The Voice of the White House

            Washington, D.C., July 3, 2010: “Every so often, our blessed government erupts into what they take seriously but which most of us see as buffoonery.

            Here, I am speaking about the breathless “revelations” of Russian spies in the United States! Who ever produced this one probably is responsible for the “bin Ladin tapes” which are also nonsense. They take their productions seriously but no one else does. Of course, the Russians are interested in what we do but so are the Chinese, the Canadians, the Italians and others.

            Why don’t the American media start talking about the real spies in America? And by this I do not mean the Russians. I am speaking about our Dearest Friends and Real Allies, the Israelis!

            Not only do they spy on us, steal any secrets they can find, but spend much of their time burrowing into our corrupt Congress and trying to persuade Washington to physically attack their enemies.

            Israel is the Spanish Fly in Middle East politics and spends her time, and our money, picking fights with her neighbors. The degree and extent of Israeli interference in our world is amazing in its depth and brazenness and the media should watch them, not a small group of Russians.

            And in addition, I am working up some interesting information on the PRC and its espionage in America. At least Beijing doesn’t pretend to be our Dearest Friend and Real Ally!”

Israeli Espionage in the United States: 1948-2010

June 20, 2010

by Dr. Phillip L. Kushner, Head of Mathematics Dept.

University of Texas-Austin

pkushner@math.utexas.edu

             Between 1998 and early 2001, more than 200 Israeli nationals were arrested or detained inside the United States, on a variety of visa violations and other nominally petty violations, including low-level drug trafficking. The majority of these detainees claimed they were Israeli art students, peddling art work to cover their college tuitions; or were toy vendors, employed by an Israeli-owned Miami Beach company, Quality Sales Corporation, which investigations link to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency.

            The emerging pattern of surveillance of American government facilities, and established links to suspected Arab and Islamic terrorist cells prior to Sept. 11, by these Israeli nationals, set off alarm bells, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Prior to Sept. 11, a series of highly-classified government memos had been circulated by the CIA and the NSA, pronouncing this Israeli espionage operation a major national security problem.

            Israel is not a friend to the United States. This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject that is ever discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. . .

            In 2005 the FBI noted that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel.” In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”

             According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.” The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.” . . .

            The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hard-line conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

            As the most powerful man in the White House, Cheney was deeply involved in the intelligence field and made three trips to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more ‘forward-leaning interpretation’ of information relating to the possibility that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. That there were no such weapons and that the CIA so advised the Vice President, was categorically rejected by him and he refused to accept their analysis and continued to insist that they produce documents supporting his thesis. In this he was aided by his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, The latter was later convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison. Libby, or Liebowitz, later had his sentence commuted by President Bush because Libby threatened exposures of both Cheney and Bush to the press. 

            The OSP had access to an enormous amount of “raw” intelligence which came, in part, from the CIA’s directorate of operations whose job it is to receive and evaluate incoming reports from their agents around the world. At Cheney’s insistence, a number of Israeli intelligence agents were given free run of the OSP offices   “None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,” said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Douglas Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

              Douglas Feith: Former Under Secretary of Defense and Policy Advisor at the Pentagon. He is a close associate of Perle and served as his Special Counsel extremist, advocating anti-Arab policies. Feith runs a small law firm, Feith and Zell, which only has one International office, in Israel. The majority of their legal work represents Israeli interests. His firm’s own website stated, prior to his appointment, that Feith “represents Israeli Armaments Manufacturers.” Feith, like Perle and Wolfowitz, campaigned intensely for war against Iraq. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, 1984-1986 and was Special Counsel to Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Peale 1982-1984. In 2001, Feith returned to DoD as Donald Rumsfeld’s Undersecretary for Policy, and it was in his office that “OSP”, the Office of Special Plans, was created. The OSP was created to manufacture intelligence information to justify the invasion of Iraq. This intelligence flowed directly from Ariel Sharon’s office to the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. The OSP also miss-planned the post-war reconstruction there, and continues to point an accusing finger at Iran and Syria, as per Zionist plans to control the Middle East and funnel Arab oil to Israeli refineries. Feith is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Like Perle and the others, Feith is a pro-Israel extremist, who has advocated anti-Arab policies in the past. He is closely associated with the extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America, which even attacks Jews that don’t agree with its extremist views. Feith frequently speaks at ZOA conferences. Feith runs a small law firm, Feith and Zell, which only has one International office, in Israel. The majority of their legal work is representing Israeli interests. His firm’s own website stated, prior to his appointment, that Feith “represents Israeli Armaments Manufacturer.” Feith basically represents the Israeli War Machine. Feith, like Perle and Wolfowitz, campaigned hard for the Israeli proxy war against Iraq

            I Background of Israeli foreign and domestic intelligence:

            The origin of Israeli intelligence services lies in the underground organizations that were formed to assist Aliya (Jewish immigration to Palestine), during the period of British mandate. In 1884, the Choveve Zion (the lovers of Zion) met in the Prussian city of Pinsk to constitute ideas on the return of the Jews to Palestine. Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State came out in 1896 and in the same year he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland to consider the idea of a Jewish national homeland . In 1900, under the auspices of the fourth Zionist Congress, the Jewish National Fund was created whose task was to purchase land in Palestine .Upon the defeat of the Ottoman Empire with the Arab help, the British promised independence to the Palestinians. On the other hand, the British in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration and pledged for the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in the land of Palestine, which later in 1922, was granted to Britain as a “mandate’ by the League of Nations.

            The Pre-1948 Waves of Jewish Immigration: The first Aliya took place from 1882-1904 and the second one from 1904-1914, both of which derived support from the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish National Fund . During the British mandate, the Zionist underground resistance force, Haganah, had as its information arm, an organization known as Sherut Yedioth. The Sherut later came to be known as SHAI which began its worldwide operations in 1929 until an independent Israel was created in 1948  Its task was to collect political intelligence for the sake of Zionist propaganda and to infiltrate the anti-Zionist and extremist groups in Palestine as well as the neighboring Arab countries

            Two routes of immigration were open to the Jews to emigrate from Europe, one legal and the other illegal. The legal immigration was allowed by the British but the numbers were small. Between 1939-1944, Britain allowed 75,000 Jews to enter Palestine legally and after that, if it allowed more Jews to immigrate, it would do so only with the Arab consent. The Jewish agency that came into being due to the need for illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine was the Mossad le Aliyah Bet  This institution at that point incorporated ten people who worked in six countries: Switzerland, Austria, France, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. And it was the duty of these agents to make false passports, arrange escape routes and charter ships to take illegal immigrants to Palestine without being detected by the British authorities

            Another pre-independence agency that formed the executing arm of the Haganah was Palmach which was military in character, whereas another organization Rekhesh was involved in covert operations and arms smuggling for the underground Jewish forces that had infiltrated the Arab townships

            The post-1948 agencies: After becoming an independent state the SHAI was disbanded in favour of IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). Its political department was responsible to collect intelligence worldwide. Sherut Bitachon Klali was formed as a general security service for the sake of internal security and counter-espionage, also known as SHABAK or Shin Beth in Hebrew

            In 1951, Ben-Gurion initiated the Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Duties (Mossad Letafkidim Meouychadim) commonly known as Mossad. Its initial function was to assess operation feasibility of military intelligence and nomination of targets, but after the creation of Military intelligence Agaf Modiin (AMAN) in 1953, it became independent of the Military Intelligence. In 1960, when Shimon Peres was in the ministry of defense, LEKEM (the Bureau of Scientific Relations) was instituted to collect scientific and technical intelligence for technological development, specially in relation to the weapon systems .

THE STRUCTURE OF ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE:

II. The Overall Structure of Israeli Intelligence Services:

            With the exception of Mossad and Shin Beth, the overall structure of Israeli intelligence services can be understood as a confederation   The Israeli case displays a confederation structure at a tertiary level. In the sense that the MI is accountable to the director of military intelligence, who reports to the chief of staff, who in turn is responsible to the Minister of Defense. This bureaucratic chain of command is peculiar in a Confederation-type intelligence organization as in the case of UK. Similarly the Research and Political Handling Center through its own director is accountable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whereas the Special Division links up to the IG of National Police through the investigation department. And the IG, through the Ministry of Interior reports to the Prime Minister.

            It is interesting to note that the Advisers on Intelligence and Anti-terrorism on one hand and the Advisers on Political and Military Matters on the other hand are directly linked with the Prime Minister, with each other and also with the Director General of Foreign Ministry and the Director of MI (See below, Figure 1):

FIGURE NO. 1 OVERALL STRUCTURE OF THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
(Source: Foreign Intelligence Organizations, Richelson.)

Llll Adviser on Intelligence

PRIME MINISTER

Advisers on Political Matters

 

Adviser on Anti-Terrorism		Adviser on Military   Matters
Minister of Foreign Affairs	Minister of  Interior	Minister of Defence
Director General		Chief of Staff
	Inspector General of National Police	Director of Mossad (Chairman of VaÕadat) MI	Dir of MI
Chief Research & Political Handling Center
	Investigation Department	MOSSAD
Special Division		l

           

            The organization of Mossad and Shin Beth is a centralized one with no intermediate layer of accountability between the Directors of Mossad, Shin Beth and the Prime Minister.

