The Voice of the White House

 

Washington, D.C., July 22, 2010: “Everywhere you look now, all you can see, hear or feel are spies. The FBI, the NSA, the TSA and dozens of other agencies are very actively spying on all of you and it is going to get much, much worse and invasive as time goes on.

All of our one-private personal information to include: bank accounts, credit information, mortgages, safe-deposit boxes, travel, telephone and computer personal messages, business communications, and even the most intimate personal medical information are at the beck and call of an ever-expanding domestic intelligence network.

Hairy-eared morons in offices all across the country are reading our lives, laughing at us and filing information in endless computer files. Not one thing you, or even your children in school, do, escapes the notice of the baboon brigades.

 Is this because the American public are secret Muslim terrorists? Enormous gangs of pedophiles? Secret assassins? No, just because they are there and a source of amusement, and justification, for the asshole clubs.

The no-fly lists have tiny babies and dead grandfathers on them. No one knows why but mark me, not one name will ever be taken off of these fascist compilations and if you complain, your name goes on yet another list.

Every telephone company rushes to pour confidential information into the laps of the eager FBI and the NSA reads all your computer mail and, via their own personal communications satellites controls, listens in on each and every overseas telephone call.

The DHS, as ripe a collection of knuckle-draggers as ever graced a zoo, not only snoops into your bank accounts domestically but has its hired goons prying into all manner of foreign bank accounts.

For example, they have been digging into the private foreign accounts of the Saudi royal family for some time now. Here is an example of the degree and extent that the bureaucracy is watching, and reporting on, us.

Let’s take the Internet information site, Google.

This information service and now, advertising groupie, is considered in the intelligence world as a key asset. In the past it supplied the core search technology for Intellipedia, a highly-secured online CIA system and has shared, and is continuing to share, a close relationship with both the CIA, NSA, and government national security officials  Google works very closely with both the CIA and NSA and top CIA people are now on the Google payroll. Also, note that  In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the CIA, also had a hand in creating the wildly popular social network Facebook.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel,

Solution: ‘Call the exterminators, Tom, the pests are everywhere!’”

 

CIA enlists Google’s help for spy work

US intelligence agencies are using Google’s technology to help its agents share information about their suspects

March 31, 2008

by Jonathan Richards

Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world.

Google is also providing the search features for a Wikipedia-style site, called Intellipedia, on which agents post information about their targets that can be accessed and appended by colleagues, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The contracts are just a number that have been entered into by Google’s ‘federal government sales team’, that aims to expand the company’s reach beyond its core consumer and enterprise operations.

In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read, edit, and tag – like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and gain access to three levels of info – top secret, secret and sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to 35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA.

“Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge,” Mr Dennehy was quoted as saying. “They maintained it in a shared drive or Word document, but we’re encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit.”

The collection of articles is hosted by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and is available only to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies.

Google’s search technology usually rates a website’s importance by measuring the number of other sites that link to it – a method that is more problematic in a ‘closed’ network used by a limited numbr of people. In the case of Intellipedia, pages become more prominent depending on how they are tagged or added to by other contributors.

As well as working with the intelligence agencies, Google also provides services to other US public sector organisations, including the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Often, the contract is for something as simple as conducting earch within an organisation’s own database, but in the case of the Coast Guard, Google also provides a more advanced version of its satellite mapping tool Google Earth, which ships use to navigate more safely.

There is no dedicated team promoting sales of Google products to the British Government, but a Google spokesperson said the company did target public sector organisations such as councils, schools and universities through the team that run AdWords, its internet advertising platform.

Search Top Secret America’s Database of Private Spooks

July 19, 2010

by Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman

Wired.com

 Figuring out exactly who’s cashing in on the post-9/11 boom in secret programs just got a whole lot easier.

U.S. spy agencies, the State Department and the White House had a collective panic attack Friday over a new Washington Post exposé on the intelligence-industrial complex. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin let it drop Monday morning.

It includes a searchable database cataloging what an estimated 854,000 employees and legions of contractors are apparently up to. Users can now to see just how much money these government agencies are spending and where those top secret contractors are located.

Check out the Post’s nine-page list of agencies and contractors involved in air and satellite observations, for instance. No wonder it scares the crap out of official Washington: It’s bound to provoke all sorts of questions — both from taxpayers wondering where their money goes and from U.S. adversaries looking to penetrate America’s spy complex.

But this piece is about much more than dollars. It’s about what used to be called the Garrison State — the impact on society of a praetorian class of war-focused elites. Priest and Arkin call it “Top Secret America,” and it’s so big and grown so fast, that it’s replicated the problem of disconnection within the intelligence agencies that facilitated America’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack.

With too many analysts and too many capabilities documenting too much, with too few filters in place to sort out the useful stuff or discover hidden connections, the information overload has become its own information blackout. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe,” a retired Army three-star general who recently assessed the system tells the reporters.

The Post — whose editorial page has been notably receptive to the growth of the security state over the years — explains in an editorial comment that it ran its constellation of websites by security officials to ensure that it wasn’t jeopardizing national security. In one instance, the editors deleted certain unspecified specific “data points” the project initially disclosed.

The editors further explain that most of what the project documents, like the locations of contractor and agency facilities, is already public information, distributed on company and agency websites. So it’s not as if the paper has put anyone in harm’s way. (Some of those overlapping contracts issued by the “263 organizations [that] have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11″ might now be in danger, however.)

Still, in compiling all this information, there’s a risk that the Post provides a hostile foreign agent looking to infiltrate the U.S. security apparatus with an online yellow pages for sending out his resume.

Ironically, the very nature of the phenomenon Priest and Arkin document might be enough to foil an infiltrator. Security agencies and their companies produce more information than anyone can consume, adding uncertain value to the amount of information already public.

And the spigot — contained in congressional budgets that are either politically sacrosanct or entirely secret — doesn’t seem to be able to close. One impressed observer told the paper about a useless intel program scheduled for closure: ”Like a zombie, it keeps on living.”

That rise in what might be called the counterterrorism-industrial complex is a story we’ve covered since this blog set up shop in 2007, as have many of our friends, because privatized intelligence is one of the major security developments of the last decade-plus.

It’s also been enshrouded by near-baroque secrecy. The intelligence community would not even disclose just how many contractors it employs, for instance, until the Post did so.

That secrecy has concealed — barely — how inextricable the contractors are from the intelligence community. Take Bill Black, who ended his nearly 40-year career with the National Security Agency in 1997, when he became a vice president of intel contractor SAIC. That lasted for barely two years before Black returned as the agency’s deputy director — with some ideas about which company could revamp NSA’s software. Long story short: Several years and a billion dollars later, the only thing the program yielded was an indictment of a whistleblower accused of leaking info to reporter Siobhan Gorman.

That’s been par for the course in the post-9/11 cash-in. Similarly to their military counterparts, intelligence companies (sometimes they’re the same companies) often “bid back” the nation’s spies, enticing veteran intel professionals to the contracting sector with greater salaries — raising the overall price of the U.S. security infrastructure when the spy agencies basically contract out for their old workforce.

Want data-mining, or a logic layer for your surveillance architecture? Contractors are often able to take a piece of the job with less red tape getting in the way.

Except that the information produced in “Top Secret America” has questionable ability to thwart, capture or kill terrorists. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab made his way onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253, and only alert passengers prevented him from detonating a bomb in his underwear.

In fairness, the law enforcement and intelligence communities have racked up notable successes in recent years, like arresting Najibullah Zazi before, an indictment alleges, he could place suicide bombers in the New York City subway. And the fact remains that the closest thing the nation has experienced to a second 9/11 came from a deranged Army major who shot up Fort Hood in November, a horrific act that killed over a dozen people, but not thousands.

