WIN #49-01, dated 17 December 2001
Weekly Intelligence Notes are produced by Roy Jonkers for non profit
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SECTION I -
CURRENT INTELLIGENCE
"INTELLIGENCE FAILURE" INVESTIGATION COMING
-- The Senate Intelligence Committee is quietly gearing up for a major
bipartisan hearing starting in February. Chairman Bob Graham and
Republican vice chairman Richard Shelby reportedly plan a 'Pearl
Harbor-type' investigation of the imputed intelligence failure: open
hearings, closed hearings, going back to intelligence failures with
the Khobar Towers. According to columnist Bob Novak, "It is going
to be a bombshell of an investigation of historic proportions -- a lot
of embarrassing red faces resulting from it." Open Season on
intelligence starts early next year. Prepare! (Jonkers) (WT,14 Dec)
INTERAGENCY TASK FORCE ON SECURITY LEAKS CREATED --
Attorney General John Ashcroft has created an interagency task force
to review current administrative and legal sanctions governing the
leak of classified information. "Leaks of classified information
do substantial damage to the security interests of the nation. As a
government, we must try to find more effective measures to deal with
this damaging practice, including measures to prevent it," Mr.
Ashcroft said. The Justice Department, under the Intelligence
Authorization Act, will lead the review in direct consultation with
the director of the CIA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of
state, the secretary of energy and other federal government agencies
that deal with classified information. The task force will deliver a
report to Congress by the deadline established in the legislation, May
1. This will set off another media frenzy! (Jonkers) (WashTimes
16Dec01, p. 3 //J. Seper)
BIN LADEN VIDEOTAPE A CIA STING OPERATION? -- The
amateur videotape of Bin Laden discussing events of September 11th was
held up some time before being publicly released to the US public last
week. After the period of delay, the translation originally provided
by the Defense Department has now been superceded by a corrected
version. According to the authorities the tape was found in a ruined
building in Jalalabad by fighters loyal to Commander Hazrat Ali, who
stated that he passed the tape on to the CIA. But doubts about the
tape have begun to surface. Why had bin Laden broken his tight
security to talk like this on tape? Why had he not used one of his
normal favored media outlets? Was the tape genuine? Was this indeed
bin Laden at all? The tape is damning. It shows bin Laden
laughing and boasting about the 11 September attacks as he talks to
his interviewer, a Saudi cleric. He describes how the planes did far
more damage to the World Trade Center than he ever imagined. He also
indicates that the men who carried out the plot knew that they were on
a 'martyrdom operation' but did not have details of the mission until
the last minute (which can be considered normal good security
practice). There now is media speculation that the tape, still
believed to be genuine, is the result of a sophisticated sting
operation run by the CIA through a cooperating intelligence service,
possibly Saudi, Egyptian or Pakistani, in an effort to get Osama to
incriminate himself. 'They needed someone whom they could persuade, or
coerce, to get close to bin Laden, and someone to whom bin Laden would
feel secure in talking. If it works, you have got the perfect evidence
at the perfect moment,' said one security source. 'It's a
masterstroke.' The media's focus of suspicion for this
"agent" is the Saudi dissident preacher who appears to have
precipitated the taping of the interview, conducted, according to the
time code on the video, on 9 November, in what appears to be a
guesthouse in the Afghan city of Kandahar. Though his name is not
mentioned in the one-hour recording, the guest, disabled from the
waist down, has been identified as Ali Saeed al-Ghamdi, a former
assistant professor of theology at a seminary in Mecca. Saudi Arabians
who watched the tape said the interviewer's accent betrayed roots in
the south-west of their country, either the lower Hejaz or Asir
province (also the region from where came most of the 15 Saudi
hijackers). Al-Ghamdi, who is known to Saudi intelligence
services, is a marginal figure who tried to make a name for himself
through inflammatory anti-Western speeches. In the late Nineties he
preached in obscure mosques along the highway leading from the port
city of Jedda - where bin Laden grew up - to the holy city of Mecca,
but his firebrand oratory drew only small audiences. Nevertheless,
despite his Islamist credentials, al-Ghamdi could be a potential point
of contact for Pakistani, Saudi or Egyptian intelligence. 'He was
suspected of being involved in the gathering of international finance
for al-Qaeda. He is a peripheral figure who wants to be something
