresses, possibly queries the service chose itself.

“The question is … whether the used queries were covered by the BND’s mandate”, MP Clemens Binninger of chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right CDU party told ARD.

Binninger is head of the Bundestag’s supervisory body that oversees the intelligence service.

The German media sourced their news at a secret meeting of the overseeing body on Wednesday evening.

The revelations are remarkable considering the criticism that followed revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013 that the NSA had spied on EU leaders, including Merkel.

“Spying among friends – that is just not done”, Merkel said following the scandal.

The BND programme stopped around the same time as the Snowden revelations revealed the NSA practices, in the autumn of 2013.

German MPs are planning to interview staff next week at the BND headquarters in Pullach and review the list of search queries to determine if there has been any illegal practice.

By PETER TEFFER
BRUSSELS, 15. OCT, 09:11

Find this story at 15 October 2015

German spy charged with treason for aiding CIA and Russia

16 oktober 2015

Prosecutors have charged a German spy with treason, breach of official secrecy and taking bribes for allegedly providing secret documents to both the CIA and Russia’s intelligence agency. Prosecutors say Thursday Aug. 20, 2015, the 32-year-old man,handled mail and classified documents for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND. ( Stephan Jansen/dpa via AP)
BERLIN (AP) — A German spy who allegedly acted as a double agent for the United States and Russia has been charged with treason, breach of official secrecy and taking bribes, Germany’s federal prosecutors’ office said Thursday.

The 32-year-old, identified only as Markus R. due to privacy rules, is accused of offering his services to the CIA in early 2008 while working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND. Documents he gave the U.S. spy agency would have revealed details of the BND’s work and personnel abroad, officials said.

“In doing so the accused caused serious danger to Germany’s external security,” prosecutors said in a statement. “In return the accused received sums amounting to at least 95,000 euros ($104,900) from the CIA.”

Shortly before his arrest in July 2014, Markus R. also offered to work for Russian intelligence and provided them with three documents, again harming Germany’s national security, prosecutors said.

The discovery that the CIA had allegedly been spying on its German counterpart caused anger in Berlin, adding to diplomatic tension between Germany and the United States over reports about U.S. surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

Following the arrest, the German government demanded the removal of the CIA station chief in Berlin.

Prosecutors said Markus R. would have had access to sensitive documents because his job involved handling mail and classified documents for the BND’s foreign operations department.

German weekly Der Spiegel reported that the 218 documents Markus R. allegedly passed to the CIA included a list of all BND agents abroad, a summary of an eavesdropped phone call between former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, as well as a draft counter-espionage strategy. A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutors’ office declined to comment on the report.

If convicted, Markus R. could face between one and 15 years in prison.

Associated Press By FRANK JORDANS
August 20, 2015 11:07 AM

Find this story at 20 August 2015
Copyright http://news.yahoo.com/

Deliberate Deception Washington Gave Answer Long Ago in NSA Case

16 oktober 2015

For months, the German government sought to create the impression it was still waiting for an answer from the US on whether it could share NSA target lists for spying with a parliamentary investigation. The response came months ago.

The order from Washington was unambiguous. The United States Embassy in Berlin didn’t want to waste any time and moved to deliver the diplomatic cable without delay. It was May 10, 2015, a Sunday — and even diplomats aren’t crazy about working weekends. On this day, though, they had no other choice. James Melville, the embassy’s second-in-command, hand delivered the mail from the White House to Angela Merkel’s Chancellery at 9 p.m.

The letter that Melville handed over to Merkel’s staff contained the long-awaited answer to how the German federal government could proceed with highly classified lists of NSA spying targets. The so-called “selector” lists had become notorious in Germany and the subject of considerable grief for Merkel because her foreign intelligence agency, the BND, may have helped the NSA to spy on German firms as a result of them. The selector lists, which were fed into the BND’s monitoring systems on behalf of the NSA, are reported to have included both German and European targets that were spied on by the Americans.

The letter put the German government in a very delicate position. The expectation had been that the US government would flat out refuse to allow officials in Berlin to present the lists to members of the federal parliament, which is currently investigating NSA spying in Germany, including the eavesdropping of Merkel’s own mobile phone. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, the Americans delivered a more differentiated letter, making it all the more interesting.

Canned Answers

Nevertheless, the German government remained silent about the letter’s existence. It disposed of all queries by saying that talks with the US on how to deal with the lists were still ongoing. The government kept giving the same reply whenever journalists from SPIEGEL or other media asked if it had received an answer from the Americans.

On May 11, for example, one day after Chancellery officials received the letter, Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert responded to a query by saying: “The heads of the Parliamentary Control Panel (responsible for parliamentary oversight of Germany’s intelligence agencies) and the NSA investigative committee are all being informed about all relevant things in the context of this consultation process.” Is it not relevant when the US government provides its first official response to the Germans’ request to present the lists to parliament?

Two days later, on May 13, Seibert was asked explicitly by a reporter whether there had been any new developments on the NSA issue. “I have nothing new to report,” the government spokesman answered. At the very least, his reply was a deliberate deception of the public by the government. The letter, after all, didn’t come from just anyone — it came from US President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough. A letter from such a high-ranking official is most certainly a new development. When questioned by SPIEGEL on the matter, the German government responded that “it would not publicly comment on confidential communications with foreign parties.”

Several sources familiar with the contents of the letter claim that in it, Obama’s people express their great respect for the parliamentary oversight of intelligence services and also accept that the committee will learn more about the NSA target list. At the same time, the letter also includes the decisive requirement: that the German government had to make sure no information contained in the target lists went public.

Keeping the Public in the Dark

The demand created a dilemma for the government. It meant, on the one Hand, that Merkel’s Chancellery could no longer hide behind the Americans as an excuse to withhold the information from parliament. On the other hand, the Chancellery didn’t want to take the risk of sharing the lists with members of the Bundestag because doing so, they worried, would create the risk that someone might then leak them to the media.

Merkel and her people instead deliberately kept German citizens and members of parliament in the dark about the Americans’ position. Almost two weeks after receipt of the letter from Washington, Merkel’s chief of staff, Chancellery Minister Peter Altmaier, informed the heads of the NSA investigative committee in a highly confidential meeting of an answer by the Americans, but he implied it had been vague, and there was no mention of any willingness on the part of the US government to allow the German parliament to clarify the issue. Instead, Altmaier argued that Washington had listed a number of legal concerns. He said it was unlikely further discussions would lead to any green light.

When the German weekly Die Zeit reported 10 days ago that the Americans had given their okay for the release of the lists, Altmaier responded: “We could have spared ourselves a difficult debate if permission to pass (the lists) on had actually been given by the US.” Altmaier clearly attempted to skirt the question of whether the US had made any statements on the issue.

Officials in the Chancellery are now doing their best to portray the McDonough letter as a kind of kick-off in German-American consultations on how to deal with the selector lists. After receiving the letter, Chancellery Minister Altmaier had a number of exchanges with his US counterpart by phone and email. In addition, Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, the Chancellery’s intelligence coordinator, also spoke several times with the Americans.

Berlin’s approach to the negotiations says quite a bit about the outcome one should expect. Officially, the German government is asking for permission to release the selector lists without the application of any restrictions by the US government. It had to have been clear to everyone involved that a demand like that would be unrealistic, but in this instance, the government didn’t want to risk making any mistakes. Within the Chancellery, officials then agreed that any time they were approached with questions, they would always answer that the consultations were still in progress — even if a decision had already been made.

Pushback from the Opposition

“The Federal Chancellery is doing exactly the opposite of what Merkel promised,” criticizes Konstantin von Notz, the Green Party’s representative on the NSA investigative committee. “Instead of clearing things up, things are being concealed behind the scenes, also using improper means.”

As the course of the NSA scandal showed, Merkel and her people already have practice when it comes to cover-up attempts. During her election campaign in 2013, Merkel created the impression for months that there was a chance Germany might be able to reach a no-spy agreement with the US. Throughout, the White House signaled behind the scenes that it would never agree to one, but the German government told the public nothing about these discussions.

Now, a special ombudsman is supposed to steer the government out of the difficult situation in which it finds itself. It’s an idea that originated with Altmaier. Rather than providing the selector lists to the NSA investigative committee in parliament, they will instead be viewed by Kurt Graulich, a former justice with the Federal Administrative Court. Altmaier’s hope is that this path will prevent details from being leaked to the press.

The opposition parties in parliament are against the idea. And why shouldn’t they be? In recent years, the Chancellery has done everything in its power to downplay spying by US intelligence services on Germany. Altmaier’s predecessor, Ronald Pofalla, even went so far in August 2013 as to say that the NSA scandal had been “cleared up.” The revelation, arguably the biggest, that Merkel’s own mobile phone had been tapped by the NSA followed two months later. Now the Green and Left parties want to prevent the government from choosing its own inspector. They are considering a legal challenge at the Federal Constitutional Court to stop Merkel’s government.

08/21/2015 07:44 PM
By Matthias Gebauer, René Pfister and Holger Stark

Find this story at 21 August 2015

An American Tip to German Spies Points to a More Complex Relationship

16 oktober 2015

BERLIN — In the summer of 2011, American intelligence agencies spied on a senior German official who they concluded had been the likely source of classified information being leaked to the news media.

The Obama administration authorized the top American spy in Germany to reveal to the German government the identity of the official, according to German officials and news media reports. The decision was made despite the risk of exposing that the United States was monitoring senior national security aides to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The tip-off appears to have led to a senior German intelligence official being barred from access to sensitive material. But it also raises suspicions that Ms. Merkel’s government had strong indications of the extent of American surveillance at least two years before the disclosures by Edward J. Snowden, which included the number of a cellphone used by the chancellor.

The decision by the United States to risk disclosing a surveillance operation against a close ally indicates the high level of concern over the perceived security breach. It is unclear, however, what that information might have been or if it involved intelligence provided to Germany by the United States.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported Friday that it believed the American effort to expose the German intelligence official arose from conversations by its own journalists. It filed a complaint with the federal prosecutor in Germany over espionage activity and a violation of Germany’s data protection laws. The prosecutor’s office declined to comment, other than to confirm that the filing had been received.

In Washington, a spokesman for the National Security Council, Ned Price, declined on Friday to comment on the reported surveillance other than to indicate that the government does not spy on foreign journalists. “The United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” Mr. Price said.

The disclosure is the latest intelligence revelation to shake the alliance, even though it is unclear that the National Security Agency actively listened to Ms. Merkel’s calls. Among other actions that widened the rift, the Germans last summer expelled the then-C.I.A. chief. And this week material uncovered by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks suggested that the Americans had been spying on their German allies back to the 1990s.

The first hints emerged in the German media this year. The Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported that Hans Josef Vorbeck, a deputy director of the chancellery’s intelligence division, had been “put out in the cold” in 2011 after the then-C.I.A. station chief in Berlin gave information to Mr. Vorbeck’s boss, Günter Heiss. Der Spiegel said Mr. Heiss was specifically told of contacts with its journalists.

Mr. Heiss, a quiet but powerful figure in German intelligence activities, was questioned for nearly six hours at an open hearing of a German parliamentary committee on Thursday. Mr. Heiss was particularly reticent when asked about Mr. Vorbeck. He repeatedly declined to answer questions about him, challenging the mandate of the committee to pose such queries, and arguing that he was not allowed to discuss a third party in public.

Konstantin von Notz, a lawmaker for the opposition Green Party, which has been vocal in its criticism of Ms. Merkel and the German handling of alleged American espionage, accused Mr. Heiss of hiding behind a “cascade” of excuses.

Eventually, Hans-Christian Ströbele, a longtime lawmaker for the Greens, asked Mr. Heiss whether he ever had a “concrete suspicion” that Mr. Vorbeck was leaking classified information. Mr. Heiss said there was no “concrete suspicion” that would have led to “concrete action.” He indicated the matter had been discussed in the chancellery, but declined to give specifics.

But when asked whether Mr. Vorbeck had been the target of spying, Mr. Heiss declared: “No. That much I can say.”

In a report in the edition it published on Saturday, Der Spiegel said Mr. Heiss had learned of the suspicions against Mr. Vorbeck in the summer of 2011, when invited by the C.I.A. station chief to take a walk.

Appearing before the committee last month, Guido Müller, a senior intelligence official, at first said he could not recall Mr. Vorbeck’s transfer to a lower-level job. Mr. Müller then said he could remember it only if testifying behind closed doors.

When he appeared before the committee, two days shy of his 64th birthday, Mr. Vorbeck himself was cagey. When Mr. von Notz raised the Bild am Sonntag reports and asked for more detail, the demoted intelligence officer replied that he “did not know much more than what has been in the papers,” according to a transcript on a live-blog at netzpolitik.org, a website that tracks intelligence matters.

André Hahn, a lawmaker for the opposition Left party, asked Mr. Vorbeck whether he had a good relationship with Mr. Heiss — “at first,” Mr. Vorbeck answered — and whether he had ever been charged with betraying secrets. “Not then and not now,” Mr. Vorbeck replied, according to the netzpolitik blog.

Mr. Vorbeck is suing the government for material damages he said he suffered as a result of being transferred to a senior archival post concerning the history of German intelligence. His lawyer declined to return a call seeking comment or access to his client.

The dimensions of German anger over American espionage have been evidenced in public opinion polls and in protests against a possible trans-Atlantic trade pact. German officials have talked about creating an internal Internet so that communications among Germans do not have to pass outside the country.

What makes these disclosures different is that they suggest that German publications have been either direct or indirect targets of American surveillance. “Spiegel suspects spying by U.S. secret services,” the online edition of the respected weekly Die Zeit reported Friday.

