TBR News July 6, 2010
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. July 5, 2010: “I walked my dog around the expensive apartment complex where I live yesterday, July 4, and I was astonished to note that my apartment was the only one flying an American flag. I suppose my fellow residents had no idea what the holiday was all about which is rather sad and very disturbing. There are the tea baggers and chronic bitchers on the Internet but it seems to me that there are serious issues that need to be addressed here.
The first one is for our useless government to get jobs back into this country. I don’t mean we should have permanent unemployment checks but we should talk, firmly, to our business community and persuade them to move their factories back to this country and out of Communist China. Admittedly their slave labor can help our business people, such as the wonderful WalMart purveyors of cheap chink goods, make huge profits but they make this money by depriving millions of Americans of jobs. If the manufacturers balk, start to boycott them and get a crooked Congress to put up tariffs that will put an end to this very serious problem. The welfare state can only put out so much money before it goes broke after all.
The second one is to get rid of all the millions of illegal immigrants that infest this country, all on welfare, none paying taxes and all producing armies of brats we have to educate and medicate. Back to Central America and their own poverty, not here. If we have welfare programs, they should be for our own people. If liberals don’t like this, they can move to Juarez where they can experience the vibrant culture first hand.
The third one is to stop the flood of fake and contaminated products now pouring into this country from China. The government is aware of this but money talks and this leads directly to the
Fourth one. Clean out the Augean stable of Congress and get rid of the compacted filth and corruption of the past sixty years. Round up all the crooked lobbyists from K Street and shoot the lot of them.
And the fifth one would be to cut Isreal loose before she drags us into yet another war to suit her needs. Like Iran.
And the final one would be to get the hell out of Afghanistan. We can never win there, regardless what lying, politicians and crooked generals say. Why are we there? The business world is making billions of dollars on the war that can never be won, thousands of young Americans are either being killed or crippled to keep the crooks in business and, note this, we won’t get rid of the opium now being grown there because our CIA has a hand in distributing this and have made it very clear to the boys in the White House that they are not going to walk away from so much money.
I don’t think most Americans would disagree with me but the question is:
Who will bell the cat?
TSA To Block Websites With “Controversial Opinions”
July 5, 2010
by Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
The Transportation Security Administration will block all websites that contain “controversial opinion” from its federal computers in the latest example of how Internet censorship is expanding in both the private and public sector as the federal government prepares to push through a power grab that will empower President Obama to shut down the world wide web with an emergency decree.
“The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is blocking certain websites from the federal agency’s computers, including halting access by staffers to any Internet pages that contain a “controversial opinion,” according to an internal email obtained by CBS News.”
The new rules came into force on July 1, and prevent TSA employees from accessing such content, though what is deemed “controversial opinion” is not explained. Undoubtedly, the ban list will include websites which specialize in criticism of the government and federal agencies.
The move to regulate and stifle free speech on the world wide web is accelerating after Senator Joe Lieberman introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, legislation that will hand Obama a figurative ‘kill switch’ to shut down certain parts of the Internet under the pretext of a national emergency. The bill was approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and now awaits a full Senate vote.
Internet censorship is expanding by stealth across numerous private and public network hubs. We routinely receive emails from visitors alarmed at the fact that their local library, university or transport center has blocked Alex Jones’ websites under the justification that they contain “hate speech”. Hate speech is being cited as an excuse to bar access to material critical of the state.
Indeed, at London’s St. Pancras station, one of the busiest international transport hubs in the world, Prison Planet.com, Infowars.com, and even mildly political websites are all censored on the facility’s free wi-fi network. In Communist China, where the state blocks most political websites, Alex Jones’ content is still accessible. In this instance, the Internet censorship policies of so-called free western nations are more draconian than those employed by the Chinese.
The move to censor certain websites is likely to be part of an effort to restrict access to stories about TSA agents abusing their power, examples of which have skyrocketed in recent years. This is all about preventing federal employees from figuring out that their entire career is nothing more than acting as goon enforcers for the state as America sinks further into tyranny.
An epidemic of TSA abuse at the nation’s airports has spread since 9/11, with TSA agents showing a penchant for harassing the easiest targets, from the elderly, to pregnant women, to the severely handicapped.
A large number of people have simply refused to travel to America anymore because entering the country is like trying to get into the old East Germany. This is killing the tourism industry and costing hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
A 2006 investigation by the Discover America Partnership found that tourism to America had sunk due to “a climate of fear and frustration that is turning away foreign business and leisure travelers from visiting the United States and damaging America’s image abroad.”
No less than a third of tourists vowed never to return to America after experiencing the treatment of Homeland Security officials at ports of entry. By early 2007, the U.S. had lost around 60 million visitors as a result of the stifling and intrusive security measures implemented since 9/11.
Clay Shirky: ‘Paywall will underperform – the numbers don’t add up’
The internet guru on the death of newspapers, why paywall will fail and how the internet has brought out our creativity – and generosity
July 5, 2010
by Decca Aitkenhead
The Guardian/UK
If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won’t exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”
You have probably never even heard of Shirky, and until this interview I hadn’t either. When I ask him to define what he does, he laughs, and admits that often when he’s leaving a party someone will say to him, “What exactly is it you do?” His standard reply – “I work on the theory and practice of social media”– is not just wilfully opaque, but crushingly dreary, which is funny, because he is one of the most illuminating people I’ve ever met.
The people who know about Shirky call him an “internet guru”. He winces when I say so – “Oh, I hate that!” – and it’s easy to see why, for he is the very opposite of the techie stereotype. Now 46, his first career was in the theatre in New York, and he didn’t even own a computer until the age of 28, when he had to be introduced to the internet by his mother. Arrestingly self-assured and charismatic, his conversation is warm and discursive, intently engaged yet relaxed – but it’s his rhetorical fluency which bowls you over. The architecture of his argument is a Malcolm Gladwell-esque structure of psychological and sociological insight, analysing contemporary technology with the clarity of a historian’s perspective and such authority that were he to tell you the sun actually sets in the east, you might almost believe him. At the very least, you’d probably want to – and if a guru is defined by the credulous deference he commands from others, then Shirky unquestionably qualifies. Within minutes I found myself hanging on his every word – despite being temperamentally hostile to almost everything he believes.
Shirky has been writing about the internet since 1996. As the chief technological officer for several web design companies during the 90s, he was quickly hired as a consultant by major media companies – News Corporation, Time Warner, Hearst – all curious about this new thing called the world wide web. In 2000, following “an intuition that the internet was turning social”, Shirky turned to the fledgling phenomenon of online social networking – an obscure concept back then, but which has since evolved into MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, to become the web’s primary purpose for billions of people all over the world. Shirky now teaches new media at New York University, and in 2008 published his first book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, which celebrated individuals’ new power to communicate, organise and change the world via the web.
His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.
“Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up.” But then, interestingly, he goes on, “Here’s what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times.”
This criticism echoes the sentiment of Shirky’s new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The book argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation. It proves, Shirky argues, that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness. Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet’s capacity for “an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer” has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.
Unfortunately, I am precisely the sort of cynic Shirky’s new book scorns – a techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking (why does anyone feel the need to tweet that they’ve just had a bath, and might get a kebab later?), troubled by its juvenile vacuity (who joins a Facebook group dedicated to liking toast?), and baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler. I do, however, recognise that what I like to think of as my opinions are really emotional prejudices. But equally, Shirky’s prediction for Murdoch’s paywall sounds suspiciously like an emotional objection, rather than a financial calculation. How, then, can he be certain his entire analysis of the internet isn’t just as subjective as my kneejerk cynicism?
“I’d say first of all that the notion that any expression of the world can be a value-neutral description of what life is really like is a fantasy, right?” he agrees readily. “We’re all postmodern enough to recognise that any writer on any subject is operating within those constraints. And I have the amiably simple-minded view of this stuff you would expect from an American, which is that I think freedom is good, full stop. So therefore I think I’m probably constitutionally incapable of seeing a massive spread in those freedoms as being anything other than salutary for society.
“But ultimately, over the long haul I’m vetted on accuracy, not on enthusiasm. So if I’m wrong about paywall, I’ve got no place to hide. I will have been flamingly, publicly wrong for 15 years. There will be no way I can weasel out of it.” He laughs, looking sublimely untroubled by this possibility.
“The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”
The one point of agreement between internet utopians and sceptics has been their techno-deterministic assumption that the web has fundamentally changed human behaviour. Both sides, Shirky says, are wrong. “Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I’m saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it’s because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don’t cause them.” Had Facebook been around when he was in his 20s, he cheerfully admits, he too would have spent his youth emailing photos of himself to everyone he knew.
But even if he’s right, and the internet has merely unveiled ancient truths about human behaviour, isn’t it still legitimate to feel a little bit dismayed by Facebook’s revelation of almost infinite narcissism? Shirky lets out a polite but weary sigh. “Would the world really be better off if we were to hide from ourselves the fact that teenagers waste a lot of time trying to either flirt with each other or to crack each other up? Like, to whom was this a mystery, prior to the launch of Facebook?” He grins in good-natured amazement.
“Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that’s been true of every medium ever launched.”
Shirky concedes that the web’s ability to connect people with a common enthusiasm, however obscure or deviant, can create a dangerously distorted impression of what is healthy or normal. “But so the question in all of this stuff, always, always, always, is: is the net trade-off better or worse for society? I’ve never been a cyber utopian. I’ve always understood that this is a set of trade-offs. So for all the normalisation of, say, paedophilia, we also get young small-town kids growing up gay who now know they’re not abnormal. And it seems to me that the net trade-off of lessening society’s ability to project a sense of normal that no one actually lives up to is a good thing.
“I don’t mean to say it will therefore be an endless fountain of raindrop-flavoured kittens from now till St Swithin’s day. But rather, in the same way that we’ve generally decided that the printing press was a good thing – and I would contrast that with television, which in my mind is an open question – rather than just saying in the panglossian way that all new technologies are an improvement, it is an on-the-balance calculation.”
The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield produced a report last year which suggested that the popularity of online social media was damaging children’s brain development, in particular their capacity for empathy. Shirky has two children, aged nine and six, and says they live in “a very restricted media household”, with only supervised access to a communal computer. “I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the internet in the first two years. It can be addictive and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around ‘Facebook is changing our brains’ strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Riding a bicycle changes our brains. Watching TV changes our brains. If there’s a screen you need to worry about in your household, it’s not the one with a mouse attached.”
Shirky does not own a television. Americans watch, collectively, two hundred billion hours of television a year, and if online social media diverts even just a fraction of that time, he argues, that has to be a good thing. “As I say in the book, even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I’d still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV.”