Still, this is a critique that resonates:

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 4½ years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Um, three wars? Only in Top Secret America …

 

UPDATE: Acting Director of National Intelligence David Gompert just released a wet-noodle response to “Top Secret America.” “The reporting does not reflect the intelligence community we know,” Gompert says in a statement. “We accept that we operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share. However, the fact is, the men and women of the intelligence community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day.”

Gompert goes on:

In recent years, we have reformed the IC in ways that have improved the quality, quantity, regularity, and speed of our support to policymakers, warfighters, and homeland defenders, and we will continue our reform efforts….

We will continue to scrutinize our own operations, seek ways to improve and adapt, and work with Congress on its crucial oversight and reform efforts. We can always do better, and we will. And the importance of our mission and our commitment to keeping America safe will remain steadfast, whether they are reflected in the day’s news or not.

In other words: we’re doing just great, and pinching pennies, too. Now stop looking at that database.
Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/search-through-top-secret-americas-network-of-private-spooks/#ixzz0uQnq7CvZ

 

National Security, Inc

July 20, 2010

by Dana Priest and Wiliam M. Arkin

Washington Post

What started as a temporary fix in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities.

Posted at 12:24 AM, 7/20/2010

          In June, a stone carver from Manassas chiseled another perfect star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

It is also a system in which contractors are playing an ever more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government’s dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S. agency is allowed to do.

Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency’s training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.

Through the federal budget process, the George W. Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought – wrongly, it turned out – that contractors would be less expensive.

Nine years later, well into the Obama administration, the idea that contractors cost less has been repudiated, and the administration has made some progress toward its goal of reducing the number of hired hands by 7 percent over two years. Still, close to 30 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is contractors.

“For too long, we’ve depended on contractors to do the operational work that ought to be done” by CIA employees, Panetta said. But replacing them “doesn’t happen overnight. When you’ve been dependent on contractors for so long, you have to build that expertise over time.”

A second concern of Panetta’s: contracting with corporations, whose responsibility “is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict.”

Or as Gates, who has been in and out of government his entire life, puts it: “You want somebody who’s really in it for a career because they’re passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money.”

Contractors can offer more money – often twice as much – to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.

The idea that the government would save money on a contract workforce “is a false economy,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official and now president of his own intelligence training academy.

As companies raid federal agencies of talent, the government has been left with the youngest intelligence staffs ever while more experienced employees move into the private sector. This is true at the CIA, where employees from 114 firms account for roughly a third of the workforce, or about 10,000 positions. Many of them are temporary hires, often former military or intelligence agency employees who left government service to work less and earn more while drawing a federal pension.

Across the government, such workers are used in every conceivable way.

Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war plans. They gather information on local factions in war zones. They are the historians, the architects, the recruiters in the nation’s most secretive agencies. They staff watch centers across the Washington area. They are among the most trusted advisers to the four-star generals leading the nation’s wars.

So great is the government’s appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed “body shops,” that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to those in the business.

Making it more difficult to replace contractors with federal employees: The government doesn’t know how many are on the federal payroll. Gates said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13 percent, to pre-9/11 levels, but he’s having a hard time even getting a basic head count.

“This is a terrible confession,” he said. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” referring to the department’s civilian leadership.

The Post’s estimate of 265,000 contractors doing top-secret work was vetted by several high-ranking intelligence officials who approved of The Post’s methodology. The newspaper’s Top Secret America database includes 1,931 companies that perform work at the top-secret level. More than a quarter of them – 533 – came into being after 2001, and others that already existed have expanded greatly. Most are thriving even as the rest of the United States struggles with bankruptcies, unemployment and foreclosures.

The privatization of national security work has been made possible by a nine-year “gusher” of money, as Gates recently described national security spending since the 9/11 attacks.

With so much money to spend, managers do not always worry about whether they are spending it effectively.

“Someone says, ‘Let’s do another study,’ and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study,” said Elena Mastors, who headed a team studying the al-Qaeda leadership for the Defense Department. “It’s about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you can fly all over the place. Everybody’s just on a spending spree. We don’t need all these people doing all this stuff.”

Most of these contractors do work that is fundamental to an agency’s core mission. As a result, the government has become dependent on them in a way few could have foreseen: wartime temps who have become a permanent cadre.

Just last week, typing “top secret” into the search engine of a major jobs Web site showed 1,951 unfilled positions in the Washington area, and 19,759 nationwide: “Target analyst,” Reston. “Critical infrastructure specialist,” Washington, D.C. “Joint expeditionary team member,” Arlington.

“We could not perform our mission without them. They serve as our ‘reserves,’ providing flexibility and expertise we can’t acquire,” said Ronald Sanders, who was chief of human capital for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence before retiring in February. “Once they are on board, we treat them as if they’re a part of the total force.”

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

The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track. A searchable database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. [For an explanation of the newspaper’s decision making behind this project, please see the Editor’s Note.]

—-

The national security industry sells the military and intelligence agencies more than just airplanes, ships and tanks. It sells contractors’ brain power. They advise, brief and work everywhere, including 25 feet under the Pentagon in a bunker where they can be found alongside military personnel in battle fatigues monitoring potential crises worldwide.

Late at night, when the wide corridors of the Pentagon are all but empty, the National Military Command Center hums with purpose. There’s real-time access to the location of U.S. forces anywhere in the world, to granular satellite images or to the White House Situation Room.

The purpose of all this is to be able to answer any question the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff might have. To be ready 24 hours a day, every day, takes five brigadier generals, a staff of colonels and senior noncommissioned officers – and a man wearing a pink contractor badge and a bright purple shirt and tie.

Erik Saar’s job title is “knowledge engineer.” In one of the most sensitive places in America, he is the only person in the room who knows how to bring data from far afield, fast. Saar and four teammates from a private company, SRA International, teach these top-ranked staff officers to think in Web 2.0. They are trying to push a tradition-bound culture to act differently, digitally.

That sometimes means asking for help in a public online chat room or exchanging ideas on shared Web pages outside the military computer networks dubbed .mil – things much resisted within the Pentagon’s self-sufficient culture. “Our job is to change the perception of leaders who might drive change,” Saar said.

Since 9/11, contractors have made extraordinary contributions – and extraordinary blunders – that have changed history and clouded the public’s view of the distinction between the actions of officers sworn on behalf of the United States and corporate employees with little more than a security badge and a gun.

Contractor misdeeds in Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt U.S. credibility in those countries as well as in the Middle East. Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, some of it done by contractors, helped ignite a call for vengeance against the United States that continues today. Security guards working for Blackwater added fuel to the five-year violent chaos in Iraq and became the symbol of an America run amok.

Contractors in war zones, especially those who can fire weapons, blur “the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, which is just what our enemies want,” Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College and the author of “One Nation Under Contract,” told the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting at a hearing in June.

Misconduct happens, too. A defense contractor formerly called MZM paid bribes for CIA contracts, sending Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who was a California congressman on the intelligence committee, to prison. Guards employed in Afghanistan by ArmorGroup North America, a private security company, were caught on camera in a lewd-partying scandal.

But contractors have also advanced the way the military fights. During the bloodiest months in Iraq, the founder of Berico Technologies, a former Army officer named Guy Filippelli, working with the National Security Agency, invented a technology that made finding the makers of roadside bombs easier and helped stanch the number of casualties from improvised explosives, according to NSA officials.

Contractors have produced blueprints and equipment for the unmanned aerial war fought by drones, which have killed the largest number of senior al-Qaeda leaders and produced a flood of surveillance videos. A dozen firms created the transnational digital highway that carries the drones’ real-time data on terrorist hide-outs from overseas to command posts throughout the United States.

Private firms have become so thoroughly entwined with the government’s most sensitive activities that without them important military and intelligence missions would have to cease or would be jeopardized. Some examples:

*At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the number of contractors equals the number of federal employees. The department depends on 318 companies for essential services and personnel, including 19 staffing firms that help DHS find and hire even more contractors. At the office that handles intelligence, six out of 10 employees are from private industry.

