(Reuters) – The leak of a document showing the Obama administration asked for millions of phone records has turned a spotlight anew on a secretive U.S. federal court set up 35 years ago to curb intelligence abuses.

Made up of 11 judges who serve staggered seven-year terms, it is called the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The judges’ identities are known, along with the name of the person who appoints them: the chief justice, now John Roberts.

In a departure from other courts, all of its rulings are secret and there is no adversarial system. Instead, government lawyers make a request and the judge either approves or rejects it. No other parties are present. The court approves nearly all requests, according to Justice Department data.

In an annual report to Congress that is publicly available, the department said that in 2012 the government made 212 applications for access to business records, which is the same kind of request as that made of Verizon Communications Inc in the present case.

The court denied none of the applications but amended 200 of them, the report said.

The court also oversees applications for electronic surveillance and physical searches. There were 1,856 such applications in 2012, when all were approved except for one, which the government withdrew before the court could rule.

Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act setting up the court in 1978 amid concerns about the lack of legal oversight over the intelligence community’s activities.

Activity by the U.S. intelligence community uncovered by congressional investigations included illegal mail-opening programs and the targeting of domestic protesters and political opponents by the Nixon administration.

Now, critics say, the court set up to curb misconduct is rubber-stamping drastically expanded intelligence gathering efforts started after the September 11, 2001, attacks that prompt similar concerns about infringements on civil liberties.

Government authority to obtain records was expanded further by the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which Congress passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

‘ANY TANGIBLE THINGS’

The government cited Section 215 of the Patriot Act in making its request in the Verizon case. This section allows the government to ask the court for “any tangible things” as part of any authorized investigation related to terrorism or intelligence activities.

As the Justice Department wrote in an October 2011 letter to members of Congress, the government must show, among other things, that the information sought is “relevant to an authorized national security investigation.”

At least one president has tried to sidestep the court.

President George W. Bush’s administration chose not to ask the court to approve wiretapping of calls between suspected terrorists until 2007, news accounts of the program’s existence prompted controversy. This incident led to increased concerns among civil liberties advocates that the government effectively had a green light to invade the privacy of Americans.

Among the few who know how the secret court acts are members of Congress. The Obama administration has been keen to highlight how access to orders and opinions issued by the secret court is provided to members of both parties on the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress and on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The court is comprised of sitting federal judges, appointed for life, who take on the additional responsibility for the seven years of the surveillance court term. The judges are all over the country, although several are in the Washington area.

It is not clear exactly how the chief justice chooses the judges who serve on the court. Some of the judges have a national security background while others do not, according to a source familiar with the court. Further information on how Chief Justice Roberts appoints judges was not immediately available from a U.S. Supreme Court spokeswoman.

WASHINGTON PRESENCE

The court has a physical presence in the U.S. District Court in Washington. The current presiding judge is Reggie Walton, a U.S. district judge in Washington who was appointed by Bush.

The vast majority of judges now on the court are Republican appointees.

The judge who approved the Verizon order, Roger Vinson, is a senior federal district judge in Florida. His term ended at the beginning of May. Vinson, a U.S. Navy veteran, was appointed to the bench by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

The intelligence court’s workload increased after the September 11 attacks. Between 1978 and 2001, it received 46 emergency requests. In the year after September 11, there were 113, according to a legal textbook on national security by legal experts J. Douglas Wilson and David Kris, who was head of the Justice Department’s national security division from 2009 to 2011.

A former member, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia, described his experience serving in a 2002 speech in which he denied that the court was a rubber stamp.

“I ask questions. I get into the nitty gritty,” he said. “I know exactly what is going to be done and why. And my questions are answered, in every case, before I approve an application.”

By Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON | Thu Jun 6, 2013 6:40pm EDT
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Howard Goller and Philip Barbara)

Find this story at 6 June 2013

@2013 Thomson Reuters

On Sept. 11, 2007, the National Security Agency signed up Microsoft as its first partner for PRISM, a massive domestic surveillance program whose existence was reported by the Washington Post today. That’s barely a month after Congress passed, and President George W. Bush signed, the Protect America Act.

The Bush Administration portrayed the PAA as a technical fix designed to close a gap in America’s surveillance capabilities that had been opened by a then-recent ruling of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). It proved to be much more than that.

While the details are still classified, reports suggested that the FISC had ruled that it was illegal for the government to intercept communications between two foreign endpoints if the communications happened to pass through the United States. Warning that the U.S. would suddenly lose the ability to continue its surveillance of terrorists, the administration pushed the PAA through Congress in a matter of days.

In reality, the PAA represented a sweeping change to American surveillance law. Before conducting surveillance, the PAA only required executive branch officials to “certify” that there were “reasonable procedures” in place for ensuring that surveillance “concerns” persons located outside the United States and that the foreign intelligence is a “significant purpose” of the program. A single certification could cover a broad program intercepting the communications of numerous individuals. And there was no requirement for judicial review of individual surveillance targets within a “certified” program.

Civil liberties groups warned that the PAA’s vague requirements and lack of oversight would give the government a green light to seek indiscriminate access to the private communications of Americans. They predicted that the government would claim that they needed unfettered access to domestic communications to be sure they had gotten all relevant information about suspected terrorists.

It now appears that this is exactly what the government did. Today’s report suggests that the moment the PAA was the law of the land, the NSA started using it to obtain unfettered access to the servers of the nation’s leading online services. To comply with the requirement that the government not target Americans, PRISM searches are reportedly “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness’” — the lowest conceivable standard. PRISM training materials reportedly instruct users that if searches happen to turn up the private information of Americans, “it’s nothing to worry about.”

The Protect America Act included a short six-month sunset provision, triggering another heated debate in the midst of the 2008 Democratic primary campaign. But that debate focused more on the past than the future. The telecom industry sought retroactive immunity for their participation in warrantless surveillance programs prior to 2007, a request Congress did not grant with the PAA.

Retroactive immunity for telecom companies dominated the 2008 debate, overshadowing the more important issue of the sweeping new powers that Congress had just granted to the executive branch. When Congress finally passed the FISA Amendments Act in July 2008, it included both immunity and a four-year extension of the government’s warrantless spying powers. But few members of Congress realized the breadth of the surveillance powers they were effectively approving.

The FISA Amandments Act was re-authorized for another five years in 2012 with little controversy. It will come up for a vote again in 2017 — though Congress could always choose to revisit it earlier.

By Timothy B. Lee, Updated: June 6, 2013

Find this story at 6 June 2013

© The Washington Post Company

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: The NSA record collection program

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency’s operations. “Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide,” he said. “However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law.”