The latest disclosures by WikiLeaks — a summary of an October 2011 conversation Ms. Merkel had with an adviser about the debt crisis in Greece, a document from her senior adviser on European affairs, plus a list of 69 telephone numbers of important ministries and senior officials that appeared to date back to the 1990s — had already prompted Ms. Merkel’s chief of staff on Thursday to invite the United States ambassador, John B. Emerson, to explain.

A government statement following that meeting did not confirm the material, but made plain that violations of German laws would be prosecuted. The government defended its heightened counterintelligence operations, hinting at the depth of anger with the United States.

Steffen Seibert, the German government spokesman, referred inquiries on Friday to another government spokesman who said he could not be identified by name. He reiterated that the government did not comment on personnel moves, and that it reported on intelligence services only to the relevant supervisory committee in Parliament.

The spokesman added in an email that Mr. Heiss had testified on Thursday that there was no reason to take disciplinary or other action regarding Mr. Vorbeck.

Alison Smale and Melissa Eddy reported from Berlin, David E. Sanger from Vienna and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

By ALISON SMALE, MELISSA EDDY, DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITTJULY 3, 2015

Find this story at 3 July 2015

Germany trades citizens’ metadata for NSA’s top spy software

16 oktober 2015

Spies keen to use XKeyscore, less keen to tell German government or citizens.

In order to obtain a copy of the NSA’s main XKeyscore software, whose existence was first revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency agreed to hand over metadata of German citizens it spies on. According to documents seen by the German newspaper Die Zeit, after 18 months of negotiations, the US and Germany signed an agreement in April 2013 that would allow the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz—BfV) to obtain a copy of the NSA’s most important program and to adopt it for the analysis of data gathered in Germany.

This was a lower level of access compared to the non-US “Five Eyes” nations—the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—which had direct access to the main XKeyscore system. In return for the software, the BfV would “to the maximum extent possible share all data relevant to NSA’s mission.” Interestingly, there is no indication in the Die Zeit story that the latest leak comes from Snowden, which suggests that someone else has made the BfV’s “internal documents” available.

Unlike Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the domestic-oriented BfV does not employ bulk surveillance of the kind also deployed on a vast scale by the NSA and GCHQ. Instead, it is only allowed to monitor individual suspects in Germany and, even to do that, must obtain the approval of a special parliamentary commission. Because of this targeted approach, BfV surveillance is mainly intended to gather the content of specific conversations, whether in the form of e-mails, telephone exchanges, or even faxes, if anyone still uses them. Inevitably, though, metadata is also gathered, but as Die Zeit explains, “whether the collection of this [meta]data is consistent with the restrictions outlined in Germany’s surveillance laws is a question that divides legal experts.”

The BfV had no problems convincing itself that it was consistent with Germany’s laws to collect metadata, but rarely bothered since—remarkably—all analysis was done by hand before 2013, even though metadata by its very nature lends itself to large-scale automated processing. This explains the eagerness of the BfV to obtain the NSA’s XKeyscore software after German agents had seen its powerful metadata analysis capabilities in demonstrations.

It may also explain the massive expansion of the BfV that the leaked document published by Netzpolitik had revealed earlier this year. As Die Zeit notes, the classified budget plans “included the information that the BfV intended to create 75 new positions for the ‘mass data analysis of Internet content.’ Seventy-five new positions is a significant amount for any government agency.”

FURTHER READING

GERMANY’S TOP PROSECUTOR FIRED OVER NETZPOLITIK “TREASON” PROBE
Heads begin to roll, but the investigation has not yet been dropped.
The BfV may have been keen to deploy XKeyscore widely, but it wasn’t so keen to inform the German authorities about the deal with the NSA. Peter Schaar, who was data protection commissioner at the time, told Die Zeit: “I knew nothing about such an exchange deal [of German metadata for US software].” He says that he only discovered that the BfV was using XKeyscore when he asked the surveillance service explicitly after reading about the program in Snowden’s 2013 revelations. The same is true for another key oversight body: “The Parliamentary Control Panel learned that the BfV had received XKeyscore software and had begun using it. But even this very general briefing was only made after the panel had explicitly asked following the Snowden revelations,” according to Die Zeit.

This post originated on Ars Technica UK
by Glyn Moody (UK) – Aug 27, 2015 5:32pm CEST

Find this story at 27 August 2015

New WikiLeaks Revelations: NSA Targeted Phones of All of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Top Aides

16 oktober 2015

BERLIN — WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a new list of German phone numbers it claims showed the U.S. National Security Agency targeted phones belonging to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s close aides and chancellery offices for surveillance.

Wednesday’s publication came a week after WikiLeaks released a list of numbers it said showed the NSA targeted officials at various other German ministries and elsewhere. That rekindled concerns over U.S. surveillance in Germany after reports two years ago that Merkel’s own cellphone was targeted.

Merkel’s chief of staff last week asked the U.S. ambassador to a meeting and told him that German law must be followed.

There was no immediate comment from the German government on the latest publication.

The list includes a cellphone number attributed to Ronald Pofalla, Merkel’s chief of staff from 2009-13; a landline number that appears to belong to the leader of Merkel’s parliamentary caucus; various other connections at Merkel’s office; and a cellphone number for the chancellor that WikiLeaks says was used until 2013.

It was unclear when exactly the partially redacted list of 56 German phone numbers dates from and it wasn’t immediately possible to confirm the accuracy of that and other documents released by WikiLeaks.

Those documents, WikiLeaks said, are NSA reports based on interceptions — including one from 2009 that details Merkel’s views on the international financial crisis and another from 2011 summarizing advisers’ views on plans for the eurozone’s rescue fund.

According to the secret-spilling site, the list of phone numbers was updated for more than a decade after 2002 and a “close study” of it shows it evolved from an earlier target list dating back into the 1990s.

July 8, 2015
Associated Press

Find this story at 8 July 2015

BEHIND THE CURTAIN A Look at the Inner Workings of NSA’s XKEYSCORE (II)

16 oktober 2015

The sheer quantity of communications that XKEYSCORE processes, filters and queries is stunning. Around the world, when a person gets online to do anything — write an email, post to a social network, browse the web or play a video game — there’s a decent chance that the Internet traffic her device sends and receives is getting collected and processed by one of XKEYSCORE’s hundreds of servers scattered across the globe.

In order to make sense of such a massive and steady flow of information, analysts working for the National Security Agency, as well as partner spy agencies, have written thousands of snippets of code to detect different types of traffic and extract useful information from each type, according to documents dating up to 2013. For example, the system automatically detects if a given piece of traffic is an email. If it is, the system tags if it’s from Yahoo or Gmail, if it contains an airline itinerary, if it’s encrypted with PGP, or if the sender’s language is set to Arabic, along with myriad other details.

This global Internet surveillance network is powered by a somewhat clunky piece of software running on clusters of Linux servers. Analysts access XKEYSCORE’s web interface to search its wealth of private information, similar to how ordinary people can search Google for public information.

Based on documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Intercept is shedding light on the inner workings of XKEYSCORE, one of the most extensive programs of mass surveillance in human history.

How XKEYSCORE works under the hood

It is tempting to assume that expensive, proprietary operating systems and software must power XKEYSCORE, but it actually relies on an entirely open source stack. In fact, according to an analysis of an XKEYSCORE manual for new systems administrators from the end of 2012, the system may have design deficiencies that could leave it vulnerable to attack by an intelligence agency insider.

XKEYSCORE is a piece of Linux software that is typically deployed on Red Hat servers. It uses the Apache web server and stores collected data in MySQL databases. File systems in a cluster are handled by the NFS distributed file system and the autofs service, and scheduled tasks are handled by the cron scheduling service. Systems administrators who maintain XKEYSCORE servers use SSH to connect to them, and they use tools such as rsync and vim, as well as a comprehensive command-line tool, to manage the software.

John Adams, former security lead and senior operations engineer for Twitter, says that one of the most interesting things about XKEYSCORE’s architecture is “that they were able to achieve so much success with such a poorly designed system. Data ingest, day-to-day operations, and searching is all poorly designed. There are many open source offerings that would function far better than this design with very little work. Their operations team must be extremely unhappy.”

Analysts connect to XKEYSCORE over HTTPS using standard web browsers such as Firefox. Internet Explorer is not supported. Analysts can log into the system with either a user ID and password or by using public key authentication.

As of 2009, XKEYSCORE servers were located at more than 100 field sites all over the world. Each field site consists of a cluster of servers; the exact number differs depending on how much information is being collected at that site. Sites with relatively low traffic can get by with fewer servers, but sites that spy on larger amounts of traffic require more servers to filter and parse it all. XKEYSCORE has been engineered to scale in both processing power and storage by adding more servers to a cluster. According to a 2009 document, some field sites receive over 20 terrabytes of data per day. This is the equivalent of 5.7 million songs, or over 13 thousand full-length films.

This map from a 2009 top-secret presentation does not show all of XKEYSCORE’s field sites.
When data is collected at an XKEYSCORE field site, it is processed locally and ultimately stored in MySQL databases at that site. XKEYSCORE supports a federated query system, which means that an analyst can conduct a single query from the central XKEYSCORE website, and it will communicate over the Internet to all of the field sites, running the query everywhere at once.

There might be security issues with the XKEYSCORE system itself as well. As hard as software developers may try, it’s nearly impossible to write bug-free source code. To compensate for this, developers often rely on multiple layers of security; if attackers can get through one layer, they may still be thwarted by other layers. XKEYSCORE appears to do a bad job of this.

When systems administrators log into XKEYSCORE servers to configure them, they appear to use a shared account, under the name “oper.” Adams notes, “That means that changes made by an administrator cannot be logged.” If one administrator does something malicious on an XKEYSCORE server using the “oper” user, it’s possible that the digital trail of what was done wouldn’t lead back to the administrator, since multiple operators use the account.

There appears to be another way an ill-intentioned systems administrator may be able to cover their tracks. Analysts wishing to query XKEYSCORE sign in via a web browser, and their searches are logged. This creates an audit trail, on which the system relies to assure that users aren’t doing overly broad searches that would pull up U.S. citizens’ web traffic. Systems administrators, however, are able to run MySQL queries. The documents indicate that administrators have the ability to directly query the MySQL databases, where the collected data is stored, apparently bypassing the audit trail.

AppIDs, fingerprints and microplugins

Collecting massive amounts of raw data is not very useful unless it is collated and organized in a way that can be searched. To deal with this problem, XKEYSCORE extracts and tags metadata and content from the raw data so that analysts can easily search it.

This is done by using dictionaries of rules called appIDs, fingerprints and microplugins that are written in a custom programming language called GENESIS. Each of these can be identified by a unique name that resembles a directory tree, such as “mail/webmail/gmail,” “chat/yahoo,” or “botnet/blackenergybot/command/flood.”

One document detailing XKEYSCORE appIDs and fingerprints lists several revealing examples. Windows Update requests appear to fall under the “update_service/windows” appID, and normal web requests fall under the “http/get” appID. XKEYSCORE can automatically detect Airblue travel itineraries with the “travel/airblue” fingerprint, and iPhone web browser traffic with the “browser/cellphone/iphone” fingerprint.

PGP-encrypted messages are detected with the “encryption/pgp/message” fingerprint, and messages encrypted with Mojahedeen Secrets 2 (a type of encryption popular among supporters of al Qaeda) are detected with the “encryption/mojaheden2” fingerprint.

When new traffic flows into an XKEYSCORE cluster, the system tests the intercepted data against each of these rules and stores whether the traffic matches the pattern. A slideshow presentation from 2010 says that XKEYSCORE contains almost 10,000 appIDs and fingerprints.

AppIDs are used to identify the protocol of traffic being intercepted, while fingerprints detect a specific type of content. Each intercepted stream of traffic gets assigned up to one appID and any number of fingerprints. You can think of appIDs as categories and fingerprints as tags.

If multiple appIDs match a single stream of traffic, the appID with the lowest “level” is selected (appIDs with lower levels are more specific than appIDs with higher levels). For example, when XKEYSCORE is assessing a file attachment from Yahoo mail, all of the appIDs in the following slide will apply, however only “mail/webmail/yahoo/attachment” will be associated with this stream of traffic.

To tie it all together, when an Arabic speaker logs into a Yahoo email address, XKEYSCORE will store “mail/yahoo/login” as the associated appID. This stream of traffic will match the “mail/arabic” fingerprint (denoting language settings), as well as the “mail/yahoo/ymbm” fingerprint (which detects Yahoo browser cookies).

Sometimes the GENESIS programming language, which largely relies on Boolean logic, regular expressions and a set of simple functions, isn’t powerful enough to do the complex pattern-matching required to detect certain types of traffic. In these cases, as one slide puts it, “Power users can drop in to C++ to express themselves.” AppIDs or fingerprints that are written in C++ are called microplugins.

Here’s an example of a microplugin fingerprint for “botnet/conficker_p2p_udp_data,” which is tricky botnet traffic that can’t be identified without complicated logic. A botnet is a collection of hacked computers, sometimes millions of them, that are controlled from a single point.

Here’s another microplugin that uses C++ to inspect intercepted Facebook chat messages and pull out details like the associated email address and body of the chat message.

One document from 2009 describes in detail four generations of appIDs and fingerprints, which begin with only the ability to scan intercepted traffic for keywords, and end with the ability to write complex microplugins that can be deployed to field sites around the world in hours.

If XKEYSCORE development has continued at a similar pace over the last six years, it’s likely considerably more powerful today.