*The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works with at least 484 and is actively recruiting more.

*The National Reconnaissance Office cannot produce, launch or maintain its large satellite surveillance systems, which photograph countries such as China, North Korea and Iran, without the four major contractors it works with.

*Every intelligence and military organization depends on contract linguists to communicate overseas, translate documents and make sense of electronic voice intercepts. The demand for native speakers is so great, and the amount of money the government is willing to pay for them is so huge, that 56 firms compete for this business.

            *Each of the 16 intelligence agencies depends on corporations to set up its computer networks, communicate with other agencies’ networks, and fuse and mine disparate bits of information that might indicate a terrorist plot. More than 400 companies work exclusively in this area, building classified hardware and software systems.

Hiring contractors was supposed to save the government money. But that has not turned out to be the case. A 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets. Gates said that federal workers cost the government 25 percent less than contractors.

The process of reducing the number of contractors has been slow, if the giant Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland is any example. There, 2,770 people work on the round-the-clock maritime watch floor tracking commercial vessels, or in science and engineering laboratories, or in one of four separate intelligence centers. But it is the employees of 70 information technology companies who keep the place operating.

They store, process and analyze communications and intelligence transmitted to and from the entire U.S. naval fleet and commercial vessels worldwide. “Could we keep this building running without contractors?” said the captain in charge of information technology. “No, I don’t think we could keep up with it.”

Vice Adm. David J. “Jack” Dorsett, director of naval intelligence, said he could save millions each year by converting 20 percent of the contractor jobs at the Suitland complex to civil servant positions. He has gotten the go-ahead, but it’s been a slow start. This year, his staff has converted one contractor job and eliminated another – out of 589. “It’s costing me an arm and a leg,” Dorsett said.

—-

Washington’s corridors of power stretch in a nearly straight geographical line from the Supreme Court to the Capitol to the White House. Keep going west, across the Potomac River, and the unofficial seats of power – the private, corporate ones – become visible, especially at night. There in the Virginia suburbs are the brightly illuminated company logos of Top Secret America: Northrop Grumman, SAIC, General Dynamics.

Of the 1,931 companies identified by The Post that work on top-secret contracts, about 110 of them do roughly 90 percent of the work on the corporate side of the defense-intelligence-corporate world.

To understand how these firms have come to dominate the post-9/11 era, there’s no better place to start than the Herndon office of General Dynamics. One recent afternoon there, Ken Pohill was watching a series of unclassified images, the first of which showed a white truck moving across his computer monitor.

The truck was in Afghanistan, and a video camera bolted to the belly of a U.S. surveillance plane was following it. Pohill could access a dozen images that might help an intelligence analyst figure out whether the truck driver was just a truck driver or part of a network making roadside bombs to kill American soldiers.

To do this, he clicked his computer mouse. Up popped a picture of the truck driver’s house, with notes about visitors. Another click. Up popped infrared video of the vehicle. Click: Analysis of an object thrown from the driver’s side. Click: U-2 imagery. Click: A history of the truck’s movement. Click. A Google Earth map of friendly forces. Click: A chat box with everyone else following the truck, too.

Ten years ago, if Pohill had worked for General Dynamics, he probably would have had a job bending steel. Then, the company’s center of gravity was the industrial port city of Groton, Conn., where men and women in wet galoshes churned out submarines, the thoroughbreds of naval warfare. Today, the firm’s commercial core is made up of data tools such as the digital imagery library in Herndon and the secure BlackBerry-like device used by President Obama, both developed at a carpeted suburban office by employees in loafers and heels.

The evolution of General Dynamics was based on one simple strategy: Follow the money.

The company embraced the emerging intelligence-driven style of warfare. It developed small-target identification systems and equipment that could intercept an insurgent’s cellphone and laptop communications. It found ways to sort the billions of data points collected by intelligence agencies into piles of information that a single person could analyze.

It also began gobbling up smaller companies that could help it dominate the new intelligence landscape, just as its competitors were doing. Between 2001 and 2010, the company acquired 11 firms specializing in satellites, signals and geospatial intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, technology integration and imagery.

On Sept. 11, 2001, General Dynamics was working with nine intelligence organizations. Now it has contracts with all 16. Its employees fill the halls of the NSA and DHS. The corporation was paid hundreds of millions of dollars to set up and manage DHS’s new offices in 2003, including its National Operations Center, Office of Intelligence and Analysis and Office of Security. Its employees do everything from deciding which threats to investigate to answering phones.

General Dynamics’ bottom line reflects its successful transformation. It also reflects how much the U.S. government – the firm’s largest customer by far – has paid the company beyond what it costs to do the work, which is, after all, the goal of every profit-making corporation.

The company reported $31.9 billion in revenue in 2009, up from $10.4 billion in 2000. Its workforce has more than doubled in that time, from 43,300 to 91,700 employees, according to the company.

Revenue from General Dynamics’ intelligence- and information-related divisions, where the majority of its top-secret work is done, climbed to $10 billion in the second quarter of 2009, up from $2.4 billion in 2000, accounting for 34 percent of its overall revenue last year.

The company’s profitability is on display in its Falls Church headquarters. There’s a soaring, art-filled lobby, bistro meals served on china enameled with the General Dynamics logo and an auditorium with seven rows of white leather-upholstered seats, each with its own microphone and laptop docking station.

General Dynamics now has operations in every corner of the intelligence world. It helps counterintelligence operators and trains new analysts. It has a $600 million Air Force contract to intercept communications. It makes $1 billion a year keeping hackers out of U.S. computer networks and encrypting military communications. It even conducts information operations, the murky military art of trying to persuade foreigners to align their views with U.S. interests.

“The American intelligence community is an important market for our company,” said General Dynamics spokesman Kendell Pease. “Over time, we have tailored our organization to deliver affordable, best-of-breed products and services to meet those agencies’ unique requirements.”

In September 2009, General Dynamics won a $10 million contract from the U.S. Special Operations Command’s psychological operations unit to create Web sites to influence foreigners’ views of U.S. policy. To do that, the company hired writers, editors and designers to produce a set of daily news sites tailored to five regions of the world. They appear as regular news Web sites, with names such as “SETimes.com: The News and Views of Southeast Europe.” The first indication that they are run on behalf of the military comes at the bottom of the home page with the word “Disclaimer.” Only by clicking on that do you learn that “the Southeast European Times (SET) is a Web site sponsored by the United States European Command.”

What all of these contracts add up to: This year, General Dynamics’ overall revenue was $7.8 billion in the first quarter, Jay L. Johnson, the company’s chief executive and president, said at an earnings conference call in April. “We’ve hit the deck running in the first quarter,” he said, “and we’re on our way to another successful year.”

—-

In the shadow of giants such as General Dynamics are 1,814 small to midsize companies that do top-secret work. About a third of them were established after Sept. 11, 2001, to take advantage of the huge flow of taxpayer money into the private sector. Many are led by former intelligence agency officials who know exactly whom to approach for work.

Abraxas of Herndon, headed by a former CIA spy, quickly became a major CIA contractor after 9/11. Its staff even recruited midlevel managers during work hours from the CIA’s cafeteria, former agency officers recall.

Other small and medium-size firms sell niche technical expertise such as engineering for low-orbit satellites or long-dwell sensors. But the vast majority have not invented anything at all. Instead, they replicate what the government’s workforce already does.

A company called SGIS, founded soon after the 2001 attacks, was one of these.

In June 2002, from the spare bedroom of his San Diego home, 30-year-old Hany Girgis put together an information technology team that won its first Defense Department contract four months later. By the end of the year, SGIS had opened a Tampa office close to the U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command, had turned a profit and had 30 employees.

In June 2002, from the spare bedroom of his San Diego home, 30-year-old Hany Girgis put together an information technology team that won its first Defense Department contract four months later. By the end of the year, SGIS had opened a Tampa office close to the U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command, had turned a profit and had 30 employees.