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. “There is no domestic surveillance without court approval,” said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government “are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.” All government-sponsored intelligence activities “are carefully reviewed and monitored,” Perino said. She also noted that “all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States.”

The government is collecting “external” data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting “internals,” a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it’s been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for “social network analysis,” the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

Carriers uniquely positioned

AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation’s three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.

The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest’s refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest’s region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.

Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.”

In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named “Shamrock,” led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.

Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.

Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of “data mining” — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn’t necessary for government data-mining operations. “FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining,” said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that “personal identifiers” — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can’t be included as part of the search. “That requires an additional level of probable cause,” he said.

The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.

The NSA’s domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer’s calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.

Ma Bell’s bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. “No court order, no customer information — period. That’s how it was for decades,” he said.

The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers’ calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of “violation.” In practice, that means a single “violation” could cover one customer or 1 million.

In the case of the NSA’s international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

Companies approached

The NSA’s domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation’s biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their “call-detail records,” a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation’s calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA’s domestic program began in earnest.

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.”

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”

Verizon, the USA’s No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.”

Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: “We can’t talk about this. It’s a classified situation.”

In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales’ reply: “I wouldn’t rule it out.” His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.

Similarities in programs

The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA’s procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation’s citizens.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, “I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. … I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks.”

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as “product” in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest’s lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest’s participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest’s financial health. But Qwest’s legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio’s successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
Contributing: John Diamond
Posted 5/10/2006 11:16 PM ET
Updated 5/11/2006 10:38 AM ET

Find this story at 5 October 2006

Copyright 2011 USA TODAY

Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans. This revelation should end, once and for all, the government’s long-discredited secrecy claims about its dragnet domestic surveillance programs. It should spur Congress and the American people to make the President finally tell the truth about the government’s spying on innocent Americans.

In a report by Glenn Greenwald, the paper published an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISC) that directs Verizon to provide “on an ongoing daily basis” all call records for any call “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls” and any call made “between the United States and abroad.”

In plain language: the order gave the NSA a record of every Verizon customer’s call history — every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for the phone and call — from April 25, 2013 (the date the order was issued) to July 19, 2013. The order does not require content or the name of any subscriber and is issued under 50 USC sec.1861, also known as section 215 of the Patriot Act.

There is no indication that this order to Verizon was unique or novel. It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that, if you make calls in the United States, the NSA has those records. And this has been going on for at least 7 years, and probably longer.

This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others, have been suing about for years. In 2006, USA Today published a story disclosing that the NSA had compiled a massive database of call records from American telecommunications companies. Our case, Jewel v. NSA, challenging the legality of the NSA’s domestic spying program, has been pending since 2008, but its predecessor, Hepting v. AT&T filed in 2006, alleged the same surveillance. In 2011, on the 10th Anniversary of the Patriot Act, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice for records about the government’s use of Section 215 – the legal authority the government was relying on to perform this type of untargeted surveillance.

But at each step of the way, the government has tried to hide the truth from the American public: in Hepting, behind telecom immunity; in Jewel, behind the state secrets privilege; in the FOIA case, by claiming the information is classified at the top secret level. In May 2011, Senator Ron Wyden, one of the few courageous voices fighting against the government’s domestic surveillance program, said this in a debate about reauthorizing Section 215:

I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: when the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.

Today is that day. The American people have confirmed how the government has secretly interpreted Section 215. And we’re angry. It’s time to stop hiding behind legal privileges and to come clean about Section 215 and FISA. It’s time to start the national dialogue about our rights in the digital age. And it’s time to end the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance program.

June 5, 2013 | By Cindy Cohn and Mark Rumold

Find this story at 5 June 2013

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.

“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense – is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”

The Post’s investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.

The Post’s online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Today’s article describes the government’s role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday’s article describes the government’s dependence on private contractors. Wednesday’s is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.

Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. “Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, ‘Okay, we’ve built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?’ ” he said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he’s begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. “Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers,” he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. “I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to,” he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post’s findings. “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country,” he said. “The attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can’t conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn’t include the Air Force’s mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there’s a big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. (Photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn’t have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI’s rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte’s office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system’s ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It’s too hard, and some agency heads don’t really want to give up the systems they have. But there’s some progress: “All my e-mail on one computer now,” Leiter says. “That’s a big deal.”

To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become, just head west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport.

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth’s geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government’s Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.

Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices “on the order of the pyramids,” in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency’s office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

Construction for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Springfield (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

It’s not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it’s also what is inside: banks of television monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. “In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF,” said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. “They’ve got the penis envy thing going. You can’t be a big boy unless you’re a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF.”

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

“You can’t find a four-star general without a security detail,” said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. “Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, ‘If he has one, then I have to have one.’ It’s become a status symbol.”

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. “Like a zombie, it keeps on living” is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. “It’s the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it,” said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI’s assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. “I saw tremendous overlap.”

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?”

He’s hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .

It’s too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.

“Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?”

“Why does it have to be so bulky?”

“Why isn’t it online?”

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

A new Defense Department office complex goes up in Alexandria. (Photo by: Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post)

The ODNI’s analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution was another publication, this one a daily online newspaper, Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of 22 culls more than two dozen agencies’ reports and 63 Web sites, selects the best information and packages it by originality, topic and region.

Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be gumming up the national security machinery and blurring the lines of responsibility.

Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

“Frankly, it hasn’t been brought together in a unified approach,” CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

“Cyber is tremendously difficult” to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. “Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf.” Why? “Because it’s funded, it’s hot and it’s sexy.”

Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people and wounding 30. In the days after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan’s increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk “adverse events.” He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence.

But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902’s commander had decided to turn the unit’s attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI’s 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.

The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The assessment “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already,” said the Army’s senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.

Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.

These are called Special Access Programs – or SAPs – and the Pentagon’s list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what’s going on.

“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,” said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. “I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value,” he said. “The DNI ought to do something similar.”

The ODNI hasn’t done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community. But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.

Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

“There are so many people involved here,” NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

“Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. “But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn’t the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. “We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. “Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more – more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can’t find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Methodology and credits

Comments

The Top Secret America database was put together by compiling hundreds of thousands of public records of government organizations and private-sector companies over the past two years.

From these records, The Washington Post identified 45 government organizations (for example, the FBI) engaged in top-secret work and determined that those 45 organizations could be broken down into 1,271 sub-units (for example, the Terrorist Screening Center of the FBI). One of the 45 organizations is represented as “unknown”; this category was created as a catchall for companies doing work for a government organization that could not be determined.

