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Weekly Intelligence Notes #08-04 dtd 24 March 2004 |
WIN #08-04 dtd 24 March 2004
Weekly Intelligence Notes (WINs) are commentaries on Intelligence and related national security matters, based on open media sources, selected, interpreted, edited and produced by AFIO for non-profit educational uses by AFIO members and WIN subscribers. Adm Don Harvey contributed to this issue.
CONTENTS of this WIN
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SECTION I -- CURRENT INTELLIGENCE
Counterterrorism Czar Gets People to Listen
SECTION II -- CONTEXT AND PRECEDENCE
SECTION III -- CYBER INTELLIGENCE
Bush Cybersecurity Plan Blasted By Senator
Russians Provide Webspace for Hamas Terrorists, or Do They?
Hotmail and Yahoo Users Vulnerable
Security Warnings: U.S. Shuts Down Internet 'phishing' Scam
SECTION IV -- EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES
Program Managers and Engineers
SECTION V -- BOOKS, SOURCES, AND ISSUES
Devil’s Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham
Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror
You're Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger
SECTION VI -- NOTES, LETTERS, AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
NMIA -- 30th Anniversary Banquet and Awards
The Office of Strategic Services Society
AFIO's Night at the Boston Pops
SECTION I -- CURRENT INTELLIGENCE
9-11 COMMISSION -- The bipartisan commission looking at missteps prior to the 9/11 attacks has begun public, senior-level hearings that, in addition to issuing condemnations of both the Clinton and Bush administrations for not being aggressive enough on terrorism, are uncovering several new intelligence-related items on the situation. This particular ten member panel is the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States which is established by Congress, scheduled to report out this summer, and recipient of much media attention because it has sought public testimony from everyone short of God himself. Several of the tidbits include:
· The senior officials of both administrations agreed that they recognized a severe terrorist threat to the US. The thrust of the commission's investigative staff report, however, suggested that neither administration assigned adequate attention to the threat [with the usual advantage of 20/20 hindsight that always figures in these post facto exercises].
· The Clinton administration had as many as four chances to kill or capture bin Laden between December 1998 and July 1999, but all the operations were scuttled because of uncertain intelligence and fears that civilians might be killed.
· "Having a chance to get bin Laden three times in 36 hours and foregoing the chance each time has made me a bit angry," a CIA unit chief wrote to a colleague, adding that George Tenet "finds himself alone at the table, with the other principals basically saying 'we'll go along with your decision Mr. Director,' and implicitly saying that the Agency will hang alone if the attack doesn't get [bin Laden]."
· In the spring of 1998, the Saudi government broke up a plot organized by bin Laden to launch attacks on US forces in Saudi Arabia using portable missiles. Scores were arrested, but the Saudis did not publicize the case at the time.
· US officials learned that Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistani intelligence, had assured Taliban leaders in July 1999 that he would provide three or four hours of warning before any US missile launch as he had the "last time" -- an apparent reference to the failed 1998 missile strike.
· Moreover, officials from both administrations assert that neither congress, the media, nor the general public would have supported a complete military invasion of Afghanistan aimed at eliminating al-Qaeda pre-9/11/01; nor would having killed Bin laden likely have prevented it.
This is the eighth public hearing of the Commission; however, it is a virtual certainty the remaining hearings will fail to achieve comparable media attention. (Washington Post 24 Mar '04, pg A1, by Dan Eggen and John Mintz)
BEHIND CENTCOM'S CLOSED DOORS -- Here, in the Joint Intelligence Center in CentCom at MacDill AFB in Tampa FL, officers expect to be the first to learn that Osama bin Laden has been captured or killed. Here, in November 2002, CentCom senior officers watched a live video of an unmanned aircraft over Yemen launching a Hellfire missile at a vehicle carrying six suspected terrorists, killing them all. Here, the U.S. Central Command staff and equipment are devoted to a single, sensitive task: hunting members of al-Qaida and the Taliban.