            The Internal Structure of Mossad: The Mossad is based in Tel Aviv with recently estimated number of about 1,200 personnel and until lately, the identity of the Mossad director was a state secret  Mossad has a total of eight departments. The director oversees, the Research, Technology and Technical Operations Departments. The director also chaperons Operation Planning and Coordination, Manpower Finance Logistics and Security, Training, Collection and Political Action, and Liaison. The latter two conduct single or multiple stations in Central America, South America, Eastern Europe/USSR, Africa, Asia and Ocean, Mediterranean and the Middle East, Europe and North America. Under the Political Action and Liaison Department is known to exist the Special Operations Division which runs highly sensitive covert operations . (See Figure No. 2)

FIGURE NO. 2 INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF MOSSAD

Director

 

Research

Technology

Technical Operations

 

Dir. Collection

Director Political Action & Liaison Cent. America

Director Training

Director Manpower, Finance Logistics & Security

Director Operational Planning & Coordination

South America Special Operations Divisions

Eastern Europe/ USSR

Africa

Asia & Oceana

Mediterranean & the Near East

Europe

North America

             Intelligence is direction of Field Security Units, Territorial Command Combat Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and Naval Intelligence

            Lastly, the General Security Service of Israel is known as Shin Beth, which is primarily responsible for counter-espionage and internal security. Shin Beth is organized into eight operational and functional departments: Arab Affairs, Non-Arab Affairs, Protective Security, Operational Support, Technology, Interrogation and Legal Counsel, Coordination and Planning, and Administration  The first three constitute the operational division and the rest, Support Divisions. Although there is a deputy director’s office, all of the other departments are also directly responsible to the director.

             Coordination of the Israeli Management Structure: The pivotal faculty of Intelligence Community in Israel is known as the Va’adat Rashei Hasherutim or simply Va’adat. The Va’adat consists of the directors of Mossad, AMAN, Shin Beth and IG Police.

            It also includes the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Director of the Research and Political Planning Center and the anti-terrorist advisers of the Prime Minister, political and military  both. All the members of Va’adat are supposedly at parity, however, in terms of importance and power, the director of AMAN is known to eclipse the director of Mossad

FUNCTIONS OF THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

            1. Functions of Mossad: Mossad’s essential functions are: human intelligence collection, covert action and counter terrorism. Its primary focus is to do clandestine operations against the Arab countries as well as against other organizations throughout the world   The Mossad collects information on the leadership, disposition, morale and armaments, not only of the Arab Military forces, but other areas of interest to include (but not limited to: )The United States, Russia, China and Turkey. . Mossad monitors the commercial activity of these entities  in relation to weapons acquisition and attempts, when it deems necessary, to sabotage the Arab states recruitment of military, economic and political experts

             Although exact functional detail remains somewhat abstruse, the largest of the departments with responsibility for most espionage operations is the Department of Collections. The Political Action and Liaison Department is responsible for liaison with friendly states, as well as those states that do not have any diplomatic ties with Israel. Israeli liaison and maneuvering between friendly and non-friendly states is amazingly professional.

            It exchanges intelligence information not only with countries like the US with whom it has formal ties, but also with states as diverse as Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and India. It provided Pakistan some information on India that was obtained by the Israeli agent in the US, Jonathan Jay Pollard, in return for some strategic information about some other countries. At the same time Israel exchanged information with India about the Pakistan’s endeavors to construct the atom bomb .

            The Special Operations Division or Metsada conducts highly sensitive assassinations, engages in sabotage, paramilitary operations and psychological warfare projects  Among the least violent functions of Mossad is its liaison, propaganda and training . About 10 Israeli agents trained nearly one hundred Sri Lankans in intelligence tactics in order to combat the Tamil Separatists in Northern Sri Lanka . Among the more violent functions of Mossad are kidnapping and assassinations. Colonel Mustapha Hafez, an Egyptian intelligence officer was killed by Mossad as he was considered a key element in the organization of the Palestinians . In 1972, in Munich, Germany the Black September faction of PLO kidnapped and subsequently killed ten Israeli athletes in an attempt to recover two hundred Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. This started the most extensive set of assassinations undertaken by the Mossad. The Mossad set up a special unit called the ‘Wrath of God’ to carry out this operation which it successfully completed by eliminating its targets one by one .

             Lohamah Psichologit or the LAP Department of Mossad operates for its psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations. The Research Department produces the intelligence in form of daily reports, situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports from its different geographical desks .

            One of the very important functions of Mossad besides gathering intelligence is the acquisition of military hardware, the assessment of enemy equipment and the enhancement of Israeli capabilities. One of Mossad’s most successful acquisitions was the theft of highly enriched Uranium from an American company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., located in Apollo, Pennsylvania  This took place in 1965. The president of the company stated that 386.1 pounds of Uranium, enough for at least ten atom bombs, was simply lost ! However, the experts believed that it was transferred to Israel.

            2. Functions of Shin Beth: The Arab Affairs Department conducts anti-terrorist operations, maintenance of an index on Arab terrorists and it also performs political subversion. Whereas the non-Arab department, which is divided into Communist and non-Communist sub-sections, is responsible for the functions of penetration of foreign intelligence organizations, diplomatic missions in Israel and interrogation of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe . The Protective Security Branch of Shin Beth functions as the guardian of all the state buildings, embassies, defense related industries, scientific installations, industrial plants and the national airline

            All foreigners are regarded with suspicion by the Shin Beth, regardless of nationality and religion. Informants are recruited from professions of hospitality industry, educational institutions and trade unions with occupations such as bartenders, telephone operators, secretaries, prostitutes and taxi drivers .

            3. The Functions of AMAN: The Military Intelligence of Israel produces comprehensive national intelligence estimates for the prime minister and cabinet, which includes communications intercepts, target studies on the contact Arab states in propinquity, and intelligence on the risk of war . AMAN’s Foreign Relations Department maintains liaison with the foreign intelligence organizations, engages in deep reconnaissance and conducts cross-border operations .

            4. Air Force Intelligence and the Naval Intelligence: The Air Force Intelligence performs the function of data collection by the means of aerial reconnaissance and signals intelligence using a variety of intelligence equipment which also includes the use of RPVs (remotely piloted vehicles), which are recoverable and recyclable after first use . These devices are excellent for photographic information which can be directly transmitted to the commander’s headquarters who can make immediate decisions regarding troop deployment without sending out the ground reconnaissance .This unit worked in close cooperation with the United States military in Georgia to keep a watch on the border with Russia in anticipation of a response by that country to attacks on breakaway provinces. This project failed because the Russian military had been alerted to the times and flight patterns of the surveillance craft by one of their sources in the IDF and was able to hide their troops and armor in good time from aerial surveillance.

            The Naval intelligence is a small service which provides AMAN on a consultative basis, assessments of the sea-based threats to Israel. Its targeting department is also responsible for coastal studies, naval gunfire missions and beach studies for amphibious assaults .

Incidents of Israeli Spying on the United States  1947-2010

• 1947. Information obtained by the Jewish-owned Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismisses the ADL’s reports on suspected communists as hearsay.
• 1950 John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets.
• 1954 A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.
• 1956 Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attach in Tel Aviv.
• 1954 “The Lavon Affair”. Israeli agents recruited Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset US-Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.
• 1965 Israel  illegally obtained enriched uranium from NUMEC Corporation. ( Washington Post, 6/5/86, Charles R. Babcock, “US an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say.”)
• 1967 Israel attacks the USS Liberty, a CIA intelligence- gathering vessel flying a US flag, operating at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, killing 34 crew members.. In 2004, Captain Ward Boston, Senior Legal Counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the attack swears under oath that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the investigation to conclude that the deliberate assault was an “unfortunate accident,” even though the evidence indicated the attack was deliberate. Given the use by Israel of unmarked boats and planes, and the machine-gunning of USS Liberty‘s lifeboats, the most likely explanation is that USS Liberty was to be sunk with all hands, with evidence left to frame Egypt for the sinking. This would have dragged the US into the war on Israel’s side.
• 1970 While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.
• 1978, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a DC hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials. Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.
• 1979 Shin Beth [the Israeli internal security agency] tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a “Honey Trap”, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.
• Jonathan Jay Pollard, a graduate of Stanford University and an employee of the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) surface ships division  was accused and convicted of stealing over a million highly sensitive documents and selling them to the Israeli government. As an example, Pollard stole and copied  the latest version of Radio-Signal Notations (RASIN), a 10-volume manual comprehensively detailing America’s global electronic surveillance network. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison on one count of espionage on March 4, 1987. Pollard is federal prisoner #09185-016 and is incarcerated at the Butner Federal Correction Complex in Butner, North Carolina.
• 1985 The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting [former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.] Mr. [Raymond] Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.
• 1985 Richard Smyth, the owner of MILCO, was indicted on charges of smuggling nuclear timing devices to Israel ( Washington Post, 10/31/86).
• 1987 April 24 Wall Street Journal headline: “Role of Israel in Iran-Contra Scandal Won’t be Explored in Detail by Panels”
• 1992 The Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli agents apparently tried to steal Recon Optical Inc’s top-secret airborne spy-camera system.
• 1992 Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant — with security clearance — on exports of sensitive US technology.
• 1992 “The Samson Option,” by Seymour M. Hersh reports, illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled: “Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts.”
• 1993. The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent directly to Israel via their Embassy and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forced San Francisco authorities to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.
• 1995 The Defense Investigative Service circulated a memo warning US military contractors that ” Israel aggressively collects [ US] military and industrial technology.” The report stated that Israel obtains information using “ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties” of US citizens.
• 1996 A General Accounting Office report “Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors” found that according to intelligence sources “Country A” (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 2/22/96) “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.” The Jerusalem Post (8/30/96) quoted the report, “Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country.” The report described “An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for [ Israel] paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was “a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel’s LAKAM [Office of Special Tasks] espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information.”