The company’s marketing efforts had grown, too, both in size and sophistication. Its Web site, for example, showed an image of Navy sailors lined up on a battleship over the words “Proud to serve” and another image of a Navy helicopter flying near the Statue of Liberty over the words “Preserving freedom.” And if it seemed hard to distinguish SGIS’s work from the government’s, it’s because they were doing so many of the same things. SGIS employees replaced military personnel at the Pentagon’s 24/7 telecommunications center. SGIS employees conducted terrorist threat analysis. SGIS employees provided help-desk support for federal computer systems.

Still, as alike as they seemed, there were crucial differences.

For one, unlike in government, if an SGIS employee did a good job, he might walk into the parking lot one day and be surprised by co-workers clapping at his latest bonus: a leased, dark-blue Mercedes convertible. And he might say, as a video camera recorded him sliding into the soft leather driver’s seat, “Ahhhh . . . this is spectacular.”

And then there was what happened to SGIS last month, when it did the one thing the federal government can never do.

It sold itself.

The new owner is a Fairfax-based company called Salient Federal Solutions, created just last year. It is a management company and a private-equity firm with lots of Washington connections that, with the purchase of SGIS, it intends to parlay into contracts.

“We have an objective,” says chief executive and President Brad Antle, “to make $500 million in five years.”

Of all the different companies in Top Secret America, the most numerous by far are the information technology, or IT, firms. About 800 firms do nothing but IT.

Some IT companies integrate the mishmash of computer systems within one agency; others build digital links between agencies; still others have created software and hardware that can mine and analyze vast quantities of data.

The government is nearly totally dependent on these firms. Their close relationship was on display recently at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s annual information technology conference in Phoenix. The agency expected the same IT firms angling for its business to pay for the entire five-day get-together, a DIA spokesman confirmed.

And they did.

General Dynamics spent $30,000 on the event. On a perfect spring night, it hosted a party at Chase Field, a 48,569-seat baseball stadium, reserved exclusively for the conference attendees. Government buyers and corporate sellers drank beer and ate hot dogs while the DIA director’s morning keynote speech replayed on the gigantic scoreboard, digital baseballs bouncing along the bottom of the screen.

Carahsoft Technology, a DIA contractor, invited guests to a casino night where intelligence officials and vendors ate, drank and bet phony money at craps tables run by professional dealers.

The McAfee network security company, a Defense Department contractor, welcomed guests to a Margaritaville-themed social on the garden terrace of the hotel across the street from the convention site, where 250 firms paid thousands of dollars each to advertise their services and make their pitches to intelligence officials walking the exhibition hall.

Government officials and company executives say these networking events are critical to building a strong relationship between the public and private sectors.

“If I make one contact each day, it’s worth it,” said Tom Conway, director of federal business development for McAfee.

As for what a government agency gets out of it: “Our goal is to be open and learn stuff,” said Grant M. Schneider, the DIA’s chief information officer and one of the conference’s main draws. By going outside Washington, where many of the firms are headquartered, “we get more synergy. . . . It’s an interchange with industry.”

These types of gatherings happen every week. Many of them are closed to anyone without a top-secret clearance.

At a U.S. Special Operations Command conference in Fayetteville, N.C., in April, vendors paid for access to some of the people who decide what services and gadgets to buy for troops. In mid-May, the national security industry held a black-tie evening funded by the same corporations seeking business from the defense, intelligence and congressional leaders seated at their tables.

Such coziness worries other officials who believe the post-9/11 defense-intelligence-corporate relationship has become, as one senior military intelligence officer described it, a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

Another official, a longtime conservative staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described it as “a living, breathing organism” impossible to control or curtail. “How much money has been involved is just mind-boggling,” he said. “We’ve built such a vast instrument. What are you going to do with this thing? . . . It’s turned into a jobs program.”

Even some of those gathered in Phoenix criticized the size and disjointedness of the intelligence community and its contracting base. “Redundancy is the unacceptable norm,” Lt. Gen. Richard P. Zahner, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, told the 2,000 attendees. “Are we spending our resources effectively? . . . If we have not gotten our houses in order, someone will do it for us.”

On a day that also featured free back rubs, shoeshines, ice cream and fruit smoothies, another speaker, Kevin P. Meiners, a deputy undersecretary for intelligence, gave the audience what he called “the secret sauce,” the key to thriving even when the Defense Department budget eventually stabilizes and stops rising so rapidly.

“Overhead,” Meiners told them – that’s what’s going to get cut first. Overhead used to mean paper clips and toner. Now it’s information technology, IT, the very products and services sold by the businesspeople in the audience.

“You should describe what you do as a weapons system, not overhead,” Meiners instructed. “Overhead to them – I’m giving you the secret sauce here – is IT and people. . . . You have to foot-stomp hard that this is a war-fighting system that’s helping save people’s lives every day.”

After he finished, many of the government officials listening headed to the exhibit hall, where company salespeople waited in display booths. Peter Coddington, chief executive of InTTENSITY, a small firm whose software teaches computers to “read” documents, was ready for them.

“You have to differentiate yourself,” he said as they fanned out into the aisles. Coddington had glass beer mugs and pens twirling atop paperweight pyramids to help persuade officials of the nation’s largest military intelligence agency that he had something they needed.

But first he needed them to stop walking so fast, to slow down long enough for him to start his pitch. His twirling pens seemed to do the job. “It’s like moths to fire,” Coddington whispered.

A DIA official with a tote bag approached. She spotted the pens, and her pace slowed. “Want a pen?” Coddington called.

She hesitated. “Ah . . . I have three children,” she said.

“Want three pens?”

She stopped. In Top Secret America, every moment is an opportunity.

“We’re a text extraction company. . . ,” Coddington began, handing her the pens.

 

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

 

The Retirement Nightmare: Half of Americans Have Less Than $2,000 Banked for Their Golden Years

With declining earnings and a culture of borrow-and-consume, America’s workers face a future of uncertainty and little money to pay for their retirement.

July 16, 2010

by Scott Thill

AlterNet

The days of quietly retiring with a nest egg built up from years of savings from a long career on the verge of disappearing. For tens of millions of Americans, facing rising costs, shrinking incomes and growing debts they already have disappeared.

“One out of three working Americans does not have retirement savings beyond Social Security, and about 35% of those over 65 rely almost totally on Social Security alone,” Dallas Salisbury, president of the Alliance for Investor Education and the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) , explained to AlterNet. “Of the remaining two-thirds of working Americans that have some retirement savings,  27 percent report less than $1,000, 16 percent between $1,000 and $9,999, 11 percent between $10,000 and $24,999, 12 percent between $25,000-$49,999, and 36 percent $50,000 or more.” Perhaps the most shocking number is that half of Americans have $2,000 or less saved for retirement. 

Crunch the numbers and you end up with a retirement myth, rather than a money-maker.  We face a colder economic reality: Not only are there no astronomical retirement returns coming down the financial pike, but what nuts and nest-eggs families have set aside for their futures have been mostly sucked dry. 

“Individuals need to follow the advice of the ages,” said Salisbury. “Spend less than you earn by 25 percent, and save for your future. This keeps your lifestyle from getting ahead of your income.”

While saving 1/4 of our shrinking incomes sounds nigh on impossible in this economic climate, many are watching their savings getting squandered by bad fund managers. One retirement Ponzi scheme starting to worry the Senate Special Committee on Aging, according to an aide who asked not to be named, are target-date funds, a financial instrument . They’re basically mutual funds that try to play equities and stocks in their early years before settling into more conservative investments like cash and fixed-income before maturing, so as not to give their investors heart attacks on the date of their retirement. As imagined, given our wheezing global economy, target-date funds are leaking money to managers who are charging insane fees before the house of cards crashes. In July, the SEC proposed new rules to make target-date funds more transparent, but lately the SEC has been proposing much while the banksters and executives that really run the country have continued to fund everything from Barack Obama’s election to the Republican Party itself.