At the private-sector level, The Post identified 1,931 companies engaged in top-secret work for the government. Private-sector companies were grouped together and listed by a parent company’s name (for example, General Dynamics), even though one company might contain multiple sub-units (for example, General Dynamics Information Technology).

In a case where a large corporation (for example, Boeing) has a distinctly named sub-unit engaged in top-secret work (for example, Boeing’s Digital Receiver Technology), the name of the sub-unit was used. In the case of large corporations not primarily in the defense industry (for example, AT&T) that have similarly named sub-units that focus on top-secret work (for example, AT&T Government Solutions), the name of the parent company is used and the name of the sub-unit is noted. For every company listed, revenue and employee data and the date of establishment were drawn from public filings, Dun & Bradstreet data and original reporting.

State and local government organizations generally do not work at the top-secret level; that type of clearance is rarely granted to state officials. But the organizations are all part of a secretive domestic intelligence and homeland security world. The Post examined nearly 1,000 threat documents marked “For Official Use Only” and collected information from government Web sites, reports and other documents to identify 4,058 government organizations involved in domestic counterterrorism and homeland security. Of the total, 2,880 are federal organizations that work at the state level, such as the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). There are also 818 state and 360 local organizations. Many of these listed themselves in documents as participants in either Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers or Anti-Terrorism Advisory Councils in 2009 or 2010.

More than 20 journalists worked on the investigation, including investigative reporters, cartography experts, database reporters, video journalists, researchers, interactive graphic designers, digital designers, graphic designers, and graphics editors at The Washington Post:

Stephanie Clark, Ben de la Cruz, Kat Downs, Dan Drinkard, Anne Ferguson-Rohrer, Justin Ferrell, David Finkel, Jennifer Jenkins, Robert Kaiser, Laris Karklis, Jacqueline Kazil, Lauren Keane, Todd Lindeman, Greg Manifold, Jennifer Morehead, Bonnie Jo Mount, Larry Nista, Ryan O’Neil, Sarah Sampsel, Whitney Shefte, Laura Stanton, Julie Tate, Doris Truong, Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Michael Williamson, Karen Yourish, Amanda Zamora

One researcher was funded in part by the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School.

Monday, July 19, 2010; 4:50 PM

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WASHINGTON — The massive National Security Agency collection of telephone records disclosed Wednesday was part of a continuing program that has been in effect nonstop since 2006, according to the two top leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters Thursday. The surveillance “is lawful” and Congress has been fully briefed on the practice, she added.

Her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss, concurred: “This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years.”

The statements by the two senators, whose committee positions give them wide access to classified data, appeared to rule out the possibility that the court order directing Verizon to turn over telephone records was related to the Boston Marathon bombings. The order was effective as of April 19, shortly after the bombings, which had sparked speculation about a link.

Instead, the surveillance, which was revealed Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, appears to have been of far longer duration. Although the senators did not specify the scope of the surveillance, the fact that it has been in place since 2006 also suggests that it is not limited to any one phone carrier.

The Obama administration defended the program Thursday, saying the data collection “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.”

A senior administration official released a statement which did not confirm the existence of the court order authorizing the surveillance, which, according to the copy released by the Guardian, is marked “Top Secret.” It was issued in late April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court that meets in Washington, and allowed the government to collect the bulk data until July 19.

“The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber,” the official said. “It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.

The court order was authorized under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect business records in bulk if its requests are approved by the court.

The official said telephone data allow “counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

The official requested anonymity to discuss the counterterrorism program.

In defending the data collection program, the administration official sought to spread responsibility, noting that “all three branches” of government were tasked with review and oversight of surveillance.

“There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the official said. He said that involves oversight by the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA court.

Separately, the Justice Department released a letter defending the administration’s handling of the FISA law that they had sent in 2011 to two senators who had objected to it.

“We do not believe the Executive Branch is operating pursuant to ‘secret law’ or ‘secret opinions of the Department of Justice,’ “ said the letter, signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Ronald Weich. The “Intelligence Community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute, with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the Intelligence Communities of both Houses.”

“Many other collection activities are classified,” Weich added, saying that “this is necessary because public disclosure of the activities they discuss would harm national security and impede the effectiveness of the intelligence tools that Congress has approved.”

Weich further defended the program by saying intelligence officials have “determined that public disclosure of the classified use” of the law “would expose sensitive sources and methods to our adversaries and therefore harm national security.”

He said collection of records, as now underway with Verizon phone logs, was different than material obtained through grand jury subpoenas. Grand jury subpoenas, he said, can be obtained by prosecutors without court approval. In contrast, he said, the intelligence collections can be done only with approval from a federal judge sitting on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most importantly, he noted that FISA courts require a showing by officials that the records sought “are relevant to an authorized national security investigation.”

The Weich letter was sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-0re.).

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is testifying Thursday morning before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and is expected to address the matter further.

By Richard A. Serrano and Kathleen Hennessey

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The US government is collecting the phone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under a top secret court order. Read the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order

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Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama

Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government’s domestic spying powers.

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI’s request for its customers’ records, or the court order itself.

“We decline comment,” said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls”.

The order directs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order”. It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information”, such as “originating and terminating number”, the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information”.

The information is classed as “metadata”, or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such “metadata” is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively.

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be “stunned” to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: “We’ve certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of ‘relevance’ to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion.” The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration’s extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that “there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

“We believe,” they wrote, “that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted” the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited “metadata” is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens’ communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual’s network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had “been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth” and was “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.” Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA’s mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency’s focus on domestic activities.

In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically.

At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: “The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”

Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman

The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013

Find this story at 6 June 2013

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

Der Spiegel meldt verder dat de Amerikaanse geheime dienst zo’n vijf jaar geleden ook heeft geprobeerd het Justus Lipsius-gebouw in Brussel af te luisteren.

JustusLipsiusVijf jaar geleden zou de NSA pogingen hebben ondernomen om de telecomverbindingen van het Justus Lipsius-gebouw in Brussel af te luisteren, zo meldt Der Spiegel. Het Justus Lipsius- gebouw is het belangrijkste gebouw van de Europese Raad, waar de delegaties van de Europese landen onderhandelen over bijna alle zaken van de Europese Raad. Politici, waaronder de voorzitter van het Europees Parlement Martin Schultz spreken van een groot schandaal en eisen opheldering van de Verenigde Staten.

lees meer

Staatsminister Eckhard von Klaeden bestätigt Auflösung deutscher Gladio-Einheiten im September 1991

Nun ist auch die Bundesregierung auf den Plan gerufen: Die Vorwürfe des Duisburger Historikers Andreas Kramer, wonach der Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) an Anschlägen auf Strommasten in Luxemburg beteiligt war (Stay Behind – Agenten sterben einsam ), werden derzeit auf Veranlassung der Bundesregierung überprüft.