—

Illustration for The Intercept by Blue Delliquanti

Documents published with this article:

Advanced HTTP Activity Analysis
Analyzing Mobile Cellular DNI in XKS
ASFD Readme
CADENCE Readme
Category Throttling
CNE Analysis in XKS
Comms Readme
DEEPDIVE Readme
DNI101
Email Address vs User Activity
Free File Uploaders
Finding and Querying Document Metadata
Full Log vs HTTP
Guide to Using Contexts in XKS Fingerprints
HTTP Activity in XKS
HTTP Activity vs User Activity
Intro to Context Sensitive Scanning With XKS Fingerprints
Intro to XKS AppIDs and Fingerprints
OSINT Fusion Project
Phone Number Extractor
RWC Updater Readme
Selection Forwarding Readme
Stats Config Readme
Tracking Targets on Online Social Networks
TRAFFICTHIEF Readme
Unofficial XKS User Guide
User Agents
Using XKS to Enable TAO
UTT Config Readme
VOIP in XKS
VOIP Readme
Web Forum Exploitation Using XKS
Writing XKS Fingerprints
XKS Application IDs
XKS Application IDs Brief
XKS as a SIGDEV Tool
XKS, Cipher Detection, and You!
XKS for Counter CNE
XKS Intro
XKS Logos Embedded in Docs
XKS Search Forms
XKS System Administration
XKS Targets Visiting Specific Websites
XKS Tech Extractor 2009
XKS Tech Extractor 2010
XKS Workflows 2009
XKS Workflows 2011
UN Secretary General XKS

Micah Lee, Glenn Greenwald, Morgan Marquis-Boire
July 2 2015, 4:42 p.m.
Second in a series.

Find this story at 2 July 2015

XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications (I)

16 oktober 2015

One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.

These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. “At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage.”

XKEYSCORE also collects and processes Internet traffic from Americans, though NSA analysts are taught to avoid querying the system in ways that might result in spying on U.S. data. Experts and privacy activists, however, have long doubted that such exclusions are effective in preventing large amounts of American data from being swept up. One document The Intercept is publishing today suggests that FISA warrants have authorized “full-take” collection of traffic from at least some U.S. web forums.

The system is not limited to collecting web traffic. The 2013 document, “VoIP Configuration and Forwarding Read Me,” details how to forward VoIP data from XKEYSCORE into NUCLEON, NSA’s repository for voice intercepts, facsimile, video and “pre-released transcription.” At the time, it supported more than 8,000 users globally and was made up of 75 servers absorbing 700,000 voice, fax, video and tag files per day.

The reach and potency of XKEYSCORE as a surveillance instrument is astonishing. The Guardian report noted that NSA itself refers to the program as its “widest reaching” system. In February of this year, The Intercept reported that NSA and GCHQ hacked into the internal network of Gemalto, the world’s largest provider of cell phone SIM cards, in order to steal millions of encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cell phone communication. XKEYSCORE played a vital role in the spies’ hacking by providing government hackers access to the email accounts of Gemalto employees.

Numerous key NSA partners, including Canada, New Zealand and the U.K., have access to the mass surveillance databases of XKEYSCORE. In March, the New Zealand Herald, in partnership with The Intercept, revealed that the New Zealand government used XKEYSCORE to spy on candidates for the position of World Trade Organization director general and also members of the Solomon Islands government.

These newly published documents demonstrate that collected communications not only include emails, chats and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.

Bulk collection and population surveillance

XKEYSCORE allows for incredibly broad surveillance of people based on perceived patterns of suspicious behavior. It is possible, for instance, to query the system to show the activities of people based on their location, nationality and websites visited. For instance, one slide displays the search “germansinpakistn,” showing an analyst querying XKEYSCORE for all individuals in Pakistan visiting specific German language message boards.

As sites like Twitter and Facebook become increasingly significant in the world’s day-to-day communications (a Pew study shows that 71 percent of online adults in the U.S. use Facebook), they become a critical source of surveillance data. Traffic from popular social media sites is described as “a great starting point” for tracking individuals, according to an XKEYSCORE presentation titled “Tracking Targets on Online Social Networks.”

When intelligence agencies collect massive amounts of Internet traffic all over the world, they face the challenge of making sense of that data. The vast quantities collected make it difficult to connect the stored traffic to specific individuals.

Internet companies have also encountered this problem and have solved it by tracking their users with identifiers that are unique to each individual, often in the form of browser cookies. Cookies are small pieces of data that websites store in visitors’ browsers. They are used for a variety of purposes, including authenticating users (cookies make it possible to log in to websites), storing preferences, and uniquely tracking individuals even if they’re using the same IP address as many other people. Websites also embed code used by third-party services to collect analytics or host ads, which also use cookies to track users. According to one slide, “Almost all websites have cookies enabled.”

The NSA’s ability to piggyback off of private companies’ tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies.

Apps that run on tablets and smartphones also use analytics services that uniquely track users. Almost every time a user sees an advertisement (in an app or in a web browser), the ad network is tracking users in the same way. A secret GCHQ and CSE program called BADASS, which is similar to XKEYSCORE but with a much narrower scope, mines as much valuable information from leaky smartphone apps as possible, including unique tracking identifiers that app developers use to track their own users. In May of this year, CBC, in partnership with The Intercept, revealed that XKEYSCORE was used to track smartphone connections to the app marketplaces run by Samsung and Google. Surveillance agency analysts also use other types of traffic data that gets scooped into XKEYSCORE to track people, such as Windows crash reports.

In a statement to The Intercept, the NSA reiterated its position that such sweeping surveillance capabilities are needed to fight the War on Terror:

“The U.S. Government calls on its intelligence agencies to protect the United States, its citizens, and its allies from a wide array of serious threats. These threats include terrorist plots from al-Qaeda, ISIL, and others; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; foreign aggression against the United States and our allies; and international criminal organizations.”

Indeed, one of the specific examples of XKEYSCORE applications given in the documents is spying on Shaykh Atiyatallah, an al Qaeda senior leader and Osama bin Laden confidant. A few years before his death, Atiyatallah did what many people have often done: He googled himself. He searched his various aliases, an associate and the name of his book. As he did so, all of that information was captured by XKEYSCORE.

XKEYSCORE has, however, also been used to spy on non-terrorist targets. The April 18, 2013 issue of the internal NSA publication Special Source Operations Weekly boasts that analysts were successful in using XKEYSCORE to obtain U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s talking points prior to a meeting with President Obama.

XKEYSCORE for hacking: easily collecting user names, passwords and much more

XKEYSCORE plays a central role in how the U.S. government and its surveillance allies hack computer networks around the world. One top-secret 2009 NSA document describes how the system is used by the NSA to gather information for the Office of Tailored Access Operations, an NSA division responsible for Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) — i.e., targeted hacking.

Particularly in 2009, the hacking tactics enabled by XKEYSCORE would have yielded significant returns as use of encryption was less widespread than today. Jonathan Brossard, a security researcher and the CEO of Toucan Systems, told The Intercept: “Anyone could be trained to do this in less than one day: they simply enter the name of the server they want to hack into XKEYSCORE, type enter, and are presented login and password pairs to connect to this machine. Done. Finito.” Previous reporting by The Intercept revealed that systems administrators are a popular target of the NSA. “Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom?’” read a 2012 post on an internal NSA discussion board.

This system enables analysts to access web mail servers with remarkable ease.

The same methods are used to steal the credentials — user names and passwords — of individual users of message boards.

Hacker forums are also monitored for people selling or using exploits and other hacking tools. While the NSA is clearly monitoring to understand the capabilities developed by its adversaries, it is also monitoring locations where such capabilities can be purchased.

Other information gained via XKEYSCORE facilitates the remote exploitation of target computers. By extracting browser fingerprint and operating system versions from Internet traffic, the system allows analysts to quickly assess the exploitability of a target. Brossard, the security researcher, said that “NSA has built an impressively complete set of automated hacking tools for their analysts to use.”

Given the breadth of information collected by XKEYSCORE, accessing and exploiting a target’s online activity is a matter of a few mouse clicks. Brossard explains: “The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds. Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

These facts bolster one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by The Guardian on June 9, 2013. “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge to even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Indeed, training documents for XKEYSCORE repeatedly highlight how user-friendly the program is: with just a few clicks, any analyst with access to it can conduct sweeping searches simply by entering a person’s email address, telephone number, name or other identifying data. There is no indication in the documents reviewed that prior approval is needed for specific searches.

In addition to login credentials and other target intelligence, XKEYSCORE collects router configuration information, which it shares with Tailored Access Operations. The office is able to exploit routers and then feed the traffic traveling through those routers into their collection infrastructure. This allows the NSA to spy on traffic from otherwise out-of-reach networks. XKEYSCORE documents reference router configurations, and a document previously published by Der Spiegel shows that “active implants” can be used to “cop[y] traffic and direc[t]” it past a passive collector.

XKEYSCORE for counterintelligence

Beyond enabling the collection, categorization, and querying of metadata and content, XKEYSCORE has also been used to monitor the surveillance and hacking actions of foreign nation states and to gather the fruits of their hacking. The Intercept previously reported that NSA and its allies spy on hackers in order to collect what they collect.

Once the hacking tools and techniques of a foreign entity (for instance, South Korea) are identified, analysts can then extract the country’s espionage targets from XKEYSCORE, and gather information that the foreign power has managed to steal.

Monitoring of foreign state hackers could allow the NSA to gather techniques and tools used by foreign actors, including knowledge of zero-day exploits—software bugs that allow attackers to hack into systems, and that not even the software vendor knows about—and implants. Additionally, by monitoring vulnerability reports sent to vendors such as Kaspersky, the agency could learn when exploits they were actively using need to be retired because they’ve been discovered by a third party.

Seizure v. searching: oversight, audit trail and the Fourth Amendment

By the nature of how it sweeps up information, XKEYSCORE gathers communications of Americans, despite the Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” — including searching data without a warrant. The NSA says it does not target U.S. citizens’ communications without a warrant, but acknowledges that it “incidentally” collects and reads some of it without one, minimizing the information that is retained or shared.

But that interpretation of the law is dubious at best.

XKEYSCORE training documents say that the “burden is on user/auditor to comply with USSID-18 or other rules,” apparently including the British Human Rights Act (HRA), which protects the rights of U.K. citizens. U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) is the American directive that governs “U.S. person minimization.”

Kurt Opsahl, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s general counsel, describes USSID 18 as “an attempt by the intelligence community to comply with the Fourth Amendment. But it doesn’t come from a court, it comes from the executive.”

If, for instance, an analyst searched XKEYSCORE for all iPhone users, this query would violate USSID 18 due to the inevitable American iPhone users that would be grabbed without a warrant, as the NSA’s own training materials make clear.

Opsahl believes that analysts are not prevented by technical means from making queries that violate USSID 18. “The document discusses whether auditors will be happy or unhappy. This indicates that compliance will be achieved by after-the-fact auditing, not by preventing the search.”

Screenshots of the XKEYSCORE web-based user interface included in slides show that analysts see a prominent warning message: “This system is audited for USSID 18 and Human Rights Act compliance.” When analysts log in to the system, they see a more detailed message warning that “an audit trail has been established and will be searched” in response to HRA complaints, and as part of the USSID 18 and USSID 9 audit process.

Because the XKEYSCORE system does not appear to prevent analysts from making queries that would be in violation of these rules, Opsahl concludes that “there’s a tremendous amount of power being placed in the hands of analysts.” And while those analysts may be subject to audits, “at least in the short term they can still obtain information that they shouldn’t have.”

During a symposium in January 2015 hosted at Harvard University, Edward Snowden, who spoke via video call, said that NSA analysts are “completely free from any meaningful oversight.” Speaking about the people who audit NSA systems like XKEYSCORE for USSID 18 compliance, he said, “The majority of the people who are doing the auditing are the friends of the analysts. They work in the same office. They’re not full-time auditors, they’re guys who have other duties assigned. There are a few traveling auditors who go around and look at the things that are out there, but really it’s not robust.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the NSA said:

“The National Security Agency’s foreign intelligence operations are 1) authorized by law; 2) subject to multiple layers of stringent internal and external oversight; and 3) conducted in a manner that is designed to protect privacy and civil liberties. As provided for by Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28), all persons, regardless of their nationality, have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information. NSA goes to great lengths to narrowly tailor and focus its signals intelligence operations on the collection of communications that are most likely to contain foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information.”

—

Coming next: A Look at the Inner Workings of XKEYSCORE

Source maps: XKS as a SIGDEV Tool, p. 15, and XKS Intro, p. 6

Documents published with this article:

Morgan Marquis-Boire, Glenn Greenwald, Micah Lee
July 1 2015, 4:49 p.m.
Illustrations by Blue Delliquanti and David Axe for The Intercept

Find this story at 1 July 2015

XKeyscore: A Dubious Deal with the NSA

16 oktober 2015

Internal documents show that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, received the coveted software program XKeyscore from the NSA – and promised data from Germany in return.

The agents from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, were deeply impressed. They wanted to be able to do that too. On Oct. 6, 2011, employees of the US intelligence agency NSA were in the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling to demonstrate all that the spy software XKeyscore could do. To make the demonstration as vivid as possible, the Americans fed data into their program that the BfV had itself collected during a warranted eavesdropping operation. An internal memo shows how enthusiastic the German intelligence agents were: Analyzing data with the help of the software, the memo reads in awkward officialese, resulted in “a high recognition of applications used, Internet applications and protocols.” And in the data, XKeyscore was able to “recognize, for example, Hotmail, Yahoo or Facebook. It was also able to identify user names and passwords.” In other words, it was highly effective.