In related news, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are free to spend, pardon the pun, as much as they want to buy political candidates In other words, even if your target-date fund survives the banksters’ scams by the time it finally matures, there’s no guarantee it can’t be downsized by them at a moment’s notice. To quote Wikipedia, “almost all target date funds do not have any guarantee.” The banksters and the SEC know it, and now so do you.

But what can we do about it? Nothing, if we don’t accept the fact that we’re quickly turning into a world of freelancers in search of our next check. Which, of course, we’d all like to divide accordingly to live comparatively well and invest in a nest-egg for a more convenient future. But in an economic environment that isalternately unable to provide job growth or security, and is infested by market-makers armed with supercomputers and math and Ph.Ds, that’s unlikely and illogical.

“I think Americans will no longer have retirements that demand no additional work,” Sara Horowitz, executive director of the nonprofit Freelancers Union, explained to AlterNet. “They will lessen work in old age. In other words, retirement will increasingly mean becoming an independent worker.”

Living like freelancers would go a long way to ameliorating our dependence on investment banks and other entities whose traditional function was to take our money and stash it smartly, where it could feed on modest interest rates that were not the plaything of freelancing hedge funds and their proprietary algorithms. But in today’s hyperspeeding electronic market, there are just too many easy marks in the matrix.

“Goldman Sachs in the 401k world is no better or worse than the others,” said Horowitz. “We need to move away from the idea that individuals will go by themselves to for-profits and be OK. They won’t be OK. They’re little bitty consumers dealing with giant corporations. Instead, they should band together and spread the costs for experts and lawyers to level the playing field. In the 1970s, freelancers were the first to lose the employer’s safety net, so they’ve been working this way for several decades. Instead of being isolated individuals, they form strong networks for information, community and benefits. Freelancers have to be more disciplined at setting money aside to pay taxes and benefits that traditional workers expect their companies to pay. And they have to purchase their own safety nets — health insurance, unemployment, and retirement — which makes it that much more difficult to save.”

In short, they have to live in a real world of diminished returns, expectations and impact. Which is a good thing, given the new millennium’s spiraling hyperconsumption. If the gushing oil bleeder in the Gulf of Mexico is a sign of anything, it’s of our excessive appetites. Today, it’s time pay up, especially if we want to retire later. Our messy ways and means have to be choked off and cleaned up. If we’re smart, live well below our lucky means, and stop trashing the planet, and its political processes, then we might just get lucky enough to dodge the guilty bullets.

“I think freelancers will actually be better off in many ways than traditional workers,” concluded Horowitz. “Because a future without a safety net has been their reality for the last 25 years.”

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

Disasters of war
July 22, 2010

by Tom Engelhardt

Asia Times

             Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for United States troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules to lessen the number of Afghan civilians being killed or wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people”, just as the “hearts and minds” part of counter-insurgency doctrine tells us should be done.

            Specifically, he made it far harder for US troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose  article contributed to McChrystal’s downfall, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration to Hastings.

            Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counter-insurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation”.

            What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counter-insurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option – kill us or kill them – when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.

            After all, in another, less protective part of McChrystal’s counter-insurgency war, he was bulking up special operations forces in the country and sending them out on night raids searching for Taliban mid-level leaders. These raids continue to cause a cascade of civilian casualties, as well as an increasing uproar of protest among outraged Afghans. In addition, even with McChrystal’s tight rules for normal grunts, stories about the deaths of civilians, private security guards, and Afghan soldiers from air strikes, misplaced artillery fire, checkpoint shootings, and those night raids continue to pour out, followed by the usual American initial denials and then formulaic apologies for loss of life.

            Whatever the rules, civilians continue to die in striking numbers at the hands of guerrillas and of American forces, and here’s the thing: tighten those rules, loosen them, fiddle with them, bend them, evade them, cancel them – at some level it’s all still neither/nor, not either/or.

            In any counter-insurgency war where guerrillas, faced with vastly superior fire power, fight from cover and work hard to blend in with the populace, where the counter-insurgents are foreigners about as alien from the land they are to “protect” as humanly possible, and fight, in part, from on high or based on “intelligence” from others about a world they can’t fathom, civilians will die. Lots of civilians. Continually. Whatever rules you make up. The issue isn’t the “rules of engagement.” No rules of engagement will alter the fact that civilian death is the central fact of such wars.

            It’s time to stop talking about those rules and start talking about the madness of making counter-insurgency the American way of war. It wasn’t always so. Not so long ago, after all, it was considered a scandal that, post-Vietnam, the US military rebuilt its all-volunteer force without rewriting or reconsidering its counter-insurgency manual.

            The high command, in fact, let counter-insurgency go to hell, exactly where they thought it deserved to rest in peace, and were focused instead on preventing Soviet armies from pouring through Germany’s Fulda Gap (something they were conveniently never likely to do). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US military would continue to focus for some years on former secretary of state Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force, decisive victory, and quick exit.

            Then Iraq happened and decisive victory (“mission accomplished”) soured into decisive disaster. It was at this moment, in 2006, that Petraeus and James “Mad Dog” Mattis (now respectively Afghan war commander and head of US Central Command) dusted off the old, failed Vietnam-era counter-insurgency doctrine and made it sexy again. They oversaw the writing of a whole new guidebook for the army and marines, 472 pages of advice that even got its own (University Press) trade edition, and became the toast of Washington and the Pentagon.

            So, after being buried and disinterred, COIN, as its known, is once again the reigning monarch of American war-fighting doctrines as the Pentagon prepares for one, two, three Iraqs or Afghanistans – and the scandal is that (surprise, surprise!) it’s not working. This should hardly have been news.

            The history of counter-insurgency warfare isn’t exactly a success story, or our present COINistas wouldn’t have taken their doctrine largely from failed counter-insurgency wars in Vietnam and Algeria, among other places. It’s not so encouraging, after all, when the main examples you have before you are defeats.

            Our generals might have better spent their time studying the first modern war of this sort. It took place in early 19th century Spain when the Islamic fundamentalists of that moment – Catholic peasants and their priests – managed to stop Napoleon’s army (the high-tech force of the moment) in its tracks. Just check out the “Disasters of War” series by Spanish painter Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) if you want to see how grim it was. And it’s never gotten much better.

            Looked at historically, counter-insurgency was largely the war-fighting option of empires, of powers that wanted to keep occupying their restive colonies forever and a day. Past empires didn’t spend much time worrying about “protecting the people”. They knew such wars were brutal. That was their point. As English author George Orwell summed such campaigns up in 1946 in his essay “Politics and the English Language”:

Defenseless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set afire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

The rise of anti-colonialism and nationalism after World War II should have made counter-insurgency history. Certainly, there is no place for occupations and the wars that go with them in the 21st century.

            Unfortunately, none of this has been obvious to Washington or our leading generals. If they can rewrite the army’s counter-insurgency manual for a new century, any of us can, so let me offer my one-line rewrite of their 472 pages. It’s simple and guaranteed to save trees as well as lives: “When it comes to counter-insurgency, don’t do it.”

            Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books),

Muslims rule major Swedish city

July 19, 2010

by Karl Jacob Dahlberg

            Sweden is one of the worst hit countries in Europe of Muslim immigration and Political Correctness. Now, the police themselves have publicly admitted that they no longer control one of Sweden’s major cities. I have made some exclusive translations from Swedish media. They show the future of Eurabia unless Europeans wake up.

            I’ve seen the future of Eurabia, and it’s called ‘Sweden.’ Malmø is Sweden’s third largest city, after Stockholm and Gothenburg. Once-peaceful Sweden, home of ABBA, IKEA and the Nobel Prize, is increasingly looking like the Middle East on a bad day.

