AFIO Weekly Intelligence Notes #09-08 dated 3 March 2008

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WIN CREDITS FOR THIS ISSUE:  The WIN editors thank the following special contributors to this issue: ls, th, pjk and dh.  
All have contributed one or more stories used in this issue. The editors also wish speedy recovery to contributor cl who has been ill for several months.

CONTENTS

Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Section II - TERRORISM

Section III - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

Section IV - JOBS, OBITUARIES, RESEARCH REQUESTS, ANNOUNCEMENTS AND COMING EVENTS

Jobs

Obituaries

Research Requests

Announcements

Coming Events

Current Calendar Next Two Months ONLY:

  For Additional Events two+ months or more....view our online Calendar of Events  

Section I - INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS

EU awaiting Polish, Romanian Replies on CIA Jails. The European Commission is awaiting responses from Poland and Romania to charges that they hosted CIA prisons where Al-Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards used methods akin to torture.

A day after Britain said Washington used its territory to transfer terrorism suspects, a spokesman for the EU executive said Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini had renewed an appeal for the countries to respond to the Council of Europe report.

The Council of Europe, Europe's main human rights watchdog, said last year that detention centers in Romania and Poland were used to interrogate top Al-Qaeda suspects from 2003-2005.

"They (the letters) reminded the two countries... of the obligation to carry out effective investigations and asked for detailed information as to how this has been implemented and in particular what the outcome of the investigation is," Johannes Laitenberger told a daily news briefing on Friday.

"We have not received a reply from Poland and the information, the reply so far received, from Romania was not considered complete by Vice President Frattini. So Vice President Frattini sent reminders to both countries on January 29 and we are currently awaiting replies to these reminders."

He said Frattini sent letters to Romania and Poland last July.

Britain, having maintained for years it was unaware of a British link to "rendition" flights, said on Thursday the United States had told it that it had used British territory to transfer terrorism suspects.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the EU executive had asked EU member states "to be transparent and investigate what happened in terms of extraordinary renditions."

The Council of Europe report's author, Swiss senator Dick Marty, said Poland housed some of the CIA's most sensitive prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, reputed mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Marty said U.S. intelligence and other sources told him the two EU members hosted the secret jails under a special CIA program created after 9/11 "to 'kill, capture and detain' terrorist suspects deemed of 'high value'."

He said they were part of a "global spider's web" of secret CIA detentions and transfers, known as extraordinary renditions. Marty also accused EU members Germany and Italy of using state secrecy to obstruct his investigation.

Frattini said in 2005 that if reports of secret CIA prisons in Europe were true, states would face serious consequences including the possible suspension of their EU voting rights. [TehranTimes/25February2008] 

Iran Dismisses Nuke Documents As Fakes. The U.N. nuclear monitoring agency presented documents Monday that diplomats said indicate Iran may have focused on a nuclear weapons program after 2003, the year that a U.S. intelligence report says such work stopped.

Iran again denied ever trying to make such arms. Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, the chief Iranian delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, dismissed the information showcased by the body as "forgeries."

He and other diplomats, all linked to the IAEA, commented after a closed-door presentation to the agency's 35-nation board of intelligence findings from the U.S. and its allies and other information purporting to show Iranian attempts to make nuclear arms.

A summarized U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, made public late last year, also came to the conclusion that Tehran was conducting atomic weapons work. But it said the Iranians froze such work in 2003.

Asked whether board members were shown information indicating Tehran continued weapons-related activities after that time, Simon Smith, the chief British delegate to the IAEA, said: "Certainly some of the dates ... went beyond 2003."

He did not elaborate. But another diplomat at the presentation, who agreed to discuss the meeting only if not quoted by name, said some of the documentation focused on an Iranian report on nuclear activities that some experts have said could be related to weapons.

She said it was unclear whether the project was being actively worked on in 2004 or the report was a review of past activities. Still, any Iranian focus on nuclear weapons work in 2004 would at least indicate continued interest past the timeframe outlined in the U.S. intelligence estimate.

A senior diplomat who attended the IAEA meeting said that among the material shown was an Iranian video depicting mock-ups of a missile re-entry vehicle. He said IAEA Director General Oli Heinonen suggested the component , which brings missiles back from the stratosphere, was configured in a way that strongly suggests it was meant to carry a nuclear warhead.

Other documentation showed the Iranians experimenting with warheads and missile trajectories where "the height of the burst ... didn't make sense for conventional warheads," he said.

Smith and the senior diplomat both said the material shown to the board came from a variety of sources, including information gathered by the agency and intelligence provided by member nations.

"The assumption is this was not something that was being thought about or talked about, but the assumption is it was being practically worked on," Smith told reporters.

He said the IAEA presented a "fairly detailed set of illustrations and descriptions of how you would build a nuclear warhead, how you would fit it into a delivery vehicle, how you would expect it to perform."

The U.N. agency released a report last week saying that suspicions about most past Iranian nuclear activities had eased or been laid to rest. But the report also noted Iran had rejected documents linking it to missile and explosives experiments and other work connected to a possible nuclear weapons program, calling the information false and irrelevant.

The report called weaponization "the one major ... unsolved issue relevant to the nature of Iran's nuclear program."

Most of the material shown to Iran by the IAEA on alleged attempts to make nuclear arms came from Washington, though some was provided by U.S. allies, diplomats told the AP. The agency shared it with Tehran only after the nations gave their permission.

The IAEA report also confirmed that Iran continued to enrich uranium despite demands by the U.N. Security Council to suspend the work. The council has sanctions on Iran for continuing enrichment, which can produce the material needed to make atomic bombs.

Iran says its enrichment program is intended solely to produce lower-grade material for fueling nuclear reactors hat would generate electricity.

Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Khazee, said the intelligence information turned over to the IAEA was "baseless" and alleged it was fabricated by an Iranian opposition group.

"I'm afraid to say that, according to my information, some of these allegations were produced or fabricated by a terrorist group, which are listed as a terrorist group in the United States and somewhere else in Europe," Khazee said told the AP in New York.

He appeared to be referring to the Mujahedeen Khalq, also known as the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, which was listed as a foreign terrorist group by the U.S. government in 1997 and the European Union last year. [Lederer/CBSNews/25February2008] 

Korean Spy Agency Spied on Citizens and Politicians. It has been revealed that the National Intelligence Agency (NIS), the nation's top spy agency, accessed 74,660 types of confidential information of individual citizens for three years and eight months beginning January 2003 to August 2006.

The activities of the spy agency were high during July and August 2006, a period when it reviewed, without authorization or prior consent, then-leading presidential contender Lee Myung-bak's personal information regarding real estate assets.

The new finding was made public by Grand National Party lawmaker Lee Sang-bae, who reviewed the monthly internal data of the agency's access to personal records gained through the Government Administration and Home Affairs Ministry's Government for Citizens (G4C) system.

According to the findings, the spy agency accessed social security information 48,590 times, family information 25,389 times, zoning information 655 times, and land recordings 14 times, among others.

Since implementation of the Administrative Information Sharing System in August 2006, only a handful of staff members can review the personal information of a citizen.

In particular, the NIS looked up personal records on real estate assets 620 times (94.6%), out of a total of 655, during just the two months of July and August 2006. The agency did not look up the real estate recordings other than during those two months. Last year, the spy agency confessed that one of its senior officials on its anti-corruption task force team had looked into the personal real estate records of President Lee Myung-bak's brother-in-law, Kim Jae-jeong.

During the same period, the intelligence agency beefed up snooping activities in other areas, as well. Now these findings are fueling suspicion, as some politicians alleged, that the intelligence agency spied on politicians, including President Lee.

Rep. Lee demanded, "We can't ignore the fact that the intelligence agency looked into the personal lives of politicians under the Roh Moo-hyun administration. We have to know why the agency accessed the private information of individuals and politicians on so many occasions, and why it increased its surveillance into real estate records during July and August in 2006." [Donga/27February2008] 

New Book Details Chinese Spy Effort Ahead of Olympics. As athletes train for the summer Olympics in China, a new book claims that the country's vast spy network is gearing up for a different challenge - keeping an eye on journalists and potential troublemakers.

French writer Roger Faligot, author of some 40 intelligence-related books, has penned 'The Chinese Secret Services from Mao to the Olympic Games', due out February 29.

His findings claim that special teams are being formed at the country's embassies abroad "to identify sports journalists... and to define if they have an 'antagonistic' or 'friendly' attitude in regards to China."

Potential foreign spies who may seek to enter China by posing as journalists or visitors will be subject to special surveillance.

The same goes for human rights activists who could use the event to demonstrate in favor of causes such as Tibet, where China has violently crushed protests against its rule, it says.