            The GAO report also noted that “Several citizens of [ Israel] were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes.”

• 1996 An Office of Naval Intelligence document, “Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare” reported that ” US technology has been acquired [by China] through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM [surface-to-air] missile technology.” Jane’s Defense Weekly (2/28/96) noted that “until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology [via Israel] to China.” The report noted that this “represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation.” (Flight International, 3/13/96)
• 1997 An Army mechanical engineer, David A. Tenenbaum, “inadvertently” gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 2/20/97).
• 1997 The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the Israelis, identified only as Dov, had commented that they may get the letter from Mega, the code name for Israel’s top agent inside the United States.
• 1997 US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.
• 1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinsky’s phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBI’s hunt for Mega is called off. Mega is later revealed to be Reuven Azar – Counselor for Political Affairs, Embassy of Israel
• 2001 It is discovered that US drug agent’s communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers. The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens. On 9-11, 5 Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel. The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandons his business and flees to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11. All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, received an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provided the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, which turned out to be located in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, hence could not be further investigated.   
• 2001 The FBI  investigated 5 Israeli moving companies as possible fronts for Israeli intelligence.
• 2001 The Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin arrested for planning to bomb a US Congressman. He was murdered in the LA County Jail and dies before he could be brought to trial.
• 2001 The Isreali Mossad, in conjunction with senior members of the Bush administration, penetrated a Saudi terrorist group located at Hollywood, Florida, and materially assisted them in preparing for an aerial assault on various significant American targets. The White House was kept fully courant of the Mossad’s actions by the Israeli Embassy personnel in Washington. 
• 2002 The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, had aggressively been trying to penetrate US Government offices.
• 2002 Police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to “deliver furniture.” The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were false positives by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous. Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.
• 2003 The Police Chief of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes. The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public. It is later revealed that they contain “extensive documentation” concerning earlier atomic weapon’s testings at nearby Alamagordo, NM
• 2003 Israel deployed assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not officially protest when they were informed by the Israeli Embassy that these squads were intended to kill known Muslim terrorists known from internal FBI reports to be operating inside the United States.
• 2004 Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake Ids. The FBI refuses to investigate and, on orders from the Department of Justice in Washington, the Israelis are released.
• 2004 Two Israelis try to enter Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home to eight Trident submarines. Their truck tests positive for explosives.
• 2004, The authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Group noted that Israel’s intelligence organizations “have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established.” The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, told Congressional Quarterly magazine that “the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets.”
• 2005 August 4,2005 a federal grand jury indiocted Lawrence Franklin a former United States Department of Defense employee, on five charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 in that Franklin passed secret information regarding United States policy towards Iran to staff members of  the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Franklin, pled guilty to several espionage-related charges and was sentenced in January 2006 to nearly 13 years of prison but was later released due to pressure from the Israeli government.  As soon as public interest died away, a Federal judge immediately reduced Franklin’s sentence to time served and a supervised home probation.
• 2009: October 20, 2009  Stewart Nozette, a scientist who worked for NASA and had a top-level government security clearance, is charged with trying to sell US secrets to Israel after an FBI sting operation. The FBI pretended to be Mossad agents.
• 2010: A classified FBI report under date of March 9, 2020 indicates that the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms who service U.S. telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon, have been “regularly reading and forwarding” in-depth information concerning both domestic and foreign NSA surveillance. Also, both the FBI and the DEA have uncovered, and reported on, a.massive ecstasy trafficking operation, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drugs, manufactured in the Netherlands, to cities across the United States. The drug trafficking operation is also engaged in black market diamond smuggling, using Brooklyn-based Hassidic Jews as couriers.

            Portions of the funds garnered from these illegal operations, according to the official reports, were funneled to offshore bank accounts of the Mossad, accounts in Switzerland and Lichtenstein,. This Israeli drug and diamond smuggling operation receives technical support (and timely warning of surveillance) via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and government law enforcement agencies.

            Spy operations, targeted at mosques and other centers of the Islamic-American communities. According to sources, the goal is to foment nominally “Arab” or “Islamic” labeled violence and terrorism inside the United States, to win Bush Administration support for an Israeli war against the Palestinians and Arabs. These sources believe further, Israeli-abetted terror attacks are to be expected.

             Surveillance of U.S. government law enforcement, military and intelligence facilities, to gather profile information for such terrorist attacks, as well as espionage penetration. Organized teams of young, “recently retired” Israeli Defense Force soldiers, often associated with specialty units engaged in electronic signal intercepts and explosive ordinance, have targeted at least 36 domestic U.S. military bases, and many federal law enforcement and intelligence installations. A second feature of this targeting of USG facilities is the recruitment of “a new generation of Jonathan Pollards” (Israeli spies).

            In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States, the case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Stanford graduate Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli intelligence with an estimated 800,000 pages of highly classified U.S. intelligence information. The Israelis in turn immediately passed this stolen information to the Soviets, thereby compromising American intelligence (CIA and military) agents in the field – a significant number of whom were captured and killed as a result.

            Israel at first denied, and then, faced with overwhelming evidence, admitted after he was arrested in 1985, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, that they were well aware of Pollard’s connections to the Mossad and an Israeli Air Force intelligence unit working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

            The case created severe strains in American-Israeli relations, and is a source of ongoing rage in many American Jews, who believe that since Pollard was spying for Israel, he had an obligation to do this and that his life sentence was unduly harsh.

            Many Jewish groups in the United States, acting in concert with high level Israeli officials have constantly importuned American Presidents to pardon Pollard and permit him to emigrate to Israel where he has been promised a large sum of cash and a seat in the Israeli Knesset.

            Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to any accusations of Israeli espionage in the United States as well as to comprehend the media response must take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America’s unique and complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a “special relationship” unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world. But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation of trust. According to intelligence sources, the United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the government decided that it was in our interest, such as observation and infiltration of pro-Palestine Arab groups legally resident in the United States (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.

            If England or France spied on the United States, and this was discovered, American officials would likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons to hide any unseemly violations of the “special” relationship. The powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the Bush administration’s strong support for Israel, and its strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a partner in the “war against terror”; the devastating consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack — all these factors explain why the U.S. government might publicly downplay any public accusation of Israeli espionage against the United States and forcefully conceal any investigation that might be expected to produce results unacceptable to the Israel lobby and the American Jewish community that firmly supports it.

            The pro-Israel lobby is an enormous and very powerful force in American politics; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby in Washington and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington, according to Fortune Magazine. Other powerful and influential pro-Israel groups include the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

            Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National Interest, calls the Israel lobby “an ethnic donor machine” that “distorts U.S. foreign policy” in the Middle East. Among foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other — just more effective. “This is what all lobbies do,” Lind observes. “If you criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem.”

            After an explosion in the town of Rishon Letzion  in May of 2002 killed two people and the bomber, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said, “The innocent Israelis murdered today underscore the need to stand with Israel as they eliminate the terrorist networks.”                                                                                                   

             DeLay’s strong response was one of many expressions of support coming from congressional members, who repeatedly remind voters of the strong U.S.-Israel alliance dating back to Israel’s 1948 foundation.

            But widespread congressional support is rooted in more than just a long-term relationship. It is traced to the power of the collective Jewish or pro-Israeli lobby, a well organized, well funded, extremely active, and extraordinarily connected group, according to political analysts.

            “They are very savvy and sophisticated,” said Richard Semiatin, a political science professor at American University. “They are extremely knowledgeable and some of the best lobbyists in the country when they get into congressional offices.”

            Indeed, the latest crisis in the Middle East, which has been punctuated by Palestinian uprisings that resulted in dozens of homicide bombings and the subsequent ongoing occupation of disputed Palestinian territory, has only energized this Washington lobby. The group has been hosting near-daily organizational conferences, press events, op-eds, advertising campaigns, and rallies — all demanding that Arafat get control of his militant supporters and reform his corrupt Parliament.

            “It’s a little like the special forces teams who go in to fight in Afghanistan. They’re on the ground, calling in bombers. The planes overhead are the pro-Israeli supporters across the country,” who donate money to campaigns and send letters to Washington, said former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris. “It’s a very effective model and basically unequaled in the Congress.”

            “The key to AIPAC’s success is support for the only Western democracy in the Middle East,” said Josh Block, spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which boasts over 65,000 Jewish and non-Jewish members. “The members support and believe that Israel is our ally on the frontline against terrorism in the Middle East. When you are lobbying on an issue that is so clearly the right thing to do, your effectiveness is high.”

             Granted, other groups, including the National Rifle Association, the Cuban American National Foundation and the American Trial Lawyers Association, all command large audiences and ready support in the aggressive environment of Washington.

