Years of spotty data-sharing on suspects

The graphic illustrates several matters; the sub-heading of the story is illustrative, and scandalous: Insufficient Funding, Old Technologies and Bureaucratic Turnover Hindered Efforts to Link Spy Agencies.

Say, what?


I almost hate to say this, but today's Journal editorial on this matter makes perfect sense, and I agree with it.

Mr. Obama blamed no one in particular for the failure, not even George W. Bush. In one sense this is refreshing. The President said the buck stops with him, not his underlings, and he ordered the usual agencies to review their usual procedures and institute changes to make sure information is shared more quickly and analyzed more comprehensively. This all seems worthwhile as far as it goes, and it may well do some good by shaking up settled behavior patterns, at least for a while.

On the other hand, it's impossible to read even the six-page unclassified summary of the White House review without a rising sense of frustration, even anger. This was above all a failure of bureaucracy.

How did this happen?


If Mr. Obama isn't angry, he should be, because Americans were told by our leaders that the "intelligence reform" of the last decade would fix this. A smaller Counterterrorism Center had existed for years inside the CIA, but the Bush Administration yanked it out to assert more control. This later became the NCTC when the 2004 intelligence reform created the Director of National Intelligence, which was supposed to prevent these kind of screw-ups by sharing information and "connecting the dots."

I sure wish he would show some anger, and fire someone. One person must be made an example of, showing that the President is leading the nation and the government. Right now, and for the last couple of weeks, the nation is adrift, and has a President who is also adrift. I have lost confidence in him.


However, the DNI has since become its own vast bureaucracy with thousands of employees, whose main job seems to be micromanaging or duplicating the CIA. We—and many others—opposed the 2004 reform on grounds that it would create precisely this redundant layer of intelligence bureaucracy, and so it has. This is one mess that Mr. Obama really can blame on Mr. Bush and especially the 9/11 Commission that came up with the idea and lobbied furiously for it.

Members of the Commission seem to have believed that the way to fix the problems that allowed 9/11 to happen was to create more government. That has been proven wrong. The solution lies in changing government, and that must include streamlining it.


A President has to drive the bureaucracy by making the fight against terrorism a daily, personal priority. Perhaps now Mr. Obama will, and yesterday he finally said after a year in office that "We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda." But in fighting that war, he'd be better off shrinking the DNI to 20 or 30 people—and the CIA by half—and starting over.

 Indeed.

Summary of Security Review

President's Directive on Corrective Actions

 

Soviet agent moved among Hollywood elite

SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) - Elizaveta Mukasei posed for decades as a housewife while pursuing her real job as a Soviet spy. She died Sept. 19 at age 97.





With a radio transmitter hidden in her vacuum cleaner and a homey fire burning in the living room to destroy incriminating documents, Elizaveta Mukasei posed for decades as a housewife while pursuing her real job as a Soviet spy.

Known by code names of Zephyr and Elza, the couple did undercover work that has been trumpeted in recent years by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. While the Mukaseis described their spying exploits in a memoir published in 2004, many details about her life are difficult to verify independently. From 1939 to 1943, the couple were posted to Los Angeles, where Mikhail was vice consul at the Soviet Consulate. From their diplomatic perch, the couple gained access to elite Hollywood circles, aided in part by sympathy for America's wartime ally.

The Mukaseis befriended celebrities in the movie industry, Ms. Mukasei wrote in the memoir, though it isn't clear how the couple used these relationships in their intelligence-gathering. Charlie Chaplin became close to the Mukaseis, she wrote, and they plied him with vodka and presented him with a Russian bear cub on behalf of the Soviet state. Ms. Mukasei also claimed the couple befriended such luminaries as the conductor Leopold Stokowski, the writer Theodore Dreiser and others who they believed were politically connected in Washington.

An Israeli Spy

To hear Israeli intelligence chief Meir Amit tell it, the 1967 clash that established his country as the most fearsome military force in the Middle East wasn't a Six Day War after all.

On June 5, 1967, Israel's air force destroyed Egypt's air force on the ground in a series of morning bombing raids that represented as much an intelligence victory as a military one. It was the culmination of years of careful work penetrating the Egyptian armed forces. The results were decisive and swift.

"Don't call it the Six-day War, call it the three-hour war," Mr. Amit, the Mossad's chief from 1963-1968, told a conference held to mark the 1967 war's 25th anniversary in Washington. "And I must take pride in the intelligence."

In one spectacular operation in 1966, Mr. Amit engineered the defection of an Iraqi fighter pilot who landed his MIG-21 at an Israeli air base. The plane -- among the most modern of the U.S.S.R's fighters -- was immediately shared with the Central Intelligence Agency, helping to cement the bonds between the two nations' intelligence agencies.

The Iraqi pilot was inspired to defect by someone he took to be his American girlfriend but who was actually a Mossad agent.