            All following links to major Swedish newspapers, with a brief translation:

http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,529910,00.html

            Malmø, Sweden. The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations’s third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengård, Malmø, for twenty years, and still don’t know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized. “Something drastic has to be done, or much more blood will be spilled” says one of the locals.

 http://w1.sydsvenskan.se//Article.jsp?article=10092861

            The number of people emigrating from the city of Malmø is reaching record levels. Swedes, who a couple of decades ago decided to open the doors to Muslim “refugees” and asylum seekers, are now turned into refugees in their own country and forced to flee their homes. The people abandoning the city mention crime and fear of the safety of their children as the main reason for leaving.

http://w1.sydsvenskan.se/Article.jsp?article=10090830

            ALL of the 600 windows at one of the schools in Malmø have been broken during the summer holiday. Window smashing alone costs the city millions every year. City buses have been forced to avoid the immigrant ghetto, as they are met with youths throwing rocks or bottles at them if they enter. Earlier this year, a boy of Afghan origin had made plans to blow up his own school.

http://w1.sydsvenskan.se//Article.jsp?article=10093267

            People working at the emergency ward at the major hospital in Malmø receive threats every day, and are starting to get used to it. Patients with knives or guns are commonplace. They have discussed having metal detectors at the emergency entrance, but some fear this could be seen as a provocation.

http://w1.sydsvenskan.se//Article.jsp?article=10093495

            Lisa Nilsson has lived in Manhatten, New York City, for 25 years. After moving back to Malmø, Sweden, she now misses the safety of New York. She never walks anywhere in Malmø after dark, but takes a taxi everywhere she goes.

http://www.expressen.se/index.jsp?a=180423

            Rapes in Sweden as a whole have increased by 17% just since the beginning of 2003, and have had a dramatic increase during the past decade. Gang rapes, usually involving Muslim immigrant males and native Swedish girls, have become commonplace. Two weeks ago, 5 Kurds brutally raped a 13-year-old Swedish girl.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/nyheter/story/0,2789,528363,00.html

22-year-old Swedish woman going out for fresh air gang raped by three strange men. The only said one word to her: “Whore!”

                        Ali Dashti comments: “Stories like this are in Swedish newspapers every week. Swedish media usually take great care not to mention the ethnic background of the perpetrators, but you can usually read it between the lines.”

One more: how have Swedish politicians reacted to the chaos caused in one of their major cities because of Muslims of whom even the police seem to be afraid? By making it easier for Muslims to enter Sweden:

http://www.cphpost.dk/get/81008.html

Sweden’s politicians view arranged marriages as a positive tradition: a cultural pattern that immigrants should be allowed to preserve even in Sweden. The Swedish government feels that interfering in arranged marriages is an encroachment upon private life. In addition, immigrant couples can apply for family reunification in Sweden even if they’ve never seen each other before – as long as the marriage is entered in a culture with a tradition of parents arranging marriages on behalf of their children. A 2002 study by Växjö University economics professor Jan Ekberg found that immigration cost Swedish taxpayers DKK 33 billion that year, compared to just DKK 10 billion in Denmark. And while one might assume that the rise in costs would result in knee-jerk opposition to immigration, just the opposite has happened in Sweden. A Swedish government commission has proposed abolishing the so-called “seriousness requirement.”

            A few years ago, the Guardian newspaper called Sweden the most successful society the world has ever known. But Sweden today is being transformed by a large influx of immigrants from the Middle East.

            This report, first published on CBN.com, has the details:

            Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, sits just across the water from Copenhagen, Denmark. To visitors, Malmö seems quiet, nice, maybe a little boring; in other words, quintessentially Swedish. But under the surface, Malmö has serious problems.

            On Saturday when Israel played Sweden in a Davis cup tennis match in Malmö, an estimated 6,000 Leftists, Arabs, Muslims and anarchists protested the Israeli presence in the city, and hundreds attacked police.

            Almost no fans were allowed inside to watch the tennis series, because authorities feared disruptions or possible violence against the Israeli team.

            Massive immigration has made Malmö today one quarter Muslim, and stands to transform it into a Muslim majority city within just a few decades.

            One of the most popular baby names is not Sven, but Mohammed. Pork has been taken off some school menus. Want to learn to drive? You can attend Malmö’s own “Jihad Driving School.”

            But despite Malmö’s usually placid appearance, this experiment in multiculturalism has not gone well. In the Rosengaard section of Malmö, a housing project made up primarily of immigrants, fire and emergency workers will no longer enter without police protection.

            Unemployment in Rosengaard is reported to be 70 percent. An immigrant-fuelled crime wave affects one of every three Malmö families each year. The number of rapes has tripled in 20 years.

But Malmö has been so accommodating toward immigrant Muslims that a local Muslim politician, Adly Abu Hajar, has declared that “The best Islamic state is     Sweden!”

            Don’t ask Malmö’s Jews to give the city the same glowing assessment. Jews who dare walk the streets wearing their yarmulkes risk being beaten up.

            “It’s true. Jews cannot walk the streets of Malmö and show that they’re Jews,” said Lars Hedegaard.

            Hedegaard lives across the water from Malmö in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he was a columnist for one of Denmark’s largest newspapers. He says pro-Israel demonstrations in Malmö, like the ones during the fighting in Gaza earlier this year, were met with rocks, bottles and pipe bombs from Arabs and Leftists.

            “I was there for demonstration; a pro-Israeli demonstration with about 400 or 500 people,” Hedegaard told CBN News.  “Jews and non-Jews, and I came over to cover it. The police allowed, I’d say a hundred Palestinians or Arabs to shout and threaten and throw bombs and rockets at us. A homemade bomb landed about ten yards from me, and went off with a big bang. And now of course, I thought the police were going to jump these guys, get them out of the way. They didn’t. They just let them stand there.”

            Swede Ted Ekeroth helped film the Arab-Left counter-demonstrations. He saw Arabs throwing rocks at a 90-year-old holocaust survivor.

            “I filmed the police chief and asked him why are they not reacting to this,” Ekeroth said. “Why are they not doing anything? And he simply answered, ‘It’s their right according to the Swedish constitution.’  We apparently did not have the same right, because we were forced out of there. Our manifestation for Israel is always peaceful, and theirs is always the quite opposite — Death, hate and killing of Jews. They come and they shout different slogans,” he continued. “It can be everything from Arabic slogans inciting killing of Jews to in Swedish and Danish, ‘Kill the Jews.’

            And like all over the Western world, some on the Left, along with Arabs and Muslims and anarchists, have formed a political alliance against Israel and Jews. They demonstrate together, and in Sweden, they vote together. Muslims are a core constituency of the Left.

            The immigrant issue is a big reason the right-wing Swedish Democrats are the fastest growing political party in the country. Matthias Karlsson is the Swedish Democrats’ Press Secretary. “In many parts of Sweden, people are, as I said, fed up,” Karlsson said. “And they’re being pushed too far and they want to make a stand.”

Swedish Democrats, who stand for traditional Christian values and limits on immigration, have been stigmatized by the Swedish media as fascist and bigoted.

Erik Almqvuist is national youth leader for the Swedish Democrats. “The media has tried to portray us as extremists, racists,” he said.  “People think we’re almost inhuman.”

Almqvuist faces regular death threats, and was almost killed recently in a Left-wing knife attack.

“The multicultural model in Sweden has polarized society,” Almqvuist explained. ”We have a political polarization. We have also an ethnic polarization. And the extremes are growing and it’s harder and harder to get to consensus.”

Hedegaard says as Malmö goes, so goes the rest of Sweden.

“I think the best prediction is that Sweden will have a Muslim majority by 2049, so we know where that country’s going,” he said.

CBN News was unable to get a response from Malmö’s mayor, Ilmar Reepalu. But he told a Swedish publication that he does not think anti-Semitism is greater in Malmö than in other Swedish cities, and said that harassment of Jews is “not good.”