By now, despite myself, I’m having to reconsider my old snootiness towards social media. There’s just one last thing, I say. Had I never been online before, and had just read his book, I’d probably be so inspired by his account of the creative and collaborative instincts of the online community, I’d be rushing to log on. But if I started out on, say, the Guardian’s Comment is free site, the sheer nastiness of many of the commenters would floor me like a train. If the web has unlocked all this human potential for generosity and sharing, how come the people using it are so horrible to each other?
Shirky smiles, confident that he has the answer even to this. “So, there’s two things to this paradox. One is that those conversations were always happening. People were saying those nasty things to one another in the pub or whatever. You just couldn’t hear them before. So it’s a change in our awareness of truth, not a change in the truth.
“Then there’s this second effect, that anonymity makes people behave more meanly. What I think is going to happen there is we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse. There’s no way to make the internet not anonymous – and if there was, the most enthusiastic consumers of that technology would be Iranian and Chinese and Burmese governments. But there are ways of saying, while you’re here, use your real identity. We need to set up the social norms which sa
y in this space you need to use your real names, or some well-known handle.
“Whenever you say that, people cry censorship, but frankly? Fuck off.” He breaks off, laughing. “You know, getting that right is important. The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge.”
The Roosevelt-Churchill Conversations
On March 6, 1942, German Minister of Post, Dr. Wilhelm Ohnesorge, sent the following letter to Adolf Hitler. To it was attached a sample manuscript of an intercepted conversation.
——————————–
The Reichspost Minister Berlin W 66 6 March 1942
Leipziger Str. 15
Geheime Reichssache!
(Secret State Matter)
U5342-11Bfb Nr. 23 gRs
Decoding of the American-England telephone system
Mein Führer!
The Research Section (Forschungsanstalt) of the German Reichspost has, as the latest of its efforts, completed a unit designed to intercept the telephone message traffic between the United States and England which had been rendered unintelligible by their use of current communications technology. Because of the significant work of its technicians, the Reichspost is the sole agency in Germany that is now able to make immediate interception and decoding of these hitherto unintelligible conversations.
I will present these results to the Reichsführer-SS, Pg Himmler who will forward them on the 22nd of March.
It is my intention, pending your approval, to strictly limit the circulation of these communications in order that no news of our success reaches the English. This might seriously jeopardize future interceptions.
Heil mein Führer!
Ohnsorge
In 1937, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company put into use a telephone scrambling device called the A-3. This device, which permitted telephone conversations to be scrambled at one and descrambled at the other, effectively prevented interception of the conversations en route.
The German Reichspost (state postal system responsible for the telephone and telegraph systems in Germany) had purchased the A-3 system from AT&T before the war for use on lines in service between Germany and the United States. However, each set of scrambling devices was different and in practice, the possessors of one set could not intercept the transmissions of another.
The A-3 system in use between Roosevelt and Churchill was housed, in America, in a secure area of the AT&T offices at 47 Walker Street in New York City and the British A-3 counterpart was located at Whitehall in London. Roosevelt’s calls to Churchill were routed through the New York office where technicians constantly supervised the conversations to be certain that the transmitted speech was unintelligible after passing through the scrambling devices.
In September of 1939, the A-3 system was in use by the White House and on the first day of that month, Roosevelt heard from his personal friend and Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, that the Germans had invaded Poland.
The Germans were well aware that Roosevelt used this device through an indiscreet article in the New York Times of October 8, 1939 entitled “Roosevelt Protected in Talks to Envoys by Radio Scrambling to Foil Spies Abroad.”
The spies abroad found this indiscretion stimulating and Dr. Ohnesorge determined to find a way to unscramble the President’s messages. He assigned a specialist in the field, Kurt Vetterlein, to work on the project using the A-3 equipment then in the hands of the Reichspost as a basis. By late 1940, Vetterlein and his team of specialists had effectively broken Roosevelt’s secure system.
Vetterlein then built a device that was able to descramble each conversation as it progressed without the loss of a single word and Ohnesorge ordered an intercept station to be established in the occupied Dutch coastal town of Noorwikj aan Zee, just north of den Haag. Here, in a former youth hostel, Vetterlein set up the equipment he needed to begin a full-scale 24-hour program of interception and transcription of the trans-Atlantic radio telephone traffic.
The first intercept was made at 7:45 PM on September 7, 1941. The daily number of intercepted calls, on a 24 hour basis, ranged from a high of sixty to a low of thirty and were screened by experts for their intelligence value. Important material was transcribed in the original English and send by courier either to Hitler’s military headquarters in East Prussia or to Heinrich Himmler at the RSHA in Berlin.
Himmler, in turn, had the original English texts translated into German and distributed within his organization. SS General Gottlob Berger, head of Himmler’s Main Office, was one of the recipients and the head of Overseas Intelligence of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD received others.
These intercepts, coupled with confidential coded reports by Bruggmann, Swiss Minister to the United States, proved to be of incredible value to German intelligence organs and gave the Germans the closest look at the inner workings of the top leadership of the United States. Bruggmann was the brother-in-law of Vice President Henry Wallace who was absolutely indiscreet about top level police decisions. The Swiss Minister had no idea that the Germans were reading all of his secret dispatches to the Swiss Foreign Office in Bern just as the American President and the British Prime Minister had no idea their often sophomoric and pompous chatterings were ending up on the desk of Adolf Hitler within hours after they hung up.
Ever since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the subsequent entry of the United States into what then became World War II, there has been a heated and protracted debate about the historical role played by Roosevelt in this episode. His detractors have claimed that the President was fully aware of the impending Japanese attack and allowed it to proceed because it supplied him a casus belli that would permit him to actively engage his real enemy, Hitler. Much is made of the interception and decoding of Japanese official military and governmental messages, which in hindsight would appear to point clearly to a Japanese attack.
Certainly, the decoding of Japanese Foreign Office diplomatic traffic would indicate the strong probability of a military attack on the United States by the Japanese if their respective governments were unable to resolve their problems in the Pacific.
None of the diplomatic messages, however, were specific about such an attack and all that can be gained from reading them is the clear knowledge that the Japanese did not want war with the United States and, like Saddam Hussein of Iraq, were desperately seeking some kind of a peaceful solution.
Given that Roosevelt was aware of this attitude, which he clearly was, there has been no proof that the President was aware of a specific attack on the United States.
On November 26, 1941, the German intercept station in Holland recorded the following conversation between Roosevelt and Churchill concerning the situation in the Pacific. It is of such historical importance that it is reproduced in full and copies of the original German documents are attached. These transcripts of the Roosevelt/Churchill conversations were always initially in English and were then later translated into German.
Roosevelt-Churchill Conversation of November 26, 1941
This conversation is taken directly from a German transcript of a trans-Atlantic scrambled telephone conversation initiated by British Prime Minister Winston Spencer-Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt. The original was taken down in English and a German translation is in the German State Archives.
The original carbon copy of this, and other historically important German intercepts, came from the private files of Robert T. Crowley, formerly Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Conversation Participants
A=Franklin Roosevelt, Washington
B= Winston Churchill, London
B: I am frightfully sorry to disturb you at this hour, Franklin, but matters of a most vital import have transpired and I felt that I must convey them to you immediately.
A: That’s perfectly all right, Winston. I’m sure you wouldn’t trouble me at this hour for trivial concerns.
B: Let me preface my information with an explanation addressing the reason I have not alluded to these facts earlier. In the first place, until today, the information was not firm. On matters of such gravity, I do not like to indulge in idle chatter. Now, I have in my hands, reports from our agents in Japan as well as the most specific intelligence in the form of the highest level Japanese naval coded messages (conversation broken) for some time now.
A: I felt this is what you were about. How serious is it?
B: It could not be worse, A powerful Japanese task force comprising (composed of) six of their carriers, two battleships and a number of other units to include (including) tankers and cruisers, has sailed yesterday from a secret base in the northern Japanese islands.
A: We both knew this was coming. There are also reports in my hands about a force of some size making up in China and obviously intended to go (move) South.
B: Yes, we have all of that. (Interruption) ..are far more advanced than you in our reading of the Jap naval operations codes. But even without that, their moves are evident. And they will indeed move South but the force I spoke of is not headed South, Franklin, it is headed East..
A: Surely you must be…will you repeat that please?
B: I said to the East. This force is sailing to the East…towards you.
A: Perhaps they set an easterly course to fool any observers and then plan to swing South to support the landings in the southern areas. I have…
B: No, at this moment, their forces are moving across the northern Pacific and I can assure you that their goal is the (conversation broken) fleet in Hawaii. At Pearl Harbor.
A: This is monstrous. Can you tell me…indicate…the nature of your intelligence? (conversation broken) reliable? Without compromising your sources…
B: Yes, I will have to be careful. Our agents in Japan have been reporting on the gradual (conversation broken) units. And these have disappeared from Japanese home waters. We also have highly reliable sources in the Japanese Foreign Service and even the military…
A: How reliable?
B: One of the sources is the individual who supplied us the material on the diplomatic codes that (conversation broken) and a Naval officer whom our service has compromised. You must trust me, Franklin and I cannot be more specific.
A: I accept this.
B: We cannot compromise our code breaking. You understand this. Only myself and a few (conversation broken) not even Hopkins. It will go straight to Moscow and I am not sure we want that.
A: I am still attempting to…the obvious implication is that the Japs are going to do a Port Arthur on us at Pearl Harbor. Do you concur?
B: I do indeed. Unless they add an attack on the Panama Canal to this vile business. I can hardly envision the canal as a primary goal, especially with your fleet lying athwart their lines of communications with Japan. No, if they do strike the canal, they will have to first neutralize (destroy) your fleet (conversation broken).
A: The worse form of treachery. We can prepare our defenses on the islands and give them a warm welcome when they come. It would certainly put some iron up Congress’ ass (asshole).
B: On the other hand, if they did launch a bombing raid, given that the aircraft would only be of the carrier-borne types, how much actual damage could they inflict? And on what target?
A: I think torpedoes would be ruled out at the outset. Pearl is far too shallow to permit a successful torpedo attack. Probably they would drop medium bombs on the ships and then shoot (conversation broken) damage a number of ships and no doubt the Japs would attack our airfields. I could see some damage there but I don’t think either an airfield or a battleship could sink very far. What do your people give you as the actual date of the attack?
B: The actual date given is the eighth of December. That’s a Monday.
A: The fleet is in harbor over the weekend. They often sortie during the week…
B: The Japs are asking (conversation broken) exact dispositions of your ships on a regular basis.
A: But Monday seems odd. Are you certain?
B: It is in the calendar. Monday is the eighth. (conversation broken).
