Weekly Intelligence Notes (WINs) are produced and edited by Roy Jonkers for the non-profit educational uses of AFIO members and WIN subscribers. RADM (ret) Don Harvey also contributes articles.

AFIO SYMPOSIUM 2001 -- sold out!!! Tomorrow and Saturday we put on the show, and a good one we have planned! Our **most sincere thanks** to the members, and to the speakers, who were undeterred by the troubles of the times, including the sudden and belated (but understandable) cancellation of our venue at CIA headquarters, to stay the course and participate. Our thanks also to the (very small) cadre of AFIO officers and the (very small) headquarters staff who did yeoman duty to produce a Symposium, a Convention, and an Awards Banquet - along with all other office tasks.

AFIO MEMBERS -- Support the AFIO Mission -- Recruit a new member or make a donation before the year is out!

NOTE: This WIN a bit short, and may be transmitted late, because of the stress of Symposium and Convention preparations. (RJ)

SECTION I - CURRENT INTELLIGENCE

PAKISTAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS -- It was recently reported in the media that a US Special Operations unit was in training to 'exfiltrate' or 'steal' Pakistan's nuclear weapons to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists. This US Special Operations element is allegedly training with Israel's anti-terrorist Unit 262 (Sayeret Matkal), which allegedly came to America soon after the September attacks to train with US military forces that could be called into action in the event that Gen Pervaiz Musharraf lost power in Pakistan. This scenario envisions the potential contingency that Pakistani army officers sympathetic to the Taliban could pose a threat to Gen Musharraf, and that some of the country's estimated 24 nuclear warheads could be stolen by renegades within Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. Without validating this unnecessary media report, one must assume that planning for various contingencies is underway.
        The fear that Gen Musharraf could lose control of the country, and some or all of the warheads, is based on the close links between the ISI and the Taliban. Last week, the Pakistani president dismissed such concerns. "We have an excellent command-and-control system which we have evolved, and there is no question of their falling into the hands of any fundamentalists," Gen Musharraf said. Pakistan is thought to have a number of intermediate-range missiles to carry its warheads as well as using F-16 fighter-bombers.
        It is doubtful that we, the public, need to have information on special unconventional clandestine forces in training for these types of tasks, with the information attributed to official sources. One may have opinions about contingencies and strategic opportunities in this war, including those concerning Pakistani nuclear weapons (among others), but in wartime these are best kept secret and discreet. Tell us after the acts have been accomplished, not before -- we don't need to know. As in other wars (three for this editor), the enemy is listening. Keep our media responsible. (Jonkers) (New Yorker, October01, by Seymour Hersh/ NYT 29/10/01 by B. Fenton) (PJK)