CBN News also asked a number of Malmö Jewish leaders to appear on camera to discuss the climate of anti-Semitism. They all declined, with one saying it would only make the situation worse.

Stop Muslim Immigration to the United States!

July 19, 2010

by Germar Rudolf

We have no way of determining which Muslims subscribe to pure Islam. The reason this matters is that pure Islam is seditious. Islamic doctrine is more political than religious, and its sole political goal is the domination of Islam over all over religions and all governments.

            It is a Muslim’s religious duty to achieve that political goal.

            When Muslims move to a country, a certain percentage of them start agitating for special considerations. They start to organize and influence the nation politically in a way that is good for Islam and bad for freedom and equality. When the percentage of the Muslims in a nation’s population becomes high enough, they gain so much political power that freedoms and rights begin to disappear
           

Given all this, until we have a way of determining who is dedicated to pure Islam, no more Muslims should be allowed to immigrate into free countries.

            Does this seem extreme? It’s not as bad as it might seem. We already choose who can immigrate and who cannot. We make the rules. This is our country, after all. We are not under any obligation to allow anyone to immigrate who wants to. They do it with our blessing or they don’t do it.

            So this policy is simply adding to the already-existing filter.

            This is not racist. Islam is not a race; it’s an ideology. The policy of stopping Muslim immigration is simply acknowledging the reality of the Islamic teachings. I know there are Muslims who reject the violent and intolerant verses of the Qur’an. But Islam also teaches taqiyya and we have no way of knowing who is sincere and who is deliberately deceiving us.

            We should not take the chance, at least until we find some way to discern between people who genuinely reject the political goals of Islam and those who do not. In the meantime, we should stop all immigration into free countries by Muslims while we can. You can get the process started right now by signing this petition.

            Does signing a petition do any good? According to ThePetitionSite (the organization I used to create this petition), the answer is: “Yes — often, but the answer really depends on a number of factors. In general, the more a target organization is impacted by public opinion, the more effective are the petitions. In addition, ThePetitionSite enhances the credibility of online petitions by centralizing signature collection, structuring/regulating signature data collection and output, facilitating communication of petitions via fax, email, etc. and by using fraud-reduction technology. Remember — the effect of a petition usually goes far beyond the actual list of signatures. Journalists write stories about the petitions, signers get inspired to take additional actions, and other “potential targets” conform their behavior to avoid being a target.”

            Petitions can also exert an influence through two powerful principles of influence: Social proof and commitment and consistency. Petitions have been known to ignite important public debates.

            When this petition reaches 50,000 signatures, I will make sure each member of the House and the Senate finds out about it. And I will make sure newspapers and magazines all over the country find out about it. Your signature will make a difference. Sign the petition today: No More Muslim Immigration.

 

Sweden has been suffering under exploding crime waves since the beginning of the mass immigration era from Muslim countries. Compared to other European countries they have several hundred percent more crime in most categories. 

The numbers are beyond fantastic and they are increasing. With the increasing crimewaves, there are growing incidents of mental problems in young and old. There are also new types of violence being discovered.  

Swedish politicians are all equally inept because they were educated during a period of normalcy, the crimes were at “normal” levels compared to the rest of Europe. Politically Correct left-wing Politicians also are afraid to speak out about immigration policies or immigrant crime. Now Swedes are confronted with extreme violence from heavily armed large gangs who will take over a whole city during a robbery. Takeover robberys are more common and the lightly armed police have in some cases been hiding while observing the crimes take place.

 

 

Military style armed gangs are permitted to stay in Sweden. Even violent crimes like child rape do not automatically result in expulsion. 

 

Hearing about these non-punishments, criminals from all over the world naturally are attracted to Sweden. 

 

American Jews Battle Israeli Conversion Bill

 

July 20, 2010

by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

NPR

A battle is brewing that is pitting the powerful American Jewish community against some of the leading Jewish figures in Israel.

Over the weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the disagreement over a controversial law that deals with conversion to Judaism could “tear apart” the Jewish people.

America is a close second to Israel in terms of how many Jews live there. And the U.S. Jewish community is vital in terms of the political, financial and moral support it lends the Jewish state. So when a senior Jewish delegation representing some of the most powerful Jewish groups comes from the U.S. to Jerusalem for an emergency meeting, it’s serious.

 

‘Unacceptable’

“We do not want to see a schism among the Jews of the United States and Israel,” said Rabbi Daniel Allen, director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America. “This will say to the Jews of the United States that they don’t have a serious place in this country, and that is unacceptable to us.”

Allen said American Jewish groups are in crisis mode.

“This would be an affirmative act of the Knesset to create a second class of Jewery,” he said. “And therefore it is a much more important moment in time in terms of the sweep of Jewish history.”

There is a fundamental divide between Jews in the U.S. and Jews in Israel. Most American Jews belong to the more liberal branches of Judaism — the Reform or Conservative movements. In Israel, the Orthodox are in almost total control of Jewish life.

American Jews are upset that the conversion bill making its way through the Knesset will, for the first time, give sole control over conversions to Israel’s chief rabbinate, which is dominated by Orthodox Jews.

At the moment in Israel, conversions performed outside the country by the more liberal branches of Judaism are honored. American Jews fear that could change if power is handed over to the rabbinate.

“Never in the history of the state of Israel has there been a law to determine the status of a convert,” said Rabbi Naamah Kelman, dean of Hebrew Union College.

 

‘A Ticking Bomb’

The bill’s sponsor is Member of the Knesset David Rotem, who represents hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them from the former Soviet Union who are trying to formally convert to Judaism in Israel.

The conversion process in Israel can sometimes take years, costs thousands of dollars and ultimately leads nowhere. Some conversions have been overturned by competing rabbis from the Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox communities.

Rotem said the point of his bill is to make the conversion process easier by decentralizing it. If the bill passes, municipal rabbis will be allowed to approve conversions under the auspices of the chief rabbinate.

“I am trying to get some parts out from the rabbinical courts and to give it to the municipality courts or rabbis who are much more friendly to people who want to convert,” he said.

The many problems with the conversion process in Israel must be addressed to simplify the system, he said.

“We are sitting on a ticking bomb. We have got 400,000 new immigrants who came from the former Russian union who are not recognized as Jews according to the Jewish law,” Rotem said. “They are serving in the Israeli army, and they are being taken as hostages today for the Reform and Conservative movements who are against this law with no reason.”

Rotem said American Jews are using their power to interfere in internal Israeli affairs.

“I am willing to talk to them. I am not willing to be hostage,” he said. “I am not willing to be threatened, and I’m not willing to be blackmailed.”

The bill has already passed through committee, and the next step is for it to be voted on in the Knesset. It’s not clear whether that will happen before or after the legislative body disbands for summer recess at the end of this week

 

 

 

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 fifteenth chapter:

Conversation No. 15

Date: Wednesday, May 22, 1996

Commenced:  12:15 PM CST

Concluded:  12:45 PM CST

GD: Am I interrupting anything?

RTC: No, nothing important. Mostly I do paperwork in the morning, lunch, nap a little and not much else. Gregory, a question here. Have you ever heard of Richard Condon?

GD: Yes, I have read two of his books. He just died, I think last month I read about it.

RTC: The Manchurian Candidate?

GD: That’s one of his first books. Interesting concept. I saw the movie with Frank Sinatra in the early ‘60s. Very complex man with his plots and the brainwashing business was too much. They get ahold of an idea and run off with it.

RTC: The Company was deeply into brainwashing. It was an utter fiasco and we can talk about it in some detail later but I am glad you know about the book and the concept.

GD: Right. Brainwashed a POW and then got him to shoot at a politician. I smelt the Kennedy business in there. He hated Nixon.

RTC: He hated everybody.

GD: Depressing, Robert. Authors pour out their sublimated hatred for their wives, their parents, their teachers and God alone knows who else. What was it about the Condon book?