A:…then I will have to reconsider the entire problem. A Japanese attack on us, which would result in war between us…and certainly you as well…would certainly fulfill two of the most important requirements of our policy. Harry has told me repeatedly…and I have more faith in him than I do in the Soviet ambassador…that Stalin is desperate at this point. The Nazis are at the gates of Moscow, his armies are melting away…the government has evacuated and although Harry and Marshall feel that Stalin can hang on and eventually defeat Hitler, their is no saying what could transpire (happen) if the Japs suddenly fell on Stalin’s rear. In spite of all the agreements between them and the Japs dropping Matsuoka, there is still strong anti-Russian sentiment in high Japanese military circles. I think that we have to decide what is more important…keeping Russia in the war to bleed the Nazis dry to their own eventual destruction (conversation broken) supply Stalin with weapons but do not forget, in fact he is your ally, not mine. There are strong isolationist feelings here and there are quite a number of anti-Communists…
B: Fascists…
A: Certainly, but they would do all they could to block any attempt on my part to do more than give some monetary assistance to Stalin.
B: But we too have our major desperations, Franklin. Our shipping upon which our nation depends, is being sunk by the huns faster than we could ever replace (conversation broken) the Japs attack both of us in the Pacific? We could lose Malaya which is our primary source of rubber and tin. And if the Japs get Java and the oil, they could press South to Australia and I have told you repeatedly, we cannot hold (conversation broken) them much but in truth I cannot deliver. We need every man and every ship to fight Hitler in Europe…India too. If the Japs get into Malaya, they can press on virtually unopposed into Burma and then India. Need I tell you of the resultant destruction of our Empire? We cannot survive on this small island, Franklin, (conversation broken) allow the nips (knips?) to attack, you can get your war declaration through your Congress after all. (conversation broken)
A: Not as capable as you are at translating there messages and the army and navy are very jealous of each other. There is so much coming in that everyone is confused. We have no agents in place in Japan and every day dozens of messages are (conversation broken) that contradict each other or are not well translated. I have seen three translations of the same message with three entirely different meanings (conversation broken) address your concern about British holdings in the Pacific…if the Japanese do attack both of us, eventually we will be able to crush them and regain all of the lost territories. As for myself, I will be damned glad to be rid of the Phillipines.(sic)
B: I see this as a gamble (conversation broken) what would your decision be? We cannot procrastinate over this for too long. Eleven or twelve days are all we have. Can we not agree in principle now? I should mention that several advisors have counseled (advised) against informing you of this and allowing it to happen. You see by notifying you where my loyalty lies. Certainly to one who is heart and soul with us against Hitler.
A: I do appreciate your loyalty, Winston. What on the other hand, will happen here if one of our intelligence people is able to intercept, decipher and deliver to me the same information you just gave me? I cannot just ignore it…all of my intelligence people will know about it then. I could not ignore this.
B: But if it were just a vague message then?
A: No, a specific message. I could not just sweep it under the rug like that (conversation broken).
B: Of course not. I think we should matters develop as they will.
A: I think that perhaps I can find a reason to absent (leave) myself from Washington while this crisis develops. What I don’t know can’t hurt me and I too can misunderstand messages, especially at a distance (conversation broken)
B: Completely. My best to you all there.
A: Thank you for your call.
Historical Significance-
In dealing with documents of a controversial nature, there are a number of factors to be considered. The first point to consider is the authenticity of the document in question.
Authenticity can be determined by several means. There is the provenience of the piece; where it came from and a catalog of the owners showing unbroken custody. Then there is the forensic study of the document. Is the paper correct to the period when the document was purported to have been written. Is the typewriter or the handwriting correct? If ink is used, can it be tested as to age?
These are the forensic issues and the next issue is one of plausibility. Does the document accurately reflect knowledge and opinion when it was alleged to have been written? The sure sign of a faked or altered piece is if it reflects information known only after the fact and not before.
As a case in point, American newspapers contemporary with the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April of 1912, reported on what was then believed to be fact. These perceived facts later turned out to be in error. A document that accurately depicts the opinions, and errors, current with its alleged origin is far more believable than one that reflects information that was developed at a later date, information that could not be known to a period writer.
In the case of the copies of the German intercepts, these principles have been carefully adhered to. Because of the importance of some of these captured papers, it is vital to at least ascertain their authenticity based on the forensic criteria.
These documents, fortunately, exist in their original form.
The Roosevelt/Churchill conversation of November 26, 1941, was typed on a German Olympia typewriter, manufactured in 1938. The typeface does not indicate excessive wear such as one would find in an old, second-hand machine.
The paper on which the document was originally typed is common pulp paper, very quick to age. This paper proved to be unremarkable pulp that could have come from any period. There were no chemical additives, as are found in post 1948 paper, and no wood pulp additives that would preclude period German manufacture.
The next step in authentication would be to study the text to see if the speech was consistent with the speakers, their education and background.
In studying this aspect of the conversations, it must be remembered that these intercepts were taken down directly from the intercepted messages, as they were in progress. The technicians were persons in German employ who were conversant with idiomatic English. They were not necessarily of German birth or upbringing and attempting to write down intercepts in a foreign language could easily lead to minor grammatical or textual errors.
It is also necessary to consider the personal attitudes of persons who wish not to believe the authenticity of very controversial documents.
As a case in point, using this November 26, 1941, intercept as an example, several scholars have decided that the text is authentic. One recent reviewer, historian John Lukacs, has decided that it is not.
Dr. Lukacs has written at some length about this intercept in the American Heritage magazine of November/December 2002.
A very polished writer, Dr. Lukacs has stated that he simply cannot, and will not, accept this conversation as authentic. He stated in his article that he once spoke with an unnamed elderly British translator who stated she could not accept some of the comments made in the text.
There is the argument that Churchill would never have called Roosevelt by his first name. Since Roosevelt had known Churchill and his family for some time before the date of the conversation, there is no logical reason why he would not have used the President’s first name. Roosevelt’s mother was a friend of the Churchill family and had been visiting with them in England in 1915. This is an obscure fact, admittedly, but one that is not so concealed that it could never be discovered by a competent researcher.
There is also the question of Churchill’s use of ‘fascist’ in the conversation when Lukacs feels that ‘Nazi’ would be more accurate. A number of Churchill’s published speeches contain references to both definitions. Lukacs refers to the use of this word as ‘nonsensical’ when in fact published material shows that Churchill very clearly had used it a number of times in his writings and speeches.
What all of this proves is nothing more than the fact that Dr. Lukacs is not happy with the implication that Churchill, about whom he has written glowingly and at great length and whom he holds in the highest esteem, had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and was engaged in plotting with his American opposite number to let it go forward. By both Roosevelt and Churchills’ doing so, it is obvious many lives were lost and the war burst forth on a global dimension.
Dr. Peter Hoffman from Canada and Dr. Lukacs have both written in glowing phrases about their particular historical idols. Hoffman produced a highly laudatory work on Claus von Stauffenberg, as worshipful as the Lukacs’ Churchill works, and any writer who dares to denigrate their heroes immediately draws the academic ire of their biographers.
These academic gentlemen have staked out their turf, as it were, and like many other academics, will fight to the death to defend their own territory. It is never an edifying sight to witness distinguished academics engaged in behavior redolent of elderly whores engaging in a hair-pulling and purse-swinging battle in a dark alley over possession of a drunken client but this sort of activity seems to be more the norm than the exception
The ferocity of these encounters is always in direct proportion to the unimportance of the subject.
In essence, Dr. Lukacs simply cannot, and will not, accept anything that brings the character, or lack of it, of his primary hero into question.
Many do indeed revere both Roosevelt and Churchill. Still others revere Hitler and Stalin and are just as fierce in the defense of their respective heroes.
The personality of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill could very well be a subject of interest to an alienist who, by definition, is a physician who treats mental disorders. There is a saying that the world is governed with very little sense and there are times when one could add to this statement that it often has been governed by lunatics.
(For an illuminating discussion of the personality and activities of Churchill, see a report by eminent American historian Harry Elmer Barnes in the Appendix)
Churchill was born in 1874 and died in 1965. His father was Randolph Spencer-Churchill, a son of the Duke of Marlborough. The first Duke was John Churchill, one of England’s most capable military commanders, who died without male issue in 1722 and the title was given to one of his nephews, a Spencer. As a courtesy, the Spencer family was allowed to add Churchill to its name, separated by a hyphen. Winston always wanted to believe that he was a gifted military leader in the mold of the first Duke but his efforts at generalship were always unqualified disasters that he generally blamed on other people. This chronic refusal to accept responsibility for his own incompetent actions is one of Churchill’s less endearing qualities.
Randolph Churchill died early as the result of rampant syphilis that turned him from an interesting minor politician to a pathetic madman who had to be kept away from the public, in the final years of his life. His mother was the former Jennie Jerome, an American. The Jerome family had seen better days when Jennie met Randolph. Her father, Leonard, was a stock-market manipulator who had lost his money and the marriage was more one of convenience than of affection.
The Jeromes were by background very typically American. On her father’s side, Jennie was mostly Irish and on her mother’s American Indian and Jewish. The union produced two children, Winston and Jack. The parents lived separate lives, both seeking the company of other men. Winston’s psyche suffered accordingly and throughout his life, his frantic desire for attention obviously had its roots in his abandonment as a child.
As a member of the 4th (Queen’s Own) Hussars, in 1896 Churchill became embroiled in a lawsuit wherein he was publicly accused of having engaged in the commission of “acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type.” This case was duly settled out of court for a payment of money and the charges were withdrawn. Also a determinant factor was the interference by the Prince of Wales with whom his mother was having an affair.
In 1905, Churchill hired a young man, Edward Marsh (later Sir Edward) as his private secretary. His mother, always concerned about her son’s political career, was concerned because Marsh was a very well known homosexual who later became one of Winston’s most intimate lifelong friends. Personal correspondence of March, now in private hands, attests to the nature and duration of their friendship.
Churchill, as Asquith once said, was consumed with vanity and his belief that he was a brilliant military leader led him from the terrible disaster of Gallipoli through the campaigns of the Second World War. He meddled constantly in military matters to the despair and eventual fury of his professional military advisors but his political excursions were even more disastrous. Churchill was a man who was incapable of love but could certainly hate. He was viciously vindictive towards anyone who thwarted him and a number of these perceived enemies died sudden deaths during the war when such activities were much easier to order and conceal.
One of Churchill’s less attractive personality traits, aside from his refusal to accept the responsibility for the failure of his actions, was his ability to change his opinions at a moment’s notice.
Once anti-American, he did a complete about-face when confronted with a war he escalated and could not fight, and from a supporter of Hitler’s rebuilding of Germany, he turned into a bitter enemy after a Jewish political action association composed of wealthy businessmen hired him to be their spokesman.
Churchill lavishly praised Roosevelt to his face and defamed him with the ugliest of accusations behind his back. The American President was a far more astute politician than Churchill and certainly far saner.
In order to support his war of vengeance, Churchill had to buy weapons from the United States and Roosevelt stripped England of all of her assets to pay for these. Only when England was bankrupt did Roosevelt consent to the Lend-Lease project, and in a moment of malicious humor, titled the bill “1776” when it was sent to Congress.
Hitler’s bombing of England was not a prelude to invasion, but a retaliation for Churchill’s instigation of the bombing of German cities and Churchill used the threat of a German invasion to whip up pro-British feelings in the United States. Threats of invasion by the Germans, in this case of the United States, have been cited by such writers as Weinberg as the reason why Roosevelt had to get into the war. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese had even the slightest intention to invade the continental United States and exhaustive research in the military and political archives of both countries has been unable to locate a shred of evidence to support these theories.
A dedicated academic supporter of Winston Spencer-Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt would undoubtedly find any evidence of bad character on the part of their beloved subjects, total anathema but this attitude in and of itself has no actual bearing on the originality of documentation that might augment or expose lack of character or morality.
Roosevelt’s role in the Pearl Harbor attack has been the subject of speculation even from the first. His opponents claimed that he deliberately pushed the Japanese into war to permit him to fight his archenemy, Adolf Hitler. His supporters have firmly denied this thesis and the multiplication of books, scholarly articles and media dramas seems to have no end.
Several valid points have been brought by Roosevelt partisans that deserve to be carefully considered. The first is concerned with American military intelligence work and deals, in the main, with the interceptions of Japanese coded messages. It has been fully acknowledged that the Japanese diplomatic code, called “Purple,” was broken by the Americans and consequently, all high-level diplomatic messages between Tokyo and Japanese diplomats throughout the world were being read almost as soon as they were sent. (The average translation took two days.)
The question of the Japanese Army and Navy operational codes was another matter. The American government has firmly denied for decades that such codes had even been broken or, if that had, were not translated until 1945! While nearly all of the “Purple” intercepts have been made public, only a very few of the coded Japanese Naval messages have appeared in print and then only concerning matters of no special significance.
The Japanese Pearl Harbor task force did not broadcast any messages during their passage to the Hawaiian Islands but Japanese Naval headquarters did send messages to the task force. What they may have consisted of are not known at present and perhaps will never be known, although the National Security Agency, holder of these documents, has stated that it will release the Naval intercepts (known as JN-25) at an unspecified future date.
The argument has been well made, specifically by Roberts Wohlstetter, that so much material was intercepted during the period just prior to the Japanese attack, that it was extremely difficult for American intelligence agencies to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. In retrospect, it is glaringly obvious that some kind of a Japanese attack was planned and in train, but the direction of this attack was lost in the muddle of complex and difficult-to-translate messages.
A further point well made is, had American military intelligence learned of a definite attack on Pearl Harbor, it would have been impossible to keep this a secret, given the number of translators and other military personnel who handled such intercepted messages. The army and navy of that period were small in size and most senior officers in both services knew each other well, having served together for many years. In the absence of any concrete evidence to support the receipt of Japanese military messages dealing with an attack on any specific American installation, it is not within the realm of belief that these senior officers would passively allow American military units to be attacked.
In response to this entirely valid postulation, it should be noted that the specific warning did not come to Roosevelt from below but on a parallel level and from a foreign intelligence source which was far better equipped to decode and translate the Japanese transmissions.
A second area of interest has been the possible motivation for Roosevelt’s increasing pressure on the Japanese, pressure which culminated in a stringent oil embargo that forced Japan into war. Diverse reasons are given for this, including a personal prejudice in favor of China stemming from his maternal grandfather’s highly lucrative opium and immigrant-smuggling operations to an intense hatred of Hitler in specific and Germans in general.
Both of these reasons for Roosevelt’s attitude are historically valid but in and of themselves do not explain the dangerous brinkmanship practiced by Roosevelt in his dealings with Japan. It is clearly evident from reading the intercepts of the Japanese diplomatic coded messages that Tokyo was not only not interested in pursuing war against the United States but was seriously engaged in attempting to defuse and dangerous situation whose accelerating progress caused them great alarm. Roosevelt and his advisers were fully aware of the ease with which they could achieve effective dialog with the Japanese government. All diplomatic approaches by Japan were rebuffed by Washington and as the diplomatic crisis deepened, the possibility of military action by Japan against the United States was very clearly evident in Washington.
The actual motivation behind the turning of the screw against Japan and the refusal on the part of Roosevelt to negotiate has been explored extensively in print but one of the most valid answers seems to lie clearly in the section of the intercepted communication dealing with the Soviet Union.
As much as Roosevelt wished to enter a war against Germany, he was constrained by Congress from conducting a personal war. A de facto war against Germany was in progress in the Atlantic where US naval units were engaged in open warfare with German U boats but Hitler would not rise to the bait and issue a unilateral declaration of war against the United States. For a time, Roosevelt was check in his ambitions.
Editor’s note: This fine study has received so much positive attention that we are rerunning in this issue. It will be the cornerstone of a new Ebook by the same author that we feel is very important.
Israeli Espionage in the United States: 1948-2010
June 20, 2010
by Dr. Phillip L. Kushner, Head of Mathematics Dept.
University of Texas-Austin
pkushner@math.utexas.edu
Between 1998 and early 2001, more than 200 Israeli nationals were arrested or detained inside the United States, on a variety of visa violations and other nominally petty violations, including low-level drug trafficking. The majority of these detainees claimed they were Israeli art students, peddling art work to cover their college tuitions; or were toy vendors, employed by an Israeli-owned Miami Beach company, Quality Sales Corporation, which investigations link to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency.
The emerging pattern of surveillance of American government facilities, and established links to suspected Arab and Islamic terrorist cells prior to Sept. 11, by these Israeli nationals, set off alarm bells, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Prior to Sept. 11, a series of highly-classified government memos had been circulated by the CIA and the NSA, pronouncing this Israeli espionage operation a major national security problem.
Israel is not a friend to the United States. This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject that is ever discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. . .
In 2005 the FBI noted that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel.” In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.” The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.” . . .
As the most powerful man in the White House, Cheney was deeply involved in the intelligence field and made three trips to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more ‘forward-leaning interpretation’ of information relating to the possibility that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. That there were no such weapons and that the CIA so advised the Vice President, was categorically rejected by him and he refused to accept their analysis and continued to insist that they produce documents supporting his thesis. In this he was aided by his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, The latter was later convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison. Libby, or Liebowitz, later had his sentence commuted by President Bush because Libby threatened exposures of both Cheney and Bush to the press.
The OSP had access to an enormous amount of “raw” intelligence which came, in part, from the CIA’s directorate of operations whose job it is to receive and evaluate incoming reports from their agents around the world. At Cheney’s insistence, a number of Israeli intelligence agents were given free run of the OSP offices “None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,” said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Douglas Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
Douglas Feith: Former Under Secretary of Defense and Policy Advisor at the Pentagon. He is a close associate of Perle and served as his Special Counsel extremist, advocating anti-Arab policies. Feith runs a small law firm, Feith and Zell, which only has one International office, in Israel. The majority of their legal work represents Israeli interests. His firm’s own website stated, prior to his appointment, that Feith “represents Israeli Armaments Manufacturers.” Feith, like Perle and Wolfowitz, campaigned intensely for war against Iraq. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, 1984-1986 and was Special Counsel to Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Peale 1982-1984. In 2001, Feith returned to DoD as Donald Rumsfeld’s Undersecretary for Policy, and it was in his office that “OSP”, the Office of Special Plans, was created. The OSP was created to manufacture intelligence information to justify the invasion of Iraq. This intelligence flowed directly from Ariel Sharon’s office to the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. The OSP also miss-planned the post-war reconstruction there, and continues to point an accusing finger at Iran and Syria, as per Zionist plans to control the Middle East and funnel Arab oil to Israeli refineries. Feith is a graduate of Harvard College and Georgetown University Law Center and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Like Perle and the others, Feith is a pro-Israel extremist, who has advocated anti-Arab policies in the past. He is closely associated with the extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America, which even attacks Jews that don’t agree with its extremist views. Feith frequently speaks at ZOA conferences. Feith runs a small law firm, Feith and Zell, which only has one International office, in Israel. The majority of their legal work is representing Israeli interests. His firm’s own website stated, prior to his appointment, that Feith “represents Israeli Armaments Manufacturer.” Feith basically represents the Israeli War Machine. Feith, like Perle and Wolfowitz, campaigned hard for the Israeli proxy war against Iraq
I Background of Israeli foreign and domestic intelligence:
The origin of Israeli intelligence services lies in the underground organizations that were formed to assist Aliya (Jewish immigration to Palestine), during the period of British mandate. In 1884, the Choveve Zion (the lovers of Zion) met in the Prussian city of Pinsk to constitute ideas on the return of the Jews to Palestine. Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State came out in 1896 and in the same year he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland to consider the idea of a Jewish national homeland . In 1900, under the auspices of the fourth Zionist Congress, the Jewish National Fund was created whose task was to purchase land in Palestine .Upon the defeat of the Ottoman Empire with the Arab help, the British promised independence to the Palestinians. On the other hand, the British in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration and pledged for the establishment of a national home for Jewish people in the land of Palestine, which later in 1922, was granted to Britain as a “mandate’ by the League of Nations.
The Pre-1948 Waves of Jewish Immigration: The first Aliya took place from 1882-1904 and the second one from 1904-1914, both of which derived support from the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Jewish National Fund . During the British mandate, the Zionist underground resistance force, Haganah, had as its information arm, an organization known as Sherut Yedioth. The Sherut later came to be known as SHAI which began its worldwide operations in 1929 until an independent Israel was created in 1948 Its task was to collect political intelligence for the sake of Zionist propaganda and to infiltrate the anti-Zionist and extremist groups in Palestine as well as the neighboring Arab countries
Two routes of immigration were open to the Jews to emigrate from Europe, one legal and the other illegal. The legal immigration was allowed by the British but the numbers were small. Between 1939-1944, Britain allowed 75,000 Jews to enter Palestine legally and after that, if it allowed more Jews to immigrate, it would do so only with the Arab consent. The Jewish agency that came into being due to the need for illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine was the Mossad le Aliyah Bet This institution at that point incorporated ten people who worked in six countries: Switzerland, Austria, France, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. And it was the duty of these agents to make false passports, arrange escape routes and charter ships to take illegal immigrants to Palestine without being detected by the British authorities
Another pre-independence agency that formed the executing arm of the Haganah was Palmach which was military in character, whereas another organization Rekhesh was involved in covert operations and arms smuggling for the underground Jewish forces that had infiltrated the Arab townships
The post-1948 agencies: After becoming an independent state the SHAI was disbanded in favour of IDF (Israeli Defence Forces). Its political department was responsible to collect intelligence worldwide. Sherut Bitachon Klali was formed as a general security service for the sake of internal security and counter-espionage, also known as SHABAK or Shin Beth in Hebrew
In 1951, Ben-Gurion initiated the Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Duties (Mossad Letafkidim Meouychadim) commonly known as Mossad. Its initial function was to assess operation feasibility of military intelligence and nomination of targets, but after the creation of Military intelligence Agaf Modiin (AMAN) in 1953, it became independent of the Military Intelligence. In 1960, when Shimon Peres was in the ministry of defense, LEKEM (the Bureau of Scientific Relations) was instituted to collect scientific and technical intelligence for technological development, specially in relation to the weapon systems .
