WASHINGTON (Reuters) – White House efforts to soft-pedal the danger from a new “underwear bomb” plot emanating from Yemen may have inadvertently broken the news they needed most to contain.

At about 5:45 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 7, just before the evening newscasts, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top White House adviser on counter-terrorism, held a small, private teleconference to brief former counter-terrorism advisers who have become frequent commentators on TV news shows.

According to five people familiar with the call, Brennan stressed that the plot was never a threat to the U.S. public or air safety because Washington had “inside control” over it.

Brennan’s comment appears unintentionally to have helped lead to disclosure of the secret at the heart of a joint U.S.-British-Saudi undercover counter-terrorism operation.

A few minutes after Brennan’s teleconference, on ABC’s World News Tonight, Richard Clarke, former chief of counter-terrorism in the Clinton White House and a participant on the Brennan call, said the underwear bomb plot “never came close because they had insider information, insider control.”

A few hours later, Clarke, who is a regular consultant to the network, concluded on ABC’s Nightline that there was a Western spy or double-agent in on the plot: “The U.S. government is saying it never came close because they had insider information, insider control, which implies that they had somebody on the inside who wasn’t going to let it happen.”

DOUBLE AGENT

The next day’s headlines were filled with news of a U.S. spy planted inside Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who had acquired the latest, non-metallic model of the underwear bomb and handed it over to U.S. authorities.

At stake was an operation that could not have been more sensitive — the successful penetration by Western spies of AQAP, al Qaeda’s most creative and lethal affiliate. As a result of leaks, the undercover operation had to be shut down.

The initial story of the foiling of an underwear-bomb plot was broken by the Associated Press.

According to National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, due to its sensitivity, the AP initially agreed to a White House request to delay publication of the story for several days.

But according to three government officials, a final deal on timing of publication fell apart over the AP’s insistence that no U.S. official would respond to the story for one clear hour after its release.

When the administration rejected that demand as “untenable,” two officials said, the AP said it was going public with the story. At that point, Brennan was immediately called out of a meeting to take charge of damage control.

Relevant agencies were instructed to prepare public statements and urged to notify Congressional oversight panels. Brennan then started the teleconference with potential TV commentators.

White House officials and others on the call insist that Brennan disclosed no classified information during that conference call and chose his words carefully to avoid doing so.

The AP denies any quid pro quo was requested by them or rejected by the White House. “At no point did AP offer or propose a deal with regard to this story,” said AP spokesman Paul Colford.

As for his appearance on ABC, Richard Clarke acknowledges he made a logical “leap” when he said that “inside control” meant “there was human inside control rather than anything else I could imagine.” But he adds that over the course of a week, ABC “took extraordinary measures … to make sure” that nothing it was planning to broadcast would damage ongoing counter-terrorism operations.

PREMATURE SHUTDOWN

As a result of the news leaks, however, U.S. and allied officials told Reuters that they were forced to end an operation which they hoped could have continued for weeks or longer.

Several days after the first leaks, counter-terrorism sources confirmed to Reuters that a central role in the operation had been played by MI-5 and MI-6, Britain’s ultra-secretive domestic and foreign intelligence services, whose relationship with their American counterparts has been periodically strained by concern about leaks.

These sources acknowledged that British authorities were deeply distressed that anything at all had leaked out about the operation.

The White House places the blame squarely on AP, calling the claim that Brennan contributed to a leak “ridiculous.”

“It is well known that we use a range of intelligence capabilities to penetrate and monitor terrorist groups,” according to an official statement from the White House national security staff.

…

(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Warren Strobel and Jim Loney)

Fri, May 18 2012

By Mark Hosenball

Find this story at 18 May 2013

© Thomson Reuters 2011

The Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records from 20 different phone lines over two months, according to the news agency. The subpoenaed phones records included personal and office lines for several national security reporters and editors as well as “the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.”

Presumably, now that the story has broken, public pressure will compel some sort of explanation from the Department of Justice or the Obama administration. In the meantime, the AP’s own story on the incident strongly suggests a theory for what happened: that the DoJ was looking for the source on the AP’s May 2012 story about a successful CIA operation to thwart a Yemen-based terror plot, a sort of underwear bomber part two.