ANTI-TERRORISM BILL PASSED -- On 25 October, one day after the House, the Senate passed a sweeping anti-terrorism bill that President Bush' signed into law on 26 October 2001. It greatly expands the government's ability to conduct electronic surveillance, erases legal information-passing boundaries between intelligence and law enforcement, allows the detention of immigrants, and the penetration or sanctioning of banks suspected of money-laundering. The measure also permits officials to share grand jury information to thwart terrorism and relaxes the conditions under which judges may authorize intelligence wiretaps.
        Intelligence files, obtained from wiretaps that are authorized by a special court that oversees wiretaps related to activities of foreign governments and organizations, can now be turned over to criminal investigators for possible prosecutions. "We have intelligence files ready to go," one senior official said. "That will allow us to make cases against some people and put them in jail." Attorney General Ashcroft said the use of national security wiretaps for criminal prosecution would be valuable in breaking up terrorist organizations.
        A major provision of the bill allows roving wiretaps in intelligence cases, as they already are in criminal cases. A roving wiretap confers blanket authority to tap all phones a suspect uses, instead of requiring separate applications for each telephone.
        The congress added money-laundering provisions, to include barring United States banks from doing business with "shell banks" overseas that have no physical facilities and are not part of a regulated banking system, and empowering the Treasury Secretary to require United States banks to exercise enhanced "due diligence" about private banking depositors from nations that will not assist United States officials. The Secretary of the Treasury can now impose sanctions on banks in nations whose bank-secrecy laws deny information to the FBI or other US agencies. Another provision would require foreign banks maintaining correspondent accounts in United States banks to designate someone here to receive subpoenas related to those accounts and their depositors. If those subpoenas were not answered, the accounts could be ordered closed.
        Attorney General Ashcroft did not get all he had asked for. There was concern in both parties and houses that the Administration proposal went too far. For example, the Congress denied the Administration the power to detain immigrants indefinitely without charges. They also denied the Administration the power to use foreign wiretaps that would have been illegal in the United States. The bill further provides that the special authority for expanded surveillance of computers and telephones will expire after four years. The administration wanted permanent authority.
        The Senate vote was 98 to 1, after a 356-to-66 vote in the House on 24 October. The lone opponent, Senator Feingold, complained of "relentless" pressure to move quickly, "without deliberation or debate." He attacked the bill for enabling the government to obtain the business or medical records of anyone "who might have sat on an airplane" with a terrorism suspect. He also objected to the bill's liberal approval of intelligence wiretaps even if intelligence gathering is only a minor purpose of the tap. Such wiretaps are often issued in secrecy and under much looser standards than those required for wiretaps in criminal cases. Said the Senator, "Congress will fulfill its duty only when it protects both the American people and the freedoms at the foundation of American society."
        Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee, said: "We took the time to look at it, and we took the time to read it. And we took time to remove those parts that were unconstitutional and those parts that would have actually hurt the rights of all Americans."
        Without a doubt the bill is needed in the current war. In he course of time it will probably be extended in application and abused bureaucratically, politically, or by prosecutors, as the RICOH laws and the drug laws occasionally appear to be. It is up to us to maintain vigilance to maintain a bedrock of constitutional rights, liberty and privacy. There are alternative societal security solutions we must not fail to explore, not merely depending on extending the intrusive and punitive ones. We must maintain a "healthy" counterintelligence capability, not sliding towards a counterintelligence state. (Jonkers) (NYT 26 Oct 01, p.1 //A. Clymer)

ANTI-TERRORIST PERSONNEL APPOINTMENTS -- The Customs Service chose a former Marine and anti-terrorism expert to guide its efforts to keep terrorists and their tools from entering the country. As director of a newly created anti-terrorism office, William Parrish will focus on ways to detect and prevent deadly biological, chemical or nuclear materials from coming across the nation's borders.
        Ambassador John Craig will be the White House director of combating terrorism. He was ambassador to Oman from 1998 to 2001 and before that was the State Department's director of Arabian Peninsula Affairs.
        Retired Adm. Charles Abbot, head of Vice President Cheney's anti-terror panel, was named deputy to Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. He commanded an aircraft carrier group and was deputy to Gen. Wesley Clark, then the commander of American forces in Europe. (Jonkers) (Wash. Post, 24 Oct 01, pg18) (T. Hart)

SECRECY POLICY -- The Administration has established an interagency group to prepare changes to the Clinton Administration's Executive Order 12958, published in 1995, which governs national security classification and declassification policy. An EO Drafting Subcommittee held its first meeting on August 9th. Since then, eight member agencies have proposed changes to 24 of the 34 sections in the Clinton Order, according to a report in an internal Energy Department newsletter. "As can be expected, there were more proposed changes to Section 3.4, Automatic Declassification, than to any other section." That section dictates that most classified records be automatically declassified when they become 25 years old. Changes relating to keeping Presidential papers away from the public domain longer are also being considered, as are changes in the applications of the Freedom of Information act . (Jonkers) (Secrecy News, FAS, 29 October 01 <http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/eorev.html>