THE STRUCTURE OF ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE:
II. The Overall Structure of Israeli Intelligence Services:
With the exception of Mossad and Shin Beth, the overall structure of Israeli intelligence services can be understood as a confederation The Israeli case displays a confederation structure at a tertiary level. In the sense that the MI is accountable to the director of military intelligence, who reports to the chief of staff, who in turn is responsible to the Minister of Defense. This bureaucratic chain of command is peculiar in a Confederation-type intelligence organization as in the case of UK. Similarly the Research and Political Handling Center through its own director is accountable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whereas the Special Division links up to the IG of National Police through the investigation department. And the IG, through the Ministry of Interior reports to the Prime Minister.
It is interesting to note that the Advisers on Intelligence and Anti-terrorism on one hand and the Advisers on Political and Military Matters on the other hand are directly linked with the Prime Minister, with each other and also with the Director General of Foreign Ministry and the Director of MI (See below, Figure 1):
FIGURE NO. 1 OVERALL STRUCTURE OF THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
(Source: Foreign Intelligence Organizations, Richelson.)
| Llll Adviser on Intelligence | PRIME MINISTER | Advisers on Political Matters |
| Adviser on Anti-Terrorism | Adviser on Military Matters | ||
| Minister of Foreign Affairs | Minister of Interior | Minister of Defence | |
| Director General | Chief of Staff | ||
| Inspector General of National Police | Director of Mossad (Chairman of VaÕadat) MI | Dir of MI | |
| Chief Research & Political Handling Center | |||
| Investigation Department | MOSSAD | ||
| Special Division | l | ||
The organization of Mossad and Shin Beth is a centralized one with no intermediate layer of accountability between the Directors of Mossad, Shin Beth and the Prime Minister.
The Internal Structure of Mossad: The Mossad is based in Tel Aviv with recently estimated number of about 1,200 personnel and until lately, the identity of the Mossad director was a state secret Mossad has a total of eight departments. The director oversees, the Research, Technology and Technical Operations Departments. The director also chaperons Operation Planning and Coordination, Manpower Finance Logistics and Security, Training, Collection and Political Action, and Liaison. The latter two conduct single or multiple stations in Central America, South America, Eastern Europe/USSR, Africa, Asia and Ocean, Mediterranean and the Middle East, Europe and North America. Under the Political Action and Liaison Department is known to exist the Special Operations Division which runs highly sensitive covert operations . (See Figure No. 2)
FIGURE NO. 2 INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF MOSSAD
| Director |
| Research | Technology | Technical Operations |
| Dir. Collection | Director Political Action & Liaison Cent. America | Director Training | Director Manpower, Finance Logistics & Security | Director Operational Planning & Coordination |
South America Special Operations Divisions
Eastern Europe/ USSR
Africa
Asia & Oceana
Mediterranean & the Near East
Europe
North America
Intelligence is direction of Field Security Units, Territorial Command Combat Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and Naval Intelligence
Lastly, the General Security Service of Israel is known as Shin Beth, which is primarily responsible for counter-espionage and internal security. Shin Beth is organized into eight operational and functional departments: Arab Affairs, Non-Arab Affairs, Protective Security, Operational Support, Technology, Interrogation and Legal Counsel, Coordination and Planning, and Administration The first three constitute the operational division and the rest, Support Divisions. Although there is a deputy director’s office, all of the other departments are also directly responsible to the director.
Coordination of the Israeli Management Structure: The pivotal faculty of Intelligence Community in Israel is known as the Va’adat Rashei Hasherutim or simply Va’adat. The Va’adat consists of the directors of Mossad, AMAN, Shin Beth and IG Police.
It also includes the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Director of the Research and Political Planning Center and the anti-terrorist advisers of the Prime Minister, political and military both. All the members of Va’adat are supposedly at parity, however, in terms of importance and power, the director of AMAN is known to eclipse the director of Mossad
FUNCTIONS OF THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES
1. Functions of Mossad: Mossad’s essential functions are: human intelligence collection, covert action and counter terrorism. Its primary focus is to do clandestine operations against the Arab countries as well as against other organizations throughout the world The Mossad collects information on the leadership, disposition, morale and armaments, not only of the Arab Military forces, but other areas of interest to include (but not limited to: )The United States, Russia, China and Turkey. . Mossad monitors the commercial activity of these entities in relation to weapons acquisition and attempts, when it deems necessary, to sabotage the Arab states recruitment of military, economic and political experts
Although exact functional detail remains somewhat abstruse, the largest of the departments with responsibility for most espionage operations is the Department of Collections. The Political Action and Liaison Department is responsible for liaison with friendly states, as well as those states that do not have any diplomatic ties with Israel. Israeli liaison and maneuvering between friendly and non-friendly states is amazingly professional.
It exchanges intelligence information not only with countries like the US with whom it has formal ties, but also with states as diverse as Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and India. It provided Pakistan some information on India that was obtained by the Israeli agent in the US, Jonathan Jay Pollard, in return for some strategic information about some other countries. At the same time Israel exchanged information with India about the Pakistan’s endeavors to construct the atom bomb .
The Special Operations Division or Metsada conducts highly sensitive assassinations, engages in sabotage, paramilitary operations and psychological warfare projects Among the least violent functions of Mossad is its liaison, propaganda and training . About 10 Israeli agents trained nearly one hundred Sri Lankans in intelligence tactics in order to combat the Tamil Separatists in Northern Sri Lanka . Among the more violent functions of Mossad are kidnapping and assassinations. Colonel Mustapha Hafez, an Egyptian intelligence officer was killed by Mossad as he was considered a key element in the organization of the Palestinians . In 1972, in Munich, Germany the Black September faction of PLO kidnapped and subsequently killed ten Israeli athletes in an attempt to recover two hundred Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. This started the most extensive set of assassinations undertaken by the Mossad. The Mossad set up a special unit called the ‘Wrath of God’ to carry out this operation which it successfully completed by eliminating its targets one by one .
Lohamah Psichologit or the LAP Department of Mossad operates for its psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations. The Research Department produces the intelligence in form of daily reports, situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports from its different geographical desks .
One of the very important functions of Mossad besides gathering intelligence is the acquisition of military hardware, the assessment of enemy equipment and the enhancement of Israeli capabilities. One of Mossad’s most successful acquisitions was the theft of highly enriched Uranium from an American company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., located in Apollo, Pennsylvania This took place in 1965. The president of the company stated that 386.1 pounds of Uranium, enough for at least ten atom bombs, was simply lost ! However, the experts believed that it was transferred to Israel.
2. Functions of Shin Beth: The Arab Affairs Department conducts anti-terrorist operations, maintenance of an index on Arab terrorists and it also performs political subversion. Whereas the non-Arab department, which is divided into Communist and non-Communist sub-sections, is responsible for the functions of penetration of foreign intelligence organizations, diplomatic missions in Israel and interrogation of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe . The Protective Security Branch of Shin Beth functions as the guardian of all the state buildings, embassies, defense related industries, scientific installations, industrial plants and the national airline
All foreigners are regarded with suspicion by the Shin Beth, regardless of nationality and religion. Informants are recruited from professions of hospitality industry, educational institutions and trade unions with occupations such as bartenders, telephone operators, secretaries, prostitutes and taxi drivers .
3. The Functions of AMAN: The Military Intelligence of Israel produces comprehensive national intelligence estimates for the prime minister and cabinet, which includes communications intercepts, target studies on the contact Arab states in propinquity, and intelligence on the risk of war . AMAN’s Foreign Relations Department maintains liaison with the foreign intelligence organizations, engages in deep reconnaissance and conducts cross-border operations .
4. Air Force Intelligence and the Naval Intelligence: The Air Force Intelligence performs the function of data collection by the means of aerial reconnaissance and signals intelligence using a variety of intelligence equipment which also includes the use of RPVs (remotely piloted vehicles), which are recoverable and recyclable after first use . These devices are excellent for photographic information which can be directly transmitted to the commander’s headquarters who can make immediate decisions regarding troop deployment without sending out the ground reconnaissance .This unit worked in close cooperation with the United States military in Georgia to keep a watch on the border with Russia in anticipation of a response by that country to attacks on breakaway provinces. This project failed because the Russian military had been alerted to the times and flight patterns of the surveillance craft by one of their sources in the IDF and was able to hide their troops and armor in good time from aerial surveillance.
The Naval intelligence is a small service which provides AMAN on a consultative basis, assessments of the sea-based threats to Israel. Its targeting department is also responsible for coastal studies, naval gunfire missions and beach studies for amphibious assaults .
Incidents of Israeli Spying on the United States 1947-2010
- 1947. Information obtained by the Jewish-owned Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in its spy operations on US citizens is used by the House Select Committee on Unamerican Activities. Subcommittee Chair Clare Hoffman dismisses the ADL’s reports on suspected communists as hearsay.
- 1950 John Davitt, former chief of the Justice Department’s internal security section notes that the Israeli intelligence service is the second most active in the United States after the Soviets.
- 1954 A hidden microphone planted by the Israelis is discovered in the Office of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv.
- 1956 Telephone taps are found connected to two telephones in the residence of the US military attach in Tel Aviv.
- 1954 “The Lavon Affair”. Israeli agents recruited Egyptian citizens of Jewish descent to bomb Western targets in Egypt, and plant evidence to frame Arabs, in an apparent attempt to upset US-Egyptian relations. Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon is eventually removed from office, though many think real responsibility lay with David Ben-Gurion.
- 1965 Israel illegally obtained enriched uranium from NUMEC Corporation. ( Washington Post, 6/5/86, Charles R. Babcock, “US an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say.”)