Here’s what the AP says in its story about the subpoena:

The government would not say why it sought the records. U.S. officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have leaked information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP’s source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information.”

And here’s a snip from the original May 2012 AP story that the agency believes may have started it all. Note that the story seems to cite both the FBI and CIA, as well as revealing that the bomb may not have been detectable by then-current airport security scanners:

US officials say the plot involved an “upgrade” of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.

This new bomb was also built to be used in a passenger’s underwear but contained a more refined detonation system.

The FBI is examining the latest bomb to see whether it could have passed through airport security and brought down an airplane, officials said. They said the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector. But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.

The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought his plane tickets when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It is not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

…

By Max Fisher, Updated: May 13, 2013

Find this story at 13 May 2013

© The Washington Post Company

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly rubber stamped nearly 2,000 government requests to search or electronically monitor people in the United States last year, according to a Justice Department report published this week.

The agency, which oversees requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents on US soil, released the report to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), showing that by approving the 1,856 inquiries “for foreign intelligence purposes,” it had granted every single government request in 2012. The FISC’s approval rating actually jumped by five per cent from 2011 – when it also approved every application.

The FISC was instituted as part of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, expanded under the George W. Bush administration, and then reauthorized by Congress for another five years in December of 2012.
The act, commonly referred to act the “warrantless wiretapping” law, authorizes the government to monitor US citizens’ phone calls and emails without first proving probable cause as long as they’re believed to be corresponding with an individual overseas.

“The 1,856 applications include applications made solely for electronic surveillance, applications made solely for physical search, and combined applications requesting authority for electronic surveillance and physical search,” the report read. “Of these, 1,789 applications included requests for authority to conduct electronic surveillance.”

David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department, wrote in the 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions that the FISA Amendments Act also gives the government domestic spying power while stripping away accountability.

Reuters / Jeremy Papasso

“For example, an authorization targeting Al-Qaeda – which is a non-US person located abroad – could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about Al-Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone,” Kris wrote, as quoted by Wired.

…

Published time: May 02, 2013 22:57
Reuters / Jessica Rinaldi

Find this story at 2 May 2013

© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005–2013

Paul Scott, the late syndicated columnist, was so paranoid about the CIA wiretapping his Prince George’s County home in the 1960s that he’d make important calls from his neighbor’s house. His teenage son Jim Scott figured his dad was either a shrewd reporter or totally nuts.

Not until nearly 45 years later did the son learn that his father’s worries were justified. The insight came in 2007 when the CIA declassified a trove of documents popularly called “the family jewels.” The papers detailed the agency’s unlawful activities from long ago, including wiretapping the Scott home in District Heights. The operation even had a code name: “Project Mockingbird.”

Jim was floored: The CIA really did eavesdrop on Dad.

Now Jim, 64, a retired Navy public relations officer who lives in Anne Arundel County, is waging an operation of his own against the agency. For the past five years, he has sought to declassify and make public any documents Langley might still have on his father and why he was wiretapped.

So far, the CIA has released to Jim a handful of intriguing documents. But Jim has been trying to compel the agency to cough up more. A federal declassification review panel is reviewing Jim’s case and could decide as soon as this month whether to direct the CIA to release more Mockingbird documents.

“I don’t have any animosity for the CIA,” said Jim, whose father died at the age of 80 in 2001. “I respect what they do. But they make it extremely difficult for the average citizen to interact with them. It makes me wonder what they are still trying to hide about my father.”

Not eager to share

It’s not easy penetrating one of the world’s most secretive organizations.

Tourists can’t just show up at its famous headquarters, let alone wander into its museum or browse the gift shop that sells CIA T-shirts and tchotchkes. Even former spies-turned-memoirists need agency approval for their manuscripts before publication and often can’t reveal seemingly harmless or boring details about their careers.

For ordinary people — academics, journalists, relatives of former employees — extracting agency information can be tough. They can file Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests or mandatory declassification review requests. But the CIA usually isn’t eager to part with much, said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

“I have a number of requests with the CIA that are more than five years old,” said Aftergood, who has sued the agency a handful of times for documents.

“The message they’re sending is, ‘If you want our attention, sue us,’ ” he said, calling it “a time-consuming and resource-demanding effort.” He usually loses.