Das geht aus einer Antwort von Staatsminister Eckhard von Klaeden (CDU) hervor, die der Bundestagsabgeordnete der Linkspartei, Andrej Hunko, auf seiner Internetseite veröffentlicht hat. Hunko wollte im April wissen, ob die Bundesregierung über Details zur Beteiligung des BND an den Anschlägen in Luxemburg vor beinahe 30 Jahren verfügt und welche Anstrengungen vonseiten der Bundesregierung unternommen wurden, um die Verwicklung deutscher Gladio-Einheiten in mögliche weitere Anschläge aufzuklären.

Klaeden ließ verlauten, dass “eine Prüfung der einschlägigen Unterlagen … bislang keine Hinweise ergeben (hat), die die … angesprochenen Sachverhalte bestätigen könnten”. Gleichzeitig erklärte Klaeden, dass dessen ungeachtet, “die Bundesregierung eine weitere Prüfung veranlasst” habe, “unter anderen die Prüfung, ob ein Ermittlungsverfahren einzuleiten ist”. Klaeden sagte außerdem zur Existenz der deutschen Gladio-Einheiten: “Infolge der weltpolitischen Veränderungen hat der Bundesnachrichtendienst in Abstimmung mit seinen alliierten Partnern zum Ende des 3. Quartals 1991 die Stay-behind-Organisation vollständig aufgelöst.” Anzeige

Der Schweizer Historiker und Friedensforscher Daniele Ganser, der intensiv zu den Geheimarmeen der Nato geforscht hat, sagte gegenüber Telepolis, dass sich Deutschland sehr schwer tue, einer Aufarbeitung des Kapitels Gladio im eigenen Land zu stellen.

In Deutschland hat man versucht, die Gladio-Forschung zu verhindern, aber das wird nicht gelingen, das Thema ist zu wichtig, gerade auch wegen den vermuteten Verbindungen zum Anschlag in München von 1980.
Daniele Ganser

Ganser erklärte, dass es es in Deutschland zunächst nur hinter verschlossenen Türen, im November 1990, eine Bestätigung der Stay-behind-Strukturen gab:

“Aber in der Öffentlichkeit log man die Bevölkerung an”, so Ganser weiter. Am 30. November 1990 habe Staatsminister Lutz Stavenhagen im Namen der Regierung Kohl gesagt, dass es Gladio-Einheiten in Deutschland nie gab. “Das war eine glatte Lüge. Kohl wollte vor den ersten gesamtdeutschen Wahlen keinen Geheimdienstskandal.”

Bislang ist es nicht einfach, die Glaubwürdigkeit Kramers einzuschätzen. Seine Äußerungen zum Anschlag auf das Münchner Oktoberfest 1980 könnten, wenn sie sich als richtig herausstellen, zu einem Staatsskandal führen (BND und Gladio in Oktoberfestattentat verwickelt?).

Marcus Klöckner 09.05.2013

Find this story at 9 May 2013

Dossier Von Nato-Geheimarmeen, Geheimdiensten und Terroranschlägen Gladio, Stay behind und andere Machenschaften

Copyright © 2013 Heise Zeitschriften Verlag

Im Luxemburger Jahrhundert-Prozess zu den Bombenattentaten in den 80er-Jahren sagte Andreas Kramer am Dienstag aus, der in einer eidesstaatlichen Erklärung behauptete, sein Vater habe als Geheimdienst-Mitarbeiter die Anschläge in Luxemburg (und auch der Schweiz) koordiniert. Claude Karger, Chefredaktor des Luxemburger «Journal», begleitet den Prozess.

Der Historiker Andreas Kramer (rechts) unterhält sich mit Verteidiger Gaston Vogel in einer Prozesspause. (Bild: Pierre Matgé/Editpress)

Der «Stay Behind»-Leiter des Bundesnachrichtendiensts, Johannes Kramer alias «Cello» stecke hinter den Bombenattentaten im Grossherzogtum, die mithilfe von BND- und MI6-Agenten und zehn Luxemburger Unterstützern, die wiederum eigene Helfer angeheuert hätten, verübt wurden. Das sagte gestern sein Sohn, Andreas Kramer, unter Eid vor Gericht (siehe dazu den Artikel der TagesWoche «Der Sohn des Agenten»). Kramer Junior hatte bereits am 13. März eine eidesstattliche Erklärung abgegeben. Am 18. Prozesstag im «Bommeleeër»-Prozess gab er gestern ausführlich und detailliert Auskunft über die Informationen, die ihm sein im vergangenen November verstorbener Vater über Jahre mitgeteilt hat.

Dieser habe ihm mit dem Tod gedroht, falls er mit seinem Wissen an die Öffentlichkeit gehen sollte. Kramer Junior soll bei den Gesprächen auch erfahren haben, dass sein Vater, der ihn als «Stay Behind»-Agent habe aufbauen wollen, unter anderem auch verantwortlich für das blutige Attentat 1980 auf dem Münchner Oktoberfest (13 Tote und 211 zum Teil schwer Verletzte) war. Auf die Frage der vorsitzenden Richterin Sylvie Conter, weshalb er nicht mit den Informationen an deutsche Behörden gegangen sei, drückte der Zeuge sein Misstrauen gegenüber der deutschen Justiz aus, die im Fall München gar nicht weiter ermitteln wolle.
Auch in Anschläge in Italien, München und Belgien verwickelt

Die Attentate in Italien, in München und in Belgien seien Teil eines Beschlusses auf höchstem Nato-Niveau gewesen, genauer gesagt im «Allied Clandestine Committee», in das auch Luxemburg mit eingebunden war.

Das ACC wurde damals von Kramer Seniors direktem Vorgesetzten, dem deutschen General Leopold Chalupa, dem damaligen Oberbefehlshaber der Alliierten Streitkräfte Euro Mitte (CENTAG) geführt. Der Luxemburger «Service de Renseignement» sei direkt in die Befehlskette eingebunden gewesen. Als Koordinator verschiedener Operationen mit Geheimdiensten aus Deutschland, Grossbritannien und dem Benelux-Raum habe Kramer Senior sehr wohl Kontakt mit dem damaligen Geheimdienstchef Charles-Hoffmann gehabt, auch wenn dieser das abstreite, so sein Sohn vor Gericht.