Mr. Amit "pioneered the use of female agents, the 'honey trap,'" says Dan Raviv, author of "Every Spy a Prince," a history of Israeli espionage.

A patron called to reserve the book a couple of days ago.

He sometimes meditated on the gestalt of intelligence, which could be "boring" because it took years to build up a useful picture of the enemy, yet had moments "far beyond" the most gripping John Le Carre novel. And to Mr. Amit, success could breed failure. He believed the 1967 victory, for example, spawned a dangerous complacency.

"After the war we succumbed to the disease of arrogance, of 'We know better, we are the best, far above the others,'" he once said.

A great insight.

Shai Tsur, Mr. Amit's grandson, says his grandfather believed "the failure of the 1973 war, especially on the part of military intelligence, was a direct product of this 'konseptziya,'" the idea that Israel was so strong that its neighbors would never attack.

In recent years, Mr. Amit warned of the dangers posed by a nuclear-armed Iran and served as chairman of Israel's Center for Special Studies in Tel Aviv, which maintains a giant sandstone monument in the form of a maze as a cenotaph for the nation's fallen intelligence agents.

In a statement Tuesday, Israel's president, Shimon Peres, said, "Generations of Israelis, entire generations of children owe Meir Amit a debt of gratitude for his immense contribution -- a large part of which remains secret."

Some secrets can never be revealed, certainly in Israel.

2 Lebanese, spy suspects , Escape to Israel

May 19, 2009
2 Lebanese, Suspected of Spying, Escape to Israel
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Two Lebanese men suspected of spying for Israel fled across the heavily fortified border to Israel on Monday, the second such escape since Lebanon stepped up a campaign of arrests against those thought to be spying, officials said.

Lebanese authorities arrested two other men over the weekend on suspicion of collaborating with Israel, raising to 15 the number of people arrested and accused of spying in the past few weeks, according to security officials.

Lebanon considers itself at war with Israel, and spying for or collaborating with Israel can be punishable by death.

The arrests, which took place primarily in southern Lebanon, appear to have singled out those suspected of gathering information about Hezbollah militants for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006 that left 1,200 people dead in Lebanon and 159 in Israel.

The two men who escaped to Israel on Monday crossed the border near the village of Yaroun with their children, a senior military official said. A man wanted by the Lebanese authorities escaped in a similar manner on May 5, according to a senior security official.

It was unclear how the men managed get past the border fence without setting off electronic alarms that have alerted Israelis to similar crossings in the past. Lebanese citizens who try to sneak into Israel are normally detained, questioned and sent back to Lebanon.

There was no immediate word from Israel, which has declined to comment on the recent espionage accusations.

The weekend arrests took place in southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, according to the security officials, who said suspicious transmission devices were seized in related raids.

The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the news media.

Nine of the 15 people arrested in recent weeks have been charged with collaborating with Israel. They include a retired general, along with his wife and his nephew, and a government security agent.

The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said in a televised speech on Monday that his guerrillas would be on high alert during coming Israeli military maneuvers.

Although Sheik Nasrallah said the five-day maneuvers would begin May 31, Israeli defense officials said Friday that no date had been set yet for the United States-Israeli war games, which take place every two years. The Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said the exercises would include testing antimissile systems.

Lebanese in Shock Over Arrest of an Accused Spy

Ali al-Jarrah
For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

How now?

Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife.

Lebanese investigators say he has confessed to a career of espionage spectacular in its scope and longevity, a real-life John le Carré novel. Many intelligence agents are said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon, but Mr. Jarrah’s arrest has shed a rare light onto a world of spying and subversion that usually persists in secret. Mr. Jarrah’s first wife maintains that he was tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview him were denied.

How was he found out?

He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy — and he awaits trial by a military court.

Hezbollah is a significant force in the country.

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Some coincidence.

It all came to an end last summer. He went on a trip to Syria in July, and when he returned he said he had been briefly detained by the Syrian police, his first wife said. He seemed very uneasy, not his usual self, she said.

He left the house that night, saying he was going to Beirut, and never returned, Mrs. Jarrah said. Only three months later did she get a call from the Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of him.

A few weeks ago, Mrs. Jarrah said, she was allowed to see him. He looked terrible, exhausted, she said.

Lebanese security forces released a photograph of Mr. Jarrah, taken before his arrest. In it, he appears against a blue and white backdrop, dressed in a formal dark shirt, wearing an enigmatic smile.

Intelligence Agencies' Databases Set to Be Linked

This is incredible. 7 years after 9/11, the US government remains technologically backward: 16 different spy agencies (16?) have separate, disparate data bases.

U.S. spy agencies' sensitive data should soon be linked by Google-like search systems, nearly five years after the intelligence community was rebuked by the 9/11 Commission for failing to "connect the dots" and detect the attack.