Todd Ebitz, an agency spokesman, said the agency received more than 5,400 Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act requests, along with mandatory declassification review requests, in fiscal 2012 . The agency doesn’t keep track of how many of those requests come from ordinary citizens, rather than journalists, academics or nonprofit groups.

Since 1995, he said, the CIA has released more than 10 million pages of declassified material. The agency also has used its discretion to release more than 100,000 pages of CIA material, including documents from the family jewels. But just because documents are old doesn’t mean they can be made public.

“CIA information that is decades old may still be sensitive when it mentions methods, techniques or sources which, if they were revealed, could harm our nation’s security or place someone’s personal security at risk,” Ebitz said. “The agency works diligently to make public information no longer requiring protection, releasing what we can and withholding what we must in the interest of national security.”

The CIA declined to comment on the specifics of Jim Scott’s case. But Tom Blanton, director of the George Washington University-based National Security Archive, questioned the agency’s refusal to release the documents about Jim Scott’s father: “There’s nothing truly secret about the wiretapping of Paul Scott now.”

“What this is really about,” Blanton said, “is bureaucracy and power.”

High-level wiretaps

In June 2007, Jim read about the CIA’s decision to release the family jewels. The collection of long-secret documents revealed details about the agency’s activities from the 1960s and 1970s, including a failed assassination plan against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, a Watergate burglar’s search for an expert lock picker, and illegal wiretaps of reporters.

To Jim’s shock, two of the wiretapped journalists were his father, Paul, and his writing partner, Robert S. Allen, who died in 1981. The men once wrote a syndicated column, the “Allen-Scott Report,” that appeared in 300 newspapers. Their column often contained national security scoops, including exclusives about Soviet aid to Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.

Jim called his mother about the wiretap revelations. She reminded him about the time he complained about hearing strangers’ voices on a phone call with a high school classmate.

“I had heard some clicking in the background,” Jim said, laughing. “I heard someone say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just two kids talking about homework assignments.’ As a teenager, you kinda just blow that stuff off.”

Once the family jewels were posted online, “I couldn’t go to sleep that night, reading the documents,” Jim recalled. “What startled me was the level of seniority that approved this operation.”

The wiretap on his father was described in only three released pages, each stamped with the words “SECRET” and “EYES ONLY.” Every sentence seemed more tantalizing than the next.

Between March 12, 1963, and June 15, 1963, phone bugs were installed at the Allen and Scott homes and their Capitol Hill office. But this was no rogue operation: CIA Director John McCone approved the operation “under pressure,” the documents said, from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. And Kennedy planned it with Robert McNamara, the defense secretary and Vietnam War architect.

The wiretap identified many of the reporting team’s sources: a dozen senators; six congressmen; 11 congressional staffers; 16 “government employees,” including a staff member at the White House and some at the vice president’s office; and “other well-placed individuals,” the documents said.

The journalists actually got more classified information than they could use, the documents noted, and passed the leftovers along to rival reporters.

But several pages were fully or partly redacted. Jim felt teased. Why, he wondered, did the CIA keep those pages secret after so many years? Are the names of all their sources hidden behind the redactions?

“It felt like a half-written Vince Flynn or Michael Connelly novel,” Jim said. “I wondered how much my dad knew about being surveilled. What was going through his mind? He had to be fearful. It felt like this was a chapter in his life we knew little about, and the release of [more] documents could shed some light.”

So, in 2008, the son filed his first Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA.

Clues from the FBI

Twelve months later, the agency mailed Jim a packet of partially redacted memos about Paul. None touched on the 1963 Mockingbird wiretap, though there was an intriguing account of a visit his father made to South Africa in 1968 to interview a captured Russian spy.

“The CIA gave me stuff that I didn’t know even existed,” Jim said, “but I just wanted to know what articles triggered the wiretap.”

In early 2009, Jim requested the wiretap documents for a second time. “Isn’t it safe to assume that most, if not all, of the key players complicit in this operation are deceased?” he asked in a letter to the CIA.

That summer, the CIA rejected his appeal, ruling that the information still required secrecy.

Meanwhile, Jim had pursued a second route: the FBI.