Der auch dabei bleibt, dass Hoffmanns «Stay Behind»-Truppe für sämtliche Sprengstoffdiebstähle in den Jahren 1984 bis 1985 verantwortlich war. Der Luxemburger SB soll übrigens nicht nur – wie offiziell immer behauptet wird – aus Funkern und Helfern bestanden haben, sondern auch eine «Angriffsgruppe», für die es einen speziellen Operationsleiter gab. Hoffmann habe die Gruppen strikt voneinander abgeschottet. Die Eskalation der Aktion in Luxemburg habe allerdings sein Vater betrieben, am Luxemburger Geheimdienstchef vorbei und auch ohne seinen Vorgesetzten Chalupa ins Bild zu setzen. Kramer Junior sagte, dass von deutscher, respektive Alliierter Seite etwa 40 Männer an den Anschlägen beteiligt waren – ausser an jenem in den Kasematten, das von «Mitläufern» verübt worden sei.
«Nützliche Idioten»

In wechselnden Gruppen. Jedesmal drei bis vier Agenten hätten sich nach Luxemburg begeben und seien dort von den von Kramer angeworbenen «Kontakten», die über die notwendigen Ortskenntnisse verfügten, begleitet worden. Namen habe sein Vater ihm nicht genannt, so der Zeuge, lediglich der Name Geiben sei gefallen. Ausserdem habe Kramer Senior gesagt, dass Leute aus der Gendarmerie rekrutiert wurden, insbesondere gute Motorradfahrer. Als «nützliche Idioten» habe Kramer Senior diese Helfer bezeichnet.

Von einem Motorrad soll übrigens auch der Sprengsatz beim EG-Gipfel auf Kirchberg im Dezember 1985 abgeworfen worden sein. Die Sprengung des Wochenendhauses in Bourscheid im April 1985 soll übrigens ein Testlauf für die Kramer-Agenten gewesen sein, die danach Cegedel-Anlagen massiv ins Visier nahmen. Übrigens: Johannes Kramer selbst habe die Sprengfalle in Asselscheuer konzipiert und mit installiert. Eigenhändig habe er sogar drei der Erpresserbriefe an die Cegedel selbst geschrieben. Andreas Kramer hinterliess gestern eine DNA-Probe bei den Ermittlern, um sie mit Spuren zu vergleichen, die auf den Schreiben gefunden wurden.

Zurück zu Charles Hoffmann: Der habe als Geheimdienstchef die Anschläge natürlich nicht akzeptieren können. Schliesslich trug er zum Teil die Verantwortung für die Sicherheit des Landes. Also habe er sich an CIA und FBI gewandt, in der Hoffnung, dass die Amerikaner dem Spuk eine Ende machen indem sie auf höchster Nato-Ebene intervenieren. «Es war Nato gegen Nato», fasste Andreas Kramer die Lage zusammen. «Die CIA war Hoffmanns einzige Chance, sich selbst zu schützen», sagt Kramer. Zwei Ermittler des FBI seien seinem Vater und dessen Einsatztruppe damals eng auf den Fersen gewesen.
«Mit Hand und Fuss»

1986 wurde Luxemburg aus dem Nato-Spannungsprogramm rausgenommen, deshalb hätten die Anschlagsserie plötzlich aufgehört. «Mein Vater wusste, dass mit Ermittlungen in der «Bommeleeër»-Affäre zu rechnen sei», sagt Andreas Kramer. Der BND-Agent sei übrigens bestens über den Stand der Ermittlungen in Luxemburg informiert gewesen. Auch lange nachdem er aus dem offiziellen Dienst ausgeschieden war. Anfang 2007 habe er seinem Sohn bereits anvertraut, dass die beiden angeklagten Ex-Gendarmen Marc Scheer und Jos Wilmes nichts mit den Bombenanschlägen zu tun hatten.

Zu dem Zeitpunkt wusste die Öffentlichkeit hierzulande noch nicht, dass die beiden zusehends ins Visier der Fahnder gerieten. Wo sein Vater die Informationen her hat, wusste Andreas Kramer gestern nicht zu sagen. Kramer Senior hatte beim Verschwinden zahlreicher Beweisstücke offenbar seine Finger im Spiel. Diese, die, wie beim Prozess zu hören war, nur sehr ungenügend gesichert waren, habe er mit Unterstützung von SREL-Chef Hoffmann verschwinden lassen. Der keine Wahl gehabt habe, als mit anzupacken, die ganze Angelegenheit unter den Teppich zu kehren. Hoffmann hat in einem Interview bereits bestritten, dass er irgendetwas mit Johannes Kramer zu tun hatte und dass der Geheimdienst in die Bombenanschläge verwickelt war.

Das Gericht überlegte gestern, ob Charles Hoffmann nicht sehr zeitnah zu den Aussagen von Andreas Kramer gehört werden sollte. Der Zeuge wird darum auch heute Mittwoch noch vor Gericht stehen. Der beigeordnete Staatsanwalt Georges Oswald hätte gerne noch präzisere Informationen zu einzelnen Punkten, die von Kramer angesprochen wurden. Seine Aussage dass er in drei Stunden zuviel «generelles Blabla» gehört habe, sorgte sowohl beim Zeugen selbst, als auch bei der Verteidigung für energische Reaktionen. «Die drei letzten Stunden waren die ersten drei, in der mit Kopf und Fuss über «Stay Behind» gesprochen wurde», hielt Me Gaston Vogel entgegen. Die Ermittlungen seien trotz vieler Indizien nie in diese Richtung weiter getrieben worden.

Verteidigung zitiert aus Top-Secret-Dokumenten

Die «Top Secret»-Dokumente vom Mai, respektive September 1985, die die Verteidigung gestern vorbrachte, tragen die Unterschrift des damaligen Premiers Jacques Santer. Der genehmigte in den 1980ern eine Reihe von Übungen von Geheimdienstagenten mit «services clandestins» aus Belgien, Frankreich und Deutschland. Die Rede geht klar und deutlich von «Exercices Stay Behind» «dans le cadre de l‘instruction pratique des agents SB». Die Missionen: «diverses opérations d‘infiltration et d‘exfiltration de matériel et de personnel par la voie aérienne aussi bien que par la voie terrestre». Nicht nur ein Indiz dafür, dass hinter dem offiziell als «schlafendes» Funker- und Schleuser-Netzwerk dargestellten geheimen Netzwerk viel mehr steckt. Sondern vor allem dass Parlament und Öffentlichkeit in diesem Zusammenhang offenbar die volle Wahrheit vorenthalten wurde. Am 14. November 1990 trat Jacques Santer vor das Parlament mit folgender Aussage nachdem in ganz Europa «Stay Behind»-Netzwerke : «Je dois vous dire que j‘ai été aussi surpris que le Ministre belge d‘apprendre les activités de ce réseau qui ont défrayé le public et je ne crois pas qu‘un autre membre du Gouvernement en ait eu connaissance». Dabei unterschrieb der Premier regelmässig Genehmigungen für SB-Missionen!