RTC: Just some report I came across last night while I was putting some of my papers into new files. “The Manchurian Candidate” was the title of the study. Actually, we were watching someone who had been a POW during the Vietnam business.

GD: You think he was brainwashed and is going to shoot the mayor of Buffalo Breath, Montana?

RTC: No, not brainwashed, Gregory, turned.

GD: The North Koreans turned one of our prisoners?

RTC: No, the Russian KGB did.

GD: Well, that makes more sense. I know a number of Russians, met a really sharp one in Bern when I was living there. That I could believe, but I can’t see them using brainwashing. I’ve heard about the CIA’s giving people drugs and using microwaves and so on. The Russians are not that idiotic.

RTC: Now, now, Gregory, not everything we did was lunatic. No, the Russians had access to some of the prisoners and we think they turned at least one of them. Not brainwashing, money.

GD: Yes, yes, now you make sense. Using secret radio waves…I knew a nut one time who wore a beret lined with aluminum foil to prevent Martian radio waves from getting through. Now don’t laugh, he actually did. I ran a group therapy class once and he was a patient. Oh, nuttier than usual, but I prevailed on the head doctor to let him wear his beret and he calmed right down after punching two nurses and a food attendant. A sort of metallic pacifier but it did work and it kept the place calm. Money, of course, is more immediate and more effective than brainwashing. So they got to a prisoner of war, did they? He must have been someone they could use. Some stupid grunt from Alabama would be useless unless they wanted him to let the family hogs run out onto an interstate when an unwanted politician’s motorcade was passing.

RTC: Gregory, there are time when I can see why poor Kimmel can’t put up with you. Do try to be serious, won’t you? Yes, a person who was perhaps important but more likely someone who could become important later.

GD: Makes sense. I don’t think the Cong ever captured a Senator on a goodwill tour of Saigon whorehouses. And I don’t think they captured any really high ranking officers, did they? Is that what you’re talking about?

RTC: Now you’re coming down to reality from the clouds. No, they did not have any Generals or Admirals in the Hanoi Hilton but they did have someone almost as important but it was a potential, not an actual.

GD: And?

RTC: And if there was such a captive, the Russians, who worked with the North Vietnamese…had liaison people there and we knew it…so they looked over the captive list and perhaps found someone that could be useful, if they could turn him. Suppose they found one?

GD: I suppose they did, didn’t they?

RTC: Well, we were not…are not…certain but we believe this happened. You know, we and the Russians were supposed to be deadly enemies then but in our game, there really are no enemies, just different shades of gray.

GD: That I am aware of. A Russian friend of mine told me that there was a regular connection with the Americans and that information went back and forth. Luxembourg as he told me…

RTC: Yes, indeed.

GD: So what? Professionals helping each other to make each other look good. I’d do it. I mean if you had an agent at some altitude who was fanatically anti-Soviet, he would be blind to the subtleties of reality, wouldn’t he? Narrow-minded fanatics are of very limited use, I have found out.

RTC: Exactly so, Gregory, exactly so. I was a specialist on the KGB and I knew a few people from the other side. That’s where I got my indication that their people had turned one of ours. A hint, but a strong one. And then we went through lists of people, vetted the ones that were likely candidates…

GD: But not Manchurian ones?

RTC: No, Moscow candidates.

GD: You know, I had a Russian friend tell me one time that he was constantly amazed at how easy it was to turn Americans. He used the phrase, the three Bs…

RTC: ‘Booze, bucks and broads?’

GD: Precisely. He said that money or pussy got them far more than threats or blackmail. He had a rather low opinion of Americans, I hate to say.

RTC: They aren’t perfect either, but he has a point.

GD: What did they turn your suspect with? Not booze in a prison. Money? Cunt? If he has potential, probably money, right?

RTC: Yes, just that, money. Oh, and little special treatments like more baths, a little better food and things like that.

GD: Well, if he was in with others, they couldn’t have been too lavish. Others would have noticed. One has to be careful. No television sets, visiting whores or lobster dinners for him. I can see a few extra cigarettes here and there, a glass of booze while having a medical exam. I suppose small things like that are possible and very useful tools. You know, Robert, Mueller was a master interrogator. He was a very intelligent man and instead of beating people he talked to them. He said if you were proper with them and even extended small courtesies during the interrogation, you could work wonders.

RTC: He’s right. But in this case, greed and envy….

GD: Envy? Now that’s interesting. Competition? Now there’s a piano to play on. A military prisoner of war. Potentially important somewhere down the road. Competition? With whom? Another officer? A former golf partner? Not strong enough. With whom? A relative perhaps? A more successful relative? Striving, Robert, striving. I did read…

RTC: Now, Gregory, let’s not drive down that road. Enough is enough.

GD: Now, Robert, it was you who asked me about Condon, don’t forget. You want to stop me while on a roll? That’s like your girl friend letting you touch her just a little bit right down there but not too much or too long. That’s called prick teasing. Competition with a relative? Someone living under the shadow of a famous relative? Did we have any prisoners with famous parents or siblings? Perhaps an exalted father…mothers don’t count except in the Oedipal way. Now I was recently reading about someone who was a prisoner of war. Injured badly, came from a distinguished military family. I’m sure you know the name, Robert. That one. That fits. Position to be helpful. If he gets unhappy, there are little reminders of past favors that it would be wise not to talk about. They help your career and you help them. Money. Senior military officers have a decent pension, but it ceases when they die, I believe.

RTC: Gregory, you are hopeless, but I love the way your mind works. A wealthy marriage is possible.

GD: Have a glass of beer, Bob.

RTC: Do be quiet about this, Gregory. This person has serious ambitions and there is no concrete proof of anything.

GD: If a stupid person like myself could put a scenario together so quickly, given your valuable hints, couldn’t others?

RTC: I doubt it, Gregory. Now we won’t be talking about this episode, will we?

GD: I suppose that depends, Robert. I wouldn’t want a Soviet…pardon, Russian…agent in too high a level, would I? And neither would you.

RTC: It’s a waiting game.

GD: Do we have something concrete besides a neat guessing game?

RTC: Yes, a copy of an interrogation file complete with future plans.

GD: My, my. And I suppose with that, your people could turn this individual, turn him to feed the Russians false information. I mean not obvious fake material but with just enough real bits in the dinner to make it pleasant to eat. You would turn him back to the paths of righteousness and fuck the enemy. That’s what I would do, Robert. A fool would expose him or shoot him when he’s taking a hike in the desert.

RTC: You got all this from Mueller?

GD: No, but he and I got on very well because we thought the same way. I suspect the reason why I get on with you is that we think the same way. Robert, I am only a shopworn observer of the human condition. Who would want to hire me? Don’t forget, Kimmel has called me a loose cannon, so that must be true and no one wants to hire a loose cannon. What he means by that is that clever as I know I am, I am not a whore and they could never get me to do something I thought was wrong. Never. And they know that very well. Mueller said my psyche was rooted in the Middle Ages and Heini was dead on. Simplistic as it is, there was a code of behavior and social interaction that they don’t have now. Why? Humanity has been reduced to a common denominator, Robert. This makes inferior people feel secure and happy in their knowledge that it is good to be mediocre. Or worse. So and So went to Harvard. Or Yale. Or Princeton. So and So thinks he is a walking god. He might be a useless twit but he went to Harvard.

RTC: We had legions of those in the Company, Gregory. I was a lace-curtain mick from Chicago and I didn’t fit in with the sailing and horsey crowd.

GD: And neither did Mueller and he was a better man than any of those effete twits. Bring back the old days, Robert, when merit and merit alone got you to the top. And do make sure I can get that file on the Candidate if anything happens to you.

RTC: What would you do with it?

GD: Wait and see.

RTC: We will see indeed.

(Concluded at 12:45 PM 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 organizaed 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 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 (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. Neither were his employers.

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 Archives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers.