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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 3 January 2014

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

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

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

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

Minutes of 30 Apr 1982 NSC meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haig concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at January 2014

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2014

Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.”President Harry S. Truman.
It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.
Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.
Truman began his article by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations.”
Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things bothering him. He wrote “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”
It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support.
Wallowing in the Bay of Pigs
Arch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles had been offended when young President Kennedy had the temerity to ask questions about CIA plans before the Bay of Pigs debacle, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to mousetrap the President.
Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes, Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” Kennedy would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”
The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to how the Russians might react. The reckless Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball later described as a “sewer of deceit,” relished any chance to confront the Soviet Union and give it, at least, a black eye.
But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual.
When Kennedy himself was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman – as it did to many others – that the disgraced Dulles and his unrepentant associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a president they felt was soft on Communism and get even for their Bay of Pigs fiasco.
‘Cloak and Dagger’
While Truman saw CIA’s attempted mousetrapping of President Kennedy as a particular outrage, his more general complaint is seen in his broader lament that the CIA had become “so removed from its intended role … I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. … It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” Not only shaping policy through its control of intelligence, but also “cloak and dagger” operations, presumably including assassinations.
Truman concluded the op-ed with an admonition that was as clear as the syntax was clumsy: “I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field – and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” The importance and prescient nature of that admonition are even clearer today, a half-century later.
But Truman’s warning fell mostly on deaf ears, at least within Establishment circles. The Washington Post published the op-ed in its early edition on Dec. 22, 1963, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media ignored it. The long hand of the CIA?
In Truman’s view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles as CIA director. Dulles’s forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, “regime change”), and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high by the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.
The Truman Papers
Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only “when I had control.”
Five days after the op-ed appeared, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a “Dear Boss” letter applauding Truman’s outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA “a different animal than the one I tried to set up for you.”
Souers specifically lambasted the attempt “to conduct a ‘war’ invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover.” He also lamented the fact that the agency’s “principal effort” had evolved into causing “revolutions in smaller countries around the globe,” and added: “With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some.” (Again, as true today as it was 50 years ago.)
Clearly, the operational tail of the CIA was wagging its substantive dog — a serious problem that persists to this day.
Fox Guarding Hen House
After Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the patrician, well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that Dulles also mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.
So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour one-on-one with the former president, trying to get him to retract what he had written in his op-ed. Hell No, said Harry.
Not a problem, Dulles decided. Four days later, in a formal memorandum of conversation for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA general counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction for Truman, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”
A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”
Dulles and Dallas
Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA files a fabricated retraction? I believe the answer lies in the fact that in early 1964 Dulles was feeling a lot of heat from many who were suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination. Columnists were asking how the truth could ever be reached, with Allen Dulles as de facto head of the Warren Commission.
Dulles had good reason to fear that Truman’s limited-edition Washington Post op-ed of Dec. 22, 1963, might garner unwanted attention and raise troublesome questions about covert action, including assassination. He would have wanted to be in position to dig out of Larry Houston’s files the Truman “retraction,” in the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud.
As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to protect himself and his associates, were any commissioners or investigators — or journalists — tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played a role in killing Kennedy.
And so, the question: Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and in then covering it up? In my view, the best dissection of the evidence pertaining to the murder appeared in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer is Yes.
Obama Intimidated?
The mainstream media had an allergic reaction to Douglass’s book and gave it almost no reviews. It is, nevertheless, still selling well. And, more important, it seems a safe bet that President Barack Obama knows what it says and maybe has even read it. This may go some way toward explaining why Obama has been so deferential to the CIA, NSA, FBI and the Pentagon.
Could this be at least part of the reason he felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief Leon Panetta to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than leader.
Is this why the President feels he cannot fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony in March? Is this why he allows National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the intermittent snow showers from Snowden show our senior national security officials to have lied — and to have been out of control?
This may be small solace to President Obama, but there is no sign that the NSA documents that Snowden’s has released include the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report on CIA torture. Rather, that report, at least, seems sure to be under Obama’s and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein’s tight control.
But the timorous President has a big problem. He is acutely aware that, if released, the Senate committee report would create a firestorm – almost certainly implicating Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and many other heavy-hitters of whom he appears to be afraid. And so Obama has allowed Brennan to play bureaucratic games, delaying release of the report for more than a year, even though its conclusions are said to closely resemble earlier findings of the CIA’s own Inspector General and the Constitution Project (see below).
Testimony of Ex-CIA General Counsel
Hat tip to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who took the trouble to read the play-by-play of testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by former CIA General Counsel (2009-2013) Stephen W. Preston, nominated (and now confirmed) to be general counsel at the Department of Defense.
Under questioning by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, Preston admitted outright that, contrary to the CIA’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the committee included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”
That “inaccurate information” apparently is thoroughly documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report which, largely because of the CIA’s imaginative foot-dragging, cost taxpayers $40 million. Udall has revealed that the report (which includes 35,000 footnotes) contains a very long section titled “C.I.A. Representations on the C.I.A. Interrogation Program and the Effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Congress.”
Preston also acknowledged that the CIA inadequately informed the Justice Department on interrogation and detention. He said, “CIA’s efforts fell well short of our current practices when it comes to providing information relevant to [the Office of Legal Counsel]’s legal analysis.”
As Katherine Hawkins, the senior investigator for last April’s bipartisan, independent report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, noted in an Oct. 18, 2013 posting, the memos from acting OLC chief, Steven Bradbury, relied very heavily on now-discredited CIA claims that “enhanced interrogation” saved lives, and that the sessions were carefully monitored by medical and psychological personnel to ensure that detainees’ suffering would not rise to the level of torture.
According to Hawkins, Udall complained – and Preston admitted – that, in providing the materials requested by the committee, “the CIA removed several thousand CIA documents that the agency thought could be subjected to executive privilege claims by the President, without any decision by Obama to invoke the privilege.”
Worse still for the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently destroys the agency’s argument justifying torture on the grounds that there was no other way to acquire the needed information save through brutalization. In his answers to Udall, Preston concedes that, contrary to what the agency has argued, it can and has been established that legal methods of interrogation would have yielded the same intelligence.
Is anyone still wondering why our timid President is likely to sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee report for as long as he can? Or why he will let John Brennan redact it to a fare-thee-well, if he is eventually forced to release some of it by pressure from folks who care about things like torture?
It does appear that the newly taciturn CIA Director Brennan has inordinate influence over the President in such matters – not unlike the influence that both DNI Clapper and NSA Director Alexander seem able to exert. In this respect, Brennan joins the dubious company of the majority of his predecessor CIA directors, as they made abundantly clear when they went to inordinate lengths to prevent their torturer colleagues from being held accountable.
A version of this article also appeared at Consortium News.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
Published on Monday, December 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
by Ray McGovern
Find this story at 23 December 2013