10.4.2013, 11:31 Uhr

Find this story at 10 April 2013

Copyright © 2013 tageswoche.ch

Duisburger Historiker Andrea Kramer behauptet, sein Vater sei für den Anschlag mit verantwortlich gewesen

Sagt Andreas Kramer die Wahrheit? War sein Vater für das Attentat auf dem Münchner Oktoberfest aus dem Jahr 1980 verantwortlich? Wenn es stimmt, was der Duisburger Historiker derzeit erzählt, dann steht der Bundesrepublik ein gewaltiger Skandal bevor. Telepolis berichtete bereits ausführlich über Kramer und seine Rolle in dem derzeit in Luxemburg stattfindenden Bommeleeër-Prozess (Bombenleger), bei dem zwei ehemalige Polizisten, die Mitglieder einer Spezialeinheit der Luxemburger Polizei waren, angeklagt sind (Stay Behind – Agenten sterben einsam, BND-Schattenmann Kramer in tödlicher Mission?). Ihnen wird zur Last gelegt für diverse Anschläge auf Infrastruktureinrichtungen, die vor beinahe 30 Jahren in Luxemburg verübt worden sind, verantwortlich zu sein.

Was zunächst lediglich nach einem inner-luxemburgischen Fall aussieht, hat sich schnell zu einem Prozess entwickelt, in dem das dunkle Kapitel der NATO-Geheimarmeen, die unter dem Namen Gladio oder Stay Behind bekannt wurden (Der lange Arm von Gladio und das Eingeständnis eines Bild-Reporters), neu in das Licht der Öffentlichkeit rückt.

Kramer, der immerhin unter Eid in Luxemburg ausgesagt hat, dass sein Vater, der Offizier der Bundeswehr, Mitarbeiter des Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND) und dazu noch in in das Netzwerk der NATO-Geheimarmeen eingebunden war, für das Attentat auf das Münchner Oktoberfest verantwortlich sei, rückt nun auch in das Interesse größerer deutscher Medien.

In einem ausführlichen Interview vom vergangenen Sonntag in der Münchner Abendzeitung und in einem weiteren Interview in der taz von heute schildert Kramer detailliert den Hergang des Oktoberfestattentats aus seiner Sicht.

Die offizielle Darstellung, an der es ohnehin genügend Zweifel gibt, ist ein Märchen. Der Terrorakt war eine gezielte und lange vorbereitete Aktion des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, für den mein Vater gearbeitet hat und in dessen Auftrag er auch gehandelt hat.

Kramer beschreibt weiter, wie sein Vater zusammen mit dem angeblich für das Attentat allein verantwortlichen Gundolf Köhler, der bei dem Anschlag selbst ums Leben kam, die Bombe bei sich zuhause in der Garage gebaut habe.

Und Kramer weiter: “Das geschah nicht nur mit Billigung, sondern im Auftrag höchster Militär- und Geheimdienstkreise.” Anzeige

Mit Kramers Vorstoß in die Medienöffentlichkeit gewinnen die Vermutungen, wonach Köhler eben nicht Einzeltäter war, wie es in den offiziellen Berichten immer wieder dargestellt wurde, neuen Auftrieb. Seit vielen Jahren wird vermutet, dass Köhler den Anschlag nur mit Unterstützung von Hintermännern ausführen konnte. (Eine Vielzahl von Links zu den Zweifel rund um das Oktoberfestattentat findet sich hier).

Mit Kramers Aussagen steht nun erstmalig, neben der offiziellen Version, eine in sich kohärente Schilderung der Hintergründe des Oktoberfestattentats im Raum, in der Planung, Motiv und Täter genau genannt werden. Berliner Filmemacher haben in den vergangenen Wochen einen Beitrag für 3Sat Kulturzeit zum Prozess in Luxemburg ausgearbeitet , der heute Abend im Fernsehen gesendet wird und in dem auch Kramer zu Wort kommt . .

Kramer: Das passt sehr gut zusammen. Die Gladio-Truppen bestanden zu einem erheblichen Teil aus Neonazis und Rechtsextremisten. Gundolf Köhler, der Bombenleger von München und in der rechtsradikalen Szene eng vernetzt, war von meinem Vater angeworben worden. Er hat sich mehrmals mit ihm an seinem Wohnort in Donaueschingen getroffen, er hat die Komponenten für die Bombe besorgt, er hat sie zusammen mit Gundolf Köhler und einigen anderen Geheimdienstmitarbeitern gebaut.

Ihr Vater hat die Bombe gebaut? Und er hat auch gewusst, wofür sie eingesetzt werden sollte?

Kramer: Ja. Die Vorbereitungen für den Anschlag haben eineinhalb Jahre gedauert. Genau genommen wurden in einer Garage in Donaueschingen sogar drei Bomben gebaut. Eine wurde bei einem Test gezündet, eine andere in München verwendet. Was mit der dritten Bombe geschah, weiß ich nicht.

Und das geschah mit Billigung des Bundesnachrichtendienstes? Oder handelte Ihr Vater nach eigener Überzeugung abseits der Befehlskette?

Kramer: Das geschah nicht nur mit Billigung, sondern im Auftrag höchster Militär- und Geheimdienstkreise. Gladio war ja eine Organisation, die von der Nato eingefädelt worden war.

Marcus Klöckner 07.05.2013

Find this story at 7 May 2013

Copyright © 2013 Heise Zeitschriften Verlag

Die eidesstattliche, vor einem Luxemburger Notar abgegebene Versicherung des deutschen Historikers Andreas Kramer, der über die geheimdienstliche Tätigkeit seines verstorbenen Vaters berichtet, ist inzwischen online veröffentlicht worden. Johannes Karl Kramer, vormaliger Soldat zuletzt im Range eines Hauptmanns im Verteidigungsministerium, war auch hochrangiger Agent des BND gewesen. Seinem Sohn zufolge war Kramer Operationsleiter von GLADIO/Stay Behind und koordinierte Einsätze in Deutschland, den Benelux-Staaten und der „neutralen“ Schweiz. Über Kramers Schreibtisch sollen die Bombenleger-Aktionen koordiniert worden sein. Zweck der Operationen waren vordergründig Übungen für den Fall einer sowjetischen Invasion, konkret aber dienten sie zur psychologischen Kriegsführung in Friedenszeiten. So sollte die eigene Bevölkerung terrorisiert werden, um sie hierdurch auf einen Rechtsruck gegen die vermeintlichen Gegner im linken Spektrum einzuschwören.