JICCENT or "Jic" is the nerve center for the Defense Department's counterterrorist operations and has become vital to the military and government in decision making. The room is one of many secure areas that make up CentCom's Joint Intelligence Center. Since Sept. 11, the center's 550 employees have maintained an around-the-clock pace, working seven days a week to satisfy the insatiable demand in Tampa and Washington for the latest information from battle zones covered by CentCom -- an area stretching, roughly, from central Asia to the Horn of Africa. Employees at "Jic" work with some of the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art electronics and are privy to the nation's most sensitive secrets at the highest levels of classification and compartmentation. However, employees there seem to insist that a majority of their work is less-than-glamorous yet always fast-paced. The center's director Col. Stephen Robb, the 51-year- old Marine who has been at the helm since June 2001 and who claims that he "was a young man when [he] started this job," is looking forward to September when a new director will take over.
Completed in November 2002, the $1.2 million Fusion Center was built in fewer than 45 days. The idea for the design came after Col. Robb toured a CNN facility and found an open work environment that encouraged communication. Consuming the forward wall is a giant screen in five sections. Analysts can follow live action in Iraq and Afghanistan, hold top-secret video teleconferences or watch mainstream news programs. The middle of the screen features Top Scene, a system that allows three-dimensional models of buildings and terrain to be displayed. This gives analysts lifelike images of prospective targets, allowing for more detailed planning. A smaller part of the screen is used to track the thousands of U.S. vehicles, ships and aircraft in CentCom's area of operations. Each has a transponder that emits a signal to avoid overwhelming the system; filters are used to show the most important vessels. Directly behind this section are three parallel rows of desks, where analysts focus on broad "function'' areas, where they evaluate longer-term concerns such as high-value targets and weapons of mass destruction. And, three times a week, regardless of where he is, Gen. Abizaid uses the Fusion Center to hold one-hour video briefings with his commanders and officials in Washington.
According to many at "Jic," the most memorable day in the intelligence center may have been Oct. 7, 2001, when Air Force bombers and jets began hitting targets in Afghanistan to launch the war on terrorism declared by President Bush. CIA paramilitary units and Special Forces had been on the ground for weeks trying to build alliances with Afghans and root out al-Qaeda or Taliban members. U.S. soldiers were in a remote corner of the world, fighting a very different enemy. "We were really nervous because we didn't know what to expect," Robb said. "If you remember the emotions from 9/11," his deputy operations director, Army Lt. Col. Stuart Smead, said, "we were only three weeks out from that, and this was going to be a different kind of war."(By Richard Lardner (abridged)// Tampa Tribune, Mar 15, 2004) Full Story at: (http://www.tampatrib.com/News/MGAJW0E2URD.html)
COUNTERTERRORISM CZAR GETS PEOPLE TO LISTEN -- Former Whitehouse counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke began making substantial accusations against the Bush administration Sunday night on CBS 60 minutes -- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml.
White House strikes back -- http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0304/032304gsn1.htm
SECTION II -- CONTEXT AND PRECEDENCE
CRITICAL SSCI REPORT -- The 310-page Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the intelligence community's performance before the invasion of Iraq which began last year is still being edited and portions blacked out so it can be publicly released. In keeping with the earlier statements and leaks concerning the contents of the report, the current senatorial press interviews and leaks point firmly to a very inadequate if not deplorable performance. The thrust of the present leaks is that the community turned vague, incomplete information into firm warnings about the threat posed by Iraqi WMD, especially in the 1 October NIE of 2002 issued just before the Congressional vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq. It appears both Democrats and Republicans on the committee agree on the key, strongly negative findings. The NIE stated Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." The press report says that that judgment was made even though no Western official had seen an actual chemical or biological weapon in Iraq since 1995. [The article did not pursue the alternative reasoning that no Western official had seen the actual destruction of all chemical or biological weapons since 1995 either.]
The Chairman of the committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, has said of the report, "The picture in regards to intelligence is not very flattering." Consistently in keeping with his earlier 20/20 hindsight pronouncements, the most vociferous of the committee Democratic members, Sen. Carl Levin, said, "It is a shocking report. There's got to be some accountability somewhere in the process for failures, for missing information, for ignoring information." Reportedly, the report finds that because of poor coordination at the top, different intelligence agencies distributed different assessments among senior policymakers. [One is left to speculate if the committee would prefer that senior policymakers be denied the opinion of their own intelligence officers until such time as the DCI sees fit to bless the assessment for the President.] The committee paper states that the different assessments contributed to statements by senior administration officials that were not always supported by most intelligence agencies. [Not counting the numerous newly-minted "Centers," there are 14 intelligence organizations according to the usual count, but it is not known what is defined as "most." or how one obtains their approval short of an NIE and even then, what about dissents in the NIE?].