That's not to mention the long list of other issues preoccupying Chinese authorities, including the possibility of an Al-Qaeda attack and protests from the Falun Gong spiritual movement. China has outlawed Falun Gong, which combines meditation with Buddhist-inspired teachings.

"The watchword for the Chinese is 'no problems at the Olympics,'" Faligot says.

Faligot, who is fluent in Mandarin, says he spoke with numerous Chinese officials.

According to him, two million Chinese work directly or indirectly for the intelligence services through the state security agency.

In a chapter titled 'China: Gold Medal for Espionage', the author says the director of the group coordinating Olympic security, Qiang Wei, has a 1.3-billion-dollar (885-million-euro) budget.

An Olympic security command center has been created "in order to assure a response to all risks in real time".

Olympic organizers admitted last year to budget overruns caused by extra expenditure on security at the Games, the biggest international event ever staged in communist China.

Last September, China's then-police chief Zhou Yongkang said that "terrorist" and "extremist" groups posed the biggest threat to the success of the Olympics.

He did not elaborate, but China has previously accused some members of the ethnic Muslim Uighur community in the nation's far western region of Xinjiang of terror-related activities.

In the year leading up to the August 8-24 Games, the Chinese army will have organized 25 exercises on how to respond to crises, including a chemical attack on the subway.

The teams being formed in foreign embassies will work in conjunction with "different Chinese intelligence services under diplomatic cover".

Those intelligence services will include the secretive 610 office, set up in 1999 to target the Falun Gong movement and which operates worldwide.

But the intelligence services won't only be deployed during the Olympics to keep an eye out, Faligot says. They'll also be recruiting among the two million visitors expected for the event. [26February2008/Turkishpress] 

Former Congo Spy Wins Refugee Status in Korea. A former member of Congo's intelligence service was given refugee status in Korea, ending his three-year-long legal battle to be recognized as a political exile.

The Seoul Administrative Court ruled that it accepted the former spy's request for political asylum, overriding the previous decision by the Ministry of Justice.

The ministry originally rejected his request in 2005, alleging that it was unclear whether his return to the Congo would have life-threatening consequences.

In the ruling, the court said "Serving as an agent for the Congo's intelligence service Agence Nationale des Renseignements (ANR), he experienced torture by the organization due to his leaking of state secrets to political rivals. The experiences can be interpreted as treason.''

The former agent uncovered a series of corrupt actions by government officials including ANR members, discriminatory practices of the intelligence agency and other state secrets, the court said. He reported them to the nation's largest opposition party, the Union Pour la Democratie et le Progres Social (UDPS).

As a result, he was imprisoned on charges of revealing state secrets. Thanks to help from his colleagues, he was able to break out of jail in July 2002 and entered China later that month.

Sensing that staying in China could be a threat to his safety due to the friendly relations between the two nations, he arrived in Korea via Incheon port, 37 kilometers west of Seoul, in September 2002. He asked the justice ministry to recognize him as a political refugee in November of that year. [Park/KoreaTimes/13February2008] 

U.S. Faces Unusually Complex Security Environment, Intel Official Says. The Pentagon's top intelligence official told a Senate committee the United States is operating in a security environment that is unusually complex. During a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, presented an analysis of current and future threats facing the U.S.

"That threat spectrum is bounded on the one side by traditional nation states with significant military inventories, and on the other by non-state terrorists or criminal networks that exploit the gaps and seams between nations, cultures, laws and belief systems," he said.

Outlining what he called "trends of concern," Maples said current threats include weapons of mass destruction, increasingly sophisticated and longer-range ballistic missiles, improvised bombs and suicide weapons, outer space and cyberspace vulnerabilities, and underground weapons systems produced by potential adversaries.

On Iraq, Maples said efforts by coalition and Iraqi forces, plus intelligence cooperation from concerned local citizens and a ceasefire by a Shiite militia, have created an improved security situation. Officials also have noted a decline in the number of foreign terrorists entering Iraq.

"The trends are encouraging," he said. "But they are not yet irreversible."

Al Qaeda in Iraq has been damaged, but is attempting to reignite sectarian violence in part by conducting high profile attacks, Maples said. The terrorist network largely has moved into the more permissive areas of northern Iraq where it remains committed to planning and supporting attacks beyond Iraq's borders, he added.

Maples said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the Quds Force, continues to provide training, weapons and support to groups that attack coalition and Iraqi forces. "The Defense Intelligence Agency has not yet seen evidence that Iran has ended this assistance," he said.

The intelligence director noted improvements to Iraq's security forces. "Iraqi security forces, while reliant on coalition combat service support, have improved their overall capabilities and are increasingly leading counterinsurgency operations," he said.

Turning to Afghanistan, Maples said successful operations by U.S. and NATO forces have inflicted losses on Taliban leadership, and prevented the insurgent groups from conducting conventional operations.

"Despite their losses, the Taliban maintain access to local Pashtun and some foreign fighters and is employing suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices and small arms to increase attack levels," he said, citing ongoing challenges. "While the insurgency remains concentrated in the Pashtun-dominated south and east, it has expanded to some western areas."

In addition to the Taliban, the central government is challenged by corruption and a strong narcotics trade, Maples said. Debate among NATO members on counterinsurgency execution has led to differences on many levels and approaches to reconciliation, reconstruction and the use of direct combat power, he added.

On Afghanistan's national security forces, however, Maples said the Afghan army has fielded 11 of 14 infantry brigades, and more than one-third of its combat arms battalions have been assessed as being capable of leading operations with some coalition support.

Al Qaeda remains a threat to the stability of Afghanistan and surrounding nations and has made overtures to extend its reach into other continents, Maples said.

"Al Qaeda presents an increased threat to Pakistan, while it continues to plan, support and direct transnational attacks from its de facto safe haven in Pakistan's largely ungoverned frontier provinces," he said. "( And it ) has extended its operational reach through partnerships and mergers with compatible regional terrorist groups, including a continued effort to expand into Africa."

Maples added the Defense Department's intelligence community is confident in the ability of Pakistan, a nation that possesses nuclear weaponry, to safeguard its arsenal. He also underscored the important role played by countries seeking to modernize their military forces, like China and Russia, and nations like Iran and North Korea which invest heavily in military capabilities.

Maples thanked the senators for supporting efforts by defense intelligence professionals, who he said work shoulder-to-shoulder with their national intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement counterparts. [Presszoom/27February2008] 

Spy Agency Recruiting Mirrors New Threats. The best spies were once well-heeled students recruited from the East Coast's Ivy League universities. That thinking has changed.

The intelligence community's need for prospects fluent in languages ranging from Arabic to Chinese, and with varying skin colors and religious backgrounds, has forced it to grow its pool of schools.

"There are gold nuggets out there who we overlooked, and we don't want to do that anymore," said Lenora Peters Gant, who is leading an effort by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to broaden the search for intelligence professionals.

To do so, ODNI, which oversees the United States' 16 intelligence agencies, is pumping money into 10 universities that offer national security degrees through its fledgling Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) grant program.

"This was one way to tap women, first- and second-generation foreign students and other minorities," said Ms. Gant, CAE director. She added that the previous focus on predominantly white universities was a limiting relic of the community's pre-September 11, Cold War mind-set.

Mark Clark, director of the National Security Studies program at California State University in San Bernardino, says finding students with the aptitude to work in the intelligence community "might lead to the unsuspecting kid next door."

"With this funding, we are able to send our students to study foreign language abroad," said Mr. Clark, who speaks Russian fluently. "Many American students have never traveled outside the U.S. The assistance opens up the world to them."

Based on ODNI criteria, students in Mr. Clark's program can study counterterrorism, homeland security, counterintelligence and risk analysis, as well as learning numerous other skills.

The idea that the agencies are solely looking for covert operatives is "a myth," said Ms. Gant, emphasizing graduates can become State Department analysts, Capitol Hill aides or civilian Pentagon employees.

The intelligence community is looking for people with the ability to bring a different perspective to the war on terror.

"Many of these students come from a diverse background, are less well-heeled, rough around the edges," said an intelligence official who participated in Mr. Clark's program.

Mr. Clark's program "was very Soviet-centric" and now, "post 9/11, with non-state actors of terrorism" it has shifted, the intelligence official said.

"Back then the threat was known and quantifiable," said the intelligence professional, whose focus now is in terrorism. "In many ways, that has all changed." [Carter/WashingtonTimes/27February2008] 

Chinese Activists Sue Yahoo for "Helping Government Spy." Yahoo Inc. has been sued by a group of Chinese activists who claim that the Internet giant helped Chinese authorities monitor their communications resulting in their persecution.