It was far beyond the capabilities of the BfV’s own system. In response, then-BfV President Heinz Fromm made a formal request five months later to his American counterpart, NSA head Keith Alexander, for the software to be made available to the German intelligence agency. It would, he wrote, superbly complement the current capabilities for monitoring and analyzing Internet traffic.

But fully a year and a half would pass before a test version of XKeyscore could begin operating at the BfV facility in the Treptow neighborhood of Berlin. It took that long for the two agencies to negotiate an agreement that regulated the transfer of the software in detail and which defined the rights and obligations of each side.

The April 2013 document called “Terms of Reference,” which ZEIT ONLINE and DIE ZEIT has been able to review, is more than enlightening. It shows for the first time what Germany’s domestic intelligence agency promised their American counterparts in exchange for the use of the coveted software program. “The BfV will: To the maximum extent possible share all data relevant to NSA’s mission,” the paper reads. Such was the arrangement: data in exchange for software.

It was a good deal for the BfV. Being given the software was a “proof of trust,” one BfV agent exulted. Another called XKeyscore a “cool system.” Politically and legally, however, the accord is extremely delicate. Nobody outside of the BfV oversees what data is sent to the NSA in accordance with the “Terms of Reference,” a situation that remains unchanged today. Neither Germany’s data protection commissioner nor the Parliamentary Control Panel, which is responsible for oversight of the BfV, has been fully informed about the deal. “Once again, I have to learn from the press of a new BfV-NSA contract and of the impermissible transfer of data to the US secret service,” complains the Green Party parliamentarian Hans-Christian Ströbele, who is a member of the Parliamentary Control Panel. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, for its part, insists that it has adhered strictly to the law.

SOFTWARE GEGEN DATEN
Interne Dokumente belegen, dass der Verfassungsschutz vom amerikanischen Geheimdienst NSA die begehrte Spionagesoftware XKeyscore bekam. Dafür versprachen die Verfassungsschützer, so viele Daten aus deutschen G-10-Überwachungsmaßnahmen an die NSA zu liefern, wie möglich.

Lesen Sie dazu:

Der Datendeal: Was Verfassungsschutz und NSA miteinander verabredeten – was Parlamentarier und Datenschützer dazu sagen

Read the english version here: A Dubious Deal with the NSA

Dokument: Die Übereinkunft zwischen Verfassungsschutz und NSA im Wortlaut

Read the english version here: XKeyscore – the document

Die Software: Der Datenknacker “Poseidon” findet jedes Passwort

The data in question is regularly part of the approved surveillance measures carried out by the BfV. In contrast, for example, to the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BfV does not use a dragnet to collect huge volumes of data from the Internet. Rather, it is only allowed to monitor individual suspects in Germany — and only after a special parliamentary commission has granted approval. Because such operations necessarily imply the curtailing of rights guaranteed by Article 10 of Germany’s constitution, they are often referred to as G-10 measures. Targeted surveillance measures are primarily intended to turn up the content of specific conversations, in the form of emails, telephone exchanges or faxes. But along the way, essentially as a side effect, the BfV also collects mass quantities of so-called metadata. Whether the collection of this data is consistent with the restrictions outlined in Germany’s surveillance laws is a question that divides legal experts. Well-respected constitutional lawyers are of the opinion that intelligence agencies are not allowed to analyze metadata as they see fit. The agencies themselves, naturally, have a different view.

It is clear, after all, that metadata also enables interesting conclusions to be drawn about the behavior of those under surveillance and their contacts, just as, in the analog world, the sender and recipient written on an envelope can also be revealing, even if the letter inside isn’t read. Those who know such data can identify communication networks and establish movement and behavioral profiles of individuals. Prior to 2013, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency was only able to analyze metadata by hand — and it was rarely done as a result. But that changed once the agency received XKeyscore. The version of the software obtained by the BfV is unable to collect data on the Internet itself, but it is able to rapidly analyze the huge quantities of metadata that the agency has already automatically collected. That is why XKeyscore is beneficial to the BfV. And, thanks to the deal, that benefit is one that extends to the NSA.

In practice, it assumedly works as follows: When an Islamist who is under surveillance by the BfV regularly receives calls from Afghanistan, for example, then the telephone number is likely exactly the kind of information that is forwarded on to the NSA. That alone is not necessarily cause for concern; after all, combatting terrorism is the goal of intelligence agency cooperation. But nobody outside of the BfV knows whose data, and how much of it, is being shared with the NSA. Nobody can control the practicalities of the data exchange. And it is completely unclear where political responsibility lies.

In 2013 alone, the BfV began 58 new G-10 measures and continued 46 others from the previous year. Who was targeted? What information was passed on to the NSA? Was information pertaining to German citizens also shared? When confronted with such questions, the BfV merely responded: “The BfV is unable to publicly comment on the particulars of the cooperation or on the numbers of data collection operations.”

How important XKeyscore has become for the BfV can also be seen elsewhere. Not long ago, the website Netzpolitik.org published classified budget plans for 2013 which included the information that the BfV intended to create 75 new positions for the “mass data analysis of Internet content.” Seventy-five new positions is a significant amount for any government agency. A new division called 3C was to uncover movement profiles and contact networks and to process raw data collected during G-10 operations. The name XKeyscore does not appear in the documents published by Netzpolitik.org. But it is reasonable to suspect that the new division was established to deploy the new surveillance software.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is itself also aware of just how sensitive its deal with the Americans is. Back in July 2012, a BfV division warned that even the tests undertaken with XKeyscore could have “far-reaching legal implications.” To determine the extent of the software’s capabilities, the division warned, employees would have to be involved who didn’t have the appropriate security clearance to view the data used in the tests. The BfV has declined to make a statement on how, or whether, the problem was solved.

Germany’s data protection commissioner was apparently not informed. “I knew nothing about such an exchange deal,” says Peter Schaar, who was data protection commissioner at the time. “I am also hearing for the first time about a test with real data.” He says he first learned that BfV was using XKeyscore after he asked of his own accord in 2013 — in the wake of revelations about the program from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Schaar is of the opinion that the agency was obliged to inform him. Because real data was used during the tests, Schaar says, it constituted data processing. The BfV, by contrast, is of the opinion that the use of XKeyscore has to be controlled solely by the G-10 commission. It is a question that has long been the source of contention. In testimony before the parliamentary investigative committee that is investigating NSA activities in Germany, Schaar has demanded that the G-10 law be more clearly formulated to remove the ambiguity.

The fact that the BfV recognized the problems with its NSA cooperation can be seen elsewhere in the files as well. During the negotiations over the XKeyscore deal, the BfV noted: “Certain NSA requests … cannot be met insofar as German law prevents it.” But the Americans insisted that the software finally be “used productively.” The NSA wants “working results,” the German agents noted. There is, they wrote, apparently “high internal pressure” to receive information from the Germans.

Ultimately, the BfV arrived at the conclusion that transferring information obtained with the help of XKeyscore to the NSA was consistent with German law. Insights gathered by way of G-10 operations were already being “regularly” shared with “foreign partner agencies.” That, at least, is what the BfV declared to the German Interior Ministry in January 2014. Furthermore, the agency declared, a special legal expert would approve each data transfer.

That, it seems, was enough oversight from the perspective of the BfV. The agency apparently only partially informed its parliamentarian overseers about the deal. The Parliamentary Control Panel learned that the BfV had received XKeyscore software and had begun using it. But even this very general briefing was only made after the panel had explicitly asked following the Snowden revelations. The deal between the intelligence agencies, says the Green Party parliamentarian Ströbele, “is undoubtedly an ‘occurrence of particular import,’ about which, according to German law, the German government must provide sufficient information of its own accord.” He intends to bring the issue before the Parliamentary Control Panel. The NSA investigative committee in German parliament will surely take a closer look as well.

Translated by Charles Hawley
Von Kai Biermann und Yassin Musharbash
26. August 2015, 18:11 Uhr

Find this story at 26 August 2015

Wikileaks: ‘Massive’ NSA spying on top German officials

16 oktober 2015

Wikileaks says its latest release of documents shows the wide reach of economic espionage conducted by the NSA in Germany. Documents released by the whistleblowers suggest an intense interest in the Greek debt crisis.

A new batch of documents released by Wikileaks on Wednesday purports to show the extent to which the spying conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on German officials was economic in nature , as opposed to being focused on security issues.
As far back as the late 1990s, the phone numbers of officials in the German Ministry of Finance, including sometimes the ministers themselves, were targeted by NSA spies, according to a Wikileaks press release. The list of high priority targets for Germany are mostly telephone numbers within the finance ministry, some within the ministry of agriculture, a few within offices responsible for European policy, and advisors who assisted Merkel ahead of G7 and WTO meetings. One of the targets was within the European Central Bank itself.
NSA interest in the course of Greek bailout
Some of the espionage also dealt with the handling of the Greek debt crisis, particularly in “intercepted talk between Chancellor Merkel and her assistant, the Chancellor talks about her views on solutions to the Greek financial crisis and her disagreement with members of her own cabinet, such as Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, on matters of policy.”
The NSA was also interested in Merkel’s discussions of “the positions of French leaders, and of the heads of the key institutions of the Troika: European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and IMF Director Christine Lagarde,” with regard to the Greece’s bailout issues.
This intercept, which is dated to October 2011, is classified as highly sensitive, “two levels above top secret.” Despite this, it was still cleared for distribution among the “US-led ‘Five Eyes’ spying alliance of UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”
Wikileaks also says that the NSA was given a German intercept gathered by British Intelligence (GCHQ), which “details the German government’s position ahead of negotiations on a EU bailout plan for Greece.”
“The report refers to an overview prepared by German Chancellery Director-General for EU Affairs Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut. Germany was, according to the intercept, opposed to giving a banking license to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), however it would support a special IMF fund into which the BRICS nations would contribute to bolster European bailout activities.”
Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ embattled editor-in-chief, made a statement on Wednesday’s release, saying that it “further demonstrates that the United States’ economic espionage campaign extends to Germany and to key European institutions and issues such as the European Central Bank and the crisis in Greece.”
“Would France and Germany have proceeded with the BRICS bailout plan for Greece if this intelligence was not collected and passed to the United States – who must have been horrified at the geopolitical implications?” he asked.
The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” daily was given access to the leaked documents. It reports that a spokesman for the German government said Berlin is not familiar enough with the information published by Wikileaks to offer an analysis or response.
es/gsw

01.07.2015

Selektorenliste der NSA Welche Nummern der Kanzlerin die NSA abhörte

16 oktober 2015

Anhand der Telefonnummern in dieser Selektorenliste wird deutlich, dass die Ausspähung durch die NSA beispielsweise auch die Telefone von Ronald Pofalla, Peter Altmaier und Volker Kauder umfasste.

Der amerikanische Nachrichtendienst hat die deutsche Politik weitaus systematischer ausgespäht als bisher bekannt – und das seit Jahrzehnten.

Neue Dokumente der Enthüllungsplattform Wikileaks belegen, dass auch die Regierungen der Kanzler Helmut Kohl und Gerhard Schröder von der NSA belauscht wurden.

Bund und Berlin ziehen Bilanz zu HauptstadtbautenBild vergrößern
Das Kanzleramt in Berlin steht im Mittelpunkt der neuen Wikileaks-Enthüllungen. (Foto: dpa)
Diese Erkenntnisse können aus den neuen Enthüllungen gewonnen werden:

Die neuen Wikileaks-Enthüllungen katapultieren die Diskussion in eine neue Höhe. Es geht darin um das Kanzleramt – es wurde über Jahrzehnte von der NSA ausgespäht, in Bonn und in Berlin. Die Liste umfasst 56 Anschlüsse und wurde von Wikileaks am Mittwochabend ins Netz gestellt. SZ, NDR und WDR konnten sie vorab prüfen.
Die Regierungen von Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder und Angela Merkel waren alle im Visier des amerikanischen Nachrichtendienstes. Die halbe Mannschaft von Ex-Kanzler Schröder steht auf der Liste. Bodo Hombach, der für eine kurze Zeit Kanzleramtsminister war und schwierige Operationen in Nahost auszuführen hatte, ist ebenso aufgeführt wie der sicherheitspolitische Berater Michael Steiner und Schröders Mann für die Weltwirtschaftsgipfel, Klaus Gretschmann.
Etwa zwei Dutzend Nummern der Bundeskanzlerin stehen auf der Liste. Darunter ihre Handynummer, die mindestens bis Ende 2013 gültig war; ihre Büronummer; eine ihr zugeschriebene Nummer in der CDU-Bundesgeschäftsstelle und ihre Faxnummern; auch ihr enger Vertrauter Volker Kauder, Vorsitzender der CDU/CSU-Bundestagsfraktion, war Ziel der NSA.
Auch Merkels ehemaliger Kanzleramtsminister Ronald Pofalla steht auf der Liste. Es findet sich darauf seine bis heute aktive Handynummer.
Auffällig ist, dass die Abteilung 2 des Kanzleramts, die für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik zuständig ist, oft vorkommt. Auch der Bereich Wirtschaftspolitik ist stark vertreten, ebenso Abteilung 6 – sie ist für den Bundesnachrichtendienst zuständig.
Vorige Woche hatte Wikileaks erste Unterlagen der NSA veröffentlicht, die Deutschland betreffen. Drei Bundesministerien – das Wirtschafts-, das Landwirtschafts- und das Finanzministerium – standen dabei im Mittelpunkt.
Lesen Sie mehr zu den neuen Wikileaks-Enthüllungen in der digitalen Ausgabe der Süddeutschen Zeitung.
IhreSZ Flexi-Modul Header
Ihr Forum
Wie sollte sich Merkel angesichts der jüngsten Wikileaks-Enthüllungen verhalten?
Die NSA hat Wikileaks-Dokumenten zufolge über Jahrzehnte das Bundeskanzleramt abgehört. Betroffen von den Spähangriffen waren die Regierungen von Bundeskanzlerin Merkel sowie die ihrer Vorgänger Schröder und Kohl. Das Ausmaß des Lauschangriffs ist damit deutlich größer als bislang angenommen. Ihr Forum

Helmut Kohl mit Gerhard Schröder im Bundestag, 1999
Tatort Kanzleramt
Kurzer Draht zur Macht
Die NSA hat die deutsche Politik weitaus systematischer ausgespäht als bisher bekannt – und das seit Jahrzehnten. Neue Dokumente von Wikileaks belegen, dass auch die Kanzler Helmut Kohl und Gerhard Schröder belauscht wurden.

