This Sept. 2, 2010 satellite image provided by TerraServer.com and DigitalGlobe shows a portion of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including the secret facility known as Penny Lane, upper middle in white. In the early years after 9/11, the CIA turned a handful of prisoners at the secret facility into double agents and released them. Current and former U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that the program helped kill terrorists. The program was carried out in the secret facility, built a few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the prison in Guantanamo Bay, bottom of image. The eight small cottages were hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus. (AP Photo/TerraServer.com and DigitalGlobe)
WASHINGTON (AP) — A few hundred yards from the administrative offices of the Guantanamo Bay prison, hidden behind a ridge covered in thick scrub and cactus, sits a closely held secret.
A dirt road winds its way to a clearing where eight small cottages sit in two rows of four. They have long been abandoned. The special detachment of Marines that once provided security is gone.
But in the early years after 9/11, these cottages were part of a covert CIA program. Its secrecy has outlasted black prisons, waterboarding and rendition.
In these buildings, CIA officers turned terrorists into double agents and sent them home.
It was a risky gamble. If it worked, their agents might help the CIA find terrorist leaders to kill with drones. But officials knew there was a chance that some prisoners might quickly spurn their deal and kill Americans.
For the CIA, that was an acceptable risk in a dangerous business. For the American public, which was never told, it was one of the many secret trade-offs the government made on its behalf. At the same time the government used the threat of terrorism to justify imprisoning people indefinitely, it was releasing dangerous people from prison to work for the CIA.
Nearly a dozen current and former U.S officials described aspects of the program to The Associated Press. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the secret program, even though it ended in about 2006.
The program and the handful of men who passed through these cottages had various official CIA codenames. But those who were aware of the cluster of cottages knew it best by its sobriquet: Penny Lane.
It was a nod to the classic Beatles song and a riff on the CIA’s other secret facility at Guantanamo Bay, a prison known as Strawberry Fields.
Some of the men who passed through Penny Lane helped the CIA find and kill many top al-Qaida operatives, current and former U.S. officials said. Others stopped providing useful information and the CIA lost touch with them.
When prisoners began streaming into the prison on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, the CIA recognized it as an unprecedented opportunity to identify sources. That year, 632 detainees arrived at the island. The following year 117 more arrived.
“Of course that would be an objective,” said Emile Nakhleh, a former top CIA analyst who spent time in 2002 assessing detainees but who did not discuss Penny Lane. “It’s the job of intelligence to recruit sources.”
By early 2003, Penny Lane was open for business.
Candidates were ushered from the confines of prison to Penny Lane’s relative hominess, officials said. The cottages had private kitchens, showers and televisions. Each had a small patio.
Some prisoners asked for and received pornography. One official said the biggest luxury in each cottage was the bed, not a military-issued cot but a real bed with a mattress.
The cottages were designed to feel more like hotel rooms than prison cells, and some CIA officials jokingly referred to them collectively as the Marriott.
Current and former officials said dozens of prisoners were evaluated but only a handful, from varying countries, were turned into spies who signed agreements to spy for the CIA.
CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who serves on the Armed Services and Homeland Security oversight committees, said Tuesday that she was still learning more about the program but was concerned about the numbers of prisoners who were released by the Bush and Obama administrations and returned to fight with terrorists against U.S. interests.
“So, when I juxtapose that to the CIA actually thinking that they can convert these people, I think it was very ill-conceived program for them to think that,” Ayotte said on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports. “These are some very hard-core individuals and many whom have been released by both administrations have gotten back in to fight us and our allies, unfortunately.”
Appearing on the program with Ayotte, Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., said it was difficult for him to evaluate the CIA program’s effectiveness. “But it has a degree of recklessness to it that I would be very concerned about,” Casey said.
The U.S. government says it has confirmed about 16 percent of former Guantanamo Bay detainees rejoin the fight against America. Officials suspect but have not confirmed that another 12 percent rejoined.
Though the number of double agents recruited through Penny Lane was small, the program was significant enough to draw keen attention from President George W. Bush, one former official said. Bush personally interviewed a junior CIA case officer who had just returned home from Afghanistan, where the agency typically met with the agents.
President Barack Obama took an interest the program for a different reason. Shortly after taking office, he ordered a review of the former detainees working as double agents because they were providing information used in Predator drone strikes, one of the officials said.
Infiltrating al-Qaida has been one of the CIA’s most sought-after but difficult goals, something that other foreign intelligence services have only occasionally accomplished. So candidates for Penny Lane needed legitimate terrorist connections. To be valuable to the CIA, the men had to be able to reconnect with al-Qaida.
From what the Bush administration was saying about Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the time, the CIA would have seemingly had a large pool to draw from.
Vice President Dick Cheney called the prisoners “the worst of a very bad lot.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said they were “among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth.”
In reality, many were held on flimsy evidence and were of little use to the CIA.
While the agency looked for viable candidates, those with no terrorism ties sat in limbo. It would take years before the majority of detainees were set free, having never been charged. Of the 779 people who were taken to Guantanamo Bay, more than three-fourths have been released, mostly during the Bush administration.
Many others remain at Guantanamo Bay, having been cleared for release by the military but with no hope for freedom in sight.
“I do see the irony on the surface of letting some really very bad guys go,” said David Remes, an American lawyer who has represented about a dozen Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo.
But Remes, who was not aware of Penny Lane, said he understands its attraction.
“The men we were sending back as agents were thought to be able to provide value to us,” he said.
Prisoners agreed to cooperate for a variety of reasons, officials said. Some received assurances that the U.S. would resettle their families. Another thought al-Qaida had perverted Islam and believed it was his duty as a Muslim to help the CIA destroy it.
One detainee agreed to cooperate after the CIA insinuated it would harm his children, a former official said, harkening to similar threats interrogators lodged against admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
All were promised money. Exactly how much each was paid remains unclear. But altogether, the government paid millions of dollars for their services, officials said. The money came from a secret CIA account, codenamed Pledge, that’s used to pay informants, officials said.
The arrangement led to strategic discussions inside the CIA: If the agency’s drones had a shot at Osama bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would officials take the shot if it meant killing a double agent on the American payroll?
It never came to that.
The biggest fear, former officials involved with the program recalled, was that a former detainee would attack Americans, then publicly announce that he’d been on the CIA payroll.
Al-Qaida suspected the CIA would attempt a program like this and its operatives have been very suspicious of former Guantanamo Bay detainees, intelligence officials and experts said.
In one case, a former official recalled, al-Qaida came close to discovering one of the double agents in its midst.
The U.S. government had such high hopes for Penny Lane that one former intelligence official recalled discussion about whether to secretly release a pair of Pakistani men into the United States on student or business visas. The hope was that they would connect with al-Qaida and lead authorities to members of a U.S. cell.
Another former senior intelligence official said that never happened.
Officials said the program ended in 2006, as the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay slowed to a trickle. The last prisoner arrived there in 2008.
Penny Lane still stands and can be seen in satellite photos. The complex is surrounded by two fences and hidden among the trees and shrubs of Guantanamo Bay.
___
Associated Press writer Ben Fox contributed to this story from San Juan, P.R.
By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
— Nov. 26, 2013 3:42 PM EST
Find this story at 26 November 2013
© 2013 Associated Press

Think of it as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) plunge into Hollywood — or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world’s most infamous jail.
The first group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a secret multimillion dollar slush fund called “the Pledge.”
Last month, the Associated Press revealed that the CIA had selected a few dozen men from among the hundreds of terror suspects being held at Guantanamo and trained them to be double agents at a cluster of eight cottages in a program dubbed “Penny Lane.” (Yes, indeed, the name was taken from the Beatles song, as was “Strawberry Fields,” a Guantanamo program that involved torturing “high-value” detainees.) These men were then returned to what the Bush administration liked to call the “global battlefield,” where their mission was to befriend members of al-Qaeda and supply targeting information for the Agency’s drone assassination program.
Such a secret double-agent program, while colorful and remarkably unsuccessful, should have surprised no one. After all, plea bargaining or persuading criminals to snitch on their associates — a tactic frowned upon by international legal experts — is widely used in the U.S. police and legal system. Over the last year or so, however, a trickle of information about the other secret program has come to light and it opens an astonishing new window into the privatization of U.S. intelligence.
Hollywood in Langley
In July 2010, at his confirmation hearings for the post of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper explained the use of private contractors in the intelligence community: “In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War… we were under a congressional mandate to reduce the community by on the order of 20%… Then 9/11 occurred… With the gusher… of funding that has accrued particularly from supplemental or overseas contingency operations funding, which, of course, is one year at a time, it is very difficult to hire government employees one year at a time. So the obvious outlet for that has been the growth of contractors.”
Thousands of “Green Badges” were hired via companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Qinetiq to work at CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) offices around the world, among the regular staff who wore blue badges. Many of them — like Edward Snowden — performed specialist tasks in information technology meant to augment the effectiveness of government employees.
Then the CIA decided that there was no aspect of secret war which couldn’t be corporatized. So they set up a unit of private contractors as covert agents, green-lighting them to carry guns and be sent into U.S. war zones at a moment’s notice. This elite James Bond-like unit of armed bodyguards and super-fixers was given the anodyne name Global Response Staff (GRS).
Among the 125 employees of this unit, from the Army Special Forces via private contractors came Raymond Davis and Dane Paresi; from the Navy SEALs Glen Doherty, Jeremy Wise, and Tyrone Woods. All five would soon be in the anything-but-covert headlines of newspapers across the world. These men — no women have yet been named — were deployed on three- to four-month missions accompanying CIA analysts into the field.
Davis was assigned to Lahore, Pakistan; Doherty and Woods to Benghazi, Libya; Paresi and Wise to Khost, Afghanistan. As GRS expanded, other contractors went to Djibouti, Lebanon, and Yemen, among other countries, according to a Washington Post profile of the unit.
From early on, its work wasn’t exactly a paragon of secrecy. By 2005, for instance, former Special Forces personnel had already begun openly discussing jobs in the unit at online forums. Their descriptions sounded like something directly out of a Hollywood thriller. The Post portrayed the focus of GRS personnel more mundanely as “designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.”
“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals, and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official told that paper. “Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants, and provide an ‘envelope’ of security… if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”
In the ensuing years, GRS embedded itself in the Agency, becoming essential to its work. Today, new CIA agents and analysts going into danger zones are trained to work with such bodyguards. In addition, GRS teams are now loaned out to other outfits like the NSA for tasks like installing spy equipment in war zones.
The CIA’s Private Contractors (Don’t) Save the Day
Recently these men, the spearhead of the CIA’s post-9/11 contractor war, have been making it into the news with startling regularity. Unlike their Hollywood cousins, however, the news they have made has all been bad. Those weapons they’re packing and the derring-do that is supposed to go with them have repeatedly led not to breathtaking getaways and shootouts, but to disaster. Jason Bourne, of course, wins the day; they don’t.
Take Dane Paresi and Jeremy Wise. In 2009, not long after Paresi left the Army Special Forces and Wise the Navy SEALs, they were hired by Xe Services (the former Blackwater) to work for GRS and assigned to Camp Chapman, a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan. On December 30, 2009, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who had been recruited by the CIA to infiltrate al-Qaeda, was invited to a meeting at the base after spending several months in Pakistan’s tribal borderlands. Invited as well were several senior CIA staff members from Kabul who hoped Balawi might help them target Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s number two man.
Details of what happened are still sketchy, but the GRS men clearly failed to fulfill their security mission. Somehow Balawi, who turned out to be not a double but a triple agent, made it onto the closed base with a bomb and blew himself up, killing not just Paresi and Wise but also seven CIA staff officers, including Jennifer Matthews, the base chief.
Thirteen months later, in January 2011, another GRS contractor, Raymond Davis, decided to shoot his way out of what he considered a difficult situation in Lahore, Pakistan. The Army Special Forces veteran had also worked for Blackwater, although at the time of the shootings he was employed by Hyperion Protective Services, LLC.
Assigned to work at a CIA safe house in Lahore to support agents tracking al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Davis had apparently spent days photographing local military installations like the headquarters of the paramilitary Frontier Corps. On January 27th, his car was stopped and he claims that he was confronted by two young men, Faizan Haider and Faheem Shamshad. Davis proceeded to shoot both of them dead, and then take pictures of their bodies, before radioing back to the safe house for help. When a backup vehicle arrived, it compounded the disaster by driving at high speed the wrong way down a street and killing a passing motorcyclist.
Davis was later caught by two traffic wardens, taken to a police station, and jailed. A furor ensued, involving both countries and an indignant Pakistani media. The U.S. embassy, which initially claimed he was a consular official before the Guardian broke the news that he was a CIA contractor, finally pressured the Pakistani government into releasing him, but only after agreeing to pay out $2.34 million in compensation to the families of those he killed.
A year and a half later, two more GRS contractors made front-page news under the worst of circumstances. Former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods had been assigned to a CIA base in Benghazi, Libya, where the Agency was attempting to track a developing North African al-Qaeda movement and recover heavy weapons, including Stinger missiles, that had been looted from state arsenals in the wake of an U.S.-NATO intervention which led to the fall of the autocrat Muammar Qaddafi.
On September 11, 2012, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was staying at a nearby diplomatic compound when it came under attack. Militants entered the buildings and set them on fire. A CIA team, including Doherty, rushed to the rescue, although ultimately, unlike Hollywood’s action teams, they did not save Stevens or the day. In fact, several hours later, the militants raided the CIA base, killing both Doherty and Woods.
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
The disastrous denouements to these three incidents, as well as the deaths of four GRS contractors — more than a quarter of CIA casualties since the War on Terror was launched — raise a series of questions: Is this yet another example of the way the privatization of war and intelligence doesn’t work? And is the answer to bring such jobs back in-house? Or does the Hollywood-style skullduggery (gone repeatedly wrong) hint at a larger problem? Is the present intelligence system, in fact, out of control and, despite a combined budget of $52.6 billion a year, simply incapable of delivering anything like the “security” promised, leaving the various spy agencies, including the CIA, increasingly desperate to prove that they can “defeat” terrorism?
Take, for example, the slew of documents Edward Snowden — another private contractor who at one point worked for the CIA — released about secret NSA programs attempting to suck up global communications at previously unimaginable rates. There have been howls of outrage across the planet, including from spied-upon heads of state. Those denouncing such blatant invasions of privacy have regularly raised the fear that we might be witnessing the rise of a secret-police-like urge to clamp down on dissent everywhere.
But as with the CIA, there may be another explanation: desperation. Top intelligence officials, fearing that they will be seen as having done a poor job, are possessed by an ever greater urge to prove their self-worth by driving the intelligence community to ever more (rather than less) of the same.
As Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to Leon Panetta, the former CIA director and defense secretary, told MSNBC: “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack.” It’s true that, while the various intelligence agencies and the CIA may not succeed when it comes to the needles, they have proven effective indeed when it comes to creating haystacks.
In the case of the NSA, the Obama administration’s efforts to prove that its humongous data haul had any effect on foiling terrorist plots — at one point, they claimed 54 such plots foiled — has had a quality of genuine pathos to it. The claims have proven so thin that administration and intelligence officials have struggled to convince even those in Congress who support the programs, let alone the rest of the world, that it has done much more than gather and store staggering reams of information on almost everyone to no particular purpose whatsoever. Similarly, the FBI has made a point of trumpeting every “terrorist” arrest it has made, most of which, on closer scrutiny, turn out to be of gullible Muslims, framed by planted evidence in plots often essentially engineered by FBI informants.
Despite stunning investments of funds and the copious hiring of private contractors, when it comes to ineptitude the CIA is giving the FBI and NSA a run for their money. In fact, both of its recently revealed high-profile programs — GRS and the Guantanamo double agents — have proven dismal failures, yielding little if anything of value. The Associated Press account of Penny Lane, the only description of that program thus far, notes, for instance, that al-Qaeda never trusted the former Guantanamo Bay detainees released into their midst and that, after millions of dollars were fruitlessly spent, the program was canceled as a failure in 2006.
If you could find a phrase that was the polar opposite of “more bang for your buck,” all of these efforts would qualify. In the case of the CIA, keep in mind as well that you’re talking about an agency which has for years conducted drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Hundreds of innocent men, women, and children have been killed along with numerous al-Qaeda types and “suspected militants,” and yet — many experts believe — these campaigns have functioned not as an air war on, but for, terror. In Yemen, as an example, the tiny al-Qaeda outfit that existed when the drone campaign began in 2002 has grown exponentially.
So what about the Jason Bourne-like contractors working for GRS who turned out to be the gang that couldn’t shoot straight? How successful have they been in helping the CIA sniff out al-Qaeda globally? It’s a good guess, based on what we already know, that their record would be no better than that of the rest of the CIA.
One hint, when it comes to GRS-assisted operations, may be found in documents revealed in 2010 by WikiLeaks about joint CIA-Special Operations hunter-killer programs in Afghanistan like Task Force 373. We don’t actually know if any GRS employees were involved with those operations, but it’s notable that one of Task Force 373’s principal bases was in Khost, where Paresi and Wise were assisting the CIA in drone-targeting operations. The evidence from the WikiLeaks documents suggests that, as with GRS missions, those hunter-killer teams regularly botched their jobs by killing civilians and stoking local unrest.
At the time, Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department contractor who often worked with Task Force 373 as well as other Special Operations Forces “capture/kill” programs in Afghanistan and Iraq, told me: “We are killing the wrong people, the mid-level Taliban who are only fighting us because we are in their valleys. If we were not there, they would not be fighting the U.S.”
As details of programs like Penny Lane and GRS tumble out into the open, shedding light on how the CIA has fought its secret war, it is becoming clearer that the full story of the Agency’s failures, and the larger failures of U.S. intelligence and its paramilitarized, privatized sidekicks has yet to be told.
by Pratap Chatterjee, Tomdispatch.com
December 5th, 2013
Find this story at 5 December 2013

Spain and France’s intelligence agencies carried out collection of phone records and shared them with NSA, agency says

European intelligence agencies and not American spies were responsible for the mass collection of phone records which sparked outrage in France and Spain, the US has claimed.

General Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, said reports that the US had collected millions of Spanish and French phone records were “absolutely false”.

“To be perfectly clear, this is not information that we collected on European citizens,” Gen Alexander said when asked about the reports, which were based on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.

Shortly before the NSA chief appeared before a Congressional committee, US officials briefed the Wall Street Journal that in fact Spain and France’s own intelligence agencies had carried out the surveillance and then shared their findings with the NSA.

The anonymous officials claimed that the monitored calls were not even made within Spanish and French borders and could be surveillance carried on outside of Europe.
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In an aggressive rebuttal of the reports in the French paper Le Monde and the Spanish El Mundo, Gen Alexander said “they and the person who stole the classified data [Mr Snowden] do not understand what they were looking at” when they published slides from an NSA document.

The US push back came as President Barack Obama was said to be on the verge of ordering a halt to spying on the heads of allied governments.

The White House said it was looking at all US spy activities in the wake of leaks by Mr Snowden but was putting a “special emphasis on whether we have the appropriate posture when it comes to heads of state”.

Mr Obama was reported to have already halted eavesdropping at UN’s headquarters in New York.

German officials said that while the White House’s public statements had become more conciliatory there remained deep wariness and that little progress had been made behind closed doors in formalising an American commitment to curb spying.

“An agreement that you feel might be broken at any time is not worth very much,” one diplomat told The Telegraph.

“We need to re-establish trust and then come to some kind of understanding comparable to the [no spy agreement] the US has with other English speaking countries.”

Despite the relatively close US-German relations, the White House is reluctant to be drawn into any formal agreement and especially resistant to demands that a no-spy deal be expanded to cover all 28 EU member states.

Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission and EU justice commissioner, warned that the spying row could spill over and damage talks on a free-trade agreement between the EU and US.

“Friends and partners do not spy on each other,” she said in a speech in Washington. “For ambitious and complex negotiations to succeed there needs to be trust among the negotiating partners. It is urgent and essential that our US partners take clear action to rebuild trust.”

A spokesman for the US trade negotiators said it would be “unfortunate to let these issues – however important – distract us” from reaching a deal vital to freeing up transatlantic trade worth $3.3 billion dollars (£2bn) a day.

James Clapper, America’s top national intelligence, told a Congressional hearing yesterday the US does not “spy indiscriminately on the citizens of any country”.

“We do not spy on anyone except for valid foreign intelligence purposes, and we only work within the law,” Mr Clapper said. “To be sure on occasions we’ve made mistakes, some quite significant, but these are usually caused by human error or technical problems.”

Pressure from European leaders was added to as some of the US intelligence community’s key Congressional allies balked at the scale of surveillance on friendly governments.

Dianne Feinstein, the chair of powerful Senate intelligence committee, said she was “totally opposed” to tapping allied leaders and called for a wide-ranging Senate review of the activities of US spy agencies.

“I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers,” she said.

John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the house and a traditional hawk on national security, said US spy policy was “imbalanced” and backed calls for a review.

Mr Boehner has previously been a staunch advocate of the NSA and faced down a July rebellion by libertarian Republicans who tried to pass a law significantly curbing the agency’s power.

By Raf Sanchez, Peter Foster in Washington

8:35PM GMT 29 Oct 2013

Find this story at 29 October 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

These 4 slides are from the powerpoint “BOUNDLESSINFORMANT: Describing Mission Capabilities from Metadata Records.” They include the cover page and pages 3, 5, and 6 of the presentation. The powerpoint, leaked to the Guardian newspaper’s Glenn Greenwald by Edward Snowden, was first released by the Guardian newspaper on June 8, 2013 at this web page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-data-mining-slides

Also included with this collection is a “heat map” of parts of the world most subject to surveillance by Boundless Informant. This image was embedded in the Guardian’s story, which described Boundless Informant as “the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data,” which collected “almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
BOUNDLESSINFORMANT – Frequently Asked Questions
09-06-2012

(U/FOUO) Questions

1) What is BOUNDLESSINFORMANT! What is its purpose?

2) Who are the intended users of the tool?

3) What are the different views?

4) Where do you get your data?

5) Do you have all the data? What data is missing?

6) Why are you showing metadata record counts versus content?

7) Do you distinguish between sustained collect and survey collect?

8) What is the technical architecture for the tool?

9) What are some upcoming features/enhancements?

1 0) How are new features or views requested and prioritized?

1 1) Why are record counts different from other tools like ASDF and What’s On Cover?

12) Why is the tool NOFORN? Is there a releasable version?

13) How do you compile your record counts for each country?

Note: This document is a work-in-progress and will be updated frequently as additional
questions and guidance are provided.

1) (U) What is BOUNDLESSINFORMANT? What is its purpose?

(U//FOUO) BOUNDLESSINFORMANT is a GAO prototype tool for a self-documenting SIGINT
system. The purpose of the tool is to fundamentally shift the manner in which GAO describes its
collection posture. BOUNDLESSINFORMANT provides the ability to dynamically describe GAO’s
collection capabilities (through metadata record counts) with no human intervention and graphically
display the information in a map view, bar chart, or simple table. Prior to

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, the method for understanding the collection capabilities of GAO’s
assets involved ad hoc surveying of repositories, sites, developers, and/or programs and offices. By
extracting information from every DNI and DNR metadata record, the tool is able to create a near real-
time snapshot of GAO’s collection capability at any given moment. The tool allows users to select a
country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collection against that
country. The tool also allows users to view high level metrics by organization and then drill down to a
more actionable level – down to the program and cover term.

Sample Use Cases

• (U//FOUO) How many records are collected for an organizational unit (e.g. FORNSAT)?

• (U//FOUO) How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country?

• (U//FOUO) Are there any visible trends for the collection?

• (U//FOUO) What assets collect against a specific country? What type of collection?

• (U//FOUO) What is the field of view for a specific site? What countriees does it collect
against? What type of collection?

2) (U) Who are the intended users of the tool?

• (U//FOUO) Mission and collection managers seeking to understand output characteristics
of a site based on what is being ingested into downstream repositories. .

(U//FOUO) Strategic Managers seeking to understand top level metrics at the

organization/office level or seeking to answer data calls on NSA collection capability.

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT – FAQ Page 1 o:

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT – Frequently Asked Questions

09-06-2012

• (U//FOUO) Analysts looking for additional sites to task for coverage of a particular

technology within a specific country.

3) What are the different views?

(U//FOUO) Map View – The Map View is designed to allow users to view overall DNI, DNR, or
aggregated collection posture of the agency or a site. Clicking on a country will show the collection
posture (record counts, type of collection, and contributing SIGADs or sites) against that particular
country in addition to providing a graphical display of record count trends. In order to bin the records
into a country, a normalized phone number (DNR) or an administrative region atom (DNI) must be
populated within the record. Clicking on a site (within the Site Specific view) will show the viewshed
for that site – what countries the site collects against.

(U//FOUO) Org View – The Organization View is designed to allow users to view the metadata record
counts by organizational structure (i.e. GAO – SSO – RAM-A – SPINNERET) all the way down to the
cover term. Since it’s not necessary to have a normalized number or administrative region populated,
the numbers in the Org View will be higher than the numbers in the Map View.

(U//FOUO) Similarity View – The Similarity View is currently a placeholder view for an upcoming
feature that will graphically display sites that are similar in nature. This can be used to identify areas
for a de-duplication effort or to inform analysts of additional SIGADs to task for queries (similar to
Amazon’s “if you like this item, you’ll also like these” feature).

4) (U) Where do you get your data?

(U//FOUO) BOUNDLESSINFORMANT extracts metadata records from GM-PLACE post-
FALLOUT (DNI ingest processor) and post-TUSKATTIRE (DNR ingest processor). The records are
enriched with organization information (e.g. SSO, FORNSAT) and cover term. Every valid DNI and
DNR metadata record is aggregated to provide a count at the appropriate level. See the different views
question above for additional information.

5) (U) Do you have all the data? What data is missing?

• (U//FOUO) The tool resides on GM-PLACE which is only accredited up to TS//SI//NOFORN.
Therefore, the tool does not contain ECI or FISA data.

• (U//FOUO) The Map View only shows counts for records with a valid normalized number
(DNR) or administrative region atom (DNI).

• (U//FOUO) Only metadata records that are sent back to NSA-W through FASCIA or
FALLOUT are counted. Therefore, programs with a distributed data distribution system (e.g.
MUSCULAR and Terrestrial RF) are not currently counted.

• (U//FOUO) Only SIGINT records are currently counted. There are no ELINT or other “INT”
records included.

6) (U) Why are you showing metadata record counts versus content?

(U//FOUO)

7) (U ) Do you distin g uish between sustained collect and survey collect?

(U//FOUO) The tool currently makes no distinction between sustained collect and survey collect. This
feature is on the roadmap.

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT – FAQ Page 2 o:

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
BOUNDLESSINFORMANT – Frequently Asked Questions
09-06-2012

8) What is the technical architecture for the tool?

Click here for a graphical view of the tool’s architecture

(U//FOUO) DNI metadata (ASDF), DNR metadata (FASCIA) delivered to Hadoop
Distributed File System (HDFS) on GM-PLACE

(U//FOUO) Use Java MapReduce job to transform/filter and enrich FASCIA/ASDF data with
business logic to assign organization rules to data

(U//FOUO) Bulk import of DNI/DNR data (serialized Google Protobuf objects) into
Cloudbase (enabled by custom aggregators)

(U//FOUO) Use Java web app (hosted via Tomcat) on MachineShop (formerly Turkey Tower)
to query Cloudbase

(U//FOUO) GUI triggers queries to CloudBase – GXT (ExtGWT)

9) What are some upcoming features/enhancements?

• (U//FOUO) Add technology type (e.g. JUGGERNAUT, LOPER) to provide additional
granularity in the numbers

(U//FOUO) Add additional details to the Differential view

(U//FOUO) Refine the Site Specific view

(U//FOUO) Include CASN information

(U//FOUO) Add ability to export data behind any view (pddg,sigad,sysid,casn,tech,count)

(U//FOUO) Add in selected (vs. unselected) data indicators

(U//FOUO) Include filter for sustained versus survey collection

10) How are new features or views requested and prioritized?

(U//FOUO) The team uses Flawmill to accept user requests for additional functionality or
enhancements. Users are also allowed to vote on which functionality or enhancements are most
important to them (as well as add comments). The BOUNDLESSINFORMANT team will periodically
review all requests and triage according to level of effort (Easy, Medium, Hard) and mission impact
(High, Medium, Low). The team will review the queue with the project champion and government
steering committee to be added onto the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT roadmap.

1 1) Why are record counts different from other tools like ASDF and What’s On

Cover?

(U//FOUO) There are a number of reasons why record counts may vary. The purpose of the tool is to
provide

BOUNDLESSINFORMANT – FAQ

Page 3 o:

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

July 13, 2012

Find this story at  txt

Find this story at jpeg

Find this story at pdf

The following page from an August 13, 2010 NSA powerpoint presentation on the joint CIA-NSA clandestine SIGINT unit known as the Special Collection Service (SCS) appeared on the Der Spiegel website last week. It has since be replaced by a heavily redacted version of the same page which deletes the locations of all SCS listening posts outside of Europe.

The page shows the locations of all SCS listening posts around the world as of August 2010, of which 74 were active, 3 were listed as being dormant, 14 were unmanned remote controlled stations, three sites were then being surveyed, and two were listed as being “technical support activities.”

In Europe, SCS sites were located at Athens and embassy annex, Baku, Berlin, Budapest, RAF Croughton (UK), Frankfurt, Geneva, Kiev, Madrid, Milan, Moscow and embassy annex, Paris, Prague, Pristina, Rome, Sarajevo, Sofia, Tblisi, Tirana, Vienna and embassy annex, and Zagreb.

In Asia SCS were located at Bangkok and PSA, Beijing, Chengdu, Chiang Mai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Phnom Penh, Rangoon, Shanghai, and Taipei.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, SCS sites were located at Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Amman, Amarah, Ankara, Baghdad and embassy annex, Basrah, Beirut, Benghazi, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jeddah, Khartoum, Kirkuk, Kuwait City, Manama, Mosul, Riyadh, Sana’a, Sulaymaniyah, Talil(?), “Tehran-in-Exile”, and Tripoli.

In South Asia, SCS sites were located at one site illegible, Islamabad, Herat, Kabul and embassy annex, Karachi, Lahore, New Delhi, and Peshawar.

In Africa, SCS sites were located inside the U.S. embassies in Abuja, Addis Ababa, Bamako, Lagos, Nairobi, Monrovia, Kinshasa, Lusaka, and Luanda.

In Central America and the Caribbean, SCS sites were located at Guadalajara, Guatemala City, Havana, Hermosillo, Managua, Mexico City, Monterrey, Panama City, San Jose, and Tegucigalpa.

And in South America, SCS sites were located in Brasilia, Bogota, Caracas, La Paz, Merida and Quito.

Any corrections to the above would be gratefully received.

Matthew M. Aid is the author of Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror (January 2012) and The Secret Sentry, the definitive history of the National Security Agency. He is a leading intelligence historian and expert on the NSA, and a regular commentator on intelligence matters for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the National Journal, the Associated Press, CBS News, National Public Radio (NPR) and many others. He lives in Washington, DC.

October 28, 2013

Find this story at 28 October 2013

Der Spiegel pdf 

Der Spiegel unredacted image

During the Cold War there were hundreds of secret remote listening posts spread around the globe. From large stations in the moors of Scotland and mountains of Turkey that were complete with golf balllike structures called “radomes” to singly operated stations in the barren wilderness of Saint Lawrence Island between Alaska and Siberia that had only a few antennae, these stations constituted the ground-based portion of the United States Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) System or “USSS.”

Operated by the supersecret National Security Agency (NSA), these stations were designed to intercept Morse Code, telephone, telex, radar, telemetry, and other signals emanating from behind the Iron Curtain. At one time, the NSA contemplated a worldwide, continuously operated array of 4120 intercept stations. While the agency never achieved that goal, it could still boast of several hundred intercept stations. These included its ground-based “outstations,” which were supplemented by other intercept units located on ships, submarines, aircraft (from U-2s to helicopters), unmanned drones, mobile vans, aerostats (balloons and dirigibles), and even large and cumbersome backpacks.

With the collapse of the Communist “bloc” and the advent of microwaves, fiber optics, and cellular phones, NSA’s need for numerous ground-based intercept stations waned. It began to rely on a constellation of sophisticated SIGINT satellites with code names like Vortex, Magnum, Jumpseat, and Trumpet to sweep up the world’s satellite, microwave, cellular, and high-frequency communications and signals. Numerous outstations met with one of three fates: they were shut down completely, remoted to larger facilities called Regional SIGINT Operations Centers or “RSOCs,” or were turned over to host nation SIGINT agencies to be operated jointly with NSA.

However, NSA’s jump to relying primarily on satellites proved premature. In 1993, Somali clan leader Mohammed Farah Aideed taught the agency an important lesson. Aideed’s reliance on older and lower-powered walkie-talkies and radio transmitters made his communications virtually silent to the orbiting SIGINT “birds” of the NSA. Therefore, NSA technicians came to realize there was still a need to get in close in some situations to pick up signals of interest. In NSA’s jargon this is called improving “hearability.”

As NSA outstations were closed or remoted, new and relatively smaller intercept facilities such as the “gateway” facility in Bahrain, reportedly used for retransmit signals intercepted in Baghdad last year to the U.S. sprang up around the world. In addition to providing NSA operators with fresh and exotic duty stations, the new stations reflected an enhanced mission for NSA economic intelligence gathering. Scrapping its old Cold War A and B Group SIGINT organization, NSA expanded the functions of its W Group to include SIGINT operations against a multitude of targets. Another unit, M Group, would handle intercepts from new technologies like the Internet.