bigger and is frustrated. It's a classic profile. They could have
turned him,' one security official for a Gulf intelligence agency
contacted in Peshawar said. In addition, the tape is said to bear a
marked resemblance to secretly filmed evidence used by the FBI against
major American Mafia figures in recent years. Draw your own
conclusions! (Jonkers) (The Observer (UK) 16 Dec01 //E. Vulliamy and
J. Burke) ( http://www.observer.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1501,619524,00.html)
THE ANTHRAX THREAT -- Intelligence deals with current
and future threats. One of the recently demonstrated threats to the
Homeland is posed by anthrax, a potential CBW weapon, rhetorically
included under the rubric of "Weapons of Mass Destruction,"
potentially useable by terrorists (like almost everything else). It is
a subject well covered in the daily press, indicating that the notion
that this chemical/biological warfare threat disappeared with the
conclusion of the 1969 treaty outlawing this kind of weapon, is
apparently an illusion. In the US program anthrax of various types was
collected from laboratories worldwide, and has been fairly widely
accessible. During the 70's and 80's, when few researchers thought of
bacteria as a potential terrorist weapon "people would share
strains," said a former Army researcher."There wasn't
necessarily any documentation." The type anthrax that killed a
number of Americans recently is said to be the Ames variety. If a
researcher sent a sample of the Ames strain to another scientist in
the 1980s without recording the transfer, a sample could have sat
forgotten for years in a freezer at a university lab in the United
States or even overseas. A terrorist could have used such a sample to
produce the anthrax used in the letters, which have killed five people
and sickened 13 others. The use of fine particles that can be inhaled,
found in Senator Daschle's office, pose a different and particularly
sophisticated threat -- and clues. In this country only the Army's
Dugway Proving Ground in Utah is known to have made this finely
milled, weapons-grade anthrax in recent years. If this type of Ames
strain anthrax was shared informally, it may also have been produced
as a fine, dry powder by a secret weapons program of another (allied
or friendly) country. Government officials have acknowledged that Army
scientists in recent years have made anthrax in a powdered form that
could be used as a weapon. Experts said this appeared to be the first
disclosure of the continuing government production of anthrax in its
most lethal form since the United States renounced biological weapons
in 1969 and began destroying its germ arsenal. Speculation on the
attackers in the US range from Islamic terrorists (no connection has
been made public) to domestic extremist terrorists (the targets appear
to have been media figures and Congressional democrats), or even to
criminals seeking to profit from the turmoil. The FBI is
investigating. No connection is said to have been made to al-Qaeda or
Iraq, yet. . The Soviets also continued to maintain a CBW research
program, but did not destroy their stockpile as required by the 1969
treaty. The outbreak of the disease near Sverdlovsk, Siberia, where
anthrax was dispersed over a wide area in 1979, demonstrated both the
program and its effects - which were more limited than one might
surmise from the horror scenarios. Documents on the Soviet program may
be found in the national security archive cited below. A great number
of countries possess the pharmaceutical laboratory base to research
and produce anthrax or other CBW diseases, including Israel, Iraq,
Egypt, and Iran in the Middle East, and China, Japan, India, and
European countries, among others. As the anti-terrorism war rolls on,
essentially the nations the US considers a terrorist threat, generally
within the Islamic world, will probably not be permitted such a
pharmaceutical research and production capability -- unless closely
controlled or monitored. (Jonkers) (BaltSun 21Dec //S.Shane)(NYT 13
Dec01, p.1 /W.Broad) ( http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/bal-te.anthrax21dec21.story
) (Anthrax at Sverdlovsk Update 15Nov01, )( mevans@GWU.EDU )
( http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/
)
( http://www.sunspot.net/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=bal%2Dte%2Eanthrax21dec21
)(T. Hart)
SECTION II - CONTEXT AND PRECEDENT
US FOREIGN POLICY, INTELLIGENCE & TERRORISM --
The View From the Third World. Much commentary in the Third world is
idle noise, just like that in our media. But we must know how others
see us and the world if we are not to fall into the trap of blind
intellectual arrogance and ignorance. Two views are offered - one
blaming the US for neglecting to address oppression and suffering, the
causes of terrorism, and the other assigning blame from within Islam.