The lawsuit is the second legal challenge faced by the company after it was sued last year by two Chinese journalists who were jailed after it gave Beijing authorities their e-mail records.

The new case was filed in a California court and alleges that Yahoo "willingly provided Chinese officials with access to private e-mail records... and other identifying information about the plaintiffs," which led to the 2003 arrest of Mr. Li Zhi. The information was used as "the basis for the acts of persecution and torture that occurred and are occurring," the suit claims.

Mr. Li has served about half of an eight-year sentence in China. Plaintiff Mr. Zheng Cunzhu, who is residing in the USA, alleges that he lost his property in China because he had been afraid to return to his country following the arrest of Mr. Li.

The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified punitive damages and "assistance in obtaining the plaintiffs' release from prison." [TheStatesman/28February2008] 

Musharraf Pardons Indian "Spy" in Death Cell for 35 Years. Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf has pardoned Kashmir Singh, the alleged Indian spy who has been languishing in Central Jail, Lahore, for the past 35 years after he was sentenced to death for espionage after his arrest in Rawalpindi in 1973.

Musharraf signed the petition for the release of the 61-year-old on Thursday. The interior ministry has received the release order and Pakistan's federal caretaker minister for human rights Ansar Burney is likely to sign it by Friday. Indian high commission sources in Islamabad said Singh is likely to be released on Friday itself.

The human rights ministry in Pakistan had earlier requested Musharraf to commute Singh's death sentence and allow him to go home as a goodwill gesture. Burney, who also runs the Ansar Burney Trust, located Singh at Central Jail.

Singh was sentenced to death on espionage charges by a court in Lahore. The oldest of three brothers and a sister, Singh had married his childhood sweetheart at the age of 16. They had two sons and a daughter and had been married for 10 years when Singh was arrested. He has not seen his family members since then. According to Fahad Burney, acting chairman of Ansar Burney Trust, Singh's family had been located in the Hoshiarpur district of Punjab after the trust management approached the Indian government.

According to Fahad Burney, investigations conducted by the trust revealed that Singh was not an Indian agent, but a sepoy with the Amritsar police. However, after losing his job in 1972 on disciplinary grounds, he began to smuggle goods to Pakistan. He and one of his accomplices were arrested in Rawalpindi. His accomplice was sentenced to 10-year imprisonment and repatriated to India 12 years ago. Singh, who was 26 at the time of his arrest, has since spent time in various prisons in Pakistani Punjab including 14 years in Sahiwal, 10 years in Multan and sometime in Miawali and Lahore prisons. [Amir/DNAIndia/29February2008] 

CIA Officer Defends Torture Technique. In 2002, John Kiriakou, an officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, looked into the face of terrorist Abu Zubaida, the third-ranking official in al-Qaida, after he was captured in Pakistan.

Yesterday, Mr. Kiriakou looked into the faces of University of Pittsburgh students to discuss whether the CIA's interrogation techniques used on Mr. Zubaida - including the controversial practice of waterboarding - were effective and morally defensible.

Effective? Undoubtedly, said Mr. Kiriakou, 43, a native of Sharon, Mercer County, who retired from the CIA in 2004 after 14 years with the agency. The information obtained from Mr. Zubaida disrupted dozens of planned terrorist attacks, he said.

The other question, however, is tougher, as Mr. Kiriakou acknowledged during his lecture, "Ethics in Intelligence," delivered to a group of more than 150 students and others gathered in David Lawrence Hall in Oakland.

"The whole agency, after Sept. 11, everybody in the building volunteered to go to Afghanistan," said Mr. Kiriakou, who never used any of the "enhanced techniques" himself. "We wanted to do something to bring these guys to justice. And we needed to act quickly" because officials thought another strike was pending.

Waterboarding was approved and used because of that sense of urgency, he said.

"In that very specific case, I think the ends justified the means," he said. "[But] we've had 61/2 years to develop sources inside al-Qaida and to improve our relations with other countries and their intelligence services to the point that we shouldn't need to do waterboarding now. We should be all over these guys by now. And I think [it's working] because we haven't had another attack on U.S. soil."

A self-described "lifelong liberal Democrat" raised in New Castle, where his mother still lives, Mr. Kiriakou was content with his post-CIA career running an international business risk analysis firm. But then he saw the controversy over waterboarding erupt, and he said he couldn't stay quiet.

"Accusations were being leveled against the agency by members of Congress that I thought were patently unfair," he said. "Because these [were the] same members of Congress who were briefed on this program when it was first initiated. They had no objection to waterboarding or other enhanced techniques from the get-go... As somebody who was involved in the counterterrorism center at the time, I resented it. So I decided, against the advice of a lot of friends of mine, that I was going to say something."

The debate of interrogation practices is healthy and necessary, Mr. Kiriakou said, if America is to regain the moral high ground it sacrificed in the days after Sept. 11, when the priority of punishing those responsible and preventing further attacks resulted in some questionable compromises.

"You can't launch an intelligence operation based on anger or revenge. It has to be clearheaded with an end goal of keeping the country safe," he said. "The only way to regain [the moral high ground] is to allow time to pass, to turn our backs on these enhanced techniques, and to try to start fresh. Maybe with a new administration, regardless of which party wins."

Mr. Kiriakou said he was always conflicted about the techniques. But the CIA did not address issues of morals and ethics when instructing new operatives. The focus instead was on intelligence-gathering techniques and the jobs at hand.

Now, he said, it's time to re-evaluate. 

"We had our very limited window to play dirty," he said. "And the window has to close." [Majors/PittsburghPostGazette/29February2008]

Section II - TERRORISM

Terrorist Recruiters Convicted in UK. Four London men have been found guilty and another three have admitted a range of terrorist offences in a five-month trial held at Woolwich Crown Court. The court heard that the ringleaders of the group sought to radicalize young men in London and encourage them to murder non-Muslims.

Mohammed Hamid, an extremist who called himself "Osama bin London", organized terrorist training camps at a number of locations around England. He was convicted on three counts of soliciting murder and three counts of providing terrorist training.

The other defendants were convicted on a variety of charges including providing training for terrorism, attending a place for the purpose of terrorism training and possessing a record containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

The case was the first to be brought under section 8 of the Terrorism Act 2006, under which it is a criminal offence to provide terrorist training or attend a place used for terrorist training. The convictions marked a successful conclusion to Operation Overamp, a two-year joint investigation by the police and Security Service. Sentencing will take place in March.

In addition, two other men were convicted and sentenced in earlier hearings that could not previously be disclosed due to reporting restrictions. Hassan Mutegombwa was jailed for ten years for intending to travel overseas to carry out acts of terrorism, and Mustafa Abdullah was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for possessing a record containing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. [MI5News/27February2008] 

The Online Hunt for Terrorists. Terrorists don't use the Internet solely to recruit members, spread their ideology, and raise funds for their activities. They also use it to conduct their own internal debates, creating a rich pool of information for analysis by counterterrorist groups. Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at the University of Haifa, Israel, and author of the book Terror on the Internet monitored just 12 Web sites operated by terrorist groups in 1998. Today he monitors 5,800.

Intelligence agencies are having trouble keeping up with the volume. That's why researchers from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have developed a set of automated tools to collect and analyze terrorist content on the Internet in a systematic way. The project, named the Dark Web, uses Web -spidering to find and catalog millions of Web pages, postings to terrorist forums, videos, and other multimedia content. The Dark Web has identified seven jihadist Web sites that host 90 percent of the information related to improvised explosive devices, such as instruction manuals and videos, says project director Hsin-chun Chen. The findings are passed on to military intelligence agencies.

"The first version of our spider could only collect 10 to 15 percent of the content. Now we can get about 85 to 95 percent," says Chen.

To make spiders more effective at retrieving forum contents, Chen uses proxies and randomized processes so that they don't get blocked. The group has also developed analysis tools to make sense of the content and prioritize the information. For example, "authorship analysis" captures the writing styles of anonymous senders, and "sentiment analysis" identifies who on the Web is the most violent and radical. "Some forums have a quarter million people posting, so there is no way anyone can eyeball those results," explains Chen. "[Now] we can analyze millions of postings in a matter of seconds."

Another independent group participating in the monitoring is the Virginia-based Terrorism Research Center. Its deputy director, Ned Moran, says that tools such as the Dark Web help intelligence analysts do the first pass. "They take this massive entity of the Internet and scale it down into something more manageable." But Moran retains some skepticism about the ability of such automated tools as spiders to differentiate adequately between relevant data and junk.

