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Weekly Intelligence Notes
28 April 2000
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WINs contain intelligence news items and commentaries produced and edited by
Roy Jonkers for AFIO members and subscribers. Associate editors Don Harvey
and John Macartney contributed to this WIN.
EVERY MEMBER SPONSOR A MEMBER. Check the AFIO Website www.afio.com
for membership details and applications.
BUSINESS ESPIONAGE AND COUNTER ESPIONAGE symposium -- Check website www.afio.com
for information on the AFIO Symposium on in Washington DC on 19 May.
WINs are protected by copyright laws and may not be reproduced except with
the permission of the producer/editor afio@afio.com
Warning Notice:
Perishability of Links: WINs, sent weekly to members, often contain
numerous webpage links to fast-breaking news, documents or other items of interest; unfortunately, after four weeks many of these websites [especially newspaper and other media sites] remove items
or shift them into
fee-only archives. This underscores the benefit of receiving the WINs
as they are released.
__________________________________________________________________
SECTION I: CURRENT INTELLIGENCE
RADIATION BOMB MATERIAL SEIZED IN UZBEKISTAN -- Ten lead-lined
containers of radioactive material were seized by Uzbekistan's Customs
officials at a remote border crossing with Turkmenistan in early April. The
ten containers were on their way to Pakistan in a truck loaded with scrap
metal driven by an Iranian. The materials were suitable for making a
radiation bomb. A radiation bomb is made of conventional explosives and
highly radioactive materials [either Cobalt 60, Cesium 137 or Strontium 90]
. Although not a nuclear weapon, a radiation bomb exploded above ground to
disperse radioactive material would cause huge casualties if located in an
urban or crowded environment.
Chechen terrorists first demonstrated the existence of such a weapon in 1995
when they buried a radiation bomb in a Moscow park. To lend credibility to
their threat to explode the weapon, a Chechen commander, Shamil Basayev,
publicly announced where the bomb was buried. It was subsequently dug up by
a specially trained Russian team. Pakistan does not need this kind of
material for its nuclear weapons program but could be independently working
on radiation-type weapons. One possible use could be in an airburst type
warhead on a missile or more simply, implaced by a terrorist in a suitcase.
An Islamic terrorist determined to be a martyr would not be greatly
concerned with possible radiation leakage from a suitcase.
The border authorities were able to interdict the shipment because the US
had provided a few portable radiation detectors to the Uzbeks as part of a
program called the Defense Department-Customs Counterproliferation Program.
The poorly funded border security program has provided equipment to some 18
countries in the former Soviet Union, Baltic States, Eastern and Central
Europe. While the seizure is highly gratifying, it also serves to reinforce
concerns about smuggling of such materials. The press accounts did not
indicate whether intelligence had alerted the Uzbeks to focus on that
particular truck at that crossing. ( Wash. Times 6 Apr '20, p. A15;
Wash. Times 10 Apr '20, by Stephen Bryen [former head of the Defense
Technology Security Administration]) (Harvey)
US INTERNET INTELLIGENCE -- A new reserve unit that monitors the Defense
Department's presence on the World Wide Web has found an astonishing amount
of classified or sensitive material on public sites, including material
relating to war plans. The Web Risk Assessment Team, established by the
Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense, is made up of reservists who
spend one weekend each month scanning DOD Web sites.
To bolster security, the Defense Department is committed to developing a
technical architecture that will allow it to disconnect from the Internet,
despite criticism it received last year when it first proposed to do so.
Links that connect DOD's Non-classified Internet Protocol Routing Network (NIPRNET)
with the Internet pose the greatest security challenge, according to Air
Force Lt. Gen. John Campbell, commander of the Joint Task Force for Computer
Network Defense. The NIPRNET is used mainly for administrative
communications.