(1) TERRORISM CAUSED BY US POLICIES -- A
Malaysian professor stated criticism of US foreign policies thusly
(edited): The recent attack on Pentagon and World Trade Center by
hijacked civilian American airlines can be regarded as one of the
worst forms of attacks on targets on American soil. For a long time,
there was belief that the geographical location of the country and its
super intelligence system would act as bulwarks against any form of
attack. But then, when part of the Pentagon and the entire World Trade
Center was demolished, Americans woke up to the new realities of
international conflict. But the funny thing is that the American
officialdom seems to be learning no lessons from this disaster. The
line of argument is simply that it has to find new ways to improve the
country's intelligence system, get the support of its allies and
prepare for strikes at targets abroad. There is no visible attempt to
consider what really went wrong in the foreign policy realm. There
seems to be general amnesia on the fact that it was the foreign policy
of the United States and its relationship with the rest of the world
that is the prime cause of the recent attack and other attacks in
different places. . . . While America might be a democratic country,
its foreign policy towards other nations is replete with
contradictions. It supports whatever regime serves American interests;
little or no attention is paid to the suffering of innocent people.
Arms supplied by the US are used by regimes in power to punish or
eliminate opposition forces in the name of opposing terrorism.
American military advisors are stationed in many countries to advise
and train troops of very corrupt regimes. American intelligence is
provided to eliminate leaders of opposition groups. The US is against
terrorists, cast as a fight between good and evil between good and
evil. But no attempt has been made to date to identify what are the
objectives of these terrorists, and why they are willing to give up
their lives and others. In other words, no attempt to address the
causes. In Sri Lanka, American military help has been sought for years
to eliminate the struggle waged by the Tamils for their own homeland.
Every successive government in Israel has sought to deny a decent
political future for Palestinians. Beyond this, American moral and
material support have been used to eliminate groups opposed to the
Israeli occupation of Palestine. Also, it was the US that brought
Suharto into power in Indonesia so that he could mastermind the
elimination of communists. It was also the US, through the
International Monetary Fund, that brought Suharto down. And it was the
same US, now destroying the Taleban as evil, that backed the Taleban
in fighting against the Soviets. The US has no qualms of
"sleeping" with dictators, military rulers, authoritarian
governments and others. Thus, if there are individuals and groups
negatively affected by US policy, it seems quite natural for them to
retaliate in the only way available to them. The fault lies in the way
successive policymakers in the US have sought to define the country's
interests - both domestically and internationally. This has nothing to
do with the country's intelligence system . Today, the enemies of the
US are groups, organizations, individuals and others who have been
negatively impacted by US foreign policies towards the struggle of
oppressed peoples in the world. Professor Ramasamy's polemic may be
considered light-weight academic generalizing and public posturing,
but actions by others in the world are not disconnected from US
actions towards them. Intelligence and bombing are not the only
remedies. It is useful to analyze - and address - underlying causes as
well as their resulting manifestations. (Jonkers) (P. Ramasamy, U
Kebansaan Malaysia, 17Sep 01) (courtesy E. M'gan)
(2) WHITHER ISLAM?? -- Although it was never his
intention, Osama bin Laden has triggered the most serious debate in
years, among Muslims, about Islam's ability to adapt to modernity. In
Arab states this debate is still muted. But in Pakistan and other
Muslim countries with a relatively free press, writers are raising it
openly and bluntly. Nothing could be more important. Here's why: Many
Arab-Muslim states today share the same rigid political structure.