Many people who follow the exploits of SIGINT and NSA are eager to peruse lists of secret listening posts operated by the agency and its partners around the world. While a master list probably exists somewhere in the impenetrable lair that is the NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, it is assuredly stamped with one of the highest security classifications in the U.S. intelligence community.  W.M. & J.V.

The United States SIGINT System (USSS)

The following list is the best unclassified shot at describing the locations of the ground-based “ears” of the Puzzle Palace. It is culled from press accounts, informed experts, and books written about the NSA and its intelligence partners. It does not include the numerous listening units on naval vessels and aircraft nor those operating from U.S. and foreign embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic missions.

United States

NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Buckley Air National Guard Ground Base, Colorado
Fort Gordon, Georgia (RSOC)
Imperial Beach, California
Kunia, Hawaii (RSOC)
Northwest, Virginia
Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico
San Antonio, Texas (RSOC)
Shemya, Alaska -3
Sugar Grove, West Virginia
Winter Harbor, Maine
Yakima, Washington

Albania

Durres -6
Shkoder -6
Tirana -6

Ascension Island

Two Boats -1

Australia

Bamaga -6 -7
Cabarlah -7
Canberra (Defense Signals Directorate Headquarters) -5
Harman -7
Kojarena, Geraldton -1
Nurunggar -1
Pearce -1
Pine Gap, Alice Springs -1
Riverina -7
Shoal Bay, Darwin -1
Watsonia -1

Austria

Konigswarte -7
Neulengbach -7

Bahrain

Al-Muharraq Airport -3
Bosnia and Herzegovina

Tuzla

Botswana

Mapharangwane Air Base

British Indian Ocean Territory

Diego Garcia -1

Brunei

Bandar Seri Begawan -7

Canada

Alert -7
Gander -7
Leitrim -1
Masset -6 -7
Ottawa [Communications Security Establishment (CSE) Headquarters] -5

China

Korla -1 -6
Qitai -1 -6

Croatia

Brac� Island, Croatia -6
Zagreb-Lucko Airport -7

Cuba

Guantanamo Bay

Cyprus

Ayios Nikolaos -1

Denmark

Aflandshage -7
Almindingen, Bornholm -7
Dueodde, Bornholm -7
Gedser -7
Hj�rring -7
L�gumkl�ster -7

Eritrea

Dahlak Island -1 (NSA/Israel “8200” site)

Estonia

Tallinn -7

Ethiopia

Addis Ababa -1

Finland

Santahamina -7

French Guiana

Kourou -7 (German Federal Intelligence Service station)

Germany

Achern -7
Ahrweiler -7
Bad Aibling -2
Bad M�nstereifel -7
Braunschweig -7
Darmstadt -7
Frankfurt -7
Hof -7
Husum -7
Mainz -7
Monschau -7
Pullach (German Federal Intelligence Service Headquarters) -5
Rheinhausen -7
Stockdorf -7
Strassburg -7
Vogelweh, Germany

Gibraltar

Gibraltar -7

Greece

Ir�klion, Crete

Guam

Finegayan

Hong Kong

British Consulate, Victoria (“The Alamo”) -7

Iceland

Keflavik -3

India

Charbatia -7

Israel

Herzliyya (Unit 8200 Headquarters) -5
Mitzpah Ramon -7
Mount Hermon, Golan Heights -7
Mount Meiron, Golan Heights -7

Italy

San Vito -6
Sorico

Japan

Futenma, Okinawa
Hanza, Okinawa
Higashi Chitose -7
Higashi Nemuro -7
Kofunato -7
Miho -7
Misawa
Nemuro -7
Ohi -7
Rebunto -7
Shiraho -7
Tachiarai -7
Wakkanai

Korea (South)

Kanghwa-do Island -7
Osan -1
Pyong-dong Island -7
P’yongt’aek -1
Taegu -1 -2 -6
Tongduchon -1
Uijo�ngbu -1
Yongsan -1

Kuwait

Kuwait

Latvia

Ventspils -7

Lithuania

Vilnius -7

Netherlands

Amsterdam (Technical Intelligence Analysis Center (TIVC) Headquarters)-5
Emnes -7
Terschelling -7

New Zealand

Tangimoana -7
Waihopai -1
Wellington (Government Communications Security Bureau Headquarters -5

Norway

Borhaug -7
Fauske/Vetan -7
Jessheim -7
Kirkenes -1
Randaberg -7
Skage/Namdalen -7
Vads� -7
Vard� -7
Viksjofellet -7

Oman

Abut -1
Goat Island, Musandam Peninsula -3
Khasab, Musandam Peninsula -3
Masirah Island -3

Pakistan

Parachinar

Panama

Galeta Island -3

Papua New Guinea

Port Moresby -7

Portugal

Terceira Island, Azores

Rwanda

Kigali

S�o Tom� and Pr�ncipe

Pinheiro

Saudi Arabia

Araz -7
Khafji -7

Singapore

Kranji -7

Spain

Pico de las Nieves, Grand Canary Island -7
Manzanares -7
Playa de Pals -3
Rota

Solomon Islands

Honiara -7

Sri Lanka

Iranawilla

Sweden

Karlskrona -7
Lov�n (Swedish FRA Headquarters) -7
Musk� -7

Switzerland

Merishausen -7
R�thi -7

Taiwan:

Quemoy -7
Matsu -7
Shu Lin Kuo -5 (German Federal Intelligence Service/NSA/Taiwan J-3 SIGINT service site)

Turkey

Adana
Agri -7
Antalya -7
Diyarbakir
Edirne -7
Istanbul -7
Izmir -7
Kars
Sinop -7

Thailand

Aranyaprathet -7
Khon Kaen -1 -3
Surin -7
Trat -7

Uganda

Kabale
Galangala Island, Ssese Islands (Lake Victoria)

United Arab Emirates

Az-Zarqa� -3
Dalma� -3
Ras al-Khaimah -3
Sir Abu Nuayr Island -3

United Kingdom:

Belfast (Victoria Square) -7
Brora, Scotland -7
Cheltenham (Government Communications Headquarters) -5
Chicksands -7
Culm Head -7
Digby -7
Hawklaw, Scotland -7
Irton Moor -7
Menwith Hill, Harrogate -1 (RSOC)
Molesworth -1
Morwenstow -1
Westminster, London -7
(Palmer Street)
Yemen
Socotra Island (planned)

KEY:

-1 Joint facility operated with a SIGINT partner.

-2 Joint facility partially operated with a SIGINT partner.

-3 Contractor-operated facility.

-4 Remoted facility.

-5 NSA liaison is present.

-6 Joint NSA-CIA site.

-7 Foreign-operated “accommodation site” that provides occasional SIGINT product to the USSS.

February 24 – March 2, 1999
by
jason vest and wayne madsen A Most Unusual Collection Agency

Find this story at February March 1999

Copyright 1999 The Village Voice – all rights reserved.

When Saddam Hussein raised the possibility of attacking U.S. planes in Turkey last week, his threats illustrated what many in diplomatic circles regard as an international disgrace the emasculation of the UN by the U.S.

When UNSCOM, the UN’s arms-inspection group for Iraq, was created in 1991, it drew on personnel who, despite their respective nationalities, would serve the UN. Whatever success UNSCOM achieved, however, was in spite of its multinational makeup. While a devoted group of UN staffers managed to set up an independent unit aimed at finding Saddam’s weapons and ways of concealing them, other countries seeking to do business with sanctions-impaired Iraq notably France and Russia used inspectors as spies for their own ends.

But what ultimately killed UNSCOM were revelations that the U.S. government had manipulated it by assuming control of its intelligence apparatus last spring (or perhaps even earlier by using the group to slip spies into Iraq) not so much to aid UNSCOM’s mission, but to get information for use in future aerial bombardments. When stories to this effect broke last month, however, there was almost no consistency in descriptions of the agencies involved or techniques used. The New York Times, for example, said only one CIA spy had been sent into Baghdad last March to set up an automated eavesdropping device. Time had multiple Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) operatives planting bugs around Baghdad throughout 1998. The Wall Street Journal referred to the use of one “device” from the National Security Agency (NSA) last year and “a series of espionage operations used by the U.S. [since] 1996 to monitor the communications” of Saddam and his elite.

When probing the world of espionage, rarely does a clear picture emerge. But according to a handful of published sources, as well as assessments by independent experts and interviews with current and former intelligence officers, the U.S. government’s prime mover in Iraqi electronic surveillance was most likely a super-secret organization run jointly by the the CIA and the NSA the spy agency charged with gathering signals intelligence (known as SIGINT) called the Special Collection Service. Further, there is evidence to suggest that the Baghdad operation was an example of the deployment of a highly classified, multinational SIGINT agreement one that may have used Australians to help the U.S. listen in months after the CIA failed to realize the U.S. objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein through covert action.

According to former UNSCOM chief inspector Scott Ritter, when the U.S. took over the group’s intelligence last year, a caveat was added regarding staffing: only international personnel with U.S. clearances could participate. “This requirement,” says Ritter, “really shows the kind of perversion of mission that went on. The U.S. was in control, but the way it operated from day one was, U.S. runs it, but it had to be a foreigner [with a clearance] operating the equipment.”

Under the still-classified 1948 UKUSA signals intelligence treaty, eavesdropping agencies of the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand share the same clearances. According to Federation of American Scientists intelligence analyst John Pike, this gives the U.S. proxies for electronic espionage: “In the context of UKUSA, think of NSA as one office with five branches,” he says. As UNSCOM demonstrates, though, sometimes the partnership gets prickly; the British, according to Ritter, withdrew their personnel following the U.S.’s refusal to explain “how the data was going to be used.” (According to a longtime British intelligence officer, there was another reason: lingering bad feelings over the NSA’s cracking a secret UN code used by British and French peacekeepers during a Bosnian UN mission.) At this point, says Ritter, he was instructed to ask the Australian government for a “collection” specialist. “We deployed him to Baghdad in July of 1998,” recalls Ritter. “In early August, when I went to Baghdad, he pulled me aside and told me he had concerns about what was transpiring.

He said there was a very high volume of data, and that he was getting no feedback about whether it was good, bad, or useful. He said that it was his experience that this was a massive intelligence collection operation one that was not in accordance with what UNSCOM was supposed to be doing.”

In other words, the Australian most likely an officer from the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s NSA subsidiary, who was supposed to have been working for the UN may have been effectively spying for the U.S. Stephanie Jones, DSD’s liaison to NSA, did not take kindly to a Voice inquiry about this subject; indeed, despite being reached at a phone number with an NSA headquarters prefix, she would not even confirm her position with DSD. However, a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said that such a scenario was probable. “The relationship between the UKUSA partners has always been of enormous value to U.S. intelligence, even when their governments have been on the opposite sides of policy issues,” the official said. “I would not be surprised at all if the Aussies happened to be the ones who actually did this [at U.S. behest].”

With an intelligence community of over a dozen components, billion-dollar budgets, and cutting-edge technology, the U.S. can cast a wide net, be it with human sources or signals interception. Iraq, however, has presented a special challenge since Saddam’s Ba’ath party took power in 1968. “In Iraq,” says Israeli intelligence expert Amatzai Baram, “you are dealing with what is arguably the best insulated security and counterintelligence operation in the world. The ability of Western or even unfriendly Arab states to penetrate the system is very, very limited.”

According to the former Cairo station chief of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the West got this message loud and clear after Iraqi counterintelligence pulled British MI6 case officers off a Baghdad street in the mid ’80s and took them to a warehouse on the outskirts of town. “They had arrayed before them the various agents they had been running,” the exASIS officer told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1994. “There were wires hanging from the rafters in the warehouse. All the men were strung up by wires around their testicles and they were killed in front of the faces of their foreign operators, and they were told, you had better get out and never come back.”

When UNSCOM was inaugurated in 1991, it quickly became apparent that the organization’s intelligence capability would depend largely on contributions from various UN member countries. According to several intelligence community sources, while the CIA did provide UNSCOM with information, and, later, serious hardware like a U-2 spy plane, the focus of the U.S. intelligence community at the time was on working with anti-Saddam groups in and around Iraq to foment a coup.

What resulted, as investigative authors Andrew and Patrick Cockburn demonstrate in their just published book Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, were two of the most colossally bungled CIA covert operations since the Bay of Pigs. While details of one of the failed operations were widely reported, the Cockburns fleshed out details of an arguably worse coup attempt gone awry in June 1996. Iraqi counterintelligence had not only managed to finger most of the suspects in advance, but months before had even captured an encrypted mobile satellite communications device that the CIA gave the plotters. Adding insult to injury, the Cockburns report, Iraqi counterintelligence used the CIA’s own device to notify them of their failure: “We have arrested all your people,” the CIA team in Amman, Jordan, reportedly was told via their uplink. “You might as well pack up and go home.”

Some UNSCOM staffers first under Russian Nikita Smidovich, later under American Scott Ritter managed to create what amounted to a formidable micro-espionage unit devoted to fulfilling UNSCOM’s mission. Between information passed on from various countries and use of unspecified but probably limited surveillance equipment, the inspectors were gathering a great deal. But in March 1998, according to Ritter, the U.S. told UNSCOM chair Richard Butler of Australia that it wanted to “coordinate” UNSCOM’s intelligence gathering.

Ritter insists that no U.S. spies under UNSCOM cover could have been operating in Baghdad without his knowledge prior to his resignation in August 1998. However, as veteran spies point out, if they were, Ritter probably wouldn’t have known. A number of sources interviewed by the Voice believe it possible that Special Collection Service personnel may have been operating undercover in Baghdad.

According to a former high-ranking intelligence official, SCS was formed in the late 1970s after competition between the NSA’s embassy-based eavesdroppers and the CIA’s globe-trotting bugging specialists from its Division D had become counterproductive. While sources differ on how SCS works some claim its agents never leave their secret embassy warrens where they perform close-quarters electronic eavesdropping, while others say agents operate embassy-based equipment in addition to performing riskier “black-bag” jobs, or break-ins, for purposes of bugging “there’s a lot of pride taken in what SCS has accomplished,” the former official says.

Intriguingly, the only on-the-record account of the Special Collection Service has been provided not by an American but by a Canadian. Mike Frost, formerly of the Communications Security Establishment Canada’s NSA equivalent served as deputy director of CSE’s SCS counterpart and was trained by the SCS. In a 1994 memoir, Frost describes the complexities of mounting “special collection” operations finding ways to transport sophisticated eavesdropping equipment in diplomatic pouches without arousing suspicion, surreptitiously assembling a device without arousing suspicion in his embassy, technically troubleshooting under less than ideal conditions and also devotes considerable space to describing visits to SCS’s old College Park headquarters.

“It is not the usual sanitorium-clean atmosphere you would expect to find in a top-secret installation,” writes Frost. “Wires everywhere, jerry-rigged gizmos everywhere, computers all over the place, some people buzzing around in three-piece suits, and others in jeans and t-shirts. [It was] the ultimate testing and engineering centre for any espionage equipment.” Perhaps one of its most extraordinary areas was its “live room,” a 30-foot-square area where NSA and CIA devices were put through dry runs, and where engineers simulated the electronic environment of cities where eavesdroppers are deployed. Several years ago, according to sources, SCS relocated to a new, 300-acre, three-building complex disguised as a corporate campus and shielded by a dense forest outside Beltsville, Maryland. Curious visitors to the site will find themselves stopped at a gate by a Department of Defense police officer who, if one lingers, will threaten arrest.

There are good reasons, explains an old NSA hand, for havingelectronic ears on terra firma in addition to satellites. “If you’re listening to something from thousands of miles up, the footprint to sort through is so huge, and finding what you are looking for is not a simple chore. If you know more or less specifically what you want, it’s easier to get it in close proximity. And if it happens to be a low-powered signal, it may not travel far enough.”

According to two sources familiar with intelligence activity in Iraq, the U.S. may have been aided by information delivered either to UNSCOM or SCS from Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications firm. It’s not an unreasonable assumption; though Ericsson brushes off questions about it, in 1996 a Middle Eastern businessman filed suit against the company, claiming, among other things, that it had stiffed him on his commission for brokering a deal between the Iraqis and Ericsson for sensitive defense communications equipment, which, reportedly, included encrypted cell phones.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a veteran intelligence official confirmed that the NSA has “arrangements” with other communications firms that allow NSA to access supposedly secure communications, but cooperation from Ericsson would be “a breakthrough despite our best efforts, they always kept their distance. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.” (This is not without precedent; though hardly covered in the American press, it has been reported that Switzerland’s Crypto AG long the supplier of cipher equipment to many of the world’s neutral and “rogue” states enjoyed such an “arrangement” with the NSA for decades. Crypto AG denies this.)

There is, however, another possible scenario regarding participation by Ericsson in an intelligence venture. According to FAS analyst Pike, it’s much more likely that anyone doing intelligence work in Iraq would want a schematic of Baghdad’s telephone system which Ericsson installed in the late ’60s and has subsequently updated. “I would find it to be far more plausible that the U.S. intelligence community would be interested in acquiring, and Ericsson would be interested in supplying, the wiring diagram for Baghdad’s telephone exchange than encryption algorithms for cell phones,” he says.