Weimann agrees with Moran that human judgment remains an invaluable tool in determining which sites contain potentially harmful content. "What automated search can do is save expenses, manpower, and time. But it is limited in the depth of the analysis. Human eyes and mind see more and deeper than a crawler," he says.

Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab lists the methods his team uses (beyond Web spiders) to identify terrorist Web content.

- Searching the Web using the State Department's list of known terrorism groups.
- Sharing information with other terrorism research groups.
- Searching known keywords of several terrorist groups (for example, many jihadist sites refer to Osama bin Laden as the "Big Chief").
- Doing link analysis - following links posted on terrorrorist sites to explore other possibly dangerous sites.
- Employing domain experts skilled in Arabic to analyze and browse domains. Chen emphasizes that the team does not pursue fundamentalist Muslim sites that do not advocate or promote violence. [Rhey/PCMagazine/27February2008] 

Sweden and Norway Hold 6 on Terror-Related Charges. In coordinated raids, the Swedish and Norwegian security services arrested six people on suspicion of financing or otherwise taking part in terrorist activity.

Spokesmen for the two security services did not identify the suspects, but numerous news reports described them as being of Somali heritage and living in or around Stockholm and Oslo.

The three arrested in Norway were to appear in court Friday or Saturday to face possible charges of "financing terror actions," said Martin Bernsen, information officer for the Norwegian Police Security Service. He said they are accused of financing activity that took place in Norway, while the terrorism actions in question took place abroad.

The Swedish suspects, whom the authorities said were Swedish citizens, were accused not only of participating in terrorism-related financial activity but also of "preparations for committing terrorist crimes," said Jakob Larsson, the press director of the Swedish Security Service.

The Swedish suspects were also expected to make court appearances in the near future, at which time more information about the nature of the offenses is likely to become public. In Oslo on Thursday afternoon, police officers and other security officials served search warrants on at least two Internet cafes and were seen carrying out computer equipment.

Brynjar Lia, a researcher at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the arrests appeared related to an informal money-transfer system called hawala, which immigrants to Europe and North America often use to send money to poor nations in Africa and the Middle East.

Hawala record-keeping is usually sparse, and several hawala brokers based in Norway have been convicted of money-laundering offenses in recent years. Three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Norwegian police officers seized the records of three Somali-born hawala brokers and charged the brokers with financing terrorism, but no terrorism-related convictions were ultimately obtained.

In recent weeks some Muslim groups in Denmark have been angered after newspapers across the country reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Violent protests raged around the Muslim world in 2005 and 2006 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 11 Muhammad cartoons, including one depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban. Islamic law is generally interpreted as forbidding any representation of the prophet.

Mr. Larsson, of the Swedish Security Service, dismissed speculation in the news media that the arrests on Thursday were related to threats against a Swedish cartoonist who last summer drew a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad that was published in a local newspaper. [Gibbs/NewYorkTimes/29February2008] 

Al Qaeda Role Seen in Directing Groups. Al Qaeda is taking a greater role in coordinating the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups operating in Afghanistan's volatile border region with Pakistan, a top U.S. commander said yesterday.

U.S. military officials are concerned the activity is part of an ongoing effort to escalate violence in Afghanistan against U.S.-led NATO forces as attacks in Iraq subside.

Maj. Gen. David Rodriguez, top commander of NATO troops in the eastern region of Afghanistan that borders Pakistan, told Pentagon reporters in a video link that "they're cross-fertilizing their tactics, techniques and procedures and also again getting resourcing mainly from al Qaeda, who is the central player in the terrorism equation."

Gen. Rodriguez said the militant Islamic groups include Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, a Pakistani armed movement associated with Islamist cleric Maulana Fazlullah; Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, another group linked to a Pakistani militant, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. [Carter/WashingtonTimes/27February2008]

 

Section III - CONTEXT & PRECEDENCE

James Brady On Media: Just Who Was CIA? A back-page essay by Rachel Donadio a few Sundays ago in the New York Times book review section brought all the old Cold War memories rushing back, sweet and sour both.

It may be difficult for some younger Americans to recall, but there was a time when most of us thought we were on the right side in our Cold War with the Soviet Union and its satellites, Red China and the rest, and we believed that, by and large, the CIA was doing good, maybe even noble, work. But was it also secretly insinuating itself into American cultural and artistic life?

The book review piece was inspired by a documentary, of which I had never heard, that had been screened in Manhattan and "is expected to be broadcast on PBS later this year." It was the names in the story that plucked at my sleeve - that wonderful writer Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton and his Paris Review, William Styron, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Terry Southern. The documentary, about one of the founders of The Paris Review, a writer named Harold ("Doc") Humes, "a rising literary star - destroyed by mental disease," is the subject of Doc, the documentary by one of his daughters that rakes over the coals of the last generation, a time when the CIA "wasn't into assassinations [and] working for the CIA was seen as honorable government service."

Plimpton, the Times reported, was "outraged" by the very idea that his Paris Review was being used as a front.

In those years, from 1956 and into the mid-1960s, I worked as a journalist, for three years covering Capitol Hill, and then from January 1959 as a foreign correspondent, first in London and then in Paris, until I returned home late in '64 to take over as publisher of Women's Wear Daily. In those years, many of the men I knew and hung with in the States and later in Europe were, or I assumed to be, CIA. I had been a Marine officer; I had fought in Korea, and so had they. Some had also fought in World War II. Some would later serve in or during Vietnam. Several were quite open about working for the Agency, others, undercover operations, I take it, masqueraded as naval attaches, consular officers, State Department functionaries and the like. None that I know of claimed to be journalists.

They all had their reasons for service. Matthiessen, the Times reports, admitted blithely he saw the CIA "as a free trip to Paris to write my novel."

It was in Georgetown in D.C. that I met my first agents, over beers at Billy Martin's pub on Wisconsin Avenue, in a little theater group. The Hexagon Club had been created a few years earlier by a couple of Princetonians, Triangle Club alums, as a way of putting on an original spring musical review and raising money for a local charity, but mainly to meet girls. Joyously, we did both. Few of us earned starring roles, but filled out the line as chorus boys and were good at moving scenery. No one talked shop, and you wondered if Ralph Jefferson, who married Jenny Clark, was with the Agency, or if Ed Streeter, who married one of the rich Kenney girls, was, or Earl Lindveit, who was working on his doctorate and married Sheila Brown from Vassar.

In London a few years later, a couple of us turned up. But then so did Ivan Stenin, the young Tass correspondent. We lunched, and he and his wife Lydia came to dinner at my flat on Dunraven Street, after first insisting I meet them in front of a movie house on Oxford Street. Strange? Well, yes, but in those murky Cold War days, lots of men had "cover," and who could demand explanations for everything?

In Paris, there was a pianist from Yale named Bill Koplowitz who fell in love with a concert grand piano he discovered in the ruins of a country house, bought it on the spot, had the pigeon droppings cleaned off and the thing tuned, and moved it into his apartment. Clair George, whom we knew in Washington where he got married. He and Mary George in Paris regularly served cocktails to Iron Curtain and African diplomats, organized a New York black-tie party for a score of us at a local bistro, where we all danced and sang and tossed party favors at midnight. The was a naval attache who wined and dined the night the colonels revolted and the French Army in North Africa attempted a coup to overthrow de Gaulle, and our French banker friend Marc Alexandre left over the entr�e to pick up a rifle and tin hat and join other reservists guarding the Elys�e Palace. And I hired Barney Leason and Chuck Mitchelmore, suspecting they were both CIA (and they wondered about me), but we all three denied it.

I remember those guys and others as among the best I ever knew, some with the Agency, some not. And we won't ever forget the night Kennedy told Kruschschev and the Russians to get their missiles out of there and my wife and I wondered abed that night, as we listened to the broadcast, if our daughters asleep down the hall would live to see a post-thermonuclear world. In the end, Kruschschev folded, mittel europa eventually rebelled, the Wall came down, the Soviets collapsed, our side won.

But the Agency had changed, the cowboys took over, and there were excesses. Clair George, maybe the best of us, was convicted of perjury, though eventually pardoned by the elder President Bush.