5 years later, same situation. More than shameful, it is irresponsible.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has launched a sweeping technology program to knit together the thousands of databases across all 16 spy agencies. After years of bureaucratic snafus, intelligence analysts will be able to search through secret intelligence files the same way they can search public data on the Internet.

Intelligence analysts can not search for data the way Google allows the public to search the Web. And, 16 spy agencies?

Mr. McConnell's new technology program is also addressing a more basic problem: Spies often have trouble emailing colleagues in other U.S. intelligence agencies, because email addresses aren't readily accessible, and messages sometimes get eaten by security filters. Mr. McConnell aims to solve that by uniting the agencies' email systems into a single system with a full directory that links names, expertise and addresses.

Seems bad project management, to say the least.

The new information program also is designed to include Facebook-like social-networking programs and classified news feeds. It includes enhanced security measures to ensure that only appropriately cleared people can access the network. The price tag is expected to be in the billions of dollars, but much of that money will be reallocated from existing technology programs.

Reallocated?

Today, an analyst's query might scan only 5% of the total intelligence data in the U.S. government, said a senior intelligence official. Even when analysts find documents, they sometimes can't read them without protracted negotiations to gain access. Under the new system, an analyst would likely search about 95% of the data, the official said.

Sounds great. But ...

Several similar efforts have been aborted in the past decade, because cultural divides couldn't be bridged between rival agencies. Some of those efforts predated 9/11, and many intelligence agencies have botched their own technology programs since 2001.

Cultural divides? They all work for the US government.

In September, all 16 agencies agreed to the goal of creating one searchable data and email system, and Mr. McConnell borrowed Mr. Winter from the NSA to get the program under way.

The first stage of the initiative is to merge the email systems of the six largest intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA. Mr. Winter said that is on track to be largely completed by the end of the month. Then, they will expand to the other 10 agencies. By 2010, the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon would have a single email system.

CIA, FBI, NSA. Defense Intelligence Agency. What else? Well, how about googling "u.s. intelligence agencies"? Neat-o. First hit: Agencies of the US Intelligence Community with an URL of www.intelligence.gov/1-members.shtml

And they are:

• Director of National Intelligence
• Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
• Air Force Intelligence
• Army Intelligence
• Central Intelligence Agency
• Coast Guard Intelligence
• Defense Intelligence Agency
• Department of Energy
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of State
• Department of the Treasury
• Drug Enforcement Administration
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Marine Corps Intelligence
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
• National Reconnaissance Office
• National Security Agency
• Navy Intelligence

Of course, the Intelligence Community has a mission statement; these days, even delis have them.

Definition of the Intelligence Community (IC)

Definition of the IC Members of the IC Relationships with other Government Organizations The IC is a federation of executive branch agencies and organizations that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security of the United States. These activities include: Collection of information needed by the President, the National Security Council, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and other Executive Branch officials for the performance of their duties and responsibilities; Production and dissemination of intelligence; Collection of information concerning, and the conduct of activities to protect against, intelligence activities directed against the US, international terrorist and international narcotics activities, and other hostile activities directed against the US by foreign powers, organizations, persons, and their agents; Special activities; Administrative and support activities within the US and abroad necessary for the performance of authorized activities; and Such other intelligence activities as the President may direct from time to time.

Switzerland Frees Suspected Smuggling Nuclear Technology

Swiss authorities have released from jail a man suspected of smuggling atomic technology to Libya and Iran as part of the nuclear black market of Abdul Qadeer Khan, officials and family members said Monday.

Khan is the one who sold atomic secrets to Iran, and was, in turn, pardoned by Musharraf. I never have understood why that story disappeared from the public radar.

The suspect, Urs Tinner, was freed Dec. 22 after more than four years in investigative detention, Swiss officials said. They added that his brother Marco remained in jail because of worries that he still had access to nuclear-weapons secrets.

Spying seems to be a family business: The developments were a new phase in Switzerland’s long efforts to prosecute the family of Swiss engineers, including the Tinner patriarch, Friedrich. All three are suspected of criminal export violations. The father was released from jail in 2006 pending legal action.

In May, the president of Switzerland confirmed that the government had destroyed a trove of computer files and other material documenting the family’s business dealings. He said that the action was taken to keep plans for nuclear arms and technologies from ever falling into terrorist hands. But in interviews last summer with The New York Times, American officials said they had urged the destruction less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a secret relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A. They said that the family provided a unique lens on the secret activities of Libya, Iran and Dr. Khan.

Now that's interesting: a secret relationship between the Tinners, who sold atomic secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya, and the CIA. A way to monitor illicit activity, it is said, yet a facilitation of behavior that the US government denounced publicly.