             But AIPAC, along with the American Jewish Committee, the American Defense League, the United Jewish Communities, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, all of whom conduct their own grassroots campaigns, have surpassed the partisan and political bickering that often marks policy on guns, Cuba and tort law.

 AIPAC also engaged in active espionage against the United States as withes this official DoJ press release:

U.S. Department of Justice
United States Attorney
Eastern District of Virginia

Paul J. McNulty
2100 Jamieson Avenue
United States Attorney
Alexandria, Virginia 22314
(703)299-3700

NEWS RELEASE
August 4, 2005

Paul McNulty, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, announced that Lawrence Anthony Franklin, age 58, of Kearneysville, WV; Steven J. Rosen, age 63, of Silver Spring, MD; and Keith Weissman, age 53, of Bethesda, MD, were indicted today by a federal grand jury sitting in Alexandria with Conspiracy to Communicate National Defense Information to Persons Not Entitled to Receive It. The indictment alleges that beginning in April of 1999, Rosen, the Director of Foreign Policy Issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington, D.C., and Weissman, the Senior Middle East Analyst in the Foreign Policy Issues Department at AIPAC, in an effort to influence persons within and outside the United States government, would use their contacts within the United States government, including Franklin, with whom they first met in February 2003, to gather sensitive United States government information, including classified information relating to the national defense, for subsequent unlawful communication, delivery and transmission to persons not entitled to receive it, including members of the media and foreign government officials.

Franklin was also charged with three counts of Communication of National Defense Information to Persons Not Entitled to Receive It. In one of those counts, Rosen was charged with aiding and abetting him in the unlawful disclosure.

            Finally, Franklin was charged with conspiring with persons known and unknown to the grand jury to communicate classified information to an agent or representative of a foreign government. It is alleged that Franklin would use his position as a desk officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to gather information, classified as affecting the security of the United States, for subsequent unlawful communication to a foreign official.

Mr. McNulty stated: “When it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law. Today’s charges are about crossing that line. Those entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s secrets must remain faithful to that trust. Those not authorized to receive classified information must resist the temptation to acquire it, no matter what their motivation may be.”

This case was investigated by the FBI, and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Kevin DiGregory and Neil Hammerstrom, and Thomas Reilly, Trial Attorney, the Counterespionage Section of the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice.

            U.S. congressional leaders like DeLay, former House Majority Leader (until his felony indictment and early retirement into private life) , and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., delivered rousing speeches to AIPAC’s annual conference, the most powerful lobbying force for the Jewish-American community. DeLay’s speech was followed by instructions to blanket Capitol Hill with lobbying teams.

            “These groups have taken advantage of the political system to organize themselves to petition the government and they have a reputation of success not only because of their influence but because our presidents have seen their cause in the public interest,” said John Samples, a political analyst with the Cato Institute. “It gives you the notion that there is a broad coalition of people who see it as part of the national interest to support Israel very strongly.”

            “They do have a tremendous amount of clout, but I think it starts with the fact that there is an enormous amount of support for their point of view in Washington,” said political analyst Rich Galen, who edits Mullings.com. “They are feeding into a willing audience.”

            But not everyone bought into the hype.

            “It is truly disturbing to see American elected officials falling over themselves in an unseemly attempt to ‘pledge allegiance’ to a foreign government and its domestic lobby,” complained the Council on American-Islamic Relations in a recent statement.

            “There are Jewish people who are opposed to Israeli policies, but they don’t get a hearing in the Congress. The pro-Israel lobby gets all the attention,” said Faiz Rehmanen, communications director for the American Muslim Council in Washington.

            “As an American, I see it as a problem. [Members of Congress] aren’t addressing our interests, they are addressing the interests of a critical lobby,” he added.

            Indeed, the number of Jews in the United States Congress well surpasses the population as a whole. Seven percent of members are Jewish, while the Jewish-American population totals 2.2 percent, about 6 million people in a nation of 280 million.

            But Jewish-Americans accounted for 4 percent of total voter turnout in the 2000 elections, totaled close to 3 percent of swing voters in several key states and their fund-raising ability is nearly unmatched, say experts.

            “It’s a big fund-raising community filled with people who are willing to give large sums of money to political parties and candidates,” said Michael Barone, author of The New Americans. “It’s money, but it is also skill, it’s the strength of their arguments.”

            In 2001, AIPAC spent $1.1 million in lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, which Block said is typical. None of that money went directly to political campaigns. Neither does AIPAC endorse candidates.

             According to the Center for Responsive Politics, pro-Israeli donors, including PACs and individuals, gave $28.6 million to Democrats and $12.7 million to Republicans. About $17.5 million came from PACs and $24 million from individuals.

            By comparison, Arab-American and Muslim PAC contributions totaled $296,830 since 1990, with Democrats receiving $206,908 of that money.

            “The Jewish lobby is extremely influential in Washington,” said Steven Weiss, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “If you are a candidate and you get the pro-Israel label from AIPAC, the money will start coming in from contributors all over the country.” “When you have a core constituency that is so passionate about what they believe in, they are likely to open their pocketbooks,” surmised Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

             Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art students. “In government circles,” as Insight’s Rodriguez put it, “anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail — deadly. No one wants to touch it.” Intelligence officers say that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to “career suicide.” And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities.

            Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters and editors as anti-Semites.

            In late May of 2010, U.S. counter-intelligence investigators believe that once again they have uncovered a “significant number” of Israelis and Israeli informants extensively engaged in domestic espionage against the U.S. Their goal is to infiltrate and become persons of influence in both the U.S. Congress, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. They already have a significant presence in these agencies as well as the NSA.  Intercepted telephone and computer messaging indicates that while an effort to persuade the Bush Administration to attack Iran failed, they are pushing a similar project with the current Obama Administration.

 

The Cold War is so over
by Ian Williams

             WASHINGTON – It’s not quite James Bond. The Murphy couple in their New Jersey Home with cans of coke, Bud Lite, and bottles of ketchup in front of them definitely made to be shaken not stirred. As for deep undercover, a Russian accent from someone with an archetypal Irish name like Murphy had even the friendly neighbors wondering what the deal was.

            Now with the arrest of the Murphys and the rest of their, well, “unregistered agents of foreign governments ring”, everyone is wondering what the deal was. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been watching them for a decade, either as puzzled as everybody else, or collaborating in an elaborate implicit job-creation scheme between the Russian and American agencies.

            The Murphys and three other couples were among 10 individuals suspected of acting as undeclared agents of a foreign country who the United States Department of Justice announced on June 28 had been arrested the previous day as a result of an FBI counter-intelligence investigation. Nine of the suspects were given fake identities and cover stories to establish themselves in the US, the FBI said.

            When I came to the United States before the end of the Cold War, a stalwart of the foreign press corps was the only Russian journalist who did not live in their own walled compound. He had his own mid-town apartment, his own big American car, went to every reception and was clearly on another payroll apart from his newspaper for whom he never wrote. Did he collect information on the US, on journalists? He appeared on prime-time television, where he explained Soviet policy in flawless colloquial American English.

            He would have made a good sleeper. Why send someone with an accent and a totally inappropriate name? Many of these 10 had notable Russian accents completely at odds with their assumed identities, and ironically, if they had used Russian names no one would have noticed with the massive post-Soviet immigration to the US.

            It was the anomalies people noticed. Several of the couples had children whom the prosecutors alleged were to provide cover. The thought of James Bond pushing a baby buggy for deep cover seems unconvincing. There seems to be no evidence that they passed on serious secret information, and much of what they did allegedly seek, like information on administration personnel’s attitudes to Russia, could have been obtained by journalists or even by trawling the web.

            That is why they are charged only with being unregistered agents of foreign governments – an accusation frequently made against lobbyists – rather than with espionage. Nor do spies traditionally post pictures and details on social networking sites like Facebook. Adding to the Keystone Cops ambience, sultry redhead Anna Chapman was arrested when she went to the police to hand in a fraudulent passport that an undercover FBI agent pretending to be an undercover SRV (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) agent had given her that weekend.

            The news of FBI involvement has to be taken into consideration, with the bureau’s extensive record of using paid informants to provoke people into crime and then arresting them for it. Last week in upstate Newburgh, a defense attorney asked for bail for four alleged terrorists accused of conspiring to blow up a synagogue. [1]

            The attorney assured the judge that her clients were in no danger of committing any crime – as long as they had no contact with the FBI paid informant who had put them up to it and provided the weaponry to do so. In fact, a disturbing number of “terrorist” trials show FBI plants instigating the criminal acts, but the magic word “terrorist” is usually enough to blow away any defense of “entrapment”.It is clear that the SRV was up to something, but was as clueless as the FBI. Both agencies continued their old Cold War habits when neither had much to gain for it, except gainful employment for their recruits and handlers. The SRV spent untold sums running this singularly useless network for a decade. The FBI was watching them all that time and only moved when they thought that some of them were leaving the country.

             Moscow is huffing and puffing at Cold War moves, but it has not really explained why it was paying people who had assumed entirely inappropriate identities and gone undercover in the US. The FBI can’t explain it either, although the Central Intelligence Agency could probably draw up a supporting brief since they are almost certainly running similar networks across the globe, including in Russia.