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the C.I.A. for an internal study done by the agency that lawmakers believe is broadly critical of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program but was withheld from congressional oversight committees.
The committee’s request comes in the midst of a yearlong battle with the C.I.A. over the release of the panel’s own exhaustive report about the program, one of the most controversial policies of the post-Sept. 11 era.
The Senate report, totaling more than 6,000 pages, was completed last December but has yet to be declassified. According to people who have read the study, it is unsparing in its criticism of the now-defunct interrogation program and presents a chronicle of C.I.A. officials’ repeatedly misleading the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal methods that, in the end, produced little valuable intelligence.
Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, disclosed the existence of the internal C.I.A. report during an Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. He said he believed it was begun several years ago and “is consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report” although it “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.”
“If this is true,” Mr. Udall said during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline D. Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, “this raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”
The agency responded to the committee report with a vigorous 122-page rebuttal that challenged both the Senate report’s specific facts and its overarching conclusions. John O. Brennan, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers before taking over the C.I.A. this year — and who denounced the interrogation program during his confirmation hearing — delivered the agency’s response to the Intelligence Committee himself.
It is unclear what the agency specifically concluded in its internal review.
Mr. Udall, whose public criticisms of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data has raised his profile in Congress and won him praise from privacy advocates, said he would not support Ms. Krass’s nomination until the C.I.A. provided more information to the committee about the interrogation program.
Ms. Krass did not respond directly to Mr. Udall’s statements about the internal C.I.A. review. Dean Boyd, an agency spokesman, said the agency was “aware of the committee’s request and will respond appropriately.”
Mr. Boyd said that the C.I.A. agreed with a number of the conclusions of the voluminous Senate investigative report, but found “significant errors in the study.”
“C.I.A. and committee staff have had extensive dialogue on this issue, and the agency is prepared to work with the committee to determine the best way forward on potential declassification,” he said.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is the Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, said recently that her committee would soon vote to adopt the report’s executive summary and conclusion, which would then be subject to a formal declassification process before it was publicly released.
Republican members of the committee, angry about what they see as a biased and shoddy investigation by their Democratic colleagues, are planning to make public a rebuttal of their own.
The Senate report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million to produce, began as an attempt to document what was perhaps the most divisive of the Bush administration’s responses to the Sept. 11 attacks. But it has since become enmeshed in the complex politics of the Obama administration.
President Obama ended the detention program as one of his first acts in the Oval Office, and has repeatedly denounced the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods under the program. During a speech in May, he said that the United States had “compromised our basic values by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”
And yet Mr. Obama has repeatedly resisted demands by human rights groups to seek prosecutions for the lawyers who approved the interrogation methods or the people who carried them out, and the White House has been mostly silent during the debate over the past year about declassifying the Senate report.
For all his criticisms of the counterterrorism excesses during the Bush administration, Mr. Obama has put the C.I.A. at the center of his strategy to kill militant suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
Human rights groups have tried to pressure the White House to intervene to get the Senate report declassified.
“Whether it’s stalling or concealing, the C.I.A. is trying to avoid reckoning with its past abuse,” said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA. “And that’s what makes declassifying the Senate’s report so crucial right now.”
Ms. Krass is a career government lawyer who works at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the arm of the department that advises the White House on the legality of domestic and foreign policies.
The office was particularly controversial during the Bush administration, when lawyers there wrote lengthy memos approving C.I.A. interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as well as signing off on the expansion of surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Under Mr. Obama, the office has approved other controversial practices, including the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric living in Yemen who was an American. Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011 by a C.I.A. drone strike, launched from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.
Much of Tuesday’s hearing was consumed by a debate about whether the White House should be forced to share Justice Department legal memos.
Under polite but persistent questioning by members of both parties, Ms. Krass repeatedly said that while the two congressional intelligence committees need to “fully understand” the legal basis for C.I.A. activities, they were not entitled to see the Justice Department memos that provide the legal blueprint for secret programs.
The opinions “represent pre-decisional, confidential legal advice that has been provided,” she said, adding that the confidentiality of the legal advice was necessary to allow a “full and frank discussion amongst clients and policy makers and their lawyers within the executive branch.”
Senator Feinstein appeared unmoved. “Unless we know the administration’s basis for sanctioning a program, it is very hard to oversee it,” she said.
Still, it is expected that the committee will vote to approve Ms. Krass.
December 17, 2013
By MARK MAZZETTI
Find this story at 17 December 2013
© 2013 The New York Times Company

Today the Government has published a report submitted to the Prime Minister by Sir Peter Gibson and Dame Janet Paraskeva, the Panel of the Detainee Inquiry, on the Inquiry’s work.
The Inquiry’s Report speaks for itself. It is a rigorous, thorough and independent piece of work. It reveals more information than ever before about the workings of Government and the Agencies, on the issues highlighted in the report.
Sir Peter said:
“There are matters which deserve further investigation. That is what the documents have disclosed and we explain why in our report.”
Dame Janet said:
“We have worked hard to put as much as possible into the public domain. I do hope the Government will decide to build on our work in a future Inquiry and give the detainees a chance to have their say.”
The library of documents, the analysis of information and preliminary identification of potential witnesses the Inquiry carried out, will save any subsequent Inquiry a huge amount of time and resource.
The report does not find facts or reach conclusions. It is based on the scrutiny of documents, no witness has yet had the opportunity to explain or add to this information. But the Inquiry has shone a bright light onto issues which might be investigated further by a future Inquiry or on which the Government can take action now.
The Inquiry covered four separate themes: interrogation and treatment issues, rendition, training and guidance as well as policy and communications. Its work revealed 27 separate issues the Inquiry would like to have investigated further and which might be followed up by a future Inquiry.
In summary the report says:
Interrogation and Treatment issues:
Documents indicate that in some instances UK intelligence officers were aware of inappropriate interrogation techniques and mistreatment or allegations of mistreatment of some detainees by liaison partners from other countries.
Rendition
Documents indicate that Government or its Agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.
Training and Guidance
No reason to doubt that instruction to personnel was that detainees must be treated humanely and consistently with UK’s international legal obligations. But officers on the ground needed clear guidance on when and with whom to raise concerns.
Policy and Communications
Documents raise the question whether the Agencies could have identified possible patterns of detainee mistreatment more quickly and whether or not sufficient information was given to the ISC to enable it to perform its duties.
Notes for editors:
The Inquiry’s original task was set out by the Prime Minister when he announced its establishment on 6 July 2010, to: “….look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11”
On 18 January 2012, the then Justice Secretary, told the House: “….. following consultations with Sir Peter Gibson, the chair of the Inquiry we have decided to bring the work of his Inquiry to a conclusion. We have agreed with Sir Peter that the Inquiry should provide Government with a report on its preparatory work to date, highlighting particular themes or issues which might be the subject of further examination. The Government are clear that as much of this report as possible will be made public.”
As the Justice Secretary made clear in his statement to the House, the CPS’ announcement of new criminal investigations to be carried out by the Metropolitan Police meant that the Inquiry start its mandate as originally envisaged.
The Inquiry examined some 20,000 documents and as a result has raised a number of robust questions for a future Inquiry to investigate further and a number of areas where the Government can act now. The vast majority of the documents the Inquiry examined were highly classified.
For more information including the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, Protocol, biographies of Sir Peter Gibson and Dame Janet Paraskeva, and a link to the report please visit: www.detaineeinquiry.org.uk
Find this story at 19 December 2013
Find the report at
© UK Crown Copyright 2013

British intelligence officers were told to ignore evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention when detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan were being interrogated in 2002, a report by the aborted inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture has found.
The inquiry was axed earlier this year after fresh criminal investigations were launched into allegations involving Libyan victims Photo: EPA
British intelligence officers were told to ignore evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention when detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan were being interrogated in 2002, a report by the aborted inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture has found.
The orders from MI6’s head quarters to intelligence officers came as Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was telling MPs that anyone who is captured “should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention”.
The report published by Sir Peter Gibson disclosed that in 2002 spies working for MI6 overseas were told to turn a “blind eye” to any evidence they witnessed of breaches of the Convention, which sets out how prisoners should be treated.
Documents uncovered by the inquiry showed that “officers were advised that, faced with apparent breaches of Geneva Convention standards, there was no obligation to intervene”, the report said.
“Officers were also advised that such conduct should only be raised with the detaining authority ‘if circumstances allow’. Officers were not advised to cease any interview immediately if they felt that the detainee was not being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards.”
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Mr Blair had told MPs on January 16, 2002 : “I totally agree that anybody who is captured by American troops, British troops or anyone else should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention and proper international norms.”
Yet two days later, Mr Blair wrote on the bottom of a Number 10 note about detainees in Guantanamo: “The key is to find out how they are being treated.
“Though I was initially sceptical about claims of torture, we must make clear to the US that any such action wd be totally unacceptable & v. quickly establish that it isn’t happening” [sic].
The partly-redacted report recommended 27 areas which should be examined further, adding that it “would also want to put on its recognition of the extreme harshness of the conditions and the treatment experienced by the detainees”.
One area it wanted to examine was whether “UK officers may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee”.
The inquiry was axed earlier this year after fresh criminal investigations were launched into allegations involving Libyan victims. The report also found that Britain “may have become inappropriately” involved in some cases of rendition of suspected terrorists.
The heads of both MI5 and MI6 have been asked to give their responses to MPs on the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is investigating the claims, by February.
Ken Clarke, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of the inquiry, said the report “finds no evidence in the documents to support any allegation that UK intelligence officers were directly responsible for the mistreatment of detainees held by other countries overseas”.
He added that it was important when considering the report to bear in mind it was a period “when we and our international partners were suddenly adapting to a completely new scale and type of threat from fundamentalist religious extremists.
Mr Clarke said: “It is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly placed on them.”
He said: “There is some damage to our reputation which prides itself as a beacon of justice, human rights and the rule of law. If failures and mistakes were made in this period that is a matter of sincere regret.”
Jack Straw, who was Labour foreign secretary at the time, flatly denied that he knowingly facilitated the torture of British citizens by US authorities, even though he authorised their transfer to Guantanamo Bay.
By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent
4:34PM GMT 19 Dec 2013
Find this story at 19 December 2013
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