Also, he explains, finding ways to tap into a whole phone system or pull short-range signals out of the air without being obvious is clearly SCS’s portfolio. “This type of risky close surveillance is what SCS was formed to do,” he says. “When you think of NSA, you think satellites. When you think CIA, you think James Bond and microfilm. But you don’t really think of an agency whose sole purpose is to get up real close and use the best technology there is to listen and transmit. That’s SCS.”

Regarding any possible collaboration in Iraq with SCS or UNSCOM, Kathy Egan, Ericsson spokesperson, said she had no information on such an operation, but if there was one, “It would be classified and we would not be able to talk about it.” It’s also possible, according to Mike Frost, that cleverly disguised bugs might have been planted in Baghdad SCS, he recalls, managed to listen in on secured facilities by bugging pigeons. But, says a retired CIA veteran, with UNSCOM effectively dead, bugging is now out of the question. “I hope the take from this op,” he says, “was worth losing the only access the outside world’s disarmament experts had to Iraq.”

February 24 – March 2, 1999
by
jason vest and wayne madsen

Find this story at February March 1999

Copyright 1999 The Village Voice

During a coffee break at an intelligence conference held in The Netherlands a few years back, a senior Scandinavian counterterrorism official regaled me with a story. One of his service’s surveillance teams was conducting routine monitoring of a senior militant leader when they suddenly noticed through their high-powered surveillance cameras two men breaking into the militant’s apartment. The target was at Friday evening prayers at the local mosque. But rather than ransack the apartment and steal the computer equipment and other valuables while he was away — as any right-minded burglar would normally have done — one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto the resident’s laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

It did not take long for the official to determine that the two men were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives conducting what is known in the U.S. intelligence community as either a “black bag job” or a “surreptitious entry” operation. Back in the Cold War, such a mission might have involved cracking safes, stealing code books, or photographing the settings on cipher machines. Today, this kind of break-in is known inside the CIA and National Security Agency as an “off-net operation,” a clandestine human intelligence mission whose specific purpose is to surreptitiously gain access to the computer systems and email accounts of targets of high interest to America’s spies. As we’ve learned in recent weeks, the National Security Agency’s ability to electronically eavesdrop from afar is massive. But it is not infinite. There are times when the agency cannot gain access to the computers or gadgets they’d like to listen in on. And so they call in the CIA’s black bag crew for help.

The CIA’s clandestine service is now conducting these sorts of black bag operations on behalf of the NSA, but at a tempo not seen since the height of the Cold War. Moreover, these missions, as well as a series of parallel signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection operations conducted by the CIA’s Office of Technical Collection, have proven to be instrumental in facilitating and improving the NSA’s SIGINT collection efforts in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations.

In other words, the CIA has become instrumental in setting up the shadowy surveillance dragnet that has now been thrown into public view. Sources within the U.S. intelligence community confirm that since 9/11, CIA clandestine operations have given the NSA access to a number of new and critically important targets around the world, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, as well as the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia. (I’m not aware of any such operations here on U.S. soil.) In one particularly significant operation conducted a few years back in a strife-ridden South Asian nation, a team of CIA technical operations officers installed a sophisticated tap on a switching center servicing several fiber-optic cable trunk lines, which has allowed NSA to intercept in real time some of the most sensitive internal communications traffic by that country’s general staff and top military commanders for the past several years. In another more recent case, CIA case officers broke into a home in Western Europe and surreptitiously loaded Agency-developed spyware into the personal computer of a man suspected of being a major recruiter for individuals wishing to fight with the militant group al-Nusra Front in Syria, allowing CIA operatives to read all of his email traffic and monitor his Skype calls on his computer.

The fact that the NSA and CIA now work so closely together is fascinating on a number of levels. But it’s particularly remarkable accomplishment, given the fact that the two agencies until fairly recently hated each others’ guts.

Ingenues and TBARs

As detailed in my history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry, the CIA and NSA had what could best be described as a contentious relationship during the Cold War era. Some NSA veterans still refer to their colleagues at the CIA as ‘TBARs,’ which stands for ‘Those Bastards Across the River,’ with the river in question being the Potomac. Perhaps reflecting their higher level of educational accomplishment, CIA officers have an even more lurid series of monikers for their NSA colleagues at Fort Meade, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company because of recurring references to fecal matter. One retired CIA official described his NSA counterparts as “a bunch of damn ingenues.” Another CIA veteran perhaps put it best when he described the Cold War relationship amongst and between his agency and the NSA as “the best of enemies.”

The historical antagonism between the two agencies started at the top. Allen W. Dulles, who was the director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, disliked NSA director General Ralph Canine so intensely that he deliberately kept the NSA in the dark about a number of the agency’s high-profile SIGINT projects, like the celebrated Berlin Tunnel cable tapping operation in the mid-1950s. The late Richard M. Helms, who was director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973, told me over drinks at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C. only half jokingly that during his thirty-plus years in the U.S. intelligence community, his relations with the KGB were, in his words, “warmer and more collegial” than with the NSA. William E. Colby, who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1973-1976, had the same problem. Colby was so frustrated by his inability to assert any degree of control over the NSA that he told a congressional committee that “I think it is clear I do not have command authority over the [NSA].” And the animus between CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner (CIA director from 1977-1981) and his counterpart at the NSA, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, was so intense that they could only communicate through intermediaries.

But the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed the operational dynamic between these two agencies, perhaps forever. In the thirteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NSA and CIA have largely, but not completely, moved past the Cold War animus. In addition, both agencies have become increasingly dependent on one another for the success of their respective intelligence operations, leading to what can best be described as an increasingly close symbiotic relationship between these two titans of the U.S. intelligence community.

While the increasingly intimate relationship between the NSA and CIA is not a secret, the specific nature and extent of the work that each agency does for the other is deemed to be extremely sensitive, especially since many of these operations are directed against friends and allies of the United States. For example, the Special Collection Service (SCS), the secretive joint CIA-NSA clandestine SIGINT organization based in Beltsville, Maryland, now operates more than 65 listening posts inside U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. While recent media reports have focused on the presence of SCS listening posts in certain Latin America capitals, intelligence sources confirm that most of the organization’s resources have been focused over the past decade on the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. For example, virtually every U.S. embassy in the Middle East now hosts a SCS SIGINT station that monitors, twenty-four hours a day, the complete spectrum of electronic communications traffic within a one hundred mile radius of the embassy site. The biggest problem that the SCS currently faces is that it has no presence in some of the U.S. intelligence community’s top targets, such as Iran and North Korea, because the U.S. government has no diplomatic relations with these countries.

At the same time, SIGINT coming from the NSA has become a crucial means whereby the CIA can not only validate the intelligence it gets from its oftentimes unreliable agents, but SIGINT has been, and remains the lynchpin underlying the success over the past nine years of the CIA’s secret unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere around the world.

But the biggest changes have occurred in the CIA’s human intelligence (HUMINT) collection efforts on behalf of NSA. Over the past decade, foreign government telecommunications and computer systems have become one of the most important targeting priorities of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS), which since the spring of this year has been headed by one of the agency’s veteran Africa and Middle East hands. The previous director, Michael J. Sulick, is widely credited with making HUMINT collection against foreign computer and telecommunications systems one of the service’s top priority targets after he rose to the top of the NCS in September 2007.

Today, a cadre of several hundred CIA NCS case officers, known as Technical Operations Officers, have been recruited and trained to work exclusively on penetrating foreign communications and computer systems targets so that NSA can gain access to the information stored on or transmitted by these systems. Several dozen of these officers now work fulltime in several offices at NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, something which would have been inconceivable prior to 9/11.

CIA operatives have also intensified their efforts to recruit IT specialists and computer systems operators employed by foreign government ministries, major military command headquarters staffs, big foreign multinational corporations, and important international non-governmental organizations.

Since 9/11, the NCS has also developed a variety of so-called “black boxes” which can quickly crack computer passwords, bypass commercially-available computer security software systems, and clone cellular telephones — all without leaving a trace. To use one rudimentary example, computer users oftentimes forget to erase default accounts and passwords when installing a system, or incorrectly set protections on computer network servers or e-mail accounts. This is a vulnerability which operatives now routinely exploit.

For many countries in the world, especially in the developing world, CIA operatives can now relatively easily obtain telephone metadata records, such as details of all long distance or international telephone calls, through secret liaison arrangements with local security services and police agencies.

America’s European allies are a different story. While the connections between the NSA and, for example, the British signals intelligence service GCHQ are well-documented, the CIA has a harder time obtaining personal information of British citizens. The same is true in Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which have also been most reluctant to share this sort of data with the CIA. But the French intelligence and security services have continued to share this sort of data with the CIA, particularly in counterterrorism operations.

U.S. intelligence officials are generally comfortable with the new collaboration. Those I have spoken to over the past three weeks have only one major concern. The fear is that details of these operations, including the identities of the targets covered by these operations, currently reside in the four laptops reportedly held by Edward Snowden, who has spent the past three weeks in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow waiting for his fate to be decided. Officials at both the CIA and NSA know that the public disclosure of these operations would cause incalculable damage to U.S. intelligence operations abroad as well as massive embarrassment to the U.S. government. If anyone wonders why the U.S. government wants to get its hands on Edward Snowden and his computers so badly, this is an important reason why.

David Burnett/Newsmakers

Matthew M. Aid is the author of Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror and The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, and is co-editor with Cees Wiebes of Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War and Beyond.

BY MATTHEW M. AID | JULY 17, 2013

Find this story at 17 July 2013

©2013 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

“I’d come back from an op and couldn’t wait for what happens next,” says Douglas Groat (shown in a reenactment with tools of the trade). (James Quantz Jr. )

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited.

They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency.

But suddenly the driver’s hand-held radio crackled with a voice-encrypted warning: “Maintain position. Do not approach target.” It was the local CIA station, relaying a warning from the agency’s spy inside: a cleaning lady had arrived.

From the back seat Douglas Groat swore under his breath. A tall, muscular man of 43, he was the leader of the break-in team, at this point—1990—a seven-year veteran of this risky work. “We were white faces in a car in daytime,” Groat recalls, too noticeable for comfort. Still they waited, for an hour, he says, before the radio crackled again: “OK to proceed to target.” The cleaning lady had left.

Groat and the others were out of the car within seconds. The embassy staffer let them in the back door. Groat picked the lock on the code room—a small, windowless space secured for secret communications, a standard feature of most embassies—and the team swept inside. Groat opened the safe within 15 minutes, having practiced on a similar model back in the States. The woman and two other officers were trained in photography and what the CIA calls “flaps and seals”; they carefully opened and photographed the code books and one-time pads, or booklets of random numbers used to create almost unbreakable codes, and then resealed each document and replaced it in the safe exactly as it had been before. Two hours after entering the embassy, they were gone.

After dropping the break-in specialists off at their hotel, the driver took the photographs to the U.S. Embassy, where they were sent to CIA headquarters by diplomatic pouch. The next morning, the team flew out.

The CIA is not in the habit of discussing its clandestine operations, but the agency’s purpose is clear enough. As then-chief James Woolsey said in a 1994 speech to former intelligence operatives: “What we really exist for is stealing secrets.” Indeed, the agency declined to comment for this article, but over the course of more than 80 interviews, 25 people—including more than a dozen former agency officers—described the workings of a secret CIA unit that employed Groat and specialized in stealing codes, the most guarded secrets of any nation.

What Groat and his crew were doing followed in the tradition of all espionage agencies. During World War II, for example, Soviet spies stole the secrets of how the United States built the atom bomb, and the British secretly read Nazi communications after acquiring a copy of a German Enigma cipher machine from Polish intelligence. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, targeted the Vichy French Embassy in Washington, D.C. one night in June 1942. An operative code-named Cynthia arranged a tryst inside the embassy with her lover, who was the press attaché there. The tryst, as both knew, was a cover story—a way to explain her presence to the night watchman. After the 31-year-old, auburn-haired spy and her lover stripped in the hall outside the code room, Cynthia, naked but for her pearls and high-heeled shoes, signaled out a window to a waiting OSS safe expert, a specialist known as the “Georgia Cracker.” He soon had the safe open and the codebooks removed; an OSS team photographed the books in a hotel nearby, and Cynthia returned them to the safe before dawn. The stolen codes were said to have helped OSS undercover operations in North Africa that paved the way for the Allied invasion there six months later.

In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin’s mass terror and “cult of personality” in a speech to a closed session of the Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Khrushchev repudiated his predecessor in such stark terms that his speech weakened the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe and contributed to Moscow’s split with China. As word of his “secret speech” filtered out, the CIA fell under enormous pressure to obtain a copy. The agency’s director, Allen W. Dulles, secured one—he never disclosed how, but by most accounts his source was Israeli intelligence—and leaked it to the New York Times. He later wrote that getting the speech was “one of the major intelligence coups” of his career.

In a secret program called HTLINGUAL, the CIA screened more than 28 million first-class letters and opened 215,000 of them between 1953 and 1973, even though the Supreme Court held as far back as 1878 in Ex parte Jackson and reaffirmed in 1970 in U.S. v. Van Leeuwen that the Fourth Amendment bars third parties from opening first-class mail without a warrant. The program’s stated purpose was to obtain foreign intelligence, but it targeted domestic peace and civil rights activists as well. In a 1962 memo to the director of the CIA’s Office of Security, the deputy chief of the counterintelligence staff warned that the program could lead “to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mails” and therefore U.S. intelligence agencies must “vigorously deny” HTLINGUAL, which should be “relatively easy to ‘hush up.’ ”

One of the agency’s most ambitious known theft attempts took place after a Soviet submarine sank in 1968 several hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, losing all hands. After spending at least $200 million to build a ship designed especially for the mission, the agency tried in 1974 to steal the sub from its resting place, 17,000 feet deep. Using a giant claw, the ship, the Glomar Explorer, lifted the sub from the ocean bottom, but it broke in two as it was raised. The agency recovered the forward third of the vessel, but former CIA director William E. Colby confirmed in the French edition of his memoir, which slipped through the agency’s censorship, that the operation fell short of its main objective—recovering the part of the sub containing Soviet nuclear missiles and codebooks.

Codes have always been primary espionage targets, but they have become more valuable as encryption programs have become both more common and more complex. Today, even the National Security Agency, the nation’s code-making and -breaking arm and its largest intelligence agency, has trouble keeping up with the flood of messages it intercepts. When decrypting other countries’ codes is so difficult, the most obvious solution is to steal them.

That is why by 1955, and probably earlier, the CIA created a special unit to perform what the agency calls “surreptitious entries.” This unit was so secret that few people inside CIA headquarters knew it existed; it wasn’t even listed in the CIA’s classified telephone book. Officially it was named the Special Operations Division, but the handful of agency officers selected for it called it the Shop.

In Doug Groat’s time there, in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Shop occupied a nondescript one-story building just south of a shopping mall in the Washington suburb of Springfield, Virginia. The building was part of a government complex surrounded by a chain-link fence; the pebbled glass in the windows let in light but allowed no view in or out. The men and women of the Shop made up a team of specialists: lock pickers, safecrackers, photographers, electronics wizards and code experts. One team member was a master at disabling alarm systems, another at flaps and seals. Their mission, put simply, was to travel the world and break into other countries’ embassies to steal codes, and it was extraordinarily dangerous. They did not have the protection of diplomatic cover; if caught, they might face imprisonment or execution. The CIA, they assumed, would claim it knew nothing about them. “It was generally understood, from talking to the other guys,” Groat recalls. “Nobody ever said it in so many words.”

Groat started working at the Shop in 1982 and became the CIA’s top burglar and premier lock picker. He planned or participated in 60 missions in Europe, Africa, South America and the Middle East. He received several $5,000 awards for successful entry missions—a significant sum for someone earning less than $40,000 a year at the time—as well as an award from the CIA’s Clandestine Service and another from the NSA. In several instances, as in the operation in the Middle East capital, he led the entry team. But that operation was Groat’s last. The simple fact that a cleaning lady had unexpectedly shown up for work set off a chain of events that pit him against his employer. The operations of the Shop, as described by Groat, other former members of the Shop and other intelligence professionals, illustrate the lengths to which the CIA went to steal other nations’ secrets. What happened to Groat illustrates the measures the agency took to protect secrets of its own.

Groat would seem an excellent candidate for the job of stealing codes. Six-foot-three, handsome and articulate, he is a former Green Beret trained in scuba diving, underwater explosives, parachuting, survival and evasion; he knows how to build homemade pistols, shotguns, silencers, booby traps and bombs. He also speaks Mandarin Chinese. He says he relished his work at the Shop—both for the opportunity to serve his country and for the adrenaline rush that came with the risks.