            So what are their chances in court? The days of the Red Scare are down now, so they would certainly get a better hearing than the Cuban Wasp network, the five Cuban agents whose work in monitoring Cuban American exile groups got Draconian sentences – in Florida, dominated as it is by Cuban exiles. Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life for spying for Israel, allegedly put US security at risk, which is why even the Israel lobby has not managed to get his sentence reduced.

            But once the FBI gets onto a case, the Kafkaesque proceedings can destroy lives. Wen Ho Lee, accused of spying for China, eventually pleaded guilty to one charge to avoid over 50 others with the risk of being sentenced to life. In the end, president Bill Clinton apologized to him, and he won a substantial cash settlement from the government and media.

            In this case the loud noise from Moscow and the absence of seriously damaging information offer a wide range of outcomes. Russia could simply round up a dozen or so Americans in Moscow and offer to swap. The FBI will need to be vindicated, which an admission could do. The prosecutors could offer deportation, since most of the false identities make accused illegal immigrants, or there could be plea bargaining of the traditional style. One mystery is what happens to the children born in the US. In a sense they are wards of state – but which state?

            Would they want to stay in the land of ketchup and Bud Lite, or become pensioners of a grateful Russian state – which could find uses for the vernacular American English they have acquired?

            There is clearly Inspector Clouseau-like culpability to go round on both the Russian and American side. It might be time for their respective presidents to order their respective spooks to note that the Cold War is over.

Note
1. Trial of alleged synagogue bomb plot gang thrown into chaos over withheld evidence New York Daily News, June 4, 2010.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

Spy Saga: In the White House, there are still powerful people who do not want, at any price, peace between Russians and Americans.
July 2, 2010

by Bulov

Translated from the Portuguese version by:
Lisa KARPOVA
PRAVDA.Ru   

Spy Incident May Resurrect Cold War Between USA and Russia

            The arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies in the United States suggests that Washington and Moscow are predestined to be eternal adversaries in a Cold War without end, despite a slight respite. Kindnesses and courtesies seemed to give the world hope for achieving the long sought after social peace sought after among all the peoples of all mankind.

http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/conflicts/114097-0/

            Last week, for example, the world imagined to return to the much coveted, cherished and dreamed of world peace that would be achieved on account of the encounter between the well-intentioned presidents Barack Obama, United States, and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia, in the House White in Washington, which marked the end of the Cold War between the two powers.

            But the dream lasted less than a week. The arrest, in the United States, of ten persons “suspected” as spies in the service of Moscow, ground into the dirt any dream of social peace in the world that was being carefully driven by Obama and Medvedev.

            The arrest episode was a puzzle and raises questions about what may have occurred hours after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ended a visit to the USA where, together with U.S. President Barack Obama, they supposedly put an end to the Cold War between Moscow and Washington.

             Conclusion: Truth or a lie, the episode of the arrest of alleged Russian spies in the United States makes clear that whether in the Kremlin or the White House, there are still powerful people who do not want, at any price, peace among the peoples of the world, especially between Russians and Americans.

            At the meeting in the White House with Dmitry Medvedev, Barack Obama stated emphatically that “the world is safer when the United States and Russia do well,” and assured that there are no technical barriers that may exist against the entry of Russia into the World Trade Organization. He said, “It should be overcome soon,” and emphasized that “Russia belongs in the WTO.”

            “I urged Medvedev that it is not only interesting to the U.S. and Russia for Russia’s entrance into the WTO, but for everyone. We must do everything possible to conclude the agreement as soon as possible,” Obama said.

            The “new” relations between the U.S. and Russia were having an informal and friendly connotation so that the two leaders were together at a popular diner on the outskirts of Washington, eating hamburgers and fries in the midst of anonymous people. Afterwards, they returned to the White House in the same car in a public demonstration of friendship between the two presidents, symbolizing the beginning of a new and friendly relationship between Russia and the United States.

            The popular coffee shop where the two leaders chose to have lunch, surprisingly, was a show to the world by the two presidents that the Cold War between Moscow and Washington had come to an end and that the world could return to dream of peace between people.

            In a clear and direct statement that the safety of humankind depends on understanding, friendship and mutual trust between the two powers, Barack Obama stressed that “The world is safer when the United States and Russia do well.”

            After years of frosty relations, Obama said that such discussions with the Russian government would have been unlikely 17 months ago. “When I took office, the relationship between the U.S. and Russia had gone perhaps to their lowest point since the Cold War. There was so much distrust and so little real work on issues of common interest.”

            During a meeting at the White House, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev arrived to make jokes about the famous red phone at the time of the Cold War, replaced now by Twitter, that the two presidents will be using it every day to talk about world problems.

            While still in the White House meeting, Obama insisted that President Medvedev is a strong and “reliable” partner and enumerated the successes of American foreign policy in recent months since the vote on UN sanctions on Iran until the conclusion of a new START treaty on nuclear disarmament.

            Obama also said that the entry of Moscow into WTO would be accelerated. Medvedev thanked him for having resolved a trade dispute between the two countries on U.S. exports of poultry and announced that the Russian state would buy 50 Boeing aircraft, valued at four billion dollars, which could create up to 44,000 jobs in the U.S. economy.

            Dmitry Medvedev visited the headquarters of Twitter and opened an account on behalf of the Kremlin. He heard Obama say that he also has an account and “perhaps we can put an end to the red phones that were used here so long.” This was supported by the Russian president.

            The Russian president hailed the “success” of the Summit on Nuclear Safety in Washington and the “change of atmosphere” in relations between Russia and the United States. “We will continue working with the United States on the most important global problems,” said the Russian leader, signaling that Moscow is also prepared to turn the page of tension with Washington.

            Under the illusion that everything seemed to go swimmingly, a true Dream Fairy on the way to world peace, with the end of the Cold War between Moscow and Washington, the Department of Justice of the United States announced the arrest and indictment of eleven people suspected of spying on behalf of Russia on American soil.

            The announcement of the arrests can cause a huge setback to the efforts of President Barack Obama, U.S., and Dmiry Medvedev, Russia, which had ended a few days ago the Cold War between the two powers.

            U.S. authorities accuse the the individuals alleged to be Russian spies of involvement in a long-term undercover operation orchestrated by Moscow and claim that they received training from SVR (the Russian intelligence services) in foreign languages with the use of codes.

            In turn, Russia stated that the arrest of Russian nationals as spies in the U.S. version is wrong and the case resembles a Cold War scenario. “In our view, such actions have absolutely no foundation and are malicious,” said a Russian diplomatic source.

            The arrests of alleged spies in the service of Russia in the U.S. is a ‘baseless and malicious” version and recalls the Cold War era,” said Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a statement following the incident.

            The spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia considers that there are many contradictions in the information on the arrest of alleged agents of the SVR. According to Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, Moscow is waiting for explanations on the arrest of these alleged spies. “We do not have an explanation of what it means. I hope to get an explanation,” Lavrov said.

             According to the U.S. Justice Department, the ten alleged Russian spies were arrested after having carried out a “long-term clandestine mission in the United States on behalf of the Russian Federation.”

            The Russian foreign ministry described the accusations as contradictory and unfounded that the alleged spies spent at least ten years gathering information on nuclear weapons, the gold market and even changes in personnel from the CIA, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

            Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, criticized the U.S. timing of of the operation, months after a broad diplomatic effort of the government of Barack Obama to “reset” the chilled bilateral relationship, and considered the action a step backward in the direction of returning to the status of Cold War.

            “Such actions are baseless and inappropriate. We deeply regret that all this has happened behind the scenes of the resumption of relations declared by the U.S. administration,” the Russian minister wrote in a press release.

            The FBI claims the undercover agents were part of a group called “illegals” for Moscow and they adopted American identities to get into thinktanks and U.S. government agencies.

             According to U.S. officials, most of the supposed spies were originally from Russia and were trained to secretly infiltrate the U.S. and act in order not to be caught. While appearing to admit that some of the arrested alleged spies are Russian, Moscow dismisses knowledge of any mission of espionage on American soil.
 

The Spy Scare: And its uses

July 2, 2010

by Justin Raimondo,

            We’re in the midst of a spy scare, one of those periodic bouts of paranoia that spreads, like a virus, from Washington on outward. This time, it’s alleged Russian spies, but the scare is already becoming a generalized fear, permeating official Washington and the “mainstream” media like a poisonous fog. Check out Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), a member  of the House intelligence committee, Fran Townsend, CNN’s “national security correspondent,” and CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux in the “Situation  Room,” bloviating oh-so-knowledgably about this latest “threat”: 

 

             “MALVEAUX: Well, Congressman, I want you to weigh in on this. How concerned are you that this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to spying inside of the United States? 

 

             “HOEKSTRA: Well, I don’t worry about that whether it is the tip of the iceberg or not. I know it’s the tip of the iceberg. Not only are the Russians involved in this, but the Iranians are involved in these types of activities. The Chinese are very involved in these types of activities. We just had a successful prosecution earlier this year of a Chinese sleeper, and Fran is absolutely right, these countries have invested, you know, significant amounts of time and energy and personnel to get people planted here today so that maybe in five or ten or 15 years, they only need one of these people to pay off and get an important penetration, and provide them with real significant and valuable information. This is the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot more of this going on.” 