SECTION II - CONTEXT AND PRECEDENCE

GERMANY'S INTELLIGENCE HANDICAPS -- About five percent of Germany's residents today come from the Middle East: Turks and Kurds mostly, but also Iranians and more than 300,000 Arabs. They are concentrated in cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, D�sseldorf and Berlin. With its liberal asylum and refugee policies, the Federal Republic has become a sort of safe haven for violence-prone, clandestine groups based abroad -- some of them affiliated with Islamic organizations. In coping with terrorists, intelligence cooperation with Germany could help a great deal; however, German domestic intelligence, the Office for Protection of the Constitution, labors under grave handicaps in gathering intelligence on the many clandestine Islamic groups active there. As a fall-out of the Nazi period, intelligence collection is rigorously divided from police work. The Office for Protection of the Constitution is not permitted to stop, question or interrogate suspects, much less detain or arrest them. On the other hand, the police are barred from "preventive intelligence work" before they have convincing evidence that a crime has been committed. Personal data protection legislation that is the most stringent in Europe safeguards private communications and other personal information. Not only must the minister of interior approve every application for a wiretap, mail intercept or private residence search, a special parliamentary commission must also give its blessing. Perhaps the greatest hindrance is Germany's federal structure. There is no federal police and each of Germany's 16 states has its own Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Except for Bavaria, these state offices are under-funded and their personnel are unskilled in dealing with threats that originate from abroad. Many are highly politicized and some, especially in the east, are feeble. Apparently it is no coincidence that plotting for the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was initially centered in Germany. Three of the four killer aircraft pilots lived for as long as nine years in Hamburg. Since the effective cooperation of foreign nations that are home to potential terrorists is crucial to American intelligence, it is hoped Germany will loosen some of the restrictions and reform the structures that hamper its common struggle with the US against terrorism.
(Harvey) (Wash. Post 19 Oct '01, p. A29 // R. G. Livingston)

SECTION III - CYBER INTELLIGENCE

COMPUTERS ATTACKED -- Internet connections at The New York Times newspaper were interrupted for several hours on 23 October after the paper's computers were flooded with bogus information in an apparent denial-of-service attack. "We don't know that it was malicious, but there seems to be no innocent explanation," wrote network administrator Terry Schwadron in an e-mail to newsroom employees. (Levine's Newsbits, 31 Oct 01) http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,48015,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001/10/31/nytimes-web-attack.htm

POWERPUFF GIRLS DVD SPREADS VIRUS -- The latest DVD featuring cartoon sensation "The Powerpuff Girls" may boast fun games for young PC users, but three computer programs on the disc have also been infected by the "FunLove" virus, CNET News.com has learned. (Levine) http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5099033,00.html
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7735109.html

CYBER-SECURITY BILL PLANNED BY HOUSE SCIENCE COMMITTEE -- House Science Committee's Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., today said that the committee is planning legislation designed to address what he said are shortcomings in the nation's critical infrastructure that open it to cyber-attacks. (Levine) http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171722.htmlWHITE

WHITE HOUSE BIO TASK FORCE -- The White House this week established a multi-agency task force charged with using information technology as a tool to fight terrorism by keeping tighter control over the use of student visas and by sharing immigration and customs information with other countries. (Levine) http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/1029/web-taskforce-10-31-01.asp

ANTHRAX SCARE LENDS URGENCY TO BIO-SURVEILLANCE -- Efforts to develop real-time, Web-based surveillance systems for evidence of biological and chemical terrorism are gaining steam and urgency because of the recent anthrax attacks around the country.(Levine) http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2820901,00.html

COOKIE BILL - A new bill extends 'no cookies' rule to all federal Web sites (Levine) http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1001/103101td3.htm

WTO WEBSITE DECEPTION -- Anti-globalization activists have enraged the World Trade Organization (WTO) with a phony Web site that looks just like the real thing but alters the site's text and mentions profit at every opportunity. "A fake WTO Web site -- has been created to deceive Internet users by copying the entire official WTO website. While the design is identical, the texts have been distorted,'' the organization said on its real site.(Levine) http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/tech/039693.htm
Levine Newsbit Archive: http://www.newsbits.net/search.html

SECTION IV - LETTERS

Jesse D. writes: The quick, low cost and possibly most effective way to provide protection for the airlines is train and arm those of us who have retired honorably from the military and law enforcement. There are thousands of us on the planes each day, I'm betting the response would be huge.

NOTE: The opinions in the WIN items are those of the editors or source authors cited. WINs contain material protected by copyright laws and may not be reproduced except by permission of the Editor, or in single instances for the recruitment of new AFIO members.
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