He grew up in Scotia, New York, near Albany. He joined the Army in 1967, before marrying his high-school sweetheart, and served as a captain in the Special Forces. He left after four years and worked in a series of law-enforcement jobs. As a police officer in Glenville, New York, Groat displayed a streak of unyielding resolve: He ticketed fire engines when he believed they were breaking the law. “The trucks would run with lights flashing even when they were not responding to a fire. They were checking the hydrants,” he says. “I warned them, ‘Do it again and I’ll ticket you.’ They did and I did.” After he ticketed the fire chief, Groat was fired. He sued and won his job back—and then, having made his point, quit to become a deputy U.S. marshal in Phoenix.

By then Groat and his wife had a daughter and a son. In 1980, he joined the CIA and moved his family to Great Falls, Virginia. At age 33, he was sent off to the Farm, the CIA’s training base near Williamsburg, to learn the black arts of espionage. Two years later, after testing well for hand coordination and the capacity to pay painstaking attention to detail, he was accepted for the Shop.

In training there he demonstrated an exceptional talent for picking locks, so the CIA sent him to vocational courses in opening both locks and safes. As a result, the CIA’s top burglar was also a bonded locksmith, member number 13526 of the Associated Locksmiths of America. He was also a duly certified member of the Safe and Vault Technicians Association.

Although Hollywood films show burglars with an ear glued to a safe to listen for the tumblers, Groat says it doesn’t work that way. “You feel the tumblers. In your fingers,” he says. “There are three to four wheels in a typical safe combination lock. As you turn the dial you can feel it as you hit each wheel, because there’s extra tension on the dial. Then you manipulate one wheel at a time until the drop lever inside falls into the open position and the safe is unlocked.”

After training came the real thing. “It was exhilarating,” Groat recalls of his first mission, targeting a South American embassy in Northern Europe. When he traveled to a target, he used an alias and carried phony ID—”pocket litter,” as it is known in the trade. His fake identities were backstopped, meaning that if anyone called to check with the real companies listed on his cards, someone would vouch for him as an employee. He also was given bank and credit cards in an alias to pay his travel expenses.

Because Groat’s work was so sensitive, he had to conceal it. Although his wife understood the nature of his work, for years his children did not. “I didn’t know where my father worked until I was in high school, in the ninth or tenth grade,” says Groat’s son, Shawn. “My sister typed a report on special paper that dissolved in water, although we didn’t know it. My father realized what she was doing and said, ‘You can’t use that paper.’ Then he ate the paper.

“He then sat us down and said, ‘I don’t work for the State Department. I work for the CIA.’” The State Department had been his cover story to explain his frequent travels to friends, relatives and neighbors. He said he inspected security at U.S. embassies.

Groat would not talk about which countries’ codes he and his colleagues stole. Other intelligence sources said that in 1989, he led an extraordinary mission to Nepal to steal a code machine from the East German Embassy there—the CIA and the NSA, which worked closely with the Shop, wanted the device so badly that Groat was told to go in, grab the safe containing the code machine and get out. Never mind the rule about leaving no trace; in this case it would be immediately obvious that a very large object was missing.

According to two CIA sources, the agency and the NSA had collected three decades’ worth of encrypted East German communications traffic; the machine would allow them to read it and, if the Soviets and the other Warsaw Pact countries were linked in a common system, perhaps to decrypt Soviet traffic as well.

The CIA station in Katmandu arranged for an official ceremony to be held more than an hour away from the capital and for all foreign diplomats to be invited. The agency knew the East Germans could not refuse to attend. That would leave Groat’s team about three hours to work. Posing as tourists, they arrived in Katmandu two days before the mission and slipped into a safe house. On the appointed day, they left the safe house wearing disguises crafted by a CIA specialist—whole-face latex masks that transformed them into Nepalese, with darker skin and jet-black hair. At the embassy, Groat popped the front door open with a small pry bar. Inside, the intruders peeled off their stifling masks and with a bolt-cutter removed a padlock barring the way to the embassy’s security area. Once in the code room, Groat and two teammates strained to lift the safe from the floorboards and wrestled it down the stairs and out to a waiting van.

They drove the safe to the American Embassy, where it was opened—and found to contain no code machine. Based on faulty intelligence, the CIA had sent its break-in team on a Himalayan goose chase.

In planning an operation, Groat says, he would normally reconnoiter the target personally. But he was told there was no budget to send him before his 1990 mission to the Middle East capital, so he had to rely on assurances from the local CIA station. Although the team accomplished its mission and returned to the Shop within two days, Groat was enraged at what he believed was sloppy advance work.

“It was a near miss, very scary,” he says. “I had to complain. It could have been disastrous for the U.S. government and the officers involved.”

Not to worry, Groat’s boss told him; he would personally tell the official who supervised the Shop what had happened. Groat says his boss warned him that if he went outside channels and briefed the supervisor on his own, “it would end my career.” He went to the supervisor anyway. “I told [him] if we had been caught our agent would be killed,” he says. “He said he didn’t care. That it was an aberration and wouldn’t happen again.” Groat did not back down; in fact, he escalated matters by taking his complaint to the CIA inspector general. The IG at the time was Frederick P. Hitz, who now teaches law at the University of Virginia. Hitz recalls that his office investigated the matter.

“On the issue that preparations for that entry had not been properly made, we did find there was merit in his complaint,” Hitz says. “His grievances had some justification in fact. He felt there was sloppiness that endangered himself and his crew, the safety of the men for whom he was responsible. We felt there was some reason for his being upset at the way his operation was prepared.”

Given the tensions rising between Groat and his managers, the IG also recommended that Groat be transferred to another unit. Hitz says he is fairly certain that he also urged that steps be taken to avoid a repeat of the problems Groat had encountered and that “we expected this not to happen again.” But the recommendation that Groat be transferred created a problem: There was no other unit like the Shop. Groat says he was given a desk at a CIA building in Tysons Corner, in Northern Virginia, but no work to do—for 14 months. In October 1992, he says, he was moved to another office in Northern Virginia but still given no duties. He worked out at a gym in a nearby CIA building and went home by 11 a.m.

By then Groat was at the end of his rope. “I was under more and more pressure” to quit, he says. “I was being pushed out and I was looking at losing my retirement.” He called the inspector general, “and he told me to find another job because I wasn’t going to get my job [at the Shop] back.”

The way Groat saw it, he had risked his life for nearly a decade to perform some of his country’s most demanding, valuable and risky work. He was the best at what he did, and yet that didn’t seem to matter; some bureaucrats had forced him out of the Shop for speaking out.

So he decided to run his own operation. Against the CIA.

In September 1992, Groat sent three anonymous letters to the ambassador of an Asian country revealing an operation he had participated in about a year and a half earlier to bug computers in an embassy the country maintained in Scandinavia. “It was a last-ditch effort to get the agency to pay attention,” Groat says. Clearly, he knew he was taking a terrible risk. At least one letter was intercepted and turned over to the CIA. But one or more may have gotten through, because the bugs suddenly went silent.

By early 1993, CIA counterintelligence officers had launched an investigation to find out who wrote the letters. The FBI was brought in, and its agents combed through the library at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, dusting for prints on a list of foreign embassies in case the letters’ author had found the address there. The FBI “came to my house two or three times,” Groat says. Its agents showed him a form stating that his thumbprints, and the prints of two other people, were identified on the page listing the foreign missions. Of course, that didn’t prove who had written the letters.<

Groat was called into CIA headquarters and questioned. “I knew they didn’t have anything,” he says. “Since I thought I was still in a negotiation with the Office of General Counsel to resolve this whole thing I wasn’t going to say anything. I wanted them to believe I had done it but not know that I had done it. I wanted to let that play out.” When he refused to take a polygraph, he was put on administrative leave.

By the summer of 1994 his marriage was disintegrating, and that October Groat left home. He later bought a Winnebago and began wandering the country with a girlfriend. Meanwhile, he began negotiating a retirement package with the CIA and hired an attorney, Mark Bradley, a former Pakistan analyst for the agency.

In a letter to James W. Zirkle, the CIA’s associate general counsel, Bradley noted that Groat “gave the CIA 14 years of his life….His numerous awards and citations demonstrate how well he performed his assignments, many of which were extremely dangerous. He gave his heart and soul to the Agency and feels that it has let him down.” Groat wanted $500,000 to compensate him, Bradley added, “for the loss of his career.”

In reply, Zirkle wrote that before the agency would consider “the very substantial settlement” being sought, Groat would have “to accurately identify the person…responsible for the compromise of the operation” under investigation. “If he can provide us with clear and convincing corroborating evidence confirming the information that he would provide, we would be prepared to consider not using the polygraph.” But the exchange of letters led nowhere. In September 1996 Groat was divorced, and a month later he was dismissed from the CIA, with no severance and no pension.

Seeking new leverage with the agency, Groat made another risky move: In January 1997 he telephoned Zirkle and said that without a settlement, he would have to earn a living as a security consultant to foreign governments, advising them on how to protect their codes.

Groat’s telephone call detonated like a bombshell at CIA headquarters. Senior officials had long debated what to do about him. Some favored negotiating a money settlement and keeping him quiet; others wanted to take a hard line. Groat’s call intensified the agency’s dilemma, but it seemed to have worked: Zirkle urged patience; a settlement was imminent. “We are working very hard to come to a timely and satisfactory resolution,” the lawyer wrote in a subsequent letter.

That March, Zirkle sent Groat a written offer of $50,000 a year as a contract employee until 2003, when he would be eligible to retire with a full pension. The contract amounted to $300,000—$200,000 less than what Groat had sought. Again, Zirkle reminded him, he would have to cooperate with the counterintelligence investigation. He would be required to take a polygraph, and he would have to agree not to contact any foreign government. Bradley urged his client to take the money and run, but Groat believed the agency’s offer was too low.

Later that month, he visited 15 foreign consulates in San Francisco to drop off a letter in which he identified himself as a former CIA officer whose job was “to gain access to…crypto systems of select foreign countries.” The letter offered his expertise to train security officers on ways to protect “your most sensitive information” but did not disclose any information about how the CIA stole codes. The letter included a telephone number and a mailbox in Sacramento where he could be contacted.

Groat says he had no takers—and claims he didn’t really want any. “I never intended to consult for a foreign country,” he says. “It was a negotiating ploy….Yes, I realized it was taking a risk. I did unconventional work in my career, and this was unconventional.” He did not act secretly, Groat notes; he wanted the agency and the FBI to know. He told the CIA what he planned to do, and he gave the FBI a copy of his letter after he had visited the consulates. The FBI opened another investigation of Groat.

Molly Flynn, the FBI agent assigned to the case, introduced herself to Groat and stayed in touch with him after he moved to Atlanta for training as an inspector for a gas pipeline company. In late March, Groat called Flynn to say he was heading for Pennsylvania to start on his first inspection job.

Flynn invited him to stop off in Washington for a meeting she would arrange with representatives of the CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department to try to resolve the situation. Still hoping to reach a settlement, Groat says, “I accepted eagerly.”

On April 2, 1998, he walked into an FBI building in downtown Washington. Flynn greeted him in the lobby. Had the others arrived yet? he asked as she led him to a first-floor conference room. She said they had not. As the door clicked shut behind him, she delivered unexpected news. “I told him we had resolved the matter, but not to his liking,” Flynn recalls. A man in a white shirt and tie—a Justice Department official, Groat later concluded—told him: “We decided not to negotiate with you. We indicted you instead.” Then the man turned and left.

Groat was arrested and held in the room for five hours. Flynn and two other agents remained with him, he says. His car keys were taken away. “One of the FBI agents said, ‘It probably wouldn’t do much good to ask you questions, would it?’ And I said, ‘No, it wouldn’t.’” After being strip-searched, fingerprinted and handcuffed, he says, he was driven to the Federal District Court building and locked in a cell. Held there for two days, he was strip-searched again in front of eight people, including a female officer, shackled and outfitted with a stun belt. “My eyes were covered with a pair of goggles, the lenses masked over with duct tape,” he says. He was moved by van, with a police escort, to a waiting helicopter.

After a short ride, he was taken to a windowless room that would be his home for the next six months. He was never told where he was, but he was told he was being treated as an “extreme risk” prisoner. The lights in his cell were kept on 24/7, and a ceiling-mounted camera monitored him all the time.<

Robert Tucker, a federal public defender in Washington, was assigned to Groat’s case. When Tucker wanted to visit his client, he was picked up in a van with blacked-out windows and taken to him. Tucker, too, never learned where Groat was being held.

A few days before Groat’s arrest, a federal grand jury in Washington had handed down a sealed indictment accusing him of transmitting, or trying to transmit, information on “the targeting and compromise of cryptographic systems” of unnamed foreign countries—a reference to his distributing his letter to the consulates. The formal charge was espionage, which carries a possible penalty of death. He was also charged with extortion, another reference to his approach to the consulates; the indictment accused him of attempting to reveal “activities and methods to foreign governments” unless the CIA “paid the defendant for his silence in excess of five hundred thousand dollars ($500,000).”

As a trial date approached, prosecutors offered Groat a plea agreement. Although they were not pressing for the death penalty, Groat faced the prospect of life in prison if a jury convicted him of espionage. Reluctantly, he agreed to plead guilty to extortion if the government would drop the spying charges. “I had no choice,” he says. “I was threatened with 40 years to life if I didn’t take the deal.” Groat also agreed to testify fully in the CIA and FBI counterintelligence investigations, and he subsequently confessed that he sent the letters about the bugged computers.

On September 25, 1998, Groat stood before Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Federal District Court in Washington and entered his guilty plea. He was sentenced to five years.

The question of where Groat would serve his time was complicated by what a federal Bureau of Prisons official referred to as his “special abilities.” While still in solitary, he wrote to a friend: “The marshals are treating me like I’m a cross between MacGyver, Houdini and Rambo.” But in the end, he was sent to the minimum-security wing of the federal prison camp in Cumberland, Maryland. “My skills, after all, were not for escaping,” Groat notes. “They were for entering places.”

There Groat was assigned to a case manager, who introduced herself as Aleta. Given her new client’s reputation, she put him in solitary the first night. But officials gradually noticed she and Groat spent a lot of time talking to each other. As a result, he was transferred to the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after two years, but the two corresponded often.

In March 2002, Groat was released a month short of four years, his sentence reduced for good behavior. Aleta was waiting for him at the prison gate, and they were married that December. Today, Doug and Aleta Groat live on 80 acres in the South. He prefers not to disclose his location any more specifically than that. He has not told his neighbors or friends about his previous life as a spy; he works the land and tries to forget the past.

When he looks back, Groat tries to focus on the good parts. “I loved the work at CIA. I’d come back from an op and couldn’t wait for what happens next,” he says. “I thought the work was good for the country. I was saddened by the way I was treated by the agency, because I tried to do my job.”

The CIA was unwilling to talk about Douglas Groat or anything connected with his case. Asked whether it has a team that goes around the globe breaking into foreign embassies and stealing codes, a spokesperson provided a five-word statement: “The CIA declined to comment.”

By David Wise
Smithsonian magazine, October 2012, Subscribe

Find this story at October 2012

© smithsonianmag.com

When a private company is granted a government contract, it’s a stamp of approval. What about the flipside? What does it say when the government—say, the German government—does business with companies involved in abduction and torture? What does it say when German ministries share IT servicers with the CIA and the NSA? And what does it mean for Germany that those same agencies are involved in projects concerning top-secret material including ID cards, firearms registries and emails in the capitol?

NDR (the German public radio and television broadcaster) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ, Germany’s leading broadsheet newspaper) are proving that these aren’t just hypothetical questions. Especially when it comes to spying, security and an American contractor called Computer Sciences Corporation, the CSC.

Khaled el-Masri sits blindfolded in a container in Kabul. His hands are tied and he can hear a plane engine. It’s a white gulfstream jet. It’s May 28, 2004 and el-Masri has lived through hell. For five months he was tortured while in U.S. custody. He was beaten and humiliated. He received enemas and had to wear diapers. He was drugged and interrogated repeatedly. All this is public knowledge. It eventually became clear—even to the CIA—that they had the wrong man; el-Masri was innocent.

That’s where the CSC comes in.

The CIA had had good experiences with the company for years, as one of its largest private contractors. The mission: the unrightfully detained prisoners should be unobtrusively removed from Afghanistan. So, the CSC subcontracted a company with a jet. Records from July 2, 2004 show that the CSC paid $11,048.94 to have el-Masri picked up in Kabul, flown in handcuffs to Albania and once there driven to some hinterland and dropped-off. Mission accomplished.

Everyone knows about the el-Masri case, but it doesn’t stop the contracts from coming in. The German government continues to give work to the CSC. In the past five years German ministries have given over 100 contracts to the CSC and its subsidiaries. Since 2009 alone, the CSC has earned €25.5 million, some $34.5 million. And since 1990, it’s earned almost €300 million, some $405 million, from its German contracts.

We paid a visit to the German headquarters at 1 Abraham Lincoln Park in Wiesbaden, Germany. It’s a modern building made of grey concrete, a little metal and a lot of glass. The receptionists are friendly, but will they talk? No one here wants to talk.