To his surprise, the bureau was more than happy to play along. Throughout 2011, FBI documents arrived at Jim’s home in waves, packed with new revelations.

Jim learned, according to one FBI memo, that his dad truly alarmed the government at a Feb. 6, 1963, news conference in which he asked Defense Secretary McNamara several questions about Cuban weapons. Paul used precisely the same information in his questions that was contained in secret Navy documents. And the Navy, according to the bureau memos, wanted the FBI to find out who his source was.

But someone very senior at the bureau expressed reservations in a letter to Robert Kennedy that referred to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Although the FBI official seemed alarmed by “Allen-Scott Report” pieces — published from December 1962 to February 1963 in, of all places, the now-defunct Northern Virginia Sun — he didn’t want the bureau involved.

[A] covert investigation will become known and I understood the President does not want it to become known. [I]t would be far more effective to have the Defense agencies interview people in their own agencies rather than an outside civilian agency do it because there is always a certain amount of resentment . . .

Very truly yours, JEH, John Edgar Hoover, Director

“I was elated when I read all this. These are some heavyweight people,” Jim said. “I figured that I am getting this from the FBI, and it’ll just be a matter of time before the CIA sheds some light as well.

Waiting for word on appeal

But Jim never gained any traction with the CIA.

…

By Ian Shapira, Published: March 3

Find this story at 3 March 2013

Related document

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Credo Mobile speaks out after judge orders US government to stop issuing ‘national security letters’ to access citizens’ data

Judge Susan Illston declared the NSLs unconstitutional as they breached the first amendment rights of the parties being served the orders. Photograph: Frank Polich/Reuters

The Californian telecoms company thought to be behind a stunning court victory that has blown a hole in the FBI’s highly secretive system for collecting US citizens’ private data has hailed the “significant” legal breakthrough.

Credo, based in San Francisco, spoke out after a federal judge ordered the US government to stop issuing what are called “national security letters” – demands for data that contain in-built gagging clauses that prevent the recipients disclosing even the existence of the orders or their own identity.

In a carefully worded release, the firm fell short of revealing itself as the instigator of the legal action that resulted in Friday’s development. But it is understood by the Guardian that the telecommunications firm was indeed the unnamed litigant behind the action.

Michael Kieschnick, chief executive of Credo Mobile, hailed the judge’s order as “the most significant court victory for our constitutional rights since the dark day when George W Bush signed the Patriot Act”.

It is extremely rare for a telecoms company to challenge the system of national security letters, or NSLs, which have mushroomed since 9/11 under the Patriot Act. Credo, a subsidiary of Working Assets Inc, that directs some of its profits to support civil liberties groups, has been a long-standing advocate for reform of the NSL.

It is believed to be the company behind a May 2011 lawsuit in which the FBI was sued for breach of its rights after the company was served with a federal demand for private data belonging to its customers. The FBI shot back by counter-suing the company.

The lawsuit was made anonymously, with the name of the company redacted from court papers made available to the media. But last July the Wall Street Journal conducted an analysis of the likely telecoms companies that could have brought the legal action, and concluded that the litigant was probably Credo.

In her ruling, Judge Susan Illston declared the NSLs unconstitutional as they breached the first amendment rights of the parties being served the orders.

Kieschnick said: “This decision is notable for its clarity and depth. From this day forward, the US government’s unconstitutional practice of using national security letters to obtain private information without court oversight and its denial of the first amendment rights of national security letter recipients have finally been stopped by our courts.”

NSLs have been an increasingly important part of the US government’s approach to counter-terrorism, though their growing use has been matched by mounting unease on the party of civil libertarians.

Last year the FBI sent out more than 16,000 of the letters relating to the private data – mainly financial, internet or phone records – of more than 7,000 Americans.

Previous court action has led to the FBI being accused of abusing its powers under the NSL statute by issuing the letters far more extensively than in the limited counter-terrorism situations for which they were devised.

The letters are among the most secretive tools of any deployed by the US state. The demand for data comes with a gagging order attached – meaning that the recipient of the NSL is not allowed even to discuss the letter in public.

…

• This article has been amended since publication.

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 16 March 2013 19.30 GMT

Find this story at 16 March 2013

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