Think of these states as having two islands: one island is occupied by
the secular autocratic regimes and the business class around them. On
the other island are the mullahs, imams and religious authorities who
dominate Islamic practice and education, which is still based largely
on traditional Koranic interpretations that are not embracing of
modernity, pluralism or the equality of women. The governing bargain
is that the regimes get to stay in power forever and the mullahs get a
monopoly on religious practice and education forever. This bargain
lasted all these years because oil money, or U.S. or Soviet aid,
enabled many Arab-Muslim countries to survive without opening their
economies or modernizing their education systems. But as oil revenues
have declined and the population of young people seeking jobs
exploded, this bargain can't hold much longer. These countries can't
survive without opening up to global investment, the Internet, modern
education and emancipation of their women so that they will not be
competing with just half of their populations. But the more they do
that, the more threatened the religious authorities feel. Bin Laden's
challenge was an attempt by the extreme Islamists to break out of
their island and seize control of the secular state island. The
states' rulers responded by crushing or expelling the Islamists, but
without ever trying to reform the Islamic schools - called madrasas -
or the political conditions that keep producing angry Islamist waves.
So the deadly circle that produced bin Ladenism - poverty,
dictatorship and religious anti- modernism, each reinforcing the other
- just gets perpetuated. Some are now demanding the circle be broken.
Consider this remarkable open letter to bin Laden that a Pakistani
writer and businessman, Izzat Majeed, wrote in last Friday's popular
Pakistani daily The Nation: "We Muslims cannot keep blaming the
West for all our ills... The embarrassment of wretchedness among us is
beyond repair. It is not just the poverty, the illiteracy and the
absence of any commonly accepted social contract that define our sense
of wretchedness; it is, rather, the increasing awareness among us that
we have failed as a civil society by not confronting the historical,
social and political demons within us. . . . Without a reformation in
the practice of Islam that makes it move forward and not backward,
there is no hope for us Muslims anywhere. We have reduced Islam to the
organized hypocrisy of state-sponsored mullahism. For more than a
thousand years Islam has stood still because the mullahs, who became
de facto clergy instead of genuine scholars, closed the door on `ijtehad'
[reinterpreting Islam in light of modernity] and no one came forward
with an evolving application of the message of the Holy Quran. All
that the mullahs tell you today is how to go back a millennium. We
have not been able to evolve a dynamic practice to bring Islam to the
people in the language of their own specific era. . . . Oxford and
Cambridge were the `madrasas' of Christendom in the 13th century. Look
where they are today - among the leading institutions of education in
the world. Where are our institutions of learning?" The
Protestant Reformation, melding Christianity with modernity, happened
only when wealthy princes came along ready to finance and protect the
breakaway reformers. But in the Muslim world today, the wealthiest
princes, like Saudi Arabia's, are funding anti-modern schools from
Pakistan to Bosnia, while the dictators pay off the anti- modern
mullahs rather than reform them. This keeps the soil for bin Ladenism
ever fertile. Addressing bin Laden, Mr. Majeed concluded, "The
last thing [Muslims] need is the growing darkness in your caves. . .
.Holy Prophet Muhammad, on returning from a battle, said: `We return
from little Jihad to greater Jihad.' True Jihad today is not in the
hijacking of planes, but in the manufacturing of them." (Jonkers)
(Thomas Friedman, "Breaking the Circle" NYT 16 Nov 01) (T.
Hart)
SECTION III -
CYBER INTELLIGENCE
FBI MAGIC LANTERN -- According to media reporting,
the FBI recently was forced to reveal another part of its Cyber-Knight
project, an effort by the Bureau to monitor Internet communications.