The committee criticizes the DCI for consistently seizing on the worst-case scenario of the Iraq threat and overriding the views of intelligence agencies in areas where those agencies had expertise. USAF intelligence disagreement on the possible use of UAVs to deliver chemical or biological attacks is one example cited in the report; the second is DOE's intelligence disagreement on possible use of aluminum tubes in enriching uranium. Both examples have received considerable play in the press earlier, indicating the release of the data to the public despite the DCI "overriding" alleged. [One recollection, admittedly imperfect, is that the AF and DOE opinions were published as dissents in the October NIE.] Not surprisingly, committee members from both political parties agree that the CIA needs to improve the quantity and quality of its information-gathering from human sources.
Although not mentioned in the press article, it is probably a safe bet that the committee recommends better intelligence analysis and considerable expansion of linguistic talents by the community. Creation of at least one more layer in the bureaucratic hierarchy of the intelligence world is always a favorite of those whose intelligence experience is largely bound by the Washington beltway also. Conversely, it is almost certain there will be no recognition of the large gaps in information available to the analysts or of the effect on the warriors and the policymakers if the DCI consistently ignored the worst-case scenario. Over the years, intelligence reports are most often criticized for having too many caveats and "on the other hand" qualifications; it would appear that the thrust of the Senate in this instance is to fault the intelligence people for trying to be too positive in their support to the policy and military customers. [Harvey / JDiamond USA Today 15Mar04 p4]
SECTION III -- CYBER INTELLIGENCE
BUSH CYBERSECURITY PLAN BLASTED BY SENATOR -- Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) charged the Bush administration with "lassitude and lack of leadership" in securing the nation's critical computer systems infrastructure. In a March 19 letter, Lieberman, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and a frequent critic of the White House's homeland security efforts, characterized the administration's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace as little more than vague generalities, without timeframes, deadlines or performance benchmarks. The strategy was originally announced February 2003.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0322/web-dhs-03-23-04.asp
RUSSIANS PROVIDE WEBSPACE FOR HAMAS TERRORISTS, OR DO THEY? -- The telecommunication company Caravan has claimed that it is not involved in support of the terrorists' website, a press release of the telecommunication company informs. On March 22 "Novye Izvestya" and some other information sources announced that Caravan had placed the website of the terrorist organization HAMAS at their servers, the company claims otherwise. (http://www.crime-research.org/news/23.03.2004/151) Hamas has chosen Russia (http://www.crime-research.org/news/23.03.2004/148)
HOTMAIL AND YAHOO USERS VULNERABLE -- Flaws in the filtering technology used by Web-based email services make it possible for hackers to smuggle viruses past defenses. Israeli security outfit GreyMagic Software warned today that this "severe security" vulnerability could allow attackers to run code of their choice, "simply by sending an email to an unsuspecting Hotmail or Yahoo! user". http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/36462.html
SECURITY WARNINGS: U.S. SHUTS DOWN INTERNET 'PHISHING' SCAM -- The U.S. government said Monday it had arrested a Texas man who crafted fake e-mail messages to trick hundreds of Internet users into providing credit card numbers and other sensitive information. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/22/crime.phishing.reut/index.html
'Phishing' Scams on the Rise -- http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-cybercrime22mar22,1,5692627.story
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,39020375,39149467,00.htm [Sulc / Ron Levine's NewsBits 03/22/04]
SECTION IV -- EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES
[IMPORTANT: AFIO does not "vet" or endorse these inquiries or offers. Reasonable-sounding inquiries and career offerings are published as a service to our members, and for researchers, educators, and subscribers. You are urged to exercise your usual caution and good judgment when responding or supplying any information.]
OPERATIONS OFFICERS/ DO TYPES -- Urgent Need! Former DO officers with current clearances are needed to work part or full-time on formulating strategy to capture major counter-terrorism support contract. Contact Peter Waldorf, USIS, phone 703-448-0178, fax 703-442-0519, e-mail peter.waldorf@usis.com
SECTION V -- SOURCES, RESEARCH ISSUES, AND BOOKS
To see his samples of simplified Arabic…view his Mutamathil font at http://arabetics.com/ .
BOOKS & OTHER ITEMS OF INTEREST:
Famous 1957 book reissued by Naval Institute Press:
SECTION VI -- NOTES, LETTERS, AND ANNOUNCEMENTS