MI6 agents in Afghanistan were told they were not obliged to intervene if they witnessed suspected terrorists being harmed by their American captors, an official inquiry into allegations Britain was complicit in torture has disclosed.
It also concluded that UK operatives “may have become inappropriately” involved in some cases of rendition of captives who were believed to be al-Qa’ida fighters.
Sir Peter Gibson’s investigation listed 27 areas he believed needed further inquiry, including whether the Government should have done more to obtain the release of UK nationals locked up at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
It suggested that the Labour minister Jack Straw should have asked more questions when he was Foreign Secretary about the UK’s possible involvement in activities in breach of the Geneva Convention.
Documents released by Sir Peter, a former High Court judge, showed an MI6 officer reported back to headquarters in London what he had seen as American officers interrogated captives at Bagram airbase, near Kabul, in January 2002.
A telegram he received in reply read: “It appears from your description that they may not be being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards. Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.”
He was reminded that the “Americans understand that we cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it”.
But the telegram made clear there was no automatic requirement to intervene if UK officers witnessed inhuman treatment of captives. It said: “If circumstances allow, you should consider drawing this to the attention of a suitably senior US official locally.”
No official complaint over the episode was passed to the American authorities and seven days later Tony Blair reassured MPs that detainees in the US detention camp of Guantanamo were being treated humanely.
Sir Peter said he wished he has been able to investigate further “whether in some cases, UK officers may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee”.
The inquiry was set up two and a half years ago by David Cameron but was heavily criticised by human rights lawyers who abandoned co-operation.
It was scrapped last year and responsibility for examining alleged complicity transferred to a parliamentary committee. Human rights groups denounced the decision as a “whitewash”.
Sir Peter on Thursday published an interim report setting out the reasons he believed his inquiry should be re-established.
In a damaging finding, he said: “A theme that runs through a number of the lead cases considered by the inquiry is whether treatment issues – such as sleep deprivation, hooding and media reports of waterboarding – were raised appropriately with the relevant liaison partner responsible for the detention and treatment in question”.
He said the inquiry had received papers suggesting that in “some instances there was a reluctance to raise treatment issues” for fear of harming relations with the United States.
The inquiry also found that while no formal request was put to the UK, records show the Government was aware that US officials were considering the use of Diego Garcia, an island in the British Indian Ocean Territory, for holding or transiting detainees between November 2001 and January 2002.”
The report said: “There is an issue as to whether the Government and the Agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.”
Mr Straw told MPs on Thursday: “As Foreign Secretary I acted at all times in a manner which was fully consistent with my legal duties with national and international law. And I was never in any way complicit with the unlawful rendition or detention of individuals by the United States or any other state.”
Nigel Morris
Thursday, 19 December 2013
Find this story at 19 December 2013
© independent.co.uk

Al Jazeera investigates how information gathered through torture of Gaddafi dissidents was used to track Libyans in UK.
Last updated: 18 Dec 2013 18:04
Intelligence extracted by torture in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison has been linked to arrests of Libyan dissidents in the United Kingdom, an investigation by Al Jazeera’s People and Power has revealed.
In this exclusive report, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the anti-Gaddafi resistance group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), explains that he and fellow leader Sami al-Saadi were subjected to torture by his Libyan interrogators, which forced them to give up the names of innocent residents in the UK.
Al-Saadi and Belhaj also claim foreign agents, including British agents, questioned them in Abu Salim prison. These allegations form the basis of a lawsuit against the British government.
According to Belhaj’s lawyers, the men and their families were pawns in a deal struck by Britain in 2004.
After Gaddafi’s fall, the role played by British intelligence agencies was discovered.
“When the rebels came to Tripoli they ransacked all sorts of buildings … associated with Gaddafi’s old regime,” said Al Jazeera’s Juliana Ruhfus, who was involved in the investigation.
“It was in the office of spy chief Moussa Koussa that they found a stash of documents that revealed, in startling detail, the collaboration between British and Libyan intelligence services.”
Belhaj says he was pressured by Gaddafi’s interrogators to give up information about Libyans living in Britain.
“Sometimes they would come to me with the questions and answers already done and force me to sign it. They would mention names to me and say that these people supported armed activities,” he said.
One of the men named under torture was Ziad Hashem, a Libyan who obtained asylum in the UK after Belhaj’s rendition. Hashem claims he was arrested in Britain without any charges: “We were just put in prison arbitrarily without any explanation.”
Hashem is part of yet another law suit against the British government. One of the things he is hoping to reveal is the flow of information between Libyan and British intelligence agencies which led to his detention.
The British government says it is committed to investigating allegations of mistreatment, that it stands firmly against torture and that it never asks any other country to carry it out.
But the dissidents accuse the British government of being complicit in their rendition into Gaddafi’s prisons, showing Al Jazeera documents from MI6 tipping off Gaddafi’s intelligence apparatus about their flight movements.
Libya: Renditions airs on People & Power on Al Jazeera English from Wednesday 18 December at 10.30pm London time (22.30 GMT) and is available online at aje.me/libyarenditions
 
Find this story at 18 December 2013
Copyright Al Jazeera

CIA Central In Mandela’s Arrest … Kept Him On Terrorist List Until 2008
Everyone from President Obama to the mainstream news is lionizing Nelson Mandela.
But the New York Times reported in 1990:
The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.
The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress, provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.
***
Newsweek reported in February that the agency was believed to have been involved.
***
At the time of Mr. Mandela’s arrest in August 1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups like the African National Congress than did South Africa’s then-fledgling security service.
***
A retired South African intelligence official, Gerard Ludi, was quoted in the report as saying that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s capture, the C.I.A. had put an undercover agent into the inner circle of the African National Congress group in Durban.
Newsweek confirmed this story yesterday.
The Daily Beast notes:
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.
…In South Africa, for decades, American presidents backed apartheid in the name of anti-communism. Indeed, the language of the Cold War proved so morally corrupting that in 1981, Reagan, without irony, called South Africa’s monstrous regime “essential to the free world.”
Indeed, Nelson Mandela was only removed from the U.S. “terrorist” list in 2008.
Mandela was highly critical of U.S. foreign policy. And anyone – even U.S. citizens – critical of U.S. policy may be labelled a bad guy.
Posted on December 6, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog
Find this story at 6 December 2013
© 2007 – 2013 Washington’s Blog

As the United States mourns the loss of one of the world’s greatest leaders, it’s important to remember the long and tenuous relationship between the U.S. and Nelson Mandela. Long before Mandela was South Africa’s first black president, he was considered a radical and a terrorist by both the white South African regime and the United States. His close association with South African communists, as well as his encouragement of civil disobedience and sabotage, was enough to convince the CIA to get involved. Shortly after he was released in 1990 from a 28-year stint in prison, the New York Times reported that an undercover CIA agent within Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was pivotal in Mandela’s 1962 arrest. The agent provided “South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him.” An unidentified source from within the CIA also told the New York Times, We have turned Mandela over to the South African Security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. The CIA maintained an extensive file on Mandela, even while he was in prison. The document below, declassified in 2001, shows how in 1986 the CIA ran hypothetical scenarios to see what South Africa would be like if Mandela were free. The documents also show an analysis of how prison may have changed Mandela’s view on violence as a protest tactic. The next document, seen below, was declassified by the CIA in 2003 and dates back to 1961. One year before Mandela was arrested, the CIA wrote of him: Nelson Mandela, who led the strike campaign in May, reportedly stated in mid-September that an ANC sabotage campaign would begin in the near future. Mandela said that the campaign would concentrate initially on telephone lines and government offices but later might include roadblocks and railroad sabotage. Nelson Mandela is a world hero for his work in the fight against racial and economic inequality and oppression. This week, as the United States reflects back on Mandela and his struggle, it must also remember the role that it played in maintaining the status-quo in South Africa.
Published:9:23 pm EST, December 7, 2013| Updated:10:03 am EST, December 8, 2013| Comment | 1.2k By Matthew Guariglia
Find this story at 7 December 2013
Document 1
Document 2