- 1967 Israel attacks the USS Liberty, a CIA intelligence- gathering vessel flying a US flag, operating at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, killing 34 crew members.. In 2004, Captain Ward Boston, Senior Legal Counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the attack swears under oath that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the investigation to conclude that the deliberate assault was an “unfortunate accident,” even though the evidence indicated the attack was deliberate. Given the use by Israel of unmarked boats and planes, and the machine-gunning of USS Liberty‘s lifeboats, the most likely explanation is that USS Liberty was to be sunk with all hands, with evidence left to frame Egypt for the sinking. This would have dragged the US into the war on Israel’s side.
- 1970 While working for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Richard Perle is caught by the FBI giving classified information to Israel. Nothing is done.
- 1978, Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, is overheard in a DC hotel offering confidential documents to top Israeli military officials. Bryen obtains a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, and the case heads for the grand jury, but is mysteriously dropped. Bryen later goes to work for Richard Perle.
- 1979 Shin Beth [the Israeli internal security agency] tries to penetrate the US Consulate General in Jerusalem through a “Honey Trap”, using a clerical employee who was having an affair with a Jerusalem girl.
- Jonathan Jay Pollard, a graduate of Stanford University and an employee of the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) surface ships division was accused and convicted of stealing over a million highly sensitive documents and selling them to the Israeli government. As an example, Pollard stole and copied the latest version of Radio-Signal Notations (RASIN), a 10-volume manual comprehensively detailing America’s global electronic surveillance network. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison on one count of espionage on March 4, 1987. Pollard is federal prisoner #09185-016 and is incarcerated at the Butner Federal Correction Complex in Butner, North Carolina.
- 1985 The New York Times reports the FBI is aware of at least a dozen incidents in which American officials transferred classified information to the Israelis, quoting [former Assistant Director of the F.B.I.] Mr. [Raymond] Wannal. The Justice Department does not prosecute.
- 1985 Richard Smyth, the owner of MILCO, was indicted on charges of smuggling nuclear timing devices to Israel ( Washington Post, 10/31/86).
- 1987 April 24 Wall Street Journal headline: “Role of Israel in Iran-Contra Scandal Won’t be Explored in Detail by Panels”
- 1992 The Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli agents apparently tried to steal Recon Optical Inc’s top-secret airborne spy-camera system.
- 1992 Stephen Bryen, caught offering confidential documents to Israel in 1978, is serving on board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs while continuing as a paid consultant — with security clearance — on exports of sensitive US technology.
- 1992 “The Samson Option,” by Seymour M. Hersh reports, illicitly obtained intelligence was flying so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings already on the documents. There were strict orders, Ari Ben-Menashe recalled: “Anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with your American counterparts.”
- 1993. The ADL is caught operating a massive spying operation on critics of Israel, Arab-Americans, the San Francisco Labor Council, ILWU Local 10, Oakland Educational Association, NAACP, Irish Northern Aid, International Indian Treaty Council, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco police. Data collected was sent directly to Israel via their Embassy and in some cases to South Africa. Pressure from Jewish organizations forced San Francisco authorities to drop the criminal case, but the ADL settles a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum of cash.
- 1995 The Defense Investigative Service circulated a memo warning US military contractors that ” Israel aggressively collects [ US] military and industrial technology.” The report stated that Israel obtains information using “ethnic targeting, financial aggrandizement, and identification and exploitation of individual frailties” of US citizens.
- 1996 A General Accounting Office report “Defense Industrial Security: Weaknesses in US Security Arrangements With Foreign-Owned Defense Contractors” found that according to intelligence sources “Country A” (identified by intelligence sources as Israel, Washington Times, 2/22/96) “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.” The Jerusalem Post (8/30/96) quoted the report, “Classified military information and sensitive military technologies are high-priority targets for the intelligence agencies of this country.” The report described “An espionage operation run by the intelligence organization responsible for collecting scientific and technologic information for [ Israel] paid a US government employee to obtain US classified military intelligence documents.” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Shawn L. Twing, April 1996) noted that this was “a reference to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, a civilian US naval intelligence analyst who provided Israel’s LAKAM [Office of Special Tasks] espionage agency an estimated 800,000 pages of classified US intelligence information.”
The GAO report also noted that “Several citizens of [ Israel] were caught in the United States stealing sensitive technology used in manufacturing artillery gun tubes.”
- 1996 An Office of Naval Intelligence document, “Worldwide Challenges to Naval Strike Warfare” reported that ” US technology has been acquired [by China] through Israel in the form of the Lavi fighter and possibly SAM [surface-to-air] missile technology.” Jane’s Defense Weekly (2/28/96) noted that “until now, the intelligence community has not openly confirmed the transfer of US technology [via Israel] to China.” The report noted that this “represents a dramatic step forward for Chinese military aviation.” (Flight International, 3/13/96)
- 1997 An Army mechanical engineer, David A. Tenenbaum, “inadvertently” gives classified military information on missile systems and armored vehicles to Israeli officials (New York Times, 2/20/97).
- 1997 The Washington Post reports US intelligence has intercepted a conversation in which two Israeli officials had discussed the possibility of getting a confidential letter that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had written to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. One of the Israelis, identified only as Dov, had commented that they may get the letter from Mega, the code name for Israel’s top agent inside the United States.
- 1997 US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, complains privately to the Israeli government about heavy-handed surveillance by Israeli intelligence agents.
- 1997 Israeli agents place a tap on Monica Lewinsky’s phone at the Watergate and record phone sex sessions between her and President Bill Clinton. The Ken Starr report confirms that Clinton warned Lewinsky their conversations were being taped and ended the affair. At the same time, the FBI’s hunt for Mega is called off. Mega is later revealed to be Reuven Azar – Counselor for Political Affairs, Embassy of Israel
- 2001 It is discovered that US drug agent’s communications have been penetrated. Suspicion falls on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis. AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom. Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls, but suspicion forms that Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, has built a back door into the system that is being exploited by Israeli intelligence and that the information gleaned on US drug interdiction efforts is finding its way to drug smugglers. The investigation by the FBI leads to the exposure of the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel. Half of the suspected spies have been arrested when 9-11 happens. On 9-11, 5 Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse. Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis are caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them are later revealed to be Mossad. As witness reports track the activity of the Israelis, it emerges that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis are interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel. The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandons his business and flees to Israel. The United States Government then classifies all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11. All of this is reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily AIPAC, forces Fox News to remove the story from their website. Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, received an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provided the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, which turned out to be located in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, hence could not be further investigated.
- 2001 The FBI investigated 5 Israeli moving companies as possible fronts for Israeli intelligence.
- 2001 The Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin arrested for planning to bomb a US Congressman. He was murdered in the LA County Jail and dies before he could be brought to trial.
- 2001 The Isreali Mossad, in conjunction with senior members of the Bush administration, penetrated a Saudi terrorist group located at Hollywood, Florida, and materially assisted them in preparing for an aerial assault on various significant American targets. The White House was kept fully courant of the Mossad’s actions by the Israeli Embassy personnel in Washington.
- 2002 The DEA issues a report that Israeli spies, posing as art students, had aggressively been trying to penetrate US Government offices.
- 2002 Police near the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in southern Washington State stop a suspicious truck and detain two Israelis, one of whom is illegally in the United States. The two men were driving at high speed in a Ryder rental truck, which they claimed had been used to “deliver furniture.” The next day, police discovered traces of TNT and RDX military-grade plastic explosives inside the passenger cabin and on the steering wheel of the vehicle. The FBI then announces that the tests that showed explosives were false positives by cigarette smoke, a claim test experts say is ridiculous. Based on an alibi provided by a woman, the case is closed and the Israelis are handed over to INS to be sent back to Israel. One week later, the woman who provided the alibi vanishes.
- 2003 The Police Chief of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, stops a truck speeding through a school zone. The drivers turn out to be Israelis with expired passports. Claiming to be movers, the truck contains junk furniture and several boxes. The Israelis are handed over to immigration. The contents of the boxers are not revealed to the public. It is later revealed that they contain “extensive documentation” concerning earlier atomic weapon’s testings at nearby Alamagordo, NM
- 2003 Israel deployed assassination squads into other countries, including the United States. The US Government does not officially protest when they were informed by the Israeli Embassy that these squads were intended to kill known Muslim terrorists known from internal FBI reports to be operating inside the United States.
- 2004 Police near the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Tennessee stop a truck after a three mile chase, during which the driver throws a bottle containing a strange liquid from the cab. The drivers turn out to be Israelis using fake Ids. The FBI refuses to investigate and, on orders from the Department of Justice in Washington, the Israelis are released.
- 2004 Two Israelis try to enter Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, home to eight Trident submarines. Their truck tests positive for explosives.
- 2004, The authoritative Jane’s Intelligence Group noted that Israel’s intelligence organizations “have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established.” The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, told Congressional Quarterly magazine that “the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets.”
- 2005 August 4,2005 a federal grand jury indiocted Lawrence Franklin a former United States Department of Defense employee, on five charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 in that Franklin passed secret information regarding United States policy towards Iran to staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Franklin, pled guilty to several espionage-related charges and was sentenced in January 2006 to nearly 13 years of prison but was later released due to pressure from the Israeli government. As soon as public interest died away, a Federal judge immediately reduced Franklin’s sentence to time served and a supervised home probation.
- 2009: October 20, 2009 Stewart Nozette, a scientist who worked for NASA and had a top-level government security clearance, is charged with trying to sell US secrets to Israel after an FBI sting operation. The FBI pretended to be Mossad agents.
- 2010: A classified FBI report under date of March 9, 2020 indicates that the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms who service U.S. telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon, have been “regularly reading and forwarding” in-depth information concerning both domestic and foreign NSA surveillance. Also, both the FBI and the DEA have uncovered, and reported on, a.massive ecstasy trafficking operation, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal drugs, manufactured in the Netherlands, to cities across the United States. The drug trafficking operation is also engaged in black market diamond smuggling, using Brooklyn-based Hassidic Jews as couriers.
Portions of the funds garnered from these illegal operations, according to the official reports, were funneled to offshore bank accounts of the Mossad, accounts in Switzerland and Lichtenstein,. This Israeli drug and diamond smuggling operation receives technical support (and timely warning of surveillance) via a number of Israeli communications firms, that subcontract with major American telephone companies and government law enforcement agencies.
Spy operations, targeted at mosques and other centers of the Islamic-American communities. According to sources, the goal is to foment nominally “Arab” or “Islamic” labeled violence and terrorism inside the United States, to win Bush Administration support for an Israeli war against the Palestinians and Arabs. These sources believe further, Israeli-abetted terror attacks are to be expected.