Back then, the Cold War was no joke, and it took casualties. [Brady/Forbes/28February2008] 

Section IV - JOBS, OBITUARIES, RESEARCH REQUESTS, ANNOUNCEMENTS AND COMING EVENTS

Jobs

Federal Account Manager, Design Staffing LLC.  Design Staffing, LLC is seeking a Federal Account Manager with software sales experience DOD and INTEL Experience. POC Michelle Poage mpoage@designstaffing.com or call 301-518-6949. Position location is Arlington, VA.
Company markets enterprise software that enables IT executives to improve performance of internal and outsourced applications teams with benchmarks and governance insight into the quality and sustainability of development output. Company has maintained its own GSA Schedule for over 6 yeas and is a sole source vendor. Company is listed on NYSE. Territory includes US Named Federal Accounts, Including Defense, and Intelligence & Civilian Sector.
Responsibilities:
- Develop and manage a diversified pipeline of Federal Accounts yielding predictable revenue that meets or exceed allocated quota.
- Develop and execute an efficient personal account penetration strategy that emphasizes OCIO, Program Management and Directorate level meetings.
- Prospect and manage account level 3rd party/integrator contacts in the region in collaboration with Federal Business Development team to create additional market leverage.
- Develop a focused time phased business plan with targeted accounts or programs to enable a rapid ramp up.
- Assist marketing in development and execution of Federal specific programs.
- Collaborate with Company Customer Care Team to maintain existing customer satisfaction and continue development of reference base.
Qualifications:
- Bachelors Degree required (technical degree desirable).
- Minimum seven to ten years of Federal software and / or IT services sales experience.
- Department of Defense and Intel Sales Experience required.
- Experience in selling software solutions targeted at the Federal IT Executive level is essential.

Obituaries

George Grau III, 69; CIA Security Officer, D.C. Tour Guide. George Peter Grau III, 69, a retired security officer with the CIA, died Feb. 19 of congestive heart failure at his home in Kensington.

Mr. Grau was born in the District and graduated from Gonzaga College High School in 1956. He received his undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1960 from Georgetown University, where he worked part time as an athletic trainer with Joe Kuczo, who also was a trainer for the Redskins. Thanks to Kuczo, Mr. Grau also worked for the Redskins during the 1960 season.

He served on active duty as an Army officer from 1961 to 1963 and retired from the reserves as a major in 1986.

He joined the CIA in 1963, working as a security officer in Washington except for two years in Alice Springs, Australia. He received a number of exceptional service awards, culminating in the Career Intelligence Medal when he retired in 1995.

For a couple of years after his retirement, the native Washingtonian was a D.C. tour guide. "He loved it," his wife said. He usually conducted bus tours but once led 65 sixth-graders on Metro. "Everybody got where they were supposed to go," his wife recalled.

In 1996, he became a security officer for Lockheed Martin, retiring a second time in 2007.

For almost 30 years, he volunteered as the athletic trainer for the Gonzaga High football team. "He was there every Saturday afternoon in the fall," his wife said. "He never had to rake a leaf." Mr. Grau was elected to the Gonzaga High Hall of Fame in 1996. He also worked as a high school and junior college basketball official for almost 30 years.

A member of St. Catherine Laboure Parish in Wheaton since 1963, he served on the parish council, coached Catholic Youth Organization football and was a lector, usher and Eucharistic minister. With his wife, he conducted marriage preparation classes for parishioners. He was CYO president at the parish level and was a member of the Arimatheans, a group of men and women who serve at funeral Masses.

Mr. Grau loved travel, playing golf with his sons and listening to music. 

Survivors include his wife of 46 years, Ann Leahigh Grau of Kensington; a brother; two sons, George Peter Grau IV of Bethesda and James Grau of Derwood; and five grandchildren. [Holley/WashingtonPost/25February2008] 

Israeli Paratrooper Who Led Entebbe Raid Dies at 70. Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, a former chief of Israel's general staff and the paratroop commander who planned and led the 1976 raid in which Israeli troops freed 103 hijacked hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, died February 26th in Israel. He was 70.

Lt. Shomron died from the effects of a stroke he suffered three weeks ago. 

On the night of July 3, 1976, Israeli commandos and paratroopers flew 2,500 miles in transport planes to the Entebee airport, surprised and killed hijackers who had demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners, rescued the captives taken from a hijacked Air France plane, and flew back to Israel with them.

The raid was punctuated by what seemed like a Hollywood touch. Several commandos rolled out of one of the planes in a black Mercedes carrying a Ugandan flag in the hopes that soldiers at the airport loyal to the Ugandan ruler Idi Amin would think he was in the car and fail to realize that a rescue operation was under way.

The Israeli soldiers and Shomron were greeted as heroes when they returned home, and the raid gained a legendary aura.

But the operation did not succeed without cost. Three Israelis who were among the hostages died in the raid, as did Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, the commander of a special forces unit in the raid and the brother of a future Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a 2006 interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Shomron, the chief infantry and paratroop officer when he led the raid, acknowledged, "I like in particular the movie in which Charles Bronson portrayed me," recalling the 1977 film Raid on Entebbe.

But, he said: "I also felt some kind of envy from the military and it was not comfortable for me. Around the world, until today, they look at me like something from a different world, a super super-hero, something not natural. I don't like that feeling of being an advertisement."

Shomron was born on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley. He fought as a paratrooper in the Sinai campaign in 1956 and was recognized as the first Israeli paratrooper to reach the Suez Canal in the 1967 war. He was picked as the chief of the general staff in 1987 and held the post until he retired from military service in 1991.

In October 2006, Shomron was appointed to investigate the performance of Israel's armed forces during the fighting in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah guerrillas. In a report, he criticized Israeli commanders for poor organization.

Shomron, who was chairman of Israel Military Industries after he retired, is survived by his wife and two children.

The Entebbe raid ended a harrowing week for the remaining captives who had been aboard an Air France airbus bound from Tel Aviv to Paris that had been hijacked shortly after a stop in Athens.

The plane, which originally carried 244 passengers and 12 crew members, had been flown to Libya for refueling, then on to Entebbe Airport, where the remaining hostages were held in a dusty, unused old terminal.

In his interview with Maariv, Shomron reflected on the significance of the Entebbe raid, putting aside for the moment the spectacular manner in which it was carried out.

"The hijacking of the Air France plane and the demands of the hijackers to release Palestinian terrorists came during a difficult period for the war on terror, which operated then on the system of hostage-taking," he said, citing the heavy toll from past attacks on the Israeli city of Maalot and the seizure of the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv.

"We were busy in those days to convince the world that one does not bow to terrorism," he said.

After learning of the general's death, the Israeli president, Simon Peres, called him "one of the greatest commanders" the Israeli military had ever known and said the Entebbe raid "earned its mythic status since we all saw it as impossible."

Shomron was asked in 2006 about his most vivid recollection of the rescue.

"When the hostages board the evacuation plane, are helped up, each one checking his family that everyone is present," he said. "That was a strong moment that I can't forget." [Goldstein/NewYorkTimes/27February2008] 

Bernard Sheldon, Legal Adviser to MI5. Bernard Sheldon, who has died aged 83, was the legal adviser to MI5 during the ill-fated attempt in 1986 by Margaret Thatcher's government to block the publication of Peter Wright's book Spycatcher and in the prosecution two years earlier of the would-be Soviet agent Michael Bettaney.

Bettaney was a young officer in MI5's counter-espionage branch who made several unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Soviet embassy to recruit him as a double agent.

In a series of messages dropped through the letter-box of Arkady Guk, the KGB Rezident (or head of station), Bettaney used classic Cold War tradecraft to lay out a complex system of dead-letter boxes and methods of communication.

If Guk accepted Bettaney's offer he was to "place a drawing-pin (any colour) at the top of the right-hand banister of the stairs leading from platforms three and four at Piccadilly underground station".

The drawing-pin never appeared, as Guk believed it was a deliberate provocation designed to "out" him as a spy. But his deputy knew better. Oleg Gordievsky was an MI6 agent-in-place inside the KGB London station. He reported the approach to his MI6 contact, and Bettaney was arrested.

Sheldon played a crucial role in ensuring that all the evidence was in place to arrest and prosecute Bettaney without giving away the role played by Gordievsky who, in a stunning success for MI6, was appointed by Moscow centre to replace Guk.

But Sheldon's attempts to dissuade the Thatcher government from pursuing Wright through the New South Wales civil courts were somewhat less successful. The government's action against Wright, who had emigrated to Australia, ended in near-farce, with Robert Armstrong, the then cabinet secretary, refusing to confirm or deny the existence of MI6.

When it was pointed out to Armstrong that he had already admitted that Sir Dick White was head of MI6 from 1956 to 1968, he replied that, this being the case, he could not confirm that it had existed before 1956 or after 1968. The court was unimpressed with the argument.

Bernard Sheldon was born on July 14, 1924, the son of a bank official. He won a scholarship to St John's College, Hurstpierpoint, in 1938 and went on to become captain of the school.

In 1943 he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was commissioned the following year, serving as a gunnery officer on the aircraft carrier Formidable during the summer of 1944, when she mounted repeated but unsuccessful air attacks against the German battleship Tirpitz.