As South Africa prepares to hold a state funeral for Nelson Mandela, we look at how the CIA helped the South African government track down and capture Mandela in 1962. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.” Several news outlets have reported the actual source of the tip that led to the arrest of Mandela was a CIA official named Donald Rickard. On Thursday, Democracy Now! attempted to reach Rickard at his home in Colorado. On two occasions, a man who picked up the phone hung up when we asked to speak with Donald Rickard. The activist group RootsAction has launched a campaign to urge the CIA to open its files on Mandela and South Africa, and the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has questioned why corporate media outlets have largely ignored the story. We speak to journalist Andrew Cockburn, who first reported on the CIA link to Mandela’s arrest in 1986 in The New York Times.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As South Africa prepares to hold a state funeral for Nelson Mandela, we end today’s show looking back at what happened on the day of August 5th, 1962, when South African police captured Mandela. On that day, Mandela was arrested while traveling disguised as a chauffeur. He would be held in jail for the next 27 years. On Tuesday, President Obama referenced Mandela’s time in jail during his speech at the memorial.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: He would endure a brutal imprisonment that began in the time of Kennedy and Khrushchev, and reached the final days of the Cold War. Emerging from prison, without the force of arms, he would, like Abraham Lincoln, hold his country together when it threatened to break apart.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: While Obama referenced the Kennedy administration in his memorial, he made no mention of the multiple reports that the CIA, under Kennedy, tipped off the apartheid South African regime in 1962 about Mandela’s whereabouts. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest, a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, quote, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.”
AMY GOODMAN: Several news outlets have reported the actual source of the tip that led to the arrest of Mandela was a CIA official named Donald Rickard. On Thursday, Democracy Now! attempted to reach Rickard at his home in Colorado. On two occasions, a man who picked up the phone hung up when we asked to speak with Donald Rickard. Last year, Rickard denied the reports in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, but refused to talk about his time in South Africa.
Meanwhile, the activist group RootsAction has launched a campaign to urge the CIA to open its files on Mandela and South Africa.
We go now to Andrew Cockburn. He first reported on the CIA link to Mandela’s arrest in 1986 in The New York Times. He’s now the Washington editor for Harper’s magazine. His latest piece, on John Kerry and U.S. foreign policy, is called “Secretary of Nothing.” It’s out now in Harper’s.
Andrew, welcome back to Democracy Now!
ANDREW COCKBURN: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you found out in the mid-’80s. At this point, Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for over 20 years.
ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. He had been—I found out—I reported that he had been—as you mentioned, that he had been arrested, thanks to a tip from the CIA, while disguised as a chauffeur. He was actually—what I had heard at the time was he was actually on his way to meet an undercover CIA, an American diplomat who was actually a CIA official. So it made it rather easy for them to alert the South Africans where to find him.
I mentioned—I thought it was particularly interesting to report when I did in 1986, because at that point it was just when the sanctions were being introduced over—voted through by the Congress over President Reagan’s veto. So, and I had noticed that in the sanctions legislation, it said there should be no contact, official contact, with the South African military, and so on and so forth, except when intelligence required that, you know, they did have to have contact. So it was ongoing, this unholy relationship, which had led to Mandela being arrested and locked up for all those years, continued on through the ’60s, through the ’70s, through the ’80s, absolutely flourished, with the—for example, the NSA routinely handing over intercepts of the ANC to the South African secret police. And it was absolutely outrageous.
AMY GOODMAN: This is the National Security Agency that is, of course, the subject of so much global controversy right now, the NSA gathering this intelligence to give to the apartheid regime.
ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. I mean, it was—it was just absolutely routine. And, you know, we have to—this was all—maybe they would have done it anyway, but it was certainly in the Cold War context. I mean, there was—it’s hard to remember now what a sort of lather people got into about, you know, the Soviet threat to the trade routes. And there was a naval base, African naval base—or there is one at Simon’s Town, near the Cape. And there was, I remember, sort of the right—the defense lobby were continually going on about the terrible threat of the Soviets maybe getting hold of, you know, Simon’s Town, seizing vital facilities.
And it was an absolute—I mean, people, not surprising—well, people have sort of forgotten just how—what a Cold War battleground southern Africa was. Not only did they turn over Mandela, but they had this very close relationship. U.S. military intelligence cooperated very closely with South African military intelligence, giving them information about what was going on, what they were collecting in the rest of southern Africa. And, in fact, you know, the two countries—CIA and the South Africans collaborated on, you know, assisting the UNITA in the horrible civil war in Angola that went on for years and years with thousands of people dying. So, you know, this wasn’t just a flash in the pan, the tip-off that led to the coordination on the arrest of Mandela. It was absolutely a very deep, very thorough relationship that went on for decades.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in that vein, I wanted to ask you about the 1996 report by Jeff Stein in Salon that the CIA was involved in sabotaging the ANC for years.
ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Stein quotes Mike Leach, a former South African intelligence operative who worked closely with the CIA, and Leach claimed that the CIA shared the recipe for a prussic acid, a, quote, “clear compound which, if inhaled, would give a massive coronary. If a doctor’s not looking for [prussic] acid he’ll put (the cause of death) down to natural causes.” Another trick, Stein writes, was to, quote, “launder anti-apartheid T-shirts in a fiberglass solution and hand them out to demonstrators, who would soon be convulsed in uncontrollable itching.” The CIA reportedly also offered training in bugging and wiretaps.
ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, that’s right. It shows that, you know, this is the agency that gave us the exploding cigar sent to Fidel Castro, or designed to be sent to Fidel Castro. You know, the sort of fascination with these rather puerile tricks went on and, yeah, were considered. I’d never heard any report that they actually did manage to give anyone a coronary or cause them frantic itching, but it was certainly, certainly in the scheme.
I mean, there was, you know, the CIA—and the other side of it is, of course, the CIA was meanwhile spying on the South Africans and had very good report on the, for instance, the South African nuclear program and the collaboration, the very active collaboration, of the Israelis in that program, which they fed back to Washington, when of course nothing was ever done about it. So, you know, they knew perfectly well what was going on, but no action was ever taken.
AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Cockburn, you write in your 1986 piece that the clause in the new law, the comprehensive anti-sanctions—the comprehensive anti-apartheid sanctions bill that was introduced by Ron Dellums, the clause in it exempted intelligence cooperation from sanctions. That’s very important.
ANDREW COCKBURN: That’s right. I mean, that was slipped in—well, not slipped, I don’t know—inserted, obviously, in the legislation by the intelligence people here. Even though they may have regretted the whole imposition of sanctions anyway, they made sure that their unholy relationship was ongoing. And this, you know, 1986, and as I said, we know—we saw the fruits of it ongoing through the rest of that decade with the war in Angola. I mean, it was a huge operation that people have completely forgotten about now.
AMY GOODMAN: Andrew, we have to wrap up, but the Philadelphia journalist and professor Linn Washington wrote a piece this week, “Obama Failed to Deliver Long-Overdue Apology to Mandela.” Your thoughts, as we wrap?
ANDREW COCKBURN: Well, I think, yeah, he did, certainly. And it would be nice if, you know, there was some acknowledgment of just how—you know, of the relationship that helped sustain apartheid for all those years. I mean, it couldn’t—I don’t think it would have existed or survived with such force, let alone keeping—you know, sending Mandela to jail, if it hadn’t had such thoroughgoing support from this end, from here in Washington.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Andrew Cockburn, I want to thank you for being with us. And, of course, President Obama has continually talked about the inspiration Nelson Mandela was in his own life and activism. Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s magazine, in 1986 wrote a piece about the CIA’s involvement in the capture of Nelson Mandela. His latest piece, on John Kerry and U.S. foreign policy, which we hope to talk to you about at a future time, “Secretary of Nothing,” it’s out now in Harper’s.
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Friday, December 13, 2013
Find this story at 13 December 2013