The German branch of the CSC was incorporated in 1970. On the CSC’s homepage it states vaguely that the company is a world leader in providing “technology enabled business solutions and services”.

In fact, the CSC is a massive company with at least 11 subsidiaries in 16 locations in Germany alone. It’s no coincidence that these locations are often close to U.S. military bases. The CSC and its subsidiaries are part of a secret industry, the military intelligence industry. And they do the work traditionally reserved for the military and intelligence agencies, but for cheaper and under much less scrutiny.

Related branches in this industry include security servicers, such as Blackwater (now going by the name Academi). Blackwater is now being legally charged for a massacre in Iraq. And then there’s Caci, whose specialists were allegedly involved in Abu Ghraib and the ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods used there.

German CSC operations refuse to be tarnished by their bad reputation in the Middle East. Every year German companies including Allianz, BASF, Commerzbank and Dailmer pay for their services. Mostly they pay for IT consulting. But some German ministries who are among their regular costumers request more than IT help.

The CSC’s annual report says nothing abduction. (They don’t advertise that on their homepage either.) For that kind of information you have to read investigative reports or human rights organization statements.

And the Ministry of the Interior is quick to say: “Neither the federal government nor the Office of Procurement know of any allegations against the U.S. parent company of CSC Germany.”

The first report of the CSC’s involvement in extraordinary rendition flights came out in 2005 in the Boston Globe and then again in 2011 in the Guardian. Since then at least 22 subsequent contracts have been signed, among them a contract to begin a national arms registry.

After the abduction and torture of el-Masri, in 2006, the CSC sold its subsidiary Dyncorp. But the CSC remains more involved than ever in American intelligence operations. Thus, the company was part of a consortium that was awarded the so-called Trailblazer project by the NSA. The contract was to build a giant data vacuum, which would have dwarfed the later-developed PRISM program whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world. The program ran over budget, failed and was cancelled altogether. But the CSC continued to be granted contracts.

Basically, the CSC is like the IT department for the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. And this is the company that has been handling German information at the highest of levels security for years.

A few examples? The CSC tested the controversial Trojan horse spyware for the Federal Criminal Police Office. It helped the Justice Department implement electronic federal court recordkeeping. It has received several contracts to encrypt government communications.

Should Germany be putting so much trust in the CSC, when the company’s more important partner is the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

The Federal Ministry of the Interior who awards the framework agreements assures us, “usually there is a clause in the contracts prohibiting confidential information be passed onto third parties.”

Somehow, that’s not very assuring.

By Christian Fuchs, John Goetz, Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer
November 16, 2013 12:55 pm CET

Find this story at 16 November 2013

Copyright © Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Eigenrichting in de oorlog tegen de ‘terreur

In de zogenaamde oorlog tegen het terrorisme zijn de missers allang geen uitzondering meer. Precisie bombardementen die burgers doden, willekeurige arrestaties, ‘verdwijningen’ en andere praktijken die doen denken aan de donkere dagen in Latijns Amerika maken stelselmatig deel uit van deze ‘oorlog’. Alles in dienst van het grotere goed, de bescherming van de Westerse heilstaat. Wie is er echter nog veilig. Het verhaal van Khaled el-Masri toont aan dat medewerkers van inlichtingendiensten en leger kunnen opereren met medeweten van hun superieuren. Vervolging en straf zullen ze niet snel oplopen. Het slachtoffer Khaled el-Masri, een Duits Staatsburger, wordt dubbel gestraft.

Verdwijning

Op 31 december 2003 wordt Khaled el-Masri bij de grensplaats Tabanovce (Kumanovo) tussen Servië en Macedonië aangehouden en overgebracht naar een kamer in hotel Skopski Merak in Skopje. De aanhouding wordt uitgevoerd door de State Security and Counterintelligence Directorate (UBK) van Macedonië. Verschillende leden van de UDBK staan op de loonlijst van de CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Na de arrestatie door de UBK wordt hij eerst door de agenten van de UBK ondervraagd over al Qaida, al Haramain, de Moslimbroeders en enkele andere terroristische organisaties. De aandacht van de ondervragers gaat vooral uit naar het dorp Kondovo waar een islamitische school gevestigd is die volgens de UBK als dekmatel van al Qaida fungeert. Masri ontkent alles en zegt dat hij een reis heeft geboekt naar Skopje met het reisbureau Touring/Ulm. Hij is vanuit Ulm/Neu Ulm zijn woonplaats met de bus onderweg naar Macedonië.
De agenten van de UBK dragen Masri over aan de CIA die hem 23 dagen in de hotelkamer vasthouden. In de hotelkamer wordt hij ondervraagd in het Engels, een taal die hij niet helemaal begrijpt. De vragen gaan in tegenstelling tot de verhoren door de UBK over Neu Ulm. Over zijn kennissen, wie zijn moskee, the Ulm Multicultural Center and Mosque (Multi-Kultur-Haus), bezoeken, over contacten in Noorwegen en over een bijeenkomst in Jalalabad, Afghanistan waar Masri aanwezig zou zijn geweest. Masri ontkent elke betrokkenheid en wil een advocaat of een medewerker van de Duitse ambassade in Macedonië spreken. Uiteindelijk zeggen zijn ondervragers dat hij naar Duitsland wordt teruggebracht.
Dhr. el-Masri wordt echter op 23 januari 2004 met een Boeing 737-7ET met serienummer N313P (nu N4476S) overgebracht van Skopje naar Kabul. Het vliegtuig staat op naam van Premier Executive Transport Services, een bedrijf uit Massachusetts in de Verenigde Staten. De ‘schuilnamen’ van de piloten zijn door het Duitse programma Panorama onthult en later door de Los Angeles Times aangevuld met de echte namen van de piloten. Het gaat om Harry Kirk Elarbee (alias Kirk James Bird), Eric Robert Hume (alias Eric Matthew Fain) en James Kovalesky (alias James Richard Fairing). Zij werken voor Aero Contractors, een bedrijf dat waarschijnlijk de voortzetting is van Air America. Het laatste bedrijf was actief tot in de jaren zeventig als geheime vliegtuigmaatschappij van de CIA.
De N313P zou volgens de Spaanse autoriteiten op 22 januari 2004 vanuit Algiers naar de luchthaven Son Sant Joan op het eiland Mallorca zijn gevlogen. De volgende dag heeft het koers gezet naar Skopje, Macedonië. Dhr. Masri heeft in zijn Duitse paspoort een stempel van vertrek uit Macedonië van Skopje airport (LWSK vliegveldcode). De Minister van Binnenlandse Zaken van Macedonië beweert later het tegendeel. Volgens hem is Masri niet vertrokken van het vliegveld, maar is hij bij de grensplaats Blace met Kosovo het land verlaten. De N313P vliegt via Bagdad (ORBI) naar Kabul (OAKB). In Bagdad wordt er bijgetankt.
In Kabul wordt Masri opgesloten in de “Salt Pit” een verlaten steenfabriek in de buurt van Kabul die door de CIA wordt gebruikt om ‘high-level teror suspects’ vast te houden. Tijdens zijn verblijf wordt hij ondervraagd door mannen met bivakmutsen. In maart 2004 begint Masri samen met enkele andere gevangenen een hongerstaking. Na 27 dagen krijgt hij bezoek van twee niet gemaskerde Amerikanen, de Amerikaanse gevangenisdirecteur en de ‘Boss’, een Amerikaanse hoge officier. Zij geven toe dat hij niet opgesloten hoort te zijn, maar kunnen hem niet vrijlaten zonder toestemming van Washington. Dhr. el-Masri krijgt ook nog bezoek van een man die zich voorstelt als ‘Sam’. ‘Sam’ is de eerste Duitssprekende persoon die Masri tijdens zijn gevangenschap ontmoet. De man stelt echter dezelfde vragen over extremisten in Neu Ulm. ‘Sam’ bezoekt Masri nog drie maal in de ‘Salt Pit’ en begeleid hem in het vliegtuig terug naar Europa.
Op 28 mei 2004 keert een Gulfstream (GLF3) met registratienummer N982RK terug van Kabul naar een militair vliegveld in Kosovo. Dhr. Khaled el-Masri bevindt zich in het vliegtuig. Na de landing wordt Masri, nog steeds geblinddoekt, in een auto gezet en op een verlaten landweg afgezet.
Tijdens zijn verblijf in Skopje en in Kabul wordt dhr. el-Masri mishandeld, gemarteld en ondervraagd. Er wordt geen aanklacht tegen hem ingediend en er volgt geen rechtzaak. Na vijf maanden wordt de man op straat gezet. Terug in Ulm/Neu Ulm ontdekt hij dat zijn vrouw en kinderen verhuist zijn. Zij hebben Duitsland verlaten toen el-Masri niet van vakantie was teruggekeerd en wonen in Libanon. Drie jaar later zonder steun van de Duitse en Amerikaanse overheid draait Masri door. Hij bespuugt een verkoopster in een winkel, slaat een leraar van een bijscholingsinstituut in elkaar en zet een filiaal van de winkelketen Metro in brand. Masri belandt in een psychiatrisch ziekenhuis.

Inlichtingen

Na zijn terugkeer naar Duitsland probeerde dhr. Masri zijn onschuld aan te tonen en de zaak te onderzoeken. Al snel wordt duidelijk dat de Amerikaanse overheid in het geheel niet meewerkt. Het duurt tot december 2005 voordat van officiële zijde enige erkenning komt van de ontvoering van Masri. Daarvoor, begin 2005, berichtten eerst de New York Times, de Süddeutsche Zeitung en het ZDF programma frontal 21 over de verdwijning van Masri. Bij de berichtgeving over het zogenaamde Rendition programma speelt Masri een belangrijke rol. Zijn verhaal is goed gedocumenteerd.
Als eind november 2005 voor het bezoek van de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Rice, de Washington Post een gedetailleerde reconstructie van het verhaal Masri publiceert lijkt de zaak rond. De Amerikanen zeggen dat de verdwijning van dhr. el-Masri een vergissing was. Er zou sprake zijn van een persoonsverwisseling. De persoon die de CIA wilde ontvoeren zou Khaled al-Masri heten en niet el-Masri. Waarom Masri dan zo lang moest worden vastgehouden, gemarteld en ondervraagd wordt geweten aan het feit dat de CIA geloofde dat het paspoort van Masri vals was. Eén letter verschil en de verdenking van een vals paspoort waren de aanleiding voor een vijf maanden brute behandeling door ’s werelds meest geavanceerde geheime dienst, de CIA? De media accepteerden de knieval. De cowboy mentaliteit van Bush en de strijd tegen de terreur deden de rest. Een vergissing is menselijk. Vergissingen die geen uitzondering zijn zoals wij al eerder schreven in relatie tot rendition en de terreurlijsten van de Verenigde Staten, Verenigde Naties en de Europese Unie.
In het artikel van de Washington Post zegt Rice echter ook dat zij de toenmalige Duitse minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Otto Schily over Khaled el-Masri in 2004 al had ingelicht en dat de Amerikanen de zaak stil wilden houden. Masri was zwijggeld geboden door de CIA. Het politieke gedraai kan beginnen. Schily ontkent in eerste instantie dat hij in 2004 iets van de zaak Masri wist. Later geeft hij toe dat in een gesprek met de Amerikaanse ambassadeur in Duitsland, Daniel Coats, in 2004 de zaak is besproken, maar dat hem op het hart is gedrukt het niet verder te vertellen, zo verklaart Schily. De huidige minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en voormalig chef van de kanselarij in de regering Schroder, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, komt door het gesprek tussen Schily en Coats in het nauw. Als chef van de kanselarij moet hij van de inhoud van het gesprek op de hoogte zijn geweest. Hetzelfde geldt voor de voormalig minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Joschka Fischer. Er ontstaat een schijngevecht tussen Duitsland en de Verenigde Staten. De Duitse justitie vaardigt een arrestatiebevel uit tegen dertien personen die betrokken zijn geweest bij de ontvoering van Masri. In september 2007 wordt duidelijk dat Duitsland het verzoek tot uitlevering van de dertien verdachten in de zaak Masri intrekt. Ondertussen waren er al diverse rechtzaken in de Verenigde Staten door Masri en zijn advocaat gestart. De rechtbanken oordelen keer op keer dat zij de zaak niet in behandeling nemen met het oog op nationale veiligheid en de bescherming van staatsgeheimen. Khaled el-Masri vangt bot en belandt in het gekkenhuis.

Onschuld?

De zaak Khaled el-Masri is exemplarisch voor de oorlog tegen het terrorisme. De Amerikanen marcheren als een olifant over de wereld in de hoop zogenaamde terroristen te doden, te arresteren, te martelen en te verhoren. Mensenrechten zijn allang bijzaak in deze oorlog die sterk lijkt op de wijze waarop de Verenigde Staten in de jaren zeventig en tachtig in Latijns Amerika hebben geopereerd. Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Fallujah, standrechtelijke executies, precisie bombardementen die trouwerijen raken en verdwijningen zijn geen uitzondering, maar regel. De Europese Unie lijkt steeds de gematigde kracht. Het opgeheven vingertje, uitgebreide discussies over wel of niet blijven in Irak of Afghanistan. Opbouwen of vechten. Het genuanceerde standpunt komt uit de Europese Unie lijkt de boodschap. De zaak Khaled el-Masri maakt echter iets anders duidelijk.
De Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Rice, gaf aan dat er overleg was geweest tussen haar toenmalige ambtsgenoot Otto Schily en de Amerikaanse ambassadeur. Dit gebeurde vlak na de vrijlating van Masri in Albanië in mei 2004. De Amerikaanse overheid toonde zich niet erg bereidwillig stukken over te dragen, maar hetzelfde geldt voor de Duitse overheid. Dat Duitsland dieper in het verhaal Masri zat werd in juni 2006 duidelijk. Een agent van de Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), de Duitse CIA, weet zich tijdens de ondervraging voor de parlementaire onderzoekscommissie naar de rol BND bij de oorlog in Irak te herinneren dat in januari 2004 een onbekende hem over de arrestatie van een Duitse staatburger vertelde. De ontmoeting met de onbekende vond plaats in de kantine van de Duitse Ambassade in Skopje, Macedonië. De New York Times weet te melden dat de autoriteiten in Macedonië de Duitse ambassade in januari 2004 hebben ingelicht over de arrestatie en overdracht aan de Amerikanen van dhr. El-Masri. Het blijft onduidelijk waarom de Duitse autoriteiten zich niet om el-Masri hebben bekommerd. Onmacht, vergeetachtigheid, onwil?

Opzet?