Formidable then sailed for the Far East, taking part in the recovery of Okinawa from the Japanese, during which time she was the target of a number of kamikaze pilots.

Sheldon was demobilised in 1946. He initially planned to join the Indian Civil Service, but when the government announced that India was to be made independent, he instead read for the Bar, becoming a member of Middle Temple in 1947. He was called to the Bar two years later.

He joined the Colonial Legal Service in 1951 and was sent to Malaya, where he was federal counsel and deputy public prosecutor and regarded by the country's attorney-general as one of the best young legal officers in the service.

Sheldon joined MI5 in 1959, one of a number of former colonial officers recruited to the service, and worked first in the counter-espionage and counter-subversion branches before being sent in 1963 to Hong Kong, where he was security liaison officer, advising the governor and Special Branch on security matters.

But he missed the intellectual cut-and-thrust of legal argument, and returned to London in 1966 to work for the MI5 legal adviser, taking the full post himself two years later.

Amid widespread suspicion of MI5's role, particularly during the hunts for alleged Communist subversives inside the trades unions, Sheldon's public face made him an easy target for attacks from conspiracy theorists that contemporaries in MI5 insist were unfair.

His two decades in charge were a difficult period for MI5 legally, with the increasing use of the courts to prosecute IRA terrorists, and improvements in the rights given to defence lawyers, exposing flaws in the way the service gathered evidence, a problem that Sheldon saw much more clearly than some of his colleagues.

His forceful personality was deployed repeatedly to persuade the old guard that they needed to collect much more evidence than in the past if they were to prosecute and convict, while at the same time ensuring that the methods and sources used to collect key parts were not to be exposed in court.

Sheldon also acted as legal adviser to both MI6 and GCHQ, and he played a leading role in ensuring that when Geoffrey Prime, a Soviet spy inside GCHQ from 1968 to 1977, was prosecuted in 1982, details of signals intelligence collection capabilities remained secret.

Sheldon was appointed CB in 1981. After retiring in 1987 he used his legal skills on behalf of people who sought assistance from the Citizens' Advice Bureau. He also served on police, prison and fire service interview boards.

Bernard Sheldon died on February 19. He married, in 1951, Dorothy Kirkland, with whom he had a son and two daughters. [Telegraph/2February2008]

Research Requests

Islamic Terrorism and Intelligence Studies/the Balkans: From Christopher Deliso: I am an American investigative journalist in Macedonia and author of the 2007 Praeger Security International study, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West. I have utilized the testimony and feedback of present and former intelligence, security and military officers from the US, Canada, Britain and several Western European and Balkan states. In continuing my research I would be grateful to correspond with any AFIO members with experience and/or insight into the recent history, present situation, or expected future scenarios for Islamic radicalization in the Balkans, Islamic connections with the Balkans from elsewhere in the world, and any intelligence-related issues regarding the Balkan states, regarding reforms, methodology, cooperation with the US, etc. Testimony can be given on or off the record and discretion is assured where necessary. My research is intended for future books and present contributions to leading political and intelligence related publications in the US and UK.
REPLIES to Christopher Deliso at: cdeliso@balkanalysis.com, or via Skype (Skype handle: Chris2792), or by phone 011389 70 890 899. 

Announcements

IWP Announces Spring 2008 Open House Schedule.  The Institute of World Politics invites you to mark your calendar for the following dates, and join us for one of our monthly open house programs this semester.

The dates are as follows:

Wednesday evening, March 19, 2008
Thursday evening, April 29, 2008
Wednesday evening, May, 28, 2008

Each program begins at approximately 5:30 pm and concludes by 8:00 pm. RSVPs are strongly encouraged, and preferences are easily requested by visiting the IWP home page at www.iwp.edu.
Open House programs are designed to extend an informal, comprehensive, and informational introduction and overview of the Institute, its programs, and its people. Prospective students, employers, members of the media, and peer professionals are encouraged to attend.
The Institute of World Politics is an independent, accredited graduate school of national security, intelligence, and international affairs, dedicated to developing leaders with a sound understanding of international realities and the ethical conduct of statecraft - i.e., the various instruments of power in service of national interests and purposes - based on knowledge and appreciation of American political philosophy and the Western moral tradition.
The Institute is located at 1521 16th Street NW, Washington, DC, eight blocks north of the White House and three blocks east of the Dupont Circle metro station (red line).
The Institute enrolls new students during the spring, summer, and fall terms. 

Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals [SCIP] upcoming chapter events:

Argentina Group Meeting
Please join us on March 3rd free of charge for 2 presentations in CI targeting: How to develop a successful CI department Successful CI cases from the Latin American region.

Chicago Chapter Meeting
This presentation will focus on the changing economic climate and its impact on hiring, growth areas, the new war for talent, the fussy client syndrome, and salary negotiations. Find out why the Zimmers and Dove campaigns star in this presentation! Come prepared for some surprises as well... Meeting benefits: 1) Learn how CI professionals can use data on the economic climate, hiring trends, growth areas, etc... to infer opportunities and threats vis-�-vis their competitors 2) Learn methodologies to collect and synthesize hiring and economic data for pattern/trend identification and market insights.

Toronto Group Meeting
Intelligence: Practical Thoughts and Philosophical Musings - An open discussion on the role of intelligence those who work in field.

New Jersey Chapter Meeting
This presentation explains the basics of CI collection techniques and trade secret law. Learn how to collect CI in a legal and ethical manner, how to identify what makes an act illegal, and how to recognize the line between law and ethics. Topics to be discussed include what is a "gray zone," and whether it is legal to overhear a competitor on an airplane, to pick up a competitor's lost document in the street, or to misidentify oneself as a student. The presentation also explains why abiding by the ethical standard will spare CI professionals and their companies potential legal problems and will explain why the Economic Espionage Act does not affect CI activities that are practiced in an ethical manner.

Minneapolis Chapter Meeting
Strategic planning is an important user of competitive intelligence information. Join us for a presentation showing not only how CI fits into the strategic planning process, but also how strategic planning tools and techniques can help the CI professional set scanning priorities.

Wisconsin Chapter Meeting
This meeting will provide an opportunity for the audience to learn about some of the leading competitive intelligence practices as three key Wisconsin companies. A panel of CI professionals from these companies will discuss and share some of their best practices, data capture techniques, analytical frameworks, project management processes, and other specifics. There will be an opportunity to ask questions of each of the panelists.

St. Louis Chapter Meeting
Competitive Intelligence professionals can deliver the greatest impact and maximize personal success by tackling the big competitive mysteries, not just the puzzles. Mysteries are very different from puzzles. Both may be strategic, but mysteries are more complex and require a different mindset and toolset. To solve a mystery one must leverage the expertise of all functions and capture the insights of many people - perhaps the entire organization, and especially the senior team. But solving the mystery is not enough - the challenge is to do so in an emotionally engaging manner which demands implementation of an actionable solution. This presentation will describe the three best tools for solving mysteries, present the pros and cons of each, and how and when to use them.

COMING EVENTS

EVENTS IN COMING TWO MONTHS....

4 March 2008 - Arlington, VA - CAREER FAIR - TECH EXPO - 11am-7pm - IBM Expo - www.IBMexpo.com

6 March 2008 – San Francisco, CA – The AFIO Jim Quesada Chapter hosts Joe P. Russoniello, U.S. Attorney, Northern District of California. Mr. Russoniello will speak on how the U.S. government prosecutes terrorism cases. The meeting will be held at United Irish Cultural Center, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94116 (between Sloat and Wawona). 11:30 AM no host cocktails; noon - luncheon. $25 member rate with advance reservation; $35 non-member rate or at door. RSVP to Mariko Kawaguchi (please indicate meat or fish) no later than 5PM 2/27/08: mariko@cataphora.com, (650) 622-9840 X608 or send a check to P.O. Box 117578 Burlingame, CA 94011.

10 -11 March 2008 - Laurel, MD - 2008 Unrestricted Warfare Symposium at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) is jointly sponsored by JHU/APL and the University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). It is also co-sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Policy), the Department of State, and the National Intelligence Council. For 2008, the theme of integrating strategy, analysis, and technology to counter adversaries utilizing unrestricted warfare approaches. The focus will be on the DoD Campaign Plan for the War on Terrorism: Integrating Strategy, Analysis, and Technology in Support of the U.S. War on Terror Campaign. I am thrilled that Admiral Eric Olson, USSOCOM, has agreed to give the keynote address. Over the two days we will have four other featured speakers [Dr. Thomas Mahnken, ODUSD(Policy); Prof. Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University; Dr. Stephen Flynn, Council on Foreign Relations; and Prof. Peter Feaver, Duke University], five roundtable panels, and a panel of senior-level government representatives responsible for various aspects of the War on Terror Campaign.
2008 registration details can be found at the symposium website: http://www.jhuapl.edu/urw_symposium/.