            How could I have missed  that they’d drag in the Iranians? But of course, and if I were one of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians living in the US, I’d be worried. Ditto Chinese-Americans. That’s the idea behind the propaganda of fear: intimidation as a method of rule. And of course be sure to pick on a vulnerable minority – preferably a racial group that has yet to achieve official victim status. Are those pockets of Iranian immigrants ringing the Los Angeles metropolitan area really a ring of giant sleeper cells just waiting for the moment to strike? How about your next door neighbor, the Chinese-American engineer who works for a defense related industry and drives a better car than you? Who’s to say he’s not a sleeper, too? 

            The uses of the current spy scare are many, and scary: the politicians of Hoekstra‘s ilk are all too ready to extend the paranoia to include their favored targets, and the media loves a story like this, one complete with a compelling narrative – “sleeper agents” in suburbia! Dastardly spies who look like the clean cut couple next door! – and a “flame-haired beauty.” What more could cable news ask for? 

            Playing her role as a megaphone for the War Party to the hilt, “reporter” Malveaux asks Hoekstra the one question he really wants to hear:  

“Who are the most dangerous spies? Congressman, you mentioned the Chinese and the Iranians and either one of you jump in here. Do we know who is the most dangerous when it comes to getting our state secrets? 

 

             HOEKSTRA: Well, okay, from my perspective, I think both the Russians and the Chinese are very, very aggressive. They are very good. They are not only targeting military and intelligence areas, but they are also targeting our research universities and there is cases where we are well aware of that they have stolen our secrets and stolen our information and they have patented it before we have ever known that they have taken it. 

 

             “TOWNSEND: That is right. I agree completely…” 

            Of course she agrees completely. That’s what she’s paid to do. It’s her job: to validate the War Party’s not-so-hidden agenda. Russia isn’t the point: they’re just the convenient fall guys. Contra Hoekstra, if the activities of the Russian “sleepers,” as detailed in the indictment [.pdf], are any indication of the danger posed to the US, then I’d say we can all relax. I don’t think the spy cabal’s research into the prospects for the gold market, for one known example, pose any great threat to our national security. The real point is to extend the spy scare to include the enemy of the moment, in this case Iran. The “expert” Ms. Townsend then goes on to say: 

 

            “The other thing I would mention that they target is our commercial, our technology. You know, our American companies invest a lot of money in R&D and we know that the Chinese and the Russians are very aggressive about targeting what in this country is that they can get through commercial relationships or on open sources, but what is restricted from transfer outside of the country, and so that is another one of the benefits that these sleepers can establish commercial relationships that really steal our intellectual property.”

            At this point, I can’t help but wonder why she doesn’t mention the one country with a considerable clandestine – as well as open – presence in the US, and that is Israel, which the FBI’s 2005 annual report on “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage” accused of running “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” Unlike the Russians, they don’t seem too interested in the gold market: “These collection activities,” the FBI continues, “are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.” If the Russkies are using old-fashioned cold war technology like invisible ink and passing bags of cash at train stations, the 2005 report describes Israeli spies as using electronic means and specifically computer intrusion as their primary tools.

            If Hoekstra and Townsend  are so worried about the alleged danger posed by Russian and Chinese espionage, then surely the considerable Mossad presence ought to concern them as well: after all, when Jonathan Pollard stole priceless secrets from the US on behalf of Tel Aviv, the Israelis traded the information to the Soviets in exchange for the release of tens of thousands of Russian Jews to be sent directly to Israel. According to a 1996 report by the Office of Naval Investigations, the Israelis sold stolen US military technology to the Chinese, and this came out in 2000, again, when Tel Aviv tried to sell China the ultra-secret Phalcon early warning detection system, created in the US.  

            In 2005, the FBI concluded that these heists posed an effective challenge to US military superiority, and cost us dearly, confirming an earlier report by the General Accounting Office (GAO). The GAO study of the costs of espionage detailed numerous instances of the theft of sensitive technology by Israeli citizens residing in the US, illustrating the key role played by Israeli hi tech companies as intelligence fronts. The GAO flat out declared that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.” 

            The activities of the Russian “moles” are a comic opera next to this kind of sophisticated and fantastically successful operation. Yet we hear next to nothing about it. Why do you suppose that is? 

            No one doubts that many nations wish to penetrate our national security firewall and steal our secrets. The question is: which nations have had the most success?  

            I would submit, based on their pathetic performance, that the Russkies are the very least of our problems. As for the Chinese, they already have their boots on our necks: in any conflict with the US, all they have to do is stop buying our debt and they’ll have won. Why bother stealing our secrets when they can buy them – buy us – without going to the trouble to plant “sleeper cells”? (The likeliest recruits to a Chinese sleeper cell are members of the Congress of the United States, which keeps upping the national debt — and handing Beijing the whip they’ll use if we get too aggressive.) 

            The Russians, you’ll note, concentrated on going after figures with some political influence: i.e. those with access to the President, or other elected officials, rather than industrial or technical targets. In the age of the American empire, with Washington dominating what goes on in many if not most parts of the world, this is a survival mechanism. With the US claiming the “right” of militarily preempting an alleged threat at any time or place, every other nation on earth needs an early warning system. This is part of the price of empire, and as long as the American people are willing to bear the costs the problem will persist.  

            I only hope – or, rather, wish – our intelligence services are as skilled at tracking down real terrorist cells as they are at scooping up cold war leftovers. Somehow, I rather doubt it.

‘Surge” smoke follows Petraeus to Afpak
by Pepe Escobar

             Confirmed and reconfirmed by United States President Barack Obama, the US Senate and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and duly hailed as the new armored Messiah by US mainstream media, “tightly disciplined” political fox and former US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is about to land in Kabul. He will either hit the road to his 2012 Republican presidential nomination, or witness another disaster in a US$7 billion a month (and counting) quagmire.

            The myth of Petraeus’ “successful surge” in Iraq could not but linger on. The Pentagon never managed not to profit by selling a public relations operation to a gullible American public. Petraeus actually “won” the war in Iraq by disgorging Samsonites full of cash to selected strands of the Sunni resistance who werefiercely fighting the US occupation, while at the same time shielding the American military inside remote bases.

            Let’s assume that what in effect are mostly Afghan Pashtuns will now also take Petraeus’ bundle of cash (after all Afghanistan is the second most corrupt country in the world, only behind Somalia). In this case will he have enough time to buy the whole Afghan resistance before the 2012 US presidential election? It depends on how much cash will flow.

            What’s certain is that the Pashtuns will be more than happy to take the money and not run, but wait – exactly as the Sunni Iraqis are doing (newsflash: the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war is still on, killing at least 300 civilians every month).

             Naturally the infinite war lobby – from the Pentagon’s “full-spectrum dominance” crowd to hawkish Zio-cons and assorted Republicans – wants “cold-eyed realist” Petraeus to engage in, what else, infinite war, with its attendant surge(s). We’re already on our way; the general already said this is an “enduring” commitment. Maybe not exactly the White House sort of commitment, which until now was demoted General Stanley McChrystal’s hardcore, “take, clear and hold” counter-insurgency (COIN) plus building up local “governance”.

            What US public opinion was sold on was McChrystal performing surge part two in Afghanistan. But from running Pentagon death squads in Iraq to performing COIN designed by Petraeus himself, McChrystal fell way out of his league; not to mention that you don’t captivate Pashtun civilians’ hearts and minds by bombing their villages to rubble and incinerating their sons, daughters and wedding parties.

Follow the money

            Every shard of lapis lazuli and lithium in the Hindu Kush knows al-Qaeda abandoned Afghanistan ages ago. The Taliban remain. For Washington, the Taliban is the same as al-Qaeda. Thus Washington also remains.

             Petraeus never ended the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war raging in Iraq between 2006 and 2007. He tried to marginalize the Sadrists; he failed miserably. What he did, apart from showering US dollars, was to kill – via McChrystal’s death squads – the leaders of many a Sunni resistance cell, while building a million checkpoints and installing a horrendous cement apartheid in Baghdad (a key factor into driving citywide unemployment to 80%).

            Yet the civil war only diminished because the Shi’ites achieved a brutal, large-scale ethnic cleansing of Baghdad (and that showed to the Sunnis that the next best option was to cash in). Petraeus was peripheral at best during this whole (bloody) process. But he was stellar in selling to the US the notion of “victory”.

            Anyone who buys Pentagon spin believing the same successful “surge” will happen in the Pashtun south and southeast of Afghanistan must have smoked Hindu Kush’s finest.

            For starters, it’s not only the “Taliban” – this James Joyce-style portmanteau word – who are fighting the US and NATO “invaders” as well as the Hamid Karzai “puppet” government in Kabul (the terminology is resistance-based). In crucial Kunar province the key resistance actor is notorious Ronald Reagan-friendly mujahid Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hizb-e-Islami. Karzai, crucially, has been talking to Hekmatyar. And Hekmatyar, apart from fighting some Taliban strands, has also been positioning himself as mediator – as long as the “invaders” leave.

            Karzai is also talking to another key mujahid who is based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the legendary Jalaluddin, another Reagan “freedom fighter”. And not leaving anything to chance, Karzai is also negotiating with the number two of the Mullah Omar-led historic Taliban – Mullah Baradar. Mullah Omar himself wants no tea with Petraeus: he firmly believes the infidels will eventually leave.