It has always seemed plain as day (not needing expensive studies) that the
only real network security is found in stand-alone databases and networks,
with manual connectivity to such general unclassified networks as the
internet, giving due consideration to tempest aspects. http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0424/web-dod-04-26-00.asp
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0424/web-jtfcnd-04-26-00.asp
(Newsbits Levine 04/25)) (Jonkers)
BRITISH INTERNET INTELLIGENCE - Last week's WIN reported that the UK
had prevailed upon two US websites (but not a third) to delete compromising
material from their sites. MI5 renegade Shayler, now living in France,
apparently provided what is said to be a top-secret document that could
endanger the lives of covert field operatives. The document, entitled
"Libyan Intelligence Service Activity in the UK," which purports
to contain details of recent surveillance of Libyan intelligence officers in
the United Kingdom, was published April 16 on three U.S. Web sites. The
document is said to reveal the identities of a number of covert MI6 and MI5
officers working in Libya. It is classified "Top Secret Delicate Source
- UK Eyes Alpha." The classification "UK Eyes Alpha" means
the document is restricted even from cooperating intelligence services, such
as the CIA.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2555003,00.html
(Newsbits 04/26 Levine) (Jonkers)
SECTION II: CONTEXT AND PRECEDENCE
ARMY INTELLIGENCE GENERAL'S CORPORATE ACTIVITIES -- ON THE WAY TO THE PLA? --
Lt. General Claudia Kennedy, US Army Deputy Chief of Staff for
Intelligence, who recently accused a fellow general of 'inappropriate
touching' on one occasion some years ago -- (now being investigated by the
Army) received further publicity. General Kennedy was reported to have
served on the boards of three "for profit" corporations -- two
holding companies and one insurance company, all three started by prominent
Democratic Party fundraiser Terence McAuliffe, said to be a
"close" friend of President Clinton.
General Kennedy's political proximity to the White House should only raise
eyebrows among the politically naive -- senior general's promotions and
positions are frequently affected by political considerations. Proximity to
political fundraising is, however, less understandable. What is truly
remarkable in this newspaper report, however, are the alleged judgments by
legal counsels, reputed "experts on military ethics."
A former Air Force general counsel, Sheila Cheston, was quoted as saying
"I think it's fine," when asked if generals should be directors of
FOR-PROFIT corporations. Retired Rear Admiral John Jenkins, former Judge
Advocate General of the Navy, also reportedly said he saw no legal or
ethical problem with admirals or generals serving on corporate boards of FOR
PROFIT corporations. We must assume these counsels were quoted correctly and
additionally, that General Kennedy's would not have proceeded unless she had
received clearance from the Army Judge Advocate General.
This editor is astounded. In terms of commonly accepted ethics, the code of
military honor and law, and a cultural sense of what is done and not done, I
have assumed for the past fifty-odd years of service that officers (and
generals, admirals or high-ranking civil service professionals in
particular) do not mix active Government service with ancillary positions
and considerations of what is good for corporation X as distinct from
corporation Y -- in the always competitive marketplace.
The Chinese PLA provides a model of where this can lead. PLA generals are
deeply involved in arms industries and trading activities. As a result,
corruption is endemic, and indeed so pervasive that the communist Chinese
Government is now doing its best to get the PLA generals out of business and
back to minding military preparedness. It is a trail we do not want to
follow, no matter how much our cultural values have changed and are
changing. Not good for intelligence, the national defense, the country.
(WashPost28 April2000, p. A29) (Jonkers)
VIETNAM OPEN-SOURCE INTELLIGENCE - Senator John McCain finally
articulated what many of us see as needed to clear the partisan cobwebs of
the Vietnam War. Visiting Saigon, now called Ho-Chi-Minh city (named after
the late North Vietnamese communist dictator), McCain said the "wrong
guys" won the war. There is much to say on this topic. It won't be said
here. But slowly some open-source intelligence articles and books are
shedding more light on communist atrocities before and after the start of
their invasion, on communist concentration camps, on resistance by north
vietnamese youth to becoming cannon fodder in the ruthless attempt to
subjugate the South, on the dead hand of communist bureaucracy on society,
etc. -- aspects that were seldom if ever featured in the warped US mass
media anti-war propaganda during the war and beyond.