Surveillance of U.S. government law enforcement, military and intelligence facilities, to gather profile information for such terrorist attacks, as well as espionage penetration. Organized teams of young, “recently retired” Israeli Defense Force soldiers, often associated with specialty units engaged in electronic signal intercepts and explosive ordinance, have targeted at least 36 domestic U.S. military bases, and many federal law enforcement and intelligence installations. A second feature of this targeting of USG facilities is the recruitment of “a new generation of Jonathan Pollards” (Israeli spies).
In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States, the case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Stanford graduate Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli intelligence with an estimated 800,000 pages of highly classified U.S. intelligence information. The Israelis in turn immediately passed this stolen information to the Soviets, thereby compromising American intelligence (CIA and military) agents in the field – a significant number of whom were captured and killed as a result.
Israel at first denied, and then, faced with overwhelming evidence, admitted after he was arrested in 1985, convicted and sentenced to life in prison, that they were well aware of Pollard’s connections to the Mossad and an Israeli Air Force intelligence unit working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
The case created severe strains in American-Israeli relations, and is a source of ongoing rage in many American Jews, who believe that since Pollard was spying for Israel, he had an obligation to do this and that his life sentence was unduly harsh.
Many Jewish groups in the United States, acting in concert with high level Israeli officials have constantly importuned American Presidents to pardon Pollard and permit him to emigrate to Israel where he has been promised a large sum of cash and a seat in the Israeli Knesset.
Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to any accusations of Israeli espionage in the United States as well as to comprehend the media response must take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America’s unique and complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a “special relationship” unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world. But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation of trust. According to intelligence sources, the United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the government decided that it was in our interest, such as observation and infiltration of pro-Palestine Arab groups legally resident in the United States (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.
If England or France spied on the United States, and this was discovered, American officials would likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons to hide any unseemly violations of the “special” relationship. The powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the Bush administration’s strong support for Israel, and its strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a partner in the “war against terror”; the devastating consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack — all these factors explain why the U.S. government might publicly downplay any public accusation of Israeli espionage against the United States and forcefully conceal any investigation that might be expected to produce results unacceptable to the Israel lobby and the American Jewish community that firmly supports it.
The pro-Israel lobby is an enormous and very powerful force in American politics; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby in Washington and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington, according to Fortune Magazine. Other powerful and influential pro-Israel groups include the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National Interest, calls the Israel lobby “an ethnic donor machine” that “distorts U.S. foreign policy” in the Middle East. Among foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other — just more effective. “This is what all lobbies do,” Lind observes. “If you criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem.”
After an explosion in the town of Rishon Letzion in May of 2002 killed two people and the bomber, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said, “The innocent Israelis murdered today underscore the need to stand with Israel as they eliminate the terrorist networks.”
DeLay’s strong response was one of many expressions of support coming from congressional members, who repeatedly remind voters of the strong U.S.-Israel alliance dating back to Israel’s 1948 foundation.
But widespread congressional support is rooted in more than just a long-term relationship. It is traced to the power of the collective Jewish or pro-Israeli lobby, a well organized, well funded, extremely active, and extraordinarily connected group, according to political analysts.
“They are very savvy and sophisticated,” said Richard Semiatin, a political science professor at American University. “They are extremely knowledgeable and some of the best lobbyists in the country when they get into congressional offices.”
Indeed, the latest crisis in the Middle East, which has been punctuated by Palestinian uprisings that resulted in dozens of homicide bombings and the subsequent ongoing occupation of disputed Palestinian territory, has only energized this Washington lobby. The group has been hosting near-daily organizational conferences, press events, op-eds, advertising campaigns, and rallies — all demanding that Arafat get control of his militant supporters and reform his corrupt Parliament.
“It’s a little like the special forces teams who go in to fight in Afghanistan. They’re on the ground, calling in bombers. The planes overhead are the pro-Israeli supporters across the country,” who donate money to campaigns and send letters to Washington, said former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris. “It’s a very effective model and basically unequaled in the Congress.”
“The key to AIPAC’s success is support for the only Western democracy in the Middle East,” said Josh Block, spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which boasts over 65,000 Jewish and non-Jewish members. “The members support and believe that Israel is our ally on the frontline against terrorism in the Middle East. When you are lobbying on an issue that is so clearly the right thing to do, your effectiveness is high.”
Granted, other groups, including the National Rifle Association, the Cuban American National Foundation and the American Trial Lawyers Association, all command large audiences and ready support in the aggressive environment of Washington.
But AIPAC, along with the American Jewish Committee, the American Defense League, the United Jewish Communities, the National Jewish Democratic Council, and the Republican Jewish Coalition, all of whom conduct their own grassroots campaigns, have surpassed the partisan and political bickering that often marks policy on guns, Cuba and tort law.
AIPAC also engaged in active espionage against the United States as withes this official DoJ press release:
U.S. Department of Justice
United States Attorney
Eastern District of Virginia
Paul J. McNulty
2100 Jamieson Avenue
United States Attorney
Alexandria, Virginia 22314
(703)299-3700
NEWS RELEASE
August 4, 2005
Paul McNulty, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, announced that Lawrence Anthony Franklin, age 58, of Kearneysville, WV; Steven J. Rosen, age 63, of Silver Spring, MD; and Keith Weissman, age 53, of Bethesda, MD, were indicted today by a federal grand jury sitting in Alexandria with Conspiracy to Communicate National Defense Information to Persons Not Entitled to Receive It. The indictment alleges that beginning in April of 1999, Rosen, the Director of Foreign Policy Issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington, D.C., and Weissman, the Senior Middle East Analyst in the Foreign Policy Issues Department at AIPAC, in an effort to influence persons within and outside the United States government, would use their contacts within the United States government, including Franklin, with whom they first met in February 2003, to gather sensitive United States government information, including classified information relating to the national defense, for subsequent unlawful communication, delivery and transmission to persons not entitled to receive it, including members of the media and foreign government officials.
Franklin was also charged with three counts of Communication of National Defense Information to Persons Not Entitled to Receive It. In one of those counts, Rosen was charged with aiding and abetting him in the unlawful disclosure.
Finally, Franklin was charged with conspiring with persons known and unknown to the grand jury to communicate classified information to an agent or representative of a foreign government. It is alleged that Franklin would use his position as a desk officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense to gather information, classified as affecting the security of the United States, for subsequent unlawful communication to a foreign official.
Mr. McNulty stated: “When it comes to classified information, there is a clear line in the law. Today’s charges are about crossing that line. Those entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s secrets must remain faithful to that trust. Those not authorized to receive classified information must resist the temptation to acquire it, no matter what their motivation may be.”
This case was investigated by the FBI, and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Kevin DiGregory and Neil Hammerstrom, and Thomas Reilly, Trial Attorney, the Counterespionage Section of the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice.
U.S. congressional leaders like DeLay, former House Majority Leader (until his felony indictment and early retirement into private life) , and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., delivered rousing speeches to AIPAC’s annual conference, the most powerful lobbying force for the Jewish-American community. DeLay’s speech was followed by instructions to blanket Capitol Hill with lobbying teams.
“These groups have taken advantage of the political system to organize themselves to petition the government and they have a reputation of success not only because of their influence but because our presidents have seen their cause in the public interest,” said John Samples, a political analyst with the Cato Institute. “It gives you the notion that there is a broad coalition of people who see it as part of the national interest to support Israel very strongly.”
“They do have a tremendous amount of clout, but I think it starts with the fact that there is an enormous amount of support for their point of view in Washington,” said political analyst Rich Galen, who edits Mullings.com. “They are feeding into a willing audience.”
But not everyone bought into the hype.
“It is truly disturbing to see American elected officials falling over themselves in an unseemly attempt to ‘pledge allegiance’ to a foreign government and its domestic lobby,” complained the Council on American-Islamic Relations in a recent statement.
“There are Jewish people who are opposed to Israeli policies, but they don’t get a hearing in the Congress. The pro-Israel lobby gets all the attention,” said Faiz Rehmanen, communications director for the American Muslim Council in Washington.
“As an American, I see it as a problem. [Members of Congress] aren’t addressing our interests, they are addressing the interests of a critical lobby,” he added.
Indeed, the number of Jews in the United States Congress well surpasses the population as a whole. Seven percent of members are Jewish, while the Jewish-American population totals 2.2 percent, about 6 million people in a nation of 280 million.
But Jewish-Americans accounted for 4 percent of total voter turnout in the 2000 elections, totaled close to 3 percent of swing voters in several key states and their fund-raising ability is nearly unmatched, say experts.
“It’s a big fund-raising community filled with people who are willing to give large sums of money to political parties and candidates,” said Michael Barone, author of The New Americans. “It’s money, but it is also skill, it’s the strength of their arguments.”
In 2001, AIPAC spent $1.1 million in lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill, which Block said is typical. None of that money went directly to political campaigns. Neither does AIPAC endorse candidates.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, pro-Israeli donors, including PACs and individuals, gave $28.6 million to Democrats and $12.7 million to Republicans. About $17.5 million came from PACs and $24 million from individuals.
By comparison, Arab-American and Muslim PAC contributions totaled $296,830 since 1990, with Democrats receiving $206,908 of that money.
“The Jewish lobby is extremely influential in Washington,” said Steven Weiss, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. “If you are a candidate and you get the pro-Israel label from AIPAC, the money will start coming in from contributors all over the country.” “When you have a core constituency that is so passionate about what they believe in, they are likely to open their pocketbooks,” surmised Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art students. “In government circles,” as Insight’s Rodriguez put it, “anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail — deadly. No one wants to touch it.” Intelligence officers say that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to “career suicide.” And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities.
Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters and editors as anti-Semites.
In late May of 2010, U.S. counter-intelligence investigators believe that once again they have uncovered a “significant number” of Israelis and Israeli informants extensively engaged in domestic espionage against the U.S. Their goal is to infiltrate and become persons of influence in both the U.S. Congress, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. They already have a significant presence in these agencies as well as the NSA. Intercepted telephone and computer messaging indicates that while an effort to persuade the Bush Administration to attack Iran failed, they are pushing a similar project with the current Obama Administration.
The 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 tenth chapter:
Conversation No. 10
Date: Monday, April 22, 1996
Commenced: 11:17 AM CST
Concluded: 11:59 AM CST
GD: Good morning, Robert. I wanted to let you know the box is finished and I have checked it out. The neighbor’s cat started screeching like a maniac and kept it up for the ten minutes I left the thing plugged in.
RTC: Wonderful news, Gregory. I am so looking forward to receiving it. Send it to the drop address I gave you and use the name we decided on.