            What this all means is that wily Karzai, seeing which way the wind blows, is essentially leaning towards Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence – and there’s nothing Petraeus can do about it. The Central Intelligence Agency – always faithful to divide and rule tactics – predictably abominates the idea of Afghans talking among themselves to sort out their common future. In an aside with truly Dadaist overtones, the head of the Taliban in Kunar, Obaid al-Rahman, offered Petraeus a praetorian “Guard of Death”.

            The heart of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in the south and southeast don’t want Karzai, don’t want Petraeus, don’t want surge, don’t want US and don’t want NATO. They want to be left alone to rule their local tribal land as they see fit. And to top it off, all those strands lumped as “Taliban” believe in their heart of hearts that their own brand of counter-surge is the real deal – that is, taking over Kabul by the end of 2012.

             Petraeus’ cash diplomacy is doomed. The Taliban in all their strands, compared with Sunni Iraqis, are infinitely stronger, as much as Karzai is much weaker than Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. And even if only 30% of tribal Afghan Pashtuns actively support the Taliban, the majority totally supports their fierce anti-occupation struggle. The Washington notion that Petraeus can influence complex tribal Pashtun politics is risible.

            If Petraeus goes “clear, hold and build” COIN in Pashtun lands he is doomed. If Petraeus gets restless and produces a Fallujah in Pashtun lands, he is also doomed (that may be in effect right away, as one of his minions told Fox News that rules of engagement will be more “kinetic” – code for more US firepower and more civilian casualties.)

            So what’s the point of all this upcoming carnage? Well, there are so many – the poppy trade, the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”, the ultimate pipe dream known as Trans-Afghan Pipeline, those military bases spying both Russia and China … So many rats scurrying around the sinking US flotilla in the sand, but what the hell, there’s another successful “surge” to sell and the (war) show must go on.

            Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Turkish fighter jets strike northern Iraq

July 2, 2010

PressTV

 

            Turkish fighter jets have launched airstrikes on targets in northern Iraq, which is seen as the hotbed for Kurdish militants’ activity, Turkish military says.

            The warplanes bombed Kurdish separatist targets in the Qandil Mountains and the Hakurk region of northern Iraq, the Turkish General Staff said in a statement on Friday.

            “It was observed that targets were successfully hit in the airstrike,” the statement said.

            The warplanes returned to Turkey safely and no casualties have been reported yet, it said.

            The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants launch their attacks from the Qandil Mountains in the areas under the control of Iraqi Kurdistan’s President Massoud Barzani. The Qandil Mountains range is also where Israel and Israeli firms operate.

            The new airstrike on the PKK hideouts comes as the Kurdish militants have stepped up their attacks, killing over 40 soldiers over past few months.

            The Turkish military says around 4,000 militants are based just across the border in Iraq and about 2,500 others operate inside Turkey.

            The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Turkey and much of the international community, took up arms in 1984, sparking a conflict that has claimed some 45,000 lives.

Stuck in No-Fly Limbo

July 2, 2010

by William Fisher,

            Ten U.S. citizens or lawful residents are suing the government for placing them on the “no-fly” list without notice or due process and then giving them no way to get their names off the list.

The first-of-its-kind lawsuit was filed seeking relief for the plaintiffs who are prohibited from flying to or from the United States or over U.S. airspace because they are on the government’s “No Fly List,” says the American Civil Liberties Union, which has brought the suit. 

None of the individuals in the lawsuit, including a disabled U.S. Marine Corps veteran stranded in Egypt and a U.S. Army veteran stuck in Colombia, have been told why they are on the list or given a chance to clear their names. 

“More and more Americans who have done nothing wrong find themselves unable to fly, and in some cases unable to return to the U.S., without any explanation whatsoever from the government,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “A secret list that deprives people of the right to fly and places them into effective exile without any opportunity to object is both un-American and unconstitutional.” 

The lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Terrorist Screening Center in U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. 

According to the ACLU’s legal complaint, thousands of people have been added to the “No Fly List” and barred from commercial air travel without any opportunity to learn about or refute the basis for their inclusion on the list. The result is a vast and growing list of individuals who, on the basis of error or innuendo, have been deemed too dangerous to fly but who are too harmless to arrest. 

“Without a reasonable way for people to challenge their inclusion on the list, there’s no way to keep innocent people off it,” said Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. 

“The government’s decision to prevent people from flying without giving them a chance to defend themselves has a huge impact on people’s lives – including their ability to perform their jobs, see their families and, in the case of U.S. citizens, to return home to the United States from abroad,” she said. 

The ACLU claims that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one-million-strong terrorist watchlist. 

The Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG), found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the FBI may contain a 35-percent error rate. OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those records and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist. 

The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records. 

The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.” 

The list has been substantially expanded following the unsuccessful effort by a Nigerian with explosives in his underwear to blow up a passenger airliner approaching Detroit last Christmas day. 

“I am a bit skeptical about claims the FBI addressed all of the concerns and problems raised in the FBI Inspector General’s audit report on the terrorist watchlist,” Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project, told IPS. 

“Are they saying that the FBI has reviewed 24,000 watchlist records to determine how many – likely a majority – need to be removed from the watchlist? Has the FBI completely streamlined a process for reviewing records so that people are removed from the watchlist within 10 days? The audit reports the average amount of time to remove an identity from the list is 60 days. And this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. 

The OIG report documents a widespread failure to scrub the lists by removing names after cases have been closed. For example, one subject stayed on the watchlist for almost five years after the case was resolved; two people on the list were dead. 

The FBI attempted to place one individual on the watchlist by reclassifying that person as an international terrorist after already having been cleared of wrongdoing by an FBI investigation. 

It identified more than 50,000 records with no explanation of why they were on the list, making it impossible to remove them. It described the controls for placing many names on the list as “weak or nonexistent.” 

The watchlist has existed since 2003, when then President George W. Bush issued a presidential directive mandating the development of a consolidated terrorist watchlist and required all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies with terrorism information to share such information. The consolidated terrorist watchlist is known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB). 

“This IG report reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is,” said Calabrese. “But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names. It certainly explains why civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis has problems when he needs to fly.” 

The late Senator Edward M. Kennedy experienced similar problems.

(Inter Press Service)

Military officials will need OK before interviews

July 3, 2010

by Anne Gearan 

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Military officials will need Pentagon clearance for interviews and other dealings with reporters, according to an order from Defense Secretary Robert Gates not long after the top general in Afghanistan was fired for his comments in a magazine article.

The order, issued by Gates on Friday in a brief memo to military and civilian personnel worldwide and effective immediately, tells officials to make sure they are not going out of bounds or unintentionally releasing information that the Pentagon wants to hold back.

The order, first reported by The New York Times on its website Friday night, has been in the works since long before Gen. Stanley McChrystal stunned his bosses with criticism and complaints in a Rolling Stone article that his superiors did not know was coming.

“We were not happy with the content, and we were not happy that we didn’t know about it,” Assistant Defense Secretary Douglas Wilson said this week.

Nonetheless, Wilson promised that no “Iron Curtain” would fall between the Pentagon and the news media.

The memo does not spell out exactly how the new directive will work but appears to require hundreds of thousands of officers to funnel interview requests through a small central office at the Pentagon.

“I am concerned that the department has grown lax in how we engage with the media,” Gates wrote.

“We have far too many people talking to the media outside of channels, sometimes providing information which is simply incorrect, out of proper context, unauthorized, or uninformed by the perspective of those who are most knowledgeable,” about how the information may fit into larger government operations or goals.

McChrystal told the Army this past week that he will retire. In the Rolling Stone article, the four-star general and some of his aides were quoted criticizing Obama’s war effort; McChrystal complained that he was backed into “an unsellable position” during last fall’s long White House deliberations on whether to add more troops.

Leaks during that process infuriated Gates.

Gates’ memo requires top department officials to tell Wilson’s office before interviews “or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications.”

Gates warned in the memo that the leaking of classified information “is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.”

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said that Gates remains committed to open dealings with the media and that he has tried to impress on colleagues that “the press is not the enemy.”

Indeed, Gates answers questions frequently and can be more revealing and plainspoken than many Cabinet officials or his own subordinates at the Pentagon.

“It’s not designed in any way to limit our interaction or restrict it, or dampen it,” Morrell said of Gates’ order. “It is designed to get our department much more disciplined.”

The Conversations with the Crow

          When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert  T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.

             Crowley did not listen to them and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.

            Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:

http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm🙂

             Here is the ninth chapter:

Conversation No. 9

Date: Wednesday, April 17, 1996

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:21 AM CST

RTC: Hello?

GD: Robert…

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. You’re a bit early today.

GD: I was talking with Corson about ten minutes ago. He started talking to me about Kennedy and said he had the whole story in his safe deposit box. Is that true?

RTC: Did he tell you anything else?

GD: He acted cute with me and said when he died, Plato would have the whole story. Why not Aristotle?

RTC: Plato is a local fix lawyer Bill uses from time to time. They all eat from the same trough. Was Bill specific?

GD: No, just that he had a big secret that he bet I’d just like to lay my hands on.