11 - 12 March 2008 - Fairfax, VA - National Military Intelligence Association 2008 Spring Symposia: Security Challenges and Opportunities in East Asia, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.  
DAY ONE focuses on EAST ASIA and brings together academicians, scholars, and government experts.  DAY TWO of the event is at the TS level and is focused on the security, military, and intelligence challenges for the US. 
For more information please visit http://www.nmia.org/upcomingevents/2008springsymposia.html.

13 March 2008 - Baltimore, MD - 10am-4pm - CAREER FAIR - TECH EXPO Top Secret - www.TechExpoUSA.com - Active Security Clearance Required.

Thursday, 13 March 2008, 3:00 PM - Reston, VA - The Washington Area Chapter of the International Association for Intelligence Education hosts a speaker on Intelligence Analysis. This first in a series of interviews by this group will be with Robert Clark (author of “Intelligence Analysis: A Target-Centric Approach”) interviewed by Marilyn B. Peterson. Location: The Forum, 1892 Preston White Drive, Reston, VA 20191. To register: Bill Spracher at 202-231-4193 or William.Spracher@dia.mil. Non-members are welcome and refreshments will be provided by i2, Inc.

18 March 2008 - Reston, VA - 11am-7pm - CAREER FAIR - TECH EXPO Top Secret - www.TechExpoUSA.com - Active Security Clearance Required.

Wednesday, 19 March 2008 - Washington, DC - Institute of World Politics Open House. The IWP invites you to join them this evening for their monthly open house program to learn more about the programs and career opportunities through graduate study at IWP. Each program begins at approximately 5:30 pm and concludes by 8:00 pm. RSVPs are strongly encouraged, and preferences are easily requested by visiting the IWP home page at www.iwp.edu. The Institute is located at 1521 16th Street NW, Washington, DC, eight blocks north of the White House and three blocks east of the Dupont Circle metro station (red line). IWP enrolls new students during the spring, summer, and fall terms. Make sure you're one of them.

20 March 2008 at 11:30 a.m. - Colorado Springs, CO - "Airport Security" is the topic for the Rocky Mountain AFIO Chapter luncheon. The chapter meets in the Air Force Academy Officers Club, Falcon Room. The speaker will be Robert Olislagers who has 25 years experience in airport management. He serves on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Airport Executives and chairs its General Aviation Committee. He is a nationally known expert on airport security. Reservations must be made by March 17, 2008 to Tom Ward, 719-487-0957, or by e-mail to: wardplapp@msn.com

Thursday, 20 March 2008, 6:30 pm – Washington, DC -“The Bomber Behind the Veil: Muslim Women and Violent Jihad”– Farhana Ali, Rand Corp. policy analyst, at the Spy Museum. Beware the mujahidaat. Farhana Ali, an international policy analyst with the Rand Corporation, is one of the few researchers focused on these Muslin female fighters. She has charted an increase in suicide attacks by Muslim women since at least 2000, in new theaters of operation, including Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Iraq. These attacks are arguably more deadly than those conducted by male jihadists, in part due to the perception that women are unlikely to commit such acts of horror, and when they do, the shock or “CNN factor” of their attacks draws far greater media attention. She discusses their place in Islamic history, their psychological profile, and the likely shelf-life of this disturbing trend. Tickets: $20. Visit http://www.spymuseum.org for tickets.

Thursday, 20 March 2008 - Phoenix, AZ - The AFIO Arizona Chapter luncheon features a religious evangelical 'humanitarian' on the supposed poverty of Western secularism and the common concerns facing all mankind. The unusual speaker is Leonard Rodgers, President/Founder of Venture International -- a evangelical group which opposes Western secularism. "Secularism is the new God in the Western world and missionaries are now coming to us from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Empire strikes back." Some of those missionaries, of course, are Muslims. Rodgers espouses the goal of his group to bring religiosity back to those countries [e.g. U.S.] that shed it for the era of science and reason. Come and make your opinions heard. Time: 11:30 am. Location: Hilton Garden Inn in Phoenix RSVPs – are necessary preferably by email PLEASE!
For reservations or concerns, please call Simone Lopes at 480.368.0374; preferably email her at sl@4smartphone.net

26-28 March 2008 - Raleigh, NC - The Fifth Raleigh Spy Conference at the NC Museum of History - Not to miss. Topic: CIA’s Unsolved Mysteries: The NOSENKO Case, Double Agents and Angleton’s Wilderness of Mirrors features top experts in counterintelligence to discuss unresolved issues from the Cold War: 

“Wilderness of Mirrors” is the theme for the fifth annual Raleigh Spy Conference, an internationally acclaimed event that draws top experts in the field of intelligence to Raleigh each year. The 2008 conference will be held March 26-28 at the North Carolina Museum of History in downtown Raleigh.

Conference founder and Raleigh Metro Magazine editor and publisher Bernie Reeves says of the event: “This year’s conference will present intelligence operatives and experts to discuss the effect of moles, double agents and deception operations during the Cold War and the unsolved questions that continue today to cause disagreement and dissension.”

“Many of these questions remain from the monumental battle between the Soviet Union and the United States,” he adds, “when the wheel of history often turned to the will of moles burrowed inside intelligence and other government agencies. It was indeed a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ that continues today to cast a confused image of history.”

Speakers include:

-- David Robarge, Chief Historian for CIA and expert on controversial counterintelligence chief James Angleton, will discuss the dissension created at CIA by the former chief of counterintelligence due to his obsessive hunt for a Soviet mole.

-- Pete Bagley, the former chief of CIA's Soviet bloc counterintelligence division, will appear at the 2008 conference. According to Reeves, Bagley will discuss his controversial new book on KGB defector Yuri Nosenko entitled Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games. Nosenko’s mysterious references to Lee Harvey Oswald, his inconsistent recall and the suspicion he was a KGB plant sent to discredit other defectors kicked off 40 years of unresolved internal strife at CIA.

-- Brian Kelley, the wrong man in the Robert Hanssen spy case, and former counterintelligence officer for CIA, will use examples of defectors and double agents he draws on as case models for courses he teaches to train espionage agents.

-- Jerry Schecter, former bureau chief for Time magazine in Moscow during the Cold War, later a spokesman for the National Security Council, and a respected expert and author of books on Cold War espionage, will discuss important cases of defectors and double agents in the heat of the Cold War.

-- David Ignatius, former foreign editor - now columnist for the Washington Post – and author of espionage fiction, is respected in the "community" for his insights on the impact of defectors and double agents on the craft of espionage.

Special Guest M. Stanton Evans, columnist, editor and author of the new book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies is a surprise addition to this year’s conference. According to Reeves, Evans used previously classified FBI and governmental files to “upend the McCarthy myth and turn the tables on the real guilty parties. “The Evans book is new and is causing comment”, says Reeves. “Although the McCarthy Era is not part of the conference subject matter, we feel the new book is of great interest to our audience as it deals with penetration of the US government by Soviet operatives.”

The Raleigh Spy Conference was founded “to bridge the gap between intelligence and current history,” according to Reeves. “The calculus of modern events is intelligence. We don’t really know what happened until someone declassifies something”.

Reeves first conceived the Raleigh Spy Conference after it was revealed in the late 1970s that the British were reading the German code during World War II, altering the accepted history of the most dramatic event in human history. 

Today, says Reeves, “after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 and the brief opening of the Comintern Archives, the CIA and NSA announced that the US had been decrypting and reading messages from Moscow to Soviet agents in the US government.  Add to these revelations the proliferation of books and articles by former intelligence officers from both sides of the Cold War, and you realize the actual history of the era requires a fresh examination”.

The first Raleigh Spy Conference in 2003 featured speakers on Cold War politics and included KGB major general Oleg Kalugin and Cambridge intelligence scholar Chris Andrew. In year two, speakers presented information on the connection of intelligence and terrorism, featuring experts on al-Qaeda and Hamas. The third year, top Cold War experts offered sessions on the fast-moving topic of Cold War scholarship, featuring Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes. Last year, the conference focused on Fidel Castro and the future of Cuba at the moment Castro fell ill and turned the reins of government over to his brother Raul.

C-SPAN-TV has broadcast several sessions and C-SPAN Radio has broadcast the entire Raleigh Spy Conference. BBC, CBS radio, other national and area media have covered the conference extensively. Recaps of previous conferences are available at http://www.raleighspyconference.com. The website also contains the 2008 schedule, speaker biographies, registration forms and other events and information.