GD: No problem at all, Robert. It uses regular household current and on one side you will find a dial and a toggle switch. The switch turns it on and off and the dial adjusts the level of noise. I mean you won’t hear any noise but that’s as good a term as anything else. If you have pets, be careful to aim the box towards the embassy, better up against the window, which I would keep open during operational times. I suggest you turn it on and off about three or four times during the day but never leave it on for more than ten minutes. You want general malaise but not protracted agony.
RTC: And if their windows are closed?
GD: Even better. The glass acts as a sounding board. If the curtains or drapes are open, get a pair of glasses and stand back from the window and watch for reactions. If not, just turn it on and off from time to time. You won’t get people with exploding heads but eventually you’ll hear about it.
RTC: I suppose exploding Swiss diplomats would cause a stir.
GD: I would think so. Now, I’ll send this out today before five and then let you know. I won’t send it registered because then your Mr. Fake Name would have to sign for it.
RTC: Understood. You’ll be in my debt for this, Gregory.
GD: My pleasure.
RTC: And I’ve been digging out Kennedy material for you.
GD: Wonderful, Robert. Now that that’s taken care of, I would like to ask you about something I found in Mueller’s journals. I’m translating them and believe me, it’s not the easiest job. His German is short and to the point but not very cultured and I was brought up to speak Hanoverian German. Mueller’s material reads like police reports. Anyway, there was a passage I really want to verify with you. I mean I will read my translation to you in toto and then let me know if you know anything about it, either first or second hand. It’s such a nasty piece of work that Bender won’t want to publish it unless I get some confirmation. It isn’t too long.
RTC: Read on.
GD: OK, here we go: Now remember that Mueller moved from DC to Warrenton and lived on a large estate with his wife. He calls her Bunny and that’s who he’s talking about. It starts out
“Friday, 12. July, 1951
Such a damned outrage! This is very hard to put down but I really ought to just for reference and also for relieving me of the pressure. I went out for a ride this morning, in spite of the weather. I thought it would be my last before I went on the trip and I do enjoy the rides now. I have gotten used to the horse and he to me. So early this morning, I went out riding and worked my way across the property to the area where the CIA unit was installed.
I smelt it before I got to it and so did the horse. A very unhappy horse and later, a very unhappy Heini! The stench was terrible as I approached the fenced-in trailers with their antenna stuck up on top of two of the trailers. There was a path leading down the hillside but the horse balked so I had to dismount and lead him down the path. I wanted to see what smelt so bad and I found out very quickly. In a small clearing were two human bodies, very much decayed and bloated. There were two men wearing some kind of blue shirts and pants and badly infested with maggots. They appeared to be black men but given the advanced state of corruption, it was not a certainty.
I remounted at the top of the path and rode over to the fenced area but no one was in sight. By this time, I was becoming very angry and went back home at a good canter and later a gallop. Phone calls to the CIA people. There are dead human bodies on my land! What is going on there? Silly, placating answers. Not good enough for me. Get rid of these things or I will call the local police and mortician at once! No, no, sir, do not do that! was the response. They would send someone right out to clean it up. I was please not to call anyone. It was (the usual shit) a matter of national security! National security indeed! Two dead blacks and how did they get there?
I want Bunny to know nothing about this. She came in when I was shouting at the CIA fool so I had to pretend it was something else. Oh yes, they came almost at once in a station wagon and drove in at the gate and then out to the charnel house. Another car came with two smooth-faced young men who wanted to talk to me privately. Into the library and later Bunny said she could hear me shouting one floor up through three closed doors! Angry is not the word to use, believe me.
What have these swine done now? It seems that the CIA is interested in mind control and were “practicing” on “willing” subjects. They wanted to see if some new radio system would have any effect on humans so they obtained several “volunteers” from a Virginia jail and experimented on them. They used radio microwaves in varying degrees of intensity on these poor fellows and literally roasted them alive! The bodies were tossed down the hill and it had been planned to bury them quietly on my farm!
There was a change of personnel and someone forgot the dead blacks!
When I asked these two sleek weasels about this, the reply was so awful I could not believe it! It seems that the CIA has no problem roasting people alive as long as they are convicted black criminals! Isn’t that a wonderful attitude? One of the CIA people said, in such an offhanded way as to infuriate me that no one cared about blacks because they were scarcely human!
It took an enormous amount of self-control on my part to keep me from picking up a poker from the fireplace and doing great damage to these two worms. I threw both of them out and ordered them to not only remove the bodies but their experimental station as well. I told them that if I heard one more word of this insane behavior I would personally take it to the President first and the newspapers second.
White faces and many apologies. They crawled out and I had a very stiff drink to calm down again. The station wagon left, the driver had a white mask over his face and the other one threw up on the driveway as the car bumped along!
Fortunately, Bunny saw, smelt or heard nothing and I had to go up and lie terribly to her. I am totally frustrated by this because my first instinct, besides shoving my shoe up their assholes, was to put them under arrest and turn them over to the local police for obvious murder. I can’t do that in my position but I would go to Harry with this if I ever hear about it again.
Mind control indeed!
Later: I spoke very sharply with (Walter Bedell, ed.) Smith when I calmed down and he was also furious. Told me that there are elements in the organization that are “completely lunatic” and he will speak with “someone” about this. I told him that if I ever heard of such psychotic nonsense again, the President would be the next on my list of callers and Smith said not to worry about this reoccurrence. No doubt the lunatics will go somewhere else. If I ever catch these evil swine on the property again, I will turn Arno loose on them and he can certainly earn his pay.
Apparently, they (the CIA, ed.) are involved in “mind control” work. This consists of drugging people, using electric shock on others, God knows what else! You should see some of the thoroughly lunatic types that scuttle up and down the halls, mumbling to themselves while clutching files to their breasts like a mama monkey with a dead baby. As expected, Wisner is involved in this madness. And him with a well-endowed (from the photos) black lover! When they are not burning people to death or looting the safes of cash, they are encouraging all kinds of strange madness.
I have no time for my journal now and am getting ready to leave here on the 19th for a working vacation. Will get in touch with Willi (Krichbaum. A former SS colonel who was Müller’s deputy in the Gestapo and later a senior employee of Colonel Critchfield’s CIA-controlled Gehlen organization in Munich, ed.) and then a musical interlude. I cannot see the family because they are still watched but will drop a card to Sophie.
There will be no mention of the new wife or the forthcoming (I hope) child. No point of putting honey on your ass and squatting on an anthill, is there?”
RTC: My God, Gregory! He wrote that?
GD: Yes, he did but in German. Is it true?
RTC: They did….I mean these mind control idiots did far worse than that. Is that true? I don’t doubt it for a second. Cameron [1] once decided to put a woman into ice water to see if he could break down her resistance and she died of shock. That sort of thing. Loaded one of their own with LSD and when he started screaming, got frightened and tossed him out of a hotel window. Oh, and we mustn’t forget the Goat Boy. That’s the strange Dr. Gottleib.[2] We called him that because he lived in a hovel and kept a bunch of goats around. He used to have sexual affairs with them. Gregory, we have had lots of people like that. Fortunately, for my sanity at least, and my reputation, I was in the intelligence branch and I left the care and feeding of the nut fringe to others with stronger stomachs. Believe it? I have no knowledge of that incident but I believe it. I can see why your Mr. Bender would be queasy about that. You know, if things like this ever become really public, they will burn all of us at the stake. I personally never was involved with such madness and actually, outside of my own areas, I had no real idea what we were up to but I can tell you that we had more than our share of raging nuts on board.
GD: Do you have any problems if I publish it?
RTC: That’s not my call, Gregory. They would have a fit over there but I’m not in service anymore and I can plead ignorance of the whole thing. Is there more like that in these diaries?
GD: That’s mild, very mild, Robert. Getting paid to kill the Iranian prime minister.
RTC: That I know about. Who was the prime mover here?
GD: Anglo-Iranian and Angleton.
RTC: Could you make a copy of that one and send it to me? We don’t need to discuss it on the phone. My God, the burned darkies were bad enough.
GD: Where do your people recruit?
RTC: St. Elizabeth’s does occur to me as a natural source.
GD: A church?
RTC: No, a local asylum.
GD: Robert, thanks for the patience and watch for the box. If it gets lost, I can have another made. Let me leave you now and I will get back to work on the Mueller material. OK?
RTC: I have a nice new name for you, Gregory. Try Mr. Sunshine.
GD: That’s such a happy name, Robert. And it does fit me so well.
RTC: I’ll call you the moment the package arrives. I’ll thank you for the poems.
GD: For sure. Goodbye.
RTC: Goodbye, Gregory.
(Concluded at 11:59 AM CST)
Dramatis personae:
James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy
James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.
William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.
John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organized the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.
Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.
Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley. Lives comfortably in a nice, and very expensive, house overlooking the Mediterranean.
Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.
Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired and lives in retirement in Florida
Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (SS-Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.
Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.
Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this.
Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarian and then failed them. First a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.
Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Arcnives. A strong supporter of fictive holocaust writers.
[1] Donald Ewen Cameron (1901-1967) was a Scottish–American psychiatrist. Born in Bridge of Allan, he graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1924.
Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York, and was involved in experiments in Canada for Project MKULTRA, a United States based CIA-directed mind control program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual Cameron was the author of the psychic driving concept which the CIA found particularly interesting. In it he described his theory on correcting madness, which consisted of erasing existing memories and rebuilding the psyche completely. After being recruited by the CIA, he commuted to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of the McGill University, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKULTRA experiments there. The CIA tasked him with the deadly experiments to carry out, as they would be tried on non-US citizens. However, documents released in 1977 revealed that thousands of unwitting, as well as voluntary subjects, were tested on during that time period. These included United States citizens.
In addition to LSD and PCP, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for months on end (up to three in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and post-partum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions. His work in this field was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist Dr William Sargant who carried out virtually identical experiments at St Thomas’ Hospital, London and Belmont Hospital, Surrey, also without his patients’ consent.
[2] Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was a American military psychiatrist and chemist probably best-known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency‘s mind control program MKULTRA.
Sidney was born in the Bronx under the name Joseph Scheider. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. A stutterer from childhood, Gottlieb got a master’s degree in speech therapy. He also had a club foot, but this did not stop him from practicing folk dancing, a lifelong passion.
In 1951, Sidney Gottlieb joined the Central Intelligence Agency. As a poison expert, he headed the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Sidney became known as the “Black Sorcerer” and the “Dirty Trickster.” He supervised preparations of lethal poisons and experiments in mind control. Gottleib later lived like a hermit in a cottage where he raised goats. He was common,y known at the Goat Boy inside the CIA and viewed as totally mad. Both Cameron and Gottlieb are typical of the members of the lunatic frings that staffed much of the CIA, and still does to this day.