RTC: I’ll have to have a little talk with him. Bill gets it into his head that he’s an important person and has to be brought down a peg. Plato is a Greek and I never trusted him.

GD: I recall a newspaper headline. It said: ‘If Russia attacks Turkey from the rear, will Greece help?’

RTC: And so early in the morning, Gregory. This whole town is a moral whorehouse. They all hang out together, lie together, steal together and generally know nothing. I wouldn’t worry about Bill and his secret information. What he has is a DIA report that I gave him a copy of.

GD: You mentioned this before.

RTC: Yes and when the box comes and it works, then we can talk about a copy for you.

GD: I’m not poking but did you hate Kennedy?

RTC: You are poking, Gregory, but no, I did not hate Kennedy. Kennedy came from a family that was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. His father was a rum-runner and a whore monger and vicious as hell. Jack wasn’t so bad but he couldn’t keep it in his pants and used drugs in the White House. And enough of him for the time being. Besides, maybe I can entertain you discussing the downfall of Richard Nixon.

GD: That would be interesting. You should have the box in a week or so and then we can discuss other matters. What about Nixon?

RTC: The Company brought Nixon down but of course he made it easy to do.

GD: Watergate

RTC: And other matters. Yes, Watergate. Shall I continue?

GD: Go right ahead.

RTC: Nixon’s problem is that he was a jealous outsider and never fit into the political or intelligence community. But a smart man, Gregory, very smart, and very ambitious.

GD: I met him once. My step-mother, who had big money, was a strong supporter of Nixon and when he was running for Governor of California, she dragged me to a rubber chicken affair and I got to talk with him.

RTC: What did you think of him?

GD: He had come across badly on the idiot box but in person, he was taller than I thought and very sharp. I liked him as a person because he knew I was nobody but had no problem having a very good conversation with me.

RTC: No doubt your step-mother’s money helped.

GD: True, but you can tell when someone is being pleasant to you for politic reasons and when he is being genuinely communicative. He had the left wing press after him and he hated them, believe me.

RTC: That’s one of the factors that brought him down. Nixon’s downfall started in early ’72 when he went to China. It was a bold move and it had an effect everywhere. It also had an effect in Taiwan. Old Chaing Kai-shek had a bloody fit when he saw this. I mean a bloody fit. He saw this as the beginning of the end of U.S. support for him and he wanted desperately to stop the slide. His intelligence chief and a couple of bigwigs came to see our DCI and wept in his office. If Nixon normalized relations with the PRC, it would spell the end of a mutual special relationship, just like our special relationship with Israel. The long and the short of it, Gregory, is that they wanted Nixon out of power before he went any further. And, the pleasant part of this is that they were more than willing to pay us very, very well for accommodating them.

GD: They wanted you to kill him?

RTC: No, just removed so he couldn’t do them any more damage. We later did discuss killing him but two dead presidents in ten years was a bit much, so we hit on another ploy. We would discredit him. Our main man in all of this was Howard Hunt, who had wonderful ideas of his importance and, besides writing bad books, he had been very helpful in the Kennedy business in ’63. He was our station chief in Mexico between August and September of that year and set up the fake ‘Oswald’ visit to Mexico City.

GD: Wasn’t Oswald there? Getting a visa for Cuba?

RTC: No, that was bullshit. Anyway, Howard arranged for faked pictures, testimony that Oswald had been there at the Russian embassy, and so on. Useful. Now let’s move ahead a few years. Nixon had won his last election in a landslide and you know he was never too well wrapped. He had a huge inferiority complex and the press did not like him. Herblock the cartoonist with the Post really made some ugly cartoons of him and Nixon was overly sensitive about that sort of thing. So with his victory at the polls, he got a swelled head and began to get even with his opponents by turning the FBI and the IRS loose on them. Things like that. Remember the enemies list? Fine. So Hunt was connected with the Nixon people as a trouble-shooter and got involved with going after Nixon’s perceived enemies. He planted the idea that McGovern, a raging liberal twit, was in contact with Castro and getting Cuban money. The next thing was to suggest that they bug the DNC offices to get proof of this and ruin McGovern. A break-in, and they had been breaking into offices and homes for some time, a break-in was planned but it was planned to fail. They taped a self-locking door open, someone tipped off Watergate security and you know the rest.

GD: But there was no guarantee that Nixon would do what he did. I mean the stonewalling.

RTC: We could read Tricky Dick like a dime novel. True to form, he believed he was an imperial figure and acted that way right up to the end. Hunt played his part and I’m sure you watched the thing unfold, right on the five o’clock news every night. For a smart man, Nixon was very stupid and played right into our hands.

GD: But Hunt was destined for the big house…

RTC: Of course. He had to fall on his sword but Howard didn’t like the idea and he began to whine about this. We had to show him the light and after that, he went right along with the schedule.

GD: A serious talk?

RTC: No, we had to kill his wife as a serious warning to follow the game plan.

GD: More killing. Someone shoot her from an office building?

RTC: No, we arranged for an accident when she was flying west. Dorothy was helping Howard with some little project he thought would help him so we sabotaged her plane in DC.

GD: Put a bomb on it?

RTC: No tampered with the equipment. Plane came in for a stopover at Midway, suddenly lost altitude and smashed into some local houses. Midway is a terrible field, believe me. Right in the middle of an urban area and the runways are far too short. Anyway, down it came on top of people and the wife was dead. The local authorities found ten thousand in cash in her purse by the way. But it had an effect on Howard…..

GD: I can imagine. How many people died?

RTC: A few on the ground and forty or so in the plane. But the point is, Howard kept to his end of things or he would have been next or perhaps a close relative. He knew the score, Howard did.

GD: And Nixon left office in disgrace.

RTC: Well, yes, he did. Remember Al Haig? The General? Yes. Well we were afraid that Nixon wouldn’t leave peacefully and might turn to the military for help so we put Al in to keep Nixon on the straight and narrow and limit his actions in that area. Worked out fine. And the chinks were happy as a clam with the results.

GD: Forty people, probably innocent at that, is a bit much, don’t you think?

RTC: Well, Lenin said you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs first. And Gregory, you surely can’t believe that there any really innocent people in this world? We are born in original sin as you know.

GD: That’s the Catholic view. Well, I suppose that’s water under the bridge now.

RTC: I think Teddy Kennedy said that after Chappaquiddick.

GD: Is it possible I could write about this?

RTC: Actually, I would rather you didn’t. Hunt is still alive and there’s no point pushing him. He’s fallen from grace and is in decline so he might not be too receptive to having all of this aired.

GD: No problem. Anyway, who would publish it? It’s bad enough that I am writing about the CIA hiring the head of the Gestapo without adding insult to injury. Does Nixon know about this?

RTC: I don’t really know and I don’t really care. He knows enough to keep quiet and count his money. I don’t think he wants his twilight years terminated with prejudice. He might be paranoid but he is a pragmatist in the end. That ought to hold you until we move on to other presidential removals.

GD: It sounds like a Mayflower moving van ad.

RTC: If it works, don’t knock it.

GD: Well, the chinks are not that happy. Look at all the money they spent and look at our relations with the PRC.

RTC: Some things are destined to happen and all they did was to prolong the final act. Jerry Ford was no threat. A wonderfully cooperative man, Jerry was. During the Warren Commission, he called up old Hoover every night with the latest confidential dirt. No, Jerry was no problem. And the peanut farmer was too self-righteous to bother with and harmless. Actually, Nixon was lucky. If the Watergate thing hadn’t worked, we would have found something a little more permanent.

GD: Nixon didn’t know anything about the Kennedy business, did he?

RTC: No. Nixon was a Quaker and God knows what he would have thought about that. Nixon wasn’t into what our Russian friends call wet actions.

GD: I’m not fishing here but did you people have anything to with Bobby’s ascension to heaven?

RTC: No, that was Hoover. The Colonel [1] hated Bobby for calling him an old faggot and harassing him. And King too. He hated King because he was having an affair with a white woman and, on top of this, had gone to the Lenin school in Russia. Bobby was a quid pro quo for his brother in our eyes.

GD: It sounds like the Borgias.

RTC: Gregory, these are matters of state, not an exercise in morality. We have to do unpleasant things from time to time…I recall our man driving around in Africa with the rotting body of Lumumba stuffed into his trunk back in ’61 after we killed him. People go off fast in that climate. He said he was sick for days trying to get the stench out of his nose. Feel sorry for the poor man, why not? That sort of work is never easy. There are often sleepless nights.

GD: Speaking of that, let me leave you now and I’ll call up my construction expert and see how the blessed Swiss bell ringing box is coming along.

RTC: You just do that, Gregory, and I will be very, very happy if and when.

(Concluded at 9:21 AM CST)

Dramatis personae:

          James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

            James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

             William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

            John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight     James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organized the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.

            Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.

            Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley. Lives comfortably in a nice, and very expensive, house overlooking the Mediterranean.

             Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.

             Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired and lives in retirement in Florida

            Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (SS-Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.

            Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller  became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.

            Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this.

            Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarian and then failed them. First a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.

          Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Arcnives. A strong supporter of fictive holocaust writers.

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[1] Roosevelt had made J. Edgar Hoover an honorary colonel in th U.S. Army during the Second World War but Hoover, outraged that he had been made a general, refused to use the title. It was an inside joke in Washington official circles.