Kramer soll alle derartigen Aktionen mit dem späteren Chef des Luxemburger Geheimdienstes SREL, Charles Hoffmann, abgestimmt haben, der das Personal ausgesucht habe. Dieser soll in den 1970er Jahren an einem noch heute existenten NATO-Objekt in Sardinien für klandestine Spezialeinsätze ausgebildet worden sein. Hoffmann, der die Vorwürfe zurückweist, soll Gründungsmitglied des Gesprächskreis Nachrichtendienste in Deutschland e.V. sein, in dem u.a. Geheimdienst-Veteranen der Öffentlichkeit bei der Interpretation der Realität behilflich sein wollen. Vor der 2003 erfolgten Gründung dieses Clubs der Spionage-Opas besorgte derartige Propaganda das damalige „Institut für Terrorismusforschung und Sicherheitspolitik“, das der umstrittene Verfassungsschützer Hans Josef Horchem aufgezogen hatte. Von Anfang an dabei war der als Journalist posierende BND-Agent Wilhelm Dietl. Auch dieses Institut, das zu RAF-Zeiten die Presse mit hauseigenen „Terrorismus-Experten“ versorgte, wurde ebenfalls 2003 neugegründet, um nunmehr der Welt vom islamischen Terror zu künden.

Die Sekretärin des BND-Strategen Kramer hatte in den 1970er Jahren tragische Berühmtheit erlangt. Es handelte sich um die rechtsgerichtete Heidrun Hofer, die von einem vermeintlich deutschen „Hans Puschke“ verführt wurde, der sie scheinbar für eine in Südamerika angesiedelte Alt-Nazi-Organisation anwarb. Tatsächlich allerdings war „Puschke“ der KGB-General Jurij Ivanowitsch Drosdow. Nach ihrer Enttarnung 1976 überlebte Hofer einen Suizidversuch. Doch auch Kramer soll nach Aussage seines Sohnes seit 1973 Doppelagent gewesen sein und an Moskau berichtet haben. Dies bedeutet nichts weniger, als dass das bis heute streng geheime GLADIO-Netzwerk auf hoher Ebene verraten worden war. Die Saboteure wären im Ernstfall daher sabotiert gewesen.

Nachdem die geheimnisvollen Bombenanschläge, die seinerzeit Kommunisten und „Ökoterroristen“ in Misskredit brachten, nunmehr NATO-Geheimagenten zugeschrieben werden, bietet sich nun ein praktischer Sündenbock an. Im gestrigen Prozesstag, den das Luxemburger Wort protokollierte, wurde der einstige Waffenmeister der Luxemburger Polizei, Henri Flammang, für die übliche Rolle eines „Verwirrten“ gehandelt. Flammang soll krankhafter Waffennarr gewesen sein, der sogar sichergestellte Tatwaffen aus emotionalen Gründen nicht zerstören wollte. Bei Hausdurchsuchungen seien bei Flammang 434 Schusswaffen und über 70 kg Sprengstoff gefunden worden. Flammang soll unter wahnhaften Angstvorstellungen vor einer sowjetischen Invasion gelitten haben und sei vom Luxemburger Geheimdienst SREL als Agent angeworben worden. Flammang starb nicht durch die Hand eines Rotarmisten, sondern 1995 durch die eigene. Im Prozess wurde am Montag von einem angeblichen Abschiedsbrief gesprochen, in welchem sich Flammang als der Bombenleger zu erkennen gegeben habe. Das angebliche Dokument liegt jedoch bislang nicht vor.

Zeugenaussagen berichten von vier Tätern. In Verdacht stehen neben den beiden angeklagten Polizisten und dem verstorbenen Waffenmeister Flammang der Gründer der Spezialeinheit BMG Ben Geiben, dessen verstorbener Stellvertreter Jos Steil – sowie ein Herr namens Jean Nassau, den Zeugen am Tatort gesehen haben wollen. Herr Nassau war vom britischen Militär ausgebildet worden und brachte es in der Luxemburger Armee zum Rang eines Capitaine. Geboren wurde Herr Nassau als Jean Félix Marie Guillaume Prinz von Luxemburg, verzichtete jedoch 1986 auf sein Anrecht auf die Thronfolge.

Markus Kompa

19 – 03 – 2013

Find this story at 19 March 2013

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Hinter Bombenattentaten in Luxemburg, welche mithilfe von BND- und MI6-Agenten und zehn luxemburgischen Unterstützern vollzogen wurden, steckt Medienberichten zufolge der Stay-Behind-Leiter des Bundesnachrichtendienstes, Johannes Kramer (Alias Cello). Die zehn luxemburgischen Unterstützer sollen demnach eigens weitere Helfer rekrutiert haben. Der Sohn von Johannes Kramer, Andreas, hatte dies unter Eid vor Gericht ausgesagt. Eine eidesstattliche Erklärung wurde bereits am 13. März dieses Jahres abgegeben. Der Sohn von Kramer gab zu verstehen, dass er sein Wissen nicht hätte an die Öffentlichkeit bringen dürfen, da der Vater ihm mit dem Tode gedroht hätte. Der Stay-Behind-Leiter des Bundesnachrichtendiensts, Johannes Kramer, war im November vergangenen Jahres verstorben. Auch hätte sein unter Eid vor Gericht aussagender Sohn in Gesprächen erfahren, dass sein Vater für das blutige Attentat 1980 auf dem Münchner Oktoberfest verantwortlich gewesen war. Kramer Senior wollte seinen Sohn demnach auch als Agenten für das Stay-Behind-Netzwerk anwerben. Auf die Frage vom Gericht hin, warum der Sohn denn nicht an deutsche Behörden herangetreten sei, sagte dieser, dass er Misstrauen gegen diese hegte, im Fall München hätte man gar nicht ermitteln wollen. Attentate in Italien, Belgien oder München waren Teil eines Beschlusses auf höchstem NATO-Niveau. Hier benannte man das Allied Clandestine Committee, in welchem auch Luxemburg mit eingebunden war. Jenes Allied Clandestine Committee soll damals von dem direkten Vorgesetzten von Kramer Senior geführt worden sein. Bei dieser Person handelt es sich um den deutschen General Leopold Chalupa, der ehemalige Oberbefehlshaber der Alliierten Streitkräfte Euro Mitte (CENTAG). Auch sei der luxemburgische Nachrichtendienst Service de Renseignement de l’Etat (SRE) in die Befehlskette mit eingebunden gewesen. Der «Stay Behind»-Leiter des Bundesnachrichtendiensts, Johannes Kramer, soll nach Angaben seines Sohnes als Koordinator bei Operationen mit Geheimdiensten aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und dem Benelux-Raum mitgewirkt haben, auch stand er im Kontakt mit dem ehemaligen Geheimdienstchef Charles-Hoffmann, obwohl dieser den Kontakt abstritt. Kramer Senior hätte verschiedene rekrutierte Figuren als “nützliche Idioten” bezeichnet. Im Jahr 1986 wurde Luxemburg aus dem Stay-Behind-Netzwerk (Spannungsprogramm) herausgenommen, womit die Anschlagsserie aufgehört hatte. Mehr dazu hier bei der TagesWoche: Bommeleeër-Affäre – “Es war Nato gegen Nato”