Het tijdstip van de Duitse medeweten schuift steeds verder op. In september 2003 begint de politie in Baden-Württemberg met het filmen van de ingang van het Ulm Multicultural Center and Mosque (multi-kultur-haus), de enige moskee voor moslims in de wijde omgeving. Dit is bekend geworden via de regionale media doordat de politie gebruik maakte van een privé CB frequentie (het ouderwetse bakkie). El-Masri moet zijn opgevallen, hoewel hij niet een speciale bezoeker was, kwam hij toch regelmatig voor het vrijdag gebed in de moskee.
De observatie en het overleg met de autoriteiten in Macedonië op de Duitse ambassade moet betekenen dat de Bundesnachrichtendienst meer wist over Khaled el-Masri dan tot nu toe door de verschillende ministers en ex-ministers wordt toegegeven. Is de verdwijning van Masri dan misschien met medeweten van de Duitsers gebeurd? Hebben die een oogje dichtgeknepen en geen vragen gesteld nadat het bekend was geworden? Of was het een samenwerking tussen de Duitsers en de Amerikanen? Het lijkt erop dat Khaled el-Masri op een lijst stond van mogelijke verdachten van terrorisme. In zo’n geval ben je, je leven niet meer zeker en wordt de rechtstaat opzij gezet. De Duitsers wilden echter schone handen pretenderen, de Amerikanen met hun lange historie van low intensity warfare in Indo China, Latijns Amerika, Afrika en Centraal Azië maakt het allemaal niet uit. De grote vraag is dan natuurlijk of Masri op een lijst stond?
Ulm/Neu Ulm lijkt niet het toonbeeld van het centrum van het islamitisch radicalisme. Volgens geheime diensten is het dat echter wel en speelde het een centrale rol in de zogenaamde islamitische Jihad. Het Multi-Kultur-Haus in Ulm werd om die reden op 28 december 2005 op last van het Beierse ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken gesloten. Wat was er aan de hand?
Volgens zowel de Amerikaanse CIA en de Duitse BND hebben verschillende terroristen Ulm bezocht. Mohammed Atta, veronderstelde leider van de aanslagen van 11 september 2001, en Said Bahaji, de logistieke leider van de aanslagen van 11 september, zouden op bezoek zijn geweest in het Kultur-Haus en bij de in Ulm woonachtige chirurg el-A. Dit is door een taxi chauffeur uit Ulm in oktober 2006 aan het Duitse tijdschrift Der Stern en het Ard-magazine Report Mainz vertelt. Volgens beide media bevestigen bronnen binnen het Landeskriminalamt (LKA) de verklaring van de chauffeur. El-A., die nu in Sudan zou verblijven, zou contact onderhouden met Mamdouh Mahmud Salim de ‘boekhouder’ van al Qaida. Mohammed Atta lijkt vele levens te hebben gehad en overal op te duiken, zijn plotselinge aanwezigheid in Ulm, waarschijnlijk voor 11 september 2001 blijft onduidelijk. Wel verklaart het de vragen van de CIA agenten in Kabul aan Khaled el-Masri. Naast Ulm ondervroegen ze hem ook over de Hamburgse cel.
Ook aanwezig in het Multi-Kultur-Haus zou Reda Seyam zijn. Hij wordt in verband gebracht met de aanslagen in Bali van oktober 2002, maar is daarvoor nooit aangeklaagd. Zijn ex-vrouw heeft een boek over hem geschreven, onder de titel ‘Mundtot, Ich war die Frau eine Gotteskriegers’, waarin ze hem afschilderd als jihad strijder. In dit gezelschap zou el-Masri zich hebben begeven en met hem vele andere bezoekers van het Kultur-Haus. Waarom is Masri uitgekozen? Dacht de CIA dat hij op weg was naar Irak, Afghanistan, Tsjetsjenië of een andere conflicthaard? Of dachten ze dat hij meer wist en meer betrokken was? Of hoopten ze hem te kunnen werven als informant?
De interesse van de CIA in de islamitische scène in Ulm gaat terug naar 11 september 2001. Naar alle waarschijnlijkheid zijn de Duitsers bij die interesse betrokken. Een vreemd incident in Ulm in april 2003 maakt die voorkennis van de Duitsers duidelijk. Een echtpaar krijgt begin april bezoek van een man die volgens het echtpaar een Amerikaans accent heeft. De man zegt van de politie te zijn maar identificeert zich niet als zodanig. Hij wil het huis aan de overkant observeren. Overrompelt door het gedrag van de man laten ze de zwaar gewapende man binnen, maar bellen later wel de politie om uit te zoeken wat er aan de hand is. De Duitse politie komt enkele dagen later ook observeren, maar reppen met geen woord over de Duitser met het Amerikaanse accent. Voor het echtpaar is tot dan toe niet duidelijk waarom het huis aan de overkant moet worden geobserveerd. Uiteindelijk horen ze dat aan de overkant de weduwe woont van een man die in Tsjetsjenië aan de zijde van het verzet bij gevechten is omgekomen. Herhaaldelijk verzoeken van het echtpaar om foto’s te worden getoond van de zwaar bewapende Duitser met een Amerikaans accent hebben tot nu toe niets opgeleverd. Naar alle waarschijnlijkheid was de observatie een Duits Amerikaanse samenwerking.
Khaled el-Masri woonde niet bij de weduwe in huis. Dat kan niet de aanleiding voor zijn verdwijning zijn geweest. Hij is in de ‘Salt Pit’ in Kabul wel naar Tsjetsjeense contacten gevraagd. Ook door de Duits sprekende agent die Masri naar Albanië terug escorteerde. ‘Sam’ zoals hij zichzelf noemde is of als CIA agent werkzaam geweest op de Amerikaanse ambassade in Duitsland en nu woonachtig in de Verenigde Staten zoals dhet Duitse tijdschrift der Stern beweert of een medewerker van het Bundeskriminalamt zoals andere bronnen beweren. In het eerste geval zou het om Tomas V. gaan die door journalisten van der Stern in Mclean, Virginia (Verenigde Staten) is bezocht. In het tweede geval zou het om Gerhard Lehman gaan een BKA beambte.
Welke ‘Sam’ het ook is, de aanwijzingen dat Duitsland betrokken is geweest bij de ‘verdwijning’ van Khaled el-Masri zijn sterk. De Duits Amerikaanse samenwerking is ook formeel geregeld via de aanwezigheid van Duitse verbindingsofficieren op het Amerikaanse hoofdkwartier van EUCOM in Stuttgart-Vaihingen. De zaak el-Masri staat in het verlengde van de steun van Duitsland aan Amerika in de oorlog in Irak. Voor de buitenwacht leek Duitsland fel tegenstander, maar in werkelijkheid ondersteunden de Duitsers de invasie met inlichtingen en manschappen.
Het ARD magazine Report Mainz schrijft op basis van een geheim BKA dossier dat Masri contacten had binnen de radicaal islamitische wereld. Zoals aangegeven bezocht hij de moskee die blijkbaar gezien werd als het centrum van islamitische Jihad in Zuid Duitsland. Is dat dan de reden om iemand te doen verdwijnen, te mishandelen, te martelen en bruut te ondervragen? Is dat de Westerse heilstaat die wij moeten verdedigen? Ook al zou Masri verdachte contacten hebben gehad, dan nog geldt ook voor hem dat iemand onschuldig is tenzij het tegendeel is bewezen. Ambtenaren in de dienst van de Duitse staat die willens en wetens hun mond hebben gehouden lijken zich even weinig te bekommeren om de rechtstaat als de CIA agenten die Masri uiteindelijk hebben doen verdwijnen en die daarvoor niet berecht kunnen worden. Hoeveel meer mensen zijn er verdwenen? Of is iedereen bang om gek te worden net als Masri? Khaled el-Masri heeft geluk gehad. Wat als hij voor het instappen in het vliegveld in Skopje ja had gezegd op de vraag ben je lid van al Qaida? Na 23 dagen had hij nog de helderheid van geest om nee te zeggen en ja tegen terugkeer naar Duitsland. Want dat was de deal die hem was geboden. Lidmaatschap bekennen en vrijlating, alsof geheime diensten op hun woord moeten worden geloofd. Net als in de jaren zeventig en tachtig toen de Amerikanen zich misdroegen in Latijns Amerika houdt Europa zich nu ook stil. Onderzoekscommissies ten spijt, wordt ook hier de rechtstaat terzijde geschoven als er een verdenking van terrorisme is.

Find this story at 29 November 2007

Banking group, which has £8.5m slice of CSC, is under pressure along with other City investors from human rights charity

Computer Sciences Corporation, according to Reprieve, organised a flight that took Khaled al-Masri, a German mistakenly imprisoned by the CIA, from a secret detention centre in Afghanistan to Albania in 2004. Photograph: Thomas Kienzle/AP

Lloyds Banking Group has become embroiled in a row over its investment in a company accused of involvement in the rendition of terror suspects on behalf of the CIA.

Lloyds, which is just under 40% owned by the taxpayer, is one of a number of leading City institutions under fire for investing in US giant Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which is accused of helping to organise covert US government flights of terror suspects to Guantánamo Bay and other clandestine “black sites” around the world.

Reprieve, the legal human rights charity run by the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, alleges that during the flights, suspects – some of whom were later proved innocent – were “stripped, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, goggles and earphones, and had their hands and feet shackled”. Once delivered to the clandestine locations, they were subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation and forced into stress positions, a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says.

CSC, which is facing a backlash for allegedly botching its handling of a £3bn contract to upgrade the NHS IT system, has refused to comment on claims it was involved in rendition. It has also refused to sign a Reprieve pledge to “never knowingly facilitate torture” in the future. The claims about its involvement in rendition flights have not been confirmed.

Reprieve has written to CSC investors to ask them to put pressure on the company to take a public stand against torture.

Some of the City’s biggest institutions, including Lloyds and insurer Aviva, have demanded that CSC immediately address allegations that it played a part in arranging extraordinary rendition flights.

Aviva, which holds a small stake in CSC via US tracker funds, said it had written to CSC’s executives to demand an investigation. The insurer said it would take further action if it was confirmed that CSC was linked to torture. “Aviva is of course concerned by the allegations made against CSC,” said a spokesman. “We are a signatory to the United Nations global compact, and support human rights principles, as outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is not yet clear that CSC is directly complicit in the activities outlined and we have written to the company seeking clarification. We will investigate these allegations further and take action as appropriate.”

Lloyds said it was taking the allegations seriously and had launched its own investigation. A spokesman said: “Our policy is clear, we will not support companies whose ongoing business activities are illegal in the UK and breach the requirements of international conventions as ratified by the UK government. We are not aware of evidence that CSC is currently committed to activities inconsistent with our policy.”

Lloyds holds an £8.5m stake in CSC via its Scottish Widows funds that track the S&P 500 index of America’s biggest companies.

HSBC, another investor, said that it was not aware of evidence that CSC was breaching its ethical investment code.

CSC’s alleged involvement with rendition came about after it purchased DynCorp, which was involved in hundreds of prisoner transfer flights, in 2003. While CSC went on to sell DynCorp in 2005, Reprieve alleges that CSC continued to be involved in the supervision of rendition flights until the end of 2006.

None of CSC’s top 10 shareholders, including fund managers Dodge & Cox, Fidelity, Blackrock and Guggenheim Capital, a fund manager founded by a grandson of philanthropist Solomon Guggenheim, responded to the allegations made in a letter from Reprieve. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is also an investor.

One of the biggest investors, which declined to be identified due to its policy of refusing to comment on investment decisions, said its executives were “extremely concerned” about CSC’s alleged links to torture, and managers raised their concerns with CSC as soon as it was made aware of the allegations by the Guardian.

Reprieve’s legal director, Cori Crider, said: “CSC evidently thinks it’s fine to profit from kidnap and torture as long as their shareholders are happy. It is now up to those shareholders, including British banks, pension funds and UK government [via Lloyds], to show this isn’t the case. These institutions must insist that CSC take their ethical concerns seriously. Alternatively, they can vote with their feet.”

Crider told investors that Reprieve had obtained an invoice indicating CSC organised a flight that took Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen mistakenly imprisoned by the CIA, from a secret detention centre in Afghanistan to Albania in May 2004. The charity said in its letter: “Having belatedly concluded after months of torture and interrogation that they had imprisoned the wrong man, the CIA, acting through CSC, arranged for Richmor Aviation jet N982RK to transfer Mr al-Masri from an Afghan ‘black site’ to a remote roadside in Albania.”

In a letter to Reprieve, Helaine Elderkin, CSC’s vice-president and senior deputy general counsel, said: “CSC’s board of directors … have a corporate responsibility programme that fosters CSC’s growth by promoting and increasing the value of the company to its shareholders, clients, communities and employees.”

Lisa Nandy, the Labour MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on international corporate responsibility, also called on CSC’s biggest investors to hold the company to account. “Investors have a unique responsibility to hold businesses accountable for their ethical conduct, particularly in relation to human rights. Corporates should conduct due diligence down their supply chains to protect human rights, working under the assumption that business should do no harm. Those that refuse to do so should have investment withdrawn,” she said.

“The UK must take the lead in this area and ensure its institutional investors, many of which are using pension funds to allow grievous abuse, are asking tough questions at board level, demanding changes in behaviour and a corporate policy to uphold human rights.”

CSC is being sued by some of its investors in relation to its £3bn contract to upgrade NHS computer systems.

Rupert Neate
The Guardian, Sunday 6 May 2012 19.18 BST

Find this story at 6 May 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Entführen für die CIA, spionieren für die NSA? Die Firma CSC kennt wenig Skrupel. Auf ihrer Kundenliste steht auch die Bundesregierung. Die weiß angeblich von nichts.

Keine Frage, ein Auftrag der Bundesregierung schmückt jede Firma. Aber wie ist es andersherum? Kann, darf, soll die Berliner Regierung mit jeder beliebigen Firma ins Geschäft kommen? Sicher nicht – so viel ist einfach zu beantworten; dafür gibt es unzählige Regeln, fast alle beschäftigen sich mit formalen Dingen.

Und was ist mit den moralischen? Sollte eine deutsche Bundesregierung beispielsweise Geschäfte mit einer Firma eingehen, die in Entführungen, in Folterungen verwickelt ist? Sollten sich deutsche Ministerien etwa einen IT-Dienstleister teilen mit CIA, NSA und anderen amerikanischen Geheimdiensten, zumal wenn es um sensible Aufgaben geht, um Personalausweise, Waffenregister und die E-Mail-Sicherheit im Berliner Regierungsviertel?

Recherchen von NDR und Süddeutscher Zeitung belegen, dass beides der Fall gewesen ist beziehungsweise noch immer ist. Es geht um Geschäftsbeziehungen zu einer Firma namens Computer Sciences Corporation, kurz CSC.

Khaled el-Masri sitzt mit verbundenen Augen und gefesselten Händen in einem Container in Kabul, als er die Motorengeräusche eines landenden Flugzeugs hört, eines weißen Gulfstream-Jets. Es ist der 28. Mai 2004, und el-Masri hat die Hölle hinter sich. Fünf Monate lang war er in US-Gefangenschaft gefoltert worden, im berüchtigten “Salt Pit”-Gefängnis in Afghanistan. Er war geschlagen worden und erniedrigt, vielfach, er hat Einläufe bekommen und Windeln tragen müssen, er ist unter Drogen gesetzt und immer wieder verhört worden. Alles bekannt, alles oft berichtet. Auch, dass den CIA-Leuten irgendwann klar wurde: Sie hatten den Falschen. El-Masri war unschuldig. An dieser Stelle kam CSC ins Spiel.

Die CIA-Leute hatten mit der Firma über Jahre gute Erfahrungen gemacht, sie ist einer der größten Auftragnehmer von Amerikas Geheimdiensten. Die Aufgabe: Der falsche Gefangene sollte unauffällig aus Afghanistan herausgeschafft werden. Das Unternehmen beauftragte dafür seinerseits ein Subunternehmen mit dem Flug – laut Rechnung vom 2. Juni 2004 gegen 11048,94 Dollar – und so wurde al-Masri mit jenem weißen Jet in Kabul abgeholt, gefesselt nach Albanien geflogen, dort in ein Auto umgeladen und im Hinterland ausgesetzt. Mission erfüllt.

Schon zu dieser Zeit machte auch die Bundesregierung mit CSC Geschäfte, und sie tut es bis heute – obwohl die Rolle von CSC im Fall el-Masri ihr bekannt sein müsste. Über 100 Aufträge haben deutsche Ministerien in den vergangenen fünf Jahren an die CSC und seine Tochterfirmen vergeben. Allein seit 2009 erhielt CSC für die Aufträge 25,5 Millionen Euro, von 1990 bis heute sind es fast 300 Millionen Euro.

Besuch in der deutschen Firmenzentrale im Abraham-Lincoln-Park 1 in Wiesbaden. Ein moderner Bau, grauer Sichtbeton, wenig Metall, viel Glas. Steril, kühl, sachlich. Die Angestellten am Empfang sind höflich, aber reden? Reden will hier niemand. Den deutschen Ableger der 1959 in den USA gegründeten Firma gibt es seit 1970. Auf der Homepage heißt es nur vage, das Unternehmen sei weltweit führend in “IT-gestützten Businesslösungen und Dienstleistungen”.

Tatsächlich ist die CSC ein großes Unternehmen, allein in Deutschland gibt es mindestens elf Tochtergesellschaften an insgesamt 16 Standorten. Auffallend oft residieren sie in der Nähe von US-Militärstützpunkten. Kein Zufall. Die CSC und ihre Tochterfirmen sind Teil jenes verschwiegenen Wirtschaftszweigs, der für Militär und Geheimdienste günstig und unsichtbar Arbeiten erledigt. Andere in der Branche sind die Sicherheitsdienstleister von Blackwater (die sich heute Academi nennen), denen im Irak Massaker angelastet werden. Oder Caci, deren Spezialisten angeblich in Abu Ghraib beteiligt waren, wenn es um verschärfte Verhöre ging.

Die deutschen Geschäfte der CSC werden durch den schlechten Ruf im Nahen Osten nicht getrübt: Jedes Jahr überweisen deutsche Firmen wie Allianz, BASF, Commerzbank, Daimler und Deutsche Bahn Millionen. Meist geht es um technische Fragen, um Beratung. Aber zum Kundenstamm zählen auch Ministerien: Mit der Firma CSC Deutschland Solutions GmbH, in deren Aufsichtsrat auch ein ehemaliger CDU-Bundestagsabgeordneter sitzt, wurden innerhalb der vergangenen fünf Jahre durch das Beschaffungsamt des Bundesinnenministeriums insgesamt drei Rahmenverträge geschlossen, die wiederum Grundlage für Einzelaufträge verschiedener Bundesministerien waren.

Im Geschäftsbericht der CSC ist von Entführungsflügen nichts zu finden, auch nicht auf deren Homepage. Dafür muss man schon Untersuchungsberichte lesen oder Reports von Menschenrechtsorganisationen. Was das Bundesinnenministerium indessen nicht zu tun scheint: “Weder dem Bundesverwaltungsamt noch dem Beschaffungsamt waren bei Abschluss der Verträge mit der CSC Deutschland Solutions GmbH Vorwürfe gegen den US-amerikanischen Mutterkonzern bekannt,” sagt ein Sprecher. Den ersten Bericht über die Beteiligung der CSC an CIA-Entführungsflügen gab es 2005 im Boston Globe, 2011 folgte der Guardian. Danach wurden von deutschen Ministerien noch mindestens 22 Verträge abgeschlossen, etwa über Beratungsleistungen bei der Einführung eines Nationalen Waffenregisters.