The new FBI program, called Magic Lantern, is described as key logger
software designed to steal the pass phrase used to start the popular
encryption program PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy. A key logger program
is designed to capture keystrokes � what a user keys in � and then
store the data in a separate location for later retrieval by a hacker.
The FBI plans to use Magic Lantern to capture PGP information to crack
encrypted e-mail and intercept Internet data. Magic Lantern is
reported to have flaws. It is allegedly sent in a fashion similar to
several virus programs, either as an attachment via e-mail or
downloaded from an infected Web site. However, the Magic Lantern
program may also be mistaken for a virus program, or as a "system
upgrade." The sudden discovery of Magic Lantern caused a
flurry of activity from computer software producers. Anti-virus
software maker McAfee Associates denied a recent report that it was
working with the FBI to ensure its software would not stop the Magic
Lantern program. Magic Lantern is also not perfect. Magic Lantern is
not designed to stop other popular computer encryption programs such
as Softwar Pcypher and Mystx public key encryption systems. These
encryption software utilities do not use pass-phrase technology and
are immune to Magic Lantern-type attacks. E-mail and data scrambling
is done with the mouse using data keys that can be stored on offline
diskettes, zip drives or CD disks. Last year the FBI was forced by
privacy advocates to reveal that it had a software program called
Carnivore designed to monitor Internet e-mail. The Carnivore system
(now re-named) is reportedly installed on Internet Service Provider
computers, allowing the agency to siphon off data from suspected
customers.
CIA TRIANGLE BOY -- The CIA is said to be a major
sponsor of SafeWeb, a company that distributes a free program called
Triangle Boy. Triangle Boy allows users to surf the Web anonymously.
Citizens inside dictatorships are using the program to avoid
monitoring by the oppressive regimes. Triangle Boy operates much
like a mail forwarding service. Each user request to view a Web page
is scrambled and randomly sent to another machine, which actually
performs the request, returning the data to the original user.
Triangle Boy is very popular inside China, and the Chinese government
is working hard on ways to counter secure access to the Internet.
SafeWeb reportedly receives hundreds of e-mails a day from grateful
Triangle Boy users worldwide. However, SafeWeb's growing audience in
China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Syria may be in
conflict with FBI efforts to monitor potential terrorist
communications. Despite the concerns, Triangle Boy's developer,
SafeWeb's CEO Stephen Hsu, claims terrorists would not use the
program. "A terrorist would be crazy to use SafeWeb," stated
Hsu, who noted that the CIA backs his company. Researchers and
software vendors have rushed to develop new programs designed to
counter Triangle Boy, but ironically, many inside the computer
security field declined to describe ways to stop the system � not for
technical reasons but for political reasons. "Normally, I'm all
for publishing flaws in software, but on this one I have to vote
against," stated one computer security expert located in the
Netherlands. "The Chinese finally have access to the Internet.
The flaws could be used by the Chinese government to block the
Internet once again." (Jonkers) (Newsmax 28 Nov 01 //C. R. Smith)
Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2001
SECTION IV -
LETTERS
John C writes: Since September 11 the Army's Strategic Studies
Institute has prepared a series of short analytical papers dealing
with the strategic dimensions of the war on terrorism. These are now
on our home page at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/welcome.htm.
Tony Newcomb relates message on OPSEC relevant to all: Operational
Security (OPSEC) has been a problem for the US Military and with USA
Special Operations Command because of "Pundits" who really
know very little, but expound a lot, to the National Media. The
National Board of Officers has not given interviews nor recommended
anyone for interviews, to any media outlet. Hundreds of phone calls
from media reporters have gone unanswered or denied access. "OPSEC"
is the call of today just as "Loose lips sink ships" during
WW II. The lives of SOF Soldiers are more important than a few minutes
on TV. Let Osama Bin Laden experience the capabilities of SF, lets not
give him advance warning.
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