15.04.2013

Find this story at 15 April 2013

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Beim luxemburgischen Untersuchungsausschuss stand am Dienstag Charles Hoffman als dritter Geheimdienstdirektor Rede und Antwort. Dieser leitete den SREL in den Jahren von 1985 bis 2003. Beigetreten war er dem Dienst 1976. Es ging bei der Befragung unter anderem auch um das sogenannte “Stay Behind” Netzwerk. Vor Beginn der Erklärung sagte Hoffmann, dass der Geheimdienst niemals für eine “politische Partei” gearbeitet hätte. Mit Blick auf die Bommeleeër-Affäre könne er keine Angaben machen, da die Staatsanwaltschaft in der Sache noch ermitteln würde, so der Ausschusspräsident Alex Bodry. Hoffmanns Aufgabenbereich war die Gegenspionage und die Terrorbekämpfung. Als EX-Chef des SREL gab er auch wenige Details über die Stay-Behind-Zelle in Luxemburg bekannt, die er leitete. “Bis zu” zwölf Personen gehörten dieser an, welche einander nicht kannten, hieß es. Selbst er hätte nicht gewusst, wer der Zelle angehöre. Im Fall einer angenommenen Besetzung (Sowjet) in den Zeiten des Kalten Krieges wäre es die Aufgabe der Untergrundzelle gewesen, Informationen über den Feind zu liefern, so Hoffmann. Bei logischer Betrachtung hört sich dies ein “wenig” ominös an, dass Hausfrauen, Lehrer, Handwerker und Eisenbahner im “Fall einer Besetzung” einen auf “Spitzel” machen sollten, um so Informationen zu gewinnen. Für derartige Aufgaben standen sicherlich auch offizielle Strukturen in Militär etc. bereit, in einem angenommen Fall, dass mit einer “Besetzung” derartige Informationsbeschaffungsaufgaben umgesetzt werden sollten. Innerhalb der Befragung von Hoffmann hieß es unter anderem, dass während den Zeiten des Kalten Krieges, wenn Bürger aus einem Land kamen, das damals zum potenziellen Feind gehörte, man diese beobachtet hätte. Sie „wurden auch gefragt“, ob sie „für uns arbeiten wollen“. Das sei die Arbeit der Spionageabwehr gewesen. Zudem hätte es damals zu seinem Aufgabenbereich gehört, Terrorbekämpfung durchzuführen. Hier erinnerte Hoffmann daran, dass es damals in den Nachbarländern, in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren, aktive Terrorgruppen gegeben hatte. In Luxemburg kontrollierte man auch, ob sich Individuen dieser Gruppen im Land aufhielten. Zu Stay-Behind. Das war eine internationale Struktur der Alliierten, „nicht eine der Nato“. So hätte auch die Schweiz mitgemacht. Die Agenten hätten einander nicht gekannt, er habe sie als Chef auch nicht gekannt. Nur die Person, die das Stay-Behind-Mitglied rekrutiert kannte er. (weiterer Verlauf hier) Eine Woche zuvor wurde der vormalige SREL-Chef Marco Mille vernommen. Dieser wurde 2003 Chef des SREL (Service de Renseignement de l’Etat). Er hätte damals eine “Black Box” vorgefunden, da die [wie üblicherweise praktiziert] Abteilungen voneinander abgeschottet gearbeitet hätten. Die gesammelten Informationen waren “nicht allgemein” verfügbar, was auch für Informationen in den Dossiers der Bombenanschläge und “Stay Behind” gegolten habe, so Mille. Nach seinen Angaben wollte er das etablierte Abschottungssystem [Anm. z.B. Matrjoschka-Prinzip, Zwiebelring oder Pyramidal] “reformieren”, was jedoch “nicht gut” angekommen sei. Es habe große Widerstände gegenüber Neuerungen gegeben, sagte der Ex-SREL-Chef. (weiterführend hier) 21.11.12: Eine Splittergruppe im Geheimdienst? 25.03.12: Luxemburgs Schattenkämpfer Dr. Daniele Ganser zu den Berichten des parlamentarischen Geheimdienstkontrollausschuss über „Stay behind“ und die Rolle des SREL bei den „Bommeleeër“-Ermittlungen – Das letzte Wort ist noch nicht gesprochen [PDF] (18. Juli 2008) Italien: Das im Jahr 1990 wegen Mordes an drei Carabinieri verurteilte Gladio- und Ordine Nuovo-Mitglied Vincenzo Vinciguerra erklärte zu den Hintergründen der Verbrechen (Strategie der Spannung): „Man musste Zivilisten angreifen, Männer, Frauen, Kinder, unschuldige Menschen, unbekannte Menschen, die weit weg vom politischen Spiel waren. Der Grund dafür war einfach. Die Anschläge sollten das italienische Volk dazu bringen, den Staat um größere Sicherheit zu bitten. […] Diese politische Logik liegt all den Massakern und Terroranschlägen zu Grunde, welche ohne richterliches Urteil bleiben, weil der Staat sich ja nicht selber verurteilen kann.“ Buch zur Thematik “Gladio”: Verdeckter Terror – Nato Geheimarmeen in Europa – Autor Daniele Ganser (ISBN 978-3280061060) – Daniele Ganser, geb. 1972 in Lugano, ist Historiker, spezialisiert auf Zeitgeschichte nach 1945 und internationale Politik. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Friedensforschung, Geostrategie, verdeckte Kriegsführung, Ressourcenkämpfe und Wirtschaftspolitik. Er unterrichtet am Historischen Seminar der Universität Basel und forscht zum “Peak Oil”, dem globalen Kampf ums Erdöl, und dem so genannten “Krieg gegen den Terrorismus”.

27.01.2013

Find this story at 27 January 2013

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