Zwar hat die CSC ihre Tochterfirma Dyncorp, die einst Khaled el-Masris Verschleppung organisierte, schon 2005* verkauft – dennoch war die CSC auch danach noch immer oder noch viel mehr in amerikanische Geheimdienstaktivitäten involviert. So war die Firma Teil jenes Konsortiums, das den Zuschlag für das sogenannte Trailblazer-Programm der NSA erhielt: Dabei sollte ein gigantischer Datenstaubsauger entwickelt werden, gegen den das durch Edward Snowden öffentlich gewordene Spionageprogramm Prism beinahe niedlich wirken würde. Das Projekt wurde schließlich eingestellt, doch Aufträge bekam die CSC weiterhin. Im Grunde ist das Unternehmen so etwas wie die EDV-Abteilung der US-Geheimdienste. Und ausgerechnet diese Firma wird von deutschen Behörden seit Jahren mit Aufträgen bedacht, die enorm sensibel sind.

Ein paar Beispiele? Die CSC testete den umstrittenen Staatstrojaner des Bundeskriminalamts. Das Unternehmen half dem Justizministerium bei der Einführung der elektronischen Akte für Bundesgerichte. Die CSC erhielt mehrere Aufträge, die mit der verschlüsselten Kommunikation der Regierung zu tun haben. Die CSC beriet das Innenministerium bei der Einführung des elektronischen Passes. Sie ist involviert in das Projekt De-Mail, dessen Ziel der sichere Mailverkehr ist – oder sein sollte. Sollte man solche Aufträge einer Firma überantworten, die im US-Geheimdienst im Zweifel möglicherweise den wichtigeren Partner sieht?

Das zuständige Bundesinnenministerium lässt ausrichten, die Rahmenverträge enthielten “in der Regel Klauseln, nach denen es untersagt ist, bei der Vertragserfüllung zur Kenntnis erlangte vertrauliche Daten an Dritte weiterzuleiten”.

*Anmerkung der Redaktion: In einer früheren Version hieß es, CSC habe Dyncorp 2006 verkauft. Es war 2005.

16. November 2013 08:00 Deutsche Aufträge für CSC
Von Christian Fuchs, John Goetz, Frederik Obermaier und Bastian Obermayer

Find this story at 16 November 2013

Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

WASHINGTON — Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion.

The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.

But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified documents. The supervisor’s cautionary note and the C.I.A.’s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden’s record once the documents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

“It slipped through the cracks,” one veteran law enforcement official said of the report.

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. all declined to comment on the precise nature of the warning and why it was not forwarded, citing the investigation into Mr. Snowden’s activities.

Half a dozen law enforcement, intelligence and Congressional officials with direct knowledge of the supervisor’s report were contacted for this article. All of the officials agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing criminal investigation.

In hindsight, officials said, the report by the C.I.A. supervisor and the agency’s suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Mr. Snowden’s top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the N.S.A. under much greater scrutiny.

“The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn’t passed on,” said a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Mr. Snowden’s activities.

Mr. Snowden now lives in Moscow, where he surfaced this week for the first time since receiving temporary asylum from the Russian government over the summer. On Wednesday night, he met with four American whistle-blowers who have championed his case in the United States and who presented him with an award they said was given annually by a group of retired C.I.A. officers to members of the intelligence community “who exhibit integrity in intelligence.”

In a television interview, one member of the group, Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department official, said that Mr. Snowden “looked great.”

“He seemed very centered and brilliant,” Ms. Radack said. “Smart, funny, very engaged. I thought he looked very well.”

Another of the whistle-blowers, Coleen Rowley, a former F.B.I. agent who testified before the Senate about missteps in the agency’s investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said, “We talked about prior examples of great people in history that had themselves been under this kind of pressure, and he’s remarkably centered.”

On Thursday, Mr. Snowden’s father, Lon, arrived in Moscow to see his son after assurances from Mr. Snowden’s legal aide that there would be “no complications” in organizing a meeting with his father. But in a telephone interview later in the day, Lon Snowden said he had not yet been able to meet with his son.

“I can’t tell you the where and the when,” the elder Mr. Snowden said. “I have no idea. I hope something happens.”

It is difficult to tell what would have happened had N.S.A. supervisors been made aware of the warning the C.I.A. issued Mr. Snowden in what is called a “derog” in federal personnel policy parlance.

“The spectrum of things in your personnel file could be A to Z,” said Charles B. Sowell, who until June was a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence working on improving the security clearance process. “There’s a chance that that information could be missed and might not be surfaced.”

Mr. Sowell, now a senior vice president at Salient Federal Solutions, an information technology company in Fairfax, Va., emphasized that he left the government before Mr. Snowden’s disclosures became public.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials say the report could have affected the assignments Mr. Snowden was given, first as an N.S.A. contractor with the computer company Dell in Japan and later with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, as well as the level of supervision he received.

The electronic systems the C.I.A. and N.S.A. use to manage the security clearances for its full-time and contracted employees are intended to track major rule-based infractions, not less serious complaints about personal behavior, a senior law enforcement official said. Thus, lesser derogatory information about Mr. Snowden was unlikely to have been given to the N.S.A. unless it was specifically requested. As a result of Mr. Snowden’s case, two law enforcement officials said, that flaw has since been corrected and such information is now being pushed forward.

The revelation of the C.I.A.’s derogatory report comes as Congress is examining the process of granting security clearances, particularly by USIS, a company that has performed 700,000 yearly security checks for the government. Among the individuals the company vetted were Mr. Snowden and Aaron Alexis, who the police say shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last month.

“We have a compelling need to monitor those trusted with this sensitive information on a more regular basis and with broader sets of data,” said Kathy Pherson, a former C.I.A. security officer who belongs to an intelligence industry task force that is expected to issue a report on the matter by year’s end.

While it is unclear what exactly the supervisor’s negative report said, it coincides with a period of Mr. Snowden’s life in 2009 when he was a prolific online commenter on government and security issues, complained about civil surveillance and, according to a friend, was suffering “a crisis of conscience.”

Mr. Snowden got an information technology job at the C.I.A. in mid-2006. Despite his lack of formal credentials, he gained a top-secret clearance and a choice job under State Department cover in Geneva. Little is known about what his duties were there.

Mavanee Anderson, who worked with Mr. Snowden in Geneva and also had a high security clearance, said in an article in The Chattanooga Times Free Press of Tennessee in June that when they worked from 2007 through early 2009, Mr. Snowden “was already experiencing a crisis of conscience of sorts.”

“Anyone smart enough to be involved in the type of work he does, who is privy to the type of information to which he was privy, will have at least moments like these,” she said.

Later, Mr. Snowden would tell the newspaper The Guardian that he was shocked and saddened by some of the techniques C.I.A. operatives in Geneva used to recruit sources. “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,” he told The Guardian. “I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”

There were other signs that have since drawn investigators’ attention. In early 2009, someone using Mr. Snowden’s screen name expressed outrage at government officials who leaked information to the news media, telling a friend in an Internet chat that leakers “should be shot.”

“They’re just like WikiLeaks,” Mr. Snowden — or someone identified as him from his screen name, “TheTrueHOOHA,” and other details — wrote in January 2009 about an article in The New York Times on secret exchanges between Israel and the United States about Iran’s nuclear program.

He later told The Guardian he was disappointed that President Obama “advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.”

“I got hardened,” he said.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Washington, and Andrew Roth from Moscow.

October 10, 2013
By ERIC SCHMITT

Find this story at 10 October 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

It was an innocuous e-mail, one of millions sent every day by spouses with updates on the situation at home. But this one was of particular interest to the National Security Agency and contained clues that put the sender’s husband in the crosshairs of a CIA drone.

Days later, Hassan Ghul — an associate of Osama bin Laden who provided a critical piece of intelligence that helped the CIA find the al-Qaeda leader — was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged killing Ghul. But documents provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm his demise in October 2012 and reveal the agency’s extensive involvement in the targeted killing program that has served as a centerpiece of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy.

An al-Qaeda operative who had a knack for surfacing at dramatic moments in the post-Sept. 11 story line, Ghul was an emissary to Iraq for the terrorist group at the height of that war. He was captured in 2004 and helped expose bin Laden’s courier network before spending two years at a secret CIA prison. Then, in 2006, the United States delivered him to his native Pakistan, where he was released and returned to the al-Qaeda fold.

But beyond filling in gaps about Ghul, the documents provide the most detailed account of the intricate collaboration between the CIA and the NSA in the drone campaign.

The Post is withholding many details about those missions, at the request of U.S. intelligence officials who cited potential damage to ongoing operations and national security.

The NSA is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets,” an NSA spokeswoman said in a statement provided to The Post on Wednesday, adding that the agency’s operations “protect the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

In the search for targets, the NSA has draped a surveillance blanket over dozens of square miles of northwest Pakistan. In Ghul’s case, the agency deployed an arsenal of cyber-espionage tools, secretly seizing control of laptops, siphoning audio files and other messages, and tracking radio transmissions to determine where Ghul might “bed down.”

The e-mail from Ghul’s wife “about her current living conditions” contained enough detail to confirm the coordinates of that household, according to a document summarizing the mission. “This information enabled a capture/kill operation against an individual believed to be Hassan Ghul on October 1,” it said.

The file is part of a collection of records in the Snowden trove that make clear that the drone campaign — often depicted as the CIA’s exclusive domain — relies heavily on the NSA’s ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

To handle the expanding workload, the NSA created a secret unit known as the Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell, or CT MAC, to concentrate the agency’s vast resources on hard-to-find terrorism targets. The unit spent a year tracking Ghul and his courier network, tunneling into an array of systems and devices, before he was killed. Without those penetrations, the document concluded, “this opportunity would not have been possible.”

At a time when the NSA is facing intense criticism for gathering data on Americans, the drone files may bolster the agency’s case that its resources are focused on fighting terrorism and supporting U.S. operations overseas.

“Ours is a noble cause,” NSA Director Keith B. Alexander said during a public event last month. “Our job is to defend this nation and to protect our civil liberties and privacy.”

The documents do not explain how the Ghul e-mail was obtained or whether it was intercepted using legal authorities that have emerged as a source of controversy in recent months and enable the NSA to compel technology giants including Microsoft and Google to turn over information about their users. Nor is there a reference to another NSA program facing scrutiny after Snowden’s leaks, its metadata collection of numbers dialed by nearly every person in the United States.

To the contrary, the records indicate that the agency depends heavily on highly targeted network penetrations to gather information that wouldn’t otherwise be trapped in surveillance nets that it has set at key Internet gateways.

The new documents are self-congratulatory in tone, drafted to tout the NSA’s counterterrorism capabilities. One is titled “CT MAC Hassan Gul Success.” The files make no mention of other agencies’ roles in a drone program that escalated dramatically in 2009 and 2010 before tapering off in recent years.

Even so, former CIA officials said the files are an accurate reflection of the NSA’s contribution to finding targets in a campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people, including thousands of alleged militants and hundreds of civilians, in Pakistan, according to independent surveys. The officials said the agency has assigned senior analysts to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and deployed others to work alongside CIA counterparts at almost every major U.S. embassy or military base overseas.

“NSA threw the kitchen sink at the FATA,” said a former U.S. intelligence official with experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan, referring to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the region in northwest Pakistan where al-Qaeda’s leadership is based.

NSA employees rarely ventured beyond the security gates of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, officials said. Surveillance operations that required placing a device or sensor near an al-Qaeda compound were handled by the CIA’s Information Operations Center, which specializes in high-tech devices and “close-in” surveillance work.

“But if you wanted huge coverage of the FATA, NSA had 10 times the manpower, 20 times the budget and 100 times the brainpower,” the former intelligence official said, comparing the surveillance resources of the NSA to the smaller capabilities of the agency’s IOC. The two agencies are the largest in the U.S. intelligence community, with budgets last year of $14.7 billion for the CIA and $10.8 billion for the NSA. “We provided the map,” the former official said, “and they just filled in the pieces.”

In broad terms, the NSA relies on increasingly sophisticated versions of online attacks that are well-known among security experts. Many rely on software implants developed by the agency’s Tailored Access Operations division with code-names such as UNITEDRAKE and VALIDATOR. In other cases, the agency runs “man-in-the-middle” attacks in which it positions itself unnoticed midstream between computers communicating with one another, diverting files for real-time alerts and longer-term analysis in data repositories.

Through these and other tactics, the NSA is able to extract vast quantities of digital information, including audio files, imagery and keystroke logs. The operations amount to silent raids on suspected safe houses and often are carried out by experts sitting behind desks thousands of miles from their targets.

The reach of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations division extends far beyond Pakistan. Other documents describe efforts to tunnel into systems used by al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Africa, each breach exposing other corridors.

An operation against a suspected facilitator for al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen led to a trove of files that could be used to “help NSA map out the movement of terrorists and aspiring extremists between Yemen, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Libya and Iran,” according to the documents. “This may enable NSA to better flag the movement of these individuals” to allied security services that “can put individuals on no-fly lists or monitor them once in country.”

A single penetration yielded 90 encrypted al-Qaeda documents, 16 encryption keys, 30 unencrypted messages as well as “thousands” of chat logs, according to an inventory described in one of the Snowden documents.

The operations are so easy, in some cases, that the NSA is able to start downloading data in less time than it takes the targeted machine to boot up. Last year, a user account on a social media Web site provided an instant portal to an al-Qaeda operative’s hard drive. “Within minutes, we successfully exploited the target,” the document said.

The hunt for Ghul followed a more elaborate path.

Ghul, who is listed in other documents as Mustafa Haji Muhammad Khan, had surfaced on U.S. radar as early as 2003, when an al-Qaeda detainee disclosed that Ghul escorted one of the intended hijackers to a Pakistani safe house a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A trusted facilitator and courier, Ghul was dispatched to Iraq in 2003 to deliver a message to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda firebrand who angered the network’s leaders in Pakistan by launching attacks that often slaughtered innocent Muslims.

When Ghul made another attempt to enter Iraq in 2004, he was detained by Kurdish authorities in an operation directed by the CIA. Almost immediately, Ghul provided a piece of intelligence that would prove more consequential than he may have anticipated: He disclosed that bin Laden relied on a trusted courier known as al-Kuwaiti.

The ripples from that revelation wouldn’t subside for years. The CIA went on to determine the true identity of al-Kuwaiti and followed him to a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed in 2011.

Because of the courier tip, Ghul became an unwitting figure in the contentious debate over CIA interrogation measures. He was held at a CIA black site in Eastern Europe, according to declassified Justice Department memos, where he was slapped and subjected to stress positions and sleep deprivation to break his will.

Defenders of the interrogation program have cited Ghul’s courier disclosure as evidence that the agency’s interrogation program was crucial to getting bin Laden. But others, including former CIA operatives directly involved in Ghul’s case, said that he identified the courier while he was being interrogated by Kurdish authorities, who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts in the background.

The debate resurfaced amid the release of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” last year, in which a detainee’s slip after a brutal interrogation sequence is depicted as a breakthrough in the bin Laden hunt. Ghul’s case also has been explored in detail in a 6,000-page investigation of the CIA interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that has yet to be released.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the panel, sought to settle the Ghul debate in a statement last year that alluded to his role but didn’t mention him by name.

“The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in the statement, which was signed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

The George W. Bush administration’s decision to close the secret CIA prisons in 2006 set off a scramble to place prisoners whom the agency did not regard as dangerous or valuable enough to transfer to Guantanamo Bay. Ghul was not among the original 14 high-value CIA detainees sent to the U.S. installation in Cuba. Instead, he was turned over to the CIA’s counterpart in Pakistan, with ostensible assurances that he would remain in custody.

A year later, Ghul was released. There was no public explanation from Pakistani authorities. CIA officials have noted that Ghul had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group supported by Pakistan’s intelligence service. By 2007, he had returned to al-Qaeda’s stronghold in Waziristan.

In 2011, the Treasury Department named Ghul a target of U.S. counterterrorism sanctions. Since his release, the department said, he had helped al-Qaeda reestablish logistics networks, enabling al-Qaeda to move people and money in and out of the country. The NSA document described Ghul as al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations and detailed a broad surveillance effort to find him.

“The most critical piece” came with a discovery that “provided a vector” for compounds used by Ghul, the document said. After months of investigation, and surveillance by CIA drones, the e-mail from his wife erased any remaining doubt.

Even after Ghul was killed in Mir Ali, the NSA’s role in the drone strike wasn’t done. Although the attack was aimed at “an individual believed to be” the correct target, the outcome wasn’t certain until later when, “through SIGINT, it was confirmed that Hassan Ghul was in fact killed.”

By Greg Miller, Julie Tate and Barton Gellman, Published: October 17

Find this story at 17 October 2013

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