The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.
The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress, provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.
The report, scheduled for publication on Sunday, quoted an unidentified retired official who said that a senior C.I.A. officer told him shortly after Mr. Mandela’s arrest: ”We have turned Mandela over to the South African Security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be.”
Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the agency, declined to comment on the news-service report. ”As a matter of policy, we do not discuss allegations of intelligence activities,” he said.
Protecting Pretoria’s Rule
Reports that American intelligence tipped off the South African officials who arrested Mr. Mandela have circulated for years. Newsweek reported in February that the agency was believed to have been involved.
Mr. Mandela is scheduled to visit the United States beginning June 20 for a five-city tour that will include talks with President Bush and a speech before a joint meeting of Congress.
The news-service report said that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s arrest in August 1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups like the African National Congress than did South Africa’s then-fledgling security service.
The account said the American intelligence agency was willing to assist in the apprehension of Mr. Mandela because it was concerned that a successful nationalist movement threatened a friendly South African Govenment. Expansion of such movements outside South Africa’s borders, the agency feared, would jeopardize the stability of other African states, the account said.
Arrest at a Roadblock
A retired South African intelligence official, Gerard Ludi, was quoted in the report as saying that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s capture, the C.I.A. had put an undercover agent into the inner circle of the African National Congress group in Durban.
That agent provided the intelligence service with detailed accounts of the organization’s activities, including information on the whereabouts of Mr. Mandela, then being sought as a fugitive for his anti-apartheid activities.
The morning after a secret dinner party with other congress members in Durban, Mr. Mandela, dressed as a chauffeur, ran into a roadblock. He was immediately recognized and arrested.
The retired official said that because of concern over the propriety of the C.I.A.’s actions in the Mandela case, ”higher authorities” required that the State Department approve any similar operations in the future. The report said the State Department refused on at least three occasions to allow the agency to provide South African officials with information about other dissidents.
By DAVID JOHNSTON, Special to The New York Times
Published: June 10, 1990
Find this story at 10 December 2013
Copyright 2013
The New York Times Company

An Egyptian terrorist should be considered as a prime suspect in the Lockerbie bombing, according to a report by two leading investigators.
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Evidence used to convict Libyan agent Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was faked and police may have been misled by a member of the US secret services, the investigators allege. Their report instead blames Mohammed Abu Talb, a terrorist with links to Palestinian militant groups who is currently living in Sweden after serving a prison sentence for bombings in Europe.
Megrahi was given a life sentence for the bombing in 2001. He was released eight years later by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds as he had terminal cancer, and died last year.
The “Operation Bird” report – by Jessica de Grazia, former chief assistant district attorney in New York, and Philip Corbett, a former police officer and ex-security advisor to the Bank of England – concluded Talb had bribed a worker at Heathrow to smuggle the suitcase containing the bomb onto the flight.
The report also said a key piece of the evidence – part of a circuit board allegedly used in the bomb’s timer – was faked and a shirt in which it was supposedly found had been tampered with.
Ms de Grazia and Mr Corbett were commissioned to look into the case by Megrahi’s defence team while it was working on his second appeal, dropped after his release.
Their report, which was written in 2002 but never published, suggested police were “directed off course” and that this was “most likely” done by a senior official in the CIA.
“We have never seen a criminal investigation in which there has been such a consistent disregard of an alternative and far more persuasive theory of the case,” it added.
Talb was jailed for life in Sweden after being convicted of carrying out terrorist bombings in 1985 in Copenhagen, Denmark and Amsterdam, Holland. He did not respond to a request for comment from Al-Jazeera television.
Dr Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was a passenger on the plane, said Talb was “a life-long, proven terrorist”.
“I believe he played a crucial part in causing the Lockerbie disaster,” Dr Swire told Exaro, an investigative news website. “My elected government actively prevented me from obtaining my human rights to know why my daughter’s life was not protected, and who it was who killed her.”
Former MP Tam Dalyell, who helped enlist Nelson Mandela to negotiate the deal that saw Libya surrender Megrahi for trial, told The Independent that Megrahi was an innocent man used as a “sanctions buster” for Libya.
“I was amazed they didn’t point the finger at Talb and condemned Megrahi. I was astonished at the outcome,” he said.
John Ashton, co-author of Cover-Up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie, wrote on his blog that the Operation Bird report’s claim that Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Council and “fellow travellers, including Hezbollah” carried out the bombing was “likely true”.
But he doubted Talb was the bomber, because he had recently been arrested then released by Swedish police and so would have suspected he was being followed.
A Scottish Government spokeswoman said Megrahi’s relatives could ask for a posthumous appeal, “which Ministers would be entirely comfortable with”.
Ian johnston
Sunday 15 December 2013
Find this story at 15 December 2013
© independent.co.uk

Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was publicly blamed by the US for the attack
The wreckage of the PanAm airliner that exploded and crashed over Lockerbie Photo: AFP
The CIA secretly held Syrian militants, rather than Libya, responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, according to newly unearthed testimony from a former US spy in the Middle East.
Dr Richard Fuisz said in a sworn deposition in 2001 that he was told by up to 15 senior Syrian officials that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) had carried out the attack.
He also testified that CIA bosses told him the PFLP-GC was responsible, according to a lawyer’s note of a second deposition. Ahmed Jibril, the group’s founder leader, who is still alive at 75, was singled out as being to blame for the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988, killing 270 people.
“Numerous high officials in the Syrian government were quite affirmative on Jibril’s involvement in Pan Am 103,” Dr Fuisz told lawyers, during his deposition in Virginia in 2001.
Dr Fuisz gave his depositions in 2000 and 2001 at the request of Megrahi’s defence lawyers. However, the evidence came too late to be used in the trial. They were first published by Channel 4 News.The CIA declined to comment.
Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was publicly blamed by the US for the attack, and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing in 2001. He was later released and died last year in Libya.
But serious doubts about the conviction have been raised by investigative journalists for several years, centring on forensic evidence, and Libya has strenuously denied involvement.
The PFLP-GC were in fact the first prime suspects in the investigation.
Experts suggested it may have been ordered by the Iranian government as revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet by a US battleship months earlier, killing 290.
They added that blame may have been diverted from Iran in order to protect secret and delicate negotiations by George Bush’s US administration over western hostages.
Dr Fuisz, a businessman who is said to have been a senior US intelligence asset in the Middle East in the 1980s and 90s, said that the Syrian officials he spoke to interacted with Jibril “on a constant basis” and that he was widely regarded to be the mastermind behind the bombing.
Asked who the Syrian officials cited as their source for the information, he said: “My recollection is they were direct. They were not hearsay sources on their part.” Asked if that he understood that to mean that he was “being told by members of the Syrian government that Jibril, and or members of the PFLGC were taking credit for the bombing,” he replied: “Yes”.
Jon Swaine
10:32PM GMT 20 Dec 2013
Find this story at 20 December 2013
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — In March 2007, retired FBI agent Robert Levinson flew to Kish Island, an Iranian resort awash with tourists, smugglers and organized crime figures. Days later, after an arranged meeting with an admitted killer, he checked out of his hotel, slipped into a taxi and vanished. For years, the U.S. has publicly described him as a private citizen who traveled to the tiny Persian Gulf island on private business.
But that was just a cover story. An Associated Press investigation reveals that Levinson was working for the CIA. In an extraordinary breach of the most basic CIA rules, a team of analysts — with no authority to run spy operations — paid Levinson to gather intelligence from some of the world’s darkest corners. He vanished while investigating the Iranian government for the U.S.
The CIA was slow to respond to Levinson’s disappearance and spent the first several months denying any involvement. When Congress eventually discovered what happened, one of the biggest scandals in recent CIA history erupted.
Behind closed doors, three veteran analysts were forced out of the agency and seven others were disciplined. The CIA paid Levinson’s family $2.5 million to pre-empt a revealing lawsuit, and the agency rewrote its rules restricting how analysts can work with outsiders.
But even after the White House, FBI and State Department officials learned of Levinson’s CIA ties, the official story remained unchanged.
“He’s a private citizen involved in private business in Iran,” the State Department said in 2007, shortly after Levinson’s disappearance.
“Robert Levinson went missing during a business trip to Kish Island, Iran,” the White House said last month.
Details of the unusual disappearance were described in documents obtained or reviewed by the AP, plus interviews over several years with dozens of current and former U.S. and foreign officials close to the search for Levinson. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive case.
The AP first confirmed Levinson’s CIA ties in 2010 and continued reporting to uncover more details. It agreed three times to delay publishing the story because the U.S. government said it was pursuing promising leads to get him home.
The AP is reporting the story now because, nearly seven years after his disappearance, those efforts have repeatedly come up empty. The government has not received any sign of life in nearly three years. Top U.S. officials, meanwhile, say his captors almost certainly already know about his CIA association.
There has been no hint of Levinson’s whereabouts since his family received proof-of-life photos and a video in late 2010 and early 2011. That prompted a hopeful burst of diplomacy between the United States and Iran, but as time dragged on, promising leads dried up and the trail went cold.
Some in the U.S. government believe he is dead. But in the absence of evidence either way, the government holds out hope that he is alive and the FBI says it remains committed to bringing him home.
If Levinson remains alive at age 65, he has been held captive longer than any American, longer than AP journalist Terry Anderson, who was held more than six years in Beirut. Unlike Anderson, Levinson’s whereabouts and captors remain a mystery.
Today, Iran and United States tiptoe toward warmer relations and a deal over Iran’s nuclear enrichment. But the U.S. has no new leads about Levinson’s whereabouts, officials said. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani publicly says he has no information about Levinson’s whereabouts.
Meanwhile, the story of how the married father of seven children from Coral Springs, Fla., became part of the CIA’s spy war with Iran has been cloaked in secrecy, with no public accounting for the agency’s mistakes.
___
A 28-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI, Robert Levinson had a natural ability to cultivate informants. Former colleagues say he was an easy conversationalist who had the patience to draw out people and win their confidence. He’d talk to anyone.
“Bob, in that sense, was fearless,” said retired FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon, who worked with Levinson in Miami in the 1980s. “He wasn’t concerned about being turned down or turned away.”
As the Soviet Union collapsed, Levinson turned his attention away from Mafia bosses and cocaine cartels and began watching the Russian gangsters who made their homes in Florida. Russian organized crime was a niche then and Levinson made a name as one of the few investigators who understood it.
At a Justice Department organized crime conference in Santa Fe, N.M., in the early 1990s, Levinson listened to a presentation by a CIA analyst named Anne Jablonski and spotted a kindred spirit.
Jablonski was perhaps the government’s foremost expert on Russian organized crime. Former colleagues say she had an encyclopedic memory and could, at the mere mention of a crime figure, quickly explain his place in the hierarchy and his method of moving money. When White House officials had questions about Russian organized crime, they often called Jablonski directly.
In the relatively staid world of CIA analysts, Jablonski was also a quirky character, a yoga devotee who made her own cat food, a woman who skipped off to Las Vegas to renew her vows in an Elvis-themed chapel.
After the Santa Fe conference, Levinson left a note for Jablonski at her hotel and the two began exchanging thoughts on organized crime. Jablonski invited Levinson to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to speak to her colleagues in the Office of Russian and European Analysis.
By the time Levinson retired from the FBI in 1998, he and Jablonski were close friends. She attended his going-away party in Florida, met his family and harvested his knowledge of organized crime.
In retirement, Levinson worked as a private investigator, traveling the world and gathering information for corporate clients. Jablonski, meanwhile, thrived at the CIA. After the Sept. 11 attacks, former colleagues say, she was assigned to brief Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller about terrorist threats every morning.
In 2005, Jablonski moved to the Office of Transnational Issues, the CIA team that tracks threats across borders. Right away, she arranged for Levinson to speak to the money-laundering experts in the office’s Illicit Finance Group.
In a sixth-floor CIA conference room, Levinson explained how to track dirty money. Unlike the analysts in the audience, Levinson came from the field. He generated his own information.
In June 2006, the head of Illicit Finance, Tim Sampson, hired Levinson on a contract with the CIA, former officials said. Like most CIA contracts, it was not a matter of public record. But it also wasn’t classified.
___
At its core, the CIA is made up of two groups: operatives and analysts. Operatives collect intelligence and recruit spies. Analysts receive strands of information and weave them together, making sense of the world for Washington decision-makers.
Their responsibilities don’t overlap. Operatives manage spies. Analysts don’t.
Levinson was hired to work for a team of analysts. His contract, worth about $85,000, called for him to write reports for the CIA based on his travel and his expertise.
From the onset, however, he was doing something very different. He wasn’t writing scholarly dissertations on the intricacies of money laundering. He was gathering intelligence, officials say.
He uncovered sensitive information about Colombian rebels. He dug up dirt on Venezuela’s mercurial president. He delivered photos and documents on militant groups. And he met with sources about Iran’s nuclear program, according to people who have reviewed the materials.
Levinson’s production got noticed. The CIA expected he’d provide one or two items a month from his travels. Some months, former officials said, Levinson would send 20 packages including photos, computer disks and documents — the work of a man with decades of investigative experience.
Levinson’s arrangement with the CIA was odd.
The agency instructed him not to mail his packages to headquarters or email documents to government addresses, former officials said. Instead, he was told to ship his packages to Jablonski’s home in Virginia. If he needed to follow up, he was instructed to contact Jablonski’s personal email account.
Jablonski said the analysts simply wanted to avoid the CIA’s lengthy mail screening process. As an employee, Jablonski could just drive the documents through the front gate each morning.
“I didn’t think twice about it,” she said in an interview.
But the normal way to speed up the process is to open a post office box or send packages by FedEx, officials say. And if Levinson were producing only unclassified analytical documents, there would have been no reason he couldn’t email them to the CIA.