Kohl NSA
Wikileaks-Dokumente
Von Kohl bis Merkel – die NSA hörte mit
Wikileaks-Dokumente belegen: Jahrzehntelang hat der US-Geheimdienst das Kanzleramt ausgeforscht. Auch die Telefone von Ronald Pofalla, Peter Altmaier und Volker Kauder wurden angezapft.

9. Juli 2015, 06:11 Uhr

Find this story at 9 July 2015

Neue Dokumente von WikiLeaks Kanzleramt schon seit Kohl-Ära im NSA-Visier

16 oktober 2015

Die NSA hat nach Informationen von WikiLeaks schon seit Jahrzehnten das Bundeskanzleramt abgehört. Das zeigen neue Dokumente, die NDR, WDR und SZ vor Veröffentlichung einsehen konnten. Betroffen waren demnach neben Kanzlerin Merkel auch ihre Vorgänger Schröder und Kohl.

Noch in der vergangenen Woche hatten der Geheimdienstkoordinator im Kanzleramt, Günter Heiß, und der ehemalige Kanzleramtschef Ronald Pofalla (CDU) bei einer Befragung im NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss abgewiegelt. Auf die Frage, ob Merkels Handy abgehört worden sei, sagte Heiß, es gebe Indizien dafür. Es könne aber auch sein, dass ein Gespräch “zufällig” abgehört worden sei, als ein “Beifang” etwa bei einem Telefonat mit dem russischen Präsidenten Putin. Pofalla sagte, er halte es bis heute für nicht bewiesen, dass das Handy der Kanzlerin abgehört worden sei. Der “Spiegel” hatte 2013 erstmals über diesen Verdacht berichtet.

Nun liegen die neuen WikiLeaks-Dokumente vor – eine Liste mit 56 Telefonnummern, darunter Merkels Handy-Nummer, die sie bis mindestens Ende 2013 genutzt hat. Die Nummern stammen offenbar aus einer Datenbank der NSA, in der Abhörziele erfasst sind. Und in dieser Liste findet sich nicht nur Merkels alte Mobilnummer, sondern auch mehr als ein Dutzend weiterer Festnetz-, Handy- und Faxanschlüsse aus ihrem direkten Umfeld – darunter die Durchwahl ihrer Büroleiterin im Kanzleramt, Beate Baumann, ihres Stellvertreters sowie weitere Nummern aus dem Kanzlerbüro.

Eine Liste mit Telefonnummern von Wikileaks galerieWikiLeaks hat eine Liste mit Telefonnummern und Namen aus dem Bundeskanzleramt veröffentlicht, die offenbar aus einer Datenbank mit Abhörzielen der NSA stammen [die letzten Ziffern wurden von der Redaktion unkenntlich gemacht].
Außerdem steht der Name des Unions-Fraktionschefs Volker Kauder, einem engen Vertrauten von Merkel, samt einer Nummer im Bundestag auf der Liste und eine Merkel zugeordnete Nummer in der CDU-Bundesgeschäftsstelle. Auch die aktuelle Handy-Nummer von Ronald Pofalla ist in der NSA-Datenbank erfasst. Er hatte es anscheinend schon geahnt. In der Sitzung des NSA-Untersuchungsausschusses wies ihn jemand darauf hin, dass seine Nummer bislang nicht aufgetaucht sei. Pofallas Antwort: “Kommt noch.”

Gezieltes Vorgehen der NSA

Die Liste zeigt, dass die NSA offenbar sehr gezielt vorgegangen ist. Außer der Kanzlerin und ihrem Büro umfasst sie vor allem Nummern und Namen von der Leitung des Bundeskanzleramts sowie von den Abteilungen 2, 4 und 6 – zuständig für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik, Wirtschaftspolitik und die Nachrichtendienste. Selbst die Telefonzentrale des Kanzleramts inklusive der Faxnummer wurde offenbar ausspioniert. Von wann die Liste stammt, ist nicht bekannt. Viele der aufgeführten Nummern sind bis heute aktuell, andere – teils noch aus Bonner Zeiten – sind anscheinend veraltet.

Mitarbeiter von Kohl und Schröder im Visier

Wann der US-Geheimdienst den Lauschangriff auf das Zentrum der deutschen Regierung gestartet hat, ist nicht klar. Aber einiges deutet daraufhin, dass auch Mitarbeiter von Merkels Vorgängern abgehört wurden. Die ersten Ziele hat die NSA offenbar bereits vor mehr als 20 Jahren in die Datenbank aufgenommen und in den folgenden Jahren stetig erweitert. Unter anderem findet sich eine alte Bonner Nummer mit dem Eintrag “DR LUDEWIG CHIEF OF DIV 4” in der Liste. Dr. Johannes Ludewig leitete von 1991 bis 1994 die Wirtschaftsabteilung des Kanzleramts, die Abteilung 4. Danach wechselte er ins Wirtschaftsministerium. Ausgespäht wurde offenbar auch ein persönlicher Referent des damaligen CDU-Staatsministers Anton Pfeiffer, ein enger Vertrauter von Helmut Kohl.

Außerdem stehen unter anderem auf der Liste: Bodo Hombach, der 1998/99 einige Monate lang das Kanzleramt geleitet hat; Schröders sicherheitspolitischer Berater Michael Steiner; Klaus Gretschmann, ehemaliger Leiter der Abteilung für Wirtschaftspolitik, der unter anderem die Weltwirtschaftsgipfel für den Kanzler vorbereitet hat; Ernst Uhrlau, von 1998 bis 2005 im Kanzleramt für die Aufsicht über die Nachrichtendienste zuständig.

NSA hörte Kanzleramt offenbar jahrzehntelang ab
tagesthemen 22:15 Uhr, 08.07.2015, S. Buchen/J. Goetz/C. Deker, NDR
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Weitere “streng geheime” Abhörprotokolle veröffentlicht

WikiLeaks hat außer der Telefonliste erneut einige als “streng geheim” eingestufte Abhörprotokolle der NSA veröffentlicht, darunter abgefangene Gespräche von Kanzlerin Merkel unter anderem mit Scheich Muhammad bin Zayid Al Nahyan aus den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten aus dem Jahr 2009 über die Situation im Iran. Laut einem weiteren Protokoll – ebenfalls von 2009 – hat sie intern kurz vor dem damals geplanten G20-Gipfel in London Vorschläge der US-Notenbank zur Lösung der Finanzkrise kritisiert. Es ging um “toxische Anlagen”, die in “bad banks” ausgelagert werden sollten. Merkel habe sich skeptisch dazu geäußert, dass Banken sich komplett ihrer Verantwortung entziehen.

Mitte Juni hat Generalbundesanwalt Harald Range ein Ermittlungsverfahren wegen des mutmaßlichen Ausspähens von Merkels Handy eingestellt. Die Vorwürfe seien nicht gerichtsfest nachzuweisen. Beweisdokumente habe die Behörde nicht beschaffen können. Kurz darauf – Anfang Juli – hat Wikileaks erste Abhörprotokolle und eine Liste mit Abhörzielen veröffentlicht, die auf einen umfassenden Lauschangriff der NSA auf die deutsche Regierung hindeuteten.

Bundesregierung prüft Veröffentlichungen

Als Reaktion auf die erste Enthüllung bat die Bundesregierung den US-Botschafter in Deutschland, John B. Emerson, zu einem Gespräch ins Kanzleramt. Die Bundesanwaltschaft prüft nun mögliche neue Ermittlungen wegen der NSA-Aktivitäten. Und in Regierungskreisen hieß es, man wundere sich in dieser Sache über gar nichts mehr. Beschwerden in Washington seien aber offenbar sinnlos. Die Bundesregierung erklärte nun auf Anfrage von NDR, WDR und SZ, die Veröffentlichung aus der vergangenen Woche werde von den zuständigen Stellen geprüft und bewertet, dies dauere an. “Insbesondere da ein Nachweis der Authentizität der veröffentlichten Dokumente fehlt, ist eine abschließende Bewertung derzeit nicht möglich.”

Zu den in den aktuellen Dokumenten aufgeführten Mobilfunknummern will die Bundesregierung nicht öffentlich Stellung nehmen. Eine Sprecher betonte jedoch, dass weiterhin gelte, was der Chef des Bundeskanzleramts, Peter Altmaier, in der vergangenen Woche gegenüber dem US-Botschaft deutlich gemacht habe: “Die Einhaltung deutschen Rechts ist unabdingbar und festgestellte Verstöße werden mit allen Mitteln des Rechtsstaats verfolgt werden. Darüber hinaus wird die für die Sicherheit unserer Bürger unverzichtbare Zusammenarbeit der deutschen und amerikanischen Nachrichtendienste durch derartige wiederholte Vorgänge belastet. Bereits seit dem vergangenen Jahr hat die Bundesregierung ihre Spionageabwehr verstärkt und fühlt sich darin durch die neuesten Veröffentlichungen bestätigt.”

Die US-Regierung hat sich bislang weder offiziell noch inoffiziell zur aktuellen Abhörpraxis in Deutschland geäußert. Nur Kanzlerin Merkel hat nach den ersten Berichten über das Abhören ihres Handys eine Art No-Spy-Garantie von US-Präsident Obama bekommen. Dabei ging es allerdings tatsächlich nur um sie persönlich, stellte der frühere NSA- und CIA-Direktor Michael Hayden in einem “Spiegel”-Interview klar. “Das war kein Versprechen, das für irgendjemand anderes an der Spitze der Bundesregierung gilt.”

Rechercheverbund
Die investigativen Ressorts von NDR, WDR und “Süddeutscher Zeitung” kooperieren unter Leitung von Georg Mascolo themen- und projektbezogen. Die Rechercheergebnisse, auch zu komplexen internationalen Themen, werden für Fernsehen, Hörfunk, Online und Print aufbereitet.

Stand: 09.07.2015 09:40 Uhr
Von John Goetz, Janina Findeisen und Christian Baars (NDR)

Find this story at 9 July 2015

WikiLeaks: Steinmeier target of systematic NSA spying

16 oktober 2015

WikiLeaks has published evidence that the NSA systematically spied on German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as well as other officials. The alleged spying reportedly predates the September 11, 2001 attacks.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was reportedly the target of systematic spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), according to information released Monday by transparency organization WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks documented an intercepted conversation or phone call held by Steinmeier on November 29, 2005 shortly after he had completed his first official visit to the United States as foreign minister.
It is unclear with whom Steinmeier was speaking at the time, but the subject of the call was the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) controversial renditions program. It was alleged that the US had used the airspace and airport facilities of cooperating European countries to illegally abduct European citizens and residents in order to interrogate them at secret “black site” prisons.
Steinmeier denied knowledge of the alleged rendition flights in 2005 and according to the intercept, “seemed relieved that he had not received any definitive response from the US secretary of state regarding press reports of CIA flights through Germany to secret prisons in Eastern Europe allegedly used for interrogating terrorism subjects.”
Human rights groups have accused the United States of having used the so-called “extraordinary renditions” in order to interrogate suspected terrorists using methods not allowed in the US itself, including torture.
NSA Symbolbild
WikiLeaks has revealed what appears to be a years-long effort to spy on the German Foreign Ministry
‘Tacit complicity of European governments’
The US has acknowledged that the CIA operated a secret detention program outside its borders, but denied the use of torture. In 2008, Steinmeier again denied Germany had in any way supported the rendition flights at a parliamentary hearing, calling such accusations “utter nonsense.”
“Today’s publication indicates that the NSA has been used to help the CIA kidnap and torture with impunity. For years the CIA was systematically abducting and torturing people, with the tacit complicity of European governments,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement.
The new documents paint a picture of an apparent years-long NSA effort to spy on the German Foreign Ministry, dating back to before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The documents reveal a list of 20 phone numbers the NSA targeted for monitoring, two of which were assigned to Steinmeier as well one number potentially assigned to Joschka Fischer, Germany’s vice chancellor and foreign minister from 1998 to 2005.
The German Foreign Ministry has not commented on the latest revelations, which come shortly after WikiLeaks revealed the NSA had allegedly spied on top German politicians for decades .
German Green Party parliamentarian Hans-Christian Ströbele demanded an explanation from the government and secret service in light of the latest revelations.
“They must say what they will do now to resolve the spying and avert damage,” Ströbele said after Monday’s revelations. He also questioned whether Steinmeier in 2006 “actually failed to answer questions regarding US rendition flights over Germany.”
bw/cmk (AFP, dpa)

20.07.2015

Find this story at 20 July 2015

An Attack on Press Freedom SPIEGEL Targeted by US Intelligence

16 oktober 2015

Revelations from WikiLeaks published this week show how boundlessly and comprehensively American intelligence services spied on the German government. It has now emerged that the US also conducted surveillance against SPIEGEL.