The final escape from the hurt of our Vietnam experience may lie in this
liberation from the ideological information stranglehold in which we have
been held for too long, a stranglehold by the mass media reveling in
excoriating our troops and policymakers while hero-worshipping our
opponents, and by a segment of the academic elite who have a continuing
vested interest in validating their ideological opposition to the
anti-communist war. Slowly we may have truth -- and overcome the shame of
the dishonorable Saigon "evacuation" we must carry with us, and
the memory of the pilgrimage of a "with-it" movie starlet and
others throwing dirt on our POWs (including McCain), or a former SecDef on
his personal path to Canossa to kiss the nether regions of General Giap's
anatomy. The truth -- reasonable, balanced, informed, may finally have its
day. (WashPost 29April2000, p. 1 and A18) (Jonkers)
CIA REPORT ON SLAVE TRAFFICKING IN WOMEN AND CHILDREN -- The NY Times
recently reported on an unclassified 79-page CIA report, "International
Trafficking in Women to the United States: A Contemporary Manifestation of
Slavery." The report is carefully annotated and exhaustively researched
and based on more than 150 interviews with government officials,
law-enforcement officers, victims and experts in the US and abroad, as well
as investigative documents and a review of international literature on the
subject.
As many as 50,000 women and children from Asia, Latin America, Eastern
Europe and Asia are brought to the US under false pretenses each year and
forced to work as prostitutes, abused laborers or servants. Primary sources
for traffickers are Thailand, Vietnam, China, Mexico, Russia and the Czech
Republic. Other countries increasingly providing victims include the
Philippines, Korea, Malaysia, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil and Honduras.
The scope of the smuggling has apparently increased markedly in recent years
according to the estimate. The biggest reason is that, since the mid-1990's,
traffickers from Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union have
aggressively entered the business. The victims believe they are to work as
au pairs, sales clerks, secretaries or waitresses but are taken prisoner
once arrived in the US and forced into prostitution or peonage.
Efforts to reduce or halt the trafficking have been largely ineffectual.
Over the last two years, while up to 100,000 victims were coming into the
US, the government prosecuted cases involving no more than 250 victims. A
second government report last fall estimated that 250 brothels in 26 cities
appeared to be holding women and children as sex slaves. The problem is not
a simple one: most of the victims do not speak English; many fear
immigration authorities; slave trafficking is not a primary concern for any
one agency; penalties for the smugglers are insubstantial; and investigation
and prosecution are difficult.
Bills are pending in the House and Senate to begin to address the situation
by increasing jail time for the traffickers and to increase law enforcement
resources. One government official probably summed it up well: "No one
really knows what to do with it. I'm not sure people are really focusing on
this." Obviously a golden opportunity to attract appropriate attention
was missed when the slave trading victims were not somehow linked in the
media coverage to the Elian Gonzalez case.( NY Times 2 Apr '00, p.
20; USA Today 3 Apr '00, p. 25A; Philadelphia Inquirer 9 Apr '00, p. D6)
(Harvey)
SECTION III: BOOKS AND OTHER SOURCES
YOUR GOVERNMENT: HOW IT WORKS -- THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, by
Tara Baukus Mello, with Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr., senior consulting
editor, Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia, 2000, www.chelseahouse.com,
ISBN 0-7910-5531-0 (hc), index. This is a short, 59 page overview of CIA in
the context of a series of how our government works - a laudable educational
effort tailored for highschool-age students. Chapter titles indicate the
scope: keeping secrets; I spy, you spy; how the agency works; the people
behind the agency; gadgets and gizmos; and, famous people, followed by a
chronology, glossary, further reading and index. The booklet will be
available shortly. Other booklets in this series will deal with the FBI, the
political parties, Congress, the President and the Supreme Court. I draw
your attention to this commendable effort -- it may be useful for
highschools in your area. (Jonkers)
"ALONE AND UNARMED: An Intelligence Insider Looks Back on the Work
that Set Recce Pilots Apart," by Dino A. Brugioni, Air & Space /
Smithsonian magazine, Feb/ March 2000, Vol 14, No.6, page 78. The author, an
AFIO member and famed imagery expert, wrote the article as a tribute to the
men and women who fly the recce missions. Said Brugioni, "We have lost
170 men since the 1950's and still others have simply disappeared. This is
my tribute to them."