The whole arrangement was so peculiar that CIA investigators conducting an internal probe would later conclude it was an effort to keep top CIA officials from figuring out that the analysts were running a spying operation. Jablonski adamantly denies that.
What’s more, the Illicit Finance Group didn’t follow the typical routine for international travel. Before someone travels abroad for the agency, the top CIA officer in the country normally clears it. That way, if a CIA employee is arrested or creates a diplomatic incident, the agency isn’t caught by surprise.
That didn’t happen before Levinson’s trips, former officials said. He journeyed to Panama, Turkey and Canada and was paid upon his return, people familiar with his travels said. After each trip, he submitted bills and the CIA paid him for the information and reimbursed him for his travel expenses.
Neither the analysts nor the contract officers or managers who reviewed the contract, ever flagged it as a problem that Levinson’s travel might become a problem.
It would prove to be a serious problem.
Levinson was assigned a contract officer inside the agency, a young analyst named Brian O’Toole. But Jablonski was always his primary contact. Sometimes, he told her before he left for a trip. Other times, he didn’t. The emails between Jablonski and Levinson, some of which the AP has seen or obtained, are circumspect. But they show that Levinson was taking his cues from her.
The more Levinson did for the agency, the more the analysts ran afoul of the CIA’s most basic rules.
Before anyone can meet sources, seasoned CIA intelligence officials must review the plan to make sure the source isn’t a double agent. That never happened for Levinson.
Levinson’s meetings blurred the lines between his work as a private investigator and his work as a government contractor. Inside the CIA, the analysts reasoned that as long as they didn’t specifically assign Levinson to meet someone, they were abiding by the rules.
On Feb. 5, 2007, Levinson emailed Jablonski and said he was gathering intelligence on Iranian corruption. He said he was developing an informant with access to the government and could arrange a meeting in Dubai or on an island nearby.
Problem was, Levinson’s contract was out of money and, though the CIA was working to authorize more, it had yet to do so.
“I would like to know if I do, in fact, expend my own funds to conduct this meeting, there will be reimbursement sometime in the near future, or, if I should discontinue this, as well as any and all similar projects until renewal time in May,” Levinson wrote.
There’s no evidence that Jablonski ever responded to that email. And she says she has no recollection of ever receiving it.
A few days later, Levinson joined Jablonski and her husband for dinner at Harry’s Tap Room in the Washington suburbs. Levinson was days away from his trip, and though he was eager to get paid for it, Jablonski says the subject never came up in conversation.
The discussion was more light-hearted, she said. She recalls scolding her overweight friend for not eating right, especially while on the road. At one point she recalls chiding him: “If I were your wife, I’d confiscate your passport.”
On Feb. 12, Levinson again emailed Jablonski, saying he hadn’t heard anything from the contract office. Jablonski urged him not to get the contract team involved.
“Probably best if we keep talk about the additional money among us girls — you, me, Tim and Brian — and not get the contracts folks involved until they’ve been officially notified through channels,” Jablonski said, according to emails read to the AP.
Jablonski signed off: “Be safe.”
Levinson said he understood. He said he’d try to make this trip as successful as previous ones. And he promised to “keep a low profile.”
“I’ll call you upon my return from across the pond,” he said.
While Levinson was overseas, the CIA was raving about information Levinson had recent sent about Venezuela and Colombian rebels.
“You hit a home run out of the park with that stuff,” she wrote. “We can’t, of course, task you on anything, but let’s just say it’s GREAT material.”
Levinson arrived in Dubai on March 3, 2007. Friends and investigators say he was investigating cigarette smuggling and also looking into Russian organized crime there.
On March 8, he boarded a short flight to Kish Island, a tourist destination about 11 miles off Iran’s southern coast. Unlike the Dubai trip, this one was solely for the CIA. He was there to meet his source about Iran.
The biggest prize would be gleaning something about Iran’s nuclear program, one of the CIA’s most important targets.
Levinson’s source on Kish was Dawud Salahuddin, an American fugitive wanted for killing a former Iranian diplomat in Maryland in 1980. In interviews with ABC News and the New Yorker, Salahuddin has admitted killing the diplomat
Since fleeing to Iran, Salahuddin had become close to some in the Iranian government, particularly to those seen as reformers and moderates.
To set up the meeting, Levinson worked with a longtime friend, retired NBC investigative reporter Ira Silverman. Silverman had talked at length with Salahuddin and, in a 2002 piece for the New Yorker magazine, portrayed him as a potential intelligence source if the U.S. could coax him out of Iran. The subtitle of the article: “He’s an assassin who fled the country. Could he help Washington now?”
“I told them to put off until after the U.S. surge in Iraq was completed,” Salahuddin told the National Security News Service, a Washington news site, shortly after Levinson disappeared. “But Silverman and Levinson pushed for the meeting and that’s why we met in March.”
Silverman’s role in helping set up Levinson’s meeting with Salahuddin has been previously disclosed. Silverman declined to discuss Levinson’s disappearance.
Levinson’s flight landed late the morning of March 8, a breezy, cloudy day. He checked into the Hotel Maryam, a few blocks off Kish’s eastern beaches. Salahuddin has said he met with Levinson for hours in his hotel room.
The hotel’s registry, which Levinson’s wife has seen, showed him checking out on March 9, 2007.
___
Jablonski was in the office when news broke that Levinson had gone missing. She went to the bathroom and threw up.
FBI agents began asking about Levinson’s disappearance and the CIA started a formal inquiry into whether anyone at the agency had sent Levinson to Iran or whether he was working for the CIA at the time.
The response from the analytical division was that, yes, Levinson had given a few presentations and had done some analytical work. But his contract was out of money. The agency had no current relationship with Levinson and there was no connection to Iran.
That’s what the CIA told the FBI and Congress, according to numerous current and former FBI, CIA and congressional officials.
Jablonski never mentioned to internal investigators the many emails she’d traded with Levinson, officials close to the investigation said. When asked, she said she had no idea he was heading to Iran. She didn’t tell managers or that Levinson expected to be reimbursed for the trip he was on, or that he was investigating Iranian corruption.
Jablonski says none of this was a secret; Levinson’s contract and work product were available to others at the CIA, she said.
Because the emails were exchanged from her personal account, they were not available to investigators searching the CIA’s computers. But had anyone at the CIA or FBI conducted even a cursory examination of Levinson’s work product, it would have been immediately clear that Levinson was not acting as a mere analyst.
Had anyone read his invoices, people who have seen or been briefed on them said, investigators would have seen handwritten bills mentioning Iran and its Revolutionary Guard.
That didn’t happen.
So the official story became that Levinson was in Iran on private business, either to investigate cigarette smuggling or to work on a book about Russian organized crime, which has a presence on Kish.
At the State Department, officials told the world that Levinson was a private businessman.
“At the time of his disappearance Mr. Levinson was not working for the United States government,” the State Department said in a May 2007 message sent to embassies worldwide and signed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Levinson’s family feared the government had forsaken him.
The government’s version would have remained the official story if not for Levinson’s friends. One of them was David McGee, a former Justice Department prosecutor in Florida who had worked with Levinson when he was at the FBI. McGee, now in private practice at the Florida law firm Beggs and Lane, knew that Levinson was working for the CIA. He just couldn’t prove it.
As time dragged on, McGee kept digging. Finally, he and his paralegal, Sonya Dobbs, discovered Levinson’s emails with Jablonski.
They were astounded. And they finally had the proof they needed to get the government’s attention.
Armed with the emails, McGee wrote to the Senate Intelligence Committee in October 2007. The CIA had indeed been involved in Levinson’s trip, the letter proved.
The CIA had been caught telling Congress a story that was flatly untrue. The Intelligence Committee was furious. In particular, Levinson’s senator, Bill Nelson, D-Fla., took a personal interest in the case. The committee controls the budget of the CIA, and one angry senator there can mean months of headaches for the agency.
CIA managers said their own employees had lied to them. They blamed the analysts for not coming forward sooner. But the evidence had been hiding in plain sight. The CIA didn’t conduct a thorough investigation until the Senate got involved. By then, Levinson had been missing for more than eight months. Precious time had been lost.
Sampson said he was never aware of Levinson’s emails with Jablonski or the Iranian trip.
“I didn’t even know he was working on Iran,” he said. “As far as I knew he was a Latin America, money-laundering and Russian organized crime guy. I would never have directed him to do that.”
Finally, the CIA assigned its internal security team to investigate. That inquiry quickly determined that the agency was responsible for Levinson while he was in Iran, according to a former official familiar with the review. That was an important conclusion. It meant that, whatever happened to Levinson overseas, the CIA bore responsibility.
Next, a team of counterintelligence officers began unraveling the case.
The investigation renewed some longtime tensions between the CIA’s operatives and analysts. The investigators felt the analysts had been running their own amateur spy operation, with disastrous results. Worse, they said the analysts withheld what they knew, allowing senior managers to testify falsely on Capitol Hill.
That led the Justice Department to investigate possible criminal charges against Jablonski and Sampson. Charges were never pursued, current and former officials said, in part because a criminal case could have revealed the whole story behind Levinson’s disappearance. Officially, though, the investigation remains open.
Sampson offered to take a polygraph. Jablonski says she has consistently told the truth. Recently, as the five-year statute of limitations concluded, FBI agents interviewed her again and she told the same story, officials said.
The analysts argued that many people had seen Levinson’s contract and his work product. Nobody questioned it until he went missing, they said. The way the analysts saw it, the CIA was looking for scapegoats.
“That she would even by accident put someone in harm’s way is laughable,” said Margaret Henoch, a former CIA officer and a close friend of Jablonski. “When I worked with Anne, and I worked very closely with her for a very long time, she was always the one who pulled me up short and made me follow procedure.”