Walks during working hours aren’t the kind of pastime one would normally expect from a leading official in the German Chancellery. Especially not from the head of Department Six, the official inside Angela Merkel’s office responsible for coordinating Germany’s intelligence services.

But in the summer of 2011, Günter Heiss found himself stretching his legs for professional reasons. The CIA’s station chief in Berlin had requested a private conversation with Heiss. And he didn’t want to meet in an office or follow standard protocol. Instead, he opted for the kind of clandestine meeting you might see in a spy film.

Officially, the CIA man was accredited as a counsellor with the US Embassy, located next to Berlin’s historic Brandenburg Gate. Married to a European, he had already been stationed in Germany once before and knew how to communicate with German officials. At times he could be demanding and overbearing, but he could also be polite and courteous. During this summer walk he also had something tangible to offer Heiss.

The CIA staffer revealed that a high-ranking Chancellery official allegedly maintained close contacts with the media and was sharing official information with reporters with SPIEGEL.

The American provided the name of the staffer: Hans Josef Vorbeck, Heiss’ deputy in Department Six. The information must have made it clear to Heiss that the US was spying on the German government as well as the press that reports on it.

The central Berlin stroll remained a secret for almost four years. The Chancellery quietly transferred Vorbeck, who had until then been responsible for counterterrorism, to another, less important department responsible dealing with the history of the BND federal intelligence agency. Other than that, though, it did nothing.

Making a Farce of Rule of Law

Officials in the Chancellery weren’t interested in how the CIA had obtained its alleged information. They didn’t care to find out how, and to which degree, they were being spied on by the United States. Nor were they interested in learning about the degree to which SPIEGEL was being snooped on by the Americans. Chancellery officials didn’t contact any of the people in question. They didn’t contact members of the Bundestag federal parliament sitting on the Parliamentary Control Panel, the group responsible for oversight of the intelligence services. They didn’t inform members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the agency responsible for counterintelligence in Germany, either. And they didn’t contact a single public prosecutor. Angela Merkel’s office, it turns out, simply made a farce of the rule of law.

As a target of the surveillance, SPIEGEL has requested more information from the Chancellery. At the same time, the magazine filed a complaint on Friday with the Federal Public Prosecutor due to suspicion of intelligence agency activity.

Because now, in the course of the proceedings of the parliamentary investigative committee probing the NSA’s activities in Germany in the wake of revelations leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, details about the event that took place in the summer of 2011 are gradually leaking to the public. At the beginning of May, the mass-circulation tabloid Bild am Sonntag reported on a Chancellery official who had been sidelined “in the wake of evidence of alleged betrayal of secrets through US secret services.”

Research conducted by SPIEGEL has determined the existence of CIA and NSA files filled with a large number of memos pertaining to the work of the German newsmagazine. And three different government sources in Berlin and Washington have independently confirmed that the CIA station chief in Berlin was referring specifically to Vorbeck’s contacts with SPIEGEL.

An Operation Justified by Security Interests?

Obama administration sources with knowledge of the operation said that it was justified by American security interests. The sources said US intelligence services had determined the existence of intensive contacts between SPIEGEL reporters and the German government and decided to intervene because those communications were viewed as damaging to the United States’ interests. The fact that the CIA and NSA were prepared to reveal an ongoing surveillance operation to the Chancellery underlines the importance they attached to the leaks, say sources in Washington. The NSA, the sources say, were aware that the German government would know from then on that the US was spying in Berlin.

As more details emerge, it is becoming increasingly clear that representatives of the German government at best looked away as the Americans violated the law, and at worst supported them.

Just last Thursday, Günter Heiss and his former supervisor, Merkel’s former Chief of Staff Ronald Pofalla, were questioned by the parliamentary investigative committee and attempted to explain the egregious activity. Heiss confirmed that tips had been given, but claimed they hadn’t been “concrete enough” for measures to be taken. When asked if he had been familiar with the issue, Pofalla answered, “Of course.” He said that anything else he provided had to be “in context,” at which point a representative of the Chancellery chimed in and pointed out that could only take place in a meeting behind closed doors.

In that sense, the meeting of the investigative committee once again shed light on the extent to which the balance of power has shifted between the government and the Fourth Estate. Journalists, who scrutinize and criticize those who govern, are an elementary part of the “checks and balances” — an American invention — aimed at ensuring both transparency and accountability. When it comes to intelligence issues, however, it appears this system has been out of balance for some time.

Government Lies

When SPIEGEL first reported in Summer 2013 about the extent of NSA’s spying on Germany, German politicians first expressed shock and then a certain amount of indignation before quickly sliding back into their persona as a loyal ally. After only a short time and a complete lack of willingness on the part of the Americans to explain their actions, Pofalla declared that the “allegations are off the table.”

But a number of reports published in recent months prove that, whether out of fear, outrage or an alleged lack of knowledge, it was all untrue. Everything the government said was a lie. As far back as 2013, the German government was in a position to suspect, if not to know outright, the obscene extent to which the United States was spying on an ally. If there hadn’t already been sufficient evidence of the depth of the Americans’ interest in what was happening in Berlin, Wednesday’s revelations by WikiLeaks, in cooperation with Süddeutsche Zeitung, filled in the gaps.

SPIEGEL’s reporting has long been a thorn in the side of the US administration. In addition to its reporting on a number of other scandals, the magazine exposed the kidnapping of Murat Kurnaz, a man of Turkish origin raised in Bremen, Germany, and his rendition to Guantanamo. It exposed the story of Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who was taken to Syria, where he was tortured. The reports triggered the launch of a parliamentary investigative committee in Berlin to look also into the CIA’s practices.

When SPIEGEL reported extensively on the events surrounding the arrest of three Islamist terrorists in the so-called “Sauerland cell” in Germany, as well as the roles played by the CIA and the NSA in foiling the group, the US government complained several times about the magazine. In December 2007, US intelligence coordinator Mike McConnell personally raised the issue during a visit to Berlin. And when SPIEGEL reported during the summer of 2009, under the headline “Codename Domino,” that a group of al-Qaida supporters was believed to be heading for Europe, officials at the CIA seethed. The sourcing included a number of security agencies and even a piece of information supplied by the Americans. At the time, the station chief for Germany’s BND intelligence service stationed in Washington was summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The situation escalated in August 2010 after SPIEGEL, together with WikiLeaks, the Guardian and the New York Times, began exposing classified US Army reports from Afghanistan. That was followed three months later with the publication of the Iraq war logs based on US Army reports. And in November of that year, WikiLeaks, SPIEGEL and several international media reported how the US government thinks internally about the rest of the world on the basis of classified State Department cables. Pentagon officials at the time declared that WikiLeaks had “blood on its hands.” The Justice Department opened an investigation and seized data from Twitter accounts, e-mail exchanges and personal data from activists connected with the whistleblowing platform. The government then set up a Task Force with the involvement of the CIA and NSA.

Not even six months later, the CIA station chief requested to go on the walk in which he informed the intelligence coordinator about Vorbeck and harshly criticized SPIEGEL.

Digital Snooping

Not long later, a small circle inside the Chancellery began discussing how the CIA may have got ahold of the information. Essentially, two possibilities were conceivable: either through an informant or through surveillance of communications. But how likely is it that the CIA had managed to recruit a source in the Chancellery or on the editorial staff of SPIEGEL?

The more likely answer, members of the circle concluded, was that the information must have been the product of “SigInt,” signals intelligence — in other words, wiretapped communications. It seems fitting that during the summer of 2013, just prior to the scandal surrounding Edward Snowden and the documents he exposed pertaining to NSA spying, German government employees warned several SPIEGEL journalists that the Americans were eavesdropping on them.

At the end of June 2011, Heiss then flew to Washington. During a visit to CIA headquarters in Langley, the issue of the alleged contact with SPIEGEL was raised again. Chancellery staff noted the suspicion in a classified internal memo that explicitly names SPIEGEL.

One of the great ironies of the story is that contact with the media was one of Vorbeck’s job responsibilities. He often took part in background discussions with journalists and even represented the Chancellery at public events. “I had contact with journalists and made no secret about it,” Vorbeck told SPIEGEL. “I even received them in my office in the Chancellery. That was a known fact.” He has since hired a lawyer.

It remains unclear just who US intelligence originally had in its scopes. The question is also unlikely to be answered by the parliamentary investigative committee, because the US appears to have withheld this information from the Chancellery. Theoretically, at least, there are three possibilities: The Chancellery — at least in the person of Hans Josef Vorbeck. SPIEGEL journalists. Or blanket surveillance of Berlin’s entire government quarter. The NSA is capable of any of the three options. And it is important to note that each of these acts would represent a violation of German law.

Weak Arguments

So far, the Chancellery has barricaded itself behind the argument that the origin of the information had been too vague and abstract to act on. In addition, the tip had been given in confidentiality, meaning that neither Vorbeck nor SPIEGEL could be informed. But both are weak arguments, given that the CIA station chief’s allegations were directed precisely at SPIEGEL and Vorbeck and that the intelligence coordinator’s deputy would ultimately be sidelined as a result.

And even if you follow the logic that the tip wasn’t concrete enough, there is still one committee to whom the case should have been presented under German law: the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Control Panel, whose proceedings are classified and which is responsible for oversight of Germany’s intelligence services. The nine members of parliament on the panel are required to be informed about all intelligence events of “considerable importance.”

Members of parliament on the panel did indeed express considerable interest in the Vorbeck case. They learned in fall 2011 of his transfer, and wanted to know why “a reliable coordinator in the fight against terrorism would be shifted to a post like that, one who had delivered excellent work on the issue,” as then chairman of the panel, Social Demoratic Party politician Thomas Oppermann, criticized at the time.

But no word was mentioned about the reasons behind the transfer during a Nov. 9, 2011 meeting of the panel. Not a single word about the walk taken by the CIA chief of station. Not a word about the business trip to Washington taken by Günter Heiss afterward. And not a word about Vorbeck’s alleged contacts with SPIEGEL. Instead, the parliamentarians were told a myth — that the move had been made necessary by cutbacks. And also because he was needed to work on an historical appraisal of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND.

Deceiving Parliament

Officials in the Chancellery had decided to deceive parliament about the issue. And for a long time, it looked as though they would get away with it.

The appropriate way of dealing with the CIA’s incrimination would have been to transfer the case to the justice system. Public prosecutors would have been forced to follow up with two investigations: One to find out whether the CIA’s allegations against Vorbeck had been true — both to determine whether government secrets had been breached and out of the obligation to assist a longtime civil servant. It also would have had to probe suspicions that a foreign intelligence agency conducted espionage in the heart of the German capital.

That could, and should, have been the case. Instead, the Chancellery decided to go down the path of deception, scheming with an ally, all the while interpreting words like friendship and partnership in a highly arbitrary and scrupulous way.

Günter Heiss, who received the tip from the CIA station chief, is an experienced civil servant. In his earlier years, Heiss studied music. He would go on as a music instructor to teach a young Ursula von der Leyen (who is Germany’s defense minister today) how to play the piano. But then Heiss, a tall, slightly lanky man, switched professions and instead pursued a career in intelligence that would lead him to the top post in the Lower Saxony state branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Even back then, the Christian Democrat was already covering up the camera on his laptop screen with tape. At the very least “they” shouldn’t be able to see him, he said at the time, elaborating that the “they” he was referring to should not be interpreted as being the US intelligence services, but rather the other spies – “the Chinese” and, “in any case, the Russians.” For conservatives like Heiss, America, after all, is friendly territory.

‘Spying Among Friends Not Acceptable’

If there was suspicion in the summer of 2011 that the NSA was spying on a staff member at the Chancellery, it should have set off alarm bells within the German security apparatus. Both the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is responsible for counter-intelligence, and the Federal Office for Information Security should have been informed so that they could intervene. There also should have been discussions between the government ministers and the chancellor in order to raise government awareness about the issue. And, going by the maxim the chancellor would formulate two years later, Merkel should have had a word with the Americans along the lines of “Spying among friends is not acceptable.”

And against the media.

If it is true that a foreign intelligence agency spied on journalists as they conducted their reporting in Germany and then informed the Chancellery about it, then these actions would place a huge question mark over the notion of a free press in this country. Germany’s highest court ruled in 2007 that press freedom is a “constituent part of a free and democratic order.” The court held that reporting can no longer be considered free if it entails a risk that journalists will be spied on during their reporting and that the federal government will be informed of the people they speak to.

“Freedom of the press also offers protection from the intrusion of the state in the confidentiality of the editorial process as well as the relationship of confidentiality between the media and its informants,” the court wrote in its ruling. Freedom of the press also provides special protection to the “the secrecy of sources of information and the relationship of confidentiality between the press, including broadcasters, and the source.”

Criminalizing Journalism

But Karlsruhe isn’t Washington. And freedom of the press is not a value that gives American intelligence agencies pause. On the contrary, the Obama administration has gained a reputation for adamantly pursuing uncomfortable journalistic sources. It hasn’t even shied away from targeting American media giants.

In spring 2013, it became known that the US Department of Justice mandated the monitoring of 100 telephone numbers belonging to the news agency Associated Press. Based on the connections that had been tapped, AP was able to determine that the government likely was interested in determining the identity of an important informant. The source had revealed to AP reporters details of a CIA operation pertaining to an alleged plot to blow up a commercial jet.

The head of AP wasn’t the only one who found the mass surveillance of his employees to be an “unconstitutional act.” Even Republican Senators like John Boehner sharply criticized the government, pointing to press freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. “The First Amendment is first for a reason,” he said.