The Men Who Spied on Nixon

Glancing through the news, I came upon this startling item: The Men Who Spied on Nixon. Amazingly, I found it on a Fox News website. A search in Google News reveals only this entry, but a general Google search on Moorer Radford (rather than Moorer-Radford) returns numerous hits.

One of the hits is from Watergate.com website. On closer look the site seems, well, weird. But the point here is Moorer-Radford. Still, this is what I mean by weird: a search on the name Len Colodny, who seems to be the force behind the site, returns this: Len Colodny is a journalist. In 1992 he co-wrote with Robert Gettlin Silent Coup: The Removal of Richard Nixon. In the book the authors claim that John Dean ordered the Watergate break-in because he knew that a call-girl ring was operating out of the Democratic headquarters. The authors also argued that Alexander Haig was not Deep Throat but was a key source for Bob Woodward, who had briefed Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970. Weird.

And how about the military spying on the President? Weird in a very different way.

A Navy stenographer assigned to the National Security Council during the Nixon administration "stole documents from just about every individual that he came into contact with on the NSC," according to newly declassified White House documents.

From whom did he steal?

The two-dozen pages of memoranda, transcripts and notes – once among the most sensitive and privileged documents in the Executive Branch – shed important new details on a unique crisis in American history: when investigators working for President Richard Nixon discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, using the stenographer as their agent, actively spied on the civilian command during the Vietnam War.

Quite a twist on history: Nixon being spied on, and by his own military.

The affair represented an important instance in which President Nixon, who resigned in 1974 amid wide-ranging allegations that he and his subordinates abused the powers of the presidency, was himself the victim of internal espionage. In adding to what has already become known about the episode, the latest documents show how the president and his aides struggled to "get a handle on" the young Navy man at the center of the intrigue and contain the damage caused by the scandal.

Eventually the stenographer, Charles Radford, admitted to pilferage.

Radford's espionage took many forms: making extra photocopies of documents entrusted to him as courier; retrieving crumpled drafts from "burn bags"; even brazenly rifling through Kissinger's briefcase while the national security adviser slept on an overseas flight.

Some nerve, eh? Looking through Kissinger's briefcase. Which, of course, begs the question: what about security?

the young stenographer did eventually break down and tearfully admit to Nixon's investigators that he had been stealing NSC documents and routing them to his Pentagon superiors. Radford later estimated he had stolen 5,000 documents within a 13-month period.

"Radford has admitted that he stole documents from just about every individual that he came into contact with on the NSC," wrote Young.

Security, anyone?

Now, here is an interesting point: David R. Young, an Ehlichman aide, who led the Plumbers's investigation into Radford's activities, wrote a memorandum to his boss in advance of Ehrlichman meeting with Radford boss; one point he made was to urge Ehrlichman to determine the extent to which Kissinger's top NSC deputy – Alexander Haig, who had personally selected Radford to accompany Kissinger on his overseas trips, and who later went on to become secretary of state in the Reagan administration – was "aware of Radford's activities."

An interesting point that Haig selected Radford.

Nixon and his men eventually concluded that Haig had been complicit in the Pentagon spying, but opted not to take any action against him.

Lily-livered Liberals and Radical Conservatives

So much for a Democratic-controlled Legislature changing the agenda of the nation.

The results were so thoroughly precooked that there was no surprise in the Senate’s 69-to-28 vote today to gut a law that has protected Americans from spying by their own government for 30 years.

Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there was nothing to fear in the bill “unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.”

Intelligence is a relative term, isn't it?

Proponents of the bill, and much of news coverage, are portraying the vote as a battle between liberals (in the 2008 edition of the Bush GOP Dictionary that means “lily-livered appeasers of terrorism”) and conservatives (patriots who understand the threat to America and have “nothing to hide and therefore nothing to fear”).

Can't get outflanked on the right during an election; expressing civil liberties is such a difficult thing.

First, there is no position more conservative than fighting to protect the rights and liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and nothing more radical than trying to undermine them.

Second, anyone with an elementary-school understanding of American history can recite cases in which the government spied on, harassed and even imprisoned people who did nothing more than exercise their constitutional right to express their political beliefs.

This bill was not a compromise, as the spinners would have it. It was a bad bill. Period. Democrats who voted for it did so primarily because they were afraid to vote against a “national security bill” in an election year.

Senator Barack Obama, who had once promised to filibuster against immunity for the telecommunications companies, executed a deeply distressing pivot in recent weeks, hewing to the “best we could do” line that was adopted by many Democrats. Today, he voted to cut off debate on the bill, and then voted for its final passage.

Fortunately, Mr. Obama seemed to have no influence over Democrats who opposed the bill. None of them joined him in changing their positions.

Obama gets political cover by voting Yea, one of 20 Democrats to vote so; all Republicans did so, too. Here is the roll call.

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows

This is a topic of interest.