"There's an old axiom that reconnaissance pilots fly alone, unarmed,
and unafraid. For security reasons, reconnaissance, or recce, pilots have
seldom gotten the respect due them. You've probably never heard of Carmine
Vito. At 5:26 a.m. on July 5, 1956, Vito climbed into the cockpit of his
silver Lockheed U-2A in Wiesbaden, Germany, popped a wad of tutti-frutti gum
in his mouth to quell his anxiety, and took off for Moscow. His
single-engine U-2 was tricky to fly, a skittish and fragile bird intolerant
of stress and prone to engine flame-out. The A-model had no ejection seat
and a primitive autopilot. At the edge of space, alone, over denied
territory, if anything went wrong, Vito would be in deadly trouble. Enroute
to Moscow Vito flew over two concentric rings of surface to air missile
sites and watched Soviet aircraft scramble to intercept him. When he
returned to Wiesbaden that afternoon after the eight-hour flight -- the
first and only US spy flight over Moscow -- the US had its first aerial
photographs of the Moscow defenses and other targets."
As you can see, Dino's style is direct and highly readable, and his
information fascinating. Recommended! (Jonkers)
PHOTO FAKERY: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception
and Manipulation, by Dino Brugioni, Brassey's, Dulles, Virginia 1999, ISBN
1-57488-166-3, index and notes. Brugioni, one of the founders of CIA's
National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC, covers some of the tricks
of the trade, ways of enhancing, faking, altering, or manipulating
photographic images that leave you both impressed and filled with a healthy
degree of scepticism about the veracity of any image. This is particularly
important as policy is often influenced by photography provided and
interpreted by mass media. A picture is worth a thousand words - but the
picture may be a fake or especially staged. The Soviets elevated this
manipulation to a high art -- individuals who fell out of favor quickly
disappeared from official photographs. In the computer age, this
manipulation has become a universal capability - people can be quickly
altered, "aged" or "morphed" into computer-generated
illusions.
For the military, creating image illusions - camouflage - is a matter of
necessity. It involves techniques to blend, disguise, cover, screen, hide,
confuse, trick, deceive, mislead or falsify. Decoys must be so real they
even expert imagery analysts cannot tell them from the real thing. But not
always. For example, when British analysts discovered a German decoy
airfield in North Africa during WWII, they sent out a lone bomber, which
dropped a wooden bomb.
Dino's book abounds in anecdotes and stories, well written, readable and
useful. We hope to have him as a speaker at an AFIO event soon. (Jonkers)
MICRO ROBOT SPY PLANES. The April issue of the Smithsonian Air &
Space magazine has a fascinating feature about tiny experimental "spy
planes." It is on line and has multiple links. This is "Buck
Rogers" type stuff and where future reconnaissance is set to go. http://www.airspacemag.com/asm/mag/supp/am00/uSPY.html
(Macartney)
THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER: The Challenge of Unlawful Conduct Involving
the Use of the Internet: A Report of the President's Working Group on
Unlawful Conduct on the Internet. In August of 1999, President
Clinton issued Executive Order 13133, which called for the creation of a
Working Group to analyze unlawful conduct on the Internet. The Working Group
has released its report in March.
The report discusses the legal framework in which on-line crimes exist, the
challenges facing law enforcement agencies in the on-line environment, and
the role of public education and empowerment in combating on-line crime.
Separate appendices focus on particular types of crime on the Internet,
including fraud, child pornography, intellectual property theft, and the
sale of controlled substances.
The report is available on the CCIPS homepage (see below). Launched by the
DOJ on March 13, 2000, this site details their efforts to stop on-line
crime. Here users will find materials such as speeches, reports, press
releases, and testimony, covering topics including "prosecuting
computer hacking, intellectual property piracy and counterfeiting, legal
issues related to electronic commerce, freedom of speech, searching and
seizing computers, encryption, privacy, and international aspects of
cybercrime."
From The Scout Report, Volume 6, N 43; March 17, 2000, Copyright
Internet Scout Project 1994-2000. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
; http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/unlawful.htm;
Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) can be found at http://www.cybercrime.gov/
(E. Bancroft)
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