But the Justice Department is unimpressed by such formulations. New York Times reporter James Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was threatened with imprisonment for contempt of court in an effort to get him to turn over his sources — which he categorically refused to do for seven years. Ultimately, public pressure became too intense, leading Obama’s long-time Attorney General Eric Holder to announce last October that Risen would not be forced to testify.

The Justice Department was even more aggressive in its pursuit of James Rosen, the Washington bureau chief for TV broadcaster Fox. In May 2013, it was revealed that his telephone was bugged, his emails were read and his visits to the State Department were monitored. To obtain the necessary warrants, the Justice Department had labeled Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator.”

The strategy of criminalizing journalism has become something of a bad habit under Obama’s leadership, with his government pursuing non-traditional media, such as the whistleblower platform WikiLeaks, with particular aggression.

Bradley Manning, who supplied WikiLeaks with perhaps its most important data dump, was placed in solitary confinement and tormented with torture-like methods, as the United Nations noted critically. Manning is currently undergoing a gender transition and now calls herself Chelsea. In 2013, a military court sentenced Manning, who, among other things, publicized war crimes committed by the US in Iraq, to 35 years in prison.

In addition, a criminal investigation has been underway for at least the last five years into the platform’s operators, first and foremost its founder Julian Assange. For the past several years, a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been working to determine if charges should be brought against the organization.

Clandestine Proceedings

The proceedings are hidden from the public, but the grand jury’s existence became apparent once it began to subpoena witnesses with connections to WikiLeaks and when the Justice Department sought to confiscate data belonging to people who worked with Assange. The US government, for example, demanded that Twitter hand over data pertaining to several people, including the Icelandic parliamentarian Brigitta Jonsdottir, who had worked with WikiLeaks on the production of a video. The short documentary is an exemplary piece of investigative journalism, showing how a group of civilians, including employees of the news agency Reuters, were shot and killed in Baghdad by an American Apache helicopter.

Computer security expert Jacob Appelbaum, who occasionally freelances for SPIEGEL, was also affected at the time. Furthermore, just last week he received material from Google showing that the company too had been forced by the US government to hand over information about him – for the time period from November 2009 until today. The order would seem to indicate that investigators were particularly interested in Appelbaum’s role in the publication of diplomatic dispatches by WikiLeaks.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has referred to journalists who worked with material provided by Edward Snowden has his “accomplices.” In the US, there are efforts underway to pass a law pertaining to so-called “media leaks.” Australia already passed one last year. Pursuant to the law, anyone who reveals details about secret service operations may be punished, including journalists.

Worries over ‘Grave Loss of Trust’

The German government isn’t too far from such positions either. That has become clear with its handling of the strictly classified list of “selectors,” which is held in the Chancellery. The list includes search terms that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, used when monitoring telecommunications data on behalf of the NSA. The parliamentary investigative committee looking into NSA activity in Germany has thus far been denied access to the list. The Chancellery is concerned that allowing the committee to review the list could result in uncomfortable information making its way into the public.

That’s something Berlin would like to prevent. Despite an unending series of indignities visited upon Germany by US intelligence agencies, the German government continues to believe that it has a “special” relationship with its partners in America — and is apparently afraid of nothing so much as losing this partnership.

That, at least, seems to be the message of a five-page secret letter sent by Chancellery Chief of Staff Peter Altmaier, of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, to various parliamentary bodies charged with oversight. In the June 17 missive, Altmaier warns of a “grave loss of trust” should German lawmakers be given access to the list of NSA spying targets. Opposition parliamentarians have interpreted the letter as a “declaration of servility” to the US.

Altmaier refers in the letter to a declaration issued by the BND on April 30. It notes that the spying targets passed on by the NSA since 2005 include “European political personalities, agencies in EU member states, especially ministries and EU institutions, and representations of certain companies.” On the basis of this declaration, Altmaier writes, “the investigative committee can undertake its own analysis, even without knowing the individual selectors.”

Committee members have their doubts. They suspect that the BND already knew at the end of April what WikiLeaks has now released — with its revelations that the German Economics Ministry, Finance Ministry and Agriculture Ministry were all under the gaze of the NSA, among other targets. That would mean that the formulation in the BND declaration of April 30 was intentionally misleading. The Left Party and the Greens now intend to gain direct access to the selector list by way of a complaint to Germany’s Constitutional Court.

The government in Berlin would like to prevent exactly that. The fact that the US and German intelligence agencies shared selectors is “not a matter of course. Rather, it is a procedure that requires, and indicates, a special degree of trust,” Almaier writes. Should the government simply hand over the lists, Washington would see that as a “profound violation of confidentiality requirements.” One could expect, he writes, that the “US side would significantly restrict its cooperation on security issues, because it would no longer see its German partners as sufficiently trustworthy.”

Altmaier’s letter neglects to mention the myriad NSA violations committed against German interests, German citizens and German media.

By SPIEGEL Staff
07/03/2015 06:05 PM

Find this story at 3 July 2015

Neue Spionageaffäre erschüttert BND

16 oktober 2015

Der US-Geheimdienst NSA hat offenbar über Jahre hinweg mit Wissen des Bundesnachrichtendienstes Ziele in Westeuropa und Deutschland ausgespäht. Die Erkenntnisse darüber behielt der BND nach SPIEGEL-Informationen lange für sich.

Im Mittelpunkt des neuerlichen Skandals steht die gemeinsame Spionagetätigkeit von Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) und US-Auslandsgeheimdienst NSA. Für die technische Aufklärung lieferte der US-Dienst seit mehr als zehn Jahren sogenannte Selektoren – also etwa IP-Adressen oder Handynummern – an die deutschen Partner. Diese wurden in die BND-Systeme zur Überwachung verschiedener Weltregionen eingespeist.

Mindestens seit dem Jahr 2008 fiel BND-Mitarbeitern mehrfach auf, dass einige dieser Selektoren dem Aufgabenprofil des deutschen Auslandsgeheimdienstes zuwiderlaufen – und auch nicht von dem “Memorandum of Agreement” abgedeckt sind, das die Deutschen und die Amerikaner zur gemeinsamen Bekämpfung des globalen Terrorismus 2002 ausgehandelt hatten. Stattdessen suchte die NSA gezielt nach Informationen etwa über den Rüstungskonzern EADS, Eurocopter oder französische Behörden. Der BND nahm das offenbar jedoch nicht zum Anlass, die Selektorenliste systematisch zu überprüfen.

Erst nach Enthüllung des NSA-Skandals im Sommer 2013 befasste sich eine BND-Abteilung gezielt mit den NSA-Suchbegriffen. Im Oktober 2013 lag das Ergebnis vor: Demnach verstießen rund 2000 der Selektoren eindeutig gegen westeuropäische und deutsche Interessen. Die Rede ist intern auch von Politikern, die demnach gezielt und unrechtmäßig ausspioniert wurden. Aber auch diesen Fund meldete der BND nicht an seine Aufsichtsbehörde, das Bundeskanzleramt. Stattdessen bat der zuständige Unterabteilungsleiter die NSA, derartige Verstöße künftig zu unterlassen.

BND-Chef von Ausschusssitzung ausgeschlossen

Das wahre Ausmaß des Skandals wurde nun erst aufgrund eines Beweisantrags bekannt, den Linke und Grüne für den NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss gestellt hatten. Die für den Ausschuss zuständige Projektgruppe des BND prüfte die NSA-Selektoren daraufhin erneut – mit dem Ergebnis, dass bis zu 40.000 davon gegen westeuropäische und deutsche Interessen gerichtet sind. Erst im März wurde das Bundeskanzleramt darüber unterrichtet. Weitere Überprüfungen wurden inzwischen angeordnet.

Am Mittwochabend unterrichtete Kanzleramtsminister Peter Altmaier (CDU) persönlich die Mitglieder des Parlamentarischen Kontrollgremiums und des NSA-Ausschusses über den Spionageskandal. BND-Präsident Gerhard Schindler wurde von der Sitzung explizit ausgeschlossen. Auch Spitzenpolitiker von SPD und CDU wurden bereits informiert.

Von Maik Baumgärtner, Hubert Gude, Marcel Rosenbach und Jörg Schindler
Donnerstag, 23.04.2015 – 16:23 Uhr

Find this story at 24 April 2015

Airbus va porter plainte pour soupçons d’espionnage en Allemagne (2015)

16 oktober 2015

Airbus Group a annoncé jeudi son intention de porter plainte en Allemagne après les informations selon lesquelles le BND, le service fédéral de renseignement extérieur allemand, a aidé ses homologues américains à espionner plusieurs entreprises européennes.

“Nous avons demandé des informations supplémentaires au gouvernement”, a déclaré un porte-parole d’Airbus en Allemagne. “Nous allons porter plainte contre X en raison de soupçons d’espionnage industriel.”

L’hebdomadaire Der Spiegel a rapporté la semaine dernière que des responsables du BND avaient indirectement aidé la National Security Agency (NSA) américaine à espionner plusieurs cibles en Europe pendant plus de 10 ans.

Le ministre de l’Intérieur allemand, Thomas de Maizière, un proche allié de la chancelière Angela Merkel, a nié mercredi avoir menti au Parlement à propos de la collaboration entre les services de renseignement allemands et américains.

Il est depuis plusieurs jours sous le feu des critiques de l’opposition dans ce dossier en raison de son rôle lorsqu’il était directeur de la chancellerie fédérale entre 2005 et 2009.

En 2013, après la publication d’informations selon lesquelles les Etats-Unis avaient placé le téléphone portable de la chancelière sur écoute, Angela Merkel avait déclaré que “s’espionner entre amis n’est absolument pas acceptable”.

Le quotidien Handelsblatt avait le premier fait état de la plainte d’Airbus jeudi.

Selon la presse allemande, le BND a également aidé les services de renseignement américains à espionner les services de la présidence française, le ministère français des Affaires étrangères et la Commission européenne.

En France, plusieurs responsables politiques ont réclamé jeudi des excuses de l’Allemagne et une enquête dans ce dossier.

De son côté, le président de l’exécutif européen, Jean-Claude Juncker, a déclaré lors d’une conférence de presse ignorer si des agents allemands étaient en activité à Bruxelles mais il a rappelé avoir proposé dans le passé que la Commission crée ses propres services secrets “car les agents sont partout”.

Lui-même ex-Premier ministre d’un gouvernement luxembourgeois contraint à la démission par un scandale d’espionnage et de corruption en 2013, Jean-Claude Juncker a ajouté que son expérience personnelle lui avait appris que les services secrets étaient très difficiles à contrôler.

La semaine dernière, le gouvernement allemand avait reconnu des failles au sein de ses services de renseignement et dit avoir demandé au BND de les combler.

(Victoria Bryan, avec Adrian Croft à Bruxelles, Marc Angrand pour le service français)
Source : Reuters 30/04/15 à 18:48
Mis à jour le 30/04/15 à 20:30

Find this story at 30 April 2015

Reaktion auf Spionageaffäre: Rausschmiss erster Klasse (2014)