Jablonski said the CIA’s relationship with Levinson was not unusual. But as part of the investigation, the CIA reviewed every analytical contract it had.
Only Levinson was meeting with sources, collecting information, and getting reimbursed for his trips, officials said. Only Levinson was mailing packages of raw information to the home of an analyst.
Despite Jablonski’s denials, her emails convinced investigators that she knew Levinson was heading overseas and, with a wink and a nod, made it clear he could expect to be paid.
In May 2008, Jablonski was escorted from the building and put on administrative leave. Sampson was next. At the CIA, when you’re shown the door, you leave with nothing. Security officers empty your desk, scrutinize its contents and mail you whatever doesn’t belong to the agency.
Both were given the option of resigning or being fired. The next month, they resigned. Their boss was forced into retirement. At least seven others were disciplined, including employees of the contracts office that should have noticed that Levinson’s invoices didn’t square with his contract.
In secret Senate hearings from late 2007 through early 2008, CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes acknowledged that the agency had been involved in Levinson’s disappearance and conceded that it hadn’t been as forthcoming as it should have been, current and former officials said.
The CIA’s top lawyer, John Rizzo, had to explain it all to the White House. Former Bush administration officials recall Rizzo meeting with a stunned Fred Fielding, the White House counsel who asked, since when do CIA analysts get involved in operations?
One of Rizzo’s assistants, Joseph Sweeney, a lawyer, flew to Florida to apologize to Levinson’s family.
The CIA paid the family about $120,000, the value of the new contract the CIA was preparing for him when he left for Iran. The government also gave the family a $2.5 million annuity, which provides tax-free income, multiple people briefed on the deal said. Neither side wanted a lawsuit that would air the secret details in public.
Jablonski now analyzes risk for companies doing business overseas.
Sampson, the former head of CIA’s Illicit Finance group, quickly returned to the government, landing a job at the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence division. O’Toole, the young contracts officer, moved to the Treasury Department. He would not comment.
Inside the CIA, the biggest legacy of the Levinson case might be the strict new rules in place for analysts. Before, analysts were encouraged to build relationships with experts. An analyst could go to dinner with a professor of Middle East affairs or pick up the phone and chat with a foreign affairs expert. The 9/11 Commission encouraged CIA analysts to do even more to solicit outside views.
After the Levinson inquiry, the CIA handed down orders requiring analysts to seek approval for nearly any conversation with outsiders. The rules were intended to prevent another debacle like Levinson’s, but former officials say they also chilled efforts to bring outside views into the CIA.
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The U.S. always suspected, but could never prove, that Levinson had been picked up by Iranian security forces. What was not immediately clear, however, was whether Iran knew that Levinson was working for the CIA.
Now, nearly than seven years later, investigators believe Iranian authorities must know. Levinson wasn’t trained to resist interrogation. U.S. officials could not imagine him withholding information from Iranian interrogators, who have been accused of the worst types of mental and physical abuses.
In an October 2010 interview with the AP, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran at the time, said his country was willing to help find Levinson. But he appeared to suggest he knew or had suspicions that Levinson was working for the U.S. government.
“Of course if it becomes clear what his goal was, or if he was indeed on a mission, then perhaps specific assistance can be given,” Ahmadinejad said. “For example, if he had plans to visit with a group or an individual or go to another country, he would be easier to trace in that instance.”
As a CIA contractor, Levinson would have been a valuable chip to bargain with on the world stage. So if Iran had captured him, and knew his CIA ties, why the secrecy?
That question became even more confusing in 2009, when three U.S. hikers strayed across border from Iraq into Iran and were arrested. If Iran had captured Levinson, investigators wondered, why would it publicly accuse three hikers of espionage while keeping quiet about an actual CIA contractor?
Occasionally, Iranian defectors would claim to have seen Levinson or to have heard where he was being held, according to his family, former officials and State Department cables published by WikiLeaks.
A French doctor said Levinson was treated at his hospital in Tehran. An Iranian nurse claimed to have attended to him. One defector said he saw Levinson’s name scrawled into a prison door frame. Someone sent Levinson’s family what appeared to be secret Iranian court documents with his name on them.
But the U.S. could never confirm any of these accounts or corroborate the documents.
Occasionally, the family would hear from someone claiming to be the captor. Once, someone sent an email not only to the family, but also to other addresses that might have been stored on Levinson’s phone. But despite efforts to try to start negotiating, the sender went silent.
The State Department continued its calls on Iran to release information about Levinson’s whereabouts. Then, in November 2010, Levinson’s wife Christine received an email from an unknown address. A file was attached, but it would not open.
Frantic, she sent the email to some computer savvy friends, who opened the file and held the phone to the computer. Christine Levinson immediately recognized her husband’s voice.
“My beautiful, my loving, my loyal wife, Christine,” he began.
The 54-second video showed Levinson sitting in front of a concrete wall, looking haggard but unharmed. He said he was running dangerously low of diabetes medicine, and he pleaded with the government to bring him home.
“Thirty-three years of service to the United States deserves something,” Levinson said. “Please help me.”
The video was a startling proof of life and it ignited the first promising round of diplomacy since Levinson’s disappearance. U.S. officials met privately with members of the Iranian government to discuss the case. The Iranians still denied any knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts but said they were willing to help, U.S. officials said.
Some details about the video didn’t add up, though. The email had been sent from a cyber cafe in Pakistan, officials said, and Pashtun wedding music played faintly in the background. The Pashtun people live primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan, just across Iran’s eastern border.
Further, the video was accompanied by a demand that the U.S. release prisoners. But officials said the United States was not holding anyone matching the names on the list.
In March 2011, after months of trying to negotiate with shadows, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a statement saying the U.S. had evidence that Levinson was being held “somewhere in southwest Asia.” The implication was that Levinson might be in the hands of terrorist group or criminal organization somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan, not necessarily in Iran.
U.S. intelligence officials working the case still believed Iran was behind Levinson’s disappearance, but they hoped Clinton’s statement would offer a plausible alternative story if Iran wanted to release him without acknowledging it ever held him.
U.S. negotiators didn’t care what the story was, as long as it ended with Levinson coming home.
The following month, the family received another email, this time from a new address, one that tracked back to Afghanistan. Photos were attached. Levinson looked far worse. His hair and beard were long and white. He wore an orange Guantanamo Bay-style jumpsuit. A chain around his neck held a sign in front of his face. Each picture bore a different message.
“Why you can not help me,” was one.
Though the photos were disturbing, the U.S. government and Levinson’s family saw them as a hopeful sign that whoever was holding Levinson was interested in making a deal. Then, a surprising thing happened.
Nothing.
Nobody is sure why the contact stopped. Some believe that, if Iran held him, all the government wanted was for the United States to tell the world that Levinson might not be in Iran after all. Others believe Levinson died.
Iran executes hundreds of prisoners each year, human rights groups say. Many others disappear and are presumed dead. With Levinson’s history of diabetes and high blood pressure, it was also possible he died under questioning.
The discussions with Iran ended. A task force of CIA, FBI and State Department officials studied the case anew. Analysts considered alternative theories. Maybe Levinson was captured by Russian organized crime figures, smugglers or terrorists? They investigated connections between Russian and Iranian oil interests.
But each time, they came back to Iran.
For example, during one meeting between the U.S. and Iran, the Iranians said they were searching for Levinson and were conducting raids in Baluchistan, a mountainous region that includes parts of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. But the U.S. ultimately concluded that there were no raids, and officials determined that the episode was a ruse by the Iranians to learn how U.S. intelligence agencies work.
Then, U.S. operatives in Afghanistan traced the hostage photos to a cellphone used to transmit them, officials said. They even tracked down the owner, but concluded he had nothing to do with sending them.
Such abrupt dead ends were indicative of a professional intelligence operation, the U.S. concluded. Whoever sent the photos and videos had made no mistakes. Mobsters and terrorists are seldom so careful.
Iran denies any knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts and says it’s doing all it can.
This past June, Iran elected Hassan Rouhani as president. He has struck a more moderate tone than his predecessor, sparking hope for warmer relations between Iran and the West. But Rouhani’s statements on Levinson were consistent with Ahmadinejad’s.
“He is an American who has disappeared,” Rouhani told CNN in September. “We have no news of him. We do not know where he is.”
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Back home in Florida, Christine Levinson works to keep her husband’s name in the news and pushes the Obama administration to do more. Last year, the FBI offered a reward of $1 million for information leading to the return of her husband. But the money hasn’t worked.
In their big, tight-knit family, Bob Levinson has missed many birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and grandchildren.
Levinson was always the breadwinner, the politically savvy investigator who understood national security. Now it is his wife who has traveled to Iran seeking information on her husband, who has meetings on Capitol Hill or with White House officials. They are kind and reassuring.
But nothing changes.
Others held in Iran have returned home. Not her husband.
“There isn’t any pressure on Iran to resolve this,” she said in January, frustrated with what she said was a lack of attention by Washington. “It’s been much too long.”
By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN
— Dec. 12, 2013 9:26 PM EST
Find this story at 12 December 2013
P News | © 2013 Associated Press