Tickets to the three-day event are $250 for the general public, $175 for seniors, and $145 for teachers, students and members of the military and intelligence community. Early registration is available by calling Jennifer Hadra or Dan Reeves at 919-831-0999. For more information, go to http://www.raleighspyconference.com

Friday 4 April 2008, 5:30 PM - New York, NY - AFIO Metro New York Chapter Spring meeting features exclusive report by Lt. General Robert J. Elder, Jr. Commanding General of the 8th Air Force, the U. S. Cyber Command on "What we're doing about these cyber attacks on our country – Defending the nation TODAY."
In May 2001, Chinese hackers took down the White House Web Site for almost three hours. According to AIR FORCE Magazine, since then, the attacks originating from servers in China have grown in sophistication and intensity.
Just a year ago, the Naval Network Warfare Command acknowledged that Chinese attacks had reached the level of a campaign-style force-on-force engagement.
Last April 26th came the first full-blown cyber assault resembling an act of war. A controversy over moving a bronze statue of a Russian soldier from the center of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, ended with a massive, coordinated assault on Estonia's cyber institutions. Many commercial and government web sites were shut down.
On Friday, April 4th, General Elder will reveal the remarkable story of how the newly-established U.S. 8th Air Force is using the electromagnetic spectrum first, as cyber defense, then to conduct cyber missions such as defeating remotely triggered IED's in Iraq, conducting electronic warfare, halting terrorist use of the Global Positioning System and satellite communications and preventing jamming.
Location: The University Club, Fifth Ave at 54th St. Reservations are required and are limited by available space. They will be accepted in the order they are received until room capacity is reached. Admission is $45 to cover meeting costs. Meeting begins at 6:00 PM
TO RESERVE: Jerry Goodwin, 646-696-1828 or by email: afiometro@yahoo.com

7 - 11 April 2008 - Boston, MA - The International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEIA), and the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU), will be co-hosting the 2008 Annual Conference in Boston. The conference takes place at the Park Plaza Hotel. This is the only event of its kind for law enforcement intelligence, serving an international audience, and is a "must attend" conference. The training will be first-rate and the opportunities to foster professional relationships with colleagues and peers from around the world will be extraordinary. To register on line, or for more information about the conference, please go to
http://leiu-homepage.org/events/index.php For hotel information and registration, please go to:
http://www.starwoodmeeting.com/StarGroupsWeb/booking/reservation?id=0707030645&key=5C3A5

Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 6:30 PM - Washington, DC - Spy vs. Spy: FBI and KGB Secrets from the Cold War - Event held at International Spy Museum."I was beginning to like these guys."-Oleg Kalugin on the FBI surveillance team observing him in Miami, December 1968. Once they worked against each other. Now Oleg Kalugin and David Major are colleagues and friends. In this unique evening the former KGB acting Washington station chief and FBI director of counter-intelligence retrace their exciting careers and how they intersected. They book-ended the espionage career of John Walker-Kalugin supervised the notorious spy and it was to Major's office that the traitor was brought after his arrest. From surveillance to recruitment, all will be shared. As columnist Jack Anderson once wrote, Kalugin's "undercover activities were known to the FBI, but only the State Department knows the reason he is still here." Now that the dust has somewhat settled on their overlapping cases, this is your chance to hear both sides of the story from FBI successes and snafus to KGB plots and procedures.
Location: International Spy Museum, 800 F St NW, Washington, DC, Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station. Tickets: $20; Advance Registration required. Tickets are non-refundable and do not include admission to the International Spy Museum. To register, call Ticketmaster at 800.551.SEAT or the Museum at 202.393.7798; order online at ticketmaster.com; or purchase tickets in person at the International Spy Museum.

Thursday, 17 April 2008, 12 Noon - 1 pm - Washington, DC - The Terrorist Recognition Handbook - A Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities - event held at the International Spy Museum. Terrorists can come from any background, any age group, either gender, and yet somehow they must be identified and neutralized. As an internationally recognized expert, author, and educator on the Iraq insurgency, Jihadist tactics and Al Qaeda's global organization, Malcolm Nance has studied the telltale characteristics of terrorist operations and developed an intelligence-based approach to observing and analyzing behavior for warning signs. In The Terrorist Recognition Handbook he uncovers the terrorists' means, methods, organization, and motivations. He identifies the key steps that every terrorist group will always follow, and how and why groups use and choose their weapons. Join Nance for an eye-opening look at terrorism as the sum of its parts rather than as an incomprehensible force.
Location: International Spy Museum, 800 F St NW, Washington, DC, Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station. Tickets: Free. No registration required

17-19 April 2008 - London, UK - The German Historical Institute in London hosts "Keeping Secrets" conference. The German Historical Institute in London is hosting a conference entitled "Keeping Secrets:  How Important was intelligence to the conduct of international relations from 1914 to 1939." Among the scholars expected to speak are Zara Steiner, General William Odom, Christopher Andrew, Ernest May, Paul Kennedy, Gerhard Weinberg, Mark Lowenthal, Richard Aldrich, Georges-Henri Soutou, and David Kahn. The conference will take place at the institute in central London from 17 to 19 April. For further information write Karina Kurbach at <kurbach@ghil.ac.uk>

Thursday, 29 April 2008 - Washington, DC - Institute of World Politics Open House. The IWP invites you to join them this evening for their monthly open house program to learn more about the programs and career opportunities through graduate study at IWP. Each program begins at approximately 5:30 pm and concludes by 8:00 pm. RSVPs are strongly encouraged, and preferences are easily requested by visiting the IWP home page at www.iwp.edu. The Institute is located at 1521 16th Street NW, Washington, DC, eight blocks north of the White House and three blocks east of the Dupont Circle metro station (red line). IWP enrolls new students during the spring, summer, and fall terms. Make sure you're one of them.

Thursday, 1 May 2008, 12 Noon - 1 PM - Washington, DC - Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Mexico City in the 1960s was a hotbed of spies, revolutionaries, and assassins. In the thick of this Cold War Casablanca was spymaster Winston Mackinley Scott. As chief of CIA's Mexico City station from 1956 to 1969, Scott played a key role in the creation and rise of the Agency. In his new book, Our Man in Mexico, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley traces Scott's career from wartime G-man to consummate intelligence officer with three Mexican presidents on his payroll. But it was Scott's role in the surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald just prior to President John F. Kennedy's assassination that led to the spymaster's disillusionment. Join Morley for a revealing look at Scott's life and his startling rebuttal of a key finding in the Warren Report.
Where: International Spy Museum, 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
Tickets: Free. No registration required.

16 - 18 May 2008 - Bar Harbor, ME - The Naval Cryptologic Veterans Association hosts mini-reunion. The NCVA of New England will hold a mini-reunion at the Bar Harbor Regency, Bar Harbor, Maine.  The reunion is open to all personnel that worked for the US NAVSECGRU or its successor organization in NETWARCOM. Contact Vic Knorowski at 518-664-8032 or visit http://ncva-ne.org for information.

Wednesday, 28 May 2008 - Washington, DC - Institute of World Politics Open House. The IWP invites you to join them this evening for their monthly open house program to learn more about the programs and career opportunities through graduate study at IWP. Each program begins at approximately 5:30 pm and concludes by 8:00 pm. RSVPs are strongly encouraged, and preferences are easily requested by visiting the IWP home page at www.iwp.edu. The Institute is located at 1521 16th Street NW, Washington, DC, eight blocks north of the White House and three blocks east of the Dupont Circle metro station (red line). IWP enrolls new students during the spring, summer, and fall terms. Make sure you're one of them.

Wednesday, 28 May 2008, 6:30 pm -The Devil May Care: A Celebration of the New Bond Novel and Ian Fleming's 100th Birthday
What better way to celebrate Ian Fleming's 100th birthday then with a briefing on the newest Bond novel and a shaken, not stirred, icy martini? Sebastian Faulks, author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, is now taking on the most famous spy ever. Hear how Faulks channeled Fleming to write "Devil May Care"- a madcap Bond adventure and romantic romp. And then salute Fleming and 007 with a Bondian cocktail. Zola's own in-house expert on "mixology," Ralph Rosenberg, will demystify the popularity of the restaurant's signature cocktails, while you enjoy drinks and hors d'oeuvres, and mingle with James Bond's real-life counterparts. Shaken or stirred? You decide.
Where: International Spy Museum, 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail Station
Tickets: $32; Advance Registration required. Tickets include martinis, specialty drinks, and hors d'oeuvres from Zola. Tickets are non-refundable and do not include admission to the International Spy Museum. Phone registration only for this program; to register, call 202.654.0930.

For Additional Events two+ months or greater....view our online Calendar of Events

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