16 oktober 2015

Die Bundesregierung reagiert auf die USSpionage: Der oberste CIAVertreter in Berlin soll
das Land verlassen. Ein solcher Affront war bisher nur gegen Agenten von PariaStaaten wie
Iran oder Nordkorea denkbar.
Berlin Die Bundesregierung reagiert auf die neuen Spionagefälle und die Vorwürfe gegen die
USA mit einem diplomatischen Affront. Als Reaktion auf die Enthüllungen forderte Berlin den
Repräsentanten der amerikanischen Geheimdienste in Berlin auf, das Land zu verlassen.
Umgehend wurde die Botschaft unterrichtet, der Geheimdienstmann musste sich die
unfreundliche Bitte im Innenministerium von VerfassungsschutzChef HansGeorg Maaßen
anhören.
Ein paar Stunden später dann war in Berlin von einer formellen Ausweisung des CIAVertreters
die Rede, der als “station chief” die Aktivitäten des USGeheimdienstes in Deutschland leitet.
Wenig später korrigierte die Regierung, man habe nur die Ausreise empfohlen. Das ist zwar nicht
gleichzusetzen mit einer Ausweisung, faktisch aber bleibt es ein Rausschmiss erster Klasse.
Die öffentliche Geste der indirekten Ausweisung ist diplomatisch gesehen ein Erdbeben. Eine
solche Maßnahme war bisher höchstens gegen PariaStaaten wie Nordkorea oder Iran denkbar
gewesen. Zwar bat Deutschland in den 90er Jahren schon einmal einen USAgenten um seine
Ausreise, er hatte versucht, eine Quelle im Wirtschaftsministerium anzuwerben. Damals aber
geschah der Rausschmiss eher diskret.
Der deutschen Entscheidung gingen am Donnerstagmorgen Krisentelefonate zwischen
Innenminister Thomas de Maizière, Außenminister FrankWalter Steinmeier und Kanzleramtschef
Peter Altmaiervoraus. Dabei zeigten sich alle Minister enttäuscht über die wenig einlenkenden
Reaktionen der USA und waren sich einig: Deutschland könne die Angelegenheit nicht auf sich
beruhen lassen.
In den Gesprächen beriet man zunächst die bisherigen Signale aus Washington. CIAChef John
Brennan und der USBotschafter John Emerson hatten Kontakt zur deutschen Regierung gesucht.
Berlin fehlten allerdings konkrete Angebote, die Vorwürfe schnell aufzuklären. Von einer
Entschuldigung war schon gar nicht die Rede.
Im Parlamentarischen Kontrollgremium berichtete KlausDieter Fritsche, Merkels Beauftragter für
die Nachrichtendienste, am Donnerstag ernüchtert über das Telefonat mit CIAChef Brennan.
Dieser, so Fritsche, habe nichts außer Floskeln über die transatlantische Verbundenheit und
seinen Ärger über die schlechte Presselage beizutragen gehabt.
Offiziell hatte sich die Regierung in der SpionageAffäre bisher zurückgehalten. Man warte erst die
juristische Aufklärung und mögliche Erklärungen der USA ab. Offenbar aber war der Ärger bis
Donnerstag aber so gewachsen, dass die Phase der Zurückhaltung nun beendet wurde.
Innenminister Thomas de Maizière wollte nach den Beratungen keinen Kommentar abgeben.
Zwar spielte er wie zuvor Wolfgang Schäuble den möglichen Schaden herunter er nannte die
von den USA gewonnenen Informationen “lächerlich”.
Gleichsam unterstrich er, dass der politische Schaden allein durch die Verdachtsmomente gegen
die USA “unverhältnismäßig und schwerwiegend” sei. Deswegen sei ein wirksamer Schutz gegen
Angriffe auf unsere Kommunikation ebenso wie eine effektive Spionageabwehr “unverzichtbar für
unsere wehrhafte Demokratie”. Man sei dabei, beides zu stärken und auszuweiten.
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel machte ihrem Ärger auf die für sie typische Weise Luft. “Mit
gesundem Menschenverstand betrachtet ist das Ausspähen von Freunden und Verbündeten ein
Vergeuden von Kraft”, so die Kanzlerin blumig und doch deutlich. Die Geheimdienste sollten nicht
alles tun, was machbar ist, sondern sich bei ihrer Arbeit “auf das Wesentliche” konzentrieren.
Bisher noch keinen Haftbefehl vorgelegt
10/16/2015 Druckversion Reaktion auf Spionageaffäre: Rausschmiss erster Klasse SPIEGEL ONLINE Politik
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/spionagebundesregierungfordertciavertreterzurausreiseaufa980342druck.html 2/3
Erst am Mittwoch war ein neuer Spionageverdacht bekannt geworden, in diesem Fall verdächtigt
die Bundesanwaltschaft einen Länderreferenten aus der Abteilung Politik des Wehrressorts,
Informationen an einen USGeheimdienst weitergegeben zu haben. Der Militärische
Abschirmdienst (MAD) hatte den jungen Referenten, der seit gut einem Jahr in einer
Unterabteilung für die Sicherheitspolitik tätig war, wegen des Verdachts schon seit 2010
beobachtet, am Mittwoch dann rückten Ermittler vom Generalbundesanwalt im Ministerium an.
Ob der Verdacht stichhaltig war, ist schwer zu bewerten. Zwar verdächtigte man den heutigen
Referenten wegen seines engen Kontakts zu einem vermeintlichen USGeheimdienstler, den er
vor Jahren während eines Jobs im Kosovo kennengelernt hatte. Bisher aber fehlen Beweise, dass
dieser den Deutschen tatsächlich abschöpfte. Er selbst bestreitet eine Agententätigkeit. In seiner
Vernehmung habe der Mitarbeiter aus dem Wehrressort die Beziehung zu dem Amerikaner
vielmehr als reine Männerfreundschaft bezeichnet. So berichtete es der Vertreter des
Generalbundesanwalts im Kontrollgremium.
Verdächtig erschien den Ermittlern nicht zuletzt eine Überweisung von 2.000 Euro, die der USAmerikaner
vor einiger Zeit auf das Konto des Deutschen veranlasste. Auch hierfür habe der
Ministeriumsmitarbeiter eine Erklärung gehabt: Das Geld, so soll er ausgesagt haben, sei im
Rahmen einer Hochzeitsfeier geflossen und auch teilweise zurückgezahlt worden.
Auch der Generalbundesanwalt sprach nach der Durchsuchung und der Vernehmung nur von
einem Anfangsverdacht und beantragte noch nicht mal einen Haftbefehl. Trotzdem sorgte allein
die Nachricht nur wenige Tage nach dem Bekanntwerden eines ähnlichen Falls beim
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) für einen Schock.

10. Juli 2014, 16:36 Uhr
Von Matthias Gebauer und Veit Medick

Find this story at 10 July 2014

Spy vs. Spy: Espionage and the U.S.-Israel Rift

27 juli 2015

If more evidence was needed to show that the relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama has morphed from tragedy to farce, it came late Monday with the revelation that Israel had spied on the nuclear talks between the United States and Iran.

“The White House discovered the operation,” according to the blockbuster account by Adam Entous in The Wall Street Journal, “when U.S. intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted communications among Israeli officials that carried details the U.S. believed could have come only from access to the confidential talks, officials briefed on the matter said.”

Talk about spy vs. spy, the old Mad magazine trope featuring two pointy-nosed, masked cartoon creatures. The National Security Agency, eavesdropping on Israeli officials (as usual, according to the revelations of Edward Snowden), overheard them discussing intelligence their own spies had gathered by spying on U.S. officials talking about the Iran negotiations.

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This was a whole new level of gamesmanship between the two bickering allies.

“It’s one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,” an unnamed “senior U.S. official” told the Journal.

Officials in Jerusalem issued emphatic denials, as they did last year when Newsweek reported on Israeli espionage against the U.S., saying that “Israel does not spy on the United States, period, exclamation mark,’’ as Yuval Steinitz, minister for intelligence and strategic affairs, told Israel Radio on Tuesday.

Of course, Israel does spy on the U.S., and vice versa. In the age of cyberwar, electronic spying runs on autopilot, with state-of-the-art Pac-Mans zooming around the Internet gobbling up anything with the right keyword. Anybody with an antenna (or a keyboard) spies on whoever is seen as the remotest threat, including friends. Or as the Journal put it, “While U.S. officials may not be direct targets…Israeli intelligence agencies sweep up communications between U.S. officials and parties targeted by the Israelis, including Iran.”

And how did the Israelis intercept conversations between officials in Tehran and Washington? In another comedic dimension to this latest spy flap, it turns out that “U.S. intelligence agencies helped the Israelis build a system to listen in on high-level Iranian communications,” the Journal reported.

In part, it’s an old story. Israel’s clandestine operations to steal U.S. scientific, technical, industrial and financial secrets are so commonplace here that officials in the Pentagon and FBI periodically verge into open revolt.

Last year, U.S. intelligence officials trooped up to Capitol Hill to tell U.S. lawmakers considering visa waivers for Israelis that Jerusalem’s spying here had “crossed red lines.” One congressional staffer who attended the behind-closed-doors briefings called the information “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Another staffer called it “damaging.”

“We used to call the Israelis on the carpet once a year to tell them to cut it out, when a particular stunt was just too outrageous ” says a former top FBI counterintelligence official. “They’d make all the right noises and then go right back at it through another door.” But since Israel is such an important strategic ally of the U.S., it was a sin that could not be named. The standing order has always been to just suck it up.

Until this week. The accusations by the unnamed Obama administration officials marked a new frontier in calling out the Israelis—or at least Netanyahu’s right-wing administration.

Netanyahu had crossed some sort of red line again when, according to the Journal, his man in Washington began quietly sharing Israeli intelligence about the U.S. negotiating position with members of Congress, hoping to shore up support for its rejection of any deal with the Iranians short of a total nuclear capitulation on their part. But what seems to have pushed Obama officials over the edge was that Ambassador Ron Dermer, a former Republican operative who holds dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, was wildly exaggerating what the U.S. position was, according to the Journal, making it sound like the White House had given away the store to the Iranians in a desperate effort to ink a deal.

Republican Representative Devin Nunes of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, indicated he had indeed gotten a different view on Iran from sources outside the administration.

“As good as our intelligence community is, a lot of times we don’t even know what the Iranians are up to,” he told CNN. “So we were shocked at the disclosures that have come forward of the size and scope of the Iranian program even in the most recent years.”

One former U.S. intelligence operative with long, firsthand familiarity with Israeli operations called the revelation “appalling but not surprising,” especially under Netanyahu, whose governing coalition depends on the support of far-right Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox parties with a stake in the West Bank settlements.

“The fact that there is such manipulation of our institutions by a so-called ally must be exposed, and the ‘useful idiots’ in [the U.S.] government who toe the Likud line will someday be looked back upon as men and women who sacrificed the U.S. national interest for a foreign ideology—Likud right-wing Zionism,” the operative said, on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

“We know publicly that the administration is seething,” he added, “but I can assure you that behind closed doors the gloves are coming off. Bibi is in the administration’s crosshairs. If this is what is being allowed to leak publicly, you can bet that, behind the scenes, folks both in the White House and the foreign policy-intel community [are prepared to] act on that anger.”

This is not the end of it, he predicted. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which critics say has morphed from a powerful “pro-Israel” lobby to a powerful pro-Likud lobby over the years, will be Obama officials’ next target.

“I’m betting there are going to be some willing leakers now about stories such as AIPAC’s operations against Congress,” the former operative said.

Bob Corker of Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has no doubt that Obama administration officials made a calculated decision to call out Netanyahu, who has long been at odds with the White House on the Middle East peace process, Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Iranian nuclear talks.

“I think y’all all understand what’s happening here,” he told reporters. “I mean, you understand who’s pushing this out.”

But if Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, is any barometer, the Israelis have little to worry about.

“I just don’t look at that as spying,” Kaine said of the Journal’s allegations. “Their deep existential interest in such a deal, that they would try to figure out anything that they could, that they would have an opinion on it…I don’t find any of that that controversial.”

Jeff Stein writes SpyTalk from Washington, D.C. He can be reached more or less confidentially via spytalker@hushmail.com.

BY JEFF STEIN 3/25/15 AT 12:23 PM

Find this story at 25 March 2015

NETANYAHU’S SPYING DENIALS CONTRADICTED BY SECRET NSA DOCUMENTS

27 juli 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday vehemently denied a Wall Street Journal report, leaked by the Obama White House, that Israel spied on U.S. negotiations with Iran and then fed the intelligence to Congressional Republicans. His office’s denial was categorical and absolute, extending beyond this specific story to U.S.-targeted spying generally, claiming: “The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies.”

Israel’s claim is not only incredible on its face. It is also squarely contradicted by top-secret NSA documents, which state that Israel targets the U.S. government for invasive electronic surveillance, and does so more aggressively and threateningly than almost any other country in the world. Indeed, so concerted and aggressive are Israeli efforts against the U.S. that some key U.S. government documents — including the top secret 2013 intelligence budget — list Israel among the U.S.’s most threatening cyber-adversaries and as a “hostile” foreign intelligence service.

One top-secret 2008 document features an interview with the NSA’s Global Capabilities Manager for Countering Foreign Intelligence, entitled “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” He repeatedly names Israel as one of the key threats.

While noting that Russia and China do the most effective spying on U.S., he says that “Israel also targets us.” He explains that “A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked [Israel] as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.” While praising the surveillance relationship with Israel as highly valuable, he added: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel.” Specifically, the Israelis “target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems.”

Other NSA documents voice the grievance that Israel gets far more out of the intelligence-sharing relationship than the U.S. does. One top-secret 2007 document, entitled “History of the US – Israel SIGINT Relationship, post 1992,” describes the cooperation that takes place as highly productive and valuable, and, indeed, top-secret documents previously reported by The Intercept and the Guardian leave no doubt about the very active intelligence-sharing relationship that takes place between the two countries. Yet that same document complains that the relationship even after 9/11 was almost entirely one-sided in favor of serving Israeli rather than U.S. interests:

The U.S. perception of Israel as a threat as much as an ally is also evidenced by the so-called “black budget” of 2013, previously referenced by The Washington Post, which lists Israel in multiple places as a key intelligence “target” and even a “hostile foreign intelligence service” among several other countries typically thought of as the U.S.’s most entrenched adversaries:

The same budget document reveals that the CIA regards Israel — along with Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and Cuba — as a “priority threat country,” one against which it “conduct[s] offensive [counter-intelligence] operations in collaboration with DoD”:

One particular source of concern for U.S. intelligence are the means used by Israel to “influence anti-regime elements in Iran,” including its use of “propaganda and other active measures”:

What is most striking about all of this is the massive gap between (a) how American national security officials talk privately about the Israelis and (b) how they have talked for decades about the Israelis for public consumption — at least until the recent change in public rhetoric from Obama officials about Israel, which merely brings publicly expressed American views more in line with how U.S. government officials have long privately regarded their “ally.” The NSA refused to comment for this article.

Previously reported stories on Israeli spying, by themselves, leave no doubt how false Netanyahu’s statement is. A Der Spiegel article from last fall revealed that “Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations.” A Le Monde article described how NSA documents strongly suggest that a massive computer hack of the French presidential palace in 2012 was likely carried about by the Israelis. A 2014 article from Newsweek’s Jeff Stein revealed that when it comes to surveillance, “the Jewish state’s primary target” is “America’s industrial and technical secrets” and that “Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly.”

All of these stories, along with these new documents, leave no doubt that, at least as the NSA and other parts of the U.S. National Security State see it, Netanyahu’s denials are entirely false: The Israelis engage in active and aggressive espionage against the U.S., even as the U.S. feeds the Israelis billions of dollars every year in U.S. taxpayer funds and protects every Israeli action at the U.N. Because of the U.S. perception of Israel as a “threat” and even a “hostile” foreign intelligence service — facts they discuss only privately, never publicly — the U.S. targets Israel for all sorts of espionage as well.

Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Fishman
Mar. 25 2015, 8:06 p.m.

Find this story at 25 March 2015

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